We Now Resume Our...

Rock Bottom Riser - smog

They tore down the hockey arena in my hometown the other day, I saw it on the news. People stood at the side of the road watching in silence as the large arm of a machine slowly and methodically dismantled the memories that the building had been holding all those years like an urn holds the intangible remains of the dead. Surrounded by a massive parking lot, the unused arena sat there, big and stupid, until people finally didn't even notice it anymore.

With its stairwells smashed open and exposed, with the letters falling off the front facade, I was transfixed by an image I found of it being destroyed on Flickr for a solid half hour today. The memories came quickly soon after. A first date with my then girlfriend, who would eventually be my wife. Her dad got us the tickets to an NHL game, they were good seats. We were young, too nerdy to be goths, but self conscious enough to put down everyone around us so that we could separate ourselves from the horrific fashion and provincial behavior of the other spectators. I remembered standing in the front aisle of the top balcony, looking over the stage where Rob Halford from Judas Priest was front and centre, wildly whipping his Harley Davidson motorcycle. I remember watching people smoke drugs for the first time, wondering what all the fuss was about when all they did was sit there and stare. It always seemed huge and spectacular, but really it was small, with red seats, and painted yellow concrete walls.

I didn't stop at the image of the arena though. I started cycling through the rest of the massive 1084 image database that it belonged to. Most of the images were taken by people that still live there, braving the elements, and celebrating the destruction of my hometown memories in the name of the progress they desperately want to achieve. And who could blame them, they're the ones that have to live there. I want it to act as a museum, so that even if a massive 12000 seat arena sits dormant for 15 years, it should stay put, preserved for my consumption. So that when I go home, once a year, my hometown will look the same way it did just before I left, but each year it looks different. The city I grew up in is becoming more of a memory than a real place, fading into the recesses of the mind of someone who is getting older. Memories are like buildings, the old are eventually replaced by the new.

Despite the obvious demise of the arena, there were still hundreds of images I recognized. The hotel that I lost my virginity to an older woman in. We had sex on the floor of the pool change room, my knees were rug burned from rubbing back and forth on the fake grass carpet. There was also the hotel that we used to have parties at all the time with stolen id so that we could trash the place, and a vision of my friend Peter barfing out the 18th floor window at a New Years party popped into my head. There was the chicken finger restaurant that used to be a house that I used to eat at with my friends in the afternoon, when we were hungover, when it was so bright, dry, and arctic outside. I saw a picture of the bridge that we used to write our names under, and an exterior shot of the bar where I smashed a beer bottle into the face of some guy who was trying to climb on top of the strippers on the stage. The music stopped, and the attention of the entire bar was on me and the six foot mammoth of a man standing before me, holding his hands to his face while blood poured out the cracks between his fingers. How odd the stripper looked standing there completely naked, brought violently out of the routine of entertainer, and into the role of spectator.

The pictures seemed endless, but the day was not. It had been raining non-stop though, so I put my black slicker on and stepped out into the darkened streets obscured by sheets of rain. I hid under the roof of the bus shelter and waited for the bus that would take me away from my dreamy melancholic state, into the city that lay just across the bridge, pulsing, seething, bursting at the edges with life, and the reality of the present.