Married.

More to follow after honeymoon.

I've been leaking little bits of pubski-esque information all over for like a week now, so I'm just going to cover the broad strokes here:

I've quit smoking. As of today, ya boi's cold turkey (shoutout to ooli and nil). It's been alright so far. I'm fighting a craving right now by drinking coffee and writing a comment on hubski while I should be working. Issa time.

I've restarted the side-project I talked about procrastinating. A lot of the code is salvageable, but I've learned a lot since starting it. Since there's no deadline, I'd like to rewrite it. So I will. Fuck you, half-of-my-brain-that's-acting-as-a-project-manager

I've squeezed a bit of independence out of my parents by spending most nights with my girlfriend. Typing that sentence made me feel young.

I'll be honest, my thoughts are pretty clouded by the nicotine withdrawal right now. I'll have a better update for y'all next week - right now, I have some coffee I need to drown in.

The bar/cafe owner handed me a bunch of cash last Saturday, roughly 1.5 rent's worth, saying I earned it. Not gonna say 'no' to money, but it feels weird. Even offered to hire me, but it's almost guaranteed to be impossible to balance it with studies. It's funny how, out of all the places, this is apparently where I'm this mythical 'good fit'. We agreed to keep the option open, though highly unlikely.

I'm still waiting for news from my 'first pick', got in on all the other theoretical physics programmes. Waiting is killing me, the fact I have my places secured elsewhere doesn't seem to do anything to alleviate it. Maybe it's this that sucks out all of my enthusiasm, though I suppose it just adds on a bunch of other crap.

Ministry's Psalm 69 was the first album I ever bought on CD. Preordered it from the local record store; waited a month for it to show up, put it in the only CD player in the house, the original Sony Discman, the one that cost $400 in 1985, the one that had a detachable NiMH battery that you could charge separately.

Staring in the face of condemnation

Laughter fills the sky instead of rain

Live my life alone in resignation

Arms outstretched for those who cannot see

Scarecrow

Crucified and left in isolation

Pictures of our lost morality

Scarecrow

Eyeless stares invite this whole damnation

Rotting corpse of inhumanity

I went to see Lollapalooza 2 primarily for Ministry. Then I bought tickets in San Diego to see Ministry despite the fact that it was a 1200 mile drive (Denver, Dallas, Phoenix and Vegas were all happening while I was taking my last finals, seeing as I was graduating a semester early to get away from all these fuckers). I had five of them because four friends were going with me. Everyone bailed one by one, though, and didn't pay me back. The last one the morning of. So I drove 18 hours through a snowstorm to see Ministry in San Diego by myself.

The first apartment I had to myself (after the apartment where all my shit got stolen by the junkie roommate I had no say in allowing in) was broken into by averats. They took all my CDs and all my gemstones. CDs I started replacing immediately; gemstones I didn't do anything with until a couple years ago. Psalm 69 was not a disc I replaced for some reason.

Scarecrow was practically an anthem for me. It was pretty much my outlook from 1992 until 1996. A bad time. But then I moved in with the girlfriend, who was not a Ministry fan. A lot of the really angry industrial stayed in memory, not in celebration.

I'm trying out Tidal right now. It allows you to grab pretty much anything. And since I now have ridiculous headphones it allows me to grab things at better quality than I ever had encoded (I turned my CDs into 192kbps mp3 because at the time, that was about where iPods didn't choke). And for some reason I decided I needed to hear Scarecrow for the first time since 1996.

I've spent the past 20 years telling the scared teenager inside me that it's gonna be okay. It's all gonna work out. That he's gonna make it free, that he's going to find girls who love him, that his parents are going to be irrelevant, that being smart actually counts for something if you're allowed to use it, and that the crap he's dealing with is more than most kids deal with and it's giving him a strength that they lack. That as soon as he can break free of the bullshit holding him down, he's going to be fine. That the shithole he's in really is a shithole, he's not imagining it, it's not all like that, that the sort of violence he's used to is more than most people are used to, that the level of antagonism he swims in is more than most people swim in. He's gotten quieter and quieter over time, as if I've slowly, gradually laid a ghost of my own creation to rest. He's almost found his peace.

