Mood Surgery

Ok, I've been vacillating about posting this link here for the better part of a year. Now that the prospect of actually singing again has come up, and I'm drunk enough to be more proud of than embarrassed by this shit, here you go:

Ever wonder what the hell I meant by Mood Surgery?

It's too bad the actual eponymous song was never recorded.

Mark (aka Popeye Khan over there <--) made this page awhile ago. This is the band that I moved to Halifax with. We broke up ten minutes later. I contributed structural and guitar stuff here and there, but musically, this was his baby. Disregarding the wannabe-deep lyrics and intrusive, occasionally off-key vocals, I still think that this music is the most amazing thing I've ever had anything to do with.

Half of the songs here were recorded live to DAT in the garage I used to live in, with Chris Lewis (who now sings in Iron Giant, haha) in the makeshift sound booth yelling "HAHAHA Bush X!" between takes. The other half were multi-tracked in great haste in Mark's basement. He did a pretty good job, having never seen a mixing board before.

I can't really tell if this shit has aged well or is dated or crappy now or whatever, because it's just too heavily-laden with nostalgia for me, but in the grey scale of my life, this is the boldest moment. Yr just lucky I don't have a scanner, 'cause then I'd be posting a bunch of pictures too.
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I wonder sometimes:
Was that song once a dream in someone's mind?
Or was it just an accident
That they later chose to stand behind?


















So yeah. This Message self-destructed. Out with the old. Get in with the new.
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But here's where everything comes together
Either that or it all falls apart
Yeah, here's where the strings come in.
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My hometown has gotta be one of the last small towns in North America -or anywhere, for that matter, because now that I think about it this seems like a strictly North American thing. Please correct me if I'm wrong- that still plays host to a drive-in theatre.

All out of nowhere I've become really fucking nostalgic about this simple thing from my childhood that basically stands as some sort of cultural anomaly now. I grew up in the trailer park surrounding it. When I was five or six I hung around with the older kids in the "park", (who, to the best of my knowledge, all grew up to be convicts) and, in the hours before nightfall, we appropriated the open ticket booth as our makeshift clubhouse. They just left it open. I had a little red wagon. It feels stupid saying this, because I'm really not that fucking old, but those really were different times. One of the first movies I remember seeing is the live-action adaptation of Popeye with Robin Williams and Shelly Duvall, and I saw it there with my mom in her cool $200 Toyota.

Fast-forward a bunch of years. Little red wagon got stolen, Mom traded the Toyota for a wicked stereo system that she still owns now, and we'd moved the trailer into a lot adjacent to my grandparents' much more rural homestead. I eventually turned into a teenager.

I'd like to say I had my first kiss or something at that drive-in theatre, because that would be just retardedly idyllic, but I didn't, and I've already written about my first kiss here anyway. I did, however, truly make out for the first time there. Like, with passion and shit. God, I so thought I was in love. We went to see Grumpy Old Men, and the first girl who ever deigned to call herself my "girlfriend" and I were camped out in a sleeping bag on the bed of my best friend's pickup truck.

Halfway through the movie it started raining. We didn't even notice. We got so fucking soaked. It's hard to explain. I can't do it justice with words, but this is the most romantic memory I have. We made out through the movie and the rain and the whole drive home. I felt like my heart was gonna break from the intensity of that moment and it eventually did and still sorta does when I think about it like I am now.

Fuck, I'm losing focus. This was supposed to be about how I didn't get to visit my hometown this summer and how I'm thinking about blowing off my phone bill for yet another month to rent a car to head over there for a weekend or something to go see some shitty drive-in movie before winter sets in and how it'd be pretty rad if I had a pretty girl to come with me and ignore the movie to make out. But whatever.
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I'm in flames it's not something easy to say to be ashamed about yr old routines and new acclaims i'm with child i'm newly ashamed to be the star witness and the only source of blame for being alone with such a literal contrary claim or for letting the arrow fly without aim for better or for worse or for arbitraty gain i'm undecided as to compass you or treat you with distain that you'd take me for such a one-way street or that you'd take me only for my brain i think maybe you should just go away wait no stay.
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Last night I dreamt I was shaving my bum hair with an electric razor as I floated past my hometown beach on an inflatable mattress. The beach was very crowded, but I was really late for something -I don't remember what, but it had something to do with this thing- and payed the onlookers no heed.

I think maybe that's what blogging is- shaving yr ass on a questionable floatation device in full view of a crowded public beach.

I wonder where I thought I was getting the electricity.
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This is so lame.

Skateboarding home in the morning has basically become the highlight of the days I have to work. There seriously isn't much to those days, and those days are most. Wake up, clean up, eat, go. Get home nine hours later, snack, off to the park with Jav, couple beers with the guitar or maybe this thing and oh shit I'm already way past late for bed if I wanna be able to squeeze jamming in before work again tonight.

If this sort of monochrome backdrop to life has any upside, it's that it allows those cornball "simple pleasures" (Yuck. What is that, a brand of shampoo? Granola bar? I suppose I should know that.) type moments to really punctuate themselves. Punctuation is, of course, the prime sense-maker of all things, and, as such, this short little board ride home has very much become my daily moment of clarity. The highlight of the highlight is the downhill stretch of Cogswell where I don't even have to push or think or anything. At 6 AM, I have the entire street to myself, and I feel about as free and un-self-conscious as I ever have and ever will. I can't even explain this feeling to you. It's something like serenity, I guess.

