memories

#1115: The Winds of Change

RECORD STORE TALES #1115: The Winds of Change

My time in music retail was relatively long, considering how taxing on the soul it can be buying used music from the public on the wrong side of town.  I started in July of 1994, in a small store in a small mall in Kitchener, Ontario, called The Beat Goes On.  We sold some used, some new.  In 1996, I began managing a new store that was a slightly different format:  95% used, with a small Top 40 chart of new CDs.  I stayed there until early 2006.  12 years total, with 10 in management.  Over those 12 years, I witnessed so many changes to the way we did business.  Join me for a journey through time.

Ah, 1994.  I had just start dating a new girlfriend.  Motley Crue had come out with their John Corabi album, which was easily my favourite disc of the year.  I wore cowboy boots to my job interview with the boss man at the Record Store.  I was hired and nervously stepped behind the counter and did my first transactions.

We had a huge cash register, and still took cheques.  Credit cards were processed with one of those imprint machines that made the satisfying CHK-CHK sound when you imprinted the card.  Then began a long process of writing in dollar amounts and getting a signature.  Today, one tap and you’re done!  When we got a debit machine, it used the same phone line as the actual store phone.  When someone called the store, it would interrupt your debit transaction if you had one going.  You usually ended up with two impatient customers that way:  one on the phone and one in front of you!

Our stock was part CD and part cassette, but tapes were on their way out and we only bought and sold used CDs.  The reasoning was it was easier to check a CD for quality visually, looking for scratches.  We carried only those two formats, until one day in November 1994.  Pearl Jam came out with Vitalogy in 1994 on vinyl, two weeks before its cassette and CD releases.  The first vinyl I ever sold.  We only stocked five copies because nobody was buying vinyl back then.  We probably should have stocked 15 or 20, because we were surprised with demand.  People who didn’t even own a turntable wanted it for its collector’s value and larger artwork.

Boyz II Men were big.  TLC were bigger.  Soundgarden and Nirvana were dominating the rock charts.  My kind of music wasn’t popular and wasn’t encouraged to be played  in store.

Tastes changed rather quickly for some of these bands.  Boyz II Men made their way into the bargain.  Thence came Puff Daddy, Mase, and of course the posthumous albums by 2pac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.  On the rock side, upstarts like Korn, Limp Bizkit, Creed and eventually Nickleback replaced Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains on our charts.  And then came Crazy Town, and by then, it felt like there was no coming back.  Rock was a cartoon.  A “fuck”-laden filthy cartoon.

The job behind the counter became easier.  By 1996, our inventory was computerized.  Cassettes were gone; it was 100% CD.  You could look everything up with a simple search.  Before, I had to physically search the shelves to see if we had inventory.  Of course, we soon learned that just because something pops up on the computer as in-stock, that actually means nothing.  Human error was a huge problem and I was as guilty as everyone else, if not more so!  Putting the wrong disc in a CD case upon sale was so easy to do.  Not every customer realized they bought something with the wrong CD inside, and we didn’t always get them returned.  We ended up with many missing or mis-matched CDs, and also missing cases due to mis-filing or theft.

Soon customers wanted to look things up on computer terminals by themselves.  They also wanted to see what our other stores had in stock, as the we franchised out and grew.  These complicated problems were eventually solved with a little thing called the World Wide Web.

Having internet access at the store in the year 1999 was unimaginable to me of 1994, who had never even been on the internet yet.

Of course, the advent of the internet brought with it an unforeseen danger.  Soon our very existence would be threatened.  No, I’m not talking about computer viruses or Y2k.  Those had little impact at all.  Something else did:  Napster.

Napster changed everything.  Soon we were carrying so much more than just music, to make up for the decline in sales.  Bobble heads, action figures, books, video games, headphones, and so so so so many CD wallets.  Sometimes the toys and action figures wouldn’t have anything to do with music, like the Muppets or the Simpsons.  (Those were carried because a certain regional manager personally liked those shows.)  Osbournes merch was popular.  Kiss had many different toy options available.  Metallica had a cool stage playset.  Macfarlane figures either sold out, or sat around forever.  We stopped carrying blank tapes, but had a variety of CD-Rs available instead.

