Wednesday, October 26, 2011

I Have A New Mustache

Just like last year, I'm going to be doing "Movember" this year for charity.

Now, "No-Shave November" and "Movember" have been around for awhile as something that's fun to do with your buddies, but recently a Movember charity was started in Australia as a way to raise money for prostate cancer research. It's easy: Start growing a 'stache on November 1st and accept donations along the way.

I, like most, have been personally affected by cancer a bunch. It's one thing to say "Yea, cancer sucks." but it's another thing when your Mom is going in to get a tumor removed and you're worried if she's going to survive or not. No matter how serious each particular case is, they should not exist. Cancer is way too easy to get and way too hard to get rid. Losing people you care about is the worst thing in the world and cancer is pretty good at making that happen.

So, my Movember page is here. Any donations would be greatly appreciated and it's for a great cause.

Even better! If you would like to join in on Movember please, by all means, join my team! You can do that here. Together we can hopefully kick prostate square in the dick so hard that it won't get back up again.

So it's win/win. On one hand you get an absolutely beautiful 'stache covering your upper lip. On the other hand, you get to help put an end to one of the worst fucking things that exists on earth.

Please donate or join!

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Fest, Fest, Fest

Leaving for The Fest tomorrow. Holy moly am I ever stoked:







I could actually go on forever. Holy Fuck.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Daybreak

Once again, I'm entering into this with pretty much no idea of what I'm going to write. This is clearly a recipe for success and by success I mean posts that don't really have any sort of central theme and I essentially only write for the purpose of putting something on this blog to make me feel better about neglecting it.

Cool, I've already been at the library for 7 hours today and I'm probably going to stay for about 3-4 more. It's not that I have a huge load of things due in school at the moment, but I'm going to The Fest next week which puts a hole in my schedule that I have to work around. As a result I'm doing a huge 180 in character development and doing assignments before they're due. What the hell?

Well, Fest is clearly something to talk about. It's a giant punk festival in Gainesville, Florida that takes place on Halloween weekend every year. By giant, I mean fucking giant. There are actually so many bands that I'm not going to go count them now because it would actually take forever and be a huge pain in the ass. Maybe 200? Over three days all in venues all around Gainesville. This isn't 300 bands over three days on a ton of outdoor stages. This is punk rock dudes from all over the world getting together to see awesome bands and drink shitty beer and have an awesome time for three days.

This thing is a pretty big deal in the punk world (Like to the extent that almost every band organizes their touring schedule around it every year) and it's my first time going.

Colour me stoked!

I'm going to get to see some American friends I haven't seen for way too long and see almost every one of my favourite bands. Literally. Less Than Jake, Bomb The Music Industry!, Against Me!, We Are The Union, A Wilhelm Scream, Teenage Bottlerocket, etc. The list actually does go on so long that it would be stupid for me to type it all out because nobody would actually read the entire thing. It's really awesome that this thing has gotten as big as it has, because every band that matters plays it every year.

Like I said, it does put a pretty huge hole in my school schedule, but in the best way. Leave at 10 on Wednesday on an overnight bus to Buffalo, fly out of Buffalo at 7 am to get into Orlando at 9:30 am. Then a bus to Gainesville at 11:30. The way back is even worse. So bad that I haven't memorized it and don't want to think about how much it is going to suck doing it hungover and probably running on Mexican food and about 4 hours of sleep for the weekend.

But like I said, I am really, REALLY STOKED.

I'll definitely do a write-up about it when I get back.

Hmm, oh yes!

My friends Tanner, Ken and I started a new blog, On My Scraper Bike! It's going to be a variety of things, but I think my main purpose on it is going to be posting mixtapes I make! I'm super stoked about this for a variety of reasons. One, I really like to make playlists, as I'm sure most music-lovers do. Two, I like to show people those playlists. Three, I get to design the covers and make them really stupid! I think it's going to be a really rad blog though and really excited about it.

I guess as a result I'll probably post less about music on here, seeing as I'm putting music up there pretty much all the time. So less youtube videos with me explaining why I like the song, more playlist downloads with me explaining why I like the songs! Friends who don't like the same music as me, ARE YOU STOKED YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ THAT SHIT ANYMORE?

Cool beans no? I've even already made some posts on it, so checking it out (and maybe even downloading my mixes? Eh? Hint? EH?) would make me a pretty stoked dude.

I guess that's all for now, back to reading about some old Venetian fuck who painted boobs and shit.

Thursday, October 6, 2011

Thrashin'

Whenever somebody ever asks me to tell them a story or event, this is always the first thing I think. It is hands down my favourite anecdote and think some parts of it are pretty funny. Definitely never going to forget it and not just because of the scars I still have from it.

So here it goes:

Like I mentioned in my story about my high school band, The Pragmatics, my friends and I used to party in Warden Woods ravine ALL THE TIME in high school. Nobody's house would ever be open and this was kind of the most convenient places considering where everyone lived. So at this party (Now that I think about it, it was the first one I ever went to.) my friend Paul and I were (obviously) pretty drunk and talking about going skating. He mentioned that the other day he had been out with his girlfriend and found a giant hill that he rode down a few times on his bike. We both concluded that we should go skate the hill with our friend Damien as soon as possible. I even said (hilariously now, in hindsight) "I hope I bail".

