Posts tagged with "memories"

Strip Club Experiences

It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a strip club. The co-work­ers of my first job, along with the pres­i­dent of the com­pa­ny, were the ones took me to my first. They made it a point to “ini­ti­ate” me when they found out I had nev­er been. I still look back on that mem­o­ry fond­ly, because I was so young and green, and they want­ed to get me over my inex­pe­ri­ence.

But it was nev­er some­thing I did with any fre­quen­cy. You always look at those guys, seat­ing by them­selves at the head of the table with a beer in hand, think­ing, “Is this bet­ter than what you have at home?”

After all, strip clubs are nev­er real­ly about the girls. It’s about being out with your friends, when your par­ents think you’re at a movie1. They’re like con­certs. You could sit at home and lis­ten to a CD with stu­dio qual­i­ty sound, but there’s some­thing dif­fer­ent about the atmos­phere of a live expe­ri­ence.

It’s easy to grow past the appeal of strip­pers though. There’s no per­son­al­i­ty there. Even Playboy mod­els have likes and dis­likes. The fur­thest a strip club goes is by say­ing, “Here’s Porsche, and she used to be an air­plane atten­dant”.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the female fig­ure. But there’s no appeal in a strip­per.

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  1. Some of them had ring­tones set for their home num­bers, and just the ring would set off a round of teenage spite [↩]

Musical Context

Every song is a time stamp. A place in life, marked by the exact moment that it’s first heard. In this moment, your sur­round­ings, cir­cum­stances, and emo­tions all become attached.

There’s a song for every­thing, from a sin­gle moment — like los­ing your vir­gin­i­ty — to an entire year — like your last one in high school. Perhaps my child­hood is such a blur because I nev­er start­ed lis­ten­ing to music until I was about 14; there was no anchor for my mind to asso­ciate with my expe­ri­ences.

In prepa­ra­tion for my house­warm­ing par­ty, Trolley and I decid­ed on a set of music to be played dur­ing the fes­tiv­i­ties. It was my idea to split the songs into two cat­e­gories, day and night, to take us from the after­noon to the evening. We sat at his com­put­er, and as we went through the list, I told him how to cat­e­go­rize each song. It seemed like such an arbi­trary act to him, but for me, there was a dis­tin­guish­ing tone to each song that made it appro­pri­ate for a cer­tain time of day.

Two exam­ples:

The quin­tes­sen­tial night, Bring Me the Disco King, by David Bowie, (fea­tur­ing Maynard James Keenan & John Frusciante).

And the quin­tes­sen­tial day, Another Sunny Day by Belle & Sebastian.

I won­der if I’m the only who can hear it, because of my expe­ri­ences and when I heard these songs first, or whether the order of cer­tain notes express a cer­tain con­no­ta­tion of sun and moon.

Accepting a song from some­one, as opposed to find­ing some­thing your­self, always puts the song in the musi­cal con­text of that per­son.

The con­no­ta­tion then comes from this per­son­’s expe­ri­ences, your rela­tion­ship with them, or both. You hear the song through their ears. It changes the notes, the chords, the core sound of what you’re lis­ten­ing to. From some­one like Darren, a song is total­ly dif­fer­ent than from Julie.

Music is thus anoth­er form of mem­o­ry.

Eagle vs Shark

Eagle vs Shark

Eagle vs Shark is the new Postal Service.

The movie I can’t stop watch­ing. The movie I can’t watch with any­one else.

Not because it’s painful in any way, but because it’s sacred. A movie where no one else would under­stand the way I see it. A reminder that I was adored once too, when some­one loved me beyond lim­it or con­di­tion. (A mem­o­ry that I need right now.)

But I will leave you with this lit­tle song, if only for a short while. You need colours and can­dles in your room when you lis­ten though, and an imag­i­na­tion will serve you well. Having a make­out part­ner and wear­ing a cos­tume of your favourite ani­mal is option­al.

That is all you need to know, for this is all I can say.

Tom and I

We used to have a code: I’d ask him “Hey Tom, you want to van­dal­ize the grave­yard tonight?”, this obscure line from an episode of Married…with Children.

If he respond­ed with, “No, Jeff, that would be wrong” (the next line from the episode), that meant he’d agree to throw rocks into a lit­tle stream under an over­pass dur­ing our grade 7 lunch break. When we were fin­ished eat­ing in the cafe­te­ria, we’d walk to the stream with the remains of the hour, dressed in bur­gundy tie and pine blaz­er, heav­ing any appro­pri­ate­ly sized rocks into the water. It was our goal to block the flow of the stream one day.

It was a fruit­less goal, of course, so much like every­thing we did back then, when noth­ing we did ever seemed to mat­ter. A goal we’d nev­er hope to accom­plish.

A way of say­ing, “I hope these days nev­er end. I hope I nev­er grow up, and I’m nev­er too old to throw rocks with a good friend.”

Sometimes we’d throw what was left of our lunch­es into the stream, and be reward­ed with the glimpse of a soli­tary fish break­ing the sur­face of the water and snatch­ing a morsel.

By the time we returned to class, the sheen on my brogues would be replaced by a fine lay­er of dust from walk­ing around in the grav­el. I’d wear that dust proud­ly, because no one ever knew how it got there, a secret code between him and me.

Sometimes I check up on Tommy. Not that he knows. I won­der if we could be friends again. We lead two dif­fer­ent lives, but that’s nev­er stopped me from being friends with some­one. Part of me is scared that he’s nev­er changed, nev­er grown out from the ele­men­tary school Tom I used to know — some­thing all too com­mon in my expe­ri­ence — and I’d just rather not know. It’s enough for me not to con­tact him.

But I still root for him, not because we used to be such good friends, but because I know that if he can make it, so can I.