Dancing part deux

OK so I can't dance, not in any trained or conventional manner. But I did form a style of dancing that is both original and totally ripped off. Obviously I put my own spin on it, but it was a style of dancing pretty indigenous to alternative music listening between 1994 and 1996. I don't have a name for this dancing but its similar to skanking, some may call it freak dancing. I first saw it at an all ages show in a high school gym in 1995, a girl named Becky Weston was dancing in brown cords, a cardigan and combat boots to a band called the Stillborns. She was waving her arms like you would in a skank, arms bent and moving side to side but her feet weren't kicking out and she wasn't spinning around. More and more after that I saw other kids doing this, and at the time I didn't question it but now I wonder who came up with this? Soon after I saw people dancing like this in a 1996 documentary about the north west music explosion "Hype" and also in the crappy film portrait of mid 90's style and music "Empire Records." OK so it was great to see Liv Tyler in a tight sweater, plaid skirt and docs one more time, but that doesn't excuse the fact that I didn't care about any characters in the movie at all.
Anyhow this is the only way I have ever danced. I dance this way all rock music I enjoy and I even danced like this once at a Latin dance club to horrified onlookers. At a local concert when I was 16 (again in the same QECVI high school gym) I danced so hard like this, jumping, flailing, my legs tossing around like limp noodles, I pulled out my groin and couldn't try out for rugby.

From the department of obvious shit: White people are bad dancers

I live in Toronto, and every Saturday you can dance in the large back room of the Clinton's which plays all 60's pop. Mostly stuff like The Beatles, James Brown, Wilson Picket, your basic hits from Motown and Atlantic records. In any case I really like dancing to this music, its pretty much the only music I will dance to. Some people will dance to anything just because they like dancing. This is not me. I can only dance to music I am familiar with, enjoy, and know the lyrics too. Knowing the lyrics to a song I am dancing to is imperative since most of my dancing consists of just singing along. Now this goes for any type of music I enjoy from Michael Jackson to Smashing Pumpkins, however you don't hear Cherub Rock in dance situations very often and you can't really dance to it. This is obviously not a big problem for me specifically going back to my point about just singing along to the music I am dancing to. But this music from the 60's is pretty much the best dance music that has been produced in the past five decades. My formative years in the 90's were dominated by alternative rock, boy bands and pilled up ravers dancing to jungle. So, how was I ever supposed to learn how to dance? I never listened to modern dance music, because it's awful and no one I ever knew was a good dancer.

Why is dancing so inherently easy in other cultures? Its because all their music is based on being danceable. Most music in South America, Spanish culture, Africa, and India are all made so you can listen and dance to it simultaneously. I grew up listening to alternative rock and punk, attached to these are forms of dancing but more accurately forms of jumping, screaming and falling into other people. Even white kids who listened to music with rhythm such as rap and techno, didn't dance to it, they just enjoyed it while playing Sega. Or blasting it out the windows of their Toyota Civic hatch backs at a volume that would rival a nuclear bomb detonation. I always wondered what the fascination was with parking in donut shop parking lots and amplifying Tupac so loudly out of car stereos it would set off car alarms. That's small town,white living for ya.

As I stared out into the crowd at Clinton's on Saturday night I saw a sea of white faces, clenching beer bottles in their hands and bobbing up and down. Their feet didn't move a lot, their arms do most of the dancing as well as their heads keeping time as they nod up and down. Couples awkwardly grope each other not moving in simultaneous rhythm as they keep trying to regain a steady movement they can maintain for a solid minute. I always thought everyone was looking at me, judging as I tried desperately to dance well, copying any move I could from someone who looked like they knew what they were doing. But then I realized no one knew what they were doing.

Nothing has changed since I was 14. Maybe I never learned to dance because I went to school dances for only one year in high school: grade 9. And what did I do at them? What everyone other 14 year old boy did, I waited until they played a slow dance song (Don't Cry by Guns and Roses) so you I could try and make out with a girl. So at least I learned how to do that. Thank you Jen Beck and Rebecca Campbell for those private lessons.

1st semester of grade 10 - One Hot Minute

In grade 10 I left the suburbs and went to school downtown. This isn't exactly like comparing moving from the burbs to Manhattan, but at the time for me, it kind of was. I was now at a school where expression was encouraged so I died my hair black, got a wallet chain and started wearing my dad's old green khakis and his beat up old blue zip up hoodie from the 70's. I was at a school where I didn't know anyone but pretty soon I had made a few friends. My first friend was Hrag, we both wanted to start a band but we didn't know how to play our instruments yet so we just listened to a lot of Red Hot Chili Peppers.
I had never really listened to the Chili's much but when I was 15 One Hot Minute came out and got into them through that record. Of course I knew Under The Bridge but I had never really listened to Blood Sugar Sex Magic which is the album you should get into the Chili's with. A friend of mine who's favourite band is Van Halen once told me that he got into VH through the album 5150 their first record Sammy Hagar after the departure of David Lee Roth. Not exactly the record you should fall in love with Van Halen with. This was the same with One Hot Minute, the first and only record with Dave Navaro on guitar after the departure of guitarist John Frusciante. A lot of Chili's fans dismiss this record but it has some really great songs on it, mainly the singles Warped, Aeroplane and My Friends. Sure it's nothing compared to the Frusciante albums but Navarro does a great job, he fit in well with the band and their sound, he was a little heavier but he was still funky. After that I went backwards and got really into the Chili's back catalogue mainly Blood Sugar Sex Magic and Uplift Mofo party plan but I still think that Warped is one of the best album openers I have ever heard. I also think Aeroplane is one of the best video's of the 90's.

Gossip Column 1995

I have a friend who still believes every ridiculous piece of popular gossip he hears. Example: When I was in university in 2003 he told me that Damon Albarn had AIDS and that he got it from Blur drummer, Dave Rowntree. This of course is untrue and the rumour probably formulated via broken telephone from Oasis' Noel Galligher saying of Blur in around 1995 "I wish they would catch AIDS and die." The point I'm getting at is that my friend is now 30 and he stills introduces these rumours as actual topics of conversation. I'm pretty skeptical of these types of rumours but like most people I believed a lot of this crap when I was a teenager. I believed that Da Brat and Lil Kim had a gallon of semen pumped from there stomachs. I believed Marilyn Manson had his ribs removed so he could blow himself, however I never believed that he was Paul from the Wonder Years or the kid from Mr. Belvedere.



