lovehatethings

an audio mashup featuring...

Thanks to everyone who's listened, commented, tweeted, emailed, and (more importantly) helped to sustain my innate ramblings.

Perhaps one of the greatest names ever for a convenience store has evolved in translation.

Mac's (which started as Mac's Milk) has been a long-stnading brand in Ontario, Canada. While originally epitomized by a cat with a tartan cap, for the past generation the chain, having been purchased by a Quebec conglomorate and had their store name shortened to just Mac's, now boasts a winking owl as the corporate mascot.

Perhaps the best part of the acquisition was the rebranding of the store name in Quebec from Mac's to Couche Tard. Couche Tard literally translates to "up late", but in the context of the owl logo (appropriated from a previous acquisition called Winky's) makes the more common interpretation of Couche Tard as Night Owl.

Above and beyond the history, Couche Tard is just a really great name to yell at people when you want to sound insulting, but really be innocuous. Pronounced "Koosh Tar", we English-speaking folk often harden up that final "D" in translation, but such is the fault of our weak command of a different language.

The latest great thing about my recent walk through a Couche Tard in La Belle Province, was finding a product called Sloche. Beyond the fact that this is a great name in itself, the logo is a scary strung-out junkie cat looking for a fix.

I can't help but think that the old Mac's cat was kicked out into the streets after the Couche Tard acquisition and is now wandering the back alleys, twitching and drooling, looking for a sugar fix of Sloche.

On the road to Ottawa making our way to PAB2011.

(written stream-of-consciousness between 12:45 and 1:00am on Thursday, June 23rd, 2011)

The sound of rain hit the metal awning
And danced back up in asymmetric reflection
Like Mickey Hart sounds at the Fillmore.

Hunched over the QWERTY
Pondering the blank slate of onyx.

A bash and a crash
And a slam and a bam
And a train in vain
As crazy stock exchange ramped up distrust in the membership
And the club tore assunder to the sound of rolling thunder
And a spike drove through the brain.

Wherefore the minds of sickening songs
Where hollow-eyed drunkards lay plastered 'gainst walls
And humble old beggars sit staunch over pavement altars?
The prayers of the slammed, slammed once more
They faltered and cried a mournful tune that echoed off the stoops
And ricocheted in the alleys behind the granite cascades.

There is a semblance to this madness.
A cause to this effect.
A liberal dose of sprinkled circumstance
Where shred and the shredded meet and blades of grass cry
Plaintiff upended to shrivel in chlorophyll blood and madness.
Nature's Sisyphus of summer only to grow each week
Then ripped asunder and left naked and shivering
Under night rains and lightning flash.

There is a storm coming.

There is a storm that, if people really listened, they could hear from a worlds away.

Like the rattle and hum of some celestial train track
And the forboding single light descending on an entrenched position
We stand, gaze transfixed.
Human caught in headlight of a reckoning that is beyond our comprehension
And yet we fear with unnatural precision.

One day the locomotive bearing down upon us with become
So loud as to render us deaf.
So loud as to make words ineffectual.
So loud as to shake our minds from thought.

So bright as to blind out sight.
So bright as to burn the corneas from our skull.
So bright as to make us translucent.

And with all of this, what we fear most is the light going out.