The Angry Hippies

I might be guilty on occasion of ranting about hippies which some folks might perceive to be bordering on the obsessive, but as a group they bring in on to themselves. When their behavior affects live music, Rockabilly in particular, and the livelihoods of musicians, I  tend to take it a little more personally. What I am talking about is hippies moving into vibrant neighborhoods and complaining about all the noise, live music venues in particular.

In one of my older posts called "Two Bagpipes", I elaborated on this phenomena. This city has gone condo-made and rabid real estate developers eyeball even the smallest patch of land like hungry flies circling a pile of dog poop. Several years ago, some condos were erected right in front of a popular live music bar. It wasn't long after that that a bylaw was created stating that certain music venues could only have two musicians on stage and they had to be playing acoustic instruments. I guess it turns out that hippies don't like bagpipes and they found out in no uncertain terms that these fuckers are loud. The bylaw was soon repealed.

What's that you say? What do condos have to do with hippies? Let me explain. Hippies are always angry about something, particularly people that don't agree with their fucked-up value system and skewed sense of right and wrong. They love nothing more than causing shit, disturbing traffic, yelling at unsuspecting citizens with megaphones and participating in drum circles. Which is ironic, because all these activities produce an incredible amount of noise. Noise is defined as unwanted sound and it seems that hippies don't want any unwanted sounds, especially those of the twangy variety.

In many cases when hippies get older, they are transformed into raging capitalists or if you will, yuppies with bad hygiene. Hippies are usually charlatans and dilettantes, but are often able to parlay this into money, because there are even more hippies out there eager to buy into their bullshit. They will open some leftoid raw food restaurant that serves bacteria-laden Collard greens to throngs of sanctimonious hippies eager to make themselves feel superior to mere greasy mortals like myself and my ilk. Maybe they will write some bullshit book on holistic healing crammed with utter nonsense, new-age pseudo-science and multiple crystal-rubbing techniques. In any case, a lot of them will make shitloads of money and a new breed of yuppie is born.

With their newly acquired wealth they will immediately buy a condo in what is one of the most expensive cities in North America ( in this case Vancouver, BC). Not just any condo, it has to be located where they can annoy as many people as they can, especially small business owners, meat shops, sausage makers and musicians ( for some strange reason, they never seem to have a go at McDonald's, maybe they secretly like Big Macs with a little bit of tofu on top).

Now they have money and man, are they ever angry. Their tendency to publicly berate total strangers could result in a good punch in face back in the day. but now they have coin and clout with city hall. In typical angry, whiny hippie single-mindedness, they will harass staff at city hall until they get their way.

Not all of these whiners own condos, often they are renters. That makes them even more of a retard, because in a city this size one could rent anywhere. That is a akin to driving a Jeep in the Sahara desert and running into the only tree for hundreds of miles around. Years ago in another city, an English band called Big Boy Bloater was slated to play a highly anticipated two night show. Some psychotic neighbor actually set fire to the bar. There was only some water damage, but the show was cancelled. Pretty sure that the band must think that all Canadians are nutso.

Speaking of British, where do you think the name British Columbia came from? Canada was founded by the French and the British. They would duke it out for centuries as staid redcoats would advance slowly in a straight line as the French threw croissants at them. Then one day, the British said "fuck it' (or more likely, fornicate this bloody place) gave Quebec to the French and fucked off to the rest of Canada. The only problem is, even though Britain advanced into the 21st century, nobody bothered to tell anyone here in BC. This is why we have liquor laws that even Queen Victoria  would find a little too strict. To circumvent these laws back in the 50's people would start membership only clubs ( sort of like a legion, but not as many batshit drunk geezers who yell at you if you wear a hat). There were places like The Marin Club and the Railway Club ( still in operation).

Which brings us to the place in question. The WISE club has been sitting smack dab in the middle  of what is now one the hipper parts of town since 1958. WISE is an acronym for Welsh, Irish, Scottish and English. There aren't many kilts or Austin Healey's around the WISE these days, but it is a vibrant live music venue. It also happens to be the home base of Paul Pigat and his band Cousin Harley ( if you aren't familiar, do yourselves a favor and check this cat out; even Brian Setzer digs him).

Some angry hippie moved in close by recently and is causing a patchouli induced shit storm. He has been doing precisely what I have described in the preceding paragraphs. He has been putting up posters, acting like a fucking goof on Facebook and pestering city hall about all the noise. The manager is a good friend of mine and this situation has been one huge headache for her and she is stuck dealing with various government agencies. There is one hilarious aspect to this however; the chief licensing dude at city hall who is dealing with matter is another good friend of mine who just happens to be an accomplished Rockabilly guitar player. The semi-deranged hippie is blissfully unaware of this fact even though it doesn't really have any bearing on the situation.

The whole situation is still up in the air at this point and no one can really say how it will play itself out. Let's hope for the best and let this be a sobering reminder that music venues everywhere are constantly being threatened. It is also a good reason to continue to support live music any way you can.

Now, I don't know where this dangerous retard lives and I can't seem to find out. Ordinarily, I would support the idea of a good old-fashioned greaser beating, but I have an aversion to picking soap in prison showers. When I do find out where he lives however I'll be making a phone call. The McDonald brothers are also good friends of mine and they play a mean bagpipe. 

The Fine Art Of Bullshit

Bullshit. It's a nice straightforward word that that leaves no doubt as to its intended meaning. It's been around a long time , but I think that over the years its true meaning has been somewhat forgotten. Some people call bullshit when they sense that someone is lying to them, but that isn't necessarily so. When someone is intentionally lying to you, they are aware of the truth but are trying to intentionally deceive you.
" Where's that twenty bucks you owe me."
" My dog ate it."

Sometimes people will indulge in white lies just to spare someone's feelings. Brutally honest truth isn't always the best option and could have far-reaching repercussions.
" Do these pants make my ass look fat?'
" No, your ass makes your ass look fat. The pants are fine."

No. Bullshit is far more subtle and insidious. It is intended to obfuscate and mislead people, or worse still; to part them and their money. I think that most advertising falls into this category. Can you think of one TV commercial that isn't trying to bullshit you in some way? If you drink a certain crappy beer, you'll never be hammered and beautiful women with huge boobs will suddenly materialize out of thin air. Maybe you can fly first-class to New York city for $29 and stay in a four star hotel for $10 ( if you believe that, I know of a certain bridge in New York that is for sale and all you have to do is send me $100.)

Maybe you will asked to believe that Windows is an awesome operating system that features robots serving you breakfast in bed who then proceed to go to your office and do your job for you while you drink Sailor Jerry rum all day and act like a pirate. Maybe you actually believe that three foot M&M's are having a conversation in your living room ( unless you have taken some really powerful drugs) Speaking of drugs, one has to ponder the fact for a moment that drug dealers never, ever have to rely on advertising.

 The reason advertising exists in the first place is that it is human nature to want to believe bullshit and the people who devise these advertising strategies are very good at it. They excel at selling us stuff that we don't need or in some cases don't even want. They sell us shit that we didn't even know we wanted and even sell us a lot of stuff that is just plain detrimental to our health or even worse, tastes like crap. The few times that I somehow got roped into eating at Wendy's were not exactly gastronomical adventures of epic proportions. It was more liking eating prison slop in the main cafeteria of a mental hospital.

Big Box stores also employ this type of subterfuge which results in very large spaces filled with staggering amounts of bullshit. Stereos used to be sold in specialty shops staffed by gurus who had as much knowledge as your average engineer. These days, one has to go to places like Best Buy. These depressing places are staffed by under-paid kids who are hell-bent on selling you an extended warranty. I would sometimes amuse myself by playing dumb and asking the clerks what functions all the knobs had on those big-assed home theater amplifiers. The made-up-on-the-spot answers were always hilarious.

Other big box stores are filled to the brim with low quality goods manufactured off-shore. I can personally attest to the fact that a lot of that shit will break the first micro-second you try to use it. I still have a shard of metal embedded in my thumb that came from a cheap screwdriver that exploded as soon as I applied a little torque to it. Strangely enough Canadian Tire still sells cool pin-striping tape that is made in the USA and have done so for years, but everything is pretty crappy, hence the moniker "Crappy Tire". A few years ago, I was looking for a space heater ( for you folks down South, a space heater is an extra electric heater for warming up your room so that you don't, as we say in Canada, "freeze your bag off") I asked one the elusive clerks if they had any that weren't made in China. He stared at me for a few seconds dumbfounded; he had no idea what I was talking about and probably concluded that I was insane.

Another definition of bullshit is having to put up with nonsense ( often referred to as horseshit). Craigslist fits this definition perfectly. I am sure almost everyone reading this has at one point sold or bought something on Craigslist. We've all encountered some form of bullshit on craigslist. The outrageously inflated prices for worn-out crap are bullshit. The ads composed by obtuse people who seemingly dropped out of school in the sixth grade are bullshit. The medieval public market tactics of trying to lowball your advertised price are bullshit. Not to mention having all types of people of questionable mental stability show up at your door step.

