Never Move Your Back Row

In addition to feeling guilty about not writing on IMU enough lately, I've also felt guilty that I've barely written about baseball lately. While I was moving the posts I'm most proud of over to my very professional Wordpress site, I noticed that a lot of them were older and I hadn't written  much about the Jays during the 2017 and 18 seasons. Was my love baseball starting to peter out? Was my zeal tied to the team's success in 2015 and 16?

No, of course not.

But it's harder to write about the team now because not nearly as much is happening and the games don't even approach the same level of excitement. There's still small moments that capture your imagination and remind you why you love baseball, like Steve Pearce hitting two walk off grand slams within a week of each other, or Justin Smoak capping off a 7-run comeback win in the bottom of the 9th inning, but for the most part the games are ugly and, worse, in consequential.

The Blue Jays are currently stuck between two eras and can't really commit to either one. On one hand, they regularly look back on and celebrate the two playoff runs because that is probably the best way to engage with the sizable number of casual fans. On the other, the team is biding its time until a crop of younger talented players emerge to hopefully carry the team to success again. As a fan, you're stuck looking only backwards or forwards because there's not a tonne going on in the present.

So if there's not a lot going in the present, what do I write about?

It's hard to write about players because most of the exciting ones are gone. Price signed with the fuckin' Red Sox. Edwin went to Cleveland. We fêted José for a whole year to distract ourselves from how quickly his age caught up with him. Josh got hurt, disappeared for a whole season and then got traded for spare parts. Russ got bad. Strochez broke up and then both got hurt. Tulo turned into something you have to chuckle about to keep yourself from crying. The core that was the most exciting team in baseball evaporated in record time and were replaced with, well, replacements.

Anyone could tell that the team wasn't supposed to contend the last two years. "Raising the floor" was our "trust the process", and that's fine! The team was old and a reboot was absolutely necessary, so that's what happened. Rebuilding the team doesn't mean you all of a sudden have young players who will be superstars in two years. It means you sign serviceable veterans, trade them for young players, eventually package those young players for something, and hope to God it works out okay. It's an ugly process and people often forget that the Cubs and Astros were buried in decades of mostly mediocre baseball before things clicked, to say nothing of perpetual rebuilders like the Reds and Padres.

Those replacements could be exciting at times, as I mentioned above, and you also got to have a taste of great personalities like Curtis Granderson* as they finish their careers, but I can't write out a whole post on them like I could about Josh, José, or Edwin. It's just not the same.

*While watching the Jays play at Comerica Park in Detroit this past summer, a very drunk Tigers fan sighed to himself and said "Granderson has an amazing ass." It's all I can think about whenever his name comes up. Even more so than Slammiversary 2018.

2018 was different than past "bad Jays seasons" because there wasn't one player who stood out as a beacon while everyone sucked. 2018 didn't have Carlos Delgado, or Roy Halladay. In fact, you'd have to go back to the early 80s to find a Jays team as devoid of impactful players as the 2018 version. The team started out bad, with bad players, and wound up bad. Who would've thought?

It's also hard to write about these replacement players when it's a foregone conclusion that they'll be traded before the season's over. The front office signed veterans to short deals so they could trade them and improve the team in the long run and that's exactly what happened. Granderson, Pearce, Happ, Axford, Oh, Loup, and Diaz are all gone now. In times of flux like this, it's hard to get attached to a player to the degree that you can write about them.

So if the team is bad and will continue being bad, and the players aren't engaging, who do I write about? The front office? Though I'm beginning to falter in my faith, I'm not enough of a zombie to do that. The ballpark? Fuck, I don't know man.

All that's left is the Blue Jays and baseball still being a "thing" in my life, so that'll have to play until May and that's alright.