I recall the boss resisted carrying CD-Rs for a while, because he thought it was counterproductive to our business of selling music on CD.  However eventually it became a case of a dam giving way to a flood.  It was “if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em” and blank CDs were now being sold by brick or spindle.  Remember bricks and spindles full of blank CDs?

We also sold CD cleaning kits and tended to stay away from snake-oil CD fixing “solutions”.   Instead, we had a couple of guys who fixed CDs with a grinder and wax in their garage.  Eventually we began fixing the discs ourselves using the same method, but actually improving upon the solution by using soap instead of wax.  I’m not sure how the original guys took that, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t pretty at all.

Competition was always fierce.  We had an HMV store at the mall across the street from the store I managed.  We had a Cash Converters pawn shop buying and selling CDs and video games in the same plaza as us.  A few years later, a Best Buy opened next door, and their prices were often lower.  DVDs began to take up a huge share of our sales, and we now had to make room.  Additional shelving was installed.  Then we ran out of space again.  New formats like SACD and DVD-A started to infiltrate our inventory.  Things became really, really complicated compared to the store I managed in 1996.

There are a million stories.  I remember one guy buying an SACD, and coming back wanting to know why the “Super Audio” light wasn’t lighting up on his player.  How the fuck should I know?  I’d never even seen an SACD player at that point.  The guy actually wanted me to write a letter to Sony and ask them on his behalf.  Yeah, I’ll get right on that sir, after I serve you some fresh Grey Poupon on a charcuterie board.

Technology, transactions and inventory may have changed shape, but one thing never did:  the customers.

When we first opened, we had a single disc CD player and tape deck to play music in store.  There was a TV for MuchMusic, but it was usually on silent while we played CDs in store.  If a customer wanted to hear a CD, we had to open it for them and play it on the store speakers.  They’d signal me when to change tracks.  In 1996, we have six five-disc changers, each with a dedicated set of headphones, for customers to list.  We had another five-disc changer for store play, and eventually one for an outdoor speaker we had.  The six customer listening stations took a dedicated person to serve on weekends.  We had to retrieve the CDs from behind the counters and load them into the players.  We often had to assist the customer in the operation of the machines.  And they broke down, frequently.  Some days towards the end we only had two working stations at a time.

Our first store was in a mall with a licensed restaurant.  We had a few drunks.  The other stores I worked at were in strip plazas.  We had a few stoners, potheads, crackheads and gang-bangers.

Ahh, the good old days when it was just drunks!

One thing we never delved into in my time was selling CD players.  We didn’t want to dip our toes into that kind of thing.  Today, they sell turntables at my old store.  We also, strangely, never sold batteries which people frequently asked for.  I guess margins were so low it wasn’t worth it.  I never lasted long enough to see the vinyl revival happen.  We only sold a few things on vinyl in time.  The aforementioned Pearl Jam was one.  Soundgarden (Down on the Upside) was another.

The change that impacted me most had nothing to do with formats, or technology.  It didn’t matter that I now had two shelves full of Sega and Nintendo games.  The biggest change was in heirarchy behind the scenes.  I started as a part timer with one boss.  I was promoted to manager, with one boss, and several peers at other stores.  Then, suddenly, I had two bosses.  Then there were three, and the worst thing about the third is that we were all told “they’re not your boss, they’re here to help.”  That was false.  Three bosses, and there was now an in-house accountant and other periphery people that seemed to get yelled at less than I did.  I’m sure it’s clear from this story that the winds of change did not bring me happiness.  Instead they chipped away at the job I started with, and diluted the “music store” I managed into a music/movie/game/knick-knack store.  I was attending manager meetings in big hotel board rooms.  There were marketing people and franchisees, and nobody ever seemed truly happy on the inside.  110% was demanded of us, but we had no reason to be invested in what boiled down to a bad retail job that caused a lot of stress.

Nothing lasts forever but the certainty of change, and there was one change I was happy to witness:  In the late 90s, Black Sabbath reunited.  It was a happy return, though they had their trailer hitched to a nu-metal Ozzfest which wasn’t my cup of tea.  Music began to shift until one day in 1999, something truly remarkable happened.  We didn’t know how long it would last, or what the new music would sound like, but Iron Maiden reunited with Bruce Dickinson and Adrian Smith.  Judas Priest were a few years behind them, getting Rob Halford back in the band.  Suddenly, classic metal was back in a big way.  Bigger than ever.  It was not waned since.  I was happy that I got to see this process begin at the end of my days at the Store.