My favourite false claim from when I was 15 was that the Nirvana song Sliver was about Kurt getting molested by his grandfather. I don't remember who the girl was who told me this, but she was the kind of girl who was intent on grieving over Kurt Cobain's death for as long as she could. She was also the type of person intent on co-opting other peoples sadness to in turn be depressed herself, and fit in with the popularized, morose generation of the mid 90's. Anyways, she told me that the song Sliver was about Cobain getting molested by his grandfather. At the time I didn't really care about Nirvana, I cared about Weezer, so I was slanted towards debating this claim instead of excepting it as a fan. I asked her why she thought that and her basis for the argument was that in the song Cobain sang over and over "grandma take me home." This seemed pretty weak and I never believed this claim.Nowhere in this song could I find evidence that Kurt was claiming to have been raped by his grandfather. Kurt was most certainly depressed and wrote a lot of dismal poetry but he also wrote a lot of dumb punk rock too. Sliver sounds like, quite literally, the story of a kid having a shitty time at his grandparent's house while his parents were at the movies.

Buying Pot

I recently had a conversation about buying pot. I would like to make clear that I don’t buy pot (not for a very long time at least) but never the less this is what the conversation was about and the person I was conversing with casually told me that they only buy weed online. ONLINE? Apparently you can send cash in the mail to an online “dealer” in British Columbia and they send you weed via Canada Post. He said despite how sketchy this transaction sounds that this site has the best customer service he has dealt with online buying, “Better than Ebay and Amazon” he said to me. I was amazed. This was the last of the things that the Internet could not sell I thought, but I was apparently wrong. We don’t need stores anymore; we can cut out the middleman, now it can be just manufacturers and your house.
The whole thing just got me to think how much has changed in the way we live our lives in such a short time.
In the 20th century the world gave birth to the car, the television, films, the radio, and the computer all things that revolutionized society. Since 1994 we have launched so many things that never thought we would ever need to rely on but we completely do.

When I was 14 the Internet existed but nobody had it (I didn’t physically use it until I was 15 and I still didn’t really get what it did).

Cell phones also existed but again nobody had them except doctors and coke dealers. If you worked on Friday night and didn’t call people at dinner time to make plans you were screwed because at 9:00pm no one was home and there was no way to get a hold of them.
Now we text our friends all day while at work and never pick up our phones to talk EVER!

Much Music only played music videos and every show they played had to do with playing music videos.

You couldn’t download any music; you had to buy an album even if you only liked one song on it.

You don’t have to wait in line for concert tickets anymore. Now you can just wait until the second they are available online and then have some scalper buy all of them (the second after they are available online) and you buy them off of him on Craigslist for double the price. Thank God for that convenience huh?
But at least now people line up at high-end shoe stores to buy designer sneakers. This I don’t understand.

There were no email lists; everything came in the mail (today’s is much more efficient, although I liked getting newsletters in the mail from the Green Day idiot club).

Reality television didn’t exist (except COPS and The Real World).

CD burners didn’t exist, until I was 17 and no one had them for another 2 or 3 years after that. I can’t remember the first CD I ever burned, but I remember going to someone else’s house when I was 20 to download all the music I wanted for a keg party and burn it onto a CD. That took 4 hours.

Digital camera’s existed but they cost thousands of dollars. The first time I ever used one was 1999 and it was 3 mega pixels and was the size of a brick.

DVD’s didn’t exist until 1997 and no one started buying them until I was 21 (2001).

When I was 14 you had to buy everything at a store. Very few times in my young life did I order something from a catalogue other than albums or t-shirts or skateboards. Now you can buy a house on Ebay. You don’t have to interact with anyone anymore when making a purchase you just have to order it. This is not to say that retail stores aren’t still thriving but even stores are becoming more condensed. They will eventually condense into websites.

It was hard to get porn when you were under 18 and if you scored a Playboy underage you kept it forever. Now porn is a bigger than the music industry and we can view porn 24 hours a day for free at any age. I kind of wish this was around when I was 15.

Basically if you’re dedicated you can stay in your house and live your entire life electronically without any human interaction. In 20 more years you won’t even have to be dedicated that’s just the way it will be and if we don’t learn to live with it we’ll be struggling to catch up.

Oh and of course you don’t have to go to a paranoid guy’s dark apartment to get weed anymore you just have to order it online and have it delivered in the mail along with the birthday card from your grandma.

The biography of my grade 5 class

Public school gym class sucks if you're not a jock. If you're fat or shitty in nets you’re totally fucked. This is a bio of my grade five class (starting top left and going right) and I reserve the right to spell everyone’s last name incorrectly.

Bobbie Joe Reese
Bobby Joe got a lot of flack for being over weight and most jokes consisted of her eating incredible large things like buildings and planets. The brilliance of grade 5 students is astounding isn’t it?

Robbie Hopkins
Robbie was one of my best friends and he used to wear rubber boots all the time because he was too lazy to lace up shoes. We once sold an old skateboard to his younger next-door neighbour for 50 bucks and then hired this older, mentally delayed kid named Mike to buy us a Playboy with our industrious earnings.

Christa Balkasoon
I had a big crush on Christa and I ended up dating her in grade eight but I was afraid to kiss her. She had hearing aids and I used to endearingly tease her that she had AIDS in her ears.

Jess Fleming
Jess was my best friend and still is to this day. Jess has always been the same, a little beyond her years and little removed from popular thought and humorously cynical. I could have easily pictured Jess in grade 5 with a smoke in her hand bitching about pop culture and explaining the genius of Mike Patton and John Waters.

Jay Verney
Jay was the tough guy and didn’t care if he got in trouble. One day he just moved away and no one ever saw him again. Cleverly the week before he moved, he borrowed as many Nintendo games as he could off of everyone and then got the fuck out of Dodge.

