sun in my mouth

this morning, i managed to buy 4 tickets to BJORK.

yes, for the second time in 5 years, i will see ms. bjork in concert, dressed to the nines in her questionable/ adorable attire. i pray that bonnie prince billy is not opening for her this time. he came *this* close to ruining the seattle show.

bjork bjork bjork.

i guess this is going to make me want to go to iceland even more than i already do.

:: sigh ::

dalia and i will hold hands like grade 8 girls and cry through most of the show. i would put money on it.

last man standing

If you are someone who has a neurodegenerative disease that is going to cripple and torture you in the most unexpected ways, I urge you to not look up that neurodegenerative disease on www.youtube.com to see what other people (including the frustrated, sad, lonely, angry, traumatized children or life-partners of people with this disease) have to say.

Especially do not do this at 7:45am when you get in to work, before your boss gets there. Though I guess at least this way you can openly cry while you watch each of the little videos.

In some strange way it is a privilege for me to be able to hear about the terrible things that *could* come my way. Other folks that I have met who have Multiple Sclerosis have had the more feared symptoms (loss of bladder control, becoming wheelchair/ scooter-bound, blindness/ optic neuritis, slurred speech, etc) encroach upon their lives before they had the chance to hear other people’s stories – before they even had a chance to feel *anything* about what was to come.

I, however, have been given plenty of time to fuck with my own mind. According to my neurologist, my MS is considered to be ‘extremely mild’ – and has been so for almost 5 years now.

This leads me to wonder, on mornings like now, just how bad things could get.

the muffs

Holy crap. Lief and I leave for Sooke/ Victoria/ Sydney in less than 48 hours.

We have been duly warned that we should cough up the big bucks and actually make a ferry reservation, but I don’t think that is going to happen. It is unclear to me as to when Spring Break actually happens – and who actually is on holidays at this time. Because Simon Fraser University did not have any kind of Spring Break or Reading Break while I went to school there, it has been eons since I attended a school that took holidays at this time. Therefore, I plead ignorance and hope that creepy teenage boys wearing Snoop Dog T-shirts and disturbing teenage girls who worship Nellie Furtado are not on our ferry… or at least that their presence doesn’t prevent us from getting out of town by mid-day on Saturday.

And so the fun begins. I can’t even remember the last time that I drove a car onto the ferry. Though I manage to get to various islands and mainland stops on a pretty regular basis, I tend to be a walk on passenger. Though I suppose I used to take a couple of ferries (by car or by bus) to get up to Powell River. But I think that it has been almost 2 years since I did that trek.

I hereby urge the lovely and talented Douglas Coupland to address Vancouverites and our ferry-taking habits in the way that he addressed Vancouverites and our Seattle-visiting habits in City of Glass.

I cannot resist a veggie burger en route, no matter how full I am or how not-heated-properly the burgers are. Fuck it. While I am at it, I will play some pinball.

I look forward to being in Sooke and finding out how eerily similar Lief’s cousin Megan and I are. I can already tell. I can spot a soft-heated loud-mouth from a mile away. My fingers are crossed that we will be able to check out the potholes while we are there. http://www.sookepotholes.com/swimming_sooke_pot_holes.html

From there we will visit another Meghan, only this time she is no relation to Lief. She is a stellar lady who I have had about 20 mutual friends in common with for the last 5 years and didn’t even know it. Luckily, we met face to face at Yvonne’s birthdoo (it was 2 years ago, I can’t f*ing believe it) and have been interweb buddies ever since.

The gang of us is going to eat some grub and then go and meet up with my cousin-once-removed. For those of you playing along at home, my cousin Erin moved over to Victoria and then promptly got pregnant. She and her man-friend are going to come and meet us for drinks (some less alcoholic than others) in some kinda local dive. It will be a triple date, I hope.

Our final day on the island will be spent hanging out with my Aunt Jan. I have insisted to her that Lief and I will go with her to do any activity she wants. I am hoping that she chooses yoga. I am also hoping that Lief has to squeeze into some of her old LuLulemon pants in order to participate. In fact, that is the sole reason that I am going on this trip.

Amazingly enough, one of my actual cousins (not to be confused with a cousin-once-removed) will be there at my Aunt’s place. I think that this will be more family-related activity than I have had… ever.

As usual, I welcome any recommendations that people may have. Good places to stop for a bite to eat? Record shops we have to check out? Tattoo shops that we have to visit? Let me know. I like to learn.

C U Next Tuesday. For reals.

next exit

The music scene here in Vancouver slays me.