Often the items on craigslist are misrepresented. Bicycles are a good example. Bikes are always advertised as only being ridden three times, a few minor scratches and maybe the bell needs a little tuning. Once you see the bike in person it usually turns out to be some rusted-out piece of shit that even a crackhead wouldn't steal. In all fairness, a lot of people have unnatural attachments to their stuff, even the crappy stuff, so they are deluded and actually believe the content of their ads. It is still a form of bullshit, however and it's annoying and wastes a lot of time. Other CL buyers want you to solve their engineering problems for them when they purchase a $15 dollar part. The real answer to all these annoying questions posed by these retards lacking even rudimentary mechanical ability is " No , it won't work and you will probably lose some fingers in the process" But 15 bucks doesn't buy the answer, just the part in question.

One of the most insidious forms of bullshit is bureaucracy. Having to navigate a quagmire of endless forms, arcane legal documents, incomprehensible procedures and bureaucrats who are paid to actually make things complicated can be tedious. It is bullshit in its purest and most undiluted form. Tax forms are a prime example, they are some of most convoluted words ever put to paper ( some of which are actually in a language spoken by humans)  and a very long-winded way of saying "just give us your money".

The fact that a car is taxed every time it changes hands is also bullshit and for some reason my butt hurts every time I buy a used car or renew my license. Cops are inextricably linked to this bureaucracy and have a level of bullshit all their own. They don't really give a damn if you were driving 100 miles an hour and squashed a few dogs, or that your pipes are too loud and you caused a few heart attacks at the old folks home or that the burn-out you just did in your buddy's El Camino just started a forest fire: They just want to give you a ticket so they can get your money. Forget about those hardened criminals, there goes a guy riding a bicycle without a helmet and they're gonna take him down.

Another form of bullshit is exaggeration and embellishment. It is not as insidious as other forms of bullshit, but it is, however just as tedious. It isn't flat out lying, but some people just seem to enjoy indulging in it. They will regale you with tales of their drinking prowess and other bullshitters will try to out-bullshit them. The boobs in these stories get bigger with each telling of the bullshit story. The amount of punches in the face will increase. The amount of horsepower will get to levels approaching that usually found in 300 ton mining trucks. These bull-meisters never seem to have ever been fired at any time in their lives, woken up next to anything but a super-model, never lost a fight, never did anything dumb while driving a car or never farted in an elevator. One has to be able to detect the fine  line between bullshit and just plain ole full o' shit.

Here's a random list of things that are bullshit.

 1. Suburban white kids that speak like inner-city rappers. Foshizzle. Whaa?

2. The breakfast combo at McDonalds is the same price it always is even when it includes a "free coffee". I have yet to have received a straight answer to that one.

3. Any cell phone plan. So, if I multiply the size of my phone with Pi, divide by the weight of my neighbor's chihuahua, include some Safeway coupons for chicken soup and get some Australian dollars at the foreign exchange I owe you ..... oh never mind just send me the damned bill in the mail.

4. Any airline ticket. Fuel tax, landing gear tax, pilot sobriety tax, make sure we don't run out of fuel tax, getting your suitcase that ended up in Bratislava tax.....

5.Warm Beer ( I'm talkin' to you LCB of British Columbia)

6. Psychics ( I once saw a for rent sign when Sonia the Psychic went out of business. Didn't see that one coming, huh Sonia)

7. $ 500 tickets to see some crappy pop singer that uses Auto-tune ( if your taste in music is that bad, maybe you deserve that one).

8. Systems for winning the lottery ( I'll buy 500 bottles of whiskey and 500 cartons of Kools when I win the lottery tomorrow.)

9. Motivational speakers. Repeat after me; I am wealthy, I'm all jacked up, I got the power; but give me a check first.

10. The Shopping Channel. Only $59.95 for a glitter-covered sandwich bag ?...hold on folks ..I'll be back in a sec.

11. 7-11 stores. Fifty six bucks for a pack of smokes, $29.99 for a 45 gallon (55 in the US) drum of Slurpee and interior fluorescent lighting visible from the international space station.

12. All those picker/ storage shows. Oh look, a Jedi light-saber once owned by Winston Churchill.

13. That hard plastic packaging that is impossible to open up. There is a special tool you can buy to open these packages, but it also comes in that hard plastic packaging.

14. Dollar stores. A great place to buy Cookies from Ecuador that expired in 1999, lead-based kids' toys, pencils that don't sharpen (otherwise known as a stick), reading glasses that will eventually make you blind, Curtis CD Walkmans and thousands of very shiny whatever-the-heck-that-is.

15. Christmas Music. Surely this is the soundtrack in hell. Designed to make you buy tons of crap and ugly sweaters.


Even though I'm a city slicker, years ago I lived on a farm for a while. I attended many wing-dings and barnyard parties and was always warned not to mess with the bull. There was always plenty of corn, beer and pick up trucks and the evenings usually ended in the same way. On the way to my truck I would invariably step in something big and squishy; a steaming pile of shit. Now that. folks , is truly bullshit. Watch where you walk, keep your eyes out for bullshit and don't mess with the bull.

iTunes: Macspeak For " Ain't Right In The Head"

It may seem strange to start a sentence with a lower case letter, but when dealing with Macspeak, one has no choice. iTunes has become the de facto music source in the age of mind-numbingly complex electronic doo-dads. In fact, it has become so ubiquitous that it has become part of every day vernacular and is universally understood that this is where your music lives.

Unless one lives in the far reaches of Outer Mongolia, it has been commonly accepted that the CD store has long since found its demise. One might still find a small and useless selection at Wal-Mart, but when was the last time that you headed down to the Virgin store to browse through CD's on a Saturday afternoon?

The alternative is iTunes. The only alternative that is. I am not a Luddite by any means, but I was thrust into this brave new world of non-physical music without me having much to say about it. The last time I walked around with a Discman all the neighborhood kids were making fun of me. Might as well be walking around with a gigantic ghetto blaster that uses 24 D cells. It soon dawned on me that  an iPod purchase was imminent and inevitable. " How hard can it be ? " I asked myself. A rhetorical question asked many times over the years by computer geeks. this probably explains why the world's first computer was the size of two houses and ran on 64,000 vacuum tubes. If just one of the tubes blew, the whole computer would go nutso. Kinda like what happened to me when I first fired up the ole iPod ( fried more brain cells than 5 gallons of whisky ever could).

Forgetting for a sec that a lot of mp3's sound like absolute shit or like flies buzzing under water, an iPod and iTunes are a technological marvel. 20 years ago it was inconceivable to carry 40,000 songs around in your pocket. That's roughly equivalent to 4000 cd's. About the same size and weight as a converted hippie school bus. The batteries required for your Discman alone would cost more than a couple of Cadillacs or the annual Patchouli budget for an entire hippie colony.

Personally, I did not lament the demise of vinyl or CD's. Records were a pain in the ass. Nothing could be more nerve-wracking than hovering an expensive needle over a record with hangover- induced shakes ( I speak from experience as one particular shaky move ended up costing me $300).
They required constant cleaning, took up enormous amounts of space and made the IKEA company rich selling millions of Grubenschnaben ( whatever they were called) record shelves and tiny meatballs to customers who couldn't find the exit.

Then there was the mixed tape. Nothing could induce panic more than someone asking you to make a mixed tape. It was a grueling 3 hour process just to make a 60 minute tape and you couldn't take your eyes off the stereo, not even to go the can. It was sometimes difficult to refuse the request especially when you were trying to impress some gal and your hormones ran the show.

 Records did have one advantage. If one of them sucked, you could whip it out the door like a Frisbee. A short, but immensely satisfying experience. Another advantage was that no thief in his right mind would break into your house and steal your records. That dirty thief probably gave himself a hernia stealing your 36 inch tube TV, so he wasn't about to steal 5000 lbs of vinyl. If he did, who the hell would buy used records? Used record stores were considered an oddity back in the day and they always smelled of incense, hippie body odor and cat piss. The hippies that ran them were often so stoned that they couldn't even read the covers (that were 12 inches by 12 inches), much less direct you to the proper section.

When CD's came about I eyed them with suspicion at first. They only seemed to issue classical music and the people browsing the CD section seemed deranged. I soon embraced them and was only to glad to get rid of my vinyl. CD players were expensive at first but soon became affordable.

It took a few years but I eventually came to the conclusion that music corporations were sticking things up our butt while we slept. The first indication was in the early generation CD's. They had a tendency to freeze up if they had even the slightest scratch on them. I think we all remember those hilarious moments on the radio when the song being played froze up and started doing that robot-like "yagayagayagayaga" sound. CD's had promised "perfect sound forever" but I also eventually found out that if you so much as cough or fart within a 20 foot radius of a CD, it will get scratched to the point of making it virtually unusable. This is why, to this day, CD's are hung on strings from the ceiling in seedy bars. Nothing says 'I've hit rock bottom" like drinking in a bar while twinkling CD's dangle over your head.

