Trapped With Neil Diamond

Personal Bits 2 Replies

While rummaging around Funky Junky in Kensington Market, I came across a thing that immediately shot me back to being 11 years old. A time when all I had to worry about were leeches and just how much longer I could stay in the water before the sun went down. A time filled with wind in the trees, a-frame tents made out of musty wool blankets strung up between two trees, of chasing frogs and raspberry picking at 8am in the morning. Yes, I’m talking about our summer cottage.

The thing that transported me back? My father’s coveted 8 track player. Space aged white in a pill shape. Plenty of buttons to mess with, it looked like something that fell out of the ass of the set dresser for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Tucked in the back of the shop was the exact model that Dad had sitting in his bedroom. The unit came with oblong pill-shaped speakers that Dad had placed up on the tops of the divider walls so the entire cottage could hear his music. Our cottage was very short on audible privacy since the walls didn’t go all the way up. 5 silent kids “sleeping” would be shattered by one of us farting. Hilarity ensued.

I guess at one point I was so enamoured with the buttons and sliders that I can clearly remember being admonished for touching them at one point. Dad set down the law: YOU DO NOT TOUCH THIS RADIO AT ALL. An edict that I obeyed to the letter.

One summer day, Dad took the 2-seater sailboat out onto the lake, leaving me behind in the cottage to fend for myself. But he left with Neil Diamond playing in the 8 track. And for you younglings, 8 track players are a continuous audio system. Once started, the only way to shut off the music is to eject the cartridge. Or an atomic blast to melt the various plastic parts. Regardless, I was caught in a logic loop: unable to touch the player, unable to stray far from the cottage. After the third playing of Forever In Blue Jeans I was ready to slice off my ears for relief.

I decided to take matters into my own hands. I strolled into the bedroom and slid the volume controls to zero. I had only slightly disobeyed his orders. I felt smart!

I don’t recall if I caught hell for that. But I do remember that radio/player. Seeing it last weekend was like seeing an old acquaintance across a crowded room.

Two Songs

Celebs and Media Leave a reply

Two songs on my iPhone this morning at the gym that got me thinking. Two utterly different styles, yet their meaning could be very similar if taken out of their literal context and held up against the artists and their personal lives themselves…

First up is Queen’s hard rockin’ Hammer to Fall:

We don’t waste no time at all
Don’t hear the bell but you answer the call
It comes to you as to us all
We’re just waiting for the hammer to fall

Oh, every night and every day
A little piece of me is falling away
But lift your face the Western Way
Build your muscles as your body decays

Rich or poor or famous
For your truth it’s all the same
Lock your door the rain is pouring
Through your window pane
Baby now your struggle’s all in vain

What the hell we fighting for?
Just surrender and it won’t hurt at all
You just got time to say your prayers
While you’re waiting for the hammer to fall

Written in 1984 during the height of the Cold War by Brian May, it’s generally a song about fearing atomic war, really. But now, past the 99 Luftballonism, when it’s sung by Freddie Mercury it has a certain air of allusion and irony to how, in a few years time, he would succumb to AIDS (lyrics emphasis mine).

The second song, written by Howard Ashman, called Human Again for the musical Beauty and the Beast is about a bunch of enchanted furniture wishing the spell that they’re under makes them uh… human again! But again, listening to the lyrics and overlaying it across Mr Ashman’s life (who wrote this song during the last stages of his fight with AIDS while holding out for new treatments. Unfortunately he died before seeing it on the screen) it turns into something more than cartoon folly:

When I’m human again
So sweep the dust from the floor!
Let’s let some light in the room!
I can feel, I can tell
Someone might break the spell
Any day now!

When we’re human again
Only human again
When the girl fin’lly sets us all free
Cheeks a-bloomin’ again
We’re assumin’ again
We’ll resume our long lost joie de vie
We’ll be playin’ again
Holiday’ again
And we’re prayin’ it’s A-S-A-P
When we cast off this pall
We’ll stand straight, we’ll walk tall
When we’re all that we were
Thanks to him, thanks to her
Coming closer and closer
And closer and…
We’ll be dancing again!
We’ll be twirling again!
We’ll be whirling around with such ease
When we’re human again

I found it odd that these two songs shuffled themselves next to each other. Like ghosts communicating to me through electronics. Thanks for the music, dead guys!

 

Coming Out: To my Friends

Personal Bits, Queer stuff 4 Replies

Coming out to my Mom is here. I’m continuing on my carpet bombing trip of telling friends and family that I’m gay…

I’m sitting in Joan’s back yard. She’s got her signature can of Coke in hand and she’s fretting about some grade 13 essay that is due later that week but she’s not making any effort to actually work on it. Typical Joan. She could knock a solid 90% out of the park 10 minutes before the 1200 word essay was due. I drop the bomb.

She takes a long pull off her Coke and looks at me. “I was wondering when you’d get around to that.”

Non. Event.

Dave sits on the swing where we once waited out the effects of a stupid LSD experiment. We shared a common love of gorey horror movies overflowing into practical jokes – when we met he threw a bag of ketchup at me trying to make me look “bloodied”. He was the first person who I could relate to on a nerdy level; that it was ok to like science fiction.

“That’s cool. I guess. What’s it like?” He was always curious. Not “gay-curious” but curious in general – hence I thought it appropriate to tell him on the “LSD swings”. If I had said I tried recreating the Jack the Ripper killings, he’d probably ask the same thing.

Non. Event.

My best friend Rick and I were walking towards the school when I told him. In high school hierarchy Rick was an anomaly – the football jock who liked to hang around the “Theatre fags”, just like Fynn off of Glee. I am sure he caught hell from the rest of the football team over it, but he never let on. Rick was highly intelligent but reveled in pretending to be stupid – it was his schtick that made our circle of friends love him more. After dropping the bomb, he didn’t said anything for 20 or so paces, then muttered: “What do you say when your best friend tells you he’s gay?” It was the last thing he ever said to me. We walked the rest of the way back in silence and at the school he waved his hand dismissively when he yanked the door open. Brockvegas Collegiate Institute swallowed him whole and I never heard from him again.

I suspect he was struggling with his feelings for me. That or he could sense that I loved him a tad bit more than “a friend” and I had dragged our relationship across the border into “inappropriate”. Either way, I’ll never know. Rick became a cop in some remote Northern Territory and last I heard was married off.

So… Sort of not “non event”.

Work With Me, TTC

The Bad, Toronto, You Stupid Dick Leave a reply

Non-Torontonians may gloss over this rant, but here goes.

The TTC is having another public relations melt down. Photos of bus drivers texting while they’re driving are flooding into newsrooms (okay as of today, only 3 so far in as many days). Of course these are getting posted all over the web.

You may recall the initial blow up where the Teet and the Internet came to blows over the Sleeping Ticket Taker (rest his poor soul).

Well The Teet has released the brilliant statement that the public should stop taking pictures of their staff to try to stem the flow of “bad imagery”. How very Egyptian.

To be fair,they aren’t saying “stop reporting our drivers” because they have either video evidence or phone record access of their staff (do they?!) which can correlate with the complaint. That, to me, sounds lame. To me, it sounds like they know they have a problem and just want it to go away.

The union pres for the Teet, Bob Kinnear, has verbal instructions for riders who want to confront drivers who are TXT while driving. He suggests: “I’d say, ‘Do you mind not texting while you’re driving from point A to point B?”

Uh. How about “PUT DOWN THE FUCKING PHONE!” It’s against the law to drive with an electronic device. Or did your drivers not get the memo?

I say take their picture. As long as it doesn’t obstruct what minimal vision they might be reduced to, depending on the driver’s infraction. Safety first, people!