Yom Kippur

It's been cold today, all day today, cold and gray. I wore my jacket this morning as I spent an hour on the bus heading out to the hospital for a five minute reunion with my orthopedic surgeon who I don't have to see again unless I have problems and then you know where to find me.

Last year I went to the synagogue on Yom Kippur for Kol Nidre. I went all alone, not really knowing anyone and having no social compunction to go, but feeling like I should really dress up and do it. I still didn't know anyone on campus really; that early in the year, late September, all I'd done was sleepwalk through my introduction classes and go to grindcore shows hoping I'd find something to occupy myself with. I guess I reached out for some kind of connection and going there felt like what I needed to do.

I fasted today. It's surprisingly easy to deprive yourself when you aren't being held by your parents or your community's requests, when it's solely of your own volition. It takes all the fun out of being contrarian. But I found what I've had to fight is actually myself. Not my hunger - that's easy. It's only two meals I'm missing. No, it's my mind working, fueled by excitement of my surprising competency in the kitchen I've discovered this month, bolstered by the strength of what it considers logical, disapproving of this religious stuff. You drank water this morning by accident anyway, and your mouth is parched from skating to the clinic and biking to class. You didn't observe a "day of strict rest" anyway, man... You went to class. You went to the hospital 20 kilometers away. What are you trying to prove? There's nobody around to watch you, and even if there was, that wouldn't be your real motivation anymore. I don't get it.

It's the right day for it really, cold and gray like I said, a day where you need to stay warm and not go out and have fun but sit alone and ruminate. But I missed Kol Nidre last night when I was out with my friends taking photos of Rifflandia for the Martlet and hanging out in a nightclub, and today I blew 9 am services for a doctor's appointment, and it seems like now that I'm here in Victoria on my own time, it became... inconvenient. And what a pathetic cop-out that is.

I spoke to my jewish friends a lot today, sussing out their plans, deciding where to go... But the synagogue here won't announce the time of their evening service, and it feels anti-climactic and half-assed to go for the final service of a five-part program over all of today. So we're all going to finish out the fast ourselves until 7:30 and do our separate things, and I feel like I should do something more to go with that. I feel like I've fulfilled my own requirements in the fast today and by spending a quiet afternoon in my room in an empty house with the wind blowing outside, trying to nail down every specific moment that I hurt someone's feelings this year and thinking of how I can better myself as a person and improve my interactions with other people. That's often how I approach my religious ties these days; I try to look at what the holiday is really about and the intentions behind it, and follow those through my secular life. That's what I'm comfortable with. And really, spending a holiday in the synagogue without my father's warm tallit and my mother all dressed up and my little brother reading quietly isn't much of what I feel about my faith anyway... Not that I have much faith in the first place. But again, it's about taking the best parts of that tradition and keeping them alive in ways that make sense today and provoke introspection in parts of myself that I usually gloss over. My heart is in my throat now, strangely, as I don't remember thinking this hard about Yom Kippur for many years - even in years when I committed wrongs much greater than this year. I appreciate so much about my life these days that I feel I must earn this life, and I need to atone for things I've done that make me undeserving.

I'm sorry if I've done anything to hurt you this year.

If I've conspired against you.

If I've been jealous of you instead of celebrated your success.

If I've made a choice I needed to make for myself that hurt you.

If I held a grudge against you for trivial reasons.

If I directed hate towards you.

If I spoke about you behind your back.

If I wronged you, acted unjustly towards you.

If I lied to you, mislead you, didn't tell you the whole truth.

If I made an apology and didn't mean it,

I mean it this time.

I'm sorry.

Know that whatever I said then, I don't mean now.

Vidui.

I acknowledge before You, Lord my G-d and the G-d of my fathers, that my recovery and my death are in Your hands. May it be Your will that You heal me with total recovery, but, if I die, may my death be an atonement for all the errors, iniquities, and willful sins that I have erred, sinned and transgressed before You.

Our G-d and G-d of our fathers, may our prayers come before You, and do not turn away from our supplication, for we are not so impudent and obdurate as to declare before You, Lord our G-d and G-d of our fathers, that we are righteous and have not sinned. Indeed, we and our fathers have sinned.

We have transgressed, we have acted perfidiously, we have robbed, we have slandered. We have acted perversely and wickedly, we have willfully sinned, we have done violence, we have imputed falsely. We have given evil counsel, we have lied, we have scoffed, we have rebelled, we have provoked, we have been disobedient, we have committed iniquity, we have wantonly transgressed, we have oppressed, we have been obstinate. We have committed evil, we have acted perniciously, we have acted abominably, we have gone astray, we have led others astray. We have strayed from Your good precepts and ordinances, and it has not profited us. Indeed, You are just in all that has come upon us, for You have acted truthfully, and it is we who have acted wickedly.

