“Heard a singer on the radio late last night says he’s gonna kick the darkness ’til it bleeds daylight…”

My beef with the younger generation, if I even have one, isn’t that the video games they play are oscar-worthy-cinematic as opposed to the 8-bit RGB games I played in the 80’s. It isn’t that the are 500 channels/streams that have become thief of the joy that Saturday Morning Cartoons once brought. It’s not that they can’t wait for their little pea brains to come up with whoever sang whatever song and they just Google it. No, I’m only jealous that they get to have a soundtrack with them wherever they go. Headphones, earbuds, noice cancelling audio contraptions, (none of them coming in with a price tag under $100 FFS). Its equal beef and an understanding that hearing the music we listened to back in the day didn’t come without some effort to get to. The bottomless on-demand well of arts and entertainment of today has buried our magical yearning for a tune, and sunk it six feet under with nary an epitaph. My Rotten Kid will never have to twist a dial on some shitty little radio to eke some classic rock turn of phrase out from within the fuzz. This isn’t an old man yelling at The Cloud™ (even if I wanted to, I forgot my password). This one time she was about six and we were watching terrestrial CABLE. An ad came on and my daughter asked, “Is it over?” Look, no hate here, I’ve embraced the future. I wouldn’t trade a frequency failing when it rains for strutting through the shelving aisle in the hardware hearing “Shook Ones II”. Not for a million bucks.

Many of you know that I’m a fan of Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. I’ve been a listener stalwart on Mondays and Thursdays for over 2000 episodes. As his stellar run comes to an end, I need to say: I’ve always found something adjacent to the punchlines, pathos or wry wit that he shares. A moment that I felt belonged to he and I alone. It happened almost every episode. I gave him an example of this once in a letter I penned one Thursday evening after hearing his show. The same letter I heard him read the following Monday. Hearing my words come from his mouth made me nearly drive into oncoming traffic with excitement. I’m unsure if it was a current episode or one from way back (I’ve been going into the archives the last few weeks) that I took to heart. Marc and Guest were talking about music and, off the cuff he mentioned that there are “…some songs some people can’t hear enough…” I have one I can’t hear enough. We all do.

‘92 I lived in a little blue-panelled house in a small town waaaaay up in Northern Canada. One evening, three mildly stoned roomies sat around a television watching an NHL game while the snow of a dark and pitiless winter gathered at our door. TV time-out or something and a beer commercial came on screen. The voice-over extolled the virtues of the breweries’ glacier-fed glory as six or eight beer cans bobbled and bounced downstream towards us. Just before they hit the camera, one after another they dropped down a waterfall. Being broke, mildly stoned and 20 years old with an innate need/ability to make everyone laugh, I took this moment to dive from the couch with outstretched arms and cupped hands to catch each gloriously wet and sun-dappled can as though they were going to fall to our filthy living room floor. It was a visual gag and my roomies all chortled through the haze. One of them, a guy I’d only known a month or so, cackled, shook his head and through wide grin muttered,

 “Oh, you are a fuckin’ dreamer aren’tcha?” 

I thought for a beat to take issue with this biting insight (which was my style at the time) but I shut my mouth because I couldn’t argue. It was succinctly put and right on the money.

 I’ve always been a dreamer.

My roomies and I all worked at a local lumberyard and that’s how we met. Two days after the beer waterfall episode, we’re all at work trying to do as little as possible in Beaver Lumber’s Whitehorse yard in all of its forty below-ness but still tryna stay warm. Its a delicate balance. It hadn’t snowed yet that day but it was in the mail. Dense grey clouds were inbound from the west but over the yard, blue sky and sunshine. The waning daylight made the wild wind that tore in between lifts of lumber up and around pallets of concrete mix more punishing. You could be up in the warehouse among batts of insulation or pop a door open on a truck or  forklift and boy, the wind, it’d find you. I served a few more roofers then ducked inside the main store for a bit to warm up and take a whizz. 30 minutes later, 4:00 PM and its like midnight. Seeking refuge from the elements and paying customers, I headed to the Nail Shed. Its where we’d go for a little peace amidst the turmoil. A little oasis. I knew there was a shitty little radio in there that was always on. It was plugged in so even at night when everything sat silent while feet of snow developed on top the piles of building materials like those squat little tombstones you see, there was a song playing.