Today I went to pick up tickets to the Ted Leo & the Pharmacists show and to Interpol.

Interpol I found out about by reading the very dodgy music section in the Georgia Straight. The GS seems to be waffling these days – not sure if they are going to list all the things that they have in their print version on the website. Thus, forcing people like me (who only read the Georgia Straight for the Music section, as a general rule) to actually pick up a copy/ waste paper.

I am not even going to waste my breath talking about Discorder. I am careful not to talk too much smack about a magazine that friends, past and present, have been involved in. It seems safe to say that their motto is ‘if you don’t already know about it – you won’t read about it here until after it has happened… if at all’.

The Ted Leo show, though I am a dedicated lover of the band, I had not heard hide nor hair about until Sarah emailed me asking if I had bought my ticket yet. She found out about it only because she was already at Scratch Records to buy something else.

And while *I* was at Scratch, I also realized that The Frames are coming. I have seen no indication of this anywhere else. What the fuck? How often do they come here (from Ireland)? Not often. That’s for fucking sure. To be sure, to be sure!

For the last 15 years I have tried to support places like Scratch records. I have tried to save some cash by buying tickets there – and tried to avoid using Ticketmaster wherever possible.

Now that Scratch and other places are basically selling tickets at their places that have already been processed by Ticketmaster, I just don’t think that I can afford to attempt to support them anymore. The service charges are fucking ridiculous. If I had known that the Interpol tickets were going to end up costing $36 (I think they were advertised as $28.50), I actually wouldn’t have bought them. Ticketmaster takes $5 of my money and Scratch takes another chunk. And for what? Dude at Scratch lets his telephone buddy know that he will ::sigh:: have to call them back. He has an ::eye roll:: customer or something. Moral of the story is: if Ticketmaster is going to save me $3 on a ticket price, Ticketmaster wins.

Now that there is basically only one mid sized venue – I can see that the Commodore is going to be banking on its monopoly. Ticket prices are beyond inflated.

Maybe the Red Room will step up to the plate and cut back on their halter-top dance-party nights and start getting some more live acts in. Chances are that Pub 340 is going to be taking up more space on my dancecard too.

I guess I am showing my age when I recount tales of $3 shows at Southwall and $8 shows at the Starfish Room.

It would surprise most of you to know that the music scene in Winnipeg is far superior to what we have going on here. More venues. Cheaper shows. Less places that kick you out at 10:30pm to make room for canned music dance parties.

Hopefully the nostalgic sounds of Interpol will soothe my agitated mind when they arrive in April. Until then….

Blargh!

... trail of the dead

I don’t want to have to follow the trail of email or archives of my online planning calendar to get a picture of ‘what I have been up to’.

It’s true that I feel as if I haven’t had a single day to ‘do nothing’, even though I am sure that I have had several of them in the past month. Being a purposefully un-busy person doesn’t seem to be going as planned.

The combination of Multiple Sclerosis, Avonex, Alertec (for those of you playing along at home – these are meds for narcoleptics that are also given to MS patients to deal with fatigue), Mersyndol, muscle relaxants, and high levels of codeine seem, surprisingly, to be affecting my energy levels. In the past 2 years, less than 20 days have gone by that I have *not* taken some form of downer or pain killer. It may be time for me to realize that the ‘vacation’ that I hope to get by taking these meds ISN’T GOING TO HAPPEN. I have almost forgotten what my body felt like before I reached out for all these pills. It is often hard to tell the difference between physical pain and emotional frustration.

A friend of mine, who has been my other half for 15 years, and I finally got a chance to go out for a long dinner and catch each other up on our seemingly adult lives. After a lengthy discussion about recreation and health – she asked me if I had been able to take my own advice – if I had mourned for a body/ nervous system that I used to have, and moved on to actually enjoying the things that my body now does/ is capable of doing.

I don’t lie about this shit, man. As I have said a million times, I chose early on to NOT be a happy face painted on Multiple Sclerosis. I will not pretend that things are okay when they are not. I will not pretend that things have healed when they have not. I will not pretend that things have been mourned, when clearly, they have not.

While I think it is safe to say that I am through the worst of it, the years where I wanted to erase my body/ smash my body/ ignore my body/ suffocate my body – I certainly haven’t re-engaged with it.

I don’t dance like I used to.

I don’t really know what this post is about. I guess that I am feeling so busy – and maybe part of that busyness (as it is for most people) is to avoid dealing with the dark, looming things that we keep in our lives.