Vidui.

It's been a while

Casa shows with HOG and GEA were always a big deal; a hundred sweaty hipsters with value village blazers and pointy leather shoes from 1973 stuffed into a tiny room, either knocking each other unconscious with flailing elbows at each momentous thud of Duncan's kick and swaying drunkenly to the eyes-closed refrain or screaming their lungs out trying to be heard over three saxophones, a trumpet, a string trio and a guy in a duct tape dress beating the shit out of a floor tom with a tambourine. But you bring them in with a shoegaze-esque trio with a sample arsenal and enough delay pedals to turn the earth back an hour and a pop band with near-legendary local status, put them up in a 250-person capacity hall with actual stage lights and a sound guy, and then promote the show as the last of the duo for this year (or forever) and you're basically guaranteed the most psychotic Wednesday night possible.

It's actually intimidating sometimes listening to local bands that are so good; sometimes it seems that no matter what you do you'll never get to the point where people appreciate your music that way you appreciate theirs, and the arrangement and conveyance of emotion through songs seem totally effortless, like they were born to do it. Maybe it's being a musician that prompts these feelings of inadequacy in my mind but even before I could play an instrument I felt left out as if I could never achieve something as righteous as what I heard. We can become a part of the moment with our own skills, with our photography, our writing, our words, our memories and voices but we are all reflecting the creativity of these people that we venerate so highly despite how close they are to us socially.

Holding them up on a pedestal can poison you too; it can make you resent those who you feel are not respecting the art and the artists that you are so emotionally drawn to, and it can make you yearn for those 13 seconds of fame you could garner by screaming into that mic just one more time, even though you are ashamed because you know how pathetic that hope is, as if the people around you are going to sit around on streetcorners after the show passing around cigarettes and commenting on how cool that guy was that knew all the words. It can make you feel so inadequate that you cannot appreciate the music anymore, that you are so caught up in needing to be included and so vindictive of those who treat the music like it could be anything that you lose the joy and basic connection that drove you to listen to their EP fourteen times in a row on repeat in the dark in the middle of the night what seems like all those years ago.

And that's important. You can dissolve yourself in the miasma of young passion surrounding the venue, soak up the exuberance and delve into the spirit of the moment, yell the words until your voice is hoarse and smile like an idiot right back into the eyes of the guy bleeding onto his guitar strings. Because that's what it's there for. This is a song about friends, this is a song about playing songs to people you know, this is a song about love, love lost, love found, love in the past, this is a song about what you used to be like and how you used to feel, this is a song about how you feel now and how you will always feel. Hoot hoot. Captivated, that's what you are, and it's such a close-knit coven of folks, those songs are written for them but it's more than that now, it's everyone, it's everyone touched by the songs and the words and the melody of one blue Ibanez with a left echelon and a fake vintage Danelectro. Driving to Queens of the Stone Age in a van with someone you just met and someone you wish you knew better, trading Palaniuk novels that have since coloured your reading of every novel and every literary interview and remembering that as you feel so enveloped by the sound and the sensation, the poor kid's having a breakdown from the stress. We knew though, we knew the sun would come up and that this was bigger than we could have imagined though it will never leave this place. We are so earnest, so earnest, so earnest. You challenge me to do better and I try, I try to encapsulate the sensation with my own voice and show you how I think of your music - you talented, honest, simple, creative, kind little son of a bitch. One day I'll look back and know again how much this meant to me and try to choke down the feeling that I missed out on the full experience, because everyone else seems comfortable with their role in this. It feels like my words just aren't good enough sometimes.

The big band is the same way but different, a cacophony that they readily admit is a wall of sonic blasphemy, the sound guy protesting wheezily as the horns blend into the keyboard and the celloist saws through every horsehair on his bow. There's never enough instruments to fill the stage, a growing, building, screaming intensity that draws everyone in and makes sweat pour from the brows of everyone who wore a tie because that is the appropriate attire to get down in this venue. A legion of instruments formerly used for passive, lonely, piecemeal verses colliding like an earthquake hitting the Long & McQuade band department and fronted by two bat-shit crazy presidents with voices like velvet, hammering on floor toms with no reservation and somehow pulling the team together with the audience in some kind of colossal indulgent mind-fuck, a hive brain of souls in unison yelling over and over that I'm not an adult yet, methuselah. Sweat hard, sweat hard because there's fifty minutes left and there's no blood on your suit jacket yet; time is running out, you're growing up, you're getting a job, life is getting serious and one day soon you'll have to hang up the rainbow suspenders and act like your dad.

