Ian Orti

It was nine thirty and a deadline was looming. I had always thought my high school habits would die when I hit university, just as I thought my university habits would die when I hit actual life. But it has not been so. I still do shit the night before it’s due. All things considered, I will probably put off my death until the last possible night.

The deadline was the following morning so I texted my friend, Mark looking for anything to do but work. I would have gone to see Mennonite chamber music in a dive bar. I was up for anything.

ian: any good shows tonight?
mark: malajube. la tulipe. come down.

Mark was with Mathieu. Mathieu was with the label. A ticket was set aside. Beers were paid for later. And the clock ticked closer to deadline.

Malajube is probably Quebec’s French language golden child and one of the few but growing bands getting acclaim on the English side of things. Their recipe is simple: they’re good: so people like them. They’re kind of epic. And kind of sweet. So you don’t have to speak French to understand what they’re about but it does help. My French is good, but it didn’t matter on a night when every amp is the place was cranked to its ear numbing max. This is why I will never be a Luddite. I value electricity because I know what it’s like to go three seasons a year without it when Hydro Quebec cuts it. In the future I will also depend on technology to rescue my dreadfully fleeting hearing.

But I digress. This article is not about me or my procrastination. It’s about the teenagers who took to the stage to cut some rug with their favourite band. They were adorable. Each moppy haired and cropped banged one of them.

And then the inevitable happened.

The long legged boy with the candy coloured polo shirt took his digital camera out.

For some reason these days it’s not enough to get onstage and rock out with your favourite band; instead this experience has to be documented at the expense of the experience itself. Strike a pose. Of course there was the stretched arm snap of his face in the foreground while the band played on in the background. And then came the snaps with his girlfriends who stopped their dancing to pose for that perfectly candid shot, followed by the painful few seconds of waiting for the photo to load on the viewfinder so he could show them and then maybe pose for another one just in case that one perfectly candid shot wasn’t candid enough.

One more moment captured, but one less lived.

And so it went. Photo after agonizing photo. Upstaging the band to preserve a memory that will likely become property of Facebook. It will be tagged. There will be comments. For his sake, hopefully he’ll win the backseat affections at his graduation party after he shares with some drunk teenage girl the moment he captured, but never truly lived. But in the future, when he looks back on this, he will have nothing to remember but standing on stage taking photographs. In the future he will not remember dancing because he did not dance. He will not remember singing along to his favourite band because he did not sing along. Everything that his digital memory will remember will be a lie. In the future, before he dies, he will turn to his grandchildren and he will say:

Do not put off living until the night before your death is due.

When aliens finally seep through the wreckage of our civilization they will remark how fond people are of their own image. But when they probe our DNA in search of our memories they will sadly deduce that for too many, saying you did something apparently meant more than doing the act itself.

It’s not about the photograph.

The pixels will never capture the sound. They will never capture the stratospheric levels of serotonin that will always be better than drugs. They will not capture sweaty backs or the whiskey-tinged taste of a tongue deep inside your mouth in those precious moments when we wish time would just stop.

I never met my deadline. I went with Mark and Mathieu and the two lovely women they share their beds with. We drank well into the morning and we spoke loudly and enthusiastically because our ears were shot. We spoke in English and French and sometimes both in the same sentence.

I will never forget that night. And I don’t have a single photo to remind me of it.