The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

(Continued from this blog entry.)

I went into my house and switched to the coolest, most breathable clothing I had: a pair of black walking shorts, a t-shirt and a U.S. Postal Service work shirt given to me by an ex-girlfriend.

(This shirt was given to her from the U.S. Postal Worker I’d saved her from. It’s a sort of trophy; I refer to it as the “skin of my defeated foe.”)

My phone rang. It was Boris, who’d arrived from Montreal earlier.

“It was weird. I put money in the parking meter,” said Boris, “and minutes later, the power went out.”

“So it’s your fault, then.” I remarked.

“Hah. I’m outside the DECONISM gallery right now, and Steve Mann is standing not ten feet away from me. I told him I was meeting up with you, and he was excited that you’re going to be here tonight.”

“Cool! I’ll be there in about ten minutes.”

I also gathered some supplies, including:

• Half a bag of IKEA tealights and a butane lighter
• A Cateye MC-200 halogen bike headlight, which I often use as a flashlight and served me so well at Burning Man ’99
• Cateye LD120II tailight, which I clipped onto my accordion straps
• An old AM/FM radio walkman, which I haven’t used in years
• AA alkaline batteries for the light and walkman
• The “street” accordion

On my way out, I ran into my neighbour Trudy and asked her if she had candles, offering her some if she needed any. I went east to to Beverley Street, then north to Dundas.

On the way there, I switched my walkman on and for the first time ever, I set its “band” switch to “AM”. I thumbed the wheel and found a station — hey, MOJO radio, the “men’s radio station”!

They’d pre-empted the usual talk shows for an all-night call-in show. People were phoning in mostly “good news” stories. One woman, who’d run out of gas while stick in traffic on Highway 401 was aided two men who were hauling a load of lawnmowers. They’d managed to siphon out the gas from the lawnmowers to give her a quarter-tank of gas.

Another caller reported that some stores were either letting ice cream and other frozen desserts go at a deep discount or free.

When I arrived at the corner of Dundas and McCaul streets, some people at the Village Idiot Pub across the street yelled at me to come over. The Village Idiot was until very recently a cafe that almost never had anyone in it; it’s since been transformed into a very cozy and charming neighbourhood pub with a very classic feel.

The Idiot’s exterior walls — essentially garage doors that can be rolled up in the summer to let the air in — were rolled up, and the place was packed.

“There’s no music here!” one of them called out. “Play something!”

“Play a polka!” another yelled. There’s always someone who yells that.

“Play Lady of Spain!” yelled someone else. There’s always someone who yells that, too.

“Hey, how about this?” I asked, cutting into You Shook Me All Night Long, a pretty sure crowd-pleaser. I finished, and the entire bar cheered. Someone started passing around an empty pint glass and collecting money. I started into Born to be Wild. By the end of that number, the glass had returned, and I’d made thirty bucks with just two songs.

I noticed that some guy was standing beside me. I nodded at him. “Got a request?”

“Joey, it’s me, Boris!”

“Hey, great to meet you in person at last!” I shook his hand, and he introduced me to his friend Ken.

“Let’s get some beer,” I said, holding up the money that had been collected. “First round’s on me!”

Ontario Premier Ernie Eves has asked everyone in the province to cut back on their electricity use:

“We currently do not have enough [power] generation back on-line to see us through a regular weekday,” Ernie Eves, the Ontario Premier, said in a televised address yesterday.

Mr. Eves, who told reporters there “isn’t anybody on the face of the Earth that can offer a guarantee that there will not be a rolling blackout of some kind,” urged Ontarians to cut their regular power usage by half and asked all levels of government to operate only essential services for the rest of the week.

Here at Tucows, we’ve shut down the air conditioning and turned off all the lights. Non-essential computers have been shut off, including the company-issued Dell running Red Hat 9 on my desk, which I generally use as an IRC machine and second browser (my own personal Powerbook is my preferred tool). The building so far has remained pretty cool and the nine skylights let lots of sun in, but I’m already planning my move away from my desk at 3 p.m. when the sun from the overhead skylight glares down at me like the abducto-ray from all those alien encounter movies.

I’m going to treat the ongoing power crisis as an excuse to fire up the barbecue tonight rather than use our electric range or oven. Might as well turn lemons into lemonade, right?

