Saturday, July 17, 2010

Difference engines

Without going into detail, I have time on my hands. This isn't exactly a bad thing, it's just a state of being that my rational brain believes should be graphed and charted and given a finite time span with loads of contingency tucked in around the edges. It's supposedly a time for reflection, but that's not working so well: I'm either staring at walls while assuming there's a mirror that I can't quite see (and believing that if I stand long enough, something will throw a little light) or I've become a low-level variation on a vampire that casts no image through any easily obtained, bog-standard looking glass.

The mechanics of this spare time are easily navigated (I've been taking my son to parks and reading lots of pull-up-your-socks publications) but some tabula rasa aspect hasn't slipped into place just yet, causing this not-unpleasant limbo to reveal signs of potential unpleasantness.

I'm on Yonge St. at 6:30pm on a weekday night, walking downtown to meet Gene. I knew him a very long time ago as part of a church group; he writes and worked in computers and works in film and was the last person I thought I'd find myself having a beer with, although I'm delighted to see him. He got back in touch around a year ago through Facebook and we've chatted from time to time. The aforementioned time off feels like a good reason to have another beer and I'm en route to the bistro when time falls out of itself for a few seconds (if that explains the duration of a non-event). I start looking into head shoppe windows and spotting the kind of stuff that would have been sold 25-odd years back: what t-shirts attract your standard stoner since time immemoriam?

There's a handful of classics: today's AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin or Doors t-shirts would slip harmlessly past temporal sensors in the early 80s and they're still popular today. Three storefronts proudly offered Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon anniversary shirts, perhaps losing the fact that the 30th anniversary was in 2003. The shirts still sell. In those places at least, 2/3rds of the t-shirts rotate through Van Halen Inxs Stone Temple Pilots Pearl Jam Nirvana Beck NIN Weezer Eminem Marilyn Manson while the rest extol the virtues of Jim Morrison and that freaky Iron Maiden mascot and that guitarist in boy's school shorts. The structure of cheap crap re-forms itself from time to time but it's thin. In this context at least, nothing changes, nothing goes away.


STAG said...

And of course the Che Guevera tee shirts, the marijuana leaf tee shirt, and the Mickey Mouse tee shirt.

Mike D. said...

I forgot Hendrix and The Who (from early 60's London undergound artwork to early 70's Tommy sort of font). I'm pretty sure that boxes of Duran Duran, Wham! and Van Halen (not Van Hagar) linger in boxes in the back room, waiting for the next hardcore wave of retro...

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