Cardigans and Consequences

  Something I've noticed recently, when I stand up after a period of sitting down, my knees ache. Maybe they've been that way for awhile but now the ache is enough that I actually notice it. I'm forced to contemplate all those years of playing hacky sack with my friend Steve. I imagine they inflicted a certain amount of wear and tear. I remember I used to do this one kick a lot, where I flicked my foot back and around up to my side and so that my back heal hit the hacky sack right by my hip. If that makes sense. Steve used to comment a lot on the weird angle at which my knee would bend, because I often pushed it so that my knee bent so much my heal would go forward past my hip. I remember the kick never felt entirely comfortable, but you push yourself doing that kind of stuff, and I would just shrug it off.
     Or, maybe, I simply have sore knees because I've reached the age where you start noticing shit like that. I don't know. I also have a weird numb spot on my right calf slightly above my ankle, that I believe is from hockey. We played rough when we were kids and you got chopped in the shins frequently, and pretty frigging hard.
    I also have a weird numb spot at the top of my right calf just below the knee. Its the only residual injury I have from the car crash I was in a few years ago. I'm actually not even positive it's a real physical sensation I feel in that spot or just the memory of the sensation. My bodies way of holding onto something from that experience. That dare I say, amazing, experience. If amazing is the right word? I believe it might be because amazing doesn't necessarily denote an experience as being either positive or negative. I don't know. All I do know is it will always be one of the most valuable moments of my life. And not in quite the same way as almost drowning in Byron Bay, Australia.
       That moment was terrifying. The closest I have to a genuinely harrowing experience. An experience it took me days to physically recover from. The crash on the other hand, happened so fast and was so completely enveloping, you didn't really have time to feel fear. I clearly remember sitting in the passenger seat and when the car flipped, sort of clinching all my muscles at the same time and staring out the window, repeating over and over again in my head,okay,stop rolling now. Then it stopped upside down. And as you may have heard before, we crawled out the back window, and even though it was 9:45pm and pitch black outside, all our memories are of the inside of the car being bright as day. Oh and when I stood up and saw the outside of the car around the passenger seat I immediately noticed the car roof had been crushed down way past where my head would have been. But I was looking at this stood outside the car, uninjured.
      Once again, I don't know. I'm just talking here.
      Sat here in my Liverpool slippers and my grey wool cardigan, which I have just this moment remembered was purchased by myself at a really good Value Village on the outskirts of Winnipeg on the very road trip we were on when we had the car accident I was just talking about. In fact, we'd left Winnipeg the morning I purchased this cardigan, and many other items, intending to stop in Thunder Bay. The town we were roughly an hour and a half outside of when we missed an injured moose, lying in the middle of the Trans Canada Highway, by mere inches and rolled off the highway. We were late leaving Winnipeg that morning precisely because of the time spent by myself in that very good Value Village purchasing this very warm grey wool cardigan I'm sporting right now. Kind of funny, don't you think?
      I mean its easy to consider such a set of events and ask what if? What might have happened if we had left Winnipeg on time? Maybe we wouldn't have crashed the car. Maybe some other poor soul would have hit the moose instead?Maybe they would have died? Maybe something equally bad or worse might have happened to us at some other point down the road, between Thunder Bay and Toronto? Maybe I'd be sitting here right now typing some other sort of nonsense, freezing my ass off with no old grey wool cardigan to keep me warm?
      Who knows. I just think its kind of a funny set of events, when you put them all together. Kind of makes you wonder in awe at the way of this world. I mean, especially when you consider, and again you may have heard this bit already, but especially when you consider that for most of the drive between Winnipeg and Thunder Bay I was hanging out the passenger side window trying to take a good photo of a particular road sign I had never seen before. I kept seeing them, kept taking the photo and the photo kept coming out blurry or the sign was out of the picture. In case you don't already know, the road sign was yellow with a picture of a big moose in the middle and below the moose it said night danger. That's kind of weird too, isn't it?

      And this is coming from me a man whose friends routinely joke about my absence of heart. About my lack of emotions. One time I was watching television with my Aunt Cathy, a news story about an American man who was on trial for murdering his pregnant wife, then trying to cover it up and flee the country. They showed footage of the man as he watched the judge read out a guilty verdict. He stood watching, void of all emotion. And my Aunt turned to me and said something along the lines of "He's emotionless, just like you,dude." It was very funny, and I laughed until I cried I think, but its still a good example. I don't know, maybe I'm only like that when it comes to people. Because most people are assholes. Or maybe my whole hilarious, I'm an emotionless asshole thing is just for show? Maybe not. Either way, Daisy Mae was a sweetheart. A sweetheart that made me laugh all the time, at a time when laughing was probably pretty important. I mean laughing is always pretty important, maybe most important. But anyway.
      I never actually intended to talk about any of this today.I'm not even fully sure how I got onto this topic. I logged on here today intending to talk about exciting stuff like the fact I had two cups of tea today, and both were delicious. That the button for typing in upper case just started acting up on my typewriter. Now every time you try and capitalise a word or start a sentence it jumps ahead eight spaces. Its very irritating.
      I also wanted to talk about this great Japanese band I just discovered called Boris. They are blowing my mind. They sort of do this ridiculously loud post rock drone metal thing mixed with 70's classic rock and big guitar riffs. Either way they are superb. And apparently a million times better live. A friend of mine back in Toronto has a band called Orn, a ridiculously loud metal band with a very singular fuzz drone metal kind of sound. He said they had opened for Boris at Lee's Palace a few years ago and that Boris were incredible. One of the loudest bands he'd ever heard.
     I've also recently become a bit obsessed with Ray Charles. I picked up two albums just out of curiosity, the Genius of Ray Charles and Genius Sings the Blues. And both are absolutely brilliant.
    I don't know. That seems to be the running theme of this thing right here. I don't know.