You know my name (please don't look up my Facebook page)

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;

The Beatles-side I can take or leave, really, but I'm all-in for the main feature. Even in '94 I only knew 5-6 of these bands, which makes sense I guess as musically this thing's all over the place. It's so much fun I kinda wish a full album could've been done, but it seems seven minutes is a perfect length. As for any other release under the Dumbrock flag, I can't find anything. And as for That Girl, I wish you an amazing life. I'm going to forget you again and try to stop running in a worn circle.    

Download here: 

TI7MYKMNLUTN 

(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)

Vancouver Independence

Being a middle-school punk ('84 not '76) in Vancouver, both this and the Vancouver Complication were something of Holee Grails of compilation albums to find at the many used record shops around town. I double-scored one Saturday afternoon at the lamentably-long-gone Track Records (a 7-11 now takes the space if I have the address right) by getting both this and D.O.A.'s "Something Better Change" for $11 each - which was still hefty for me at the time. I asked why so cheap and Grant replied that the vinyl was perfect, but the ring-wear on the jackets left them all but worthless, collector-wise. 

Ring-wear, schming-wear. Aesthetically scuffed but eminently playable, I jammed them in with my other grabs from Zulu (every week, nabbing on average 6-7 old punk albums at $7 apiece. I'm starting a petition to get those old days back) and got myself the hell back home...

...to be horribly disappointed. At least by the V.I. LP. I got four punk tracks and ten other cuts of utter shite, not worth perusing again, not worth the incalculably-small amount of wear on the cartridge needle incurred from letting it bore through those microscopic ravines of displeasure on it's circular trek to my misery.

So, 17-plus years later, yesterday, I pull the thing from the shelf for the third time (the Subs tracks were already classics in my head, but I had to memorize the No Exit's before shuffling the disc away forever, so I actually officially played it two times) and flap it on the Ion digital, and find myself like loving every damn track, or at least liking it or them more.

How does this happen? Hell, I'm not complaining.

Everybody knows about the Subhumans and bassist Gerry Hannah's imprisonment as part of the "Squamish Five" and their legendary punk status both here and around and all the awesome songs so we have "Behind the Smile", but a slightly different version than the later recording that was included on the "Terminal City Ricochet" movie soundtrack, and "Out of Line".

The Metros are on here with their more new-wavey "Don't Like It At All" and "In with the Crowd", and a nice bio of the band by Wolf Roxon can be read about here after scrolling a bit.

The enigmatic Si Monkey and their electro-experimental "The Conquest of Daytime" and "Get Rigid", and very little information about this outfit is Googleable. Any Vancouverites got some history for me?

And the loveable No Exit, getting under the skin with "No Excuse" and "Nothing New";

Doors-y neo-psychedelia from the Droogs' "Nuremburg '34" & "J.K.O.";

New wave and 2nd-wave ska coming from the B-Sides' "Spy vs Spy" and "Underground Radio Stars";

What I can only describe as sci-fi-influenced punk out of M.E.C.'s "What Would You Say?";

and I dunno what the Singing Cowboys are about, but "Midnight Cowboy" is a very cool instrumental.

Now, Vancouver still has a vibrant music-scene. It has slid away from the punk stronghold that held sway for most of the 90's and early 00's and into indie-rock territory with about ten new bands forming every month where ten bands disbanded and made room in the city's casualty-ridden play-space scene, so why haven't we had more compilations put out to showcase this?

I dunno.

Listen up.

Download here:
Vancouver Independence