{"id":2074,"date":"2026-09-22T19:03:25","date_gmt":"2026-09-22T19:03:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/?p=2074"},"modified":"2026-09-24T00:14:58","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T00:14:58","slug":"the-shape-of-before-tiny-accidents-of-grace-outtakes-orphans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/the-shape-of-before-tiny-accidents-of-grace-outtakes-orphans\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shape of Before: Tiny Accidents of Grace (outtakes & orphans)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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The Shape of Before: Tiny Accidents of Grace (outtakes & orphans)<\/h1>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t
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Only on Bunz<\/h1>\n

Toronto, 2016<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cClosing Time\u201d was a meme within a meme.<\/p>\n

The short story made even shorter: some random guy rode his bike around College and Dundas streets wearing a balaclava, middle finger to the sky, screaming \u201cClosing Time,\u201d the late-\u201990s radio hit by Semisonic.<\/p>\n

An iconic photo of him was posted to Bunz as a legitimate ISO:<\/p>\n

ISO: Closing Time Guy.<\/em><\/p>\n

It caught on like wildfire. The image was replicated over and over, placing Closing Time Guy in different poses and scenarios: at a riot, in a mosh pit, on Mount Everest. You know how memes work.<\/p>\n

It got silly\u2014and became so enmeshed in Bunz culture that people had shirts made. Then people got tattoos of the cyclist.<\/p>\n

Now that is some meme commitment. I don\u2019t think they ever found the guy.<\/p>\n

On the Books<\/h1>\n

Being a booking agent was kind of the best.<\/p>\n

I saw shows three or four nights a week. I travelled to see more shows. I got to hang out with my friends in a work environment\u2014or befriend my coworkers, I suppose. It all added up to a very full life: loud music, exciting travel, and the feeling that I was good at something. It was fulfilling.<\/p>\n

Because we had offices all over the world, I travelled to New York fairly often\u2014monthly for a while\u2014and became friends with the agents there. I went to the L.A. office a couple of times too, but felt less welcome there. New York fit my personality and the energy I brought to the job.<\/p>\n

There were essentially two parts to my work. As a junior agent, I was responsible for A&R: finding, developing, and signing new acts and spending a lot of time in the trenches with artist managers, artists, record labels, promoters, and other agents. It is a fiercely focused industry full of go-getters and fellow music nerds.<\/p>\n

The other half of the job was working the roster for my boss, the Veep Rob Zifarelli, who represented some of the best indie rock on the continent: Dinosaur Jr., acclaimed pop pianist\/producer Chilly Gonzales, Broken Social Scene, indie pop icon Feist, Built to Spill, and Stars, among a dozen more.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d break me off a section of the country and say, \u201cGo book ten dates for so-and-so,\u201d and I\u2019d go make it happen.<\/p>\n

It was fun. It was challenging. It was one of the highlights of my career.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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TUESDAY<\/h1>\n

One night in 1999, SNFU Rob and I were screamingly high on mushrooms, watching TV.<\/p>\n

At some point, the television casually mentioned the Cassini space probe.<\/p>\n

Cassini, we learned, was going to be passing extremely close to Earth on its way to Saturn. This was apparently necessary to use the Earth\u2019s gravity to slingshot the probe deeper into space.<\/p>\n

Fine.<\/p>\n

The problem was that Cassini was carrying a shitload of plutonium.<\/p>\n

And if something went wrong during the flyby, the probe could re-enter the atmosphere and potentially scatter radioactive material across a large portion of the planet.<\/p>\n

Or something like that.<\/p>\n

We were on mushrooms.<\/p>\n

The exact science was not what stuck.<\/p>\n

What stuck was:<\/p>\n

Cassini.
Plutonium.
Earth.
Tuesday.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The television delivered this information with the urgency of a local weather report, then moved on.<\/p>\n

Rob and I did not.<\/p>\n

We sat there, tripping balls, having just been informed that a giant plutonium-filled spacecraft was about to skim past the Earth and, if anything went wrong, potentially cause an apocalyptic event.<\/p>\n