Like the way it takes a heart attack to convince some people to change their eating and exercise habits, the big blackout has started to convince some people to find ways to conserve electricity. Power conservation has become a virtue and conspicuous consumption of kilowatts has become a vice, to the point that people running air condtioners are getting overly defensive. Take the quote from the guy in this article:

One man said he had a good excuse for running his air conditioner.

“I resent your asking me that,” he said. “I have asthma, and I could die without the air conditioning, so go away.”

He had me with “I have asthma” and lost me with “I resent” and “I could die”. He comes off more as a petulant emo rock teenager who really needs that new piercing than a guy with a respiratory ailment.

(Here’s another entry along today’s theme, “catch-up day”.)

For those of you with fast connections, I present to you Derek’s Stag, The Music Video! (7.1 MB QuickTime movie).

It’s made of the 41 photos I took during his stag party from two Saturdays ago, assembled into a photo-montage and set to the tune of Dynamite Hack’s cover of Boys in the Hood. The photos in the montage are in chronological order and span the time period from 5:30 p.m. Saturday night, where we started at the Park Hyatt rooftop bar, to 2:30 a.m. Sunday morning, where we were in line to get into Toronto’s most notorious speakeasy, The Matador.

The video is safe for work, but there is some swearing in the song. Remember, it’s an Eazy-E rap number!

The video took me all of one minute to make using iPhoto. I have yet to see a Windows-based solution that’s as elegant. Cool stuff like this is one of the reasons that I “fired” Microsoft.

Yeah, today is “catch-up day” here on The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

One of the items that I’m going to try and get blogged tonight is Derek and Allison’s wedding, which took place in Queenston, Ontario (a stone’s throw from Niagara Falls, for those of you not familiar with the local geography).

The wedding was lovely, the dinner was excellent, the company was charming, and we’d all do well to emulate this very happy couple, who are two of the sweetest people I know.

I’ll post the rest of the photos later this evening, but in the meantime, here’s a taste — it’s my favourite out of the set:

This is the first set of my photos from last week’s blackout.

Here are two photos of the guy at the W salon on Queen Street West who had the rest of his haircut outside:

Queen and Spadina is a busy intersection, but it’s never this busy on a Thursday afternoon unless it’s the Christmas shopping rush:

These two guys, who live on Beverley Street just south of Dundas we prepared with flashlight and hand-cranked radio:

With a good chunk of Accordion City’s public transport disabled, traffic became a nightmare in short order:

The smart ones decided to wait out the traffic and the blackout by killing time at their local pub, especially if it was open-air. Here’s our view from the patio of The Black Bull:

…but the point is to live so that you can always say “I gotta blog this!”

I’m looking at my backlog of unfinished blog entries. So far it consists of:

• Worst Date Ever, part 5, or the actual “worst date” from which the story arc draws its name
• Stories from Derek’s Stag, where I learn a valuable lesson about “getting digits”
• The remainder of the blackout story
• A night out with Fuzzy

…and I’m sure the wedding and Niagara Falls trip should provide ample storytelling fodder too.

Hopefully, as the freelance client work winds down, I’ll have more time to sit in cafes during the evenings with the trusty new Powerbook and write it all down. (Mind you, hanging out in cafes with a laptop is usually how all my girl trouble begins…)

Have a bloggably good weekend, everybody!

Black Hugo Boss suit? Check.

Dress accordion? Check.

Camera? Check.

Gift? Check.

I’m off to Queenston, Ontario to see my friends Derek and Allison get married this afternoon at 5:00, and then party the whole night long with my friends from Crazy Go Nuts University. The ceremony’s in Queenston — where Allison’s family is from — but this is a rare opportunity to see this cute couple as they live in Switzerland now. It’s also a chance to see Dhimant, who lives in Philly and Sascha, who’s now in Ottawa.

Weddings, the theory goes, are good places to, ahem, hook up. Or at least they would be, if my friends getting married would show some common courtesy and invite single women to their weddings. I want to be able to affect a Spider-Man voice (a la the old cheesy animated series) and say “Bridesmaid…senses…tingling!”

(A number of people have asked me recently if I’m one of those “committed bachelors”. Actually, the answer is no — it’s just that the one person I ever seriously broached the subject with said “no”. She will regret this decision years from now, when local news crews use her life story for puff pieces: “And now, here’s a story about the crazy old lady whose lives alone with 75 cats…”)

Anyway, on Sunday, we’ll probably explore the wonderfully cheesy Niagara Falls tourist traps. I need to work on my Skee-Ball game.