My boss used to say that I resisted change.  I don’t agree.  No sir.  I embraced the good stuff.  The computers, the internet, the website, fixing CDs, the abandonment of certain formats (cassettes and VHS) when they were fading away.  The things I struggled with included the diluting of the store with all these other products like video games.  I started there because I loved music.  Fortunately I also loved movies, so when DVDs began to take over a large section of the store, I was cool with that too.  When Grand Theft Auto was upon us, I had no passion.  Then came the addition of more upper management, and increased demands on our personal time and investment in the Record Store life.  Monthly manager meetings dragged on for hours.  We’d leave scratching our heads why this wasn’t just covered in emails.  We had zero autonomy and little say in what we did.  I remembered a time when I loved my job.  There was no love there anymore.

The happy ending is this.  When I quit that job, I rediscovered my passion for music.  Music was fun for me again, not just something playing in the background as I worked.

Music is joy once more.

 

#1110: Happy Winter Memories Vol. 3 – Rocking the Basement

RECORD STORE TALES #1110: Happy Winter Memories Vol. 3 – Rocking the Basement

To an unsporty Canadian kid, growing up in a cold climate had its disadvantages.  I didn’t give a fuck about hockey (to coin a phrase from Gord Downie), and nobody likes to shovel.  The only good thing about fall and winter to me were Christmas and the return of my TV shows, like the Transformers and GI Joe.  Otherwise, it was like hibernation.  There were a lot of things I wanted to do and could only do outdoors, so I passed the time inside with my music and shows.

In a sense, winter was the best time for my friendship with Bob Schipper to flourish.  In the summer we’d be outside a lot, riding bikes or hitting balls.  Or, just getting into trouble as we often did.  During the colder months, we spent more time being creative.

A typical Mike & Bob winter Saturday morning would go as follows:

Around 10 AM, Bob would pop by my place.  Our creative Saturday mornings would usually happen at my house.  Bob’s parents were more strict than mine, and we could listen to music in the basement.  The basement was the best place because that is where the big TV with the VCR was.  That was where MuchMusic lived.  My VHS collection would grow video by video, week by week.  The Pepsi Power hour ran twice a week (“Molten” Mondays, and Thursdays) and I would collect music, clip by clip, on my VHS collection.  It would be my responsibility to show him what was new in music.

We did not always agree!

Savatage struck me from the moment I saw “Hall of the Mountain King”.  It was the riff, the singer, and of course the little guy running through the caves looking for the king’s treasure.  I had to record it.  I thought Bob would really be into this song.  It had a lot of what we both liked:  nice, heavy melody metal with a screamin’ singer.  Disappointingly, he was not as impressed as I was.  He thought the video was less than great, and the singer not as impressive as I hyped him.

On the other hand, one viewing of “We Came to Rock” by Brighton Rock had him hooked immediately.  In this case, singer Gerald McGhee really did blow him away.  That scream at the end of “We Came to Rock” made his jaw actually drop.

If music videos were not on the menu that morning, I would bring my “ghetto blaster” downstairs and we would play whatever newest tape one of us had acquired.  If it was a good one, we’d dub each other a copy.

Then, out came the paper and we would get down to creating.  We were very much into drawing military vehicles, cars, and muscle-type men with warrior’s garb and jagged guitars.  Our self-portraits were always masked, muscled, and flexing.

We would fantasise about being on stage.  We’d picture the drum riser, and why not have it elevate?  We would both be singers and guitar players, sharing lead duties from song to song.  It had to be democratic.  We came up with cool melodies and song titles.  Mostly though, we sang our lyrics to other peoples’ songs.  Of course, I can’t repeat the lyrics to anyone.

The two of us had enough creativity to power the world for decades.  If only we had the technology to do the things we really wanted to do!

