schism.ca

I read or heard a legend some time ago that involved the changing of the seasons from Winter to Spring. It had to be either an Inuit or Native American legend. I don’t recall exactly who the players were, but they were animal spirits. One of the seasons was represented by a Great Bear. The other I don’t recall. The Oracle came up with nothing I could use. Anyway, it’s sort of a violent legend, with the main point being that whichever animal represents spring “breaks the back” of the other animal in a battle. This happens sometime in late February or early March. In spite of the savage imagery, I always thought this little legend was particularly apt. That’s what that time of year feels like. It feels like Winter is a mighty beast. Strong, worthy, hard to beat. But it is irrevocable–Spring will come along and battle it, and it will beat the strong Winter. It does so though in an interesting way. It doesn’t kill it outright–it breaks its back. Winter is left wounded, crawling away slowly. It’s defeated, but it isn’t gone. It will take a while to retreat to its cave to heal its wounds and become strong again. The weather around that time still looks very much like Winter, but there’s something different in the air. Icicles start to drip, and the wind loses its teeth. There seems to be a relaxing that carries some nearly subliminal joy–like a promise that you know will be fulfilled because you can feel it more than anything else. I love it when every year, I get that feeling–like the back of Winter has been broken.

I never really before thought that there must be some sort of complementary summertime battle. I don’t know if there’s any legend that is a counterpart; some time when another mighty beast comes to defeat the hold of Summer. But I realized for the first time in my life on any conscious level that whatever this complementary battle is, it has taken place. I have the same feeling now as I do in February. I feel it somehow. It’s still utterly gorgeous outside–there’s no real hint of anything like Winter anywhere. Heck, even Autumn is feeling a few weeks away yet. But this morning, there was something else going on, and I think the Pagan in me for whatever reason picked up on it.

This morning, the apartment was cooler than I recall. I have been sleeping with the windows open for months now (except on the rare occasions where the A/C was on), and my body sorta felt a temperature difference when I got out of bed that wasn’t the norm. Seems like the last couple weeks have just been a cooker, and sometime early this week, the fever broke, and Summer let out a tremendous exhale. On the way to work on my bike today, I noticed things that might be analogous to the icicles and the teeth of the wind.

There is a work crew tarring the roof of the public school I bike past on Keats Way. I didn’t consciously realize it until today, but that mostly unpleasant smell is a marker. I recall that smell as a precursor to going back to school. I recall being on my bike and going to the school yards during summer vacation and smelling that. It’s the scent of a time.

And apples. The smell of apples. Seems the crab apple trees on the U of W campus are quite fragrant, and it’s this smell that isn’t like the one you get from cutting open an apple–it’s way more intense. Apples on the ground, some rotting. When I was a kid, my dad used to rent a cottage from a colleague of his in the summer time up in Midland, and we’d go there for a week or so, hang out at the beach, eat at Dock Lunch and just sorta chill. There was a huge apple tree that grew on the side of the driveway opposite the house and it would routinely be laden with apples that no one ate when we were up at the cottage. It would frequently drop the apples, or a bird or squirrel would pick one off and the apple would either land with a damp thud on the dirt or with a mighty resounding WHAM! on the roof of the cottage, followed by a roll off. And that smell I smelled this morning, that was the very same one that was all around the cottage. I forgot about it until today. But that smell is another marker. Whatever beast that rules the Summer has been defeated, and it is slowly retreating.

It won’t be long until we start to really see the change. Kids with new backpacks, evenings in nice long sleeved hoodies, leaves changing colour, and pumpkins ripening on the vine. It’s like they’re all just sorta on the other side of a window, waving and beckoning me out to play.

Sigh. Resting in this sort of awareness can be sublime.

The big news of the last couple months has been that my mom decided to sell her house. This is a house that has been in the family for nearly 45 years; the only one I have ever known. It’s the place that, to me, has always been home. There’s so many stories that have come out of the last little while, so many little rituals and memories.

As of today, the house is out of our hands. 7 Cardill belongs to someone else. The letting go has been hard for me. That house and everything about it not only embodies my family and my growing up, but is also, in a lot of ways a character. A family member. I feel sometimes either like I’ve disowned it (literally) though I did not not want to, or that it’s somehow died. I think the latter is just a coping mechanism, whereas the former is more the truth. We all agreed that it was the right thing to do at this time, but it’s clear to me that sometimes, the right thing doesn’t feel right at all. I guess change is just inevitable. Even the things you thought were forever really are not.

