Never mind the homework, here's the Vegan Teacher

Still hunkered down in the studio. Today is our last day here and it will probably be a long one since there are about 10 songs left to mix, with the odd vocal track left to go. We’ve averaged 10 hour days which takes a toll on the old ears. After listening to a song three dozen times to get the right balance between the guitars or correcting pitchiness of vocals, my ears start feeling warm and I get a strange full sensation in my stomach. It’s neccessary though since the quick-fix digital tools like pitch correctors are not a consideration for us.

Jesse is a total pro too and has been doing a great job helping us find the right sounds. He’s done hundreds of records so in between takes when we’re kicking back, I usually find myself picking his brain about being in it as long as he has. One example comes to mind; I asked him about his days with D.B.S. and he told me a story about how they got on the Rancid tour in 1995.

Apparently when they were booked to play the Gilman in San Francisco, they had found a contact number for a place to stay in the Maximum RockandRoll publication Book Your Own Life. BYOL is a great resource for DIY touring bands. I’m not sure if it’s still up (I haven’t booked a tour for a couple of years), but when Fractal went down the west coast we relied heavily on the promoters and people who’d offer up places to stay in the online version of it. Anyways, d.b.s. played this show at the Gilman (a well known all ages club, where many East Bay bands started off) and ended up at the dude’s place they had lined up before hand. Turns out it was Tim Armstrong’s pad. Rancid were right about to release their acclaimed album (And Out Come the Wolves) and Tim was still offering up his place to stay to touring bands going through SF. The D.B.S. dudes were beyond stoked and Tim mentioned they were going to try to hit western Canada soon. They gave him their contact and sure enough, a few months later, they got a call from Rancid asking them to hop on the tour.

I don’t know why I love stories like these so much, maybe it’s because the tradition of oral history has always fascinated me. It’s funny too because a lot of the time music is just entertainment, but when I hear about human beings making these connections and actual communities being formed as a result, I tend to forget about the commodified aspects of it. I guess it helps keep me grounded, eyes open to the potential of music as an expression of the essence in each of us.

Anyways, this morning I met with a girl I dated long ago. I hadn’t seen her in about 6 or 7 years and up until a couple months ago we’d completely lost touch. She tracked me down through the old band and it turns out that she ended up doing what she told me she’d wanted to do long ago: move West and help people who need it. I’m not generally into the idea of reconnecting like this. With these types of relationships, I tend to cut the lines and not think back. But it was really good to see her and hear about the work she’s doing as a doctor. In a lot of ways we are still as similar as we were when we’d first met, and it was neat to hear about how the work she was doing in the downtown east side parallels some of the stuff I’m doing. Albeit the people she helps include more junkees and prostitutes.

You get a lot of “information” about these people through the media, they’re usually portrayed as faceless casualties and never actually people. Hearing from someone that works with them on a day to day basis, talking about the importance of such things as a needle exchange program to reduce disease transmission, is an important perspective to get. Like my students, it would be easy to toss stones without knowing their stories. But when you learn about how almost 100% of the prostitutes working in East Van were sexually abused as children, another perspective resolves itself. This, I think, is an important quality of humanity and ultimately helps us search for the most apporpriate solutions.

Anyways, that was that. After 90 mins we said our goodbyes, but I realized the strange resentment I had when I was 22 has been replaced with excitement for her. It’s good to see people who end up doing what they’ve set out to do, and there are a ton of people in my life like this who I feel fortunate for knowing/have known.

Well back to mixing this thing. I think it’s still going to take about 8 more hours and a few more beers.

I’ve been in Vancouver for a few days enjoying the humidity, fantastic veg-friendly food and doing a bunch of recording. We rolled in on Saturday night and somewhere around Hope I got an incredible hankering for perogies. Must call the Grandparents and make it happen, and that’s exactly what I did. Two hours later, they oversaw me filling my gullet with the starchy little morsels while recalling tales of growing up in the 40’s. One of my favorite things to do out here for sure.

The next day was spent by the water, basking in the sun. A friend of mine is putting two of us up in his apartment which is across the street from beach so after filling a cooler full of veggie dogs and brewhahas, we hit it with towels and a hibachi in tow. 7 hours later, we were sufficiently sunburned, wobbled and in bed by 10.