Well, so much for that. There were always cops parked at the foot of Citadel Hill, and often in the Centennial pool parking lot -basically in full surveillance of my zen stretch home- but I never bothered worrying about them until this past week or so, when I started hearing about this retarded crackdown on helmetless bicyclers and skateboarders. I already know like three people who've been fined.

So now I push my way down Quinpool and between the Commons, only to snatch my board up at the first sight of those antsy and eager-looking cops stationed across from the intersection at North Park. And I walk.* I walk drearily, conspicuously, utterly self-consciously through what had become my one daily respite and my only moment of true freedom. I trudge through the one small pinnacle my daily life once had, and I swear I can feel it mocking me.

It only figures that this shit would become illegal again when I pick it up after a ten-year hiatus. Why is my life so full of bad poetry?



*Aw, honey, aaaaaaaaahh talk.
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Saturday night, after Annie's show at the Khyber, I ended up drinking scotch on the waterfront with a fine gang of scenester hooligans. There were a few run-ins with wharf-rat rent-a-cops, and when we got sick of that we decided to move back up the hill a-ways toward the downtown core, in search of a pleasant-enough nook for harassment-free scotch-guzzling. Wow, that's a lot of hyphenation. Anyway, after a block or two we found a nice walkway straddled on both sides by low concrete walls perfect for sitting, and mostly concealed by surrounding foliage. Double-perfect.

It became aparrent, as soon as we sat down on the opposing walls, that we'd inadvertently settled into two distinct stylistic factions. Somebody yelled out "mods versus rockers!" and it was hilarious and indeed fairly apt. I was on the rocker wall. Of course, right?

There was some goofball shit-talking -the scotch kind- and I thought this was the most hilarious thing ever until it was suggested from the mod wall that I was most likely better-suited to their camp.

Awha?

Dude, I've ridden scooters. In my mind I pretended they were Harleys. In fact, I once tore the entire rear fender section off a scooter trying to make it do a wheelie. I mean, I like the Jam and all, but if it came down to them or the Stooges... well, sorry Paul Weller, but I'd like you a lot more if you played a vacuum cleaner as an instrument and rolled around in broken glass.

Sigh. Nobody understands me.
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I had a disturbing revelation tonight. I saw myself 15 or 20 years from now, in the form of my co-worker Jeff.

Cara came by for a few hours Wednesday night to send off a bunch of resumes using my computer. We talked a bit about jobs and job hunting, and at one point she just sort of casually asked if I ever think much about ditching this grocery gig for something else, presumably something less um, y'know... soul-destroying. I rattled off my usual list of reasons why I don't (I've gone into them here before, so I won't bother reiterating), didn't think much more of it, and took off to the bar to get drunk and interact with annoying flaky women. And Annie, who is, in case you didn't know, incredibly not annoying-and-flaky and, in fact, is quite spectacularly awesome. Go to her show. Come see it with me on Saturday if you can handle that much rad in one room at the same time.

But yeah, my shitty job.

Going in to work last night I had one of those dull, throbbing gut feelings of helplessness at being trapped into another eight hours of indentured sucktitude. So, basically, a night not unlike any other. The previous night's conversation with Cara came to mind, and just as I was trying to re-repress those thoughts I stepped around the corner to begin that first long walk down my aise. And there was Jeff, all the way down there at the end.

Jeff is 40-something. Smokes and drinks too much. Struggles financially. Nice enough guy. Doesn't give much of a shit about anything in particular. Took a couple years of university, but never bothered with a degree. He's been at this job- this same shitty, monotonous job- for 19 years. He was probably pretty cool or hip or relevant or whatever in the 80s.

He was wearing exactly the same thing as me; sneakers (I wear sneakers at work because I can't skate there in boots), black jeans, plain black t-shirt, modest, nondescript hairstyle, moustache (the sideburns of the 80s), the whole schmeel. He's a little pudgier with age, walks with a little more of a slouch, displays a bit more apathy in conversation. He's exactly me in 15 years, if I keep on this path. I don't know how I never saw it before.

At that moment, what had previously been a small post-it note on the fridge in the back of my mind became a giant screaming neon billboard: WARNING: USELESS FUTURE AHEAD.

Honestly, I don't want anything extravagant out of life: some small degree of financial security; a humble place to hang my hat; a little freedom for creative pursuits. Maybe a girl who also values these things to spend a few hours a week with.

Not even next-to-nothing is within my reach. I've realized that, the way I'm letting my life unfold, I will never have any of those things.

So what do I do? To be perfectly frank, I'd just ditch the half-measures and go into full-on punk rock self-destruction mode and fuck this living-past-30 bullshit if it weren't for my mother. I'd out-guilt the afterlife if I ever caused her the sorrow of seeing her only son die before she. So that's not an option, as compelling as it may be.

I don't know what to do, but I need to do something. Soon. Help.
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Holy fuck.

I take it back.

I'd rather be celibate than that.

Is there a sticker that says "interested only in flaky retards" on my back?
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Wow. Reading through my archives, I just realized that it will soon be an entire year since a woman's let me put my pee-pee in her vee-vee.

That probably explains a lot.

So, uh, hey; how you doin'?
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