Graham Weston
Graham lived behind me and I was good friends with him. We actually got into stamp collecting this year.

Matt Milligan
Matt was a powerhouse who had moved to my city from Oshawa. He always had tons of money and would take us to the candy store at lunch. He was the strongest kid in school and excelled at sports. I saw him beat up Todd Adam and Matt Emigh at the same time once, no one jumped in to save them because at the time we thought he would literally kill us.

Marlena Szpunar
Marlena wasn’t especially popular but wasn’t un-popular either she was just kind of around, at least that how I perceived her existence. I never knew her that well even though she lived about 10 houses away from me my entire life. Marlena was an excellent student and her family was also a bunch of geniuses her brother was an engineer and her mother was a physics professor. In high school Marlena would become the hottest girl in school and become a model. Some grade twelve guy scooped her up about a month into her high school career.

Nikki Rust
Niki was a girl from Texas and I’m pretty sure I was afraid of for some reason. I was good friends with her brother Bart. Bart was a great baseball player because in Texas they take that sort of thing seriously. He thought our baseball leagues were a joke when he was 10 and used to pitch balls right at kids heads on purpose.


Matt Emigh
Matt (nick named Will) was one of my best friends but he got picked on a lot. His claim to fame was that his dad drove a Hostess chip truck and Matt bartered with everyone using chips. Of course Matt very rarely produced these chips but when he did everyone knew exactly how much they owed them for example, “Hey Will you owe me 5 big bags and 7 little bags.” The thing is even though Matt hardly ever produced chips no one ever stopped bartering with him for chocolate bars or baseball cards. I guess everyone always had an illusion of a grand pay off one day.

Me
I don’t remember myself from grade 5 but I do remember doing poorly in school and I remember where I sat in class. Actually, maybe I don’t.

Robert Williams
Robert was the bad kid. Robert was always getting into trouble and thus you could blame anything bad you did on Robert and the teacher would believe you. Robert was an amazing artist and if he had gotten to go to an arts program he would have been fine. Sadly though Robert was pushed through the system with no guidance and then got really into acid.

Luke King
Luke had a vibrating chair in his rec room. I spent the better part of a summer playing the card game Asshole in his basement.

Claire Dixon
Claire was the girl from England. Claire was a really cool girl who was always a little strange but in an interesting and artistic way. She was at a young age an intellectual and a fantastic writer and poet with thoughts way above her age. She gave me the treat out her lunch every day because every day my lunch sucked without fail.

Jessica Ross
I gave this girl a hard time and I have no idea why. I think I had a crush on her when I was in grade two and this other girl Analise made fun of me about it so I started disliking Jessica to prove this other girl wrong. I guess that just stuck.

Todd Adam
Todd was the kid with two first names, which is kind of like an omen for evil. The fact was that Todd was a pretty nice kid but he had a wild streak. Todd also had an uncontrollable oral fixation; he chewed on everything like a hamster. All his sleeves had been chewed apart and he ate all his pens and pencils. At least once every two days Todd would have a pen explode in his mouth and he’d be covered in ink leaving him looking like some sort of cannibalistic murderer with a bowl cut.

Geoff Fisher
Geoff was the cool guy and another best friend of mine. Geoff was a really confident guy who was good at just about everything but he wasn’t a jerk at all. He never took any criticism about his interests or what how he chose to dress seriously because whether he knew it or not Geoff was a trend setter. Everyone would make fun of something he was wearing and within a week everyone would have purchased what Geoff was wearing (baggy pants or a hat with a metal plate on it.) Geoff also started the No Fear shirt revolution at my school.
Back when things were pure I spent my entire grade 8 summer hanging out with Geoff, riding bikes, hanging out at my cottage and watching Stand By Me. That was the best summer of my life. Other than the summer after 1st year university when I got shit faced everyday.

Doug Sibley
Doug wasn’t a bad guy but he was nerdy. His family were all the same way too, they were like a Saturday Night Live sketch of a stereotypical family of nerds. At a school charity auction his family auctioned off a night with them in their hot tub. And the other nerdy family the Toppings bid on it and won. I would give a million dollars to have a videotape of that spectacular evening. I also changed a sign on his front gate from BEWARE OF DOG to BEWARE OF DUG.

Matt Bonaparte
I hung out with Matt quite a bit. His best friend was Tyler Dungy and they had their own little clique of girls that they hung out with. And if you haven’t already assumed this I will confirm it for you...yes, his nickname was Boner.

Tyler Dungy
Tyler’s nickname was Spike and I have no idea why. In our grade one yearbook under desired profession he wrote cement plant worker. I guess everyone just wrote down what his or her dad did though, except me. I wrote down that I wanted to be a comedian. Billy Bevens wrote down that his favourite food was side pork.

Mike Rochon
Mike was another wild child from the burbs, I think this is the only picture in Mike’s public school career he wasn’t crossing his eyes in. There are many great stories about Mike but I like the one where he built a gas bomb out a slim fast container. When it exploded on to the side of his house covering it in gas fueled flames he tried to extinguish the fire by smothering it with pieces of chopped wood.

Steve Oakley
Steve was like the mascot of our school, he was a short, doughy little character who was a great artist and he was hysterically funny. Steve was the obsessed with the concept of “gay” not homosexuality but gay. We didn’t really know what gay was but making light of anything gay was hysterical when we were 11. It basically went as far as referring to everything as gay i.e. “You’re gay”, “that’s gay” “stop being so gay.” Steve’s life also revolved around three stuffed frogs he owned who he named the Doses. There was the leader Steve Dose, the middle Dose Matt Dose and Sean Dose was the gay Dose. Steve lived in a fantasy land of comic strips he drew of the Doses. The Doses all had tuxedos and remote control Jeeps and they all listened to Gangsta Rap.

