Nevermind what I felt about Nevermind

One of the problems with writing a personal blog is that you generally aren't near a computer when you are having slightly better than shallow thoughts. And I do my thinking in the car, or when I can't sleep, which makes even scribbling things down on a piece of paper difficult.

So, even when I have managed to figure something out, by the time I get round to blogging about it, I've usually forgotten what it was.

Which is a roundabout way of saying I don't know if this post is going anywhere.

But it's the journey, boys and girls...

We were in the car on Sunday, driving through the radio wasteland that is the Annapolis Valley, so I put on Nevermind and we listened to it for the first time in a long time.

I think Nevermind is the only album I own whose opening track brings me right back to the moment I heard it for the first time.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It is November 1991. I am in my room in the GMB in Trinity. A friend up from Galway is raving about his newest tape. Accent Monkey is here and other people are coming and going as usual and we play it and it is fantastic so we play it six more times and then the girl upstairs (the one who has the enormously loud orgasms with someone called T-aaa-dddhhh--gggg-hhhh!!!!! twice a week) bangs on the floor so we stop.

Then the movie Singles came out a few months later. Set in Seattle, home of Nirvana, it made the twenty-something struggle to fit into the world of work and bills and adulthood hopelessly romantic, and we all thought we'd like to be Seattle grunge slacker green creatives who live in way cool co-op apartments and drink Starbucks coffee.

Well, I did.

While trying to find an adequate definition of the word 'slacker', I found this post from what could be described as a very early blog. It's called Barefoot Jim's Flat. Like Barefoot Jim, I've never considered the word slacker as describing someone who is 'workshy', unlike him I've always seen it as being in some way 'responsibility shy'.

It's hard to believe all that angst and hope and trepidation was swirling around my head nearly eighteen years ago.

It's also hard to believe I ever aspired to drinking Starbucks coffee, but there you go...

It's even harder to believe I'm still getting away with being a slacker. Even though it's not a word I can say outside my head anymore, and I had to move to Atlantic Canada (Capital of the Slacker Universe) to haul my ass back onto the slacker waggon train...

...because slacker's a dirty word these days...

Why, I don't know.

Look at the end result of all the running around and huffing and puffing and wheeling and dealing we did between 1996 - 2008.

What did we achieve that we could not have achieved in a more sustainable way and at a slightly slower pace?

I hope I never get taken in like that again.

I want to grow old and be a slacker Walmart greeter.