heaven is not the kind of place that gets found

My teeth need to be fixed. I put it off, even though I can now afford it. Can I please repeat that I think making the populace pay for dental care is totally wild west? You can die from teeth problems, it's medical care. Teeth and hair make me think of existential issues, because they are permanent -- permanently had or permanently lost.

I owe money, I put it off.

There's those stupid loose ends that won't go away.

Once when I was a teenager my dad was driving me somewhere and I had a flyaway hair sticking out and he offered to cut it off. I wasn't having it. An army couldn't have made me cut that thing off.





I need to tell you a story. About four years ago I was browsing in a zeller's store in etobicoke, and I heard this song over the loudspeakers -- a christmas song for it was christmas. It sounded like magic, like a hipster's christmas carol, a british new wave hymn. I hearkened in vain to grab some lyrics for later googling, but because of the muddled raw production I could get nothing out of it.

I called that song my white whale. I would tell people about it. I heard it again a couple of years later when I (unfortunately) worked at a store owned by the same company, but I was on the phone with an important customer and could not get out of the conversation. I had to use the half of my brain that wasn't trying to please someone other than myself.

Another couple of years later (which was incidentally a few weeks ago), I heard it again in a cd store. I asked the shopkeeper what the song was, and like that the knowledge was mine. A little anticlimactic, but I got more out of it than a song.

Turns out the song was called "Christmas," and was recorded by a band called the Buzz of Delight, a two person band (one of these persons was Matthew Sweet). The song is better than I remember.

I found the song, and the full album from whence it came on a blog called Willfully Obscure, an amazing blog which seems to feature vinyl and cd rips of really cool music.

The rest of the record is even more exciting to me than even the song I was looking for. I don't know how to describe the music, except to say that it's beautiful.