if I am gone and with no trace

He’d probably even list genre romps by Paul Auster, Jules Feiffer, and Richard Brautigan as more important influences on his style of detection than Macdonald, but Macdonald was local. Macdonald had Vancouver roots. Macdonald was within reach.

I was thinking Peter Lorre

Aesop was no closer to finding Hislop and he had sore feet. At least, he consoled himself, I feel like an authentic detective. Lew Welch had days like this, I’m sure. Lew Archer, I mean. Damn. I keep doing that. Which is a Beat poet and which is a private detective? Who walked out into the forest with a turkey shooter and never came back? Who cracked the Galton Case? Who is rumoured to have come up with advertising slogan/zen koan “RAID KILLS BUGS DEAD”? Who said, “I have a secret passion for mercy. But justice is what keeps happening to people.”? 

don't you know, don't you know?

"I just wanted to get out of the office and beat someone up, you know? You ever wanna do this again, you know where to find me, right?"

here's to you, Human Torch

“Regardless,” he said out loud but to himself, then opened the covered jar of biscotti and removed something with nuts and a chocolate covering. Now the day hadn’t been a total waste.

I walked by the Stop 'n' Shop

“Hey,” the skinny barista behind the counter wearing a curled mustache and braces over a tie-dyed Miley Cyrus t-shirt pointed at a chalk-covered sandwich board near the door that read NO DERBY CHICKS. He shrugged. “I don’t make the rules.”

Garbagemen don't care for the blues or rock n' roll

...the coffee shop favoured by frustrated screenwriters and male models once linked with Paris Hilton, the 24-hours Waves that isn’t 24-hours anymore, the coffee shop where Aesop once rescued a dog that didn’t actually need rescuing...

stay in your lifeboats, people

“No, kid, I’m just a cop who likes to ride the bus. What do you think?”

todos los acertijos son iguales

A hand covered his forehead, stopping him cold. “Don’t even.” The hand shoved his head back, then disappeared.

these are the facts and here is the news

“I don’t know. I figured he was leaving the country when he closed the office. But it’s been a while, right? He wouldn’t stay away forever. He likes the coffee here.” 

turned the whole thing sour

"Come closer. You lose any teeth?"

sometimes you just wanna run

“No, everyone just calls him Cousin Phil. I don’t know why. He must be cousins with someone who matters, or used to matter. He’d been Cousin Phil for a long time before I met him.”

put the wrong lock on and disappear

It seemed like a bit of a put-on to Aesop, but then he paid rent on an office with the words PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR on the door.

YOU WON'T BELIEVE WHICH 25 CANADIAN ALBUMS FROM THE 90s ARE BETTER THAN CHIXDIGGIT

Haters gonna hate and raters gonna rate. Last week the CBC Music posted a list of "The 50 Greatest Canadian albums of the 90s" and it's a mess. A Beautiful Mess, like the Thelonious Monster tape I bought in the West Edmonton Mall when I was 15*. Or something. Look, I like that there was a lot of room for personal favourites on the list and some kind of effort was made to include stuff that wasn't necessarily good or important or popular or whatever. 

I dunno, I Twittered the crap out of that list with my typical half-assed outrage, but that failed to mollify. Those tweets are collected here. As all good revolutionaries know, it is not enough to smash the system, you have to build a better submarine sandwich too. 

So here are 25 albums off the top of my head that are AT LEAST AS GOOD OR IMPORTANT OR GOOD-LOOKING as Chixdiggit's self-titled LP, number 50 on CBC's list. 

SOME NOTES ON METHODOLOGY: I didn't put a lot of thought into this. I avoided duplication with the CBC list not just of bands, but of artists, because that would just be boring. I didn't put any consideration at all into the order I'm listing albums. I'm not necessarily following MAPL guidelines. My picks are heavily biased toward guitar-based indie rock, because that's what I mainly listened to as a teenager.

*an obscure 90s reference that displays not only the breadth of my expertise, but the questionabilitude of my judgment.

THE LIST