So I fell out of the bed last night…

Some nights when I’m sleeping I have vivid dreams and I’ll wake with a start, shouting and sometimes flailing at an imaginary snake or other menace. When Sharon moved in she brought her recently-purchased bed to replace the aging one that I had inherited from friends of mine. I’ve taken to sleeping right at the edge as though my body was trying to reject the comfortable middle. Maybe it’s because the new bed doesn’t sag and it feels strange for my body to be horizontal when I move closer to the center.

Last night I had another intense dream. This time I was in my Mom’s house, in the spare room, and the side door was open where I was sure there was some sort of creature or dangerous criminal at the threshold. I jumped up and lunged towards the door only to wake up yelling “ahhhhhh” as I fell right off the bed onto my floor.

After making sure I was ok, Sharon demanded that I try and sleep closer to the middle. It felt awkward and unnatural and I wasn’t really able to get back to sleep. It was 5am and nearly time to get up anyway.

There’s been much change in my life over the past few months. Sharon moving in is the most recent event and it’s going to take some time for me to adjust to things like sleeping in the middle of a new bed. It’s likely going to take her some time to discover all my quirks and strange ways that come from being a bachelor who’s never understood the point of spending money on comfort.

Pearl Jam 20

Last night we wheeled up to the Esplanade 6 theater in North Vancouver to see the Pearl Jam 20 film. The film was only played on Sept 20 at 7pm and anyone who missed it will have to wait for the DVD release on October 24. It covers Pearl Jam’s 20 year history with a heap of archival footage and interviews.

They would have been a wild band to see when the got started out. Their shows were high-energy and Eddie would climb onto lighting racks and speaker towers, often to jump into the crowd below. Check out this clip from their first Pink Pop Festival appearance in 1992. There was some good footage of them yelling at MTV execs at the Singles release party and many of their early shows. Everyone there was happy to see a clip from Pearl Jam’s first show at the Town Pump in Vancouver where Eddie was getting worked up about the bouncers roughing up some kid in the crowd.

The theater even brought in a young, likely local, band to do a few PJ covers before the film. Neat band. Drummer played like Animal off The Muppets.

Beyond the Wheel

That was the title of my favorite song from tonight’s amazing Soundgarden show. Those guys came out and thundered! They haven’t put out the new album yet so it was a set full of their early stuff like Gun, Beyond the Wheel, Slaves and Bulldozers, and many, many other great songs.

Chris Cornell was sporting a new beard and long hair that made him look a little like “The Dude” from Big Lebowski. Kim Thayil was all mysterious looking and was also rocking the beard but with much more grey than he had back in the 90′s.

Meat Puppets, who you might know from having written a couple of songs that Nirvana covered on their Unplugged performance, put on an inspired set to start things out. Those dudes are getting old, but they still rock out. The bassist looks a bit like Relic from the Beachcombers. They had a short show but managed to stuff it full of the Nirvana unplugged material and their big 90′s hit, Backwater. I’m glad I finally got to see them.

Then Queens of the Stone Age came out and delivered an avalanche of rock. Josh and his band are tight and blew through their time. It seemed like they’d just gotten started and then they had to leave. In hindsight they performed a bunch of songs but it all went by too quickly.

Now I’m home, starting to wind down, and have to pack for my cycle trip (my first real one!) to Nanaimo tomorrow to hang out with Dave for the weekend.

Terminal City Roller Girls

This past weekend Sharon and I hit up the Terminal City Roller Girls vs. Axles of Annihilation (from Portland) roller derby bout in Richmond. Incredibly fun! I think it’s my new favorite sport since it mixes athletic competition with plenty of crashes and action. It’s kinda got a punk-rock theme about it too. I’ll be going again for sure. There’s another bout on August 13.

Rick Mercer has a good video that outlines the sport. Check the TCRG YouTube site for some local video.

Car Free!

I’ve decided to get rid of my car at the end of the summer. Years ago I was car free as well, but I took a job at the south end of Richmond where there were no reasonable transit options and I broke down and picked up a ’97 Honda Civic to get me to work. I discovered that I hated commuting. Being stuck in traffic for 45 minutes makes one’s blood boil over and you get home all wound up from the drive. Even now I find driving in the middle of the city gets my stress levels up. Sharon has been enjoying the creative expressions I yell when I’m stuck behind some monkey on the road. “You goddamn **** donkeys!” I’ll hollar at someone who doesn’t notice the green light.

Stress levels are managable now that I don’t commute anymore (30 minute walk to work!). The big reason is cost. I’ve been opening a number of savings accounts at ING Direct so that I can have automated savings plans for my yearly expenses. For example, if I have $130 automatically put away every month for car insurance, then I can pay cash when it comes due in November. I have a number of these accounts and it allows me to break my yearly expenses down into monthly payments and never have to swallow a large expense all at once.

