Too Good to Be True

 I recently discovered the band Dazy via their collaboration with Militarie Gun, one of my favourite active bands, on the song "Pressure Cooker". The tune is huge, but it has a lot more poppy bounce than your typical MG song and that intrigued me. Looked into Dazy and lo and behold, they, like Militarie Gun, have been on an extended kick of releasing short EPs for the last two years. All of them are collected, along with some new songs, on the comp MAXIMUMBLASTSUPERLOUD, which rocks. Personal favourite cut is "Crowded Mind (Lemon Lime)".

I've always been a big fan of the novel Catch-22, which I predictably checked out because of my high school obsession with the ska band of the same name. As a 32-year-old, and really as a 22-year-old, I can say that the novel is significantly better. After reading Catch-22, I read Heller's last novel Portrait of the Artist, as an Old Man. It has a godawful title and while the book isn't as bad as that might imply, it wasn't far off. That soured me, but I've had Something Happened sitting on my to-read bookshelf for ages and decided to pick it up for the trip to Ontario that I'm currently on. Since I wasn't familiar with most of Heller's other stuff, I wondered if he was a one-hit-wonder, but it doesn't seem that way. Still really funny and irreverent, but in a completely different setting than WWII.

I mentioned the trip in the last paragraph to forecast it being the topic of this paragraph. WRITING. Returning home is always weird. The trip has been the most social that I've been since the beginning of the pandemic, going to my first show, dinners at restaurants, and seeing a ballgame. The social guilt of COVID is and will continue to be there and I always have a voice in my head telling me I should just be staying inside, even though that has killed my brain over the last two years.

We've been in Montréal long enough now that it has become the new home and that coming back to Ontario doesn't carry the same degree of homey-ness that it used to. Speaking English in stores feels weird, though it took about a day to get used to it, and even more jarring is seeing people without masks. That being said, the city that I knew and that I will always deeply love is still right where I left it and I still get around intuitively because it's what I've always done. As my French friend Valentin said, "Connecting with your roots man, there is nothing like it."