A few months ago I moved from Vancouver to Maple Ridge for money-saving reasons. MR is two hours away from Van. Unfortunately what I'm now saving in dollars is what I'm losing in sanity due to this new rural lifestyle.
I'm used to dense throngs of pedestrians representing every race creed and culture milling about in a neighborhood filled with nearly nothing but independent stores and restaurants a block away from me, where we cross the street without looking, and if a car beeps its little horn, we stop in front of them and stare down the driver until a point is made; people first. Then yer little car.
Now it's a 20-minute walk from my townhouse-cluster (like an anthill for humans) to "the city" which is 90% white and there are more lifted pickup trucks and A&W's than humans. And I mean egregiously-powerful monster trucks with no purpose other than being powerful. Some even have Confederate flags on them. Yes, they know they're in B.C., which is in Canada which wasn't (still isn't) a part of the Confederate U.S. southern state territory. So I don't know. Oh yeah I do! They're racists! Also, people here actually smile and say Hi passing by you on the sidewalk and get this: it's not sarcastic, and they actually get legit offended if you don't do the same in return! I feel like Kevin Bacon in Flashdance, only he doesn't blow up the Death Star. Or whatever that movie is. You get the idea, I guess? I'm basically in opposite-land! Confusion has become my default setting.
So today on the now 90-min-plus-long bus ride home from work (it was 45 minutes before), I have no idea why, but the memory of a girl that I had an enormous crush on when I was in grade like nine or ten and maybe fifteen or whatever came over me. There's a lot of nothing to look at outside the window, so looking inside the self and its weird, morphing, mental photo-albums becomes a thing you get to do. Esp. if you don't have unlimited data.
Now, I had it SUPER-heavy for this girl. We shared an art class and I was one year older than her. I'll skip all the details because - I mean, when you think of past moments and people like this, you're thinking of them as you did at that time , not as who you are now, so basically I'm a fifty-year-old thinking about how hot and beautiful a 13-to-14-year-old was. Fine for Vladimir Nabokov, but not me.
Anyways, I imagined how she must look these days, slipped into a platonic fantasy-situation where we'd meet up today and etc etc, snapped out of it and got off the bus and went home.
...aaaand looked her up on Facebook. Yep, I did that.
It was weird, and I shouldn't, I mean really shouldn't have done that thing.
But it was a thing I did.
I feel like each love we have, be it crush, fling, marriage, failed romance etc is its own little animal and it gets fed and cared for differently than any of the others. And some shouldn't be fed at all. I mean, they gotta get put down. So when I - and this only came to me later the next morning when a song I had on dug some old, unrelated feels out of me - sat on that bus tripping away, I was subconsciously dusting off a set of complicated emotions that were never meant to be unpacked again, breaking some sort of safety seal like a four-year-old with a new bottle of 'candy' found in the medicine cabinet. I'd discovered a dime bag in an old drawer and it had a few crumbs left in it of some of the best shit I'd had in the 80's and like a dumbass I hadda go and dab the remains expecting to suddenly re-live the good ol' days, and now I'm freaking out, finding it kinda difficult to put everything away again where it should've stayed. Is it possible to re-crush after 30-something years!? I'M PLAYING RE-ANIMATOR WITH DEAD MEMORIES!? Keeping in line with my first allegory, I hit up the Pet Sematary and we all know how that pans out.
For about an hour afterwards I just felt odd, misplaced, and I guess jarred into that feeling of being one step further all up in the face of mortality. Actually, it's six hours later now and I'm still a bit shook. As to why, though, I can't pin down.
Actually, yeah, I can. That's exactly it: she aged, and accomplished a lot so far in her life. Whereas I'm still a kid in my head, and have done nothing.
What was I expecting, huh? A taller, slightly-more-mature version of That Girl with maybe a little grey in the same Jr.-high-styled hair?
35+ years monstrously climbed outta the cellar of memories and kicked a reality-check in place of the old, fuzzy mental photograph I have of a person I had mentality-changing feelings about.
Now I'm sitting here just blanketing my cold soul in some old comfort and feelings I haven't gotten cozy with in a long while, but it's mildewy and strange so away it goes. Eventually I guess. This is so weird. I hauled an emotional corpse out of its grave and am paying a toll for the effort. A small part of this is also probably because I haven't physically changed much since school. I weigh the same and my (albeit thinning) hair is only starting to sprout silver. And I still think and act like I'm 20. Hell, two years ago I got back on a skateboard after a double-decade absence and I'm ripping way harder than I ever used to. Maybe I lack a time-filter? Dude with the scythe is starting to walk faster behind me, and I'm tripping on his shadow in the lamplight while daydreaming about the past. Uh-oh. I guess I'll sort it all out? Someday?
But until that miracle happens, I still love all the music that I was ever into, including punk and The Who (a band I got heavily acquainted with way back in the time-frame that the above loveawkwardness happened), two musical entities mashed up in this year's (haw) entry.
This is Dumbrock Vol.5: Tommy in Seven Minutes - a tribute of a sort, I guess, to that classic Who album on one side, and the other with four versions of The Beatles' "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)". Released in 1994 on clear vinyl (my version at least) with twelve very varied bands taking on the rock opera with jubilant abandon, all of whom you can see on the jacket-scans below;
Download here:
(Oh and it looks like I'm back, at least for a little while. I also have these files in .flac if anyone deems them worthy of an upgrade. And I'm still unsure about the new background pic I'm using)
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