#all three of these were like thirty bucks!!!! i feel like i robbed this goddamn place blind!!!

[piimpf]

ABSOLUTELY INSANE RECORD GRAB TODAY LADS

[thisnewdevilry]

The Tragically Hip, a reflection

They shot a movie once, in my hometown Everybody was in it, from miles around Out at the speedway, some kind of Elvis thing Well I ain't no movie star But I can get behind anything Yeah I can get behind anything

--

We don't go anywhere Just on trips We haven't seen a thing We still don't know where it is It's a safe mistake

--

In November of 1984, Gord Downie, Rob Baker, Gord Sinclair, and Johnny Fay got a band together in Kingston Ontario, with Paul Langlois joining them a little after.

Also in November of 1984, I was born.

-- 

Don't tell me what the poets are doing On the street and the epitome of vague Don't tell me how the universe is altered When you find out how he gets paid, all right

--

If you can make me scared, if that's what you do If I'm unclear, can I get out of this thing with me and you If you feel scared, and a bit confused I got to say, this sounds a little beyond anything I'm used to

--

I’ll be turning thirty-three next month.  One of the odd things I’ve noticed about growing older in this world has been the realization of a strange sort of parameter for measuring life and age and growth: when you measure your life in new constants, in things you have always known and experienced, you’re young… and when the constants you’ve always known suddenly stop, or expire, or die, then you’re old.  For example – I’ve never lived in a world without the Apple MacIntosh computer.  I’ve never lived in a world that didn’t have CD players.  I’ve never lived in a world without the AIDS virus.  I’ve never lived in a world that didn’t know Ghostbusters, or The Terminator, or Indiana Jones.

I’ve never lived in a time that didn’t have the Tragically Hip.

--

I had my hands in the river My feet back up on the banks Looked up to the Lord above And said "hey man thanks" Sometimes I feel so good I gotta scream She said Gordie baby I know exactly what you mean She said, she said, I swear to God she said...

--

We're forced to bed But we're free to dream All us human extras, All us herded beings And after a glimpse Over the top The rest of the world Becomes a gift shop

--

Fifty-three.  Younger than my parents.  Jesus.

A relative of mine died of the same cancer years back.  Jesus.

--

Just give me the news It can all be lies Exciting over fair or the right thing at the right time Everything is clear Just how you described The way it appears, a world possessed by the human mind

--

I come from downtown Born ready for you Armed with skill and it's frustration And grace, too

--

I wasn’t the biggest fan of the Tragically Hip.  I don’t own a single album.  I’ve never been to a concert, even though they played one in my slightly-out-of-the-circuit Canadian city a little over two years ago.  Put me on the spot and I would probably struggle to identify one of their typically poetic lyrics by the correct song name.

But I still knew them.  It was next to impossible not to.  The moment Gord’s twangy wail of a voice started up, wavering like the guitar riffs that adapted to whichever poem they were communicating this time… no one else sounded like the Hip.

I liked their music.  I liked the way lyrical veins of bitter history and sad truths braided themselves with nostalgia and anger, with the sound of tires on gravel and the scent of a city in winter.

And I knew them because they were always there.  I heard them in theme songs of Canadian TV shows, on soundtracks.  I saw them cameo in our movies, our sitcoms.  They released 15 albums, 58 singles, and Downie made 6 albums of his own.  Whether watching MuchMusic and seeing their videos when I was in high school, or catching Downie’s interviews on the Strombo Show when I was in college, or hearing a song on the radio as I drove from home to university to work and back – the Tragically Hip were there, in that sort of way that you never really notice or quantify.

--

So there's no simple explanation For anything important any of us do And yeah the human tragedy Consists in the necessity Of living with the consequences Under pressure, under pressure.

--

They don't know how old I am, They found armor in my belly Passion out of machine revving tension Lashing out at machine revving tension Rushing by the machine revving tension

--

You take it for granted.

It’s like walking up the stairs without paying close attention to your feet, until suddenly you take that step and the stair isn’t rising up with you anymore.  It’s stopped.  There won’t be more.