Mike Coles
Mike was the third wild child in class. Mike was a very nice kid who did well in school but was really reckless. He also never got caught for any of the damage he caused on a daily basis. Mike always got us into trouble though and we were always getting hurt somehow by involving ourselves in his schemes. But the one time when I accidentally hit him in the face with a brick his parents lost their fucking minds on me as though I had destroyed his life by giving him a bruise. They forbid me from hanging out with Mike citing me as a bad influence never knowing that Mike would convince us to do things like ride our BMX bikes off a cliff and onto a rock beach.

Danny Hulton
Danny was a good friend of mine and at the time I never saw the writing on the wall for him to be a possible nerd candidate. However right around the time this picture was taken Danny was just discovering Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons and computers. But Danny would have made a great indie rocker, he had the hair (and later on the glasses) and he was into the Doors.

Nicole Steglich
Nicole was very vibrant and creative. I used to play Mario Kart on Super Nintendo with her at her house all the time.

Jenna Ray Leader
I surprisingly remember this girl's name but I couldn’t tell you a thing about her or what ever happened to her. I don’t even remember if she was in that class for the whole year.

Tracy Shales
This is my one story about Tracy Shales. One time her cat had kittens and some crawled under her bed and died. Then when a bad odor began growing in her disastrous room she cleaned out the junk pile from under her bed and found rotting, half de-composed kittens.

Tara McMun
Tara was the smallest person I ever knew except for her sister who must have weighed about 12 pounds when she was 10 years old.

The time I sort of met Notorious B.I.G.

The time I sort of met Notorious B.I.G.

On my 16th birthday I got to visit NYC. I tagged along on a road trip with my mom who was taking one of her students to interview for a summer internship with Michael Moore. This was in 1996 and at the time Michael Moore wasn't as big a deal as he is today. He had a cult following but wasn't a national celebrity yet. Anyways, I got to go to his office and although he wasn't there I looked through his CD's and thought it was cool that he listened to Rage Against the Machine. Looking back though, this was a pretty obvious listening choice for him.
We stayed at my mom's cousin George's house. George is a very straight laced, corporate business man with little interest in popular culture or anything artsy for that matter. Needless to say he wasn't very impressed that his attached neighbour in his New Jersey gated community was a loud, partying, gangsta rapper named Notorious BIG. Biggie like Michael Moore was also not a huge household name yet because A) he had only been around a few years B) rap hadn't yet exploded into the monster that it is today and C) he wasn't famous for being dead yet. So, I didn't really know him because of all of these reasons and the fact that I had absolutely no interest in rap at all.
Even though George hated Biggie (mostly because of the noise that he made) he managed to keep newspaper clippings of all the violent crimes Biggie had been involved in. I guess George did in some way think it was mildly amusing or "cool" that was living next door to a famous rapper.
So, while I was visiting two things happened involving Biggie that I like to tell people (especially teenagers who love Biggie Smalls, which makes me look cool.) The first thing is that the night I stayed at George's, Biggie not surprisingly had a loud party. When the party was in full force my mom yelled at Little Kim and Faith Evens telling them to shut up when they were talking loudly on a balcony outside my mom's room when she was trying to sleep.
The second thing is that the next day when I was leaving the house to go to NYC I ran into Biggie and his even larger bodyguards/entourage and he said to me "Party loud enough for ya'll?" to which I responded "No."
That was my meeting with Biggie Smalls.
A few months later Biggie got killed and everyone knew who he was. I told my friends at that point that I had a chance meeting with him and everyone actually believed me because they new I was clueless when it came to rap.

Dating in high school

Dating in high school. It's the same 10 years later except sex is probably more common and people aren't as awkward and ugly as they were in high school.
Falling in love for the first time is lot like smoking pot for the first time. You're wondering if it worked. Is what I'm feeling love? How do I know I love them? I guess you just know. I remember the first time I knew I was in love... not surprisingly I was 17 and drunk and I told my girlfriend I was in love with her. I meant it but like many more times I would need alcohol to boost my confidence to express myself. Later that night I had a dream that I pissed myself, but when I woke up luckily it was a dream and I was dry. Another magical night at John's place.

Things you believed in high school

-If the bus is even 5 minutes late that means you don't have to go to school. It's the law you know?
-If the teacher is even 5 minutes late showing up for class that means you can leave and class is cancelled. It's the law you know?
-If you press your temples hard enough you'll die.
-Anyone who could do any sort of half assed Metallica solo was the best guitarist you knew.
-They changed the name of Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC because they couldn't legally call it chicken anymore.
-Someone in a grade ahead of you put acid in a teachers cup of coffee and the teacher freaked out and had to go to the hospital.
-Someone in a grade ahead of you wrote a phiosphy exam and the only question on the exam was: Why? And the student wrote: Why not? And they got 100%
-Someone in a grade ahead of you wrote an exam on acid and wrote the entire essay on one line of the page
-Drug dealers laced their weed with cocaine. Anytime you got really stoned you'd claim that it was laced with something. But why would a drug dealer add a really expensive drug to their weed at no extra cost?
-If you go to Jane and Finch corner in Toronto you'll get shot guaranteed.
-Cyprus Hill smoked six pounds of pot in one day.
-Dean is wearing a gas mask on the album cover of Ween's the Pod because the band members were huffing aerosol through the entire recording.
-A guy tried to cross the border with sheets of acid taped to his chest and he got nervous and started to sweat and all the acid entered his skin through osmosis. He freaked out and now he's in Kingston's metal hospital because he thinks he's a peach tree and the nurses have to water him.
-You know a guy who knows a guy who owns a bait shop that sells worms to McDonald's to make burgers out of.
-You know a guy who knows a guy who owns a lumber yard that sells saw dust to McDonald's to make burgers out of.
-Hoverboards are real but the government has made them illegal.
-Rob Zombie was on tour and stopped in Kingston to go trick or treating.
-A family in your neighbourhood went on vacation and when they came back all their stuff had been stolen except for their toothbrushes and their camera. They keep using their toothbrushes and when they get their film developed it's pictures of the burglars sticking their toothbrushes up their asses.
-If you eat Mr. Noodles raw you'll get cancer.
-If you eat raw hotdogs you'll die.
-There is a park in your neighbourhood where: you'll get stabbed, raped, pregnant, people worship Satan and sacrifice animals, older kids get drunk and beat the shit out of younger kids that come in.
-When you get your license there will be something to do.

