Nombrilisme, PuncProsody, Page 7

Delving Into Subconscious Times Past

2022-07-30, approx. 1:00 pm

I don’t remember the true beginning of the events that followed, but I have a sense that I had spent the previous day at work. Where I worked was a strangely vertical, cramped area above someone’s rather gargantuan living room. I recognized the living room. It was either a very strange imagining of the living room of someone I grew up with, or it was a living room that I used to dream about as a child. Either way, my workstation was above this living room, which had a chasm in the centre of it. I never saw the chasm, I just had the very profound sense that it was there, and that that was why we kept our gazes high or level, and had to use things like ledges, bridges, and rope-swings to get from one side of the living room to the other. When I was in that lower, living room space, I felt like I was a kid again, interacting with other kids. Moving around and across the living room with trepidation, gravity, and a paradoxical ease that I may not felt as an adult. There, I played video games with the other kids whenever we reached the TV — more than likely, we were playing on N64, Dreamcast, or PlayStation, but I don’t remember any specific game or console from the dream. Up some steep, carpeted, curving stairs, was my cramped, carpeted workspace, with other coworkers. I didn’t recognize any of them, and maybe that is simply because I didn’t truly interact with any of them in the dream.

It was a new day.

It seems that I lived with my parents, or at least near enough to them that I could go over in the morning before work and ask if I could drive one of their four cars to my office. This is strange for two reasons: I do not currently and have never had a driver’s licence, and they have never had more than one car at any given time. To make matters stranger, after accepting, my parents told me to take the car “at the end”, a vintage vehicle, newly restored and looking pristine.

I protested, but they insisted.

Off we went to work — and I do mean “we”. My parents also insisted on coming along. I’m not certain what the rationale was, but when we arrived, my mother wanted to have a look around and, of course, chat with anyone in the vicinity. I felt very stressed, knowing this, but for whatever reason I had truly needed to borrow a car to get to work that morning, so I mustered up patience and tried to get on with things. Sure enough, as soon as we’d parked and gotten out of the car, she began chatting with everyone we passed, though thankfully, it seemed, not with anyone I worked for or with directly. From the outside, my office appeared to be a trailer, a truck, or a luxurious shipping container — that was the sense I had, even though I never looked at it directly during the dream. It seemed to have some sort of vertical protuberance, like a tower, jutting out of it. This small-seeming exterior of course belied the fact that the fully-carpeted interior contained an upper floor that served as an office for who-knows-how-many workers or companies, an enormous split-level main floor that served as the house of someone I had been friends or acquaintances with as a child, and in the centre of all of that (of course) a fucking abyss.

No big deal.

My mother wanted to come into the office and attempted to do so, despite my protests.

The next thing I remember is that I was just outside the back of a Winners, and that it was winter — or at least cold enough for me to have shrugged into what seemed to be a new coat before walking over. I didn’t work there. Nevertheless, I went through the back door — me and a couple pushing a cat in a coat in a stroller. I found the sight both endearing and bizarre. Though I did not seem to find it unusual to be entering the store from the nearly-unmarked back. The room that we found ourselves in was well-lit, but had strange dimensions, with a winding foot path cut through piles and stacks of children’s toys, mainly. The couple wheeled over to a miniature aisle (child-height) in order to look through new clothes for their curiously-calm cat.

In the top-left corner of the room, there was a very small flat escalator, moving in an oval around that small section of the room; a loop with no apparent purpose other than perhaps to entertain children and keep them in one place. I got on it and when I did, I was at such an angle that I could look through a large window set into that back corner, looking down into the rest of the store, which strangely seemed to have been built continually downward, below ground level. From that vantage point, I also noticed that down below the window there was a separate conveyor belt that you could get on in order to be taken down there.

So I got the hell on it.

Down below was a large, mostly empty atrium of sorts, with a few patrons passing through it, mainly crossing from doors and hallways at opposite ends of the room. I turned away from the conveyor belt and followed a rather dark corridor leading back from where the upper-level window had been.

The next thing I remember was being in my aunt ’s living room, though a very strange version of it. She’s the one that used to babysit me and make me Delicate Cookies when I was a kid living in Newfoundland; still one of the best recipes in my collection. I don’t get the sense that she looked like herself in the dream, but I knew instinctively that it was her. I was with at least one other person — my brother, maybe, but I can’t remember who it was. In her house the living room, dining room, and kitchen are all on the same level, with a door separating the living room from the two other spaces. In the dream version of her house, the living room and darkened dining room were on the bottom level, and then walking up a small set of stairs took you to a small, purposeless landing, where you could take another small set of stairs to reach the kitchen at the top. It was all open plan.

