Get My Money, I Don't Give a Fuck What You Say

 When I lived in Toronto, the main thing that I worried about was being 'present'. While working at the art gallery and trying to maintain a schedule of writing, this seemed like an important practice to work into my life that would make me appreciative of the good things around me and help me understand the world. I guess that being present is still important, but it's something that I never think about anymore.

It's hard to prioritize that now. Before COVID hit it was already hard to live in Montreal, as we were far away from friends and family and it tough to deal with our social circle shrinking so fast. Rebecca and I were doing a good job of building up a new network of people in Quebec, but then that was taken out from under us as soon as it was starting to gain momentum.

COVID was easy to deal with at first because it was new. Everyone was experiencing it for the first time and people were supportive and flexible. Now it's gotten old and everyone is settling into a routine around this dumb fucking pandemic, so all the shitty parts of the world are returning in a worse form now that we need to navigate both them and a global virus. Watching TV and staying inside all day was a fun change of pace for me in March, but even I, who loves TV more than almost everything, is willing to admit that this shit has gotten old.

I guess that I'm fortunate to have my thesis to focus on during this, or at least that is the way I'm trying to frame it to have a more positive mindset. On one hand, working through a crucial point of grad school from my office in the back of the apartment and over Zoom has been... weird and I wish that I was able to go to campus and the library and my coffee shop and the fine arts student lounge, but on the other I am genuinely thankful that I have a huge project that I can always work on. It's also comforting to know that if people ask what I've been doing during this pandemic, I can say "my thesis" as an easy answer.

I think what sums up this spring/summer/fall the best is that I've never been closer to picking up smoking in my life. That seems like it would be so nice right now.

Anecdotes! Anecdotes! pt. 155

One of my favourite jokes with Rebecca is me doing something strange and then describing it as "random" as a lampooning of 2000's teen/Myspace lingo, when everyone described everything as "random". But if I'm making fun of that use of the word, am I also allowed to have a series on I, Musical Genius called "Random Anecdotes"? I would say no.

Fortunately, we are sharks, not sheep here at I, Musical Genius and we never stop swimming forward in our blogging venture, so we are pivoting and re-branding "Random Anecdotes" as "Anecdotes! Anecdotes!". I need to have some sort of series where I dump small memories that stick in my brain Larry David-style, because a future without that, in addition to everything else that has happened in 2020, seems too dark.

During my first week of classes in my first year of university a few of the new people I had just met and I went to the University Centre cafe to get lunch before we went to our afternoon classes. I definitely ended up getting Taco Bell. While we were there everyone talked about getting Booster Juice because there was one near the exit and I mentioned that I didn't know what it was. They were flabbergasted and insisted that I get one right away and that it would blow my mind and make me feel like I had mainlined vitamins and nutrients. I got one and thought that it was fine and tasted like a regular smoothie. Every time that I see the restaurant (juice bar? kiosk?) I always think of the disappointment of realizing that all of those people were way too excited about a $10 smoothie in a foam cup.

Hey Fuck You, Fuck You Too

Something you may not know about me is that I am secretly a petty and dramatic person. I love to talk shit; it is so fun and great. I also hold grudges much more than I let on.

In addition to all of that, I have strong opinions on music, seeing as I am a straight white man who weighs under 150 lbs. Though I try to expand my music tastes, discover new things, and re-visit things I used to hate to see if anything has changed, there are some bands that I will just never like because if I've come this far in hating them, I can't just roll back on that and admit they might be good.

The Bands I Will Never Like:

The Beatles

The Beatles are #1 with a bullet. Fuck this band. I deeply love power pop, so people are always like "You would like the early stuff" but the early stuff is either 60% of a good song or Motown covers that are worse than the original. John Lennon has a nine inch nail stuck in his head vibe. Paul is good at bass but sucks. Worst of all is that everyone says they are the best band of all-time, a true sign that they are a band for jabronis.