Remember the radio?

Remember the radio? Remember when you couldn't just download anything you wanted exactly when you wanted it? There was a time when you had to wait to hear a song and it was special when you heard it. Everything is constantly evolving. My grade seven teacher used to call my generation the "microwave" generation meaning everything had to be instant. This was of course true, we had Nintendo and microwaves and always wanted things to be done that instant however, we still had a few things you had to wait for. You had to wait for a movie to come out on video, you had to wait for a music video to come on Much Music and you had wait to hear a song on the radio. You couldn't just download it and if you wanted that song you had to spend $18.00 and buy the whole CD. I had a lot of CDs when I was young for the soul function song.
The same went for discovering music, you had to subscribe to fan zines, research record labels and belong to fan and CD of the month clubs to find new music. Now you can find and preview anything instantly on the net.
There was a station called Z ROCK that was syndicated out of Austin Texas in Watertown NY and we could receive it an hour away in Kingston. This station would serve as a pre-Internet source for new music. Music like Weezer, Beck, Hole, Bush, Silverchair, Bad Religion, Korn, Type O Negative, Hum, The Nixons, The Toadies, Rage Against the Machine, Marilyn Manson and many more. Basically the entire DGC Records roster which housed the most popular bands of the moment. Every once in while you could even hear Love Buzz by Nirvana. But, just as soon as we had got a taste for new alternative rock it was taken away from us and the station was replaced by a country station. This was Christmas of grade 11.
Hearing a gem on the radio is still as rewarding as getting a letter in the mail. Everyone still loves getting mail and everyone still likes it when Eruption and You Really Got Me by Van Halen are played back to back on the radio. Or failing that Walk On The Wild Side by Lou Reed. And if it's a parallel universe you may catch Black Number One by Type O Negative.

Grade 10

In grade 10 I switched high schools and left the suburbs to go to a school downtown. Here is a little background about Kingston: The first fact is that it takes about 15 minutes to drive from one extreme end of the city to the other, 18 if you hit traffic. Traffic lasts for about 20 minutes at 5:00 when everyone gets off of work. Consequently looking back there was a lot of great divisions culturally in Kingston squeezed into a very small amount of space. Everything seemed so far apart and every part of town had it's own feel and it's own population yet dividing the wealthiest most well manicured part of town and the poorest most dangerous part of town was separted by about 5 minutes of driving.
Driving about 7 minutes from my neighbourhood to where my high school was located made a big difference. Everyone in my neighbourhood really strived to be the same and everyone was into hockey, tapered jeans, no fear shirts and grades. Downtown everyone was into haircuts, punk rock, all ages shows, pot, acid and mescaline. Drugs didn't interest me too much but new music did so I liked all these new alternateens immediately and was soon wearing ripped oversized work pants, shirts and ties and dying my hair blue.
The other fact that I want to make known is that every area in Kingston is not referred to in a north, south, east, west fashion it is referred to by name. The west was the "township" which is where I lived and basically everything else east of that was downtown even though it wasn't all downtown. My area, the township, was divided into 3 parts. My immediate neighbourhood was Reddendale, the middle was Henderson Place, and north of that was Bayridge or more affectionately known as the Ridge. The Ridge also had Cataraqui Woods which was inhabited solely by skids.
Downtown could be easily broken up into 3 main parts north and south of Princess (street) and Rideau Heights. North and south of Princess has always been a phenomenon and as easily as I can put it the south side is rich and well kept and the north side is considerably crappier and shadier. By phenomenon I mean that literally either side of Princess st which is a two lane street that spans the city is divided into these two extremes. Not to say that north of Princess or N.O.P. was horribly bad it was just a little undesirable. I spent a better part of my youth on this end of town and most of my friends and my girlfriend lived there. My high school was south of Princess and that neighbourhood was almost exclusively inhabited by doctors, lawyers, business and property owners and Queens University professors and all their long haired, burnout kids. It was downtown and much more open minded than my neighborhood but still sheltered by money. Rideau Heights was the force in town not to be reckoned with.
Rideau Heights was the northwest corner of the city which was out of everyone's way. We didn't go to their neighbourhood and they didn't come to ours, it was a different world. It was the projects of Kingston and compared to Rexdale it probably looks like Beverly Hills but lets face it this was a sheltered, small city and this neighbourhood of criminals and bikers was scary shit where I was from. For one semester of grade 11 I went to the feeder school for Rideau Heights, Queen Elizabeth Collegiate or QE for short. A lot of QE kids families had generations of family in prison, people had dirt floors, drug addictions and parents offering you bong hits while trying to sell you stolen stereo equipment. Everyone was doing B&E's, everyone had a child of their own in grade 10 and they were feeding their infants fries and Coke. There was a fight every period, the cops came at every break to make sure everything was ok and the fire alarm got pulled almost every other day. It was the best time every had in high school. I was at QE in a special theatre program with no homework and kids attending from all over the city, I was dating a 19 year old when I was 16 and we partied every night. I got a 90% in the program and I almost got to have sex.