In reality, she is still sound of mind and reasonably healthy, physically, but in the dream, she seemed confused and kept putting things in unusual places. At one point, she startled when I came near her and explained that she’d actually been sleepwalking the whole time. I felt unnerved. The house was very dark, all the curtains drawn; the only light that had been on had been the one above the stove. She led me and whoever I was with away from the kitchen, over toward a set of double doors. Beyond them, it was broad daylight, and other relatives were sitting on the patio chatting and laughing as if nothing had been amiss.

I sat and stayed for a while, but then suddenly I was walking out into another large atrium, brightly-lit and far more cavernous than the one at Winners had been. I recognized this place; much like the living room abyss, this was a location I had dreamt of more than once in my childhood.

It was the McDonald’s corporate headquarters, it was the 90s again, and a gaggle of families were there with their children, sitting at the heavy, restaurant-style tables scattered throughout the atrium, eating cake. Some sort of celebration was underway, but we had likely arrived just as it was winding down.

My parents led me and my brother through that carpeted main hall without stopping for cake.

We were little kids again. Six and three.

One section of that main hall had been walled off in glass or plastic barriers and filled with child-size tables and chairs so that kids could mingle freely on the inside while their parents watched on the outside.

For some reason this detail stuck out in my mind: one kid in a dress, sitting on a chair, shoes just barely touching the carpeted floor, eating cake.

I don’t know what my parents were looking for, but it clearly wasn’t cake.

They led us all the way over to the other side of the atrium, where barely anyone had chosen to sit, and then into a corridor. It was carpeted too, and felt both too-clean and still-grimy, the way old airports tend to when they don’t get the foot traffic they used to. It was too quiet back there, and I started to feel uncomfortable.

Then my little brother and I were alone.

I don’t know why, just that we were.

So we had to be brave — I had to be brave.

I took my brother’s hand and started to walk back through the corridor we were in, though I had no idea where we were going, or how to find our parents again. I tried not to let my fear show. A few people passed us, but we weren’t to talk to strangers, and curiously, they paid us no mind. Finally, after wandering through several corridors without success, we came upon a glass door that led into a unlit room. My little brother opened it cautiously, and together we stepped just inside, the both of us holding the door ajar. The light from the corridor gave us some sense of what was in there. To our left were pools of water, the water running and overflowing gently into each one. I didn’t like being in the dark, but there was something strangely calming about the dark pools of water, like they were the beginnings of an aquatic garden.

My little brother tightened his grip on my hand, and I looked over at him quizzically.

Which is when my eyes caught on the sight that had alarmed him.

Eyes.

Countless eyes flashing back at us from the other side of the room, the humanoid figures that belonged to them shrouded in shadow.

A cry caught in my throat, and holding even more firmly to my little brother’s hand, I pulled him back from the room into the hallway, the glass door shutting behind us as we broke into a run, going back the way we had come.

Or at least I assumed we were heading back the way we had come.

We were utterly lost, fear sharpening our reflexes and making our panicked minds go fuzzy.

At last, we ran into another room, this one lit from above by pot lights and filled with rows of large, oval tables, some sections of the room fenced off with plain chain-link panels. But there they were: our parents.

Sitting at one of the tables and eating some sort of meal — though not cake.

The rest of the room was conspicuously empty, and my hackles rose.

My parents seemed rather relaxed and unbothered, and somehow I knew that their food had been laced with a drug of some kind.

We needed to leave, all four of us, as quickly as possible.

Something told me that the eyes that had stared back at us from the depths of that darkened water-garden had been adults like our parents at some point, having been whisked away to be experimented upon after having ingested the tainted food. I kept urging our parents to follow us and leave, but they didn’t have any real sense of urgency. They were humouring me.

I kept hold of my little brother’s hand, and we led the way, but the hallway was darker coming back out of the room than it had been going in, and we slipped off into a side passage where I hoped we could avoid notice so that our parents wouldn’t be captured. This new corridor’s walls were made of curving glass, and utterly dark; I thought there might be some sort of liquid on the other side of them, but I couldn’t be certain. The floor was a wooden boardwalk suspended in water and lit dimly from below. Water sloshed up over the wood, the walkway bobbing and swaying, as we made our way across.

My brother and I were so busy looking at our feet to make sure we were walking on the planks of wood and not getting our little feet caught in the watery spaces between them, that we didn’t notice the researcher’s approach until it was too late.