Led Zeppelin

Led Zeppelin is the worse version of every good band from the 70s. Less heavy than Sabbath. Rock less than Thin Lizzy. Worse solos than Cheap Trick. Less groovy than the Stones.

Nirvana

I actually liked Nirvana a lot when I first started listening to rock music. Since then I've come to find the hardcore/metal riffs with throaty crooning so obnoxious. I always get this idea of Nirvana being really heavy and thrashy for a mainstream rock band, but then they're always the same boring butt rock whenever I try.

Why?

One of my ex-girlfriends always put down my taste in music and was always trying to change what I listened to by giving me terrible recommendations. She loved the band Why? and for that reason I will never even consider listening to them.

50 Cent

Unfortunately, I was a "rap is crap" kid growing up and 50 Cent got the worst of it. I've gotten into lots of different types of rap since then, but G-Unit stuff still sounds so shitty to me.

Meet Me at the Turnstile

 What do you think about dreams?

I think about the dreams I have a fair amount. It's one of my more hippie-ish qualities. I think that I used to be a more vivid dreamer than I currently am. I would wake up and the feelings of what I had just experienced would be so real. I knew that what happened wasn't real, but there would be about 10 minutes where my body still believed it was. Crazy and intense feelings that felt lived in. That led to me learning a bit about lucid dreaming, which I thought would be an amazing skill to master.

One of the things recommended to get better at lucid dreaming was to keep a dream journal, which I guess helps you to realize the things that recur in your dreams. That worked a bit, and I've lucid dreamed (dreamed lucidly?) a few times, but it's never been something that I've really worked at or something that I coveted. A result of this though, is that I've kept a dream journal, with varying degrees of upkeep, since my early twenties. I started this journal with the goal of working towards lucid dreaming, but what I found much more rewarding about it was being able to revisit dreams I've had and getting, what seems to me to be, a window into my subconscious.

I took an intro psych class in my undergrad and I didn't retain all that much from it. The two things I do remember was my weird hippie teacher explaining Pavlov with a story about béarnaise sauce (and that he said it as sauce béarnaise) and a tutorial discussion about dream interpretation. The TA explained that ultimately dreams don't really mean anything and you can't draw any serious conclusions from them. At first that didn't make sense to me, as to me my dreams felt significant, but in hindsight I understand what she was saying. You can't draw any serious conclusions about a person or their situation from the content of their dreams. If someone was a suspect in a murder case and confessed to having a dream about being guilt-ridden and hiding a secret, it wouldn't mean shit. It would be suspicious, but it wouldn't mean anything concrete in regards to the case.

I still find them interesting to myself though. I find that small occurrences or worries tend to show up in a central way in my dreams. In that way, what happens in my dreams does two things. 1. It helps me to see what I'm worried or anxious about, because that tends to pop up regularly. 2. It can be reassuring to see events from my life re-happen in the dream.

I don't really speak with people about dreams, at least aside from Rebecca sometimes, but I think it's a nice idiosyncrasy of mine that helps in making my personality unique, even if I don't share that with other people. My interest in my own dreams, which I guess is an interest in introspection and self-awareness, has to bleed over into other parts of my personality and existence, right?

Duff recommended Horses by Patti Smith this week. It's great.

That's Rad Yo, She's Gonna Get Naked

Note: I wrote the following this afternoon so that I would be sure to finish the blog later, before going outside and enjoying a bike in warm Montreal:

"I think that it is safe to say that summer 2020 is now over. Temperatures in the mid teens have set in in Montreal and it seems unlikely that they'll leave for more than a day."

Still rings true! Today was like the good episodes from the later seasons of Cheers. With the chill autumn weather and the start of the school year coming in, every day feels the same and too filled with things that distract me from what I need to do. Then a warm day blows through and it feels just like when Woody perfectly sets up a opening joke about Norm drinking too much and you're reminded that there is beauty in the world.

Weird paragraph, right? Cold fall weather : warm fall day :: generic later Cheers episodes : good later Cheers episodes.

