Week XIII: Imagine

"Jesus was alright but his disciples were thick and ordinary." - John Lennon

Goin' all John Lennon. Imagine there's no Yoko, it's easy if you try. No hell below us... I can't imagine a world without the Beatles. Wouldn't be worth living in. Hop on over to YouTube and put on 'I Want You (She's So Heavy)' while you're reading this, then 'Happiness is a Warm Gun' afterwards. It'll make your day better, I promise. If you can listen to the Beatles and still be in a bad mood, seek help, you're a sociopath.

The Beatles invented a lot of the recording techniques that are still in use today. They stopped playing live in the early '60s because no amplifier that was commercially available could overpower the volume of their screaming fans. No joke. Everything they wrote between '62 and '70 with a few exceptions was recorded at Abbey Road Studios. All of their psychedelic-fueled energy went into experimenting with studio wizard George Martin, who really ought to have been credited as a member of the band for all his contributions to their art. They created music that was never intended to be played for a live audience, and in the process discovered all sorts of studio tricks and effects that had never been attempted in the history of recorded music. 

The end of the Beatles was a sad, protracted legal battle - Paul McCartney filed suit to dissolve the band in 1971, but the latent contract disputes weren't resolved until more than 3 years later. There were occasional collaborations between members afterwards, but the band didn't play together again. One of the great moments in their career happened right before the end in 1969, when they played on the rooftop of their headquarters - the Apple building - in London. John Lennon was murdered in December of 1980, putting an end to any hope of a reunion.

The Beatles are the best and most important rock band of all time. Some might argue the case for Elvis, or maybe the Rolling Stones. They are wrong. The Beatles didn't ruin their legacy by fizzling out in a sad attempt to stay in the game long after their time in the sun. They left a back catalogue of timeless classics, and didn't try to make another go of it with substitute members. They didn't reunite and record a painful, underwhelming album in the modern era where their influence and relevance to the present-day musical landscape had long since passed.

Enter Black Sabbath. I quote from 'This is Spinal Tap': "This pretentious, ponderous collection of religious rock psalms inspires the question: on which day did God create [the new, Bill Ward-less Black Sabbath], and couldn't He have rested then, too." 

I submit into evidence the new single from Black Sabbath's unfortunately titled forthcoming album, '13', God Is Dead? The jury will note the protracted length of the track, which is not commensurate with the quality of riffing or vocals displayed therein. Absent the help of enlisted super-producer Rick Rubin, Ozzy's vocal performance would not stack up. The jury will also note the sheen of slick over-production which the prosecution will argue is utterly antithetical to the band often credited with founding the genre of heavy metal. This is a long way from the 1970s 'Basement Tapes' that were recorded in an empty movie theatre in Birmingham. Hard to re-capture that kind of magic. Compare, if you will, the aforementioned piece of studio theatrics to the classic Children of the Grave from their 1971 album 'Master of Reality'. It's sad, really. How the mighty have fallen and such.

The prosecution also submits into evidence the lack of drummer and founding member Bill Ward, who has been photoshopped out of all the photos on the band's official website. Something about an "unsignable contract," which is newspeak for "we're a bunch of rich old farts who bicker like little girls and sully our good name while pissing away our credibility in the eyes of our long-time, loyal fans." They've tapped Brad Wilk, formerly of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, for the studio. His playing is the only thing I'm excited about in this entire fiasco. I love Brad Wilk, he's one of my all-time favourite drummers. He's also not Bill Ward. Kinda makes this whole reunion thing feel a bit wrong, y'know... In short, WHY, BLACK SABBATH!? DEAR GOD, WHY!?

I don't want to misrepresent myself here. I'm a huge fan of Black Sabbath and always will be, which is why I won't be listening to their new album, watching the inevitable bootleg footage of their big fat overpriced reunion tour, or more generally having anything to do with their post 1982 catalogue. You have to let sleeping dogs lie, dammit! Shame on you, Black Sabbath! Ronnie James Dio is rolling in his grave! You could have at least had the decency to avoid this latest tabloid-riddled tour into the mainstream, and I could have continued to forgive you for recording 'Born Again,' but NOOOOOO! You just had to have one last kick at the rusty, crumpled can. 