From the depths of the snaking, eerily-lit corridor, a figure wearing a full diving outfit, complete with glass and metal bubble helmet came lunging toward us, and —

I woke up.

Scout, eyes wide, stared back at me from the foot of the bed, curled up on a light brown faux-fur blanket.

I woke up to Scout giving me a quizzical look from the end of the bed, because I’d just emerged from a frankendream and probably seemed rather flustered and sweaty. I’m not actually certain when I fell asleep, but given that the dream-turned-nightmare went four levels deep, I have to assume I was under the influence of the stranger parts of my subconscious for a good hour or two.

Not long after that, I made myself presentable, gave Scout and early supper, and headed out to my brother’s house for a family dinner.

Seven cod tongues frying in a cast-iron skillet, most of them already golden-brown on the top.

A dinner that featured a roast expertly-prepared by my brother’s girlfriend, sweet corn shucked by my brother and I (inexpertly, according to our very amused and somewhat exasperated father), and fried cod tongues, a belated birthday present for our mother, whose favourite food is exactly that.

As soon as I got in the door, though, I was greeted by two cardboard boxes: one filled with some LPs from my mom’s twenties, and one filled with tons of not-for-sale singles from her days as a radio DJ and morning show host that she’d been allowed to take home from work and keep. My father didn’t have any records, because instead of those, he’d been collecting 8-tracks and cassettes, all of which he’s long had converted to mp3 files. He seemed particularly delighted when we unearthed a single by The Alan Parsons Project (Side A: Eye In the Sky / Side B: Gemini), one of several bands, apparently, whose works he’d collected almost entirely on cassette.

Close up of a single on vinyl; in the background, the inside of a cardboard box filled with more singles on vinyl is visible.

Close up of a single on vinyl; in the background, my younger brother is seated on the floor, looking through other vinyls

I felt a little indignant about the fact that my parents used to listen to those sorts of bands but would always just put on soft rock radio stations at home instead of playing cassettes/records of albums that they personally collected. What gives?! Which is not to say that I didn’t enjoy the music on those stations. I just. Could have had more exposure to rock and albums made to be listened to as whole works of art much earlier — rather than simply listening to individual songs in isolation the way I did for most of my childhood.

The important thing, I suppose, is that I’m trying to work through a backlog of cool sonic journeys now, as an adult. And enjoying all the new ones that are coming out currently.

ALICE NINE.‘s as-yet-unnamed album will be one such epic sonic journey, I’m quite sure, especially given how cool the lead track Funeral is, and the passion that Saga currently seems to be pouring into the recording of said album, if the following tweet is anything to go by:

アルバムの半分はベースソロあるし
何曲か丸々アコギ弾いてるし
コーラス、ラップ、グロウル、お経、2ndボーカルやってる😇

もはやパート何😇
— Saga ALICE NINE. (@Saga_A9) July 26, 2022

Half of the album has bass solos,
I’m playing acoustic guitar the whole way through on I dunno how many songs,
And I’m singing the chorus, rapping, growling, chanting, and doing backup vocals, so 😇
What’s my part now? 😇

Live still of Saga singing during the chorus of a song for their their tour finale in December 2021.

I love Saga deeply. Reading that update made me so very happy.
Let your passion and musical talent be unleashed even more!
My ears, my mind, my heart, and my imagination are in for such a treat on release day!
楽しみだよ！♥

Live photo of Saga holding an acoustic guitar just before playing a song, taken during the 2021 Saga Birthday Festival concert.

Ahem. Back to discussing the family dinner.

When my mom noticed the gold pearl ring on my finger, while we were chatting between supper and dessert, she expressed how pleased she was that I still wore it, because she was the one that gave it to me when I was twelve (it used to be hers), but then my father chimed in to explain something about it that I hadn’t known. Apparently it had originally housed a ruby (mom’s birthstone), but the ruby had fallen out long ago. When they’d been living in San Diego as newlyweds, they’d repaired it by having a pearl set in the ring instead. My mom insisted that the pearl had been chosen from a clam “at a Japanese garden”, while my father had insisted that the pearl had been bought “at Sea World”; maybe they were somehow referring to the same place. My little heirloom just got more mysterious.