But yesterday I played Scarecrow for the first time in 23 years and suddenly I wanted to know what that kid thought of me.

I was driving a silver 911 convertible to my wife's office where she's the head witch of a coven of 7 hot acolytes. I was in between a house that the bank only owns a small portion of and a half million dollar medical center that has outgrown its 4-extension phone system (that the bank owns a larger portion of,but still). I was wearing vintage Gargoyles, still, and I was blasting Ministry through a 9-speaker Bose system.

I think that kid would be proud of me.

He'd think the job is dope. He wouldn't really understand what the fuck it is but he'd grasp it pretty quickly and be curious as to how I ended up there. He'd be gobsmacked by how much it pays and the sheer number of buttons and levers would give him a hard-on. That I only have to do it a small portion of the year would seem magical to him. he's a latchkey kid; his parents are out of the house an easy 60 hours a week easy and the idea of not having to work for months at a time would seem positively illegal to him. He'd be astonished by how hot my wife is and he'd dig the shit out of my kid. He'd give me the side-eye over owning a PORSCHE but then I could take a few minutes to explain to him that not only is it the only reasonable sports car with a back seat for the kid, but that the reason 911s continue to exist is they impress chicks, not teenage boys (postmenopausal women, truth be told, but we could hide that from him for the time being). He'd be annoyed that the motorcycle isn't currently running but once he saw that I shared his annoyance he'd leave it be. He'd be fascinated that people give a shit about "rolexes" (he wouldn't much think beyond that) but once he thought about the difference between a mechanical timepiece and a quartz one he'd sorta get it. And he'd despair that I had to spend so much fucking time in Los Angeles but he'd be stoked that I spent the rest of the time in Seattle. He wouldn't even know my secret shame in having the word "bose" inside my car.

And then I got on the plane with 20lbs of library books about the Showa era and Belle Epoque jewellery but without my laptop because I forgot it but that's okay it's the little laptop not the big laptop and while the big laptop is too big to bike into work with it's currently faster than any laptop you can buy so when we're talking white people problems? "I only have one laptop" is near the top of the list. And if you fly out of the little airport you're way more likely to get first class so I haven't ridden coach even once which means free Woodford Reserve and power leather seats and hot moist towels at 10,000 feet. And if you buy everything Solar Fields has on Bandcamp you get everything in their library but if you listen to Solar Fields on Tidal you get the soundtrack to Mirror's Edge: Catalyst which is five fucking hours long

And teenage me? He'd be 100% into Solar Fields.

Drove the panda car to my parents last Friday. Got the newer 33 kWh (~150 mi range) version, so I made it there without charging along the way. We spent Saturday visiting the oldest known planetarium in the world. It's old-old: it was under construction when the Declaration of Independence was written. Both my girlfriend and I had visited it once when we were younger, but we both wanted to see it again.

It's still dope. I had forgotten how many things it indicates - besides accurately displaying the positions of our planets, it also tracks sunrise/set, astrological signs, its x/y axes match the seasons, it has a star map, moon phases and it even shows the moonrise and moonset times. All because a Dutch mathematician in a small, quaint place wanted a dope living room that would prove his point.

On Sunday, we drove to another side of the country to visit one of my girlfriend's best friends. She bought a home with her boyfriend in another small, quaint place somewhere south of Rotterdam. And coincidentally they were working on the living room that day. The sight of a poorly lit, chaotic building-site-in-a-room was a familiar one to me - my dad was always working on fixing up our home for as long as I can remember. It dawned on me that my parents were also in their mid/late twenties when they started living together, my dad spending the evenings and weekends improving the home. It also dawned on me that people my age are now buying homes 'n shit.

When we entered they were just closing a hole they accidentally made in the wall the day before. The home was known to have been built originally somewhere in the fifteenth century, so the exposed wall was a hotchpotch of brick types and sizes from centuries upon centuries of care and disrepair.

