In A Contemplative Mood

Mme Metro surprised me this evening with something I hadn't really had the capacity to enjoy as it deserved for some time.

No, not that. You came here for the Paris pictures, didn't you?

Now that he's gone: It was Live Between Us, the Tragically Hip's sort-of senior year album.

I think that a live album tells us that a band has, arrived, for lack of a better word. And that brings me to my loss of the capacity for enjoyment.

I haven't bought a new album in a long time. It's not that I don't enjoy newer material--although I confess a detachment from the constant repetition of "I-me", "I-me" that seems the hallmark of modern music.

But my musical taste grew, perhaps hardened, in the '90's--the second age of the hippies. In the mild euphoria that a president who never inhaled brought to the scene--a contact high from the last rush of joy that the baby-boomers had before they sank into fear and age, and the ease of the bars of a cage. And somewhere down the line I ceased to groove on good tunes.

I think perhaps that now I have arrived too. That I spent a long time on that ol' hamster wheel trying to get somewhere, and that finally I've been able to settle into a job I like, with a person I love, in a place I enjoy.

Now I can look around, get my head up and ... what, exactly?

"I fucked up," says Gord Downie in the background "Just a loss of momentum," or something.

Well for the moment I can bask in the monologic stream-of-consciousness rock that is the Hip on stage.

There's a certain risk in this sort of post. Wonder if you'll guess what it is?