And apparently this did not warrant any further discussion.<\/p>\n

I looked at Rob.<\/p>\n

\u201cTuesday.\u201d<\/p>\n

He looked at me.<\/p>\n

The TV continued.<\/p>\n

Some time passed.<\/p>\n

I looked at him again.<\/p>\n

\u201cTuesday.\u201d<\/p>\n

At this point, the word had begun to change.<\/p>\n

Tuesday was no longer a day of the week.<\/p>\n

It was an event.<\/p>\n

A deadline.<\/p>\n

A prophecy.<\/p>\n

TUESDAY.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The more casually the rest of the world seemed to be carrying on, the more outrageous it became.<\/p>\n

Did nobody else hear that?<\/p>\n

There was a giant fucking plutonium spacecraft coming back toward Earth.<\/p>\n

And it was happening…<\/p>\n

\u201cTuesday.\u201d<\/p>\n

Rob would be doing something else.<\/p>\n

\u201cTUESDAY.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

A commercial would come on.<\/p>\n

\u201cTuesday, Rob.\u201d<\/p>\n

The mushrooms took over from there.<\/p>\n

For the rest of the night, I periodically reminded Rob of our impending appointment with the cosmos.<\/p>\n

\u201cTUESDAY.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cassini, of course, did not crash into the Earth.<\/p>\n

It whipped past us and continued on to Saturn, where it spent the next twenty years doing some of the most extraordinary science in human history.<\/p>\n

Civilization continued.<\/p>\n

Rob and I survived.<\/p>\n

Tuesday came and went.<\/p>\n

But for one mushroom-soaked night, the apocalypse had a date: TUESDAY.<\/p>\n

The Time I Met My Best Friend<\/h1>\n

March 18, 1996
Dinwoodie Lounge, Edmonton<\/em><\/p>\n

Onstage: The Presidents of the United States of America.<\/p>\n

Mikey and I: teenagers, moshing joyfully.<\/p>\n

Mikey is tall, which sometimes puts him at a slight disadvantage in the pit, where crowd-surfers are at eye level and getting hit by airborne debris is an occupational hazard. Right on cue, a shoe came sailing through the crowd and clocked Mikey in the head. The comedy was real. Minutes later, the show wrapped up, and Mikey stood among the exiting fans with the recovered shoe perched on his head. A young bespectacled man with a labret piercing approached him.<\/p>\n

\u201cHeya. You have my shoe on your head.\u201d<\/p>\n

They shared a laugh, and he got his shoe back. We introduced ourselves. The erstwhile shoeless man was named Greg.<\/p>\n

From that night onward, Greg became one of the best friends I\u2019ve ever had\u2014and a fantastic roommate when we lived together in an off-campus condo in Old Strathcona for three years while I went to university. We\u2019ve gotten up to plenty of shenanigans (including co-producing some truly legendary house parties) over the past 30+ years, and onto plenty of dance floors, too. Greg and I are cut from the same (raver) cloth. Even though we\u2019re dads now, we still make time to dance together at least once a year. Being disabled now makes clubbing a challenge, but not an impossibility.<\/p>\n

In the story involving my coming upon garbage bags full of fresh magic mushrooms, he is the briefly named roommate helping me to unpack the stash.<\/p>\n

Sometimes your whole life changes because somebody throws a shoe.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Milwaukee<\/h1>\n

For no good reason, I have a bunch of friends in Milwaukee I\u2019ve never actually met.<\/p>\n

It started around 2001, when I searched MySpace to see who else liked the label Ghostly International. It turned out only one other person did, so naturally, I befriended her. Her name was Haven, a campus radio DJ from Milwaukee, which made her a kindred spirit immediately. We got to talking, she introduced me to some of her friends, and somehow we all became friends.<\/p>\n

More than twenty-five years later, we\u2019re still in each other\u2019s lives\u2014cheering on one another\u2019s wins and showing up for the losses. They celebrated the arrival of my children. They watched from afar as I nearly died, then slowly came back.<\/p>\n

I really want to go to Milwaukee.<\/p>\n

One day, it\u2019ll happen.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Only on Bunz Toronto, 2016 \u201cClosing Time\u201d was a meme within a meme. The short story made even shorter: some random guy rode his bike around College and Dundas streets wearing a balaclava, middle finger to the sky, screaming \u201cClosing Time,\u201d the late-\u201990s radio hit by Semisonic. An iconic photo of him was posted to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_header_footer","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2074"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2091,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2074\/revisions\/2091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/booksvantage.com\/demos\/eli\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}