This is the Day.

It’s one minute after nine on Saturday morning and I am sitting on a patio drinking coffee thinking about how it seems like seconds ago I just wrote my first post on this site to commemorate my 50th birthday. It was a selfish, indulgent initiative, but we do things with our time that makes us happy when we can, and this is one of them for me. I have a compelling desire to say things to no one and publish them into the ether for no real reason beyond the fact that I like to hear myself think.
With a subscription to Apple Music I am able to transport myself back to being 18 much easier. Lately I have been song jumping retro artists when I am not below ground. A song can put me somewhere pretty easily, and I find that sometimes one song will resonate more than the others and take me somewhere I haven’t been in a long, long time. It’s more of a feeling than a memory. In a way it’s really the only thing I can do to feel like I felt at the time the song was hitting the airwaves for the first time. I am usually not one to dwell in the past, I would much rather dwell in the head of a fictional character, or in my own head in the here and now. 

But the music does things to me. It makes me think things I remember thinking or doing when listening to the song. It makes me remember how important I felt walking down Yonge Street with my jungle boots on and a long Russian wool overcoat with a high collar and large brass buttons. I think of it now and I cringe, how pointless and shallow it all seems now. How disillusioned and naive. 

Yes it seems harsh to judge myself in the past, but it’s what we do, we judge ourselves constantly. The fun thing about it is that I remember thinking I really was “the shit”. I really truly believed I had the world by the ass and that everything was going to just come to me and fall at my feet any minute.
The music pushed these thoughts higher, and amplified my illusionist approach to life. Listening to BLACK FLAG Slip it in could really take me where I wanted to be. Listening to it now makes me laugh, and I still love it as much as I did them, but now it has a different meaning for me. It’s not my life soundtrack, but it’s like watching a favourite movie that I haven’t seen in a long time, or forgot about, and just happened upon. 

Why is it that when you reach a certain point in life the new music just seems to not do it for us anymore. Sure I try to relate. I try to like. But to be honest it never puts me where, or inspires me in a way that moves me. My guess is that as we age we replay memories and experiences more than we create new ones. Or we just become more jaded and well-travelled as we experience what life has to offer after a longer stretch of time. So today’s youth is utilizing the shit on the radio to model and design their own life soundtrack. Everything is just so much more exciting for them that it all just fits together, and makes its mark on their soft tender brains.
This happens to every generation I am not having any kind of revelation here – but it amuses me. The thing that I don’t understand the most is how the newer music is just so un-relatable. My conclusion is that because it is being created and produced by a younger set of individuals that have grown up with a completely different set of influencers than older generations.  

I have tried to like hip-hop, R&B, Rap, and even some of the new POP, but in most cases I would rather listen to cats copulate than ever hear any of it again. 

I find myself staggering and physically loosing my balance due to the acute malaise that will overtake me due to the music played in modern retail environments. Most of the time I get this inane desire to set the place on fire, and push over displays as an uncontrollable rage consumes me. I begin to see everything as stupid, pointless, redundant, and shallower that urine on a dinner plate. It makes me hate youth, and want to punch little tweens that are wearing way too short, shorts, and far to much makeup. It makes me want to push down posturing sagging-panted Justin Beiber fanboys and pull out their over gelled hair. I want to toss grenades into rap-pounding Escalades and watch them explode as I seek cover behind a mailbox. It makes me wish I could banish artists like Drake, and declare their music a health hazard, due to the fact that it inspires, and harbours a lack of thinking and can literally reduce IQ’s with extensive exposures to.  

Horrible horrible feelings and impulses I know, because these are just innocent kids trying to make their mark in the world. Playing out their own soundtracks for life, and painting the pastiche for their dreams and hopes – the ones they will cling to and reminisce about when they realize the world is just one big dirty lie. When they find out that they spent far too long looking for a spot to see their reflection well enough to get an idea as to how the world sees them. They can always take refuge in the fact that ahhhh, at the time ignorance truly was bliss. 

It’s hard to adjust because things just move way to fast. One generation seems to just bulldoze over the next, and technology is just cutting a larger pathway for the bulldozers to travel over easier. The word has turned into a barrage of media garbage cannons and everyone needs a tin foil helmet or to at least to duck out of the way once in a while to get a reality check. I am off the rails now ranting. I need to get over it and step over it all. 

So I dive deep, and settle back into a time that seemed to make so much more sense. I try to stop comparing today’s youth with my youth or anyone else’s. It simply is their youth, and if it makes sense for them great.  

BUT SHIT I am tired of having to put up with interference it causes for older generations with different values and ideals. Why does the shallowest and lowest common denominator always have the loudest voice? Strength in numbers I guess.
So this post seems pretty much done now. After writing it I get a sense of déjà vu.   

Wait … Save it for Later by the English Beat just came on, I remember the first time I heard this song, I was buying a pair of cheap WOX wraps sunglasses at a junky gift store at Queen and Church, listening to CFNY 102.1 on my Sony Walkman….. I gotta go and enjoy the moment.