It's been strange to think about what this summer has been like, now that it's over. Everyone has been repeating the same thing over and over since the pandemic started, but I guess I have to lean on that too and say that it was a summer unlike any other I've had in my life. What I was doing every day didn't change that much in the grand scheme of things, but the pandemic limiting where we can and what we can do did end up taking a toll by September. No eating out, no drinks at bars, no shows, no baseball games, no seeing friends.

Those are a lot of my favourite things.

Still, I guess it's important to try and maintain some levity in the face of this insane virus and that world it has brought with it, so here are the things I appreciated about Coronavirus Summer 2020.

Even though we couldn't "go out" the way we normally did, it was nice to see friends in the park. Let's all look at the sky and think about how nice it is to sit with friends and have a cold one.

I learned to ride a bike. It's nice to ride your bike through Montreal, especially at 5 PM.

This summer, I skated more than I have in like 6 years. Popping off a good ollie still feels amazing.

The NBA season was pushed back, so teams ended up playing early in the afternoon on summer weekdays. I wish that's when all sports happened.

Frig off virus. Getting pretty tired of this shit already.

There's Only One Hubba

 Yesterday I started to watch an episode of the skateboarding podcast The Nine Club, before realizing that if I was going to watch TV focused telling the stories of skateboarders, and casting YouTube videos does seem to count as TV now, that I should just watch Epicly Later'd, the pinnacle of the form, rather than a sometimes boring meandering conversation taped in a studio.

I watched the multi-part edition of the show on Guy Mariano, focused on him conquering an intense drug problem and re-emerging as one of history's all-time great street skaters with the release of Fully Flared, and that promptly went into another episode of the show as soon as it ended, since I've been watching them in a huge YouTube playlist.

The thing is, every skateboarder knows Guy Mariano. He's headlined several landmark videos, Video Days, Fully Flared, Pretty Sweet, and is up there as one of the strongest influence on tech street skating that exists today (how Guy still manages to do tech with an extreme amount of style is a topic for another time). After his series on Epicly Later'd ended, the autoplay led me to watch one on someone who I had never heard of before, James Kelch.

I find that these episodes, which tell the stories of skaters who fell through the cracks and weren't in the limelight, are often my favourite ones. It's fun to get the stories of the people you know, of course I want to hear Eric Koston's lifestory, but really those episodes just serve to fill in the areas in between what you've already seen. With episodes like this one on Kelch, Epicly Later'd gives you a much fuller picture of the world of skateboarding. There's so many small moments in this that equally hilarious, due to Kelch's natural charisma, and heartbreaking. We learn about what happens around the pros. 

Much like the rest of the world, everything in skateboarding isn't ideal. For every Nyjah making tonnes of money from Street League and Nike, there are those who could never make it happen, despite devoting themselves to it fully. They were still in the right place at the right time, but it didn't matter. Of course, those stories still deserve to be told.

Random Anecdote, Part XXIII

 Last year I was at a house show and some friends and I were hanging out with others we didn’t really know in the kitchen before the bands started. The house had bought  two boxes of Halloween chips for everyone to snack on and we picked out one of each flavour and laid them out on the table. We made a game in which we got each person in the kitchen to rank each flavour of chips. 

Sidenote: Somehow everyone seemed to pick either Salt and Vinegar or Ketchup as their top flavours. What the fuck is wrong with people???

One member of the crowd resisted the game in favour of bragging about being vegan. We then started to draw things on the whiteboard in the kitchen. We encouraged this person to draw something to which they replied "I only know how to draw eyebrows," before proceeding to draw that eyebrow shape on the board.

My friend then came out, saw the whiteboard, and drew an oval around the eyebrow, forming the face of the Pringles man. I don't think many other people noticed, but I really enjoyed knowing that this person draws the Pringles man mustache on their face every day. 

This is a Land of Riches

One of the most enjoyable parts of COVID quarantine has been delving into shitty reality TV with Rebecca. Watching people be cringey and do embarrassing things in the hopes of fame is something the two of us love to share.

