"...just like Brian Wilson"

Winter 1998-99. I used to volunteer satuday mornings at the library helping ESL (English as a second language) kids learn to read. When I was done for the morning, I used to read parts of Brian Wilson's autobiography. I had an obsession with him because I could relate to his mental breakdown and because he was deaf in one ear and still wrote songs and produced albums like Pet Sounds. At the time my sinus condition was so bad that at times my ears felt plugged. It usually affected one ear more than the other. I hid this fact from my friends and bandmates, (though my constant picking of the ear was probably a tip off that something was wrong). I still wrote songs with Chalmers and Sean on the weekends. What would usually happen is I would give lyrics to Chalmers. He'd bang out chords and a melody. Then Sean and I would take turns playing lead lines. One such song was "Pennies on Victoria". It is still my favourite song from the first incarnation of the band.

On friday nights after school, I'd call Sean and we'd go have pizza at Pizza Pizza, and then we'd go to his place and jam and goof around waiting for Chalmers to get his shit together to join us. I'd go to his keyboard and we'd play "Jump" by Van Halen. Or I'd play the acoustic intro to Pinball Wizard and Sean would play the power chords. We played that once and Sean's dad came in and said "Hey, I know that song". In the words of Bill and Ted, it was truly righteous.

Aleks was not a part of these "sessions" as we called them. He was usually spending time with his girlfriend at the time When he did finally rejoin us, it was the death of the band. It wasn't his fault, we were just sick of each other creatively, and there was some resentment as I've alluded to before. The band thing had to die so we could go on with our lives as friends.

I used to hold this period up on a pedastal as my most creative time. I felt like with the second incarnation of the band I was playing second fiddle so to speak, whereas I had more creative input in the first. But then I had a great deal of input in the band I formed with Aleks, and I am still quite creative. ("My powers have doubled since our last meeting..."). The truth of the matter is I miss things like jamming with friends, hanging out with Sean etc. But this period was the height of teenage awkwardness, and I am much much better now. So I would not live this time again for anything.

"Don't stand so close to me"

Summer 1996. Aleks, Chalmers, Jason, Josh, David and I were playing football in a sand dune in the Pineries Provincial Park near Grand Bend. We were camping there by ourselves without parents and were having the time of our lives. As we were throwing the foot ball around, we noticed two girls higher up watching us. They were clearly enjoying the spectacle of our clumsy attempts to play football. To say we weren't overly athletic would have been an understatement. I mean, some of has had been on track teams or baseball teams, but let's face it. We were labelled nerds at school, and at times the shoe fit. These girls were laughing, and whistling, and eventually called out to us saying they thought one of us was particularly attractive: David. We all broke down laughing. David was gay.
"I'm a fag," he declard with pride. Not missing a beat, they said, "Oh well, the guy in the green pants is pretty cute. We'll take him instead!"

And just who was the guy in the green pants? Yours truly. The girls came down from their perch and we shyly exchanged words with them. The girls were from Milton which was where I lived before I moved to London. So we talked about the landmarks (chuckle) of Milton. At some point they said that they had to leave but they gave us their lot number. After they were gone for awhile we decided to find this lot.

It was still somewhat light out but it was getting dark as we searched and searched for the girls' lot. As it turned out we going round in circles. As much as I wanted to find these girls, because truthfully I was a love-starved "nerd", I was willing to let it drop. The immortal words of Paul McCartney" I'm in love but I'm lazy" were beginning to ring true.

It was completely dark now. One of us noticed there was a way we hadn't tried it, an low and behold we found the girls.....and their parents!

It turns out they were younger than us. We were 15-17 then. These girls were 14. It is not a huge age difference but when you are that young every year counts. When it became clear that there was going to be no action sexual or otherwise, we decided to retire to our campsite to annoy our American neighbour with our "loud behaviour".

"Y'all be quiet, or I'll call the rangers, y'hear?"

It's still funny to this day. He was being serious but his thick, southern accent betrayed him We were having a good time and here this southern goof wanted to rain on our parade. It's true, we were being a bit noisy but it was not his park to ruin our fun. That's what we thought until, sure enough, the Yogi's showed up to tell us to be quiet.

Unbelievable. First we go on what seemed like a wild goose chase to find some girls who weren't even old enough, and now some yankee-doodle dandy has called in the heavies. Oh well, we had fun anyway, so it's all good.

"Trainspotting"

Spring 1999. The radio in Aleks' parents van was playing Harvey Danger's rendition of "Save It For Later" as we drove towards the 7-11 on Oxford street west. On the weekend we used to jam in Sean's basement but now we've taken to trainspotting and going on random trips in the car. My crush on Sean's sister, Terryl had reached its zenith. In our exploits on nights like this, she was present along with Aleks' sister, Jen. I tried my hardest to impress Terryl but my almost manic behaviour only pushed her away. Little did I know that I would one day see her for what she really was and get over her but that comes much later. At the moment of which I write, no girl could be what she was. And nobody could be as elusive.