I’m sleeping on the wood floor with our bassist (dubbed Snores McGee) on the couch a few feet away. To deal with the periodic episodes of his palatal vibrations, I’ve adopted a technique of Small Pillow Throw. This has proven to be both nonevasive regarding sleeping patterns as well as an effective cessation to late night snore induced anxiety. Small Pillow Throw has been adopted in conditions where I can’t see him as the snoring blips away on my foggy midnight radar. A flick of the wrist in the right direction and I buy myself 2 more hours of sleep. This morning the pillow was defected back in my direction and it was decided that it was probably just time to get up and find coffee.

The whole reason for being out here is to document the work I’ve done with these three other dudes over the cold prairie winter. We wrote 16 tunes and I think we’re putting 14 of them to tape. It’s going really well. We spent the past couple of days working on the bed tracks, that is the music sans vocals. Since we’re recording to tape, there’s not a lot of room for edits. We run through each song a couple times and take the best runthrough. It can be a frustrating process because I’ve got to nail my drums in a single take which makes my super conscious of my timing, leaving less room for frills and whathaveyou. After playing for hours and hours it can also get very tiring. But no matter, when this happens it’s just time to hit the fridge for a brew and loosen up a bit. I’ve got good timing anyways and haven’t used a click track in the studio for years which lends itself to creating a great live recording. The energy of the band has also been great, you could say we’ve set ‘em up and knocked ‘em down. Vocals today, we’re right on schedule.

I should also mention we’re recording with Jesse Gander. For those who were into west coast punk rock in the 90’s, this is a familiar name as he fronted d.b.s. for almost 10 years. As a personal aside, one of the first “punk” videos I ever saw was for their song Snowball. I think they put that record out when they were still in high school and them doing their thing so young definitely got me motivated to get my first band up and running. Anyways, 17 years later and he’s still playing music but he’s also a total pro in the studio. You need a good engineer when you’re making records, someone who both understands what your band is going for while also pushing for the best results. It can be a really fine line, I’ve worked with people who’ve either not understood what I wanted to get out of my drums or who were pretty satisfied with mediocre takes. But this session is going great and I’m already starting to anticipate the results.

Well, I finished up my teaching work for the next couple of weeks. Since the band is off to Vancouver to do some recording next week, I took on a tonne of work on to compensate for what I’ll miss while I’m gone. Gotta love salary. Truthfully it’s not even about the dough, it’s my students who needed to have enough direction to get them through while I’m absent. One of my kids should be returning to school monday but the others will keep on truckin’.

I have a really interesting case with this new girl who has been too ill to go to school for a couple months. It’s hard to say if she actually is or not, but her mother keeps canceling our visits. She’s not getting a lot done and her regular teacher seems to think she’s using excuses to stay home. Meanwhile her mother (a, shall we say, unique person) is very insistent that her condition is very serious. I can’t get a good read on the whole thing yet. Regardless, this student is providing quite a challenge and I feel like I’m doubling as a social worker over there, which is fine of course.

Another student is coming along very well, and I hope that she will write her finals with the other kids at the end of June, which makes me happy. I guess the hospitalized girl is in a pretty bad way right now. I’ll know more about it when I get back, but for now she’s a bit preoccupied with mental issues for me to resume working with her.

This job is really fascinating, I love it.

In other news I just found out that an ex of mine is having a baby. That makes both of ‘em married, one preggers. These were my two longest running relationships. It’s kind of weird for me to think about it, because of course my first instinctive thought is “wow, that could’ve been me”. Of course realistically it never would have been, but when I think about myself at age 28 and put myself in the context of 30 or so years ago; I’d be a career man, likely married with kids. Instead I have this uncharted existence where I keep myself occupied teaching, touring with bands, DJing, building bikes and making art. I wouldn’t have it any other way, the only strange thing is not having grown up around any people like me to kind of place myself beside.

I guess it’s partly a generational thing, mine being a little less involved in the whole American Dream-type thing as well as a result of the amount of information out there affecting my daily attitudes. Environmental concerns, not really wanting to contribute to the billions of humans making short work of the planet’s ecosystem, being super involved in what I think is community building… these things keep my brain too preoccupied to think about finding someone to settle down with. Some friends think people like me should be adding to the gene pool. After all, we’ll need more good people to make decisions when we’re gone, right? But maybe that’s why I’m teaching in the first place, to try to get these kids leaving school with minds to do just that.

At any rate, none of this bugs me or anything, it just makes me think and reflect. With that, I’m going to spend a sunny afternoon on my stoop with a couple of bad felines.