Reality TV is now undoubtedly the most popular guilty pleasure when it comes to TV right?The schadenfreude you get when a reality show hits the perfect mix of over the top fake drama, top 40 music, and stupidity is now so specific that I think it needs its own long German word.  Wirklichkeitschadenfreude? I tried.

Netflix has recently started to develop its own MTV and Bachelor-style reality shows, after making many "prestige" ones like cooking travel shows, and it has been just glorious. They're never very good for very long (is any reality show?), but they scratch such a specific itch (see above aside) and it's so easy to indulge in them. Since the start of this year, our favourites have been The Circle, Love is Blind, and Too Hot to Handle. All have their faults, and could be so much better with minor tweaks, but who am I to complain?

A funny thing we've noticed in all these shows is a subtle addition of Christianity to all of them. It's never a main plot point or overtly present, but each show has had characters who are Christian and speak about it in more episodes than they don't. It surprised me because I'm not used to getting God in my trashy TV, though that could be because I mostly limited myself to The Challenge and, of course, Jersey Shore, in my youth.

Something else I like to think about though is how Netflix uses its user viewing data in its content creation. It's famous for doing this, as shows like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black were both written in ways to exploit viewers' watching habits. If you put a twist here and a happy episode here, someone is more likely to keep watching and get more eyes on your stuff. Keeping this in mind, I tend to consider this when it comes to most Netflix content, especially stuff meant for a wider audience like Love is Blind. 

So, does the steady does of Christian characters in Netflix reality shows mean that they think about attracting a Christian demographic? Is there a Christian lobby pushing for good, God-loving characters on The Circle? IS NETFLIX COMING FOR THAT YESTV/PUREFLIX MONEY?

Even on the recent Wipeout clone that Netflix put out, Floor is Lava, there was a team made up of a pastor and two of his employees (they were by far the biggest weirdos). I keep looking online to see if anyone else has noticed this, but it seems like no one else has really cared besides me.

Fortunately, there is one bastion of reality shows on Netflix untouched by the Bible, and that is the incredible phenomenon of Australian people doing home renovation, rating each other's Air BnBs, and getting back into the dating scene after getting divorced.

Random Anecdote Pt. 12

I was thinking about the shelf life of fads recently and before long, the king fad of them all, Pokemon Cards, came to mind. Whenever I'm reminded of them, I immediately think of one memory related to them.

Opening Scene:

A small portable in a school yard. It's a fall morning, but it hasn't gotten chill outside yet. Pokemon is at the height of its popularity. Though it has captured the imaginations of North American children everywhere, this only means that a precipitous drop in interest will be coming soon.

"Good morning students."

The principal begins to run through the morning's announcements after the national anthem. After giving some news about the school's Jog-A-Thon fundraiser, he pauses.

"Now, on the subject of Pokemon cards. Starting tomorrow, no Pokemon cards will be allowed on school grounds. This includes recess."

Our protagonist Tim turns in his seat to see his classmate Tyler dropping his head into his hands in anguish, a 2" binder full of Pokemon cards open on his desk.

There aren't any other scenes!

That moment really sums up the experience of every fad (Crazy Bones, yo-yos, Pogs) to me. Though Pokemon as a franchise has persisted longer than I'm sure any North American parent saw coming, the cards came and went pretty fast. Pokemon cards were such an intense thing while they were here and an economy developed around them among kids so fast. Every kid knew they wanted a Charizard (I was sadly only able to muster a Chansey) and was on a quest to trade up for it. It's funny for me to think of Tyler dying inside in real time in front of me because he couldn't bring his giant binder to school anymore, but there was genuine sadness there too, as misguided as it may have been.

What's also funny though is that I don't think many kids actually knew how to play the card game. We all created our own versions of how to play based on looking at the numbers on the cards, but the rules were too complicated for our dumb asses to understand. I only realized how the game worked years later when I played the GameBoy edition of the trading card game. We were so caught up in how badly we needed to own Pokemon cards, but none of their worth was based in us actually using them,* only in having them.

