🎼 Rock Opera

Hello Adventurers, 

Can you separate art — or life lived — from the artist? That’s not some grand opener on my part. Rather, it’s just something that’s been asked with more frequency these past few years (as consequence went mainstream…as prêt à porter cancel couture continues to be in vogue — as well as all the rage — season after season…on the runway of our demise).

Me? I don’t know. Like, where does good art — or bad art — start and stop, and when does an artist go from ethically good to ethically bad — and vice-versa — and where exactly is the intersecting ‘crimeline’ plotted on the timeline in the murkiness of the aforementioned? Like, who decides that? And, if an artist does something asshole-ish, what does it invalidate? Work in progress? Or recently completed work? Future work…and livelihood? Or like just past work…as in the whole canon of their creations or their careers…even if such was created pre-crime? And when the banished are sent down the path of punishment, is there a rehabilitative road for them to return on — by way of recovery and redemption — or nah?

None of this is asked in jest. And don’t mistake me as an apologist for unsavoury behaviour either; accountability matters. Rather, these are simply the questions of our time (well, in pop culture at least); be it Lizzo last week, others before that, and for omnipresent Michael Jackson too; in his post-life still here-ism. Like, Off the Wall is one of the greatest pop albums of all time (if not the greatest)…released when MJ was around 20 years old…and decades later he allegedly got pretty weird around kids…so in his death do we retroactively throw the baby (groomer) out with the bath water…before he was that, and his art was otherwise? I don’t have answers…this is just a hook that can hurt like a barb. Like, MJ also had that later song ‘Black or White’ which bought him more time via ‘second act renaissance’ — and sometimes these things are that binary in terms of ethics — but outside of that…life is mostly grey tones of who-the-fuck-knows uncertainty.

I don’t have answers for these things, I’m just asking…or wondering aloud ‘cause I think I’ve always hated rock operas but I’m not that sure…so I’ve decided to write a rock opera this week (sans music)…like, if that’s even possible.

I recall me and my Buddhist brother hacking darts at some point — just looking out at the street — and Elliot saying something like, “It’s fucked…we used to wait” not as he exalted but as he exhaled. And he was referencing the Arcade Fire song of the same name from their concept album ‘The Suburbs’ long after it came out…and long before the frontman of the band got cancelled for sexual misconduct allegations. And the notion of the lyric just sorta stuck with me thereafter. And I don’t really know why…maybe it’s because I’m old and recognize the times have changed, maybe it’s because I spent some of my formative years growing up in the suburbs, maybe it’s because I lived in Montreal when Arcade Fire — a band sorta from there / the lil band that could — exploded in worldwide popularity (and us Montrealers felt proud)…or maybe it’s because I was searching for something to write about this week and saw the lyric with my mind’s eye in the fatty tissue of my subconscious.

According to Win Butler, that album — The Suburbs — "Is neither a love letter to, nor an indictment of, the suburbs – it's a letter from the suburbs." And me using that song as the conceptual underpinning for this issue of the newsletter is neither a love letter to, nor an indictment of, Win Butler. Rather, this whole thing is just letters gathered on my marathons this week (done around my old suburb) that have been conjoined into words — and then fleshed out as sentences — to create a dispatch from and about — the suburbs now (as I knew them to be in the ‘80s and ‘90s…when I lived there then). And all of it is a ‘go / no go’ thing depending on how you answer my grand ender: do you separate art from the artist?

- Ben Pobjoy

P.S. This issue of the newsletter flirts with memoir, and in my humble opinion ‘The Night of the Gun’ by David Carr (RIP) is the greatest memoir ever written ala “Do we remember only the stories we can live with? The ones that make us look good in the rearview mirror?”

2023 TREK TRACKER

Where in the world...record am I?