I’d like to tell you a little story about the house from last night. I dunno how many stories I’ll tell, but this one hit me. Last night, after everyone had gone, and I had looked my last upon those rooms and hallways, I went out to the back yard. Having been built in the ’60s, the house has a sizable back yard–probably more land than the house actually occupies.

Throughout the years, my family had many trees in the yard, all of which we planted, as originally the land was a farmer’s field and had no trees when the neighbourhood went up. In my time, we had a row of five pines along the back of the yard; two apple trees (macintosh and golden delicious); a pear tree; a plum tree; a big, beautiful cherry tree in whose shade my father spent many hours reading and sleeping; a couple of birch trees; a magnolia; a black walnut tree; and two silver maples.

Today, all that’s left are the magnolia and the maples. Either age or sickness took the others. Rarely, my dad decided that a tree had to go for other reasons, but I don’t recall that happening more than once or twice. We liked having the trees, much as the leaves around this time of year were irksome.

I stood in the back yard, and it was a little strange to see it so unmanicured. Given we knew we were moving, not a lot of effort was put into landscaping and maintenance of the outside–we spent most of our time moving and tidying the inside. As a result the backyard was utterly blanketed with yellow leaves from the maples. Usually, these were all raked up and removed, but last night, they were all there. I loved wading through them and hearing them crunch and whisper under my feet.

I thought it’d be dark out back, given that it was well past 9pm when I was back there, but I could see almost everything. Maybe it was because the moon was waxing into full for Nov. 2 and the cloud cover created some sort of diffuse glow, but the back yard was almost as detailed as it is at twilight.

The only things back there were the trees and the bird bath. I remembered these trees; I know them very well. The big maple at the rear corner of the lot is older than I am. My brother tells me it was fortunate happenstance that it grew where it did. Apparently, when the house was built, there were all these maple keys floating around from wherever. One of them took root somewhere on the property, and my mom decided she’d try to save it, so she replanted it in the corner, in the hope that it would be out of the way enough to not fall to construction or lawn care or whatnot. And there it thrived. It’s so very high now, and so very strong, I think that it’d stand there for a long, long time to come. I truly hope it does. I cannot count the times that I climbed that tree, both with friends, but also alone to just sit in it and think while it cradled me in its crooks and leaves and cool bark. It tolerated my carving girlfriend’s initials into it, up in the highest branches I could climb to. It was the base of many a ‘fort’ I built as a kid, and it supported more than one hammock over the summers it has been there. It is an old soul, nearly as old as the house itself, and it has long stood there and watched over it.

The other maple is younger. I brought it home one day. As I recall, Northdale Public School had a thing when I was in second or third grade wherein they gave each student a sapling on the occasion of Arbour Day. Heh. I don’t think that children today even know there was such as thing as Arbour Day. Anyway, I chose a black walnut sapling and brought it home. We tried it in various locations on the property, but eventually, my dad figured it wasn’t happy and wouldn’t grow, and even if it did, it would attract lots of squirrels with its fruit, so he wound up giving it to the neighbour. As it happened, the tree thrived in his yard, and stands there still, not 10 feet from our property line. The silver maple I brought home the next day. It turned out that the school had extras, and any student who wanted one could come to the office and get a ‘leftover’ tree. I picked the silver maple, and brought it home. We planted it in a couple places before it finally found its ultimate home close to the entrance way of the back yard, about 20 or so meters from the older maple my mom planted. There it grew, very happy, and there it stands still. It wasn’t ever good for climbing because it didn’t grow many climbable branches in arm’s reach, but birds loved it. I always felt proud that this huge tree was so happy, and that I had brought it home and it did well. It’s an old, old, friend.

Last night, as I was standing there by the birdbath, the trees were raining leaves all around me. It was completely quiet, and I could hear the regular soft whisperings of leaves touching the other leaves as they made it to the ground. It sounded like little animals or something. It felt decidedly like I was not alone. I looked up to see if I could follow one of them from its fall from the canopy, and it was a little too dark to tell. But I could see the silhouette of the branches of both trees reaching out across the gray sky, and I noticed for the first time that they could just barely touch one another. The branches of these two trees that had stood together and yet apart for so many decades were finally able to reach out and connect.