Eventually CD's became prohibitively expensive and the writing was one the wall for big corporations. It soon became apparent that a friend with CD burner could make you a copy for free. They were also very attractive to thieves, who could easily break in to a car and steal $2000 worth of music in a heartbeat. Soon pawnshops were filled to the brim with "used" CD's . Even though everyone knew that most of those were stolen, it was still amusing to see what horrendously bad taste some people had in music.


Alright, 160 Gb Ipod, a computer with a Terabyte of memory; now what? Get to know that Machiavellian application known as iTunes. Woe is you if you don't own a Mac because Windows adds a whole other dimension of brain searing anguish to the process.

Along with losing an expensive iPhone, someone hacking your bank account to buy rapper clothes, and cops being able to track you via GPS after you busted the headlights on a BMW with a hammer in a traffic altercation, there is one more cyber-problem causing inordinate amounts of stress. The fact you could easily wipe out your entire music collection in a fraction of a second a never know how it happened. One would think that the level of technological sophistication in current computer technology would make this impossible, but think again. It would be akin to an airline pilot eating a bagel that would somehow make the plane crash. I also found out that iTunes has a function that is called " doesn't work after 9 beers". This somehow makes songs disappear into some dark abyss on a server somewhere in North Carolina or end up in the trash reconfigured as Nickelback and Justin Bieber songs.

Your songs eventually will disappear because all hard drives eventually fail. You can make a back up but that too is a hard drive. Your iPod classic is a hard drive, but you can't use that as back up because it only goes one way. Sounds like the circular type of logic found only in mental institutions for the criminally insane.

Loading your iTunes with music is infinitely more difficult than making mixed tapes. Loading a CD that you own into iTunes is slow and about as exciting (and infuriating) as watching a mime on the sidewalk. I don't want enter into an ethical debate about downloading music that has been " creatively acquired" but let's just say that that is about as complicated and convoluted as tax law or hippie logic.

Managing the music is equally as convoluted and quite tedious. I just said "fuck it" and piled all my music into one Genre called Rockabilly and I now sleep better at night. It is so counter-intuitive that I downloaded a book called " iTunes and iPods for Dummies" (just never you mind where I downloaded it from). The book is three hundred and sixty freakin' five pages long. I've read it and I can safely say that I don't feel any smarter whatsoever.

I still love my music and I won't let the daunting task of mastering iTunes stop me or stress me out. I don't recall having to worry about my music collection, it's like owning a dog that likes to pee on people's feet, crap on their carpet or eat their dogs. It's like having a friend who picks fights with bikers in bars and tells the bikers that you started it. Sometimes it's like owning a temperamental car knowing that engine could blow up at anytime and possibly kill you ( or maybe the car just hates you and wants to kill you anyway). Or maybe Satan is a majority stock holder at Apple.

I'll figure it out, but just in case I saw a used cassette player on craigslist. Now where am I gonna find 4000 blank cassettes?

The OCD Club

I certainly can't deny that greasers have a little bit of OCD. We are indeed devoted to a lifestyle. Some people may even think that.. wait for it.. we are weird.  If liking cool rat rods and listening to rockin' music is weird, then so be it. If putting huge dollops of greasy shit in our hair is weird, let the weirdness continue. If all the gals we know like to get all dolled up in vintage clothes, I can see why the average office drone who is devoid of any culture or sense of history ,would wonder aloud where the fifties party is.

We are all pretty content with the whole Rockabilly thing and I can understand that the average square will just never get it, and I can live with that. I know for a fact that the twanginess in Rockabilly is mistaken for Country by a lot classic rock lovin' rednecks and that it definitely offends them for some reason. I find that amusing, and I won't even try to explain it. The whole greaser thing eludes most people making it all seem somewhat enigmatic. I completely understand that. There are goups of people out there however, who I completely don't understand. They are the OCD clubs . They are slavishly devoted to whatever their indulgence may be and dogmatically espouse the virtues of that sub-culture ( nothin' like rockabillies, right?)


The Chess Club.

There is such a place. Why I know a dude who hangs out there is a long, convoluted story. It is a cafe that has a bunch of tables with chess boards and all the chess dudes spend a lot of time there. They mill around incessantly, unabashedly displaying their obsession like meth addicts waiting for their next fix. They bet money on the outcome of games and the better players play speed chess, further adding to the chaos.

They obviously drink a lot of coffee, further still fueling the tension in an already tense atmosphere. This means that a) they don't drink and b) they definitely don't have girlfriends. I suppose one needs a modicum of intelligence to play chess, but I don't see the allure. I know how to play chess, and I freakin' suck at it. Not to mention the fact that it bores the ass clean offa me. Like blackjack (which I also suck at) the subtlety eludes me. It's not that I'm dumb, it's just that my brain doesn't want to indulge in hours of endless tedium trying to figure this shit out. Buying lotto tickets is way easier than playing blackjack and watching paint dry is way more fun than watching a bunch of nerds playing chess.

Yes, there are even bigger nerds who actually view chess as a spectator sport and get all excited as the various moves are executed. They ooh and aah and mutter such inanities as " oh, he is using the dweebokov gambit". They should trying playing chess where each chess piece is a shot glass of whisky. That would make things interesting and surely nerd slapfights would break out. Now that would be a spectator sport.


Live Long And Prosper.

Oh those Trekkies, or Trekkers as they prefer to be called. Several documentaries have been made on this subject and in the end, it is just downright sad.  I do know the difference between Captain Kirk and Captain Picard. Sometimes I wish that I indeed was a Klingon, so that I could beat the crap out of people without any fear of reprisal. I wish that transporters did exist so that I could beam annoying hippies out to the middle of the ocean or 10, 000 feet straight up into the sky, but hey, I sometimes wish that the Coyote would catch that smart-ass roadrunner as well.

This all harmless fantasy until it is taken too far. If you convert your car into a shuttle craft and roll around the 'hood in your pajamas looking for Romulans you may be in need of some therapy. If you learn the fictional language of Klingon with your half-wit friends, you have too much time on your hands. If you and your dweeb army order Big Macs at McD's in Klingon then you deserve a Vulcan nerve pinch... I mean a good punch in your Klingon forehead.

This vanguard of the boozeless take things to extremes that few other groups can eclipse. Often they know little of actual science or physics. One time, I somehow got embroiled into a pointless discussion with an idiot in a bar about science. Maybe I also was an idiot that night for getting roped into this discussion in the first place. This genius was convinced that faster-than-light travel was real because it happened on Star Trek. I made futile attempts to explain that it is a goddamned TV show, but I somehow wasn't getting through. I guess these type of people believe that Great Danes can solve mysteries, Coyotes have easy access to tons of explosives, there was nothing going on with Batman and a 17 year old side kick wearing underwear or that Fred Flinstone could move a 65 ton car made out of rock with his feet. These are the exact same people who are convinced that the Moon landings were a hoax.




Vegan Bongo Madness.

While it's true that many of my posts include various tirades on the annoying and predictable habits of hippies, a list on OCD behavior would not be complete without it. As I have stated many times in the past, hippies fondly see themselves as staunch individualists and nothing could be further from the truth. Their interest and demeanor are so cliche and obvious that is laughable ( if their dogamtic proselytising wasn't so infuriating).
Their fascination with obscure African percussion instruments is not difficult to understand; very little talent is required to aimlessy bang away on one of the things and the annoyance factor is a plus. Being passive-aggressive, hippies love to annoy regular folk. And drum cicles are pretty fucking annoying.

Protests are equally annoying and I suspect that hippies participate in demonstrations and protest simply to annoy people who aren't in them. Also, lacking any direction or focused interest in anything concrete, it is simply a way of finding an identity for themselves( and 100,000 of their unwashed brethren).

Their shrill denouncement of meat, bacon, leather, cars (re; crititcal mass), smoking on patios and any thing else fun seems to give them a sense of smug self-importance and moral superiority. Yet they see nothing wrong with smoking tons of pot in parks, mooching smokes and driving vintage VW buses. The latter really kills me seeing as those contraptions pollute more than 60 two-stroke weed whackers and is so blatantly cliche that I wanna cut their dreadlocks with a two-stroke Husqvarna chainsaw.

Yeah a lot of people smoke pot, but hippies take it to a whole other level. They will never admit that they simply want to get fucked-up ( like us boozers). They have to spew half-baked philosophical concepts about expanding their mind and creativity as well the importance of 420 day. In reality it just increases their already astounding level of laziness and incoherence. It also gives them the munchies, so now you know what happens to all that tofu at the supermarket.

Hipsters on the other hand, are nothing more than hippies with pork pie hats and mustaches. I have written much on hipsters, so I won't go into an in-depth rant. Suffice it to say that they are shallow, directionless scensters who refuse to admit they are part of any scene. They have ruined a lot things for a lot of people: mustaches, vintage eyeglasses, tattoos, bicycles and hell, even irony itself. I am still incapable understanding their obsession with fixed-gear bikes however. I tried riding one once and, other than only being able to pedal the thing backwards, almost freakin' killed myself. Maybe their numbers will eventually dwindle through attrition due to fixie bike collisions with other fixie bikes because of the complete lack of brakes, fatal ironic mustache entanglements, walking into traffic as a result of wearing thick glasses while sporting 20/20 vision, coffee overdoses, brain injuries from listening to one too many shitty bands, aneurysms from overly vigorous poetry slams or espresso machine explosions.