After dessert (an incredibly rich wild blueberry custard pie that my brother’s girlfriend had picked up from the farmer’s market), me and my brother’s girlfriend exchanged an inordinate number of cat photos (…okay, I admit, it was mostly me showing her a ridiculous number of Scout photos), as well as some recommendations. She advised me to listen to Lizzo’s newest album Special (I did so while doing dishes this morning and it elevated the entire experience into something playful and joy-filled), while I advised her to listen to Beyoncé’s RENAISSANCE in full because, where Lemonade was an album imbued with a confidence born out of anger and hurt, RENAISSANCE is an album filled with confidence couched in ease and trust — both powerful for different reasons. I also recommended she listen to the latest Billy Talent, Crisis of Faith (a rallying cry for social justice and compassion wrapped up in a truly hard-hitting, excellent sound), and to my brother, I recommended OFF-TRACK, Steve Neville‘s first solo album, created and recorded while he was undergoing cancer treatment, and you can hear all the humanity and raw emotion of that experience in the sound on the record. His sister Jacquie Neville and former bandmate Liam Jaeger participated in the creation of the album as well.

As an aside, the Neville siblings and Liam Jaeger were the founding members of The Balconies, one of my favourite bands, which happens to have been formed in my hometown of Ottawa, Ontario. I never actually attended a show when Steve was part of the band (he left shortly before I managed to see them live), but I did attend the very last concert they played for their 10th Anniversary on February 3, 2018. It was stellar. They also released a final album at that point, “Show You“, that boasted recordings from 2012 — compared to their last two albums, Fast Motions and Rhonda, the sound on Show You was a lot more ‘garage’, and it featured earlier arrangements of songs that had come out on later albums. It was a great surprise release at the time, is what I’m saying, and I recommend it.

Just after dessert, my father made a big announcement: he’s going to be interviewed for an internet security podcast this week (he’s a big name in the white hat/security world). As someone who listens to a lot of podcasts during the workweek especially, I thought that was pretty cool and I’m looking forward to listening to the episode, even if a lot of the shop talk goes over my head.

If you’re curious, some of the podcasts I listen to regularly are ones like RISK! (since like 2014 or 2015 — incredible cross-section of true stories that are moving, hilarious, filthy, shocking, and thought-provoking), Getting Curious with JVN, Writers Ink, The Secret Room, What Was That Like, The Dark Paranormal, Financial Feminist, Hiroto’s Voicy, Kei’s SYNERGY twitcast, and lately, the back-catalogue of Supercontext, which I can already tell is going to become a bit of an obsession for me. I’m currently listening to a detailed examination of David Bowie’s Blackstar album, and then I’m on to an absolute treat… an in-depth analysis of one of my very favourite comics: volume one of the incomparable space opera, Saga (art by Fiona Staples, story by Brian K. Vaughn).

And no, it’s not a favourite just because it shares a name with Saga (though I love that link). It definitely delivers on the “space opera” front, has a diverse cast of characters (including plenty of queer ones), incredible art and witty writing, is steamy and filthy in all the right ways as well as being perfectly fluffy and romantic when the mood calls for it, will move you to tears, and then later make you laugh with its often dry and irreverent sense of humour.

It’s a favourite because the comic series itself, both visually and narratively, is stellar.

And I was today-years-old when I realized that they actually started releasing new issues of Saga again this January after a long hiatus; their 10th volume is going to be published this October, so I might wait to buy that and then start buying single issues after that. Yet another thing to get very excited about.

Okay, I’ll stop waxing lyrical about Saga². （´・ω・｀）

It’s a long weekend, so I get to stay home and do more creating tomorrow.
Back to writing and editing TE9…

Singing Truth

Music

According to a few commenters and a translator in another piece of coverage from another network, this singer wasn’t singing O Canada, but rather a very old Cree song that could be put to the melody of the national anthem.

In spite of the Catholic church and the Canadian government’s efforts to tear apart indigenous families with the goal of extinguishing the many indigenous languages and cultures nationwide, she sings. They failed. She will not be silenced, she rejects the shame these institutions tried to force on her and on thousands of other children, so many of whom did not survive the ordeal.

I highly recommend listening to the following two podcasts, both of which are investigations into the atrocities carried out in two different residential schools in two different provinces in Canada. Each podcast centers the stories of those who survived, in the survivors’ own voices. They both also highlight the effects of intergenerational trauma, as well as how the indigenous communities draw upon, protect, and revive their own cultures in order to continue to heal.

Stolen Season 2: Surviving St. Michael’s (investigated by Connie Walker and her team)

Kuper Island [also on Spotify] (hosted by Duncan McCue)

As a primer into how the Canadian government’s attempt at carrying out this cultural genocide culminated in the establishment of these long-running residential schools, I recommend this quick but incredibly informative read:

21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation With Indigenous Peoples a Reality – Bob Joseph

At the very least, we need to understand what happened, to bear witness both to the truth of the horrific abuse that occurred, along with the true beauty and complexity of the indigenous languages and cultures that have survived and now flourish despite colonial attempts to quash them.