That completely filled me with a joyous kind of sadness. On the one hand, they are losing their family, and I am losing them. On the other, they now have one another in a way that they never have. I hope they stand for many, many more years. I hope they are blessed with sunlight, and birds nesting in their branches, and squirrels that can now jump between them without ever touching the ground. I hope they are happy. Most of all, I hope the new owners treat them with reverence. They are very much old souls, and they are the steadfast guardians of the backyard at 7 Cardill.

Long may they stand in silent watchfulness over my childhood home.

It’s a well-known thing that when I find myself alone, as I currently am with Suz away for the week, that one of the first things that happens is nostalgia creeps in. I start to think of the past. I’m happy to report that these days I do so with the sort of happy reminiscing that I think these remeberings deserve, rather than the painful longing that I used to attribute to them years ago. That’s a big, good thing for me. Used to be that all I’d ever do is sit around and think of the past and wish for it again. Now I’m just grateful for it, and happy that I have such good memories. I also like to look at them and see if they can still teach me anything. Quite often, they can.

Last night I was thinking of old love letters, partially because I still had Cyrano’s letters to Roxanne in my head from the weekend, but also having listened entirely at random to “Everybody’s Free To Wear Sunscreen”. For those of you not in the know, the piece contains the words, “Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements.” That sort of advice has been circulating forever. Although I’m not entirely sure why one should keep one’s old love letters, (lord knows one of my fav sites once rubbed me the wrong way by suggesting the exact opposite) doing so seems like the right thing to do for me.

What I was thinking of this time around though wasn’t the content of the letters, but the overall being of them. I’m wondering if the art of the love letter is officially a lost art. I don’t know many people currently in high school, and of those that I know, none of them seem to fit into the “writing love letters” stage. That said, I get the impression that most correspondence among teens these days is through text messaging or e-mail or other electronic means. I think that’s sort of a loss.

The picture above is a scan from my mom’s Tagebuch (loosely translated “Book of Days”). The book is a small, hard cover book with unlined pages in it where her friends wrote her messages when they were at school. I guess it’s kind of the answer to the modern yearbook (if they even still do those, I don’t know). It’s sort of cool the way kids did stuff then. Bear in mind, that little piece of history was created some 68 years ago. But someone took the time to cut out a heart shaped piece of paper that they could then lay on the page in the book and scribble around to create a heart halo effect within which is written “remember me”. I dunno, maybe it’s me turning into an old fart, but this act that someone did somewhere in a dusty playground in Europe as a hope of remembrance seems to be so much more meaningful than tapping out “remember me” in multi-tap on a cell phone and sending it off. I guess the emotion behind the act is a human one, and therefore has to be roughly the same today as it was then. But I find myself in utter agreement with Marshall McLuhan in the idea that the medium comprises at least a part of the message. Somehow, it’s much more personal, present, somatic. Seriously, I dare you to find ANY text message sent today in 6 months, never mind 68 years. The fact that today’s medium of communication is so temporary also speaks at least in part to the sentiment.

Back in my day as a high schooler, the notes were sorta cool too. While there were no memory books of the sort my mom had, aside from the yearbooks that people wrote in on the last day of school, and letters of remembrance had broken free into single sheets of paper, they were still a ‘hard’ medium, and still endure in the same ways. That, and they were an ‘any time’ sort of thing, much like text messages are today. When I was dating someone, we usually wrote a letter a day to one another, the contents of which I’m sure are as inane as such letters have always been, but somehow they’re still way cool. But I think I misspoke with the ‘any time’ remark.

Text messages truly are an ‘any time’ thing. If I get onto my Blackberry right now and type out a note to Suzanne, she’ll have it in seconds regardless of where on the globe she is. That’s something that is so taken for granted today, but it really is miraculous. As little as 100 years ago, if global correspondence was even possible, it was sketchy and took a long, long time. If want to write a love letter though, even if she’s in the same city or the same building, it’ll take time to write, get there, and read, and the time it takes is its own, which may add value too.