--

When I left your house this morning, It was a little after nine It was in Bobcaygeon, I saw the constellations Reveal themselves, one star at time

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Tired as fuck I want to stop so much I almost don't want to stop See now then Can't and won't Will and can

--

I wasn’t surprised when I read the headline, when I turned the keys in the ignition and fired the car engine and the radio to life together to hear song after song on every radio station, all variations on that poetic twang that spanned thirty goddamn years.  We all knew this was coming.  1/3 of Canada tuned in to listen to Gord Downie commandeer his own goddamn wake.

I didn’t go to any of the concerts on that last tour.  When the last one, the finale in Kingston, was broadcast live across the country (no, you don’t understand, no one else has ever done that), I was driving my wife and a friend down a prairie highway, windows cracked just enough to alleviate the August heat without interfering with the music.

“Little Bones” was the song.

It was just as it had always been, the Hip stepping into the soundtrack of my life, and then out again.

--

Two-fifty for a decade And a buck and half for a year happy hour Happy hour, happy hour is here

I can cry, beg and whine To every rebel I find Just to give me a line I could use to describe

--

Driving down a corduroy road, Weeds standing shoulder high Ferris wheel is rusting off in the distance At the hundredth meridian At the hundredth meridian At the hundredth meridian Where the great plains begin

--

In the time it took for me to write this, the Wikipedia page for the Hip moved Gord Downie from ‘members’ to ‘past members’.

--

Come in, come in, come in, come in From thin and wicked prairie winds, come in It's warm and it's safe here and almost heartening Here in a time and place not lost on our imagination

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Wheat kings and pretty things Let's just see what tomorrow bring Wheat kings and pretty things Oh, that's what tomorrow brings

--

I’ve never lived in a Canada that didn’t have the Tragically Hip.  On Wednesday, social media statuses declared, ‘There’s been a death in the family – Canada is closed today.’

--

His tiny knotted heart Well, I guess it never worked too good The timber tore apart And the water gorged the wood You can hear her whispered prayer For men at masts that always lean The same wind that moves her hair Moves a boy through Fiddler's Green

--

Stare in the morning shroud and then the day began I tilted your cloud, you tilted my hand Rain falls in real time and rain fell through the night No dress rehearsal, this is our life

[originaldetectivesheep]

I decided not to blogpost until I got SotS back on schedule (I'm like a week behind and getting worse), but on the one hand Nine Nights In Galway will be out for release on Sunday (Walpurgisnacht), and on the other hand, the response to this prompt turned into 2200 words that I might as well publish.  Watch out for a neat trick with Riley that I didn't realize I was doing at the time.