Still, it was in that basement during the coldest of months that Bob and I amassed binders full of drawings and cassette tapes full of our goof-offs.  I kept everything I could.  Of course, some things couldn’t last forever, such as the cardboard guitars or silly sketches.  As unofficial archivist, I kept a lot.  I have almost all my VHS tapes with those special music videos.  When I play them, the memories return.  These things matter to me.  They show a snapshot of the best childhood anyone could have.

#1106: “The Entire Population of the World Can Fit in the State of Kansas”

A sequel to #893: Damien Lucifer, and #1104: …Parental Guidance…

RECORD STORE TALES #1106:  “The Entire Population of the World Can Fit in the State of Kansas”

Not all of us have been this lucky.  I had a fortunate and free childhood.  I was allowed to listen to whatever I wanted to:  AC/DC (oh no, “Anti-Christ/Devil Child!”), Kiss (“Knights in Satan’s Service!”), Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath, Alice Cooper, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest…all the bands that the TV shows said were bad influences on kids.  They would lead us to drink, drugs, violence, and worst of all…Satan.

I went to a Catholic grade school where wearing a Judas Priest shirt to class earned scornful glares and harsh words.  I also had several friends in highschool from other religions with strict views on dress, music, movies, and TV.  I knew how good I had it at home.  I never had to hide my Guns N’ Roses tapes from my mom.  I didn’t have to crop my hair short like a couple of the highschool kids.  There was a family though…oh, there was a family across the street.  And this is a story about those strange characters that I loathed, then and now.

Now, keep this in mind:  I have no issues with faith.  I do have issues with dogma and assorted silliness.  So if you’re offended, I am sorry.  I’m cool with Jesus but not so much with strict, outdated thinking.

With that in mind, let’s push play on Ghost’s Opus Eponymous CD and dive on in.

Let’s call these people the Davids.  Mr. and Mrs. David, and their two kids, Boy and Girl.

Mr. David was a teacher.  I have rarely encountered such a dumb educated person in my life.  Maybe dumb isn’t the right word.  Airheaded?  Scatterbrained?  Moony?  Oblivious?  I once saw him pull out of his driveway, realize that he forgot something, stop his car in the middle of the road, run in to get whatever he forget, and get back in his car.  He used to park on our side of the road because he liked our shade tree, but he would park his car backwards against traffic, which drove me nuts to no end.  I would purposely park as close to his bumper as I could get without pissing off my own parents.

They had embargoed all kinds of fun stuff in their house.  One day we were out tobogganing.  Mrs. David was driving a car full of kids.  I was talking about how much I loved Doctor Who, in particular the villainous Daleks.  They may have looked like little pepper pots with a plunger sticking out, but their cries of “EXTERMINATE!” rattled the bones of every kid.  They were awesome!  Mrs. David simply said, “We are not allowed to watch the Daleks in our house.”  Ouch!  Talk about a buzz killer.  What the hell did she have a problem with?  Intelligent science fiction with badass villains, I guess.

In 1984 they all went to go see Bruce Springsteen. His music was allowed.  Helix was not.  I can remember Boy David coming over and watching the Pepsi Power Hour with Bob and I on television.  He was absolutely terrified from the “Rock You” music video.  I seem to remember him bailing and running home when it came on.

‘Twas Mrs. David who spied my MAD magazine and was so offended by the cover story about “Damien Lucifer“, lead singer of “Antichrist”.  She reported the offending magazine to my mother, who asked me about it.  I laughed and took great joy in telling my mom that Mrs. David thought a MAD Magazine was real.  Mrs. David was a child psychologist.  She fell for an obvious parody.  Directly below the Damien Lucifer picture was a contest, with the prize being getting trampled at a Motley Crue concert.  There was a “six page fold-out” of Gene Simmons’ tongue.  I mean, come on.

The weird thing is this.  About a decade later, Boy David was blasting Savatage’s “Hall of the Mountain King” from his front window so loud you could hear it around the corner.  Banning music didn’t really work for the David family.

Through the years, my parents have maintained suffering contact with the David family.  They always come home bitching about them, but haven’t been able to completely get themselves away.  I sense that they wouldn’t mind if they never had to socialize again, but don’t want to be the ones to make the break.

One night while I was still working at the Record Store, my parents came home from dinner with the Davids, and my mom immediately started with the stories.  The things these people would say!  My parents would sit in stunned silence, sipping drinks and nibbling food, but not really reacting.