Let me unpack that one a bit. Text messages are nearly effortless. If you and your recipient have a device no bigger than your average deck of cards you can write and receive one anywhere at all. And, they are delivered in seconds regardless of what the recipient is doing. So, if I’m in the car stopped at a red and I rip off a “thinking of you” message to Suz who then gets it while she’s doing tea with someone else in some other city and she reads it quickly and puts it away.. well, that’s sorta lacking in meaning. If, on the other hand, I find pen and paper, sit down and write a note saying “thinking of you” and it gets delivered, then Suz will collect it when she’s in a space to do so, and read it when she’s ready to absorb it. It seems like there’s a time for letters, but text messages sort of exist in little slivers of interruption with whatever’s happening at that point. It removes the meaning for me, just because the sentiment doesn’t receive the respect that it truly deserves.

I still believe that a hand written letter demands more respect than a type written form letter, e-mail or text message ever could, thank god. I think that’s a human thing. If you had a handful of papers in front of you and all but one were black, uniform serif font on white 96-bright paper, and the hold out was a hand written page on fine traditional bond paper, which one will you more likely read first?

When I was in high school, we wrote our notes on standard Hilroy lined paper, but we often didn’t follow the lines, and we used only one side of the sheet, so that we could employ these way cool folding techniques that turned the note itself into the envelope it was delivered in. There were all sorts of cool ways to fold notes–I wonder if I’d still remember how to do them. The notes were then small enough to fit into lockers or secure enough to give to a trusted friend to deliver, and the recipent would recieve them when there was time to do so. I recall I’d look forward to the end of English class so I could go to my locker and get the note that I knew would be waiting for me from my girlfriend. It was fun, and great, and much more meaningful than I imagine receiving a text message would be.

I’m happy I still have these letters. Not for the content… as I said, it’s mostly inane teenage scribblings about things we were doing or emotions we couldn’t possibly understand. But I love the fact of them. They are real, tangible, and can tell a story just in how they came into existence, were delivered and still exist in my little space.

If teens these days really don’t write anymore like this, then I think its a shame. I can’t imagine how the whole body of teen angst could possibly be contained electronically. Maybe that speaks to the temporary nature of love in the generations following my parents in general, although I admit that’s a bit of a leap. I’m very glad technology didn’t find me until later. It’s funny actually… it seems that technology in general is a meaning-killer. But perhaps I’ll leave that musing for another time.

I know, I know. It’s the second. I didn’t get around to posting anything up to now, however, I did manage to spend some time celebrating the day. Canada day was a little weird this year in that it fell bang smack in the middle of the week, which made it hard to arrange holidays. Usually, Canada day happens in such a way that the most it’ll cost me is a single vacation day to create a nice, long weekend. This time around, it was made difficult.

So, I opted to work on Canada Day for the first time since I was a teen working convenience stores and movie rental places. I did this so I could move the stat holiday to tomorrow, effectively creating my long weekend. Pretty sweet to have that option, although it was a little surreal… half the office was there, the other half not. Kinda strange.

But the fact of the matter is that I didn’t really miss much save for sleeping in. I never go to the daytime events. The big thing for me is the fireworks display at night. I’ve gone to that for about as long as they’ve been doing it. I remember sitting right on the erosion-preventative stones on the side of the lake with my then girlfriend, both of us all of 18, she wearing my jean jacket, watching the fireworks go up. It’s sort of become a marker of the year for me. There’s a few of those – events that I go to more because they give me a sense of continuity and place in my year than because I think I’ll see something I haven’t seen before, or get anything new out of it.

Through the years I’ve gone to this event with all sorts of people. Family, friends, significant others, and I guess at least once I’ve gone entirely alone. It always sorta makes me sad that Suz never seems to be there, though. Last year was an exception, and it was lovely. We were in Ottawa and we got to see the fireworks there. It felt weird not being here, and decidedly it was much more crazy, but at least I got to watch a fireworks show with Suz that year. But it is nice that I’ve rarely found myself there all alone. I think one of the better years was one where Suz did come, and so did Terry and another guy whose name I now forget. My god, how the memory fades. It was cold that year and we were under blankets. Hee hee.

