We just got back from a concert at the Air Canada Centre. It was a free concert performed by none other than the Tragically Hip (pretty much Canadian royalty).

It was put on by Goodlife Fitness to celebrate its 30th anniversary.

The concert was free, but you had to win tickets by contest or have them given to you by favour via a personal trainer. Either way, only clients, affiliates, and their families were invited to see this. (But I'm sure others got their hands on tickets via "other" means.)

The Hip rocked. As a Kingston boy, I was glad to see my kin do their thing. I'm both sorry and glad to say that this is the first time I've seen them perform live. (I've only been to a handful of concerts.) It's amazing how well they sound live. Downie's lyricism is nothing short of pure performance. And he didn't stand still once during the entire show, which, from what I've heard, is par for the course. Actually, his presence and movements...

In your preoccupation with entering the stream,
you turn your back on that which brought you here:
the worlds that would teach you languages that
can speak to those now flitting by.

Nothing speaks to you in this moment, and you cannot
translate the penetrating noise despite your best
attempts at filtering it out.

Sitting on the cusp between the real and the imagined,
you cannot focus on anything but how it's as sharp
as the point of a spear.

You give into impulses that pull in either direction;
you stumble, yet never fall.
You resist--and in that fool's tenacity, you insist
on being nothing,
a subject of neither.

It's like spending the entire Saturday at the end of the world
stringing speaker wire
while having no music to listen to.

Having to repeatedly tell your boss they missed payday.

Are you a man with that posture,
with your yearnings and spendings?

A man knows and wants and takes and gets.

The impulsive inertia of this collision course is criminal.

Prevention lies in submissive aggression--
impressionable,
supple.

Torn edges of paper can be cut smooth,
made new,
reused.

All things are eventually spent, after being well used.

While deathly sirens are swinging doors,
you can find your way throughout the world and still not know how to act.

On the days when being is unbearable,
when time accelerates and movement has no pattern,
where the deceitful sound of the world forces its false
predicaments upon you,
you cannot know how to act.

Nothing is created out of nothing.
And then you have nothing; you have it all.

Repeatedly shipping the breakfast of your day, your gut
has no feeling. You have no feeling but of the paste in your mouth
and the dryness of your lips.

Having no appetite for the world, you're skipping out on its tastes,
its bits of tastes, novel but not new.