That covers only a few of the strange OCD people out there. Now you'll have to excuse me while I go shopping for some hair grease and have hour long discussions with my greasy buddies about grease. I  might swing by the store to get some PBR and Lucky Strikes. Before I go, I have to check my hair in the mirror, measure the cuffs on my jeans to make sure they're exactly 4 inches, synch some more rockabilly onto my iPod while looking at pictures of rat rods, curse the fact that my wallet chain ain't big enough and practice saying "daddy-o". No OCD behavior here.

Mortal Enemies

Some people claim to not have any enemies. This may be true, but eventually they will run in to someone that will irritate them beyond anything in their past experience and they have a new-found enemy. It's not anything to be overly concerned about; this is the very nature of the Universe. There are some forces that are diametrically opposed and the laws of physics make these forces unchangeable and immutable.

So, if someone irks you to the point of you having a very tangible desire to punch them in the head, there is no need to feel guilty. These are simply the laws of physics at work. Retard molecules and regular people molecules just mix, they collide and produce negative, and sometimes very volatile, interactions.

Then there are the every day simple things that simply cannot co-exist in the same universe. Others are mortal enemies such as cats and dogs. Others still can be avoided with a few simple precautions and some can be amusing.


1. Liquids and Electronics.

This is physics 101, something that we all intuitively knew even in early childhood (no doubt learned from sticking ones finger in an electrical socket). In the days of big badass stereos we all subconsciously knew not to put a beer on a big amplifier, the resulting explosion and shower of sparks could have been life-threatening.

Modern electronics are more insidious. Our daily lives are filled with small electronic devices. At any given time one will have an iPod or Iphone charging on the desk next to a computer keyboard. These devices do not like liquids. I know this from personal experience. That last microscopic amount of beer left in the bottom of can is barely visible, let alone drinkable. Those few molecules of beer are more than enough to instantaneously destroy a keyboard.  I should know because most of the keyboards in the big pile at the recycling were once mine. These devices don't fry, they unceremoniously stop working without any advance notice.  I am quite certain that a few hours after the first cel phone was invented the event portrayed in the followed picture inevitably occurred.

      

2. Cops and Bicycle Riders Without Helmets.

Depending what city you live in, bicycle helmet laws vary. In this city they are mandatory. Cops just love chasing cyclists down for committing the heinous crime of not wearing a helmet. I myself received four such tickets last year alone. There is something both surreal and inane about the site of a motorcycle cop in full riding regalia writing up a ticket to some poor unsuspecting dude, with the red and blue lights on his Harley flashing all the while. No, nothing ridiculous here. The tickets are $29.00 which is not high enough to ruin your day, but just enough to piss you off. ( the smarmy comments about my greasy pomp acting like a helmet don't help either).

The last ticket of the year was given to me in front a park that is notorious for harboring a large amount of drug dealers. Those guys are missing teeth, are malnourished and the circles they hang around in are far more hazardous to their healths than trundling a bike at 10 miles an hour without a helmet. I guess it's much easier to shoot fish in a barrel with a shotgun than catch them with a fishing rod. Also those cops would have to wade through the clouds of pot smoke produced by all the hippies sitting in that park and actually have to talk to these drug dealers, and hey, that could get unpleasant.

I still drive around my buddies El Camino once in a while and I drive it like a fucking insane person. I find that heavily excessive horsepower irresistible. Never been pulled over by a cop.  I like to drink beer in parks which could result in a steeply priced ticket, never been harassed by cops. I yell obscenities at bad drivers and cops seem to think it's funny.  Must be the sight of a greaser on a bike that sets 'em off.

Where's yer helmet, you sum bitch?

3. Me and Cats.

When the weather is nice, I like to sit in the back yard and have a few beers. This is when I observe an endless parade of neighborhood cats strolling by. They all give me that smug expression that pretty well says, "fuck you, buddy". They randomly kill birds, root through my trash and pee on everything. That smug expression may also mean " yeah , I peed on your stuff, whaddya gonna do about it?"

This is when I like to chuck empty beer cans at them. You see, cats are pretty stupid and the never see that coming. Ever. Those fuckers jump three feet straight up and take off like a bat out of hell. I say they are stupid, because  they come back the following evening and fall for it yet again. I laugh so hard that beer comes out my nose.  Endless hours of cheap entertainment.

If you tried that with a dog he might ignore you, wag his tail and come over or charge at you  and chomp right into your bag. And he'll never fall for it twice.                             



4. Hippies and Greasers ( and pretty much everyone else)

It's not that greasers think that they are better than anyone. A lot of time and effort goes into looking good and and a lot of money is spent on good haircuts. It is therefor perplexing why anyone would go out of their way to be filthy and disheveled. Hippies spend as much time looking for ridiculous and outlandish clothing as the average executive does for suits or greasers for the elusive ultimate can of hair grease. Surely maintaining dreadlocks is more work than maintaining the average car, so why bother.

I don't have a concrete answer, but I think that hippies fondly see themselves as rebels. In most cases these are the products of middle class homes and are mundane and uninteresting individuals. This might explain why they all seem to be into the same things such as waving their hands around crystals, playing bongos, saying ohmmm a lot, displaying large posters of Che Guevara ( who was a fucking commie) , being self-righteous, driving VW buses ( as well as indulging in other time-worn cliches) and just being all-around fucking annoying. Then there's all that pot. Tons and tons of pot with all the prerequisite pontificating that goes along with it.

I feel sorry for all the mangy, bedraggled dogs that they haul around with them. Dogs have a heightened sense of smell and their lives must be miserable having to smell dreadlock grunge, body odor and patchouli all day. As for those poor critters, you can be sure that every dog-owning hippie has blown pot smoke up his dog's nose at least once.



5. Booze and keys, wallets, bikes. logic etc.

Who among us doesn't enjoy a nice cold beer? Who among us can deny having over-indulged and having stupid shit happen? It does happen, people have varying levels of tolerance for the stuff and reactions may vary. Collectively, liquored-up greasers have lost enough keys to build a battleship. This is still a mystery to me, as my keys are always safely secured to a key chain attached to my belt and my wallet chain. I guess the little spring loaded clip becomes too technically challenging to operate while under the influence. Another battleship could be built with the nubs of keys that were broken off in locks. The joys of waiting for a locksmith to show up at three am are unparalleled ( the extra beers in fridge take the edge off, though).

All the wallets that were lost would probably make up 100 whole cows or feed the entire village in China where they make the wallets for a year. It's always fun to go to the DMV 4 or 5 times a year to replace your driver's license. Adding to the excitement is the hairy eyeball the already surly bureaucrats will give you as they mutter " dumbass" under their breath.

Booze seems to mess with gravity and centrifugal force because riding a bike can be challenging after a few brewskies. Did I say challenging? That's not what the staff at St. Joseph's hospital call it.  I did, however, manage to countermand the booze/gravity equation by riding cruisers and designing and ultra-low laid back seat post; a booze-bike! On an average mountain bike however, your weight is directly above the front axle. Booze must affect the bearings or something because the front wheel gets really twitchy. Even walking seems hazardous on certain booze-soaked evenings.

There's no accounting for alcohol-tinged logic. Maybe it's the lowering of inhibitions or maybe that's the sound of brain cells frying. In any case, strange decisions are made while boozing with varying levels of regret the next day. Some may choose to call their ex in the middle of the night ( always a bad idea) others may decide that some very large dude is staring at them and deserves a punch in the face right this very second (an even worse idea).  Others still decide that they want to eat a large pizza with everything on it ( this never ends well).

Greasers have a tendency to play invisible air-upright bass which can be very confusing for people who don't know what an upright bass is. Sometimes they get the urge to rev their engines as fast as they will go and wonder what happened to their piston rings the next day.

It comes with the territory I suppose. Greasers all love to go out, check out some bands and chicks and sometimes inadvertently get shithouse plastered. Pardon the pun, but shit happens. As long as everyone has all their fingers and toes the next day and 50 bucks poorer because of a cab ride, life is good.

As for myself, I have to go, because I have just confronted my mortal enemy, my arch-nemesis if you will: the empty beer fridge. Pure Evil.

Lawyers and Dumbasses

It seems that every product that one purchases these days has an explicit warning label. I am thoroughly convinced that these labels exist for a very simple reason: at least one dumbass somewhere has done what the label warns about. In our increasingly litigious society dumbasses want unsuspecting companies to pay them for their stupidity. Lawyers are all too eager to take on these frivolous causes. Even Shakespeare had a problem with lawyers, but I doubt that in medieval England people were suing tailors after ripping their pantaloons in some drunken brawl. They just rolled with it and bought new pantaloons, or maybe traded a couple of chickens for them.