There are days up North with almost no light. An hour, maybe three around mid day. Something about the earth’s rotation on its axis and the elliptical orbit it takes around the sun. When you can’t find the fucking Nail Shed due to equal parts darkness, howling wind and blowing snow, and only armed with an 8th graders understanding of the paths of celestial bodies, it can for sure just feel like some higher power is making things pretty personal. Fully dark at 4:30pm, that shitty little radio was fuzzing out the local station like a beacon through the elements. Sometimes late in the afternoon before closing we’d turn it up as loud as we could, park all of the machinery in a wide semicircle and beam all of their lights towards an icy home plate and we’d play stickball in the afternoon dark. Should you ever meet anyone who worked there in the early nineties, they might speak of these games, just know it was MY idea. I wonder if they still do it.

So anyway what I do is I stumble, fumble and do my level best do evade the shock of the wind to find refuge in the Nail Shed. It was a hut inset below a larger wooden structure. It was about 8 feet by 6 feet but shelves of nails cut into that so you really only had about an area of 6 by 4 and a really low ceiling. Some guys had to hunch. There was and empty socket where a lightbulb should have been but wasn’t. Ye Olde Nail Shed represented a sort of haven in this wintry hellscape, but even in the summer you could duck in there and pretend your were doing some sort of half-assed inventory should you need an escape. Anyway, I duck in and find, warmly ensconced in this tiny enclosure, two of my esteemed associates. They are both stone faced and slit-eyed leaning up against the shelving. I’m greeted with a grin from one while the other sucks on a punctured can of Hires Root Beer. In this cradle of tin, a nugget of weed flares hot in the dark. He inhales, holds it all in for about 7 or 8 seconds then blows it my way. His lips jut out like how a little kid thinks you’re supposed kiss and his lungs send a thin ribbon of smoke my way to bathe my face. “Hey man.” He coughs just as he runs out of air then turns the can opening towards me. I lean in and take a nice deep one, then tilt my head back. Hold. Hold. Hold. Here we go. 

Oh there we go.

I let the heavy dump into my lungs and let the feeling wash over my brain. Simultaneously, tiny aluminum root-beer-can-particles, wild from the heat, come loose from the can’s interior. They take up on the wind I provide and ride the smoke coursing down inside me. down and around my internal parts and along the inner walls of my veins, then shoot out to my extremities. Leaving no part of my nervous system untrammelled and with nowhere left to go, they come to rest in my chest. These tiny tin corpuscles remain there today, just as this jet black-haired chick I was hot-knifing hash with YEARS later told me they would. Sometimes when I’m at a light or stuck in traffic, I think of them moving, spinning at top speed through by bloodstream in wild orbits irrespective of one another. Each of them with a microscopic branding that reads Hires™. I purse my lips and flick my tongue furtively against them so the vapour looks like its from the smokestack of some steam engine chugging across the great plains of the frontier. I turn my head towards the door of the Nail Shed and begin to move out into the afternoon night, up to my hips in what feels like preset concrete.

Just then a song came on the shitty little radio in the Nail Shed and I took pause.

All alone at the end of the evening

And the bright lights have faded to blue

I was THINkin’ ‘bout a WOman 

Who might have loved me

I never knew

I said thanks for the hit and tipped on out, exhaling frosty air. I looked up and just then the running lights of the one, lone plane that left my little town at the same time every day shot across the sky. I realized in that moment that I’ve been, and probably will be a leaf in the wind for a considerable time hence. Right then through the fuzz and the wind the guy from The Eagles goes, he goes, he’s all like…

You know I’ve always been a dreamer

Some thirty years gone, that day, and I can listen to ‘Take It To The Limit’ on my AirPods, headphones, in an aisle at Home Depot or on some shitty little radio and it will take me back there to the Nail Shed. I can’t hear it enough.

I have to say goodbye now to my time Up North. I’ll miss the way the sun bronzed The Yukon’s great and terrible wilderness in the early afternoon. I’ll miss the joy and wonder friends and family alike have brought me in my time there. The full and intrepid hearts of those that choose to reside there are a wonder to behold. I recommend you visit if you can, but Up North is behind me now, at last. It has been a wonderful relationship, one that I took to the limit. Gotta dream on.