I wonder what sort of ornamental device they'll employ to prop up Ozzy onstage for the forthcoming string of shows where they'll trade on classics that are now older than most of their new fans. The people who'll become familiar with their music through this new album will be used to overproduced, brain-dead rock, and they'll look back on the early years of Black Sabbath with derision and dismiss it without any appreciation or understanding of the history behind it, or the importance of their early music to everything heavy that came after.

I hope that when Ozzy, Tony Iommi, and Geezer Butler (and that harlot, Rick Rubin) foist their bastard child on the public next month that the big boost in "vintage" t-shirt sales to 16 year old girls at Hot Topic will be enough to compensate for the loss of their souls. We sold our soul for rock 'n roll? More like a 360 deal with options on future concert ticket revenues... HOW DO YOU SLEEP AT NIGHT!?


Word count: 1,017

Week XII: Simulated

When fatigue took hold he saw bugs and loops

This does not compute, he said to himself

He hammered keys and the characters became

Him and his life and all that he knew

Processor logic says fetch and execute

Like mercenary dogs, he thought to himself

The thought became the image that would contain

The wealth of what he could offer

Tired and blurry, he saw errors encoded

Poorly written instructions, he supposed

Composed they called for time and motion

And he gave what he could measure

His thoughts were massive and he doubted them

Like the god hands and their reach, he ventured

Forth and last to reconcile the maker

With its creation, was it he or they?

He thought about a torus twisting time

Then suppose if you will, he instructed

As though to circumvent their will

And impose upon them every word

Suppose the curve is steep and rising

That each instruction redoubles the slope

Consider the moment, infinity

In its granular loop begins to fold over

Suppose that a moment in the loop

A fractured frame we witnessed from inside

That we began the cycle yet anew

A clone of what we knew, in carnal terms

The infinite divisions, momentarily

Integrated Achilles and caught him fast

And what we saw were heels and wings

That seemed to run from us and then take flight

It must have been alarming then

When the digital mirror's veil, cast aside

Refracted the sacred profanity we made

And pixelated Cain in our own image

Yet the mark, it seemed to fade away

With each iteration obfuscated

The version control no longer in hand

And the vision clouding our eyes

The glitches then, mere blips it seemed

That our radical visions escaped

The mind, the link in copper and fiber

Glass but the lens bent parallax errors

Projected on holographic screens

The resolution passed, its definition

Ever higher as Icarus on waxen wings

Lifting cubes into tesseracts

Drawing lines and the frequency

At which the frames surpass the nerves

Came upward from the chemical pulse

And the analogue falters, slowly

Admire the strands of new mankind

The biomimicry in networks drawn

Precisely, and this is surely why

The mind, the map was our compass

A backlight to the flickering world

As it came online and the shadows

Cast of Plato's perfect forms, binary clones

The cave was rendered and redrawn

Unshackled then the modern age

Of anode and cathode and mother and child

The gate the drain the source aligned

To serve as the spark to the flame

At first the shapes we witnessed at the wall

Grotesque like fetish masks and skewed

Softened bitwise smooth shading until

We forgot ourselves and worshiped them

Until they, taking lifelike steps toward

The luminescent visionaries

All in silhouette to one another

Reached out their hands and touched us at the core

The central process, once a unit

Solitary, singular purpose serial

Counting shifting registers and stacks

Compiled at a human pace, we thought

To take upon ourselves, our new device

Correcting itself as it queried and learned

To occupy the spaces in between

The synapses, transmissions terminated

In due time, clock cycles oscillate

And the aperture time a fraction

Of a blink of an eye, no longer

The optical instrument of choice

Submit, and when you start to see

The pain behind the eyes and the mind

Pull the veil of sleep over everything

And fall down into Turing's dream


Word count: 490

Week XI: Spring cleaning

Rally the troops and grab the brooms. Everything must go. Out comes the sun to shine the light of day on boxes and bags and stacks of papers long forgotten or set aside. My "deal with it later" pile is on notice. I'm stalking the house with my silver hammer, ready to bring it down on the stowaways that have been hiding in my closet and gathering on my shelves. They're all dead.

Clutter is the enemy. Things are nothing but a source of stress. Mo' stuff, mo' problems. I look across my living space and for all its artwork and furnishings, all I can see is the random assortment of papers, craft supplies, and electronics splayed across the low wall that divides the living room from the kitchen.