I am left to conclude that there seems to be a higher per capita number of dumbasses in modern society. It is true that there were always dumbasses, but back in the day we rolled in a whole different way. If anyone is old enough to remember those big wheels pictured above, chances are you've done something similar. I used to do shit like this with a 90cc mini bike way before I had a driver's license. Funny part is that I never hurt myself and if I ever did hurt myself, say from trying the world's longest wheelie, my mom would patch me up and my dad would make fun of me. The very next day, me and my friends would be out doing some more daredevil stuff. Nobody ever lost an eye and it would never occur to us to wear bicycle helmets. I actually once tried riding my bike while wearing a football helmet. Everyone laughed at me and the tooth guard made me look like I took the short bus to go to school, That was the first time and only time that I wore a helmet when I was a kid.

This was also an era where your folks would light up some smokes in the car on a Sunday drive and tell you to keep the windows closed because they didn't want a " draft". This is also when you would learn how to drive. The old man would find some country road, stop the car and say " alright boy, drive!" He would tell you "never you mind about that there seat belt." Once you got comfortable he would tell you to stomp it just to see how fast that old Ford Galaxie would go. I'm still alive ain't I?

Greasy culture has retained this outdated ethos. Hot rodders have absolutely no qualms about going 100 mph in a chopped model A with no fenders and no wipers. If we happen to hit our hand with a hammer in a shop, there are only two possible outcomes: a long volley of cursing and/or the sound of another beer being opened. If we happen to lean on some red hot metal that was just welded, we are secure in the knowledge that it will cauterize immediately and probably won't hurt. If it does hurt, we are not worried: there are many beers in the beer fridge. One glaring exception is the warning on the tubs of green Dax that states " Keep hair away from open flame." I know this shit is greasy, but in all honesty; who knew?

We do not have to sign waivers to drive fork lifts because we already know how to do it, and if we don't, we'll learn it quickly without anyone losing any limbs. We do not have to attend any safety meetings before we grind a few burrs off of some metal pieces with an angle grinder. We are also reasonably sure that motorcycles are not possessed by the devil. It all boils down to using common sense, not being a chicken-shit and not succumbing to media induced paranoia (on a side note, the media seems to enjoy portraying dudes as inept retards who would blow themselves given the chance).

Being stuck in the past does seem to have its advantages. We learned the basics that were taught us by the previous generation.  Don't look directly at an arc welding flash, don't breath paint fumes, don't stick hands into moving parts and don't taunt anyone who is way bigger/ drunker than you. If we slip on a wet floor at Walmart, we are more concerned about the embarrassment of looking foolish and possibly messin' up our hair rather than thinking of contacting a lawyer.

One exception to all this seems to be rednecks. Many rednecks are endowed with excellent mechanical skills, yet use them to engage in foolish endeavors. Virtually all redneck mishaps involve some sort of motorized conveyance and is always preceded by  " Hey, ya'll watch this!" It rarely ends well, but at least the rednecks don't whine about it. Like greasers they will just get more beer.

Which leaves us with the rest of society. There are many valid reasons why employers and large corporations are fearful. If you refer to the picture below, you can rest assured that Apple had a whole team of lawyers scrambling to come up with warning labels, because, yes, one idiot somewhere actually did eat an iPod shuffle. Chances are he tried to sue Apple because of it and cover the cost of gallons of Pepto-Bismol, Ex-Lax and many rolls of toilet paper. He probably tied to get compensated for the music he lost which is ironic, because it was likely all illegally downloaded.

Many companies won't let you within 50 feet of a forklift without certification, hours of safety training and 60 pages of documents to sign. The reason is obvious, more than one dumbass has driven these things right off a loading dock. They're not very fast but they do weigh ten thousand pounds. This why lawyers lose sleep. If there was a fork lift race and two of them went off the loading dock, rest assured that there were rednecks involved.

This is probably the same reason why big trucks have those beeping alarms when in reverse. To many dumbasses that were too stunned to see a truck the size of a house approaching them at 2 miles an hour.

Technology is just helping to compound the problem. You would be hard pressed to find scissors that don't have blunt edges, yet the complexity of iPhones is slowly turning us into a nation of techno-zombies. I am sure you are all familiar with the texting zombies walking down the sidewalk, head tilted down intently staring at their iPhone while furiously texting. They will usually saunter into the path of oncoming vehicles. Sometimes the drivers of those vehicles are also texting ( which I still find absolutely mind-boggling). I think that you can conjure up an image of what ensues next. As the Darwin Awards' header states: " Those who are helping to improve the gene pool by removing themselves from it."

I am no expert, but it seems to me that this all might stem from the educational system that is in place these days, which is a productof all those goddam left-wing politically correct freakos. Young 'uns are not taught to take responsibility for their own foolishness and are never admonished for being a dumb ass. This leads to lack of common sense and self-entitlement.

This is not to say that I and my peers, did not act like complete fucking retards when we were in school. There were repercussions and we knew it. I will try to avoid dating myself, but these were the days when principals roamed the hallways with a big leather strap in their pocket. If you messed up, it was gonna hurt ( only for a short time). Boys will boys however, and our biggest fear was not the roving six foot five principal, it was the daunting prospect of making a fool of yourself in front of all the girls. ( these were different times, and this particular principal retired and went on to become a children's author. A gentle soul who was caught up in the educational system).

It wasn't all discipline and foolishness. The teachers would give us glue and let us run with scissors. In wood shop, you could run power tools to your heart's content and nobody had goggles. You could smoke cigarettes in a designated area and the teachers would hang out with you and give you a smoke if you ran out. That same teacher was your neighbor and would give a ride home in his unreliable car. If not you would take public transportation on your own ( a situation just begging for a bunch of teenagers to act like complete fucking barbarians).

When we got older, a new invention came around that completely blew our minds: The cassette Walkman. Those fuckers were big and they were loud. They came with big-ass headphones and absolutely no warning labels and we, of course, cranked them to ten. People down the block could hear the high frequencies emanating from these not-so-portable ghetto blasters. This would probably explain why I still like really loud music AND WHY I SOMETIMES TALK LIKE THIS.


 I still have all my fingers, toes eyeballs and one scar from an unfortunate encounter with an x-acto knife. Life is good and I don't plan on eating any iPods, climbing inside a dryer at the laundromat, sticking a curling iron into any orifices, taking a bath with a toaster, taunting lions at the zoo, or changing a fan belt while the engine is still running. This is my day off so I will go the liquor store that has wet floors, grind some metal at the shop and climb an actual ladder to get some stuff. Later I will go for a bike ride in the rain while drinking beers and not wearing a helmet. I have a little amplifier that makes my iPod twice as loud and I will crank some tunes. Best to avoid cops though, because it looks like I'm simultaneously breaking three laws. Stay safe, friends, keep an eye out for dumbasses.

You Might Be a Hippie If....

The reality of living in a large urban centre is that encounters with various unsavory types is inevitable. The most unsavory of them all are hippies and there is no shortage of them and they come in all shapes, sizes and age groups. Some might argue that our cities are overrun by ever proliferating gangs of roving hipsters. I can say with no small amount of uncertainty that hipsters annoy the fuck out of me as much as hippies, but hippies are far more insidious.

Hipsters do have certain useful purpose in modern society. That triple-latte mocha ain't gonna serve itself down at the trendy coffee shop. An army of aspiring tattoo-artists are able to perfect their technique by practicing their art on all those ratty tattoos that hipsters seem to have a penchant for. They contribute to to the economic health of the bicycle industry. If not for hipsters, there would be millions of fixed-gear bicycle gathering dust in a warehouse somewhere on the outskirts of Portland. They also help to save the environment because those real skinny jeans only take up have the material of regular jeans. The skinny jeans also squeeze their bags so hard that they'll never be able to procreate, thereby helping over-population. That said, it doesn't seem that hipsters are going away anytime soon, That's fine by me, I mean, it is so gratifying to make fun of them and feel smug. Hippies on the other hand, not so much fun. Their shrill, humorless and self-righteous demeanor is hard to avoid and confrontations are inevitable.

It is perplexing to comprehend the reasons why someone would consciously choose to become a hippie. Sigmund Freud might have had a field day trying to analyze this. I won't indulge in psycho-babble, but suffice it to say that they are indeed among us. The one thing we all have to ponder is; you might be a hippie if.....

You might be a hippie if.....

I'm, like, an artist, man!

you think that riding around a VW bus is a good idea. Youngish hippies, in a possible attempt to emulate the smelly generation that preceded them, have a propensity for riding around in one of these shitboxes. The absolute cliche seems to completely elude them. No VW bus would be complete without bad art. Hippies love bad art, mainly because they are incapable of producing anything else. They ride to and fro to various demonstrations whose sole purpose is to annoy people that aren't demonstrating. They will pile more hippies into that scheisse-wagen than the average clown car. What is really amusing is the ultimate irony of owning this vehicle. The under-powered air-cooled engine in these things lack any type of emissions control. No catalytic converter, no nothing. A trip to the local organic market spews more toxic fumes than 200 two-stroke chainsaws. I guess they are too dumb to realize that as they drove this monstrosity to a go-green-enviro-whale-baby-seal-meat-is-murder rally, they most likely killed three trees on the way there. Matter of fact is they probably stole the gas because they gave all their cash to the local pot dealer.