So get out, get out, go home, show's over. We'll see you next year maybe, or never. You'll know where to find us. We're here.

It seems like everything is working out

Everything is working out; I've nothing to complain about.

Circumstances seem okay.

I felt the same way yesterday.

My ankle aches and my eyes are heavy

but it's alright, my bed is ready.

Tomorrow will be much the same,

but... I'm off till Saturday.

My throat croaks and phlegm comes up

I haven't felt that much like writing

It seems that I have things to say

but they come out slowly if ever.

Half baked ideas appearing and disappearing in my mind.

I feel useful to be doing work

but rarely creative

and mostly just tired.

I installed new pedals on my bike

I used a 5/8ths crescent wrench

and got dirt and oil on my fingers.

WD40 smells like work. I felt competent.

Honestly, you could have done it.

Sort of like my second job. I am a human vending machine

and sometimes I sweep the floor

but mostly, I drink iced coffee.

To be frank, I haven't really thought that much about it

I guess it seems like too small of a chance to linger over

but I think it's been sitting in the back of my mind

and making work easier.

Here's hoping. Things should have worked out that time.

Maybe we'll get another chance.

In Limbo by Radiohead

and Blaise Bailey Finnegan

I cribbed the style of this post from someone

that I used to date.

Or did I?

It feels pretty organic.

Neoprene biking gloves, business cards, Slayer tickets

A p-bass, red plaid loafers, work clothes draped over a fan.

A green skull-shaped shaker that Seb bought me for no reason.

Pirate bandaids. Headphones for listening to underwater.

A CD player I got for free when I was 14.

A carabiner that is unsafe to use for climbing.

Wine glasses I used once. How ornamental. Ostentatious?

A recursive beer mug. A craft vise in which I crushed a coke can.

Lots of coke cans. Duct tape. Staples. Peg winder.

A lava lamp that doesn't work anymore.

I'm too nervous to longboard at any reasonable speed.

Even on my bike

rolling over manholes makes me cringe

but I think the confidence will come back at some point.

All the roads I ride look so inviting for urethane.

I have more drum keys than I know what to do with.

When I got home today, I had a bunch of things to do

and exciting things to tell my dad

but there was KFC on the table and only one plate.

It was ok, though. 

He came back later.

My brother was listening to Ride The Lightning.

I gave him some more music to listen to.

Made me kind of proud.

He will be a serious dude someday.

If he doesn't discover cold fusion first

that would be death for his social life.

How ironic!

She paid like fourteen bucks for a cable I got for $1

at the Dollar Store, no less.

CAT-5 was invented in 1974 at Xerox Parc.

I have a package of fake moustaches on my desk.

The plug for my mouse is taped down because it is broken

I can't even imagine what life will be like in three months

How inconceivable. 

But really,

it's not a big deal.

I wonder if they'll let me keep my lego AT-ST...

It's a collector's edition.

(He just came into my room

and said it would have been awesome

if, as apparently they almost did,

Harmonix had put Angel of Death

in Guitar Hero: Metallica.)

Did you know?

Brian Gibson works for that company.

He is also in the band Lightning Bolt.

There is a tissue burnt from the application of a soldering gun

and a five hundred page guide to traveling in Mexico

for the sort of people who would travel in Mexico.

If i'd worked this job last summer

it would have been craaaaazy.

Maybe we can interface at some point

I'm available by many forms of electronic conveyance

I've collected about ten stickers that say  Thank You

and I dare you to type that on your keyboard.

Carrier pigeon and homing owl are not recommended

but you can probably send me an email.

I want a capybara.

Good night.

Bafflegab

It's kind of funny how there is such a backlog of my personal history on this blog. Admittedly it's kind of like the letters your parents got from you at summer camp saying how you hated it and wanted to go home even when camp really wasn't that bad and you only had time to write when you were homesick anyway, and I am surprised sometimes to find how upbeat other people's blogs can be. 