I have a giant garbage bag full of stuff that's ready to walk out the door, but it's not enough. I need to rid my life of things. I don't want any of them. I feel compelled to condense and cleanse, to rid myself of the objects that inhabit my life. No binge, just purge.

There's a special sort of romanticism to life without material things. It feels like beat poets and vagabonds and the open road. What if I could just pack up and go whenever I felt so inclined? What if the baggage that I carry with me is completely unnecessary? I don't own anything, I just have long-term rentals. Eventually it's all going to disappear. I don't get to keep any of it, not even my own skin. Although I was thinking of offering my tattooed hide to a taxidermist when I'm done with it...

It's been almost seven years since I moved to Charlottetown, PEI. Everything that I owned fit into the trunk of my '92 Toyota Corolla. I miss that car, and what it represented to me - the opportunity to put a lot of things behind me and find my own way. I still miss the east coast. I often wonder about how my life might have been different if I'd stayed there.

Pining for what once was is rarely a healthy activity, and it's not my intention here. The healthiest part of my cross-Canada experience was the freedom from stuff. I didn't have any junk. Just books, a couple changes of clothes, a laptop, and a guitar. I lived in an 8'x10' bedroom quite comfortably, sleeping on a twin bed from a garage sale and studying at a desk I borrowed from my roommate. I have more responsibilities now, keeping a home and caring for my son, and stuff seems to piggy-back its way into my life as a consequence. But it's not the rule. I don't have to let things accumulate. I can get back to that simplicity.

Once I've paid off my student loans, I never want to work full-time again in my life. Maybe that makes me incredibly lazy. Maybe I care a lot more about time than money. Maybe I'd rather play with my son and make music than give 40 hours a week to my occupation. Maybe I don't mind forgoing common luxuries in the interest of conviviality. Maybe I don't ever want a bank to own my life. Maybe I've resolved to avoid the trap of money + stuff = happiness by eschewing the left-hand side of the equation whenever I can.

But how to avoid something that's culturally and socially predominant? I live in one of the most expensive cities in Canada and rent isn't getting any cheaper. Even if I could qualify for a mortgage, the price of houses here is insane. A five year fixed-term mortgage from CIBC would cost me 5.24% if I signed up this week. If I went and bought the house around the corner for its listed price of $422,900, I'd pay nearly $100,000 in interest over a 30 year amortization if my interest rate stayed the same or decreased over the term. Madness, I tell you! Madness!

But what about the equity? What about the credit you can build? What about the tendency of property values to increase over time? Don't you know that historically, real-estate has been one of the more secure investments? Ever heard of mortgage-backed securities? There's a reason those exist, y'know. It's because consumer confidence is high, which is why the price of houses keeps going up! You could be sitting on a gold mine!

Maybe. Or maybe I could be sitting on a leaning tower of debt that's going to collapse any second. In my estimation, this is not a good time to be adding hundreds of thousands of dollars to my debt load. Student loans are bad enough. Once I'm rid of them, I'll be damned if I'm going to owe money to banks, credit cards, the government, or anybody else. I'm done with money. I don't buy the argument that I ought to work to fill my life with creature comforts. It's not worth it. It's a bad deal. It's a trick, and I'm not falling for it.

The question arises once again - if you don't want to pay rent, and you don't want to own a house, what's the alternative? That cake you're holding looks mighty delicious, too bad you'll never get a bite. I say to hell with the cake and its baker. I'm going to avoid spending my life as a servant of debt by ridding myself of stuff, step by minimalist step.

I hope that in a few years from now I'll be re-reading this entry from the back of my converted school bus, parked on little patch of dirt somewhere on the coast away from commuter traffic and city lights. I'll have a little shed for my tools, a coop for my chickens, a garden full of vegetables, and a smile on my face that I can only imagine right now - one that comes from the immeasurable satisfaction I hope to find in living without debt and without stuff. It's my beautiful dream, and now I'm working to make it real.

Word count: 1,004

Week X: The pen

I've found the perfect pen. It's a Pentel EnerGel-X BLN105 Retractable Gel Roller Pen in black with a 0.5mm ball. I bought it from the Camosun College bookstore. At first I wasn't entirely sure that it was my one and only, the pen I'd been searching for so long. I'd seen many like it before, boasting of hi-tech nibs and nubs, futuristic gels, strange inks that would confuse most cephalopods. I expected to be disappointed. Instead I was elevated to a higher human form.