The weight of shame and silence is not for survivors to bear.

The Cree singer gave voice to so many.

You don’t need to understand a word of Cree to understand the spirit of her message.

; ♪

Footnotes

After a lengthy brainstorming session, I made the decision to let go of my original domain name jeaology and continue to expand my home under this new one, puncprosody.

In keeping with the aim of an old blog entry in which I explained what the original domain name meant to me (now, obviously, no longer relevant), I figure I might as well do the same for this new name.

My original name and impetus for making a site was to create a space where I gave myself permission to experiment and display my work, however rough it might be. It had been pushback against an emotionally rough (or at the very least stifling) situation; an overcorrection based on someone else’s mistreatment and my own inability at the time to stand up for myself. I am thankfully at a very different place in my life now, and so I wanted to change my site’s name to reflect that. Instead of pushing back against something, the name I chose embodies the way I want my creations to feel.

Punctuation helps create the rhythm and musicality of prose — its prosody.

Truncating the word punctuation made for one hell of a good pun too.

“Hey! What does that punc over there think it’s doing?“

“Creating an excellent flow, my friend. Shaking things up, gettin’ it just right.“

At a certain point, I updated the site logo to read The Anthologist instead of Jeaology as well. That, I plan to keep for the foreseeable future, as I think it works well with the feel of PuncProsody.

I think that about covers it; よろしくお願いします♪

Double-neck

Music

If I’d gone to Bluesfest this year, it would have been to see Crown Lands, Sum 41, and Rage Against The Machine (Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morissette, and Garbage would have been high on the list too). Not going was a really hard decision, because I know it would have been pure badassery.

^{Crown Lands at Dragonboat Fest ’18; the guitarist started playing a frickin’ guitar-bass halfway through the set.}

Part of the reason I made the decision not to was that I managed to get a ticket with a stellar view to see The Smashing Pumpkins in Toronto this October, and that will require me saving up for and going on a mini-trip. No matter what their setlist is, it’s going to be incredible.

I also plan on eating at least one penis waffle while there (it seems like their vag-shaped waffles are a summer-only special lol). I adore the fact that their shop name (Members Only) and entire menu is replete with filthy puns. Glorious.

It’s looking like that Toronto vacation (and time taken off work here and there to have extra long weekends for writing and web-developing) is going to be my only real getaway this year, because Japan still isn’t open for independent travel (tour groups only, for the foreseeable future). If I can’t go for concerts, then I’ll just be sitting tight for a little longer and exploring areas closer to home.

But I want to go back. I do.

I want to go see ALICE NINE. live again. THE ALTERNATIVE.

I want to feel Saga’s groove firsthand again.

Time Lag

Slice of Life

It is Thursday.

I had convinced myself it was Friday.

I must now face the reality that I have another work day ahead of me tomorrow.

Goddamn it.

Work this week has largely consisted of training four other coworkers in a fairly rule-intensive indexing job, so I’ve been doing a lot of getting up and flitting between desks in order to address issues and answer questions. Training employees is work that I generally enjoy, despite my shyness and awkwardness (and overabundance of quips and boring jokes). It certainly makes the work day go by faster.

My week’s been pretty alright, is what I’m saying.

I just wish it were already the weekend.

A black and white furred cat lays stretched out and bored-looking on top of a kitchen table.

I sat down to do a bit of writing before bed tonight, and managed a couple of paragraphs before sleepiness took hold, but as is often the case these days, Scout simply had to add in his two cents before I closed the window. His contribution to this sentence-in-progress is as follows:

If the universe and the collective imagination/imaginary share the same property of being without known limit, then perhaps they are, 000000000.222222222222222222222222222 (by Scout)

You know… it isn’t half bad.

I had a real titter over his good grasp of theme.

Which reminds me: earlier this week Scout gave me both a bit of a scare and a bark of a laugh when I settled in for a bubble bath. He started out very wary of the tub, and has gradually grown incredibly fond of hiding in it to ambush me from behind the shower curtain, as well as being incredibly fond of watching the tub fill with water or peeking around the curtain at the fountain of water when I’m taking a shower.

A black and white furred cat, its forepaws perched over the edge of a bathtub filling with bubbly water, looks back at the camera with an inquisitive expression of devastating cuteness.

When I’m relaxing in the bath, he likes to sit by the door and supervise, peer over the edge of the tub, or else walk along said edge and touch the surface of the water with his paw.