*Is Charizard actually the best card?

Fads meet at the most volatile crossroads of kids needing to fit in and parents having to be withholding because they know better. Your parents realize how stupid the thing you're obsessed with is and as a result need to dole it out in small doses. Sure, you could receive pack upon pack of Pokemon cards, like Tyler did, but then you start to expect everything you want and don't appreciate everything you have. And yeah, the fad your kid is obsessed is stupid, but if you don't give them a little taste, they're ostracized by their peers and being consistently put out like that can create some very real issues later.

Kids like such dumb shit. How will they ever survive?

Tryin' to Lose the Awkward Teenage Blues

Coincidences have to be one of the weirdest things about our human existence, right? You see a few things recur over a couple of weeks and it's easy to convince yourself that we're living in a simulation and are just pawns being manipulated by an unseen power. You can even convince yourself that a worldwide pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people isn't real.

This is on my mind because of two musical artists that seem to be circling me lately.

Coincidence band #1: Screeching Weasel

I used to love Screeching Weasel when I was younger. I  was really into learning the history of pop-punk at the time and being into My Brain Hurts made me feel like I was a bigger head than all of my peers listening to All Time Low. To be honest, the songs are still very good, but the "I hit women and SJWs are unfair" act that Ben Weasel has going on is a quick path to me not giving a shit about your band.

Sidenote: One day it rained at Ontario Place and the entire water park staff jammed into our break room to escape the storm. One person asked for an iPod to put on music and ended up using mine. They asked "What should I put on?" and I replied "I don't know, everyone probably won't like the music that's on there." Everyone teased me for being pretentious and then put the iPod on shuffle. The first song that played was "My Brain Hurts" and everyone made a disgusted face. I laughed.

So, how has Screeching Weasel turned up for me lately? My friend John started a vintage streetwear shop. Or page? Or account? I don't know how being a hypebeast works. Anyways, he recently did an unboxing video and one of the shirts he featured was a vintage Boogadaboogdaboogada shirt.

Then, when I woke up this morning I did my usual routine of downloading the most recent episode of Blink-155 so that I could listen to it while I took Pierre on his morning walk. This morning's episode? blink-182's cover of "The Girl Next Door".

Coincidence Band #2: Bob Seger

A couple of weeks ago, I watched Girl and Chocolate's 2014 skate video Pretty Sweet. Given how ubiquitous those companies (company?) have been in skating, the video is stacked and their team is pretty much unparalleled in terms of talent. The part that stands out the most to me in the video, for whatever reason, is Cory Kennedy's, which is accompanied by Seger's "Night Moves".

Whereas most of the video featured hip-hop or hardcore punk, Kennedy's super laidback and Pacific Northwest style of skating works absolutely perfectly with the long acoustic-driven song.

Man, what a part. Jeeze.

Yesterday my friend Matt tweeted "he died as lived, listening to Bob Seger's 'Night Moves' on repeat". That is ... the ultimate way to go. This coincidence makes a lot of sense, as Matt and I are essentially two version of the same person and have identical interests, so it's not a stretch that he would be pumping the Silver Bullet Band and I would be excited about him pumping the Silver Bullet Band.

THEN, Seger came back again. Rebecca and I have been watching the first season of The OC, a much-loved show that I have never watched. One of the characters on the show, Julie Cooper, is a women who came from a poor neighbourhood, but married a then-rich man and is now ashamed of her past and overcompensates with a rich lifestyle. Early in the season, one character refers to her past self as someone who loved Bob Seger, which is supposed to be signifier of her lower class background and taste and is seemingly unbelievable in the rich confines of Newport Harbor. Cooper then begins an affair with her daughter's ex-boyfriend, but ultimately spurns him in favour of accepting a marriage to the father of her neighbour, who cheated with her husband. This show is so stupid and it is very funny to me that Days of Our Lives in a different time slot was such a definitive show and identity-shaping moment for many people I know.

Anyway, the song that plays after Luke sees Julie say "yes" and drives away drunk? Take a guess.