You might be a hippie if......

you think that riding a tall bike is a good idea. I seem to remember some book learning that I did in high school about a dude called Archimedes and some basic mathematical principles. They higher up you go the more you're gonna bust your dumb dreadlock-clad fucking stupid head wide open. This requires very little engineering know-how. Years ago some pot-addled hippies had a flash and came up with the half-baked (as it were) idea of stacking two bikes one atop another. The still haven't followed through the most basic design flaw:how to stop this ridiculous contraption. Lacking any type of good taste or modicum of coolness, it never occurred to the hippies that welding two bikes end to end and making it nice and low would make more sense. Bad taste knows no bounds and hippies can't weld anyway.


You might be a hippie if......

you look forward to 4-20 day. For those of you who are not familiar 420 is the hippie-code word for hippie-crack, in other words, marijuana. So, with that reasoning, every April 20 th, thousands of them gather in a public space to wreak havoc and smoke enormous joints while taunting cops that are trying to keep public peace. The cops are really there to keep those dumb stoners from walking directly into the path of oncoming buses. 4-20 day often falls on a weekday which makes one wonder if any of these cretins are employed. Maybe they just got the day off from their jobs at the local raw food emporium where they work as seed squashers. I guess they need a minimum wage job to buy more pot and magazines instructing them how to grow even more pot. Strangely enough, beer drinkers are never compelled to engage in public demonstrations and indulge in anarchist (and vaguely commie) behaviour. I guess we're too busy having a good time in a bar, digging a cool band or maybe actually welding something useful.


You might be a hippie if.......

You like living on some forsaken, remote island without even the most basic of amenities. There are many islands in this part of the world and many are inhabited. The one circled in red takes hippie weirdness to whole new level. The island has no roads, no electricity, no sewage system, no nothing. There is, however, no shortage of freaks, self-proclaimed eccentrics, talentless artists and an inordinate amount of philosophers. From some inexplicable reason they have a website. This website seems to celebrate the weirdo lifestyle and seems to focus on scatological aspects. There is a whole section ( I kid you not) about exactly how to go about taking a poop on that island. Judging from the third-world sanitary arrangements, one can safely deduce that nobody over there is using toilet paper. (you're most definitely a hippie if you eschew toilet paper). How these people came to live on this island is a mystery to me, but I am convinced that I would never want to go there. It would be like a hippie nuclear blast.

You might be a hippie if......

You like oddball percussion instruments. I have gone off many times in the past about drum circles and how annoying and disruptive they can be. I will leave it that. Still, strange bongos and hippies go together like flies and dog shit. Not that the hippies have any rhythm to begin with, but they try to avoid 4/4 time at all costs, thus adding to cacophony even more. When I hear drum circles, I get the urge to smack them on the head with a sitar; now that would be an interesting sound.



You might be a hippie if....

you are obsessed with medieval shit. You can often find this particular strain of hippie near drum circles where they engage in mock battles with rubber swords. They shout random things such as "stand and deliver!" with a fake British accent. You can't have a medieval wing-ding without having at least half the participants wearing jester hats. Oh how hippies love jester hats. Brings a whole new meaning to the expression "what a clown". Stupid clown spilled mead on me and came nigh to ruining me pantaloons. I will thrash this buffoon and take all his doubloons.



you might be a hippie if......

you are a dude and walk around wearing a sarong.

you are a dude and you have your unwashed hair piled in a bun on top of your head.

you think that patchouli smells good.

you are dirtier than your dog ( and have at least 3 of these unwashed mongrels).

you love vegan restaurants where all the furniture is (intentionally) mismatched, the waitstaff are way more stoned than you are and the food looks like something that was shovelled out of somebody's backyard.

you love shitty bicycles. You are also unable to master the use of a spray can and will paint the entire thing, including the tires. Or even better, you like to wrap the bike in wool.

you think crystals have mystical powers and enjoy rubbing them. Rock. It's a Rock.

instead of saying thanks or cheers, you say "namaste" a lot while holding your hands together. You're a real fucking hippie if you take a bow when you say it.

you love to adamantly point out to smokers that they aren't allowed to smoke in some particular spot. You do this as you have a big fat joint in your mouth.

you are on craigslist and are too busy posting ads like " looking for chronic" or " in need of 420"  to notice that big section on the bottom right called "jobs".

you always have four or five hackey sacks on you.

you have peed on a dog because it's organic.

you have let a dog pee on you because it's organic.

your house smells like cat pee because it's organic.

your girlfriend smells like cat pee because she's organic.

you are terrified of words like Mennen, Ivory and Gillette ( they're evil corporations man! is usually your excuse).

you talk a lot of shit about conspiracies, and yet, can barely spell.

you have anything that's says "Free Tibet" on it. ( they would fry your sorry ass if you actually went to Tibet and started mouthing off).

you have a bumper sticker that says "Co-exist". You don't have a car so you stuck it on your bongo.

you like bluegrass, but hate country music.

your cats keep running away because you tried to feed them a vegan diet.

you always rant and rave about social change, yet neglect to change your underwear( that is, presuming that you actually are wearing underwear).

you are blissfully unaware that, yes, those rednecks over there really do want to punch you in the head.



.........and the list goes on my friends. Feel free to add to this list in the comments section. Thanks for reading.

The Bad Canadian, Part II

Here I iz in Canaduh... I mean, here I am in Canada, eh? As I had stated in part I, we do say "eh" a lot and are unabashedly proud of that fact. On a day-to-day basis, life in Canada is pretty much the same as your average day in the USA. Yes it's cold, but no more so than a January night in International Falls , MN. It is no small coincidence that 90% of the Canadian population lives within an hour of the US border. This fact has created the long-standing tradition of cross border shopping to get cheap beer and even cheaper factory outlet clothing. Life is good and everything is cool, cool that is , until you want something cool or out of the ordinary. These requests are usually met with blank stares from the red-shirted clerks at Canadian Tire.

(Side bar for my non-Canadian friends. Canadian Tire are big stores which are franchised. They used to sell tires decades ago, but now, along with overpriced tires, they mainly sell junk that is made in China and fix automobiles. They seem to hire mechanics that never graduated and charge a lot of money for the privilege of having one of these illiterate chimps work on your car. Sort of a cross between Costco, Target, Wal-Mart and Honest Zeke's Car Fixin' and Moonshine Supplies.)

I don't wish to convey the impression that I don't like it here. Socialized medicine and mighty fine beer are indeed good reasons to live here. One has to realize, however, that the place is virtually empty. 30 some odd million in a country second in size only to Russia. That's a whole boat load of some mighty empty spaces with a bunch of small towns who are situated literally in the middle of nowhere ( Google Wawa, Ontario just for the hell of it).  Should one have the inexplicable desire to there, it is relatively easy. There is a bumpy, two-lane horse trail called the Trans Canada Highway, and it conveniently goes through the middle of every single one of these small towns.Whenever the need would arise for me to drive Canada to say, Houston TX, I was always reminded that the suspension on my car wasn't busted as soon as I would hit the Interstate south of the border.

Whenever I would be rolling on the myriad of Interstates I would always stop at truck stops and marvel at their sheer size. I remember stopping at one particular truck stop in Utah. I walked in to the store that was located at the front and was amazed by the bewildering array of strange and wonderful junk food that I had never heard of. I must have looked lick a hick as I stocked up on twenty bucks of cholesterol-laden snacks and a couple of American flag bandannas. There are no truck stops in Wawa Ontario. There is one place that sells greasy chicken. As you slip and slide on the even greasier floor, the locals will eyeball you like they would a moose in the sights of a high-powered rifle.

We do however, have a few large cities in Canada. One of them is called Toronto. Or T-zero as we call it. Torontonians seem too think that they are the cultural and financial  epi-center of Canada when in actuality, Toronto is sort of like New York run by the Swiss. About as exciting as Gary, Indiana on a Sunday night. Toronto's province, which is Ontario, still has the Union Jack on its flag as do several other provinces. The grumpy lookin' dude on our money is actually the Queen of England. Canada is indeed a country with an identity crisis, and this is why it is deemed perfectly acceptable for men to walk around in public wearing kilts.

Canada's governmental structure is a Parliamentary one very similar to England's, but my American friends need not be perplexed. As archaic and convoluted as our system of government may be, our politicians are just as full of shit as their American counterparts. The only difference is that they get to hurl insults at each other in a large room while a dude sitting on a throne holding a large gold-plated stick keeps an eye on them and makes sure they don't "fuck".

One of the rules that our politicians came up with ( at great cost to the tax payers I'm sure) is the dreaded Canadian Content or Can-Con for short. This states that 30% of TV and Radio broadcasts must be Canadian. The government run CBC has some of the most boring crap ever broadcast perhaps eclipsed only by Soviet-era propaganda cartoons. The music, don't even get me started on the music. As far as my musical tastes go, there isn't much on commercial radio that is worth tuning into, but if you want to hear some really bad Country music, Can-Con can help you with that. If you want to hear some truly horrifying music, tune some radio stations in rural Quebec ( which has their own set of content laws). You ain't never been truly skeered until you've heard a Johnny Horton tune sung in French.

