THE MEGA-BLOG

Thanks, Lorraine, for the title of this blog. Yesterday I Mega-bused it out to Montreal to open for and celebrate with The Hangers for their CD release show. The trip out was slow involving a 55 minute delay at the beginning and a flat tire just outside of Kingston.

The Hangers’ set was a strange mix of theatre and bar band. Their back drop was a quasi-3D cityscape that made gave the show the kind of zip that meant buzi-nezz. Their energetic set was taken strictly from the new CD (Get Your Ticket), they only dipped into songs from their first album during their encore. The band is now faced with that abyss that every artist or group has to look into right after they’ve expended so much energy into the launch which is “what do we do now?” That is the exciting part.

Me? I had it easy, I hung out at the local pub until it was time to catch the midnight bus back home. Relative to the day trip it was smooth (or as The Hangers would call it smmmmmoooothhhhhe). The night was peppered with little naps which feel refreshing every time I woke up – “ahh, I actually slept”. The only casualty was my left butt cheek which apparently, I favoured while trying to find that perfect sitting/ sleeping position. At 5:15am we pulled into Whitby. My stop was 20 minutes away so I had time for another cat nap. I was ready to pass out until I noticed the woman across the aisle getting sick into her plastic bag – the bag courtesy of Mega-bus. My thoughts were – food poisoning? Motion sickness? Flu? Then my head was swimming with the idea of this double-decker being ground-zero for the next epidemic. I could hear her throat gurgling and then she expelled all she had to give – which wasn’t much really – I watched. Her head rested forwards on the seat in front. I think the right expression is – she was not long for this world.

My feeling of paranoia was fueled partly by the book that I’m reading and that I spent a good part of my trip to Montreal digesting. Pontypool Changes Everything is the book by Tony Burgess that inspired the film, Ponypool. It’s a zombie book using the idea of language as a trigger for deadly virus. Burgess’ writing is so intense that it was hard not to feel it’s mood clinging on to me well after putting the book down. I found myself wincing at his sharp, angular descriptions of the frozen Ontario landscape, well before the flesh tearing. Pretty incredible.