• Countries visited: 42

• Flights taken: 46

• Kilometres flown: 70,387

• Marathons completed: 145

• Kilometres trekked by foot: 6,911.9

• Total kilometres trekked since 2015: 70,003

RAPID WEEKLY RECAP

A speedy synopsis for time-crunched readers

• The Wildest Thing: I had to help babysit two little boys the other day…and that shit is more exhausting than a marathon. How do parents have the energy to parent for decades and decades? Like, I could barely handle it for five hours🫣

• The Biggest Obstacle: Almost risking my life — by trekking the suburbs by foot — where the drivers road rage against the dying of the traffic light…to get to Costco, Walmart, and McDonalds at warp speed😮

• The Lesson Learned: I think my baseline for pain is screwed up (i.e. psychotically tough in some ways / ultra tender baby man in others) — and I’m pretty sure my legs and hips have been sore to the touch for like five years — and my wife bought me a Theragun Mini a few years ago (and it hurt too much to use when I first got it)…but this buttercup sucked it up this week (and used said torture device)…and it really does aid with recovery when you pulverize your quads and glutes with it🤕

LYRIC VIDEO AS CONCEPTUAL UNDERPINNING

Presented without comment or co-sign

FIELD NOTES: ONTARIO SUBURBS

“We used to waste hours just walking around”

When I moved to the wilderness downtown at 18, everyone used to ask me where I was from and I’d say the suburbs and they’d snicker (‘cause such was sooo uncool) and I’d reply with a shrug of indifference as we were standing around. And I never felt ashamed to be from somewhere so boringly exciting because I never asked to be born…I just happened to be birthed by two people who wanted a child…so everything thereafter was my lot in life, one I inherited with no say in the matter; being a middle class kid from suburbia. Well, at least for some of my childhood and some of my teens (I did live in France and Belgium before that…which I mention ‘cause it could earn me some retroactive cred today).

The North American suburbs have long been painted as a cultural wasteland, and the critique is sorta true. However, I also know it to be otherwise; a place of sprawl where us latchkey kids could roam far beyond the watchful eyes of parents and police, and do whatever the hell / hell raising we wanted to do. And if I’m being honest, I never was — or felt — like a Springsteen trope / character that was trying (or dying) to get outta town…because I was abroad before I arrived there…and easily departed thereafter (to live in different places in different countries around North America).

I look back at my time in suburbia with fondness because I was as free as I’ve ever been (the house rules in our family were simple; do well in school / never get arrested, and you have total freedom…and the closest I flew to the sun was dumping my penny-saver flyers in a park culvert at like nine years old / getting fired from said newspaper route ‘cause a postman snitched on me / my parents being really disappointed / me getting spanked then grounded…the punishment being totally deserved).

Anyhoo, I felt compelled to return to suburbia on some marathons this week — to creatively examine it — and I don’t know why…I guess, for hope. Like, for the kids there now…that suburbia is for them what it was for me; a paved paradise of parking lots as well as infinite possibility (of fun and fuckery and adventure…a bit of which you gotta carry into adulthood so as to spice things up).

We used to wait for my Dad to come home from his business trips — or for my Mum to read to us each evening — or for my sibling Elliot to get out of the hospital for the umpteenth time…due to the umpteenth seizure. But mostly, I’d wait for Snotty, Jason and Dusty — my older cousins who lived on my street — to show up so we could play road hockey (occasionally with gasoline-soaked tennis balls set on fire from fuel stolen from my Dad’s lawnmower…flipped over so it’d leak in the garage which was below my baby brother’s bedroom above) or we’d go spend eternity in the park at the end of our street. The latter — Woodhurst Heights Park — was the one with the two soccer fields, the outdoor tennis court cum winter skating rink, the playground, and the hill for tobogganing.

This park had two seasons; sun-scorched (with burnt grass) or freezing AF (with three feet of snow), and us rat pack shits were there nearly 24/7/365…enriching the land — thawed or frozen — with tears or blood; the result of someone taking a rocket of a soccer ball to the face, cousin Jason getting shot in the head with a Gotcha Gun (and flailing / falling from the upper deck of the playground), and me whimpering ‘cause my roly-poly self could never keep up with the bigger, fitter kids.