All this would explain the existence of Celine Dion and Nickelback. You have Can-Con ( and Quebec) to thank for that. Before I go much further, I must apologize on behalf of all the Canadian people for foisting these musical travesties upon you the world. As for the existence of the medieval and homo-erotic Cirque Du Soleil, I have no explanation for that one. Bad drugs might have been involved. Their head office is built on a quarry that was filled to the brim with garbage. Maybe they were breathing all those methane fumes.

Which brings me to the fact of being greasy and Canadian. It's just hard to get cool shit in Canada. Yes there are greasers in Canada, not many, but we're out there. Every large city has a small contingent and we are all faced with the same dilemma; where to get good hair grease. The drug stores only sell that chunky Dax in a red can. Being an American company, Wal-mart  has Murray's , which not sold anywhere else ( strangely enough Wal-Mart sells those steering wheel knobs which were banned in Canada years ago). The Ace combs sold here are not Ace combs, but some cheap-ass knock off which are the equivalent of  running 20 rusty nails on your scalp. The only way to solve this problem is to order these supplies from the USA. I get all my greasy stuff from New Jersey, but sometimes take a trip to Everett WA. There is a large store that has a Mexican specialty section and it is almost a religious experience for me as I see row upon row of Tres Flores next to Guadalupe candles.

If you happen to be a Canadian hot rodder, for the most part, you will be shit out of luck. There are a few speed shops in my neck of the woods, but Canadians still haven't gotten over muscle cars. If you want big fat cheater slicks, chrome accessories for a '74 Plymouth Duster, fur for your dashboard, an 8 track player, or a plastic name plate that actually says "muscle car" , yep, they have that in stock. Should you ask for parts for '48 Flathead you will be met with blank stares or maybe the dudes behind the counter think you are referring to your haircut. It is interesting to note that the aforementioned Canadian Tire still sells those bolt conical blue lights and those dumb gas pedals shaped like a foot.

I think that a little road trip is my near future. I'm running low on Tres Flores, I need some new American flag bandannas, I have a strange craving for cheese-flavored snacks that glow in the dark and I could sure use a real American Pabst. I'll be stopping by an authentic taco truck on the way down and I will try to figure out who the presidents are on that money that is all the same color. I might blare some country music on the radio secure in the knowledge that I won't get any dirty looks. I might stop by a bar where they have padding for your elbows on the bar and I actually get to mosey up to it. I just have to remember to not say" Gimme a beer, eh?"

Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here

That was the inscription that was allegedly found over the gates of hell in Dante's Inferno. I am not intent on entering any type of ecclesiastical debate, but suffice it to say that everyone has their own definition of hell. I think that most of us, at one time or another had to endure a crappy job, a despotic boss, extreme weather or some piece of shit car breaking down by the side of some stretch of desolate road, all hellish experiences to be sure. Some people might subscribe to the Cartesian view that "hell is other people" and a ride on a bus through Cracktown can certainly prove that theory. However, other than circumstances that are mostly out of our control, hellish situations can be avoided and life is great. I try to avoid those and am getting more gregarious as time goes buy. I hang out with greasy people, go to greasy shows and spend time drinking beer in dirty, greasy shops. Life is greasy and hellish encounters are averted. Here is a short guide on some small corners of Hell to avoid and a good way to avoid aggravation, high blood pressure or multiple assault charges.

1. The 'Burbs.

I have ranted about this in the past, but am again reminded what a special kind of hell suburbs can be. The treeless landscape filled with row upon row of soulless, identical houses devoid of any architectural merit is depressing enough in its own right. Suburban dwellers fail to see the innate strangeness of driving two miles to some of the strip malls that intersperse these qausi-towns just to get a pack of Marlboro's. That is part of the main problem right there with suburbs. These are not real towns, but shamelessly manufactured ones. The slavish adherence to post-modern architecture and the cheap materials and design lacking any imagination make the 'burbs that much more depressing. Depressing to me that is, because suburban dwellers are blissfully unaware of this.

One might argue that buying a house in the suburbs maybe cheaper than buying in the city. This might be true, but I suspect that this is rarely what motivates people to buy houses there. It is a square mindset that somehow makes it seem desirable, or actually preferable to living in the city. The absolute lack of cultural stimulation doesn't bother them, quite the contrary, they actively avoid it. They sniff aristocratically at at the urban denizens and condescendingly call them " City People". While they are debating the finer points of reality shows, waiting in line at bland family restaurants, eyeballing the latest Lexus at the showroom and going to Costco like it was a spiritual experience, I will be busy. I will be busy rockin' my life away to great bands, drinking fine beers, meeting cool people and look at buildings that are more than three stories.

It's not that I am a snobbish urban dweller. I have lived in the country on a farm. I went to a lot of barnyard parties and you ain't lived right until you've had drunken tractor races, teased 2000 pound bulls, scared some chickens and eaten fresh corn on the cob while sitting on a bail of hay. Everybody is hammered, you can make a bonfire as big as humanely possible, hoot and holler like barbarians and there ain't a cop around for miles. Lots to be said about country living. Sadly, it is the 'burbs that are encroaching on arable farm land and these days one has to travel pretty far to have a proper wing-ding.


2. The Dentist.

Unavoidable as this may be, everyone eventually ends up at the dentist's office. There are three simple tenets that apply to a visit to this house of horrors: Yes, it's going to fucking hurt, it will be outrageously expensive and you will have to wait three hours to have the privilege of having the surgical equivalent of a multitude of punches in the mouth. Before any of this begins, large pieces of cardboard will be jammed in your mouth so the sadist, I mean dentist, can take x-rays ( which  bombard your brain with lethal doses of radiation). Before any of the medieval procedures begin however, you will be sent to some virago of a dental assistant for a cleaning. An integral part of the cleaning process is the assistant berating you for not coming often enough and yelling at you because your gums are bleeding ( if she stopped jamming pointy metal instruments on your gums, maybe they wouldn't bleed). You are sent back to the dentist to have your mouth frozen. This pointless ritual doesn't alleviate any pain, it is only designed to make look like a fool for the rest of the day as you mutter and dribble water from the sides of your mouth when you try to have a drink. The dentist will produce a series of terrifying and shiny instruments and proceed to do more contortions than the rubber-man at the freak show. After two hours of enduring excruciating pain, having bright lights shining in your eyes and watching bad shows on a TV stupidly embedded in the ceiling, you will be sent on your way. The parting advice is always the same " Take a couple of T-3's. My reaction is always the same, " Fuck it, I'm going straight to a bar for some liquid T-3's". This is the time when I usually toy with the idea of going straight-up hillbilly and not having any teeth.


3. Uh-Oh

There are four words in the English language that will strike fear into the hearts of even the bravest of men, cause even the stoutest tough guy to quake in fear, cause doubt in even the meanest of bikers and maybe even make some men cry like beaten dogs. These words are " Bend over and cough"

Comes a time in every man's life when a the inevitable visit to the proctologist becomes a reality. The dreaded prostate exam becomes that unavoidable situation where a rock meets an immovable object. Without going into the gory details, most men put this off as long as they can and would gladly gargle with gravel rather than go through that frightening procedure. Women might berate me and call me a chicken-shit as they regale me with tales of child birth that make a prostate exam look like a Sunday morning nose-pick. Men don't care; they will readily admit to being a chicken shit, they just don't want to do it. This is probably a graphic example of why it's a good idea to live a clean life and avoid prison. There seems to be an inordinate amount of proctologists in jail, and they keep dropping their soap in the shower for some reason.

4. Tastes Like Chicken.

I generally don't like restaurants. I don't like being in close proximity to strangers who will eavesdrop on my conversation. I don't like waiting around when I'm so hungry that I could punch a cat. I don't like the insincere servers with their Aryan efficiency. I don't like being asked if everything is OK while I have a mouthful of mashed potatoes.There is also the distinct possibility of servers putting boogers (or worse ) in your food should they perceive even the most innocuous of slights. The part that I dislike the most is that the food was prepared by strangers in a greasy kitchen. I have been inside my fair share of restaurant kitchens years ago when I would run wiring for sound systems. Even the high end ones were greasy, and not in a good way. I would slip and slide all over the place as I stood on all manners of greasy surfaces running wires into even greasier ceilings.

I hate to admit it, but one of my guilty pleasures is watching Gordon Ramsay on TV. I like him because he curses like a sailor and yells at idiots all day. Who wouldn't love a job where you get to berate morons all day and they gotta take it? British cursing aside, what astounds me is how clueless some restaurant owners are and how absolutely disgusting their kitchens can be. Some might call me naive and claim that all this stuff is staged and makes for good TV, but there must be a basis for truth somewhere in that show. All one has to do is look at the local paper and check out how many restaurants are cited for health infractions on a daily basis.

