I swear on something holy we live in a god damn cultural wasteland. There is nothing but blindness and blandness, no matter which direction you turn. Every attempt to think in a manner that is counter to the herd and you get trampled by the stupid, unwashed masses as they rush towards sameness and normalcy.

I went to the mall recently. My purpose was to buy a St. Louis Cardinals baseball jersey. They won the World Series and I was going to commemorate the occasion by acquiring their jersey for my collection.

First of all I just want to say that the whole Halloween thing has been grossly misappropriated. I’m downtown at the mall and there are all these stupid people dressed up in costumes. I’m not a big fan of a costume on even the best of occasions but I don’t need to see fairies and people with robot heads walking around the mall while I’m trying to get something done. Frankly I think its kind of stupid, and infantile.

Bygones.

So I go to the one place in Saskatoon that might have the article I am pursuing. It might have piqued my wrath already, had I stopped to consider there was only one place in all of Saskatoon where I might find this item. I wasn’t that far ahead in my thinking at the time. I peruse the store, looking for my jersey and to my great dismay they had nothing.

Then I got mad.

How god damn pathetic is it that, in a city of close to a quarter MILLION people, we:

a) have only one store that sells a wide array of sports jerseys and
b) they don’t have the World Series champions in their inventory!?!

What did they have for selection? About 100 different Saskatchewan Roughrider jerseys. All that had been appliquéd with names/numbers so that they could be premium priced at $169.99. Failing that you could get an Edmonton Oilers jersey. Where the HELL were they back in June? Or, if you happened to be stupid enough to like baseball, there were an assortment of Toronto Blue Jays shirts hanging disconsolately, way at the back of the store.

Is this what we’ve degenerated to? You can like The Riders, the Oilers or the Jays, and other than that you can go stick it in the left ear? Oh, they MIGHT have something else, but its just one sample, and its probably the wrong size, or it’s the away jersey when you wanted the home one. Christ, would it kill us to have some halfway decent shopping options in this outpost on the road to oblivion? How many times do I have to go shopping for something, and not be able to find it? This shouldn’t even have been that obscure. They won the bloody World Series!!!

By this time I was just wound right up about the injustice that is shopping in Saskatoon. I pay my $0.75 for 10 minutes worth of shopping and high-tail it out of the Midtown Plaza mall.

What’s my solace as I drive down Idylwyld, back to a job I don’t like, and that doesn’t like me? God damn Supertramp!!! Christ and bloody hell are we ever gonna stop playing this worn-out re-tread crap!?! This music was annoying twenty years ago, when they were playing it in the 80’s. Why in George’s name are we still being subjected to this piss-poor, deluge of liquefied excrement!?!

If its not Supertramp then we get Trooper. If its not Trooper then they play Rush. Failing that we might get that same god damn Eagles song we’ve heard 800 million times! It never ends.

They wonder why the radio format is dead, and people download music, play iPods in their cars, and burn custom CD’s. They play the same re-tread crap all the time!!! Its 2006 already! I don’t want to hear a Rush song from 1982. The damn Eagles might as well be dead. And Supertramp and Trooper were garbage when they had their first go around. I don’t wanna hear that crap on the radio!!! Play something new! Play something good. Hell, play something new AND good! Just don’t subject me to the same washed out, bland, corporate friendly, meal-ticket sheep-dip that we hear on the radio every damn day. If I NEVER hear Supertramp again, that would be just fine. Shoot Rush in the face. The sound of their brains on the wall would be better than the dreck they pretend is music. Trooper may be Canada’s party band, but not at any parties that people actually go to.

I just want something good, something real. I swear to heaven there must be some new bands out there, struggling to be heard. Let’s play them! Frankly I’d rather hear some crappy new song, from a group I’ve never heard of, then another bloody Supertramp medley of tripe songs that couldn’t get any more pathetic. Maybe New Band X will suck but at least it wouldn't be by repetition. Another chorus of ‘take it on the run baby’ is likely to make me hurl.