Flu = 1, Marius = 2
It was a bit of a struggle, but between an good antibiotic treatment and awesome willpower, I can now happily admit to having vanquished my illness. Actually I vanquished it a week ago, but it’s been a busy intervening few days. Lots to catch up on, so here goes!
I decided recently that I was going to go down to Michigan to visit an old composer friend of mine, Nico. Nico, besides being a fantastic composer of classical concert music, is also a great friend and a fun character. I think it’s probably a bit dangerous to have more than one crazy composer in close proximity to each other for more than a few hours, but we managed the whole weekend without breaking anything significant in the universe (I think…maybe I should go check).
I live near Toronto, Ontario, which is quite close to the Canada/USA border. Michigan is basically the closest state to us, and so in my naiveté, I figured that it should be easy to find a way to get down there. Due to some annoying complications, I don’t yet have my full driver’s license so I couldn’t just drive, which meant that I was stuck choosing between plane, train, and bus. Plane was too pricey, so I opted for train. Interestingly enough, there is no direct train route from Toronto to this particular suburb near Detroit.
Not one.
Perhaps I should have expected that the automobile state would reject such antiquated travel means as trains, but I still find it curious that there is not a single simple method to get where I wanted to go by train. Damn you, Amtrak. VIA Rail, you suck too.
By bus, it turns out, there is a fairly direct route, which was good news; and it’s comparatively cheap, which is great news. The bad news is that the travel time each way is about 8 hours, which is more or less the same amount of time it would take me to fly to Europe, were I so inclined. Alas, no friendship is complete without a few sacrifices and so, iPod in hand, I decided that the bus it would be. This was on Friday.
Now, when I bought the tickets, I had two options: I could either leave at 1AM from downtown Toronto and arrive in the morning, or leave at 8:30AM and arrive in the afternoon. I decided that the 8:30 one was slightly more humane, and so myself and my bag boarded the bus promptly on Friday morning, aching for coffee, sleep, and music.
For those of you in the know regarding the general area I live in, we came up to Milton and then across, stopping in 3 small towns on the way to London (Ontario). After a brief stop there, we carried on all the way to Windsor.
Things I discovered along the way:
- Greyhound buses are quite comfortable when they’re not too crowded.
- Canadians couldn’t match the colour of their scarf to the colour of their clothing outside of a major city area if their lives depended on it.
- Not one of my bus-mates seemed acquainted with the idea of using the bathroom before boarding the bus. Thankfully, there’s a small coffin- er, bathroom, at the back of the bus. Halfway to Windsor, I began to genuinely worry that it couldn’t possibly contain all the waste it was being fed.
- Speaking of feeding, granola bars make great bus meals.
- If you’re not into pretty natural landscapes (which I am, so it wasn’t an issue) the only entertaining thing to look at out the window on the stretch from London to Windsor is a series of incredibly suggestive road names — Longwood, Ripe Bush, etc. The intersections get particularly racy. It seems road makers get bored in rural Canada.
So…Windsor. One of the prettiest cities I’ve seen in the area. Really quite a comfortable, and charismatic sort of place; I got great vibes driving through and stopping over for a bit in the bus terminal. But all good things must come to an end, of course, and so we then continued on through the Windsor tunnel and ended up in the United States of America in the unwholesome failure of a metropolis known as Detroit.
The contrast between Detroit and Windsor is like night and day, and whereas in Windsor I felt quite comfortable, in Detroit I was fairly certain that I was going to get shot if I sneezed particularly loudly or exhibited bad posture or something. What a place. Oh, and the smell. An interesting mix of exhaust fumes, drugs, garbage, and poverty. And piss. With all due respect to its hypothetical nice portions, I have to say that Detroit is the single most abhorrent city I’ve ever had the misfortune of visiting. Did I mention it’s smelly? Just making sure.
After a fairly tense hour and a half sitting in a bus terminal nestled somewhere between the left and right ass cheeks of the city, I boarded another bus which took me to a little suburb about twenty minutes from Nico’s place, from where he picked me up. Thus began my weekend sojourn.
Without going into unnecessary details, it was a lot of fun and I hope to do it again sometime soon. Here’s a shot of the two of us from the trip. I am the taller and more evil-looking of the two:
My return to the world of school and work brought with it a brand new project! A student from the UK contacted me hoping for a couple of tracks for a university assignment for which he’d been working on an exciting little military arcade-style game called Spitfire. I was only too happy to flex my retro muscles a bit and put out some tracks for him, but it turned out that what he was looking for was less of a classic “retro” sound and more of a cinematic one that would fit in the retro setting. As far as I’m concerned, that’s even more exciting because it means I got the chance to work on blending the two styles together and seeing what I could come up with.
Some screenshots and descriptions later, I had two tracks done and I’d like to include them in here because I’m very happy with how they turned out:
Anyway, I hope you enjoy them! Now to catch up on some missed work from my little sick-leave…
