I was up until 2 in the morning reading a thread called backstreet amusements circa 1984-89 at halifaxlocals.com. Trying to read, anyway, as I scrolled through pictures of people I used to see all the time but haven't for years, and then dreaming about them, because all those pics and stories fired up the part of my brain that is still 21 years old.

Backstreet Amusements was a video arcade in downtown Halifax and one of the main hangouts for the alt crowd in the 1980s. I went there quite a bit, even before I got to know Greg Clark or the local music scene. I was a jazz kid who liked punk, a little older than most of the kids there, but over time I got to know some of them through CKDU-FM.

I've reconnecting to all this because last week Lezlie Lowe from The Coast talked to me for a piece about Out of the Fog, a compilation LP that was a snapshot of the scene in 1985.

The worst thing I told Lezlie was that I have dubs of a number of band demos from that era and that it might take me a year of two to put them on my site. I had ripped them a couple of years ago directly to MP3, and would rather have better quality, but sitting on my hard drive they do no one any good. It might take a couple of weeks, but it's time they went back out into the world.

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Go back and take a look at us, twenty years ago. He is on stage with his band -- sweating, snarling, screaming. I hang in the back of the crowd; hardcore's not really my thing, but these guys are important, and this is our music. He doesn't remember meeting me that night at Mount Saint Vincent, but off-stage, he seemed quiet and serious. I'm sure I was either too caustic, or too shy, or too dark.

We didn't become friends until ten years on. He had left Halifax well before me, taking his band with him and starting another in Montreal. When we ended up chatting in a UNB cafeteria in the summer of 1994, it was about the information highway and where we were headed. Our Web design business went no where until it took us everywhere: Africa, Japan, Rome, Paris, Singapore, the UN.

This afternoon, peeking through the dancing sheet lightning of migraine, I raised a glass to Iainand his new wife. I reminded them that the groom had escaped a good creeling, contrary to all supposed Nova Scotia tradition, and that the first time we'd met, Iain had spit on me, by accident. And I thought, Thank god we all ended up here.

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