The Harmolodics Live CD
It's 10:16 pm on Sunday, June 8th, 2025. I am sitting in my living room– no, my parents' living room. Listening to the Harmolodics live CD, I bought post the religious experience I had Friday night when they were opening for Lavender Town. I tapped my card the second the sound of an electric clarinet nestled itself between my eardrums, whispering the offer of another drink and of taking me somewhere I had never been before.
The sound, like a roach pitching a tent in my ear canal, will inevitably impair my already deteriorating hearing.
The sound, like the sloshing of stuck chlorine-treated pool water, won't let me go free without leaving its mark of an earned ear infection.
My dog mistakes the drums for someone knocking at the door. After realizing the false alarm, she swiftly ducks herself into her comedically small crate that lives on the left side of my mother’s previously perfect white couch. This crate once sat on the right side of the couch until this past December, when my father got his dream record set up, set up in that spot.
Last night, when I saw my dog for the first time since January, she got so excited that she went to put herself in the crate to calm down, except she instinctively went to the right side of the couch and not the left.
I think it takes time to get used to change. People aren’t always what we expect them to be. Crates aren’t always where we think we left them. Is that what you are to me now? A shifted object?
I know not to go to the right side of the couch anymore. Still when I hear shit news about the state of my family all I want is to respond to your dry DM and for you to ask me how I’ve been. It's been exactly a month. I still don’t know if I want to go round to the left side of the couch. To get used to this change.
On the right side, I lay on your chest, I breathe in tandem with the pumping of your blood, your palm is flat on my bare back, rubbing circles, your voice echoing, “I know”‘s, into my ear.
The sound is too far in for me to remove it, like a bead in the ear of a toddler that can’t be reached with a pair of tweezers.
On the left side, you leave me on delivered, and we don’t talk about anything of substance.
The sound is– nothing, there is no sound here.
Currently, I am feeling partial to throwing the whole crate to the curb, at least there I won't have any expectations of it.
My mind has never been so busy– as I am sure you can tell. No matter how much I write, nothing clears. My head feels like a screaming kettle, like it needs my attention, but I don’t know how to take it off this metaphysical burner.
The pressure builds, from the stories, the ones of my father when he was just a person who flipped his dad’s car by the Guelph arboretum and wrote short stories about glimpsing alternate universes through art.
The pressure builds, the unfinished school work, the awaiting of grades, the burnt ends of familial ties.
The pressure builds, and I am too tired to do all the things I wanted to do in Toronto in the time I have left.
I want to write all of it down til my head feels like a freshly raided piggy bank owned by a 10-year-old going to get a slushie from Max Milk. The sound is familiar; the clanging of dumped loonies and toonies left on the floor because she was in a rush to get out the door.
I try to take in the present: the freshness of the vinyls inhabiting the living room, the smokey haze that hovers over the city from the Alberta wildfires, how my grandfather teaching me to play cribbage reveals that the Ontario elementary math curriculum failed me (I can’t count in my head), how despite everything that is happening– woodward walks, mythic cold sores, subtext brought to you by spotify– I still want to be here, sat at my computer or hunched over my notebook, to let these stories move through me.