We used to wait at the bus terminal — the one at the shitty mall — for everything but buses. As tweens, it was where the squad would assemble before crossing the street to go the city’s ‘teen centre’ to play bumper pool or to go to dances on Friday nights (after you had watched the music video countdown show to know what was #1 on the charts). As teens, fuck…the bus terminal became much darker — day or night — when you’d wait for the mass fights to break out; where the cliques from different schools collided like angry currents of hormones and fists and body odour and ultra violence. Here, you’d also wait hours for someone — usually some white trash twenty-something homie-looking dude with a spotty goatee that looked like face-grown pubes — to sell you a rolled pinner of bum-y weed, single cigs or booze at inflated prices (because you were underage, and that’s the tax).

This place wasn’t rough or tough at all. Rather, one has to create their own fun in the ‘burbs…so boys brawl (like the idiots they are and/or as chimps before they evolve into human beings further down the line).

We used to wait to get the meagre paycheque from the part-time job…used for spending money on dumb shit like pagers when we were teenagers in high-school. I had a handful of dumb jobs in suburbia but the two bangers concerned gas and oil.

My Mum bought cigs from this one gas station ‘cause of the discount special; two packs of du Maurier Special Mild 100s for $7.50 CAD ($4 a pop if bought individually…with packs verging on $20 today). Back then, the owner liked her comportment, and somehow they — her and him — decided I should work there…so I did…at maybe 14 or 15 years of age (when minimum wage was $6.85 CAD an hour and gas was around 50¢ a litre).

In hindsight, I think the gas station may have been a front — or laundering money — because I never had to record what I sold / the owner said I could consume as many chips and as much soda as I wanted / the owner would regularly swing by to just take wads of cash money outta the safe in the floor. I worked completely alone in the little kiosk stall — that was maybe four feet wide by ten feet long — from 4PM-11PM on weeknights, and I can’t believe I was never robbed. Sitting ducks type shit.

The gas station never got that busy — and I didn’t have to pump gas — so I basically got paid to read hundreds of books / write / skateboard in the parking lot. There was a seedy motel next door, and people would regularly come over to buy condoms (which we didn’t sell), and a few different dudes invited me to their rooms after my shift…but I never went ‘cause that’s how teens prolly get murdered. Oh…and you had to be 19 years old to buy cigarettes, and I took great delight in refusing to sell smokes to minors; often being those older than me from my high school, LULZ.

Once I could drive, I quit the gas station job to work a different part-time job at a nearby factory bottling motor oil; from 6AM to 6PM on Saturdays and Sundays for $15 CAD an hour in the mid ‘90s. It was monotonous but had me feeling like a millionaire; the wage was crazy for the time / my age, and had me feeling cash flush. On the factory line, I’d watch plastic pellets get melted / smushed into four litre bottles by mechanical presses, the empty bottles would get filled with motor oil, and they’d make their way to me where I’d put four bottles into a box, load the boxes onto a skid, shrink wrap everything tight then whistle at someone to forklift it away…and I’d just ‘step and repeat’ this process a few hundred times over the course of a shift.

The bottling system was made for filling 355 millilitre cans of soda — so it never worked well — and occasionally went haywire when all the plastic lines would snap off — looking like snake-haired Medusa headbangin’ to Metallica — and oil would spray everywhere and it took hours to clean up…and I’d get paid to stand there as the engineers fixed it all…and it was the best (especially because hungover colleagues would sabotage the machine on occasion when they were too drunk to work). One Eastern European guy in the room where the bottles were made cooked chestnuts over the pulsing flame that removed imperfections in bottles. He also lived in a makeshift shed in the forest on the periphery of the parking lot. That guy — too — almost got thrown into the ‘imperfect bottle crusher recycler’ machine thing-y when he got into it with another worker. It was a very dull job that never got boring.

