The Wizard of Id

[In an effort to get Castpost working for me again, I'm taking off all copyrighted materials. This was My Ever Changing Mood by The Style Council. 3/27/06]

Here's another tune guaranteed to get you through the winter. Well, if you're anything like me, I guess. This one's getting maximum rotation on the mp3 player as it seems to make any and all surroundings into a movie montage of maximum joy. Bipolarity has never been so celebratory.

Does anyone listen to The National Playlist on CBC weekday mornings? It's a nifty concept and a fun show hosted by young and handsome tolerable Canadian goofball Jian Ghomeshi. They've had Grant Lawrence, host of CBC3's weekly podcast, on all this week, and his naïve but authoritatively delivered musical opinions have been driving me crazy. Today Ian Thomas, who is one of the other panelists, didn't like one of Grant's bland choices, so Grant started on a sarcastic rant about how hip hop is a new style of music Ian might not have heard about and how much he loves a particular Ian Thomas song from the 70's. It was really mean and made me so mad that I unsubscribed myself from the CBC3 podcast, even though he sometimes plays some pretty interesting Canadian indie rock on it.

Yesterday, on returning The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin to the video store while our clothes dried at the laundromat, I ran into the father of my childhood best friend, who was coincidentally the one who introduced me to the show back in the seventies. Very strange. I told him that I'd rented it and it hadn't really held up, and he didn't seem too surprised. In fact, he barely remembered the show. It's funny that in my memory it was his favourite show and the times spent with him and my friend watching it in their den were some of the greatest examples of hilarity and male bonding ever. Just goes to show you what a uniquely personal, Rashomonian version of events memory is. He asked me if I was still in Sloan.

Last night I dreamed for a long time that I was at a party at which I expected not to know anyone, but ended up seeing a lot of figures from my past with whom I'd fallen out of touch. It was a little uncomfortable because I didn't really know the hostess very well at all, and certainly didn't know how they all knew her. More and more people gradually populated the place, and it started getting louder and harder to move or hear, or even think. Just as it was reaching a fever pitch and I wondered how I was going to ever get out of there, someone yelled my name from upstairs, loudly enough that it cut through all the hubbub. I looked upstairs to see who it was, but there was no one there, and I suddenly realized that everyone else had also disappeared the moment my name was bellowed. I woke up confused. Then I went back to sleep and had an equally long but much more pleasant dream wherein I was sitting in the back seat of a car driving at night and watching the car ahead of us in our headlights through the windshield. Nothing happened, and I couldn't see anything else because it was pitch black, but it went on and on like that. It was a great relief and very relaxing after the previous dream. I don't really know what either one means exactly, but the juxtaposition seems significant.

- Andrew