So a few days later we met up to go find a place to skate and then try to find the hill. It took us a little bit of searching through residential side streets, but eventually we found what we were looking for. I jokingly pushed hard and hauled as right into (the entrance was curved) but pulled up as soon as I saw it.

This thing is fucking massive. I haven't been to it in a few years, but I would estimate that the incline/whatever/you know what the fuck I'm talking about is roughly 400m long. The top quarter is very steep and it gets progressively less steep as you go. The bottom curves left, easing into a very long and straight residential street. Minus the possibility of a car hauling ass up the hill to hit you, the hill is pretty much the ideal for hitting and just bombing.

Sidenote: This is seriously my favourite part of skating. It could be because I am about as far as you can get from being a technically gifted skater, but hitting a hill and just going really fast on my skateboard is one of my favourite things on earth.

Our strategy was to start at a relatively low part of the hill and work our way up on each successive run. This worked great. Even going from 2/3 of the way down the hill, you still went REALLY FAST. This was happening around the end of June. Being high school students, we were done for the year but elementary schools were still in session, which meant our neighborhood was still pretty empty. Also, it being the end of June meant that it was really hot out, so we opted to take our shirts off because we were sweating so much.

SO, I took off my shirt and tucked it into the back of my checkerboard shorts, with most of it hanging out. This is definitely up there as one of the dumbest things I've done in my life. Paul and Damien went first (We would stagger ourselves so we wouldn't be all be beside each while going down, because that is super fucking dangerous.) with me going last.

Also adding this in here because I don't really know where else to put it, but sometime during the course of this we named the hill "The Poo Hill".

By this point we had gotten about 2/3-3/4 of the way up the hill. This meant that we really getting up there in speed. I'd guess about 20kph? This could be skewed for obvious reason though. So pretty early in this run I thought I felt my shirt fall out of my shorts and for some completely asinine reason turned my head back to check if it had. As soon as I did I realized how bad of a decision that was.

My board went into what skaters call "death-wobbles", which is when your board starts to rapidly wobble back and forth while you're going very fast. When this happen it's borderline impossible to keep control and usually means a bail is imminent. This is all something I realized right away. I knew it was only a matter of time before I was going to fall off. I guess this is the closest thing I've had to a near-death experience. It might sound ridiculous to some saying that about falling off a skateboard, but seriously what If I landed headfirst? Landed awkwardly and broken my neck? Bad shit could have happened and I was pretty lucky. But anyways, I remember thinking when the wobbles started to get really bad that I was going to die. It wasn't even that I was scared, it was like I knew it was going to happen and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I remember thinking "Fuck, well I guess this is it then."I jumped off my board to see if I could maybe just run it out, but knew I was going way too fucking fast for that.

SO, I fell into the cement gutter on the right side of the road on my left side and slid for about ten meters. My left arm and leg scraping along rough pavement is what stopped me. Think about that. So I was lying in the gutter just thinking "Fuck!" mostly because I was supposed to go to Wonderland the next day with a girl I liked (I think if there was anything in my life that proved how fucking emo I am it is this (and there are a fuckton of examples), but I just absolutely massacred my body and the first thing I thought of was that I wouldn't be able to make my date the next day. LADIES????). A little after the bail, my skateboard came roaring down the hill and hit my head. That was what kind of got me to stand up.

I got up and took a look at my self and cleaned my self up (re: Brushed a minimal amount of dirt off of my cuts.). To give you an idea what happened to me I made an incredibly in-depth diagram in MS paint. The orange represents "road rash", pretty shallow cuts from skin getting scraped off by, you guessed it, the road. The red represents deeper cuts that bled a whole ton.





















Obviously my first idea was go and find Paul and Damien. I figured they would come back to see what happened to me, since I obviously didn't finish the run. Since I am constantly trying to be funny (operative word: "trying"), I turned so they would only see the right side of my body (This near-death experience really shows what I'm all about: love and trying to be funny). They pulled up looking a little relieved that I had apparently only scratched my right elbow and then I laughed pretty hard at their horrified expressions as I turned around and they saw the real carnage that was the left side of my body.

The thing about this is that I was extremely high on adrenaline for about half an hour after the fall happened. Rather than limping around, I was jumping around really stoked that I had just taken the gnarliest bail I had ever seen in real life. After documenting all of injuries on Damien's state-of-the-art Motorolla Razr (If these pictures still existed somewhere, I would obviously post them because believe me, they are great. But they're gone forever.), we began to make our way uphill figuring that we should get me home and start to take care of my absurd amount of injuries.

Like I mentioned earlier, elementary and middle schools were still in session at this time. So when we passed by Bliss Carmen Public School on the way home it happened to be their time to go home and the area was swarmed with little kids. You could actually hear the crowd of kids go silent as we walked by. The girls all yelled "Gross!" and the boys all yelled "Cool!".