Nodejacked

I don't know how the fuck I missed the guy.  I'm usually pretty good about these things, especially walking around in the Port after midnight, but it was like he came out of nowhere – the first thing I heard was just the one footfall, real loud right behind me, and then there was red lightning shooting out the back of my skull, out through my face, as the fist smashed me right between the spine and my right ear. I guess I might have blacked out for a second, because I was on the ground, not hearing too good, seeing stars and green phosphors instead of the fire hydrant, the roaring stink of blood all over the place like I bit my tongue, and I was trying to move, push myself up, but my hands and feet weren't cooperating.  The guy who hit me was on top of me, kneeling on my back – and – maybe? – my pockets were getting turned inside out.  I flailed around, and my ears must have rebooted because I could make out the slap of soles on concrete, running away. There was something on the sidewalk in front of me; I blinked a couple times to try to focus, and picked it up.  Leather, clunky: wallet – mine.  I opened it up: cards still there, license there, billfold empty.  It was less bad than it could've been.  I shoved it back in my pocket and put my hand in the other one to check my keys, get out my phone to call the police and call a ride home from here.  No phone.  Duh.  Of course.  Goddamnit. Ten hours later I had skipped my morning class and was still sore from where I'd gotten hit in the back of the head, worse sore because T-com was giving me the runaround about turning the goddamn phone off.  I decided to bail on the afternoon one too and see if I could steal some food from the bagel stand in the engineering hall, or off Riley's lab.  The world had fucked me out of a nearly-new smartphone and thirty-two bucks plus a Dunkins coupon, and I had to get my own back somehow. There were still freshmen from the Gluino Research Society manning the bagel stand, so instead of just stealing stuff I had to slug the can; seven cents makes about the same sound as twenty-five in loose change, but I was flat broke and doing a nickel-and-dime runaround to afford a stale bagel was really not helping my mood.  No grad-student guest lectures, no pizza crusts to garbage-dive for; there better be something lying around that applied-physics lab. When I got there, though, there was anything but: Riley was standing around some kind of bit of machinery with Carolína and Yuping, looking at it like it was going to blow up.  "Yo," I said coming in, because if you don't let the applied physics lab know you're there, nobody's going to stop you before you point at something that's going to arc you into bacon bits.  "Hey.  What's up?  Can I borrow four bits off someone to go get coffee?  I got robbed last night and I'm dead broke." "Experiment," Yuping said.  "Please stay still."  I stood still. "In three – two – one – discharge!"  There was a shake through the floor as Carolína came to that point.  "Diverging – when you see the reference frame shift, grab it!" "Power's holding," Riley said, nervous but excited.  There was a really weird feeling in the pit of my stomach.  "Holding – estimate branch merge in thirty seconds – if you get the shot take it, in position now!"  Yuping leaned over the chunk of technology, hand poised – and suddenly, no warning, stabbed into the box, yanking out almost as soon as he was in.  "Cut!  Cutting!  Metrics?" "Steady – steady –" Carolína's voice was rising, and she was trying to keep focused on whatever readout she was looking at instead of the Lions mug in Yuping's hand.  "Cut!  Cut!  Clear!  Clear!  Do you have it?" "Have!" Yuping shouted.  "Clear?" "It's clear – and it's still in there!  We did it!" "Yes!"  Riley jumped up in the air, punching at the ceiling.  "We did it!  We're going to win the Nobel Prize!  We're going to be famous!" "Wait," I said, "what did you do?  What did you do, exactly, except take a Detroit Lions mug out of a box?" Carolína shook her head.  "We didn't just take a mug out of a box – we took the mug out of a different quantum frame of reference, without disturbing the one in this one."  She leaned over and took an additional mug out of the box that they'd been looking at. "The frame dislocator have two compartment," Yuping said, calmed down a little now.  "Mug placed in one of them at start of experiment by random function.  During experiment, frame dislocator shifts reference point to sample of nearby quantum state.  When in state where random function chose other compartment, we take mug out from that one – and when return to original ground state, mug is also in original compartment, because didn't take it out from that one – particular quantum state intact." "So… you violated the conservation of matter to steal a Detroit Lions mug from a parallel universe."  My head hurt, and not just where I'd gotten punched. "Pretty much, yeah," Riley said, nodding.  "You can immediately see how this is going to revolutionize everything." "Yeah, there's going to be no causality and other universes are going to be jacking our crap all the time while we steal from them," I said.  If they were going to break everything, why couldn't they have put something useful in the box first, like one of those vending-machine microwavable cheeseburgers, or a twenty-dollar bill? "Well, not right away," Riley said.  "Right now, you're limited to what's in the dislocator field, really, and the space of 'nearby' states is so huge that most of the time, you don't find one where the mug actually 'moves' before we have to shut the dislocator down.  We've been working on this for the last week and a half, and this is the first time we've been able to tune to a state space and actually extract something from it." "Yeah, but you said it – you proved that it's possible, and now it's all engineering after that.  Someone's going to solve that problem, and then there's going to be people running around all over the place looting other universes." "No, like I said, this really only applies to the dislocator right there.  