This morning I told a student we’d come back to long division tomorrow in order to spend the day working on her multiplication. A fantastic cover up because you see, I completely forgot how to make long divisions.

Going through my record collection for the DJ set this week (I’ll be flying solo as the other two brosnakes have left for opposing coasts), and doing so I was compelled to give a listen to a few albums that have been collecting dust for the longest time. Did they stand the test of time?

An enthusiastic yes. You cannot go wrong with unreleased Mudhoney, Soundgarden, Screeming Trees and Pearl Jam songs. Plus, the Paul Westerberg songs are just as good as anything he ever wrote with the Replacements. This will be spun on Thursday.

No no no no. Awful. With the exception of the Rollins Band covering suicide, and a half decent Helmet song, this record was better left in my mind then on my stereo. I never liked the Cure, Trent Reznor butchers Joy Division (albeit he preforms it decently live) and Pantera are still the worst. Ugh. Sorry Henry, but this will not be spun on Thursday.

Say what you will about the Stone Temple Pilots, but I always thought they were trying to escape their title of a poor man’s Pearl Jam with this record. Some of the songs are just as cheesy as they were 15 years ago, but you can’t deny that Interstate Love Song is a decent jam. Even Randy Bachman agrees. This, however, will not be spun on Thursday. I will leave that to every half hour on the local corporate rock radio station.

I got this tape for Christmas one year and it was the heaviest thing I’d ever heard, back then. Now I realize that Nirvana, circa 1989, was just aping the Melvins. Which isn’t so bad. School will be spun on Thursday.

The bike is coming along really well. I fixed the chain line this weekend at the co-op with the help of a couple of volunteers. Bike Yoda came along to tell me that my wheel was not true and that I would have to do some spoke-tightening to basically make it nice and round. After spending about 90 minutes doing this under the direction of a confusing Bulgarian man, I decided that it would be better to pick a rim out of the scrap pile that was already true and just swap the axles out. Then an old hippy/backyard mechanic helped me get it ridable once again as I’d deconstructed the frame pretty good over those three hours. I’m fairly certain that after spending $40 on a new chainring that no more parts for this thing will be required, just a ton of tweaking.

In other news, I’m off to Vancouver next week to make a record at a studio called the Hive. Jesse Gander (of DBS fame) will be tweaking the knobs and we’ve got 5 days booked with him to lay down and mix about 15 tracks. It’s 1-inch tape this time around and we’ve got some new stuff lined up as opposed to the last time we made an analog recording (when we bought some used tape off craigslist). So I guess it should sound a bit cleaner.

Anyways, in order to make up for the lost work, I worked with some of my kids over the holiday weekend which was fine. One of my boys is healing well and should be back in school next week, another one is also on the up and up. Then I called one of my student’s Moms to see what the deal was with her no show the other day. She told me this girl (the refugee) was back in the hospital and I was shocked to hear the details. She will likely be there for the next few weeks and will hopefully emerge in June sometime. But until then, things are going to be rough and I really hope she’ll be ok. Such a cool kid handed a heck of a heavy situation.

You know, you hear about genocides happening every day in places like Sudan and Sri Lanka but when you work with kids who fled, the situation becomes very real. Kids will eventually grow up and some of this shit will probably dog them until their last days. I’m sure everyone can remember certain things about their upbringing that still affect them, like the time they got yelled at or their first spanking. But can you imagine the effects of witnessing the killing of those you hold dear?

I think for me it’s always been easy to scoff at the lack of government will to intervene in these situations, and I’m not sure if that has been a result of the seemingly constant bombardment of bad news or just a general feeling of helplessness. I haven’t been working that long with kids, but I’ve noticed that the more I become directly involved in their lives, the less I gripe about what isn’t being done on a global scale because I’m actually trying to help these kids out.

When you become invested in something like this, the context of news changes. It ceases to be entertainment (ie. something you can avoid by changing the channel) and becomes part of your reality. Like the kids I work with, they just accept it and work it out as best they can. Believe it or not, I think this has actually made me a much happier person because trivial things that used to get me bent out of shape don’t play much of role in affecting my life these days. The inconveniences of line ups at the grocery store, traffic jams, noisy neighbours and the condition of my washroom are much easier to just accept then get frustrated with.

Jeeze, who’d of thought that a 12 year old kid would be the person to teach me these things!