This year I was there with Chris, and we hauled the cameras along as a matter of course. I discovered much to my surprize that all this time I’ve been positive that I needed a tripod to capture fireworks properly, that it is quite possible, and easy, to get good fireworks shots totally hand-held. Revelations abound. It was an okay night. Suz is off camping at the moment. Overall, it was a good sort of Canada Day this year. Nothing great, but good. I wonder who will be with me next year, and how it will all pan out.

Anyway, happy 142, Canada. You don’t seem a day over 130.

This past weekend (and I know I’m late getting to it–everything was blown away by the whole Bimbo thing) was a pretty decent one. I just wanted to give you a little update and look into things to come.

Erik made arrangements to come on down for a visit before he heads off to more Portuguese pastures for the next little while. Usually, when Erik and I hang out, there’s a simple list of things that we like to do. It’s kinda too bad that each item on the list takes up pretty much an entire visit. With those visits getting ever more sparse, I feel a little like the machine isn’t running as well as it should. But I suppose such is life. And it tramps on and on. In any case, getting together usually boils down to one of the following:

• Working on One Note’s Wife music
• Having one of those Erik-Martin conversations. This can take place in any number of milieu–walks, just sitting around, etc.
• Hanging out with friends/family here in Waterloo.
• Anything else that happens to come along.

This weekend, we opted for the final option, mostly because I had this cockamamie idea that I wanted to film me on the motorbike. More on that whenever in the heck I get around to putting it all together.

Anyway, after that day of fun, I sandwiched in a pretty decent RGD show, largely honouring good old Michael Jackson. At this point, I think I’ve completely absorbed it all, And then Erik came back on Sunday, this time with his daughter Victoria, whom I’d never met before.

While children have always done strange things to my mental pathways, I’m now having to encounter children who come from people I knew when we were children. Time seems to have this way of compressing, and sometimes I feel like it really is going very fast.

The whole topic of children as they pertain to me and my feelings isn’t something I’m going to write about here… I think that’s better kept in my personal journals. But what I will say is that it’s surreal to be where I am. I tend to get this out of body feeling, and I become “Observation Man” for a time.

There was a moment where I was sitting in my living room, a place in my home town I never knew existed when Erik and I were hanging out in spite of the fact that we must have walked by the building many times on our way to his dad’s place, and I was just sorta watching. Suzanne was engaging Victoria, and Erik was giving her some attention too, as well as talking about the news of the day, which at this point, was talking about our parents, and how they are doing, and various maladies and neurological diseases, and it struck me that we’re the people our parents were when we were young. Such conversations wouldn’t ever occur to us 20 years ago.

And although the children of my friends aren’t yet old enough to have hit the same place where we were when all of the memories I have were forming, you can see where they’ll get there, and we will be on the other side of that mirror, knowing with a wisdom they don’t get what they will know.

Wow, that was convoluted. Anyway. I guess it just makes me feel all sorts of things when I think about how much of life is gone already. It’s no small thing.

All right, Ed McMahon… I knew he was probably still alive, but I wouldn’t have been surprized to learn he’d kicked off and I hadn’t heard before. Farah Faucett… a little closer to my awareness, enough that I knew she was sick with cancer, and so when she kicked off, at the very least, I was prepared to hear the news. But Michael Jackson to complete the trifecta? Colour me utterly shocked. I never imagined I’d be hearing that one this year. I guess because his work had such a profound effect on me and my ilk, who were coming into their own in the early 80’s, I feel like I want to write a little bit about what goes through my head when I think of Michael Jackson.

I guess the first time he showed up in earnest in my little music world was in 1983 with the release of Thriller. That’s no real surprize, given it was his masterpiece and the fact that it was pretty damned near omnipresent. I discovered all his other stuff retroactively, as so often happens with me. I hear something, and then go looking, and a lot of the time, I find that I actually know the artist from singles or radio play, but just never really followed up. I discovered I actually knew a load of Jackson’s earlier work, although I’m not sure how. But yeah, the main hit came with Thriller.