My relationship with Aleks had regenerated at this point but I started having problems with Chalmers (and if you're reading this Chalmers, know that I love you and I am sorry). Much like the way I unconsciously blamed Aleks for my problems earlier, Chalmers represented all my short comings and frustrations. Instead of talking about it with him, I let the resentment quietly build until it was no longer a mystery that I was angry with him, only why. Sean appeared to me to be taking his side and I doubt he lked the fact that I was going after his sister. My only friend it seemed was Aleks.

I have to admit this is a fragmentary part of my memory. That is to say, alot of things were going on at once and it is difficult for me to connect some things. There were the weekend nights driving and trainspotting but we were getting to the point where we started drinking. Of course we'd each tried drinking before but this was the beginning of the end of the beginning. That is to say we were starting to lose our timidity surrounding drinking under age. (I will talk about our first May 24 and of graduation in another entry).

But I have a hard time connecting this to school where I laboured through OAC English with Mr. Needles whose significance to my life would occur much after graduation.

Then there was OAC History where my love of learning was first rekindled. And speaking of love, I was starting to have feelings for a girl in my class named Sarah Favalaro. It almost seems like a contradiction when I juxtapose the two memories:this class and the weekend trainspotting.

A word about this trainspotting. This wasn't us shooting up smack like in the movie of the same name. This was us literally walking on traintracks at the edge of town and wait for the arrival of the train. We didn't play "chicken" with the train either. You might say this was a dull pass time, but it was a necessary pass time. We'd temporarily given up the dream of becoming rock stars and were approaching the age where one can legally go to bars and drink alcoholic beverages. This trainspotting thing was just a transition

The summer of 1999, arguably the best summer of my young life, was about to begin

Beware drunken girls who tell you they love you

There's this girl I know, and, for the sake of anonymity, we shall refer to her as Blondie. Blondie was in my first year philosophy class. I had a cush on her. Not huge in my personal history of crushes, but I was certainly attracted to her. Being the gutless coward that I am , I kept my feelings stoicly to myself. I finally got up the nerve to approach her at least after the the final exam. I figured it was innocent enough seeing as how people naturally compare notes after an exam. So I talked to her for a bit then she took a call on her cell from...bom bom bom..her boyfriend!!

You never quite get used to feeling of discovering the girl you like is spoken for. It is like jumping into a pool of boiling water when you are expecting a cool refreshing dip. (Ok a bit dramatic but you get the point). We said our goodbyes and I believed for some odd reason that our paths would never cross again (I guess you're allowed to be naive in first year).

A few years passed and I didn't see her until one day I was out with some friends and I saw her at a bar we used to frequent. She recognized me instantly and she came up to me and we began talking about the respective "isms" of our fancy. Me with my naive existentialism and her with her feminism. After a while, she left to go to a different part of the bar. Left to my own devices, I might have left it at that. But with the encouragement of the people I was with, I decided to try to pursue this matter furher, or in plain talk, I was trying to see how far I could get with her. No I wasn't trying to get laid. I was trying to open the possibility of going out with her. I went to downstairs part of the bar where she said she was going and there she was in all her glory....sitting on the lap of (yes you guess it)her boyfriend with whom she was living. Ouch. But I guess I should have known better

A couple more years pass, and I am sitting in a heavy metal/goth bar with some friends. We were having a good time listening to some good tunes when my attention was attracted to a blond girl violently making out with some guy. Suddenly it dawned on me who this girl was: Blondie. She came over to me all strung out from booze, and I suspect some other chemical in her system. She started hugging me and telling me how she remembers me from first year. She then pointed to the guy she was with and she said to me "You're a nice gy, you should tell him to treat me better" I was like "I'd prefer not to get beaten up tonight." She sort of begged me the way only an an attractive young woman can. My resolve broke and I walked up to the guy and asked him if he was Blondie's boyfriend "No," he said without a trace of sarcasm "we're just friends".

It is kind of hard to explain how strange this situation was. Here you have a girl who is drunk and possibly stoned, wearing sandals in February making out with a guy who claims not to be her boyfriend. She then resumed hanging off me telling me she loves me. Ha. I've always wanted a hot, blond woman to tell me she loves me but not like this. But just as strangely as the non-couple arrived, they vanished of into they night leaving me dazed and confused.