Grade 9

Grade 9 was a great year... For a while. I am only going to talk about the good aspects of it though, mainly about getting more and more immersed with alternative rock and punk. My friend Robbie and I had been listening to a lot of Green Day and Offspring and we had at this point now bought their back catalogue and I had also bought the Dead Milkmen's first record Big Lizard In My Backyard. We knew that what we were listening to was mainstream but it was also new and we had never heard music that was fast and aggressive like this basically we didn't know what punk was and we didn't know we were listening to it. All I knew was that punks had Mohawks but I didn't know what they listened to. So we started finding other punk bands like Bad Religion and Rancid to listen to but at the same time I was listening to new bands like Blur, Oasis, Bush, Nine Inch Nails and Eric's Trip. Then one day I got a big order from Columbia House and a band called Weezer came in the box with a bunch of assorted junk. I wore this record out. I started with the single Buddy Holly and then listened to the back half of the record over and over again for about a week, then I decided to listen to the first four songs and they were incredible too. Once I started listening to the record in a linear entirety I was completely sold. Never had I heard such a well built album that mixed a sort of alternative pop punk with the feedback of Sonic Youth (even though I didn't know Sonic Youth at the time but I had to describe the record using them) and perfect three part harmonies. But it rocked too, the songs had a fantastic pop sensibility and were fun and big, there were great hooks and it was new. Although I have listened to thousands of bands since then and have had great loves in music for some reason that band has followed me through my entire life since then I have never gotten tired of their music and especially their eponymous debut record. I listened to the entire record everyday for years afterward occasionally finding unreleased tracks to keep me occupied until the new record was released which I kept praying for. In the meantime I found other interesting bands to listen to like Ween which would also stay in my interest through out my highschool years and even until now. I was dating a girl named Jenna Robins who lived in a big house on the edge of my neighbourhood. I can't remember how I met her but I do remember she liked the Beastie Boys a lot and so did I so we became friends and eventually started dating. Before the end of our month or so long relationship she showed me an album her sister had bought called Chocolate and Cheese by a band called Ween. This was different stuff, I didn't even know what genre it was because every song was different on the album, songs about HIV, spinal meningitis, a sick pony, lots of songs about food. I went out right away and bought it and I remember having fights at Jess' going away party about whether we should listen to "Baby Bitch" or "Mr. Would You Please Help My Pony" first. Next up grade 11 and Steve Webster's punk collection and I buy hear Weezer Pinkerton.

Why don't black kids like punk?

Why don't black kids like punk and alternative rock? I don't know. Maybe it's because they have been excluded from so much in white society that they just want to connect more with the music that speaks to their culture ie. rap. Why did I connect so well with alternative rock and punk? One explanation was that it was the immediate voice of my generation. I was always more interested in the melody and the song structure more than the lyrics though. That's not to say that I don't know or was not interested in the lyrics of songs I just paid more attention to the music itself. Anyhow, I connected well with aggressive and faster music like NOFX, Nirvana and Weezer because I was a hyper kid with lots of energy. Also, I identified well with more experimental rock like Pavement, Ween and Erics Trip because I was also interested in more artistically slanted composition. However, I was never interested in rap. A lot of my friends were interested in rap when we were younger but I just never identified with it at all and I hadn't ever liked anything I heard. I thought it was repetitive and boring and slow. I identified with a bigger and faster sound. However I can see now why a lot of kids in Kingston were interested in it: Because we had no black culture to learn from or connect with at all. Rap was distant and strange and new and white suburban kids were interested in that. A lot of kids loved to mimic the identity of rappers because they seemed dangerous and different and although everyone wants to fit in when they're young they also want to be different and unique. To be honest it was a very hard line to balance on and I always sucked at trying to be different and comfortable with myself. This was because I was different than most kids I knew when I was young and I didn't know how to fit in because I didn't know what I was interested in. And I wasn't interested in sports which is what EVERYONE was interested in. When I found music I realized what I was interested in finally and I started feeling more comfortable and confident. But I'm getting off topic.
Now as I have mentioned before their were very little visible minorities in Kingston. The minorities who were present wanted to fit in or just grew up with white music like everyone else and were obviously going to be interested in it. My friend Ali Kadeer was a Muslim who was into hardcore music so loud and fast it was incomprehensible. Johnny Manicat a Pilipino kid from the burbs who was the leader of a skate punk band. Mike Butler was a jazz saxophone player and although he tried he was still the whitest black kid I have ever met. So, instead of having actual black people in our city white kids created their own division of ethnic diversity through music. Punk kids who would skate out front of the church on Princess st. would have to endure white kids who thought they were black cruising by in Honda Civic's with obnoxious sound systems and blasting Puff Daddy so loud out of their subs they would set off parked car alarms. It's kind of like in Jurassic Park when their are only female dinosaurs and they spontaneously changed sexes in order to breed, such was a really white town lacking black culture. Some kids had to take it upon themselves to listen to rap and call each other "niggaz" and wear big white jeans from Stitches. God Bless Styles and Flo aka Chris Stebans and Andrew Wagger the original gangsters of Bayridge.

No one can drink when they're in high school

No one knows how drink alcohol in high school, it's almost a rule. Like most things in life you have to fail before you succeed, everything is a learning process and you have to try anything in life to know how to experience it. Drinking in high school is sort of like this except for the fact that in life majority of people learn from their mistakes after the first or second time and then work towards accomplishing something correctly. For some odd reason though drinking alcohol between the ages of 14 and 18 is something that no one ever really grasps. Is it because your mind is too over stimulated trying to quickly learn how to interact and thus "make out" with the opposite sex? Or, even more difficult and awkward in suburban high school, same sex. Is it because you're trying to hard to desperately fit in so you try and wow some socially cool strangers by drinking an entire canteen full of vodka in 2 minutes? In any case right about the time you start to get chest hair your brain seems to shut off the part that gives you power of any real logic and grants you the power to say to yourself "I've drank 5 beers and puked in a recycling bin in a cute girl's garage... I should probably drink that 6th beer I have as fast as I possibly can." Why do teenagers think that drinking as fast they possibly can is always a brilliant idea? This idea never fades. Maybe it's because you have to be home by 12:00 a.m. or maybe it's because you're getting a buzz and having such a good time you want it escalate quickly, that can certainly be understood. However when you continuously drink to excess and then have to get up at 8:00 a.m. on Saturday morning force down bacon and eggs to keep appearances and then mow you're lawn in July heat, is it worth it? Apparently yes. One note: Mowing your lawn is a good cover if you're hung over because you can throw up and then sound of the mower will mask the sound of projectile vomit and then you can mow over puke and turn it into untraceable particles of party evidence.
Teenage drinking effects the part of the brain that would tell you not to drink half a 40 of rye when you're 14 and call the gorgeous, popular girl in school and tell her she has a big nose (of course Val didn't tell me why she wouldn't talk to me for the rest of the summer until I was 18). It effects the part of the brain that would tell you not to throw a gallon of red paint into a dryer. It effects the part of the brain that would remind not to drink wine coolers until you're blind and ride you're bike into a cement wall. It effects the part of the brain that would remind you not to beer bong Goldslagger while on acid. It effects the part of the brain that makes you take off tuxedo pants half way to your house on a strangers lawn for no reason. It effects the part of the brain that tells you not to shoot Paxton Smith with a roman candle at point blank range. Yeah, there are tons more I'll write more as I think of them.