Once I saw how much I had to save for the car insurance, maintenance, and replacement cost, it became clear that I was going to be diverting a huge sum of money towards keeping a car. Here are the numbers:

Replacement assumes I’ll need to replace the car in 4 years at an approximate cost of $10,000 – $12,000 dollars. Saving $3,000 a year ($250 per month) for 4 years will ensure I have the cash on hand when the old Civic finally dies. It’s a ’97 with 230,000 km on it and it’s reasonable to expect it will get near 300,000 before things start to really go wrong.

Maintenance has cost me, on average, between $800 – $1000 per year. It’s an older car and I make sure everything’s kept up on it which means it’s never broken down on me. There is a cost to preventative maintenance on an older vehicle though. I budget $100 a month ($1,200 per year) for this.

Total cost each month is $520 which is $6,240 every year! Given I have back contribution room in my RRSP then I should be putting the money there instead of a car that I rarely use.

How am I going to get around without a car? I live in Vancouver so that’s not much of a problem. I’m a 15-minute walk away from the Waterfront Station skytrain which is our main transit hub. From there I can go directly to the airport, or to the suburbs, or take the Seabus to the North Shore. There’s also the Westcoast Express should I need to make a trip to Mission.

Mostly I plan to start biking more. A couple of years back I bought a nice commuter bike that’s light and has 18 gears on it. It’s a great bike to ride and with the Vancouver weather I see no reason why I can’t ride year round. I’ll have to pick up some rain gear as well as some proper bike shorts but given I’ll be saving over $6,000 a year, I’m not worried about those costs.

I’ve already started moving away from using my car to make sure it’s going to work. This weekend I loaned it to a friend of ours whose wife was heading into Seattle with their car. I knew I had some things I needed to run around and pick up so this would be a good time to find out if the bike was going to work or not. Turns out it’s no problem. Most of my shopping happens downtown anyway and I have discovered that I can carry groceries AND beer on the rear bike rack.

One can also transport a Dairy Queen log cake if need be:

The DQ cake was a bit ridiculous but I wanted to prove the point to myself. Worst case if I need to pick something up that’s difficult to transport I can hail a cab. $500 a month pays for many, many cab rides.

Really the only thing I like having the car for is to go hiking and camping. What I did when I was previously car-free was to rent a car for doing those things. It’s a bit of a pain in the ass and you have to plan things in advance more, but it’s easily manageable.

I’d also like to get into bike touring. My bike will be adequate for the next couple of years while I get started but I suspect I’ll want to buy a proper touring bike in the future. Again, $6,000 a year would let me buy 2 touring bikes every year so I don’t expect cost to be an issue. I’ll be saving on ferry fees to get to the Gulf Islands too. $14.25 for a walk-on vs. $61.50 if you take a car! Sharon, who’s an avid biker, and I will probably do a bunch of trips from Horseshoe Bay since it’s close. From there we can go to Bowen Island or over to Nanaimo. Tsawwassen is painful to get to by bike since you aren’t allowed to ride through the George Massey Tunnel. They have a shuttle that runs every hour or so during peak hours and I think you can put your bike on the 620 bus to get to Tsawwassen, but it’s still not easy. I’ll have to experiment over the next few months and see what works best.

Cuba!

I spent a week in Cuba and it was quite a crazy adventure! It started off pretty chill with 7 of us piling off the plane, onto a bus, and over to the Breezes Jibacoa resort between Havana and Varadaro. I spent 3 days eating, drinking beers, and doing loads of snorkeling. The resort’s on a huge reef so there’s lots to see under the water. Josh captured a good slice of underwater video with his GoPro camera.

On Tuesday morning I went outside the resort for a short run in the morning heat. I had realized that we were isolated from Cuban culture but it really hit me when I went out and said hi to the locals that I passed on the road. Nobody spoke English, which was a sharp contrast to the resort and I could see that people living in the area were eking out a living in rural Cuba. You don’t get a good feeling about stuffing yourself at a buffet only minutes away from people living in poverty.

So I began to crave some authentic Cuban culture. On Thursday, day 4 of the trip, we were taking a bus tour of Havana and the night before, Reilly, Josh and I had a few beers and talked well into the night. There I hatched a plan to take the bus trip into Havana and stay there until I had to be back at the resort on Sunday night to catch our early flight on Monday.

Thursday we piled onto the bus with the other tourists and were guided around the tourist sights in Havana. When that all wrapped up, around 4pm, I said goodbye to everyone and wandered into Havana with a Lonely Planet guide, a Spanish phrasebook, and a couple changes of clothes.