I don't know what it was precisely - the centuries old stuff, seeing my parents, the normalcy of my SO's friend buying and fixing a home, but I have rarely felt more old than the past few days. Not old in any absolute sense - I turn 26 in three months, so I can't complain. It's more that I've always thought of myself as a young 19 y/o college student. I've held that identity for long enough that it still lingered on, even though my last lecture was well over two years ago. Clearly I'm in a different phase of my life now, but I don't know yet what that will mean for my future, or what that might mean decades or even centuries down the line.

For a couple of months now, my wife and I have been involved in this plan with a group of people to rent an entire chartered fishing boat and a beach house, and go tuna fishing this weekend. Thursday-Monday. Nothing but chilling on the Oregon Coast with dogs and friends and beach and one long-ass day on a boat (for me; she was gonna back back at the rental property with the dog and have a doggie-and-mom day on the beach).

Over the last two weeks or so, I have had an inkling that something is amiss with my wife and our plans.

This week - yesterday - they came to a head. She and I had an honest talk about our weekend plans, where we both spoke openly and honestly about What The Heck Is Going On Between Us, and we decided to cancel the trip.

It's too late to cancel, so we just lose the $600+ dollars we paid in advance for the house rental and my seat on the fishing boat.

But it doesn't even matter.

Literally the instant I sent the message to the organizer and our friends, the energy in the world around us shifted, and we felt lighter, and more connected with each other.

Both of us had our reasons for not wanting to go, and for wanting to go. And both of us didn't want to disappoint the other with our reasons for not wanting to go; or to pressure the other into doing something they weren't into.

Now I have 5 days wide open.

And I don't think I'm going to tell anybody. I'm not going to work. I'm not going out. I'm gonna just take the time to BE.

Heh. Right.

That ain't gonna happen. The water always finds a way around the seawall.

But I feel like we made the healthy choice for us. And that feels amazing.

Today's moving day!

I can't say I am enthusiastic about it. It's weird, I don't want to live "at home" forever, but I'm also not that bothered about it (It might help that I am living "at home" but not with my parents so there isn't that urge to be free of them). So moving out is a thing. That is happening now.

I am living in a hotel for a couple months.

I am recording.

As of right now, I am planning to release CDs next year.

Those that know me, get them free.

So. I am recording separate material just for the fun of it.

I'm enjoying my life.

Thanks for listening:)

Hopefully, I'm meeting one of my last remaining friends from highschool tonight, at a fancy speakeasy cocktail bar i've been meaning to check out. She's been going through a tough time, with her mom being sick so I've been trying to reach out from time to time. Shitty life circumstances can be isolating I think.

Tomorrow, my new friends are coming over for a "fermentation party" where we'll attempt to make kimchi or whatever strikes our fancy. They're awesome new friends, but also unlikely to be still in Montreal in a couple years. It kinda sucks making connections and having people move away all the time, but i'll enjoy it while it lasts!

Then it's a weekend of work, showing bars to tourists and talking about Montreal. Thankfully, some friends are fundraising for a makerspace nearby by selling poutine - so I have a place to go hang out after work!

Life is pretty good right now, but the fall is coming. And with it, the constant question of what am I doing with my life, what should I do this winter, and what should I do for money? I have some ideas, and many options. I think in september will come the time to make a decision and start taking steps towards the future.

Watched 12 Angry Men with my dad. He's older than that movie. He's cheery as fuck. I assume he no longer has any fucks to give. Hope you all had a good Wednesday.

I think I would really enjoy seeing a live baseball game at 9 in the morning. I can't put my finger on it, but for some reason the idea strikes me as a pleasant way to start the day.

I've been playing a lot of raquetball and I've been getting better at it. I'm closer to the raquetball gym at my new job, so that gives me more opportunities to play and work out in general. Overall, I think the new job is working well with me lifestyle-wise. Things at work are starting to fall into place, the band is heading back to the studio next month, everything's coming up Milhouse.