Monthly Archives: November 2003

Concert: Billy Talent, Crowned King, Death From Above

The Billy Talent con­cert was pret­ty decent. There were quite a few peo­ple who seemed out of place there such as 10 year old girls and women beyond the cougar idiom, I’m guess­ing because BT is more of a main­stream band, but I’m not sure. I did­n’t real­ly know any­thing about them besides the fact that they have four mem­bers and that they have a sin­gle out (even though I know the entire album like the back of my hand). I’ve nev­er even seen one of their videos so actu­al­ly see­ing what they looked like, to put a few faces with the music, was pret­ty inter­est­ing. They played about half the songs from the album, and Benjamin was able to work the crowd up pret­ty well.

A band called Crowned King opened first and they had a fun ska derived sound with a lot of well com­posed har­monies, but the lyrics that I heard were a turn-off.

The best part of the show, how­ev­er, was the sec­ond open­ing act by a band called Death From Above, who used to be on the Sound-Virus label and are now on the Ache Records label (which also hap­pens to be the label for Hot Hot Heat). It’s a band with just a drum­mer (the vocal­ist) and a bassist, but the sound is extreme­ly full and well round­ed. It’s extreme­ly blood pump­ing, adren­a­line rush­ing, great sound­ing music and I would have bought an album at the con­cert if it was avail­able. They’re com­plete­ly a no-bull­shit band who tried to start shit with secu­ri­ty for kick­ing some peo­ple out dur­ing their set. They start­ed talk­ing about how much of a big­ot Glen Danzig is, and then mak­ing fun of the crowd for hav­ing no fuck­ing clue about who Glen Danzig is after cheer­ing from a men­tion of the Misfits. Just goes to show how many peo­ple at con­certs are com­plete poseurs. I’ll def­i­nite­ly be look­ing into Death From Above because I believe that they’re Canadian as well.

The NEMLC

When I went home for Christmas three years ago, I was a very con­fused per­son. I had no idea what I was look­ing for, what I was doing. When I came back, I felt as if I had gone through some sort of mid-life cri­sis. I still did­n’t know what I want­ed, but for some rea­son I was­n’t con­fused any­more. Did I end up resolv­ing any­thing? To this day I don’t know.

What I do know, how­ev­er, is that I haven’t stopped chang­ing. Even if I did come to some con­clu­sion back then, it would have no rel­e­vance today. So many things are chang­ing, not the world around me, but me myself.

I see this as a good thing. It lets me know that I’m still learn­ing, that I’m still liv­ing to the high­est degree. I have dif­fi­cul­ty “defin­ing” myself, dif­fi­cul­ty under­stand­ing my own (long term) actions some­times. As I’ve known since high school, it usu­al­ly takes me at least half a year to under­stand the choic­es I make.

Sometimes it feels like a con­stant mid-life cri­sis when I keep ques­tion­ing the deci­sions I make and the rela­tion­ships I have with oth­ers. I ques­tion things not with doubt, but with curios­i­ty.

And this has filled my life with uncer­tain­ty.

Winter Prelude

The weath­er these last two weeks has been wet and dull, though not unpleas­ant. It’s just begin­ning to turn a stark Canadian cold. The sun is out, the pave­ment is salt­ed, but the sky feels too dry for pre­cip­i­ta­tion. I can smell the bat­tery acid in the air, let­ting me know that snow is almost here.

*25*

I told Aaron a few months ago that I held his morals and atti­tudes towards rela­tion­ships as a per­son­al goal. Knowing him for a while and being through a few odd rela­tion­ships issues with him has made me real­ize that he has a very healthy mind­set. I’m not say­ing that there are bad or wrong ways of view­ing rela­tion­ships, I sim­ply found that his ideas fit with my over­all life goals very well. Even though I haven’t always stuck to these lofty stan­dards in my own rela­tion­ship expe­ri­ence, I still try to main­tain this set of ideals.

I know a few peo­ple whose main goal in life is to get mar­ried. I ques­tioned them about why they have this goal, and they would tell me that they sim­ply don’t know. I’ve been through all types of rela­tion­ship mind­sets before, all fair­ly dif­fer­ent, all from dif­fer­ent man­i­fes­ta­tions of my per­son­al­i­ty. There were phas­es such as “I want to be in a rela­tion­ship”, “I don’t think I’ll ever be in a rela­tion­ship”, “I’m unsat­is­fied with this rela­tion­ship”, “I’ve giv­en up on rela­tion­ships”, “I’ll be in this rela­tion­ship for the rest of my life” (haha­ha), “I don’t want to be in a rela­tion­ship”, and it goes on and on.

Right now I’m not even sure what I want. I think a rela­tion­ship would be great but unnec­es­sary. I’ve stopped being depen­dent on some­one to com­plete me, stopped look­ing at life as a dead­line, and have recon­sid­ered almost every­thing about what I want.

Being able to do so has made me think much more clear­ly and act with more con­vic­tion.