“You wouldn’t believe what Mrs. David said at dinner tonight,” began my exasperated mother.

“You’re going to like this one Michael,” nudged my dad as he walked past.

“Tell me!” I squealed in delight.

My mom set up the story.  Mrs. David was on about the state of the world, natural resources, overpopulation, and lord knows what else.  Malthusanists, they were not!  You see, they adhered to a particularly hard (but traditional) interpretation of God’s infallibility.  Because God is incapable of error, the Earth that He created is flawless and perfectly made for us to use.  Hard-core Catholics used to believe that extinction was impossible, due to this perfect intelligent design.  Equally impossible is overpopulation.  God told us to “go forth and multiply,” did He not?  Therefore, overpopulation is absolutely impossible.

“You know, the entire population of the world can fit in the state of Kansas?” asked Mrs. David to my stunned mother and father.

“How the hell did we get on this topic?” they thought to themselves as they concentrated on their food.  My mother told me this in the kitchen that night, and I just laughed uncontrollably.

“Sure, if you packed them in like sardines!  What is wrong with those people?” I asked.

“I do not know,” said my mother in a flat, tired tone.

The last time I saw anyone from the David family was in the 1990s.  I’d like to keep it that way.

#1063: Life is Like a Lake

RECORD STORE TALES #1063: Life is Like a Lake

Over the course of 51 years on the shores of Lake Huron, I have witnessed the power of nature and the change it brings every season.  Change is the one constant in life, isn’t it?  For better or worse, everything changes.  Nothing can remain static.  Things wear and decay, and are eventually replaced by newer, younger things.  This is obvious every spring on the shores of Huron.  The coast changes, the rocks, the trees, everything.  In a way, life is like a lake.

When we returned this spring, much had changed.  The seasons are unrelenting.  We found several large rocks, freshly cracked, and sharp like blades.  Over the summer and fall, water found its way through microscopic cracks in the stones.  Over winter, it froze and expanded, breaking rocks clean in half.  The remnants are like ancient stone cutting tools, sharp and jagged.  In a way, that’s parallel with relationships.  Sometimes things set in, year after year, until they eventually expand and crack the relationship in two.  I’ve experienced this recently.  The edges that cut are still painful.

Things die over the winter.  Some young trees do not survive.  Older ones fall, only to become firewood for the coming year.  Just like life, and the losses we experience more and more as we get older.  It never gets easier.  It’s a matter of picking up the pieces are carrying on.

The only constant at the lake is change.  Eternal change.  This is especially obvious when you look back at old photographs.  The lake levels change, the beach is covered with rocks one year, and sand the next.  The changes cannot be predicted, except that the land will change.  Where men once pushed the forest and weeds back, now they encroach again when left untended.  It’s quite amazing how quickly nature can retake a patch of land left untouched.  Just like life.  Neglect an aspect of your life, be it physical or mental, and you will notice the difference.  Life must be worked, at constantly, or you will lose what you gained.

Some years, there is more life than others.  Some years, wild turkeys.  Other years, foxes.  Perhaps the foxes scared away the turkeys.  Once in a while we’ll have a dear, or a bear.  Raccoons, porcupines and skunks are common.  When the animals disappear, you can only guess as to why.  Kind of like being “ghosted” in life.  Sometimes they return unexpectedly.  Always a delight.  Like a friend returning after a long absence.

One thing that is clear at the lake:  You cannot return to the past.  The past is gone, like the ghost of a memory.  Things only move forwards, not backwards.  The massive winter ice sheets we used to get are gone now, likely never to return in my lifetime.  The rivers carve away the landscape, leaving different shapes.  The cliffs we used to walk as kids no longer exist, or are now on inaccessible private property, built over and paved.  There is no return.  Those things are gone.

And that’s life in a nutshell.

 

 

 

 

 

#971: Facebook Memories

RECORD STORE TALES #971: Facebook Memories

While I’m sure that “Facebook Memories” are Zucking up my brain in some way, in this brave new Metaverse…I kinda like them.