On the bottling line, I learnt that I could let bottles sorta pile up — as I read a few pages of my high school textbooks — before I hurriedly packed / wrapped boxes in sprints. My supervisor busted me doing this — he was a real gruff-looking dude (yellowed from cigs and booze) — and surprisingly didn’t reprimand me. Rather, he sorta understood my ‘homework hack on the job’ and gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever been given:

“If you party in high school then you gotta work your entire life…but if you work in high school then you can party the rest of your life.”

I don’t know if the above is fully true — or whether it still holds true in this day and age — but I like the spirit of it as well as how it sounds. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We used to wait out the rains under this bridge…or puff-puff-pass a spliff here…or spray paint graffiti on its walls…or just egg the fuck outta cars on the parkway above…or just light stuff on fire underneath it (just for the hell of it). But that doesn’t matter much…but it did at 13 or 14 years of age.

What is interesting to note is that my suburb was uniquely punctuated by the most elaborate path / trail system (somewhat pictured in the underpass above). It snaked alongside roads as well as the one big river — I’m talking 500 hundred kilometres of multi-use trails and paths and lanes and routes — and me and my mates would waste hours just walking around…it; from here to there all over suburbia. And oddly, it just always felt kinda adventurous…like veins through something larger — and more mysterious — that was just so evergreen to explore.

And this week — trekking it — I was sorta dumbfounded by the realization that it ‘maybe probably’ had a super profound effect on me (unbeknownst back then); of how far you can go on foot…if the boredom for adventure — or the infrastructure — exists.

All of this issue is just a longwinded way of acknowledging this; how something so small — and pedestrian — can keep you alive; then and now. Said another way, how maybe ordinary places — and the most ordinary of things like paths and trails — can inadvertently compel you to do extraordinary things later in life. Or not. Genesis is a fuzzy thing…it can be reverse engineered with different catalysts, I suppose.

Make of it what you will…just know that the young devil in this old man was glad to be back on the paths in suburbia this week…chuckling at the fiery residue of things incinerated — or imaginations kindled — on said paths; strolled then, and marathoned now.

BEST LOCAL THING-Y

I don’t know if it was an immigrant thing, a British thing, a Canadian thing, a family thing, a convenience thing, an ‘80s thing or a frugality thing…but in the backyards of the homes of our parents in the suburbs…we often ate outside in the summers, and I always fucking hated it (like, as a little kid). FYI, restaurant dinners were very seldom in these parts.

In the yard, you’d be eating hot food — as you’d be overheating — as you’d be getting scorched by the sun (why didn’t we ever have patio umbrellas?) — as you sat uncomfortably on some plastic chairs (or chairs with some polyester weave) most likely bought-on-sale from Zellers, Consumers Distributing or Canadian Tire (aka Crappy Tire)…as the adults took forever to eat…and didn’t want to play…because they were rightfully eating and conversing with one another.

But you didn’t give a fuck! You’d fidget and moan, and brat-ily complain about all the free food being served to you (i.e. lots of options, none of which you wanted) — y’know which the adults had laboured most of the afternoon to turn into nice meals — and then they’d essentially ‘excuse you’ after you’d eaten an ‘acceptable minimum amount’ by telling you to go kick the ball around the yard…being the ball that you’d been kicking around earlier (for what felt like nine hours) all done in the sun before dinner. And when you annoyed the adults with another 50 interjections or shirt tugs or toy shows…the ball kicking segued into ball busting (ushering in the parental breaking point), so they’d issue the last ‘fuck-off send-off’ ala “Go to the park…NOW!” And it was unsaid, but you knew you had to be gone for no less than an hour and/or be back before dark…which could be hours and hours away. Fuck!

So me and the cousins would hit the park…until someone got hurt or was crying…at which point we’d drag said casualty — being whoever was the most emotionally or physically damaged (e.g. always Jason) — back to our parents…back in the backyard…as proof that dinner was now officially done. And that is how kids ruin nice things for adults.

Anyhoo, Denise and Russ invited me and the missus over to their house the other night — which admittedly isn’t in the ‘burbs — to eat a long and nice dinner outdoors. Despite it being moved indoors ‘cause of rain…I still had ‘yard flashbacks’. Like PTSD ones…ironically on behalf of my parents as well as Auntie Ing and Uncle Tone…because empathy is a funny thing that can express itself in odd — and long overdue — ways.