Way too quiet

It's quiet. Oh so supremely quiet. Only the sound of Airwalks and Adidas Campus' and baggy pant legs brushing against each other are heard as you walk through Reddendale. The only sound you can hear is Weezer blasting through your Sony Discman. No cars are driving through the neighbourhood at 10:00 pm on a winter night in January. The only sound is you grunting as you lug a 60 pound amp across a park through snow with a bass on your back to jam before you stop and decide to just sit and listen to Op Ivy or watch Much Music Spotlight on REM. Growing up with such extreme silence and nothing really to do usually causes you to rebel in a loud fashion. This can mean kicking over a recycling bin or lighting off fire crackers or anything that will result in a large banging noise. Smashing an empty botte of beer you stole from your dad? Think of being in Toronto amongst sirens and cars honking, people yelling, music blasting out of store fronts and restaurants and clubs. Hearing someone kick over a recycling bin isn't going to make a difference, no one will probably even notice or hear it at all actually. However, in a neighbourhood that was infinitely silent like mine making a big loud noise would make a big difference and would be exciting. In fact it would probably make headlines in the township newspaper. So, playing bass on the front porch or pulling the hood ornament on my neighbour's Cadillac to make the horn beep was always a promising way to break the silence and get your adrenaline racing as you ran and hurdled hedges back your own yard. That was usually just the time I had to be home anyways, just in time to watch the Wedge or catch Rancid as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live.

Adopting music

I had an interest in music before 1994 but not like after my grade 8 summer. I was into the Doors and I would listen to the Beatles albums that my parents had but I was completely out of the loop concerning the anything new. Of course I knew Smells like Teen Spirit and Jeremy and November Rain but as far as knowing names and albums I was in the dark.
My best friend Jess had really gotten into Grunge for the past few years but even though my best friend was listening to new and underground music I still had taken no interest. Music wasn't my thing but Jess and I found common interest in comedy and more specifically Kids In The Hall. One day at the end of grade 8 maybe it was just after graduation or maybe just before I saw the video for Black Hole Sun by Soundgarden. Something immediately clicked between me and that song and the incredible video that accompanied it and all of a sudden I was in love. I called Jess and asked her if she had the album that Black Hole Sun was on and she did, Superunknown.

By the end of the week I was listening to Soundgarden, Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins. Also in that week I had not stopped watching Much Music ever since I had seen Black Hole Sun and was craving more music and I was now taping music video onto VHS. I somehow had connected so deeply with Alternative music and it now taken over my life and all I cared about was listening to music and learning about new bands. Through out the summer I would begin to listen to Radiohead, Soul Asylum, The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blind Melon, Alice in Chains and of course the band that completely took over the summer and bled into the fall of my first year of high school the Offspring. The single on the radio Come Out and Play was catchy and fun but did not reflect the rest of the punk attitude record. When my friends and I first heard the whole album probably around the end of summer it was a sound that none of us had ever heard. We wanted more. I grew up listening to mellow sixties records that were collecting dust in my parents stereo cabinet. I was certainly familiar with new music and had been taking an active interest in it recently but this music was like nothing any of us had ever heard. It was fast and aggressive with a lack of solos and it just churned out raw energy and emotion. I started listening to music at a time of great transition. Kurt was dead and Grunge was still popular but it was on it's way out. All the Grunge artists with new records were the last gasp of the genre. When you really think about Grunge was almost an 80's genre when the scene which was close to dying was thrust into the spotlight with the popularity of Nirvana. Grunge was very dirty and hard for a general population to listen to but it had great ideas and was marketable. The big energy of sound with good song writing ideas, a classic rock tone and pop sensibility had now turned into great, big albums. Now, it had paved the way for the radio punk explosion which would include mainly Offspring and another band from the fall of 1994 and just in time for back to school: Green Day. It was the year punk exploded and music just seemed to be getting better and better.

Anna's quote

"If you weren't white in Kingston, chances are you were ceramic and holding a lantern on someone's lawn."
Anna Sudac

Things to do without a car

Picture a neighbourhood on the edge of a city. Dividing you from the city is a giant minimum security penitentiary farm field, on the other side is a conservation area. There is a small plaza with 6 stores and only 2 of any interest to teenagers. There was also a grocery store a bank a car garage and a hockey arena. So now, things to do without a car in a neighbourhood with nothing to do.

Climb on top of the public school and retrieve tennis balls
Go to the pizza parlour and get a steak and cheese sub
Go to Quick Check and buy 3 for a dollar cans of Pepsi to drink with steak and cheese sub
Eat steak and cheese sub in Robbie's basement
Play ping pong
Drive golf balls across Joreen park and into Chris Milner's pool
Try and beat the Legend of Zelda
Go to the concerrvation area Lamoins Point (this was a lot more fun when driving was added to these trips)
Ride your bike into the lake
Go swimming in the lake
Have a bon fire at the lake and hope girls show up
Hang out in front of Quick Check buy glass bottles of Coke and then turn in the bottle for 40 cents worth of candy
Smoke pot and then walk 4 km to Dairy Queen
Jump off the cliff at the quarry
Hang out in front of Quick Check some more
Play guitars in Robbie's basement
Go skateboarding
Throw snowballs at cars
Throw snowballs at a bus
Get served under age at the Chinese restaurant
Cut lawns for money
Shovel snow for money
Ride your bike to the mall and buy 2 4 1 pizza, Pavement and Ween cds and posters of Cindy Crawford
Watch Dazed and Confused over and over and over
Watch a Clockwork Orange over and over and over
Steal a Playboy from Quick Check
Hang out in front of Quick Check some more
Push a haybail onto the road
Walk around at night
Take a bus to the mall and smoke cigarettes in the food court
Listen to Green Day and the Offsping over and over and while playing NHL 94 on Sega
Steal golf balls from the Celebrity Sports World driving range
Hit golf balls into the lake and then go and find them
Play Frisbee (this involved 2 people tossing a frisbee to each other on the road)
Play 500 up (basically hit baseballs for your friends to catch)
Go to a party and hit on girls from other high schools
Date said girls for a week until their older boyfriends find out
Stay in Robbie's basement until the coast is clear
Go pool hopping (jumping into strangers pools at night when they're asleep)
Dye your hair
Shave the sides of your head your head (the under-cut)
Cat walk your bike down some steps
Go to the hospital
Fall out of a tree
Go to the hospital
Get drunk and fall off a roof
Suck it up and don't go to the hospital because your parents will find out you got drunk and fell off a roof
Just walk around
Talk about seeing a girl topless
Talk about how much more fun things will be when you can drive