For those of you who prefer to stay out of the Metaverse or social media in general, “Facebook Memories” are a daily feature that shows you what you posted in the years prior.  While not every day is solid gold, I find that most days have at least one cool memory that I would want to post again.  Something funny, something cool…occasionally something sad.

The early years of Facebook memories seem to be nothing but me posting what I’m currently “rockin’ to”.  Dear God there were a lot of those “rockin’ to” posts.  Interesting nonetheless especially when I happen to be rockin’ to the same artist on the same day years later.  There were also a lot of early video blogs that were not very good (but were very young).  In that tradition, as I write this now I’m rockin’ to Slash Puppet’s Studs & Gems.

I didn’t start using Facebook on a regular basis until 2012 when I launched this site.  I found that most of my hits were coming from that platform, but not Twitter, so I made a choice and stuck with it.  Memories start picking up in 2012.

In the winter months, I see a lot of complaints about driving conditions.

Frequent memories of co-workers pranking my office.

In 2016-2017, nearly daily postings about the shenanigans of one Donald J. Trump.

In January, with memories from different years, it seemed like I was constantly sick.  The flu, the man-cold, whatever.  And it also appears that each time it was the “worst one ever”.  This does not bode well for the next time I get sick.

Also in January, in the year 2018, come the bad memories.

But I still want to remember them.  Not necessarily first thing in the morning with my first Nespresso, but I do want to see them.  I don’t want the minutia lost.  Maybe I won’t always feel that way, but I won’t deny that we are still grieving.  And it helps the grieving process to see some of these old electronic thoughts.

Of course, this means Zuck knows my entire life story for the last decade-plus, but so do you.  I made a choice a long time ago to write personal shit in public.  At the end of the day I don’t think I’m interesting enough to attract unwanted attention, and what’s done is done.  While the Metaverse expands I may have regrets, but at present I’ve made some friends doing what I do.  I’ll take it as a win.

 

 

NOTE:  The LeBrain Train will be on Saturday night rather than Friday!

#556: Shazam Kazaam! It’s a Fire in the Sky!

GETTING MORE TALE #556: Shazam Kazaam! It’s a Fire in the Sky!

Do you recall a 1996 kids’ movie called Kazaam starring Shaquille O’Neal as a genie? If you’re like me, the answer is “no”, because you’re too old.  From browsing the shelves of your local video stores, over the years you may have seen the VHS or DVD for Kazaam. It was a legendary flop, but not enough to kill Shaq’s movie career permanently. In 1997, he starred in DC Comics’ Steel (technically a Superman spinoff).

Something strange started happening a few years ago on the internet (home of the strange).  People came out of the woodwork remembering a completely different movie: Not Kazaam, but Shazam, starring Sinbad instead of Shaq, as a genie. A simple case of convergent movie making a-la Deep Impact and Armageddon? Not this time. Sinbad says he never made such a movie, and there is no record of such a thing ever being made, anywhere by anybody.  Not in this universe.

This isn’t one or two people who say they’ve seen the nonexistent Shazam. It’s hundreds of people (so they claim), and some have vivid memories. A man named Don, who used to work at his uncle’s video store, says he distinctly remembers the two copies he had in stock. He claims that he had to watch it many times, because customers told him it was defective and he had to check.

kazaam-shazam

This kind of mass delusion has been called the “Mandela Effect”, named for the strange phenomenon of multiple people who remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s. Some think they may be transplanted natives of an alternate universe where the movie did exist, or Mandela did die in prison. Some think the movie (and every written record of it) was destroyed on purpose (somehow). Of course the truth is, these folks are just mixed up. They’re confusing something that Sinbad did with the Shaq movie, and people have even found pictures of Sinbad wearing a genie-like turban (from a 1995 Sinbad the Sailor movie marathon he hosted) that may have increased the confusion. No alternate universes necessary.

The simplest explanation is that memory is very fluid, and I have had my own experience similar to this. It too involved two movies with similarities.

In 1993, the sci-fi thriller Fire in the Sky was released and I was an instant fan. Alien abductions are such a neat subject, and Fire in the Sky depicted one of the most famous. Travis Walton disappeared in 1975. When he reappeared, he told a tale of being taken on a craft by strange beings. The movie elaborated on this with a scene set on the alien space ship.