A black and white furred cat inspects his waterlogged tail and back paw miserably.

Well, earlier this week it finally happened: Scout slipped and got a scare when half of his body got drenched with bathwater. He didn’t injure himself, thankfully! But he resented the tub for the rest of the night and slunk off (after I patted away the excess water on his fur with a towel) to lick himself dry.

He looked so miserable I didn’t want to laugh, but he was alright… and it was hilariously cute.

In case you’re wondering: he harbours no lingering ill-will toward the tub. The next morning, when it was again dry, he hopped in and proceeded to ambush me while I sat on the toilet. As usual.

All is well.

The Podcast Has A New Home

Footnotes

Close-up of concrete stuck to the dark wood-grain of a pole. Graffiti in purple spray-paint covers the concrete.

Given that I have been on a semi-hiatus when it comes to The Side B Anthology podcast, I started to re-think what I wanted to make of it and decided, for starters, to switch hosts. I’d been with Podbean since the podcast’s inception, and they’ve been a great host, but at this point, switching to Acast just made more sense. It’s more cost-effective (especially in this semi-hiatus stage) and has a nice array of features to make upload and distribution of new episodes simple.

All the episodes of TSBA are still accessible through Apple Podcasts, and they have a new homepage through Acast as well. Once I edit current episodes a little bit and record some new ones, I aim to distribute the podcast on platforms like Spotify as well (the service I use most, personally).

All this being said, I have not yet finished replacing old episode links on this site yet. All episodes are ready to stream through the widget on the TSBA main page, but clicking through to individual episode pages may still result in broken links.

Ontario Storm

Slice of Life

In the afternoon yesterday, I suddenly got an emergency alert on my phone warning residents to take cover as a severe thunder storm was about to blow through the city. I’d known that there was a thunder storm on the horizon, having checked the weather earlier that morning, but it had seemed odd to me nevertheless to send out that sort of alert for a thunder storm. Sure enough, it blew through the downtown area, and the downpour was strong, but it wasn’t particularly out of the ordinary.

Though the white slats in blinds, grey, rainy weather is visible, the tail lights of cars and lit street lamps visible but blurry through the downpour. In the foreground, the silhouettes of potted plants on the windowsill are visible.

If you’re wondering how Scout handles the sound of thunder, I’m happy to report that he is as cool as a cucumber.

So far the only thing that truly seems to scare Scout is his hairbrush…

But I digress.

A white and black furred cat snoozed sprawled out and contented on a brown, white, and lavender bedspread.

The most interesting thing that happened in our abode was that the toilet began gurgling and bubbling, unnerving both Scout and I at first… but after it quieted again without the water overflowing (thankfully), it seemed more funny than anything else. Indeed, other than that, I just worked on the CSS issue I wrote about in the previous entry, and Scout napped contentedly on the bed.

Which is why I was puzzled when I got a text from my parents on the family group chat urging us all to stay inside and that they were sheltering in their basement. I was downright shocked when they sent us photos some time later of what it looked like outside their front door after the storm had finally passed in their area.

Our cherry tree had been uprooted by the wind and fallen over on the neighbours’ car. Two enormous trees across the road had been uprooted and fallen as well. In another picture they sent, the tree and entire sheet of grass that covered the front yard of a neighbour two doors down had been uprooted all together and fallen over. If they hadn’t sent photos, I wouldn’t have believed it.

View of uprooted trees and driveways strewn with debris after a powerful thunder storm.

A storm like this, the likes of which we never used to see in these parts, is climate change in action. Rightfully alarming.

Several people so far have been reported as having died in the Ontario storm (as it’s being called), and there were several injuries as well. Tons of uprooted trees, flying debris, and downed powerlines, the widespread likes of which we haven’t seen in this region since the huge ice storm of ’98 (I was in elementary school back then, but I remember it vividly). My parents lost power and as of my writing this, it still hasn’t been restored, because people have lost power all over the region. It’s incredibly fortunate that my area wasn’t hit with a power outage or the heavy wind and rain that my family members’ and friends’ areas were subjected to.

It took until late at night for us to get back in contact with my brother, who had lost cell reception, internet and power early on, but for whom the storm seemed otherwise fairly typical in strength (like it did in my area). His power was restored overnight.

I’m glad that everyone is okay.

View looking up at cherry tree blossoms in full bloom, lit up bright pink in the sunlight, the bright blue sky visible between the flower-laden boughs.

I’m also sad that the cherry tree is gone… it had been growing in the front yard since before we moved in in ’97, survived the ice storm in ’98, had been home to countless bird nests over the years, and was just beautiful to look at, especially in the spring.