Within half an hour I had met a local resident, Ivan, who was intent on practicing his English. We ended up talking for quite a while and when I said I was looking for a place to stay he accompanied me to the hostel I had picked out from the Lonely Planet guide. Good thing too, since during my whole stay in Havana he was the only person who really spoke any English.  I found a place run by 2 women, I think it was a mother and her daughter (again, they spoke no English so I didn’t get to find out too much about them) and settled in.

For the next 3 days I got the non-tourist tour of Havana and the surrounding area compliments of Ivan. He’s a really cool guy and I had a great time checking everything out. We hit some nightclubs where live bands provided a soundtrack for people to salsa dance. I saw Ivan’s hometown of Guanabacoa and the Statue of Christ across the water from Havana. On Sunday his friend Suri cooked us an amazing dinner and I headed back to the resort in a taxi during which I managed to have a long conversation with the cab driver in a mix of English (of which he knew a few words) and Spanish (of which I now knew a few words).

My friends were happy to see me return safely since they had no way of contacting me in Havana. I was full of energy after being in such a vibrant city and being back at the resort felt like I’d stepped into an old-age home!

I have a lot more to write about Cuba but I’ll save that for another post. I just wanted to get the basic story down for anyone who’s interested.

Upcoming Shows

Speaking of shows, here’s what I have planned for April and May:

The Trews at the Roxy (!!) – Tuesday, April 26
The Corin Tucker Band at the Biltmore – Sunday, May 1
The Pixies at the Orpheum – Tuesday, May 3
Guitar Wolf at the Biltmore – Wednesday, May 25

So 3 killer shows just before we head to Cuba and then Guitar Wolf when I get back. May is going to be a great month!

The Unbundling

If you have any interest in the direction of the music industry then I highly recommend reading The Unbundling (and Re-Bundling) of Music by Ian Rogers on the Topspin blog.

I’m excited to see what’s happening now that the CD format has (finally!) died and artists are selling directly to fans. On April 26 we’re going to see The Trews play the Roxy. Instead of shelling out a bunch of money to Ticketmaster, Sharon and I purchased tickets directly from the band’s website. For $40 Sharon gets a t-shirt, the new album on CD, and a ticket to the show. I splurged on the $45 bundle which gives me a vinyl record instead of the CD along with my shirt and ticket.

There’s a big change now that record companies are no longer the gatekeepers for an artist’s music. I still think there’ll be a role for them, but it will be greatly diminished and we’ll see more of the money flowing to the artist, which is where it should be going.

Riding a giraffe down main street wearing a viking helmet and swinging a bag full of gophers

Brent Butt, the guy from Corner Gas, showed up in town to work on some new stand up comedy material so we got to see him at a club downtown last night. Funny guy. Makes me want to see Corner Gas again.

Friday night I hit up the game with my friend Chris. We managed to wrangle seats in the Lamplighter, which was packed by the time the game got going. Vancouver won (yay!) which should set up some intense games in Chicago this week. Tonight I think I’ll put the game on at home and chill out before an intense work week this week. We’ve got an end-of-month deadline that got dropped on us and there’s a tonne of work to do so I’ll be tied up for the next dozen days or so.

It’s All In the Art of Stopping

In 2008 I attended the Sled Island Festival in Calgary where I saw a band called Wire perform. They’re a band from the late 70′s that’s had a strong influence on a number of groups that I like so I was curious to see them. Their show didn’t impress me and I dismissed Wire as a lame band that was of interest to indie musicians in the 1980′s. Little did I know that they were to become one of my favorite acts.

Several months after Sled Island I had that Elastica song in my head and found out they’d pulled the main guitar riff out of a Wire song called Three Girl Rhumba off their first album, Pink Flag. I started to listen to Pink Flag and quickly professed it to be THE GREATEST ALBUM OF ALL TIME! (Note: I say this often, but that album has remained in heavy rotation throughout the last 2 years which makes it truly great for me)

I started to hope that Wire would play again and I could see them after becoming more familiar with their work. Well that day came today! I just got back from their show. Super-cool but I can see how it would be hard to get into if you’re not a fan. Their songs tend to stick to a simple rhythm and use subtler textures instead of in-your-face dynamics that slap you to keep you interested.

There was a good mix of material, most of which I didn’t recognize. The songs that I did know (they have 12 albums – I have only really listened to 3 of them) were performed in a very different fashion than what the band had recorded which made it more interesting for me. I like it when bands change it up.

Last week I nearly fell asleep at Thursday night’s Rural Alberta Advantage show so I had a post-work nap today and was much more lively tonight. I’m going to do the post-work nap for all the upcoming weeknight shows.

On the subject of napping, I’m going to bed.