The adult dinner with our adult friends was really nice and I enjoyed it, and I am gracious for Denise and Russ’ hospitality. Us four ate an elevated take on ‘make your own tacos’…which just so happened to be something my Stepmum made for us in the ‘burbs when we were young (which we always loved).

I’m just sharing this for the young readers of this newsletter — and you’ll hate this…so I’ll go gentle — but get ready…because life has a weird way of ‘jump-cutting’ decades forward…and you’ll one day ‘snap to’ and find yourself essentially being your parents (even if you don’t have kids or own a home) — doing things your parents did (which you once hated) — and now loving it (interruptions and all).

So laugh it off when it happens (and trust me, it will happen)…and recognize that you were probably an ungrateful, disruptive lil shit once upon a time (hopefully you’ve matured since then). So bon appétit…as you try and eat and keep the kids occupied.

POBJOY'S GLOBAL PRICE INDEX

This is an on-going documentation of how much things cost in different places around the world. Here are some of the things I bought in the suburbs (all prices converted to USD):

• A public train ticket from suburbia back to the city: $6.58

• Two 710 millimetre bottles of fruit punch-flavoured Gatorade Zero from my childhood convenience store: $4.09

• A near-inedible tofu teriyaki on rice, one spring roll, and one 500 millimetre bottle of Coke Zero — with tip — from the place at the mall (across from my high school) where I’d occasionally eat lunch: $16.89

MARATHON MUSINGS

“Now our lives are changing fast. Hope that something pure can last.”

Why? Why waste so much time marathoning around…making notes as well as making photos? No one really asks me — or at least frames it that way — but I do pose the question to myself every now and then…like, out of concern for being a ‘conventional failure of an adult™’ or maybe to survey and/or update my inner topography. And I guess it’s ‘cause of the health benefits — and because of my loftier creative justifications (i.e. one rarely chooses their creative practice…the reality is that — more often than not — the practice chooses you) — but really, it’s because all the freestyle marathoning is so genuinely child-like…just full of wonder (which IMO is the secret sauce for staying inspired by — and engaged with — life, and living).

There are good childhoods and bad childhoods — and I know zilch about child psychology — but childhood IMO is just this really finite time when you’re small and everything is sooo big; big feelings, big laughs, big moments, big sads, big firsts, big marvels, big everything. It’s where awe and astonishment are so vivid because you’re so fresh-to-the-world or innocent or uncorrupted or receptive as a receptor or receiver.

But for me, adulthood has been pretty ‘meh’…it’s more rote / less romantic than I thought it’d be…just constrictive around the collar…where so much feels small.

And yeah, you get old — and life changes so fast — and it’s like all the external forces are trying to kill the inner child in us all (somehow still alive if you’ve fought your heart out to preserve and protect it). And in adulthood you get numbed by the news, depressed by doom scrolling, worn out by work, trampled by tech, and squished by standards…be they norms or expectations or conventions or whatever. And I know you can’t suspend reality, but that doesn’t mean we should take it sitting down either…so I stand up, put on my sneakers, and go stroll…out into the physical world — natural or urban — where none of those things exist (because they are artificial constructs…frequencies felt…but immaterial…just anti-matter that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things).

But in the suburbs, some of us were young once…

…And we’d jump on our shitty, busted-up bikes and pedal our true hearts out and explore the massive universe of our tiny enclaves…which were so infinite we could never reach the outer edges of them…but where everything of bigness and of substance — and significance — seemed to happen. In them. Out there.

…So that is where I choose to be now. Out there, in it.

I’m no longer holding onto handlebars — like, I don’t even own a bike these days — but I am holding onto a hope that something so pure can last; the child and the bignesses of things felt; awed and astonished.

And if so, the music plays on…

…In the ‘Rock Paper Scissors’ opera of how we choose to conduct our lives.

We used to wait…but what now?

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