Had I known how messed up this girl was, I wouldn't have invest so much in trying to get with her. The moral of the story is sometimes the one you can't have is the one you don't want anyway. Love unrequited is sometimes better unrequited

Seeds Harvested: A Band's beginning and perhaps it's end

In the not-so-distant past, 4 young men came together in the almost timeless, suburban, adolescent tradition of forming a rock band. This band may never make it to the rock ‘n’ roll hall of fame or have a video played on MuchMusic but its story will remain fond in my heart as I am inextricably part of it.
The story begins with two friends, myself and Chris Chalmers. I was at the time spellbound by music (The Beatles, Cat Stevens, Pink Floyd, and The Police to name what I was listening to) and found a fellow aficionado in Chalmers. We spent hours talking about music and the philosophies they conveyed. Sometimes he would come over and we would sit in my family room listening to old Beatles records. He was learning guitar on an acoustic guitar and I was keen on getting my hands on an instrument so we could form a band together. I thought about the bass guitar, imagining myself to be the next Paul McCartney (I had thought that Chalmers was a lot like John Lennon and at the time he looked like a Let It Be era John Lennon, so if I was to be in a band with him I wanted to like Paul McCartney so we could be song-writing partners), or Sting or Roger Waters, but I settled on guitar because I had a broken one that belonged to my mom. My dad fixed it up and I began taking lessons. It was at this point where I was introduced, by Chalmers, to the music of the Smashing Pumpkins, which would turn out to be THE common influence to the band that followed.
By the following year I was fully in love with the dichotomy of hard rock and soulful, melancholic psychedelia of the Pumpkins’ music. Moreover, it had won over my best friend Aleks, who had been against contemporary music until this point. He too began to dream the dream of many and conceived of forming a band, seeing that both Chalmers and I were learning guitar (To Aleks’ credit, he knows how to get things started). A newcomer to our circle, and now one of my closest friends, Sean had just moved to London from Abbotsford B.C. and befriended Aleks and subsequently Chalmers and I as well. He also had musical aspirations…and he too was learning the guitar! (He was also a Pumpkins fan). Aleks, wanting to play drums but couldn’t afford them, instead picked up an old guitar that once belonged to his grandfather and slowly began teaching himself chords.
4 guitarists!? In a band!? No drummer, no bassist, just 4 guys playing guitar!?
If you said that this was like walking with two left feet, you’d be right, it was…at first. We tried working on covers but obviously that didn’t work because most songs only have 1or 2 guitar parts. The band would usually split off into two groups each hamfistedly trying to work on their respective songs. The only alternative was to write our own songs…but how?
I must say I’m more of a poet than a musician as much, as music is an important part of my life. I began writing lyrics to song and a few months prior I had been learning some chord progressions and nice-sounding arpeggios from my guitar teacher. I began putting it all together like an alchemist (albeit a very inexperienced one). In my mind the music I has hearing was reflecting an idea I had, being conveyed in the lyrics. The idea was of the cyclical pattern to nature, the seasons, birth, growth, death, etc. I thought about introducing the song idea to my friends but I was not wholly confident in it and at the time I was overly sensitive to criticism. But the time would come for me to share it with the others and let fate takes its course.
It was New Year’s Eve 97-98. We were invited to spend the night at our friend David’s place. He lived in a small town outside of Sarnia. We took this opportunity to hone our musical skills as David was very apt in this regard (he played piano). We loaded our instruments in Aleks’ van. As I recall the weather was bad that day and Aleks’ dad was reluctant to risk driving but I suppose if he hadn’t things might not have developed as they did. We arrived at the David’s unharmed, everyone in good spirits as we unloaded our instruments from the van. Almost as soon as we got in the door we had the urge to bust out our instruments. We had the place to ourselves so we didn’t need to worry about making too much noise. However, the same problem as before occurred; there was no cohesion in the group; the group was splintered. We needed something to work on together…but what?
I reached into my guitar sleeve and pulled out a sheet of paper. I gave the sheet of paper to David saying something to the effect of "I’ve been working on a song but I don’t know how to write melodies to go with chord progressions…..maybe you can help me." And help me he did and the band too. He sat at his keyboard and came up with a melody. The rest of the song took some working out, but with the band working on it we were able to turn a small idea into a song. The song was called Seeds. The song wasn’t finished but it was a step in the right direction. Now, I won’t lie to you, this did not make us a full band and it would also be a lie to say that there wasn’t any immature infighting and temper tantrums (I talking about my self here), but we had come to taste the sweet nectar of song-writing and cohesion as a band (albeit a small taste) and we liked it. It was the true beginning of the band.
Today that band still exists although it has undergone many transformations. Chalmers sings, Sean and Aleks are dual guitarists, and I play bass, as I had always wanted to. In both incarnations of he band we wrote a few good songs, two of which were expertly recorded on computer by Aleks with Sean’s help. We still don’t have a drummer but the computer does a good job pretending to be one. In the not-too-distant future, this band may no longer exist as the boys who founded it are growing into men, men who must put away their play things and venture into adulthood. Our last task may well be what we endeavour to do next month: finish what we started and record the song written that fateful New year’s eve. It is fitting that if the band must end that it be where it started, the circle complete.

Raisin Box

When in grade 2 I was often sent to school with lunch that included a small box (about once inch square) of Sunkist raisins. Being so young, I did not know casting the empty raisin box to the wind was a social faux pas.