Lately I've had a hard time ignoring 'possibilities', we'll say, within chaos. About how every single choice affects the future. I used to find fatalism pretty easy to believe, however now when I close my eyes, I see threads sewn into stiches- several individuals making seams. They're quite easy to rip apart if you tug from the right angles...

I now understand the appeal of Choose Your Own Adventure books, and why I had to read the first paragraph of both options before I settled upon one.

Failure - The Nurse Who Loved Me

So here's a song with potential. Here's a song that could have at least been #63 on CFNY's top ninety of the nineties. You probably recognize it thanks to A Perfect Circle's banal cover which strips it of its mess.

True, messes cause headaches for some, and true, this can come across as an ugly weld of Snoopy's Classicks On Toys and Candlebox-grade post-grunge. But it works in the same way a paint-by-numbers bleeds outside the lines to make something softer, more pleasing to the eye.

And this song begins the soundtrack of the adventure I didn't choose. I could have stayed in school after returning from India... never moving to Hamilton, never working in Oakville and St. Catharines... I'm pretty sure I know where I might have ended up, and I'm pretty sure it would have been a success at the cost of great emotional health. This song may have been played at that wedding.

Things were a haze, really, when I brought this into my canon. My verdant memories of Summer 2004 end with a brushfire I lit myself. Luckily I chose the correct adventure, which began by putting out the flames instead of burning down a third of Patagonia.

-kam

Buy Failure's 'Fantastic Planet' (but don't laugh at the cover-art)