Anyways, these guys keep me pretty hopeful as does your selflessness. That’s what we’ve got. Maybe the more the economy tanks, the better this will get as we rethink our ideas regarding money and happiness.

I attended an interesting meeting at the end of the day Monday to discuss the No Zero policy that is sweeping the district. I’m not quite sure what to make of it, I can see the point in giving students more flexibility to complete assignments and whatnot, but I’m not sure if it’s setting them up for success in this here modern world. Have a look at the article and please comment as I’d love to discuss!

Alright, bike update!

After spending a couple of hours at the co-op last night, I managed to get the beast ridable! The great thing about the co-op is that you can save huge amounts of dough by going through their scrap bikes. For example, yesterday I picked up new pedals a crank and a chainring for 4 dollars! Then I bought a new bottom bracket because mine was pretty rusty as well as a new set of single-speed bolts (the five shiny things in the photo) to make sure it all fit snugly together. I was happy with the results!

The dude who helped me put all this stuff together is a man I will refer to as Bike Yoda. It takes a while to get Bike Yoda’s attention, but once you’ve got it you’re basically set to tackle any project. My second one of the night was replacing the cassette with a bmx freewheel I’d picked up from the shop this weekend. This is nerdspeak for removing the sprockets on the rear wheel and replacing them with one.

Once that was in, and after Bike Yoda helped me get the right amount of tension in my chain, I realized that I had a problem. The chain isn’t really in line and to fix that I’ve got to do something called dishing the wheel, which is essentially moving the spacers onto the other side of the axl and centering the wheel. You can see in this photo, how the chain veers a bit to the right. Bad chain alignment.

But this takes a fair amount of work and by the time we got everything assembled the co-op was shutting down. Bike yoda also informed me that the crank I found was a bit warped and that I’d probably want to get a new one to avoid having my chain fall off. All of this for another day. Until then, I just picked up some tape for the handlebars so it’s time to take it for a spin!

I subbed Friday. It was pretty rough since I worked the previous day at the school and the restaurant, then I DJ’d ’till 2. No matter, even though the kids were being little rascals, it was the last day of the week so I made a quick stop on the way home for stoop supplies.

So this weekend I started working on a bike project. A couple of weeks ago, a friend found an old frame in some dude’s backyard trash pile. It was in good shape and the guy ended up letting it go for 60 bucks, then it was enthusiastically handed it off to me to run with. It’s a Sekine from the 70’s and I’m stoked since I’ve been wanting to build a bike for a while now. So I cleared off the picnic table behind my place and assessed the situation:

The shifters were shot, the pedals had taken some damage from an accident, the seat is not that great either but everything else looked to be in servicable shape. Except the front wheel (see below).

So this is what I’ve done so far; I completely stripped the frame of everything but the brakes, which are in fair shape. I went down to the bike co-op and picked up a new front rim, tube and tire which cost about $17. Then I went into the local bike shop and picked up some new ball bearings. After a little work and some tips from a friend’s mechanically inclined roommate, I greased ‘er up and got the new front wheel running really smoothy.

I also picked up a single-speed freewheel to replace the gears with, as well as a new chain which ran about 50 bones. Then I removed the shitty, broken pedals and cracked a Lucky. I took the handlebars off and redid the brakes a bit, taking off the suicide bars. Once it was stripped of everything, I took it to a neighbour down the street that I’ve seen tinkering away with stuff in his driveway. I reckoned he might have a pipe cutter to trim the handlebars down with. He didn’t have one that was the right size, but he had a grinder. He chopped about 5 inches off the handle bars so I could put them back on upside down for a more comfortable ride. He also told me stories about how his wife’s grandfather build the apartment that I live in.

So at the end of the weekend this is what I’ve managed to get it looking like. It’s still not rideable, but hopefully after another trip to the co-op tomorrow I’ll be able to take it for a spin around the block.

This week is going really well. I’m taking on two new students which means my contract will likely be bumped up to a 0.8. I’m stoked for a few reasons. While I’ll be getting more dough, there’s also been talk of extending my contract into next year. This would be huge because teachers in the province are expected to take a hit this year because of the big bad economy as well as the Alberta Government’s lack of a long term investment in Education. But no matter, I am not here to gripe about shit everyone already knows. I’m not here to gripe at all actually. My job rules!

