Wandering around even a smaller Borders shop in the southern land is a revelation and when the credit card has been paid down, or a near enough facsimilie thereof, it is a candy store. I walked around and gathered an armful, looked at it and realized I had proposed to myself the procurement of a stack of CDs from my twenties, replacements of their vinyl clones. I put most of them back, except for the Pretenders Learning to Crawl and Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music For Airports both of which are among the most important works in my experience of growing up into the present state. An elder Swick had the Eno in my grade 11 and Learning to Crawl was the soundtrack of the second half of my undergrad. Buy either now if you do not know them. Leave your workplace mid-shift if necessary.

But I did not stop there. I recall a reference or two to The Decemberists and picked up their 2003 CD Her Majesty. This led me to a review of their very recently released follow up at cokemachineglow.com and also to the question of whether that site preceeded the CD and book of poetry by the frontman of the Tragically Hip, Gordie Down...or Gord Downie, or the other way around. I used "Coke machine glow" in a conversation the other day to describe the experience of being in the exercise room without the light on, reading a magazine as I cycled to nowhere as someone who was there first did some yoga like thing. Anyway, the CD is good, an interesting voice, something of the Ben Folds Five with piano but also some art rock self-indulgences.

I also bought The Beginning Stage of...The Polyphonic Spree, the Jesus Freaks meets Supertramp and small college revival of the musical Godspell as it might have been presented by and only to the members of some lesser 1970s Christian cult, one that never got to the purple Kool-aid. Freaky webs site. They were on Austin City Limits three weeks back. It had the kids complaining on the drive home. They all sounded the same they shouted from the back seat but it reminded me of being their age when yet another troupe of Jesus freaks in a old school bus passed through the Maritimes filling United Church Halls like Dad's more than thirty years ago during my pre-teen summers, them sleeping on sleeping bags on the floor, surviving on sandwiches and squares made the elderly widows of WWI vets who in turn were somewhat stunned and amused by all the hair on the boys. Plus it has French horn among all the other horns and once upon a time I took French horn and, after grade eight, I even went to band camp to become excellent at French horn only to be returned to my parents with a note about my fatal overbite. I suspect they had wished that the overbite test occurred prior to the application and cheque being forwarded. The next summer I went to basketball camp and, moving before the new school year, I dropped that, too, in favour of typical anxieties and the gang including the one with a Hagstrom Swede electric guitar. I seem to have picked up my present habits of ale, ska and soccer only in grade eleven when I started to become mostly the me I am now.

Best of all perhaps is my acquisition of "Conquering Dub" by Yabby You Meets King Tubby off of The Rough Guide to Dub, recorded around 1974 somewhere between the Jesus freaks and band camp. Is it just me or was this what The Clash was listening to on the bus?