I think I've become really exacting about the kind of stuff I'll post on here, like I expect it to hold up to some personal standard that doesn't really have any guidelines. Hesaidquote is kind of about that; it has some more rigid guidelines that turn each post into a calculated take on whatever topic, as opposed to here where I just futz around and vomit verbiage pretending that people actually enjoy reading it. In fact I find that a lot of material on here is like some kind of purgatory for thoughts that irritate me so much I have to write them down, and it's often so lazy in terms of creativity and thought that it's basically the equivalent of HST typing out other people's books on his Selectric. That's a good example actually - I noticed the last time I used that word that I'd mentioned it twice more pretty recently and that bothered me. I think the kind of artistic sensibility that I like to imagine I share with people like Mackenzie sometimes bleeds into my view of a lot of things in my life; I'm judgmental about album art and other people's photography for example when they, for whatever reason, appear "incorrect" to me.

This kind of writing is interesting if you're focused on a specific topic and have some kind of goal in mind but I often find my own words on this blog so boring. I drone on about whatever topic with weak metaphorical explanations in disjointed paragraphs that have questionable specificity. I used to end each post with a haiku until I decided I was kind of insulting the great tradition by jumping lines and using curse words and that you can't really write haikus in any other language than Japanese... But anyway, I kind of like that sentiment. I'd say that I'll make more of an effort to include imagery but who am I kidding, I'd regress back to here anyway...

This weekend was a strange mixture of loneliness and good times with friends; I spent nearly every day with A&M, saw Wolverine, went to band practice where we wrote a great song, checked out the Skull Skates yard sale, ate at the Topanga Cafe, and beat most of MGS3 on normal... But last year just like this year my family was out of town and I came home every night to a house that was too big to be my space alone. While I'm whinging, my ankle is almost healed but I probably won't be skating for another three months even with lots of attention from the physiotherapist of questionable credentials who was constantly chewing gum and hooked up electrical suction cups to my foot.

Maybe it's that I don't often do much that is really noteworthy that hobbles my ability to come up with moments I feel are worth writing about. Really, who gives a fuck that I bought a slurpee (even though I didn't because I can't carry them without somebody to help me). Hmm, let's see what else - I wasted hours of my life arguing pointlessly with people I don't know very well over a largely irrelevant topic which wound me up to the point where I had a stomach ache on my way to the job interview I had today, which by the way leads to the most worthwhile thing I've been doing lately... It looks like I'll be gainfully employed at the very boutique Apple Store downtown in Pacific Centre as well as the laid-back and locally owned Park Theatre on Cambie St. So I'll have something to do during the waking hours... 

It's pathetic really, I go on Facebook sometimes and see people planning things I'm not involved in and have to remind myself that there is no malice involved and that I really live nowhere near whatever event is going on. Playing video games by yourself is cool as long as you have video games, and when you beat them all and have nothing to look forward to you might as well go out and hang out with people and actually get a real life. It's like summer is limbo where you are suspended in a constant shifting state of lethargy and labour before returning to the plane of reality for eight months of speaking to other people and drinking copious volumes of alcohol. 

Anybody reading this should check out the album Decline of the West by Holy Sons... You are probably totally into indie music and therefore you will probably like it a lot more than any of the sweaty armpit grumpy metal bands I'd otherwise be tooting the horn of. 

I wrote a pretty off-the-cuff op-ed thing for the summer edition of the Martlet about the election, and I haven't heard back so I doubt it'll be published but either way it'll probably end up here too. This blog is so often a catalogue of disappointment that it seems like it'll fit right in. Christ I am a bucket of sunshine this morning... I have to turn off the Godspeed You! and start grooving on something posi.

Lost for months at sea, craving human contact... Come in Cape Canaveral...

The Allure of Old Spice

I can't say how many times I've seen the new Degree Men's ad on tv... You know, the one that opens with "7 out of 10 men prefer Degree to whatever Old Spice scent," and then features a funny looking "average guy" jumping out of an airplane with a shopping cart and then zooming through two semi-trailers on the freeway. You can watch it here: http://www.degreemen.com/Men/Degree-Men-Deodorant.aspx It loads on the right side of the screen and you can enlarge it. I can't imagine the kind of jumped-up twitchy-fingered intercity/midtown card-carrying gym membership meathead jock that this ad is tailored to appeal to, but either way, mentioning that "fewer men like Old Spice" is really just unnecessary. I wouldn't be surprised if Degree was more popular that Old Spice, but I think that's because their target markets are far different. If the fans of Degree Men are Chad Ochocinco and shopping-cart-jumping guy, Old Spice is represented by Bruce Campbell and is probably used by Dos Equis' Most Interesting Man In The World. Here's an Old Spice ad: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af1OxkFOK18 Damn. That was TASTEFUL. Now you know: Degree Men is nothing short of embarrassing.