The harrowing scene had Walton on an operating table with all sorts of alien mechanisms ready to poke and prod. The scene came to a terrifyingly sudden end as a sharp metal needle-like device made its way to his open eye. It touched the very surface of his eye…and jump cut to Travis waking up back on Earth!

The sequence seared itself into my memory. What a scare! I remembered the whole thing very clearly.  How could you forget it?  A few years after, I bought a used copy on VHS. I watched the whole thing on the edge of my seat. I cringed and waited for the spaceship scene with the needle and the eyeball.  I remembered vividly. My minds eye could see the needle indenting the surface of his eye….

But that wasn’t on the VHS version. The needle never touched his eye. The scene cut away prematurely, and ended before that happened…but I REMEMBERED!  I had seen it.  I knew what I had seen, because I have an “eye thing”, and stuff touching eyes generally grosses me out.  I don’t wear contacts for that reason.

I returned the tape to the store and explained it was an edited version with some content removed. I put myself on a waiting list for another copy. Perhaps the widescreen version would be un-edited.

Every copy of the VHS was the same. None featured the full contact eyeball scene.  Can you guess why?

Because the shot, as I remembered it, wasn’t in that movie.  It existed…but it wasn’t in Fire in the Sky.

It was in Star Trek: First Contact. In the flashback scene when Picard is abducted by the Borg, he is operated on. A needle makes its way to his eye…and actually touches the surface before Picard awakes. Picard was just dreaming! But that was the origin of the eyeball-touching that I had misremembered as being in Fire in the Sky. I was so sure that I returned every tape that didn’t have the shot, but it was me that was wrong!

 

Two science fiction movies, two alien abductions, two eye-related medical procedures (both on the right eye)…combined into one memory.

I can understand the confusion of the Shazam/Kazaam people. I have experienced it myself. You can be absolutely certain of something until confronted by the real memory, as I was. If anybody else saw the same two movies I did, then I bet at least one of them confused the same two scenes too.

Personally, I’m happy to not live in a universe where Sinbad made a genie movie.

 

#489: I Forgot To Remember To Forget

meme

GETTING MORE TALE #489: I Forgot To Remember To Forget

Here are five short stories about forgetfulness in the old Record Store Days!

1. The Boss Man lived his life via one of those day timer books. Everything was in there – all his contacts, all his notes, where he had to be, when he had to be there, everything. So it was quite difficult for him when he left the book on top of his car and drove off! Needless to say he had to buy a new day timer and start over.

2. In my last year, I totally forgot I was working a morning shift. It was during the Christmas rush, and we had two people opening:  me and one other guy. Since my reputation was that I showed up at least an hour early for an opening shift, my absence was noted before we actually opened. My co-worker Kam called me. “Did you forget you were opening today? You’re usually here by now.” Quickly covering for myself, I answered “Nah I was just doing some banking, I’ll be there really soon.” Saying this as I pulled on my pants trying to get out the door….

3. Ah, daylight savings time. Spring forward, and fall back! One day the Boss Man called me from our store in Waterloo.  Keep in mind, I always got to work early except for that one time!

“Mike, have you heard from [“Bully” – name redacted]?” She’s not here at the store yet.”

I answered him no, but that she’s not usually in that early in the morning anyway, and not to worry. She’d surely be in before opening.

“But she’s late!  I had to open the store!”

But she wasn’t late, and the store wasn’t supposed to be open. The clocks had turned back, but the boss forgot to change his. The boss got there early without realizing it and opened the store early anyway! We had a good laugh over this misunderstanding.

4. They had me running all over the place. I drove all the way to open a store in Oakville, Ontario one morning, only to discover I forgot the key to that store at home. Thankfully the boss man wasn’t far away and within 20 minutes he was there to open the door for me! Crisis averted again!

5. Once, and only once, somebody forgot to lock the door at closing time. I opened the next morning and was shocked to find the door unlocked. Obviously nobody had tried the door during the night or the alarms would have gone off. That was scary! My dad always taught me to lock up the doors when you leave a place. In fact there were times – many times – on my drive home when I couldn’t clearly remember locking the door, so routine had closing become. So I would drive back and check. I never left the door unlocked, but I also never would have been able to sleep at night if I didn’t go back to check!