Ahhooooooooum.

Thank goodness for a weekend away.

November typically features a dipping down of the energy from September until the resurgence that comes before Xmas. The parents with lists haven't started in earnest, so the offbeat interactions are limited to arbitrarily strange:

The woman looking for any scratched 7"s we'd like to give her... but passing on the 99 cent ones... free only, please.

The man who wants buttons for his daughter... but not music buttons, because his daughter isn't into music buttons... which leads one to wonder, ah, what time of buttons might a music store carry?

And my favourite:

Quick background note: At times folks bring in boxes of records that are less than absolutely necessary for our collection... when we make noises like we're going to pass on them they usually go from bartering for a small amount for each or a small amount for the lot or, ultimately, offering them for free to do whatever we'd like.

So, in this case... it's August, guy brings a box of records. The guy has other business in town and says he'll drop by later after I've had a chance to look them over. The records are mostly crap, damaged no-gos or more of the same titles we have 3-6 copies of already. However, as is usually the case, there are a handful that we can actually, probably, sell. Day ends. Guy doesn't come back in.

Two days later guy calls and asks about the records. I tell him I can offer $20 for the few we can use and he can have the rest back. He says he doesn't want the rest back, but will stop in on Saturday for the cash and to see which ones we took.

Saturday comes along. Guy doesn't.

Week goes by. And half of another... and finally I figure the statute of limitations have gone by. I've not put anything out yet because it isn't totally out of the question for dudes to change their mind after, say, talking to an idiot buddy who says something like, "Shit man, I would've given you $10 bucks for that Best of Steve Miller Band!" Then when dude comes back to find out I've sold it for 25 cents, he gets a little huffy. But. Two weeks after they've dropped them off and still no contact... shit is mine.

Late November comes along. Dude wanders in and says, "Hi, my name is ***** and I dropped off a box of records in August. You said I could have $20 for the ones you could use."

I have to point out here that this is not a bottle picking, King's place hanging out kinda guy. This is a wife and kids and weekends at the cottage kinda guy.

I say, "well, all my paperwork from FOUR MONTHS AGO is packed and sent down to Saint John, but if you have your copy of the receipt for the cash...."

Dude says, "I didn't get a receipt."

I say, "How's that?"

Dude says, "I didn't come back in for one."

I say, "Ah."

So. Beyond everything else, the question I'd like to ask is: Why today? Why after four months would it suddenly occur to him that he's owed $20? He was always cheerful and never demanding, even when he came back in... but that makes it even more puzzling. In the usual case, after four months and no contact, one would expect just a nice clean write off.

I wonder if anyone out there owes me $20. Maybe I'll start a store to store inquiry.

Post-Remberance

Ah, underwear.

How I missed your firm support.

Let's Not Twist Again...

I have a folder of pictures from the last Festival International de Musique Actuelle de Victoriaville from this past May. It's a New Music festival that I go to with Marc LeBlanc every year... and this time I managed to get ahold of the standard press package that goes out to all the journals and magazines that review the event (which I do actually do for Exclaim!, but they usually only run 2, 1 or none of the photos to save space). My idea was that I'd do a full show by show review of the festival over on the Surgery blog, but now it's November and it seems a little past prime time to proceed.

The shot above is of Norwegian duo Fe-Mail who make a fiercely loud and varied racket with their voices, french horn and a table-load of homemade/modified electronic apparatuses. Tear your head off they will, and look damn good doing it, too.

The Third annual UNB Poetry Weekend is over. It was a fun time seeing old friends visiting to read, like Matt Tierney and Adam Dickinson, Michael Debeyer and some recent and new acquaintances to boot (not that I booted them). The semi-official kickoff was a Friday night launch of QWERTY's tenth anniversary anthology at Alden Nowlan house. The anthology has an introduction of sorts by me, some captions for images and a poem. Since I'm a local, surviving old-timer I was invited to read. Although the other readers were current MAs reading from works in the anthology I decided to present a non-reading/reading. Having been to more than a few readings in my time I've developed a mild allergy to the standard process... often finding that the introductions and descriptions of the works about to be read more compelling than the works themselves. To that end I prepared an introduction for the reading of a chapter of a book I haven't written, nor have any plan of writing. The "book" was titled The Coefficiency of Friction and it involved, centrally, irritations. I'll leave the rest to your imaginations.

This morning it had snowed, so the walk to work was a little gunky... but still I was in pretty high spirits; mentally energized by the better segments of work I'd heard over the previous two days. At the store there were a few milk crates of vinyl and CDs to reshelve after a record show in Moncton. I grabbed an armload of records out of the very first crate and a few slipped out of my arms so I pivoted and bend to grab them and my lower back wrenched or pinched or buckled or some shit. Anyhow now I have to walk around like I have a load in my pants, wince like a beaten puppy each step I climb and in the interim sit in this chair while my spine locks up into a new interesting shape.

Of course tonight is the night where printers get jammed, polycoms break down and need replacement parts, posters are picked up and multimedia stations need setting up... everyone is very sympathetic and ask if I'm o.k., which is nice, but it'd be nicer if they just went and built snowmen and left me alone... oh well.

Also, something else I've been wondering about...

What you suspected afterhours might look like

Watch a nearly one minute movie here.

Music courtesy of Bill Frisell and Dana Hope's iTunes