The Orvis Theme Declined To Comment

Footnotes

Close up of rivulets of water running down a windowpane, the sky in the background a light grey, with diffused globes and lines of light reflecting in the glass and water droplets.

Since this website’s inception, I’ve been using the Orvis theme, which is intended to be used to display photography portfolios. It’s a sleek, classic theme with a navigation configuration that I like. However, since the beginning, the Orvis theme has had one major issue: while you can enable a comment submission form on your posts and pages, the theme itself (at least using a white background the way that I do) makes the comment box and submission button invisible. Luckily, you can add your own custom CSS to the theme.

I have some experience with HTML/CSS, enough to be able to modify code to a degree, so I scrutinized the code on a page with a comment submission box enabled and tried to fix the issue. The strange thing was that the comment box, any text entered, and submission button were displayed all in white, which you could see if you highlighted everything, but which appeared invisible otherwise.

Aha!, I thought.

And added CSS to make the textarea’s background and the text within it a colour other than white. I made the submission button a colour other than white too.

It worked!

Well, sort of.

At that point, I could finally see the comment text box, but as soon as I clicked inside it and started typing, it would all disappear. When I clicked outside of the box again, both the comment text box and the text itself would magically appear! What the hell?

No matter how much I scrutinized the theme’s original code, I couldn’t figure out where the issue was coming from. There was nothing that I could see that would cause the issue. Google did end up having the answer (…eventually, after a lot of failed queries).

Focus.

Even though there was nothing related to it that I could find in the CSS on the page of my site that I had been combing through, the right query finally led me to finding out how to modify an input area that has been selected (that is, which is in focus). I’ve been coding webpages casually for years, and I’d never come across that before. I am not embarrassed to admit that I threw my arms up in triumph when that finally worked.

So now anyone can see the comment box to reply, not just spammers and bots!

If anyone else is using the Orvis theme, wants to enable comments, and runs into a similar issue, add the following to the Additional CSS for your site and change the colours to whatever suits your site:

textarea:focus {
	color: #333;
	background-color: #eee;
}

input, textarea, select {
	color: #000;
	background-color: #eee;
}

button, input[type="button"], input[type="reset"], input[type="submit"] {
    background: transparent;
    border: 2px solid;
    border-radius: 0;
    color: #333;
    padding: 4px 10px;
}

Then again, I might be the only weirdo using this theme with the comments enabled.

Mother Mother & MONOWHALES at the NAC

Music

After work, I dashed home to give Scout his supper, and found to both my amusement and dismay, that he had ripped apart his second treat bag in less than a month and helped himself to a mid-afternoon snack. I asked him who the culprit was, but he wouldn’t say, just kept rubbing my legs affectionately, clearly very pleased with himself and ready for his evening meal.

View looking down at my feet from above, where a black and white furred cat is looking down at a torn-open package of cat treats.

Alas. That little scallywag. I transferred the remaining treats into another container, gave him his supper, changed into concert-appropriate attire, and then (finally) dashed over to the NAC to see Mother Mother and their opening act MONOWHALES.

I’d never heard anything by MONOWHALES before, and I decided not to listen to anything or look them up in preparation so I could go in to their set without any expectations. Mother Mother, meanwhile, has been one of my favourite bands for a number of years, and I’ve been to every show they’ve played in Ottawa since their performance at Bluesfest in 2013 (…except one, I think).

You could say I was excited.

The NAC’s Southam Hall is a venue that I am intimately familiar with, as I go there often, usually to see classical concerts, so I had no trouble getting there and finding my seat. As I waited, other slowly filing in, the anticipation mounted.

View of a stage lit up in red stage lights.

Close up of my peacock-patterned overcoat, underneath which I am wearing a black v-neck shirt and a pick-shaped silver necklace.

Then–

The auditorium lights were turned off, and MONOWHALES made their stage entrance.

View of the members of band MONOWHALES on stage, lit up in purple and green lights.

They hyped up the hall with some hard-hitting songs and great power vocals, even playing a brand new track for us to celebrate their final stop as the opening act on the tour, and the final Canadian show on the tour. The main phrase I remember from the chorus was caught in the middle. I also remember CTRL^^^ in particular. I really liked what I heard, and how fired up Sally was on vocals, dancing all over the stage, and at one point even leaping down into the main floor seating area and singing her way through the main aisles in an arc until she could leap back up onto the stage again. She led us in a handful of call-and-responses, and also encouraged us turn on our phone flashlights for one of their slower songs, the hall lighting up on all four levels.