The bottom line is that many kitchens resemble the average frat boy's apartment. Unwashed dishes that are growing mold so big that it has developed a consciousness, new forms of life mutating in the refrigerator, cockroach parties, rats setting up their own corporations under the sink, piles of compost under the table and thousands of empty booze bottles. I'll just stick to Costco hot dogs. I know they are made from lips and assholes, but at least everyone there is wearing a hair net.


5. Cyclotrons.

There is a large University here called UBC and for some reason they have a really big cyclotron. It is housed in a huge subterranean facility and must be the size of two football fields. There main function is to take sub-atomic particles and smash them into each other thereby creating other , mainly unstable, sub-atomic particles. There are massive cement blocks piled up everywhere to prevent the dangerous particles from escaping, but I found that hardly reassuring.  These particles are flying around ad libitum at nearly the speed of light and I am sure that they were entering my brain. I could have sworn that I felt a strange tingling sensation inside my head as these mutated radioactive particles vaporized my brain cells. It was more than a coincidence that everyone who worked there was extremely weird. Their weirdness did not stem from working with complex mathematical formulas, playing dungeons and dragons for days on end or participating in medieval mock-sword fights. It's all those flying protons I tell ya. I haven't felt right since I left that place. That might explain why I like twangy 50 year old music, put tons of greasy shit in my hair, have the uncontrollable urge to stomp on gas pedals when I drive cars and get real angry when I see(or smell) hippies. Damn protons !

How Do Ya Like Dem Apples?

 
MIRANDA

    O, wonder!
    How many goodly creatures are there here!
    How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
    That has such people in't! 

William Shakespeare
The Tempest


 I won't even come close to having any pretenses about knowing what the hell Shakespeare is talking about, but I do know irony when I see it. Brave New World indeed. These days I find myself stuck in the Brave New World that Steve Jobs has created. While it is true that greasers and greaser culture revel in all things old, most of us are not Luddites and have embraced ( some more reluctantly than others) modern technology.

We are all aware that vintage guitars sound way better, that tube amps are cool and that vintage cars and motorcycles are true classics of design. Like many other people, however, we are using computers at work and drive a Honda Civic to get there. Speaking for myself, I find it amusing to resolve the dichotomy that arose at my place of employment. I work with one hundred year old obsolete technology, yet am still trying to master the skills required to use Excel to document these archaic pieces of technology. While I am attempting to understand the i-Universe around me, the PC at work never lets me forget that Bill Gates has created his own Brave New World.

I recently found an i-Phone buried in the sand at a local beach. I truly hate the beach. Being roasted alive in the hot sun and going home with five pounds of sand in each shoe is not my idea of an enjoyable day. It therefore makes even more improbable that I would find such a device on the beach. But, hey, everyone likes free shit. There was a little bit of juice left in it, and after several beers, I finally manged to figure out how to turn on this needlessly complicated gizmo. I started randomly poking on the screen after fishing my glasses out of my bag to see the ridiculously tiny icons. As I continued messing around with this device, images began to squish and disappear and various unintelligible pieces of techno-babble popped up on the screen. I had no idea what I was hitting and started imagining me causing distant explosions, satellites falling from the sky or maybe even Captain Kirk appearing on the screen. As the remaining power began to fade I came to the conclusion that I didn't have three months to waste trying to learn how use this contraption nor did I have any use for the "apps" that were in it. I just left it on the beach and cracked another beer. I later found out that iPhones have an Orwellian overtone. They have GPS in them and maybe Capt. Kirk was charging his phasers and was preparing to zap my ass into oblivion. I find it slightly disconcerting that total strangers would have the possibility of knowing my whereabouts without me even being aware of it. Just when I was getting used to texting.

Ironically, I am writing this on an aging Mac. I take no small amount of heat for being one those Mac weirdos, almost as if I was being intentionally anti-social. The answer is much simpler; they are easy to use.I don't give a damn what's inside a computer, I just want it to work. That, however, is short lived. Computers get obsolete quicker than teen boy-bands and it's gonna cost you big time to replace it with a new Mac. There is no reason for electronics to become useless in such a short span of time, my twenty year old stereo amplifier is still working just fine. It's just that computers grow demented very quickly. They start forgetting stuff and are unable to do even the simplest of tasks and they even start doing the cyber-equivalent of pooping their own pants. Kinda like a real old dog who can't hold his bowels and walks in to pane glass doors. It's the operating system that is to blame. In the real world, you would upgrade this, like getting new tires for car, but you can't because your computer is to old and the microprocessor isn't fast enough. This is the type of circular logic employed in only the uppermost echelons of government.

Which brings me to the subject of music. I won't launch into a tirade about music being the whipping boy of the digital age, we all have to come to terms with the state of music and the music business these days. While it was physically impossible to carry one thousand vinyl records with you wherever you went there was never any issues of storage or memory. They were stored on a shelf and all you had to do was remember where that shelf was. There was no lost data, it was all there in the grooves. The only lost data that happened is if you lent some records to someone and that sack of shit never returned them.

Even in the days of primitive audio, people wanted to have music wherever they went. Motorola invented the car radio and at the same time invented the car audio goof. There were scores of dudes in model T's and handlebar mustaches cruising down Main Street blaring their car radios ( I guess there were annoying hipsters back then as well).

In the fifties someone came up with the bright idea of making a record player for cars. These things did to records what that critter living under the Flintstone's sink did to trash. Then you had the infamous 8-track player that would interrupt songs right in the middle with an alarming klunk,

Then everyone went nuts in the seventies and invented Disco and ghetto blasters. Those things were loud, were about the size of an average doghouse and ran of 24 D cell batteries. Many a young person spent their college funds on the constant need for replacement batteries. Their immense size and volume output was guaranteed to annoy people for a radius of a few hundred feet as they were subjected to the questionable musical tastes of the person doing the blasting.  There was, however, poetic justice in the fact that it took hours upon hours for said blastor to make the mixed tapes to annoy the blastees.

Then Sony invented a way for everyone to look like dorks and called it a Walkman. You could get spare battery packs, equalizers and cassette carriers that all strapped on to your belt making you look like a douchey sort of Batman. They would still annoy, as the users of this newfangled gadget would crank them up to eleven and the headphones would emanate high-pitched sounds and distortion. Those people are all deaf now. It is interesting to note, that Walkmans had quite a social impact at the time. They were considered by many to be anti-social and many people took serious offense to them (not unlike dudes who walk around wearing hoods and texting).

Not content with stirring up shit, Sony upped the ante and came out with the Discman. Personal players were almost ubiquitous at this point so from a social perspective it was no big deal. This was pretty much the death of the mongrel mixed tape. Instead one could now fumble with a bunch of CD's while riding the subway. Sony neglected to mention that CD's were made out of metal and 25 of them weighed a ton. They also conveniently neglected to tell us that they scratch easier than paint and stop playing altogether if you look at them funny. I'm sure we all knew someone who had fifty coasters made out of CD's.

One day, when nobody was looking, all the CD stores shut down. Some basement dwellers who grew tired of Dungeons and Dragons came up with ways of getting free music on the internet. Enter the iPod ( It actually started with a weird gizmo called the Diamond Rio, but nobody remembers that one).

iPods are even more common that Walkmans ever were, but getting one these things to actually play music requires an engineering degree. There's that ole Apple voodoo again. If you are fortunate enough to own a Mac (by fortunate I mean if you were coerced into paying two grand) the two gizmos speak the same language. That is until one of them goes nutso. This iPod will only work with a certain operating system and your computer is too old, congratulations, you have just bought yourself a two thousand dollar doorstop.

Apple has their own stores where you can buy Apple products. The staff is way more knowledgeable than your average flunky at Best Buy, the only problem is that they don't want to share that knowledge. They don't even want to talk to you. If you do get one to talk to you you will be treated with contempt or told to send them an e-mail to make an appointment the following week. If you want to witness true apathy, try to get one these Macsters to upgrade your old G-4. It might or might not be possible, I never did get a straight answer. They will refer to some obscure part and make it seem more difficult to obtain than talent for the average Pop singer. It's almost as if they are a secret society with arcane rituals and you can't get in without knowing the secret handshake.

You have now ascertained that your Mac wouldn't be upgradable without an act of Parliament and have to purchase a brand new one just get your iPod to work. But wait there is more, one day your new Mac will not be compatible with the latest generation iPod. Wait,..wait.. there is even more. You must decide whether you want an iPod with flash memory or a hard drive. Hard drives have a tendency to not work if you drop them in a toilet bowl and can wipe out 40,000 songs in a flash (no pun intended). Or they may randomly decide to stop working on their own. The only way to wipe out 40, 000 songs on vinyl is if your vindictive ex sets fire to your house.

Once you have set up all this stuff at home and manage to get these things unpacked and hooked up you realize that there are two types of Firewire , you have the wrong one and the Macster can only see you a week from Thursday.

I haven't bought that iPod yet, and I still have my Discman. I think I'll load up 40 pounds of CD's in my backpack and make a stop at a beer store and a grocery store. I will buy 12 beers and a bag of Apples. The beers are for drinking as I listen to my 40 pounds of CD's and the apples are for tossing in the windows at the Apple store.