You're Dreaming if You Think That I Care

I had the initial idea for this blog post waiting for the subway to go to work one morning, but then the St. Mike's news broke and that became my main talking point for a couple of weeks. I'm the one person that all my friends know that went to St. Mike's, so for many people, I was the one person they asked about it. From my end, that meant one new person asking me about it each day. It weighed on me a lot to have a group sexual assault, and the problematic institutional attitudes that led to it, on my mind each day. The issue has slowly begun to be resolved and many of the important developments, like arrests of the perpetrators and authority figures stepping down, have already happened. I hope that steps to right the issues at the school continue and work, but a big part of me believes that won't be the case. I still hope it happens though.

What I was going to say before this happened, is that I've felt mostly comfortable in my life lately. I'm diligently working towards school applications and work isn't so overbearing. Something about taking a quiet Sunday morning subway ride from Bathurst Station to a job I wasn't dreading made me feel something resembling inner peace. I wanted to commemorate that with a post here for posterity. I like that I can return to this blog and look at the posts like they're moments in time. I can usually remember who I was when I wrote them and what inspired them. It feels good to access those things inside of me.

I wanted this post to fall into a specific type of IMU post that's hard for me to describe. They usually are about a lot of things, but nothing in particular, which leaves me writing about my life and existence, I guess, and I feel like that's when my real and worthwhile observations come out. I feel like in between retrospectives of bands and moments associated with them and things I'm interested in at the moment, there's these medium length posts that are just me conveying a calm state of mind. I have a "life in general" label that roughly translates to this, but it's not universal. They're my favourite ones.

I was listening to The Decay while trying to get work done today, and took a little look back into IMU to see if I could find a post I remember when I discovered the band. I couldn't, but looking through the blog is what reminded me of the types of posts I described above. Also, going forward "Empty Frames" should be considered the urtext on Kitchener. I don't think anything describes living in the city like that song does.



It's nice to look back at the blog and see that I'm still mostly the same person, at least personality-wise, but have also grown up in important ways. There's things I find embarrassing on here, but that's okay. No middle-class white kid born with a perfect conscience. Growth means that I'm trying at least.

I also find comfort in the couple of things that haven't changed. Still put off writing by writing. Still am embarrassed to tell people how I feel. Still find a lust for life in punk.

Great, but That's Not Me

In lieu of Liberties this week, I've made a playlist to accompany my most recent zine I, Musical Genius, Vol 11: Toronto Ska, 2004-2007. It has songs from all of the bands I talk about in the zine. Fun!

Liberties, Vol 11

"Orgcore" is a name for a niche type of punk music that rose in popularity in the mid-00's and is now starting dwindle in popularity. It's name comes from the website where it's popularity originated, Punknews.org. It's a term that only means something for a small group of people online, but it's been omnipresent in my life as a music fan so far.

I used to use my first period spare in high school to read Punknews and learn about as many different bands as I could. At first, anything that wasn't ska and NoFX seemed daunting to me, but eventually I started find myself gravitating the punk bands I was reading about, which is a process I think made me more open to new types of music later on in my life.

Like many music genres, orgcore is hard to pin down and more of a "know it when you see it" type of deal. Punknews beat the Propagandhi drum harder than anyone else, but they are not orgcore. Banner Pilot are a common example of orgcore's tropes being commodified and "jumping the shark". I would describe it as mid-up tempo poppy punk music with gruff vocals and lyrical themes of depression, self-doubt, drinking, and uncertainty.

Eventually, I started to care less and less about the genre because I found that too few bands were finding new and exciting ways to play it. I still look back upon it fondly because of how invested I was in it during my youth. It felt like there was a whole sea of exciting bands at my fingertips, but it also carried an exotic feel of secrecy.

My theme for Liberties this week is orgcore that has stuck with me and still stirs things inside me. A playlist to carry me through this dark, wet, dead, and cold time during the winter known as the baseball off-season.