We got home and started looking for first-aid stuff right away but came up short, getting only a few band-aids and some "steri-strips". Around this time my adrenaline was starting to wear off and I was feeling it pretty hard. For some reason (re: Us being young and stupid.) we thought it would be a good idea for me to get in the shower to clean the dirt off of my cuts. So I dragged myself into the bathroom and got in. That was probably the most pain I've felt in my life. I passed out from the pain almost immediately, but only for a second. I managed to get myself out and then laid down on bathroom floor for like ten minutes. I eventually got back to my room and laid down on my bed while we tried to figure what exactly we were going to do with me.

During this time the phone rang and I got Damien to pick it up. Now, all this happened just after I had applied for my first job to the City of Toronto as a lifeguard. I hadn't heard back in awhile and assumed that the job was a no-go and I would be unemployed for the summer. Instead, this was the time they chose to call back with an offer, while I was semi-conscious and covered in blood laying on my bed. I did end up getting that job though. I used the money I made that summer to buy my Hoppus bass.

After this we decided that I could go over to Damien's where his sister, who at the the time was in school for nursing, would patch me up. We figured I wasn't bad enough for the emergency room, so it would be better to save waiting extensively at the hospital for another time. It took what seemed like an hour or so to get all my cuts completely cleaned and dressed and looking back now, it was actually a really good time hanging out in Damien's kitchen. Recess was on.

It took a pretty long time for some of the deeper scars to heal and I had a staph infection in my foot, but I got back to normal with tons of time left in the summer. Still do have some of the scars from it.

Coincidence was that about a month or so after I fell on the hill Damien and Paul went back to it and Paul fell and got pretty messed up on it. Though his was a lot more serious, as he got a minor concussion. His was more of the "Holy shit! Man you could've gotten really hurt!" as opposed to "Fuck yeah! Cuts and blood!"

So yea. That's my poo hill/skate bail story.

Monday, October 3, 2011

Catch You Later

Here is the problem: I want to write a blog, man. I want to write one because I haven't written one in a while. I don't really have a subject or idea for one though. So this is probably going to be long-winded and probably about everything I can think of off the top of my head.

I said the same thing about three weeks ago at the start of this semester and my friend Tanner replied with "Write one about couch-hopping." since I was crashing on his couch for a week at the time. At first I thought this was an awesome idea. "I'm gonna get all On The Road up in this motherfucker! I'm a fucking drifter man! I don't have a fucking house! I fucking sleep on a couch and live out of a fucking hockey bag!" Then I realized that I wasn't crossing the United States on a crazy road trip, drifting around and meeting wild people. I was sleeping on my friend's couch and going to Art History classes. That sounds boring.

But at same time, maybe I'm just oversimplifying? Because that week was pretty fun. So I guess I could write out some long-winded story about getting high and going to get milkshakes? You know what? I think I will, but not at the moment. That's on my to-do list. Along with many other things.

So what else? I guess I talk about music on here all the time right? Actually shitty short sidebar: Recently I was having a few drinks with some friends and the topic of old bands came up. Obviously, I jumped at the opportunity to mention my magnum opus, the Comedie Humaine of local ska band histories, Timmy Chandler's personal Chinese Democracy: my history of the Pragmatics, which somehow took me like three months to finish writing (or I should say took me three months to overcome my intense laziness and spend the two hours it took to finish). I've never really mentioned the band to them and said they should check out that entry. She replied with "I hate reading your blog" (much less malicious than the way it looks here), mainly because it's usually me writing about bands and things that she (and most people, I'd assume) don't care about. And I'm down with that. I mean why the fuck would I read things that I don't care about?

Buuuuuut, the main reason I started this blog was to write things that I have on mind down. Doing so makes me feel accomplished because I've written something and no matter what it is and how stupid/not needed it is, that is more productive than hanging around in my room doing nothing on the internet all day (though this considered that as well no?). So I'm going to be honest, I'm really not a complicated dude. If I throw a song up here it's because I've been to that song/band a bunch and feel like writing something about it. It's what is on my mind, so I put it on here. It's not me saying "I know more about music than you" or anything like, because I probably don't. I'd leave that to my much musically inclined friends, who are way more on-top of what is coming out when/on what/touring with who.

But I like jams and I like to write about them. Y'know?

So yea, music then.

Since I was playing The Stereo so much this summer I decided that I should get another album of theirs. My friend John Flynn pointed me in the direction of Three Hundred and as soon as the first song started I knew I was going to adore the album. While listening to it it's pretty fucking obvious that every big "emo" band from like 5-6 years ago was trying to be this band. Not to say that The Stereo sounds like those bands, but Fall Out Boy and Panic! At The Disco made a pretty decent living out of trying to sound like Rory and Jamie.

If you show this song to a girl and she doesn't immediately swoon, it's pretty obvious that she is a love-mongering succubus:


What else? Man, I don't fucking know. I really don't have anything left to say. Though I didn't really have anything coming into this either.