We've got a more powerful frame-shifter that I guess we need to try out now, now that we've proven the theory, but if that doesn't work, trust me, nobody's going to be bamffing in and mugging you today.  And I don't think we're going to get any volunteers for that one any time soon." "Why?" "Because it's walk-in-closet scale and people are afraid that it's a teleporter aka instant sci-fi death machine." "Does it work?" "It works on the same principle as the box, so it ought to, but someone still has to test it." "Well," I said, "if someone here will go buy me lunch off the vending machine, I'll be your guinea pig.  Yuping stuck his hand into the box, and I'm definitely at least as brave as Yuping about sticking body parts into other universes."  I slumped into one of their spare chairs, chin up and defiant.  Carolína rolled her eyes and flipped through her wallet for singles. Half a Coke and a two microwave cheeseburgers reheated in an unshielded radar housing later, Riley and Yuping were checking up the cable connectors for the power supplies as Carolína ran her diagnostics again and I looked over the door cell that I was going to be going into.  It looked like one of those scanner tubes that the exhibitionists go through at the airport, but closed in with steel and smoky glass. "All green," Carolína said. "Leo, whenever you're ready, get in the random cell.  Once you're in, the doors will close, you'll spin around a little, and then the door will open into one of the cell boxes.  Once you get in there, hit the wall switch to turn it green." "What happens after that?" "When we see the green light, we'll start the reference-frame distorter.  If everything works, you should see the light go off – or, accurately, not be on.  When you see that, hit the switch again.  That'll turn on the light in the other cell, the one you didn't go into, and we'll power down the machine." "Got it," I said.  "What cell should I be in after the machine gets back to ground state?" Carolína shrugged, palms up to the sky.  "Dunno.  It's an experiment." "This is kind of why none of us have done it already," Riley said from the floor; Yuping followed with something in Chinese that was probably a joke about the kind of guy who thought his safety was worth a cheeseburger, something that the other two both laughed at.  I gave up and walked into the tube. The door closed behind me, and there was kind of the sensation, after that, like the floor and walls were turning in place, one cylinder inside another, but I couldn't really tell how fast or how far.  The door opened in front of me, and I walked out into a squarish box; there was a big square plastic button in the far wall, and as I pressed it, it turned green.  There was a big vwooooorm sound from somewhere outside the metal box that I could hear even through the steel, even though my frame of reference was supposed to be isolated; I leaned against the wall, looking at the button, waiting for it to stop being green. It was dark out – real dark, and I was leaning against bricks, not metal.  The fuck?  Wait – no – right, this was a quantum state dislocator, I could be anywhere in the graph, not just states decided by the branching from the random door in the tube.  Shit.  Where was I?  What – no, they didn't get mugs disappeared or disintegrated in the box unit (they didn't, right?), so when the power dropped I would be back in the metal cell. And that meant that wherever-whatever-whenever I was, until that cut-out, it was a completely disconnected universe, and there would be no consequences.  I could jack up some dumb fucker and get back at the world for ripping off my phone last night, and I'd come out ahead.  I held still, listening, looking around as much as I dared – there, that idiot walking along this way, not looking out, not a care in the world.  I held my breath, timed it, and stepped in, one step, swinging my right with everything I had behind it.  I smashed him right at the top of the neck, just behind his right ear, and he went over like he'd gotten hit by a car. The dude was thrashing around on the ground blind, and I dove on him, hands in his pockets; he had a phone, and now I had a phone, and I skinned all the bills out of his wallet and threw it on the ground.  As good as "no consequences" sounds in theory, if he started yelling and someone called the cops or if he had friends with him or something, I could still get in trouble even before the machine powered down and I went back to my own ground state.  I shoved the cash from his wallet into my pocket and ran like hell down the block. I dove into an alley, the first one I came to, not thinking about what other muggers might be hiding out in it, like that guy who'd gotten me last night, and as I was leaning against the concrete wall, breathing hard, I realized I was leaning against a metal wall, looking down at a plastic button that was still lit up green.  Something clicked, and the metal started to push away in front of me; I pushed out through the opening back door of the cell, and looked around to see Riley and Yuping frowning over Carolína's shoulders at the console. "No good, I guess," Riley said, discouraged.  "Well, it happens; if you want to try again, we've got to wait like half an hour for the capacitors to recharge." "Sure," I said, "might as well.  After all, it wasn't a total loss."  I pulled the phone out, but they were all occupied frowning at one of the readouts, not interested at all.  It didn't matter; if I could just get this thing unlocked, I – By force of habit I'd swiped through my passcode as I pulled the phone out, and now it was unlocked in my hand.  The phone was unlocked, showing my wallpaper and my home screen apps.   This was my phone.  Down to the same model.  Huh.  Just for the hell of it I reached into my pocket, to see what I'd gotten off that guy for cash: thirty-two dollars even and a Dunkins coupon.  Huh.