I should have taken a photo of that; it was quite pretty to see.

They ended their set by asking us to stand up while they played their crazy-good cover of The Hand That Feeds by NIN. I loved it. We gave them a long, well-deserved round of applause and they left the stage, professing how grateful they were to have been able to join Mother Mother on tour and that, being fans as well, they were just as excited as we all were to see the upcoming performance. And, indeed, they went up to a Mezzanine-level box to join the rest of the crowd in watching the rest of the show.

Fun fact: With Teeth was the first NIN album I ever bought. On a less-fun note, I no longer have that particular CD, as it was one of dozens that I donated or gave away over the course of several moves in the past few years. I regret parting with it a little (I did keep The Downward Spiral), but it is now in the hands of one of my good friends from high school, who I know has been enjoying it. That’s something.

Back to the story at hand.

During the brief interlude in which the crew re-arranged the stage setup for Mother Mother, I took to my phone to work on a translation of the beautiful name by ALICE NINE., one of my favourite Saga compositions off VANDALIZE that takes deep inspiration from U2’s song Where The Streets Have No Name. It’s nowhere near done, but one of the lines of the song has the phrase 音速を越えてcross the speed of sound in it, and when I translated that, the melody for Speed of Sound by Coldplay immediately popped into my head and I queued it in my playlist for after the performance. I hadn’t heard that song in what felt like forever, though when it first came out, I played it on repeat over and over again.

Finally, the lights went out again, the stage, lit dimly, was filled with smoke, and Seven, the ethereal and vaguely eerie opening track from their latest album Inside, began to play.

Mother Mother took to the stage.

View of the members of Mother Mother on stage, lit up in purple lights.

As I mentioned above, I have gone to see Mother Mother many times, but each time I do they sound better than before with all their accumulated experience. And if you’ve never seen them live in concert, I can assure you: they sound really good live. I love their interesting rhythms and the complementary, wide-ranging tones of all of their voices. Their rhythm-heavy, melodic vocal harmonies are extremely cool. But then they also each take the lead in singing certain tracks. The drumming, bass phrases, and guitar work was all really good and right from the get-go Ryan called all of us to get up on our feet for the performance, which I was really glad of. It’s hard to dance in your seat.

But on my feet? Boy, did I ever dance.

Their setlist included tons of staples (like Ghosting, The Stand, and O My Heart), included a few older songs that I wasn’t familiar with (some song-research for the near future!) and a few of their newest songs (like Life and Girl Alone).

View of the members of Mother Mother on stage, lit up in rainbow-coloured lights.

It wasn’t any surprise that they played Hayloft and Hayloft II, considering the fact that Hayloft went viral months ago… which was much-deserved, because that’s been a favourite track of mine for years. The rhythm in it is completely addictive. I don’t think they’d included that one in many of the setlists for the shows I’d been to in the past, so I was genuinely ecstatic to hear those opening notes.

I was also genuinely ecstatic to hear the opening notes for The Drugs, Let’s Fall In Love, and Bit By Bit, two songs during which I danced my little heart out.

When Molly started singing Pure Love, everyone in the hall quietly took out their phones, turned on their lights, and swayed to the sweet melody. I can’t remember whether we turned on our lights for It’s Alright, but that performance utterly moved me. It was so heartfelt and raw, and those lyrics truly capture the experience of having mental illness, of making mistakes that you regret, with honesty, and such humanity.

At the time the song came out (on their Dance and Cry album in late 2018), I was in a complicated situation, in a bad place mentally, and that song really spoke to me. A lot of the songs on that album did.

Mother Mother’s lyrics can have such a down to earth, conversational style, and are written with a raw honesty that doesn’t feel tired or overused; I love their lyrics. Having three people on vocals also provides ample opportunity for a lot of very good harmonies and call-and-response moments.

During Sick of the Silence, the band and the audience all let out cathartic yells.

The silence during the worst of the pandemic was hard to bear, but the stillness was worse. I attended so many concert livestreams, and the music sounded great through my headphones or through the sound system attached to my TV. When you’re watching a livestream, though, you don’t get to feel the sound buzzing and thrumming through the hall; you don’t get to sense the energy of the band and the concert-attendees around you–a palpable, visceral thing.

That’s what I missed most.

It was a really good night, and I’m so glad I went.

On the way home from the venue the air was warm but a strong breeze was sweeping through the streets, so with Coldplay’s Speed of Sound on repeat, I let my long coat trail behind me and floated home on a music high.