Today's Empires, Tomorrow's Ashes

I went into this blog post planning to do the "IMU Special" in which I write a post about nothing to try and get my creative juices flowing again, but instead I was sent this news by my older brother:

CP24 reports students pinned another student down and sexually assaulted him with a broom handle as part of a hazing ritual at Toronto's St. Michael's College in one incident. The school has since issued a statement saying expulsions have occurred. pic.twitter.com/OHbbdIdiZk

— Lucas Meyer (@meyer_lucas) November 14, 2018

My response to my brother, who also went to the school, was "I wish I could say I was surprised".

I have a complicated relationship with my high school and always feel awkward talking about it. I feel like every time that I mention it, I immediately get labelled as an extremely privileged upper class private school kid, which isn't the case and far from the truth. But if I went to the school, I am clearly privileged to have gone and I don't want to come off like I'm pretending to be lower class, which would be despicable. My mother was a high school history teacher and my father owned his own small landscaping company. Both made extreme sacrifices and went into a lot of debt to send me to one of Toronto's oldest private schools because they both placed an immense amount of importance on education and wanted me to receive the best one they thought that I could. My parents are also both Catholic (my mother brought up this way and my father as an adult convert) and this also undoubtedly played a role in their openness to me attending St. Mike's. Not everyone in Toronto is afforded the opportunity to go to a private school and I am immensely fortunate that I got to.

But I was also far from the average St. Mike's boy. Even though my parents were *gasp!* middle class, I was near the bottom of the St. Mike's economic scale. Other students often poked fun at "how poor" I was or how I couldn't afford things. I was reminded several times that I was the "poor kid" in my grade. When I entered the school, Father Daniel Zorzi was the school's president, and though I have nothing to base this off of other than hearsay from the time, I understood that he was behind a major push for St. Mike's to expand into richer suburbs around Toronto, especially the wealthier parts of Mississauga and Vaughn, to bring more money into the school. That worked, I guess, as the school had loads of new facilities while I was there, but it also brought in wave upon wave of entitled, asshole kids.

With entitlement comes mistreatment of others. Though the school loves to act as though its students' academics and values are what it places the most emphasis on, that's a sham and athletics are really all they care about. Look at their Wikipedia entry and pay attention to how much of it focuses on hockey. Football was a close second while I was there. How many intelligent, low-income students have been turned down in favour of meathead hockey players over the school's history? I can't tell you how many truly moronic people I was in classes with during my time there. If students have to write an entrance exam to get in and academics are so important to the school, how did these students get there?

Easy answer.

The rich, entitled, macho jock attitude was readily encouraged by most of the school's faculty. Teachers would reprimand Filipino students and tell them to tighten their ties and then playfully slap white hockey players with no uniform on a moment later. Loud, braggadocios jocks could do whatever they wanted and never faced repercussions. The school often tried to encourage its students to be a "St. Michael's Man", someone who studied hard, stayed Catholic, and participated in extra curriculars, but I feel like the true "St. Michael's Man" was a dickhead who thought he was better than everyone and rarely stopped dropping casual racism and homophobia. The school constantly turned a blind eye to this behaviour.

I didn't fit in well at the school and hard time there. My bullying experiences weren't nearly as bad as some of the other students there, but they were still there. If you didn't conform to some strange crossover between Wooderson and Tie Domi, you were, of course, "a pussy". Being quiet and skinny made me feel out of place at all times. I made a few friends while there, but didn't continue talking to anyone from the school after I graduated.

For what it's worth, I found the students at my local high school much friendlier and hung with them instead. Even the jocks there were welcoming. Crazy what class entitlement does to a person.

The problem with the school's treatment of its students is that they have ignored it for so long. This type of assault is, unfortunately, the logical endpoint of the toxic masculinity that is allowed to fester in the institution. Again, I wish I could say I'm surprised. Things similar to this assault have almost certainly already happened, but been either ignored or swept under the rug. I don't even know what to say other than that I hope this school dies the swift death it should have a long time ago.

Liberties, Vol 10

You know how you can tell that both Liberties and IMU are in a sad state? I've had this edition of the plyalist cued up for more than a week, but have only just gotten around to posting it. More music, playlists and writing coming soon, I promise.