Jeff Hopkinson

Jeff Hopkinson was a powerful force in my high school life because he was a good friend but was also as I would put it, the was the Ferris Bueller of my school. Jeff was clever and an individual all his own always wearing a ball cap like most but Jeff only had maybe 2 hats for the duration of school. By the time the first one was ready to be replaced it probably should have been replaced about 3 years previous. Things like this didn't matter to Jeff what he cared about was doing what he enjoyed and nothing else. And what Jeff enjoyed was alcohol mostly. But, don't get the wrong impression Jeff wasn't the popular football player who got drunk every weekend, got in fights and stole your woman. Instead Jeff was the guy who got drunk and lifted fake credit card numbers off the internet somehow and tried to order infrared glasses to a hotel.

Jeff was tech guy for the school which essentially meant running the lightboard for all the events that would happen in our auditorium. Through five years of doing this job Jeff managed through running events to somehow get a key to every door in the school. Since when you're a teenager school dominates a lot of your time finding ways to challenge that time becomes a full time job. And when you have a friend with a lot of keys that job became a career. We had a key to the elevator which came in handy from time to time and a key to the roof if you wanted to go and have beer on spare or a game of hockey during the winter when it froze.
Of course he also had a key to the lighting booth which Jeff had converted into a fairly well stocked bar. When police dogs were set loose into the halls to sniff out small time dealers pot in their lockers we quickly learned that we were in the clear because dogs can't smell alcohol in glass bottles. In fact I doubt they were ever even trained to because who figures some 17 year old is going to set up a bar in their high school. Well, they never met Jeff.
Jeff worked for internet Kingston because he was good with computers and he also worked at a grocery store. The only thing I can remember about Jeff and the grocery store is that he had taken a giant roll of expired meat stickers so that he could place individual stickers on his beers at parties so he wouldn't lose said beer.

The really cool stuff came from Internet Kingston. Jeff got everything that we have today that are a part of everyday life first. He got his hands on the first digital camera the summer of grade 11 which would have been 1997.
We brought it to my cottage and Jeff got a plastic case to take it under water so we could take pictures of ourselves underwater off of my dock. Then we launched Chubby bottles of pop at boats off my deck with a giant 3 man slingshot Jeff had built.

Jeff also got the first cd burner a concept I couldn't even grasp when he told me it. Mix tapes were still envogue and the fact that you could now in 1997 make you're own mix cd was a big deal. Using this to his advantage Jeff did a marketing project on his grocery store, wrote it drunk the night before and talked in length about how Adult Only Video located beside the grocery store helped improve business by luring perverts in to buy food. Then he handed the entire project in on a cd rom he had made from the brand new burner and got 100%.

Jeff had a new idea everyday and it was always devious yet carefully planned like the time he tried to buy a giant, old coastguard boat and throw keg parties on it until he raised the $60, 000 cost to fill the tank and then travel to Florida. It was a good idea but Jeff's bid on the vessel wasn't high enough at $2,000. He had a working stop light in his basement that he aquired when it blew down in a wind storm. Jeff could played the tin flute and guitar and he loved the Pogues and Guns and Roses. Infact Jeff dropped grade 12 math the day of the exam so he could go and see the Pogues in Toronto.

When he went to college he got kicked out of the only 2 bars in his college town in under a week and as the resourceful person that he is figured out how to make wine from a package fermented in mason jars.

White town

left: 18 in the 90's

Kingston was probably the whitest place in the entire world. It was old and white. The city was one of the first settlements in Canada and it's close to 400 years old (I just got back from Vienna though and apparently that's not that old.) It was settled by white British people, it was home to the first Prime Minister of Canada Sir John A McDonald and it was the first capital of Canada. Everyone had the last name Smith, McDonald, Johnson or Anderson. And because I grew up in the suburbs every kid was named, Ryan, Brian, Matt, Robert, Chris, Karen and Jessica. There are no black people in Kingston. Wel,l in actuality their are probably something like 100 black families spread out over a city of 160,000 people. I'd say that would put it in the range of housing about 40 black people and that's probably being generous. We had some Philippino kids and lots of Portuguese families but that was basically our extent of diversity. Even so, Portuguese kids are pretty damn close to being white and all the Philippino kids were either into skate punk, dj Shadow or Notorious BIG and both were Catholic so they were not exactly separated from the Johnson's and the Smiths of the town. What were they going to instead anyways? They all grew up in white suburban culture too. And, what did it matter? None of them when to my high school they all went to Catholic school so I had no chance of exploring non white, white kid culture. Any real shot of being effected by other cultures was totally out of reach unless you want to count Marilyn Manson (he was a hot ticket in the 90's.)

My high school was something like the second oldest secondary school in Canada, it was built in 1792. It was incredibly old in every respect. It was also on Queens University campus which is probably the most elite university to go to in Canada. So what happens? Well, rich people in Canada are old and white and they send their rich white kids to school in Kingston. So now we have more white kids! And not only that... rich, snotty white kids! And the only thing they brought to the city was a "better than you" attitude and occasionally good hash.