It was presumably sometime in 1983, which places me in about grade 7. Ye gods. Anyway, one of the things to do at the time on weekends in Ontario was watch the CHUM top 30 video countdown. Video was just about to come into its own with MuchMusic launching in about a year’s time, so we as budding consumers of all things culture had to get our hit of music videos from shows like Toronto Rocks, hosted by Jon Majhor (and OMFGBBQ he’s dead too… a small search reveals he died of lung cancer in ‘07 jesuschristthey’redroppinglikeflies) and the CHUM top 30 video show. One fine weekend, I was watching the top 30 show and something completely unprecedented happened that changed my musical landscape. A song and video, which had not yet tracked on the top 30, leapfrogged into the number one spot. Nothing like that had ever happened, and I don’t think it’s happened since (not that shows like the top 30 are around anymore to inform us). When they got down to number one, I distinctly remember thinking something must be wrong, because they had wayyy too much time left in the show to have only one video left to air. Well, I was wrong. With 15 minutes left, they started playing Thriller, and it changed everything.

Not only was it instantly the de-facto standard for ubercool, it managed to synergize music and video in a way that no one had seen before and the ripple effects were also unprecedented. Before we just listened, but now, it was an ears AND eyes sort of thing. The song was awesome, danceable, energetic fun firepower. The video embodied the 80’s at the same time it confused the hell out of us by being cool, scary, and fun at the same time. And more, we we were shown what cool was, how you had to move when you listened. In a way it was pretty constrictive, I suppose, but in another way, it brought teenage confusion to a clear focus, and my god, it was all that. Kinda like joining the cult of Mac–you give up control to King Steve, but you get some awesome stuff in return.

And so, all of Motown entered into my world when I started digging into MJ’s, and much more too. Radio at that time was popular top 40 stuff, and while I didn’t know it at the time, it was largely formulaic. This certainly doesn’t detract from its charm, at least not to me, even decades later. But Jackson was coming from a totally different place, and my god, it was like a beautiful black Trans AM in a sea of Chevy Impalas. You couldn’t help but look and just say, “dayam!”

Suddenly everyone wanted to be Michael Jackson. Break dancing clubs formed in my school and the minority of black kids all suddenly could be cool just by sheer association. Jackson, you boob… you had such a power of mentorship and you blew it with your wanting to become white. Sigh. But to us white masses, we didn’t give a shit. We wanted to be Michael, too. We wanted to move like that. To this day, I can still moonwalk. But yeah, I couldn’t ever hold my own with the other break dancers. I nearly effin’ killed myself trying the worm–what sane person pitches himself head first into the pavement without any training or practice? Sigh.

From there, I think I started to seek out other forms of music in addition to top 40. I discovered Jackson’s back catalogue, and loved it all, but I also suddenly had permission to enjoy all of Motown and discovered more folk, too. I branched out, and I think that’s Jackson’s doing… at least a little. It was cool to be different.

And the hits off of Thriller just kept on coming. And ALL of it was awesome, and people started to emulate Jackson on their recordings. In particular I always think of Rockwell, who sometimes sounded more like MJ than MJ did. And then there were TV crossovers like Alfonso Ribeiro, who showed kids our age how kids our age looked when we were emulating MJ. And we all grew up, and although the trail is cold, you don’t have to dig very far to find musicians today in the R&B and Rap genres who will happily point to MJ as an influence.

Oh, yes Mike, you did start somethin’.

The later years were what everyone knows they were. He just let it all get to him, and I think, while maybe he could have avoided all that, I think it was really hard to do. I dunno if I want to blame Jackson for his idiocy in later years, or if I want to blame all of us for creating him. Either way, it kinda got sad after Thriller faded, and he became a caricature of himself, as anything that’s as big as he was eventually does. I think that one of the people I heard interviewed recently had it right–his apex was Thriller, but he kept trying to top it, and it was totally untoppable.

But if I want to really enjoy his work, it’s just about putting it on and forgetting all that other sensational mumbo-jumbo. Seriously, put on “Don’t Stop Till You Get Enough” and try not to move. It’s bottled positive energy. I love it all. No one will ever do that again, and that loss sorta makes me feel sad. And old.

Michael Jackson was among the first of my generation’s idols to die of something not suicide or substance related. While one can argue that his lifestyle was such that he did indeed do this to himself by taxing his body with stress and psychological sickness teamed with media stalkarazzi, at the end of the day, he had a heart attack.

