Rage Against The Machine One of my friends had a sleepover when I was sixteen. There was about twenty of us at her house; the girls slept upstairs and the boys slept downstairs. I only knew half of the boys, the others were the birthday girl's friends from church. The boys did not mingle well.

Dave brought a CD. The music he played was loud, fast, and angry. I didn't care for it but at the time it was fun to lose myself in.

When I was seventeen, it was hearing that same album that made me trade in my new acoustic guitar for an electric. I learned how to play every song on the album and I jammed start to finish with it, over and over.

It was the self-titled album from Rage Against The Machine.

There was more to this music than what I'd been listening to. It was loud, because it had a message, and its volume reflected its importance; it was fast because it was urgent; and it was angry, but it was with purpose and focus. Somewhere in the verses I learned that the world is a lot more complex than I knew it to be. Until then, I'd been sleepwalking through life. Rage Against The Machine woke me up.

Your anger is a gift.  ¶ 8:29 PM

  Nirvana The first time that I heard Nirvana was in Jason's bedroom. He was a year older and lived across the street with his very religious family. Jason had skateboarding magazines hidden in his room, and that's where he heard about grunge. Nevermind had just been released and the whole world was listening to Nirvana. Except me.

And I didn't like it. I went home.

Late in junior high, there was a school assembly, some kind of senior citizen awareness or appreciation thing. The seniors played a song that they liked and then we played a song that - apparently - us kids listened to. I'd never heard it before. It was Lake of Fire from Nirvana Unplugged in New York.

I bought that album the next day. And then later I bought Nevermind, and In Utero, and Bleach. Then I bought Incesticide as well as a fan-made album of rarities and outtakes called Outcesticide. I listened to these albums more than I breathed.

I can't imagine who I'd be today if only I'd stayed in Jason's room and listened to the rest of that album. I really can't imagine that I might have been doing something better with that time.  ¶ 8:22 PM

  Bossanova Before my sister got her first car, the only people I'd traveled with were my parents. That meant their music. So on long road trips, we listened to exactly five tapes: Rock and Roll Hits of the Fifties and Sixties, volumes one through five. I was raised on doo wop and Buddy Holly, and I loved it - but I knew there must be more out there.

Then my sister got her first car, and that meant her music. She had a few mix tapes from friends. Some songs were loud and chaotic, and others were soft and harmonious, but they were all unlike anything that anybody I knew was listening to.

She gave me the one that I loved the most. It was Bossanova by the Pixies.

There were only two radio stations in the small town that I grew up in. One was country and the other was pop forty. Bossanova saved me from that. Black Francis did not simply make music; he composed. Every song had so much structure and individual strength. Every song was unique.

That album spent so much time in my walkman that it may as well have just come with it. It was all I listened to for nearly a year, and it was all I needed. It set such a standard in my taste that I could never have looked at music the same way.  ¶ 6:12 PM

  Protection She had safety mechanisms built into her personality, protecting her from being hurt by any outside force. When I met her, she let her guard down, became human. Our lust was mutual, and at the time, so was our trust. She let herself be beautiful, then.

We were apart for months and together for one. It was then that she refused to become weakened by love, fueled by a need to prove that she was strong. Most of what I said was incidental, a reaction to minor contradictions in her behaviour, and she's held it against me ever since.

For a while during our time, we were on the same page, and it was written in one of the great romantic languages. But when she turned the page, she didn't tell me, left me to figure everything out on my own. I read ahead, right to the end, and still, she wasn't there. I never thought that she might have turned our page backwards.

She protected herself from being hurt by anything on the outside, and I wonder how old she'll be when she realizes that she's being hurt by what's on the inside.  ¶ 11:27 AM

  Growing and Glimmering There was more that happened that night.

We had been friends for many years, but we'd never been as close as that night. Both of us had the aura of alcohol around us while we laid on the trunk of my car staring up into the night sky. The beautiful thing of small towns is that you can actually see the stars; and it's comforting to think that they can see you, too.

We had a long conversation out in the cold about constellations and life and love. To think that this person I regarded as a friend actually thought the same way as I did, that we were both experiencing similar things. To think that I wasn't alone, that I could be seen as well.

Last night, I was the first one that he told about his life changing. I honestly never felt happier for him. And if he remembers that conversation we had that night, I'm glad that it all worked out.  ¶ 2:23 PM

  Karma Confession She was right, it was all karma.

Around the end of elementary school, I was a great big bully. Well, more accurately, I was an associate bully. The actual bully was a friend of mine, and we used to pick on his little brother and all of his friends. I remember a lot of spinning them around by their feet at lunch time, but then again I also remember it being voluntary. One afternoon, I was called to the principal's office. I walked out of the room angry, and my teacher, M. Cuisson, tried to grab me by the arm, get me to calm down. But I threw his arm away, stormed off and away from my favourite teacher.

When I started junior high school, I remember it being very hard to fit in. I wore glasses with the worst prescription you could imagine and always seemed to have last year's style. Every possible definition of the word geek.

The computer lab was in the high school wing, and every lunch hour I would have to navigate my way there through the maze of giants and ogres. They would line themselves up on either side of the hallway, like a gauntlet of varying hostility, and push me around as I tried to get through. One time I had to use the washroom, which is something a meek geek should never do in the senior's wing. I have bitter memories of laying on that washroom floor, watching the two giants walk out sideways.

I don't dwell on these things anymore. I am who I am, and who I was, and who I will be. Nothing can change that. Nothing, except who I am.  ¶ 6:24 PM

  Regifted There is only a single instance in my life when I've dated the same woman twice. The relationship had expired after a couple months because at the time I had no idea what I was doing. She was older than me by a few years, which, in my eyes, gave her infinite wisdom on these matters, and somewhere between Christmas and New Year's was when we agreed that it simply was not working and that we should be friends instead.

And so we were. Months and months went by where we chatted casually and met infrequently, until one night when we got together for drinks.

In an odd twist of irony, somewhere between the following Christmas and New Year's Eve was when we agreed that, once again, it simply was not working. We did our best characterized portrayal of friends for a while afterwards, but the play itself was redundant. Things end, so it goes.

And still, to this day, these memories make me nervous around the holiday season. It always seems like something will become unwrapped.  ¶ 9:10 AM

  The Return I wasn't sure why I was walking away. It was a cold night; I could see the frost of my breath, and that's how I knew I was alive. We'd just had our first kiss, which had taken me by surprise, and each step I took in a direction away had me wondering more and more why it had been so brief. I stopped, turned around, and called. It rang forever until she answered.

"Are you upstairs?" I asked.

She was.

"How long would it take you to get back downstairs?"

"A moment," she said.

She came out of the door with her phone in her hand, but the conversation wasn't in our voices anymore. Pulled together, we lingered in the slow winter chill, fighting it with the warmth of wanting.  ¶ 7:57 AM

  Bonding With Rage When I was in grade 12, I was part of a group of students that went to Italy and Greece. When we arrived, we joined a group of grade 9 students from Kentucky. They were all much younger than us and despite where we were at the time, we all had very little in common. When this sort of thing happens, it makes all similarities that you do find that much more vivid in memory. In this particular case, I remember walking down a street late in the evening with one of the boys while we sang the entire length of a song by Rage Against The Machine. Every word perfectly in time with drum fills and solos exactly as they were on the album; an album that we'd both listened to countless times in our own city in our own country. This was what brought us together that night.  ¶ 7:54 AM