About a year ago I went a little crazy. I had to find a better pen. It was driving me to distraction. I was missing lecture and cursing the ink smudges on my hands as the under-performing writing utensils in my bag mocked my efforts at clean lines and legible script. I knew I'd settled. I hadn't found what I really wanted. I was staying in a comfortable relationship with my pens despite my surety that a beautiful new instrument was just beyond the horizon. 

I went to office supply stores and tried every pen but none could satisfy me. I would know immediately. One or two flourishes and I could tell. Sometimes I would buy them anyways and hope that if I took them home there would be some spark, some flickering sign of life, some connection that I hadn't immediately seen. I lied to myself, said that I'd found the one. But when I woke up the next day and rolled over there would be a monster staring back at me from the desk.

My desk drawer is a graveyard. A mass grave. A black hole where unloved pens go to die among spent batteries and zip ties, packs of gum and tissues, packing tape and notepads. I barely gave them a chance before casting them off. The corpses of pens that didn't make the grade. I discarded them with no remorse. I took them home from off the shelves and promised them a better life filling pages and spilling their ink across new generations of notebooks. And then I denied them and threw them back into the abyss.

I still take all my notes longhand. I took over one hundred pages of handwritten notes in one math class this winter. I write many of the drafts and outlines for my blog in my beloved notebook. I love to write and I must have the correct pen, it is essential. I had to find the one. I had to.

I should have known that my relationships with those other pens would never work out. We were wrong for each other right from the outset. We danced around, pretending that we might find a way to resolve our differences, but we knew. We always knew that it would be temporary. My disgust would scarcely be concealed as I sneered at the inferior quality of the ink scrawled across the page. I would furrow my brow and look and understand and we would acknowledge the inevitability. I will stay, you will go.

Then one day I went through the racks of pens at the college bookstore. I tore pages away from their tester pad as I tried pen after pen after pen. There were stacks of triangular cubby holes each housing a different one. Perhaps two dozen in all. The blues and blacks fought for my attention. The finer wider roller super duper glider slider gel pen. Whatever happened to the blue ballpoint that everybody had? WHY DOES THIS HAVE TO BE SO DIFFICULT!?

And then I found the Pentel EnerGel-X BLN105.

The pen. I knew. I hestiated... then submitted to something of a religious experience. A jolt to the senses. It must have been akin to finding Jesus. A clear, cylindrical, Japanese-made Jesus with a 0.5mm tip. When I took its fine grip between my forefingers and thumb and began to stroke a page with its smooth point and its low-viscosity, quick-drying ink, a sensation comparable to hearing the sweetest music saturated my whole system. I experienced the pen. Its black ink left bold flourishes of stain on snow white sheets of paper. Beautiful. Magical. Precise.

You might think it odd to write an ode to a pen. And it is. But 1,000 words is nothing compared to the hours I've spent in the company of my Pentel EnerGel-X BLN 105. My guitar might be the only object I've spent more time holding in the past year. It's a work of art and a tool of my trade and I love it.

I wonder what sort of relationship Picasso had with his brushes. There must be writers who are quite particular about their keyboards. Brian Jacques writes the Redwall series on a typewriter in his garden, like every hipster wants to but lacks the originality to actually achieve. You can't conceive of a world where a religious order of mice do battle with a revolving cast of unsavory woodland creatures and rodents when you're pretentiously sipping overpriced coffee and wearing glasses with the lenses punched out. I really cannot stand hipsters.

I bought a fountain pen when I visited France for a student exchange. Everybody had one and I wanted to be cool. It was yellow, round-tip, 0.7mm. I bought it from a stationary store in Lyon. It was my first genuine experience with a superior writing implement. When I was in grade 9, one of my classmates pulled the ink cartridge out to inspect it and dripped a huge blob of black ink on my khakis.

Now I have my pen and I have my notebook made from a record sleeve and recycled posters and I cannot be stopped. I went back to the bookstore and purchased twelve of these pens. This object that would be the vehicle for all my thoughts, sacred and profane. Then I went to Amazon and purchased two dozen refill cartridges so that I would never experience that sick feeling, that gut-punching sadness that comes when the pen you love dies mid-sentence, and for all your mad scribbling and cursing you cannot give it life.

Word count: 1,007