Most of the time I spend with them is used going over work I had assigned them the previous day, then introducing new topics, then getting them to try to work on stuff. This method has been working especially very well for the girl from Somalia who I’d been told had been getting nothing done at school. In less than two weeks she’s managed to nearly complete the package they’d given me to spend the next month on with her. She’s very eager and extremely bright, I guess she just doesn’t function the same way in class for whatever reason.

The boy is kind of slacking, spending too much of his free time watching wrestling and not enough on the homework I give him. I’m going to have to bust his balls tomorrow because he’s pretty far behind.

The other girl is coming along. She has to write a test for me in between two doctors appointments tomorrow.

Lastly, my favorite search term used to find my blog today has to be “teacher practicum shit”. You people crack me up!

Alright, I’ve got the afternoon off so I’m going to get to a bunch of stuff I’ve been meaning to post this week.

First off: Swine Flu and how I’m tiring of the media hype behind the projected pandemic. Now if it’s not the economy it’s swine flu (which the WHO is now referring to as H1N1 because of pressure from the pork industry). There have been several mild cases in Canada and it’s astounding how I’ve barely heard anyone give it context or mention the fact that thousands of Canadians die annually from the regular flu. In the Tao of Pooh, this kind of reporting was referred to as Eeyore News. That is; sensationalized reports that just give you something to worry about. With all the coverage over the last couple days more important stories in my neck of the woods have gone by the wayside. The best example is how the provincial government is debating a piece of legislation that would make it possible for parents to pull their kids out of science class in order for their minds to be spared from learning about evolution. I think if people want to indoctrinate their kids with creationism that’s fine (well, not really), but at least give them the chance to be exposed to other things. Keeping them away from dangerous ideas like the origin of species will surely do them a disservice by not only keeping them in the dark (as far as good science is concerned), but make them incapable of understanding processes like how to decide if something makes more sense than something else.

Anyways, onto my job and how it rules. I settled in last week, got my desk together, paperwork sorted and met my kids. They’re pretty cool and very inspiring to work with, I’ll tell you why. Each one of my kids can’t attend regular school because of something serious that’s either keeping them from being able to be in the classroom or even from just being able to go outside. As it stands I have three that I work with, which is soon to be increased. In order to respect their privacy I’ve got to be a little vague, but it’s basically like this: one girl just had a stroke and is relearning how to do almost everything, I’ve been assigned to get her through high school math. One boy is having surgery after surgery to deal with an infection that’s pretty much got him confined to his room. I’m teaching him 4 subjects at a Jr. High level. The other girl is a refugee who’s got some serious post traumatic stress disorder from the situation she fled. She’s in line for some cognitive therapy so she can be integrated back into school, until then I’m also getting her through some Jr. High stuff.

So it’s a heck of a thing. Considering their situations, my students have the best attitudes and basically just want to keep on truckin’ so they can graduate. Getting to know them this week put a lot of things into perspective for me, again. Sometimes you just need a little reminder about how you’re problems really amount to nothing when you consider the things some people have to live with on a day to day basis. Personally, I find this a hard thing to keep that in the old memory bank sometimes. Not only because I have a bad memory, but when you are confined to your own bubble that limits your interactions and keeps you very comfortable you’re reality is skewed a bit. It’s always good to shake it up.

As far as stories go from last week are concerned; all I’ve got right now is that when I was working with the boy, his Mom and little brother were making a serious ruckus downstairs. She was trying to keep this kid from crying by playing some dvd about trucks called Mighty Machines. There was a theme song for Mighty Machines and it basically looped the entire time I was there because she’d left him in front of the television when the dvd started to skip.  I found it on youtube, check it out. 90 freaking minutes of mighty machines.

Lastly, I saw Mr. Chi Pig bring his ringers to town as SNFU at a free show the other day. I’m going to try hard not to complain about the clown he has replaced Marc Belke with. Really hard (he’s a total clown). Instead, I’ll say that I’ve got to hand it to him. For being as weathered as he is, he has a remarkable amount of energy and can still whip a crowd into a fury. Also, it was great seeing kids out who weren’t even old enough to buy the last SNFU record on it’s release date. There’s something special about what he’s doing with those guys. I don’t know if they’ll ever even put out a record again, they’re kind of like the Fleedwood Mac for punks in that way. But if singing those jams he wrote 25 years ago is going to get kids interested in going out to shows or starting bands then vaya con dios Mr. Chi Pig. Do what you’ve got to do, the only thing you can. Even though you’re starting to resemble some kind of toothless, punk-rock Father Time.