My iron gods are starting to have their clay feet kicked out from under them. My generation is starting to die, and that is a thought that creates a feeling in me I can’t quite quantify yet. But I think that yeah, even now, Jackson’s startin’ something. Sigh.

I am so going to go marinade my ears in his body of work for a while. He was one of a kind. Truthfully, the Jackson I know has been gone for a long time already. I guess it’s time I both mourn and celebrate him. This is the Jackson I remember. I watch this, and I still think, “dayam!”

This one was originally on Facebook. Thought I’d share it here too, just to get the content going.

Think of 15 albums that had such a profound effect on you they changed your life. Dug into your soul. Music that brought you to life when you heard it. Royally affected you, kicked you in the wazoo, literally socked you in the gut, is what I mean. Then when you finish, tag 15 others, including moi. Make sure you copy and paste this part so they know the drill. Get the idea now? Good. Tag, you’re it!”

Now, I have one preamble to all of this in that I’ll say that I didn’t start listening to full on ALBUMS until much later in my life. I lived off of top 40 radio pretty much until I got into high school. So there’s so very many songs that defined me in my youth, but the albums came much later.

That, and I don’t have 15 friends who I thought would want to participate. So, I only tagged you if I thought you might appreciate. If not, carry on.

1. Def Leppard – Hysteria. This album WAS 1987. Every song released from this album became a favourite of mine, and still is today. It was the second CD I ever bought with my own cash, after I raised the 20 bucks necessary having spent every last dime I owned on a CD player, something I was convinced was the newest and most awesome invention known to man at that time.

2. Pink Floyd – Dark Side Of The Moon. This is THE first CD I owned (still plays great). I would listen to this album nonstop, at least once a day, all through grade 10. There was a time when I couldn’t get enough of Pink Floyd in general. In the interest of not having this become a Floyd list, I’m going to lump The Wall, The Final Cut, Atom Heart Mother, Animals, and Wish You Were Here right here under Dark Side Of The Moon. All of them were sheer awesomeness in sonic form for me… for the same Pink Floyd flavoured reasons.

3. Indigo Girls – Indigo Girls. And, while I’m here, let’s lump Strange Fire, Nomads Indians Saints, Rites Of Passage, and Swamp Ophelia in under this category. I completely forget when the first time I heard an Indigo Girls song was, or what the circumstances were, but they came into my life at the same point i developed a love for playing guitar, and I hungrily devoured everything I could, learning to play whatever they put out, even though I couldn’t sing it to save my life. I loved the lyrics, and I loved the harmonies and they made me love my six string.

4. Sarah McLachlan – Fumbling Toward Ecstasy. This album was my introduction to Sarah’s work (although truthfully ‘Vox’ was one of those single songs I mentioned before – retroactively discovered the self titled debut album later and loved it). The album came at roughly the point of the dissolution of a long term relationship, and Sarah sang me though it. Lots of tears, lots of love. The tour for this album was the first full-out concert I saw. Up until then, I was too anxious to go anywhere like a concert, but I loved Sarah so much back then that I braved all my fears for her, and came out better. It never occurred to me before now just how much I owe her a debt of thanks for this album.

5. Survivor – Vital Signs. This might have been the first time I started listening to albums in their entirety. I bought this *tape* of all things because of one song, “The Search Is Over” which was my first ‘dedication song’ in that for my first girlfriend and I, it was “our song”. I was pretty amazed to find out the rest of the album not only contained other tracks I knew but wasn’t aware until then Survivor did, but was pretty good album overall.

6. Supertramp – Crisis? What Crisis? I think this is yet another “lump” category, as I’d put Crime of the Century, Famous Last Words, and Breakfast In America under here too, but Crisis… was my fav. It plays a little like a rock opera, and Sister Moonshine is one of the awesomest songs ever. I first heard this album walking around in Natural Sound dreaming of the day where I’d be able to afford an awesome stereo, and they had it on. I think I stayed in the store for the full length of the album, asked the sales dude which one it was, and rented it, copied it and loved it. It was years later that Suz gave me a CD. Still listen to this one lots… but it’s been too long.

