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.

Knowing I Don't Think About You, Even Though I Said I Do

After that last post, I thought that something I would like to add is the soundtrack to that time in my life.

These three albums always remind me of the early days volunteering at KWAG:






Those sure are three sad albums about being alone!

Also these two songs, oddly enough, were just constantly repeated:

Basements

There seems to be an inevitable lifecycle as a punk where you go from curious to nervous to invested to jaded to bitter. We all try to avoid this as much as possible, but it is apparently failsafe. If you've been interested music and ever involved in a particular scene, there is always a certain time period or group of bands that evoke the most nostalgia. You start to think "Back then, it was different. It mattered", but in reality everybody thinks that about something. The punk kids older than you thought that about what came before you and the kids younger than you think about right now. Life, of which punk is of course a part, is always changing

It's really easy to look back on a certain time period as the "Golden Age" of a scene simply because you were there to experience it. Maybe just being there is what really matters.

For me, that time was about 2005-2012 or so (or maybe now? I guess?) in Ontario. I went to a lot of shows, though more importantly I went to a lot of shows that featured local bands from Ontario. I have vivid memories of the first times I saw Junior Battles, !Attention!, and The Decay and when I think about that now, it's more or less like there's a rose-coloured lens over the whole thing. I couldn't believe how good the music and bands around me were. I made unforgettable memories in weird and awesome places. It mattered more than anything to me.

With that, I give you this collection of music made by my peers that affected me in a major way. I have strong memories tied to all of these releases and the people who made them. I tried to limit it to one release per band for the sake of it not being overwhelming and tried to go for 7"s or EPs when I could. It can sometimes be a little daunting to jump into a giant collection of music, or at least thats the way I find it, so I tried my best to curb that as much as possible. I hope you like these songs, because they were a big deal for me.

The Essential Ontario 2008-2012.