Weblog and Playground of Gord Fynes

Our washing machine fritzed out on us, for the third time, close to two months ago. The quote we had to get it fixed this time started at $300 just for the labour. With a new baby on the way, and already having a messy six-year-old, the final decision was to purchase a new set (ours was a stacking combo). We’d been making do with loading up the week’s dirty laundry every Saturday morning, grabbing a coffee and magazine and heading down the block to the laundromat before it got too busy and all the quarters were gone from the change machine. Imagine feeding in a $20 bill and getting twenty loonies (dollar coins) in return. It’s fucking aggravating!

Last weekend, we finally bit the bullet and dropped into our local Sears department store to pick out a new stacking washer/dryer, and, what the hell, a new blender while we’re at it. The scheduled time of delivery: the following Saturday (yesterday). That gave us a week to get rid of the old set, which sounds reasonable, non? We took the blender home the same day.

You’d think that calling up any second-hand appliance and repair shop, saying I’ve got a free stacking washer/dryer that needs some work that you guys could probably do in a couple of hours. All you need to do is come and get it would have shop managers leaping through the phone at you, showering you with accolades regarding such generosity.

Such was not the case.

After a week of No thanks, We’re not interested and WTF? (none of the charities were interested), Thursday arrived with still no plan as to how to lose the closet full of recyclable junk.

Junk? Ah ha!

I dial up 1-800 GOT JUNK’s site to get an idea of pricing and availability. Luckily for us, they’ve got an opening at the end of the day on Friday, just as we’d be getting home from work. At this point in the game, whatever their cost to haul the whole thing away is a bargain.

Friday morning, I pull the set out and disconnect the power, hoses ‘n’ such. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure of looking behind a washer ‘n’ dryer that’s been stationary for at least five years in a closet. It’s fucking’ scary! By the time the GOT JUNK guys left, we’d been walking this stuff up and down the stairs and around the landing outside the ex-laundering appliance’s home.

The new set arrives early Saturday, we hook it up, check that nothing’s leaking and/or sparking and get the first load of laundry at home in the past two months muthafucking on.

But hey, why stop there? The rest of the weekend consisted of:

* vacuuming up the residuals of the old machine (as well as the rest of the place)

* relegating a bunch of junk from our Harry Potter suite (the closet under the stairs) to the building’s basement storage

* scrubbing toilets, sinks and the bathtub

* cleaning out the fridge’s contents and scrubbing it out (shudder)

* peeling off the layers of paper clumped together on the kitchen wall to re-discover our bulletin board

* rounding up a garbage bag’s worth of old clothes to donate

* rounding up a small bag’s worth of old and holey t-shirts to pitch in the bin

* cleaning out the car and take it for a wash ‘n’ vacuum

To paraphrase Henry Rollins: We didn’t just clean this weekend. We kicked dirt’s ass!

Hell, I also managed to finish off last month’s issue of The Walrus, start reading Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything and get to the gym to burn off 1,000 calories while finally listening to some of the Boing Boing and This American Life podcasts piling up on iTunes.

How was your weekend?

A couple o’ things out of the mouth of my almost six-year-old son recently that made me do a double-take:

bq. Dad, what the hell are you doing?
Hey, when can we listen to some Frank Zappa?

And on the subject of whether his soon-to-be sibling will be a boy or girl having viewed the ultrasound which failed to reveal the baby’s sex:

bq. It’s going to be a boy, not a girl, because it doesn’t have any hair.

There you have it.

One of those musical epiphanies, the kind that one can have at least once during their lifetime, occurred to me in late September 1988 at the then Concert Hall at the corner of Yonge and Davenport in downtown Toronto. I was attending a MetalFest of sorts (I don’t remember the show’s official name) that was scheduled during a weeknight, which hadn’t been _that_ big of a deal to attend, seeing as I’d dropped out of high school for that first semester of my final year and was working full-time in a cheese factory. The big news story of the day: Ben Johnson was stripped of his Olympic Gold Medal after testing positive for steroids.

Among the bands appearing on the bill was a group from the San Francisco Bay area that I’d heard about from friends and read about in various fanzines: Blind Illusion. They’d been through town one other time before this, however, at a licensed establishment where I would have been refused entrance due to my not being of the legal drinking age in Ontario. My pre-performance attraction (having never heard a note) was that one of their members, Larry LaLonde, had been a member of the metal outfit, Possessed, a group that I had previously been a fan of (see _The Eyes of Horror_ EP).

The band, lead by guitarist/vocalist Mark Biedermann, took to the stage looking very unmetal (no black leather or studded wristbands and bullet belts) and proceeded to put a refreshingly near-psychedelic spin on the evening’s tried (tired) and true genre of headbanging, fist-pumping Thrash Metal. Without sounding like the stop/start style-hoppings of John Zorn’s Naked City (another band I would have a musical epiphany over), the band successfully blended melodic lines and counterpoints with intricate motifs, heavy riffs and ball-crunching rhythms. I would later describe the group to friends as having a real Yes-meets-Metallica sound.

Once the band had finished, my first move, after picking my jaw up off of the ground, was to rush to the venue’s lobby to pick up one of the band’s t-shirts (a _blue_ one, not black) which I wore for the next two years until it was eaten by either a washing machine or a dryer. In the days immediately following the gig, I ran out to my local independent record store to pick up a copy of their debut LP, _The Sane Asylum_. Through various friends and connections, I also managed to get a cassette copy of the band’s first performance in Toronto. I played the tape until the magnetic finish had nearly been stripped away and practically wore out the grooves on the LP.

Flash forward to present day. I have been scouring the internet looking for either a copy of their album on CD (I have seen it with my own eyes before) or _any_ mp3s. Alas, the closest I’ve come to finding anything of Blind Illusion in a digital format has been YouTube videos from a show of theirs in Sonoma back in 1988.

Should you ever come across a copy of _The Sane Asylum_ on CD, please, _please_ get in touch with me. If the price tag ain’t too hefty, I’ll even PayPal you for it.

First Dean Allen’s Textism goes quiet with little warning, and now his better half, Gail Armstrong, has decided to lead her OpenBrackets out to pasture.

I’m tellin’ ya, sometimes the internet loses more good than it gains.

Thank you Gail for the making the place a touch more classy all these years. We’ll miss ya!