7. Boston – Boston. Pure 70’s rock and roll firepower. This album is a ride front to back with nary a throw away. One of my favourite things in the world to do on a summer day is roll down all the windows, open the sunroof and cruise the back roads of Southern Ontario singing at the top of my lungs. It is divine.

8. Melissa Etheridge – Melissa Etheridge. I was one of the fortunate ones who loved Melissa from the get-go. I bought this CD on a whim, and it was so raw and so awesome that I couldn’t get enough of it. To this day, this album stands as one of the best debuts I’ve ever heard, and I have been happy to listen to anything she’s put out since. Melissa’s husky, passionate voice is one I can listen to whenever I need to scream and feel better.

9. Led Zeppelin – Led Zeppelin IV. Nuff said.

10. Enigma – MCMLXV. This was my introduction into Electronica as a genre. My friend Jake listened to this, and I found myself completely drawn in. There was something primal about the beats. Many was the time I was driving, listening to Mea Culpa and realized I was speeding quite a lot. This album can go around and around and around and I just never get tired of it.

11. Fleetwood Mac – Rumours. Although it was years after I knew the songs that I bought the album, I think that this album’s contents were so pervasive on top 40 radio in the late 70’s that I heard the whole thing sitting in the back seat of my dad’s Dodge Dart Swinger on long summer drives. Dreams is still a song that grabs me in ways I can’t even describe, and Songbird remains one of few songs that coke me up every time.

12. Meat Loaf – Bat Out Of Hell. I was recently reminded of the overblown, silly awesomeness that is anything written by Jim Steinman. But this album was both pervasive and had something about it that reached in and just took you. It’s been forever since this was released, and it is so kitschy and self-aggrandizing and just plain goofy that it should have died on the vine or gotten old and forgotten ages ago. Meat loaf and Debbie Boone should have been tossed into the same garage sale 5-cent record heap. And yet every time that honky-tonk piano plays the first few bars of the title track, I’m hooked for the whole album, listening and singing with a stupid-assed smile on my face. This one’s better than any hit of anti-depressant could ever be.

13. Ben Folds – Rockin’ The Suburbs. I don’t know what it is about Ben Folds. Maybe it’s the sheer concentration of talent that makes him vibrate at some sort of music-god frequency, or maybe the sad, melancholy lyrics that sound happy even though you swear he’s cutting his wrists and writing with the blood, or maybe it’s just his overall goofiness that makes him completely lovable in a nerdy way, but this album is still one of my very favourites. Everything on it made me want more, and damn if he doesn’t keep delivering. I love singing along with Ben. Makes me feel normal, somehow. I dunno.

14. Leonard Cohen – More Best Of. I came late into the Cohen fold. I actually remember the day. I was on a bike ride of all things, listening to my first MP3 player, a big, brick-like thing that was as unreliable as stink and on came “Suzanne”. I listened… really listened that time, and the poetry hit me. I got a taste and wanted more and more until I had me a love for Cohen that rivaled anything else. The man cannot sing, but it somehow doesn’t matter at all. It’s all in the voice, and in the poetry. It is holy. This best of album was the first i owned, and it went round and round until my world was a whiskey-and-cigarettes drenched, bohemian gnostic wonderland.

15. The Wyrd Sisters – Sin And Other Salvations. I gotta admit, after Swamp Ophelia, the Indigo Girls and I had a falling out, and damned if i didn’t miss them. The Wyrd Sisters came along with this album and filed my heart with everything I’d been missing. This album also came at a time where I was missing Suzanne as she was gone for the summer, and it sot of defined that summer. It made me feel happy and sad, holy and human. It made me hurt so good. Unfortunately, this was it. I got the next album, Wholly, and it was a steaming pile. I don’t know what th earlier works sound like. This album though, is a slice of Teh Awesome.

Dang, when I started this, I thought I’d have trouble finishing, but I could go on. I haven’t even mentioned Elton John, Billy Joel, Michael Jackson’s Thriller, The Doobie Brothers… man. But, I guess you gotta stop someplace.

Now, I’m going to go and find some of these albums and listen again. I have been away too long. Damned MP3s and their ADHD invoking listening practices. If there’s one thing to be said for albums, tapes and CDs. You put ‘em in, and you listened front to back. That was no bad thing, and it’s a shame it got lost.

Chao!