I’m a fan of non-professional, unknown writers who savor the ridiculous little things of life. Unfortunately, I can hardly name any such writers. Hardly anyone can. You read their stuff somewhere, some magazine or blog, you nod your head, chuckle to yourself and say “yea, he’s (or she’s) right” and you leave it at that. You never learn their name and you never see anything by them again.

Well, I recently came across something like that, but this time I did stop and take names (or name, anyway). I was looking for a CD on amazon.com, namely Firehouse’s namesake album from 1991. I eventually found it and started reading the reviews. One of them was especially entertaining. It was written by a guy who calls himself “canuckiewookie”. He hails from Portland, Maine, and I guess that he has Canadian roots (what if he came from Kentucky? would he then be . . . oh, forget it). He tells you how a couple of Firehouse albums turned his drive home from high school in his junky old car into a transcendent experience. And then came graduation and the whole timbre of the rock music world changed (from hair bands like Firehouse putting out lively, overproduced tunes to gloomy grunge artists cranking out lean, angstful dirges). Yea, that’s high school all right. You live in a little bubble where everything seems pretty cool, then reality eventually sets in and blows it all to bits. And all you’ve got left is the memories of the good times and of the stuff that once made you smile. Like canuckiewookie’s Ford Tempo and his Firehouse tapes.

You can check out canuckiewookie’s reviews of Firehouse and other stuff
here. Oh, as to the Firehouse album . . . . I did eventually buy it, but not from amazon. I found it for $3 (with shipping) on ebay. Ebay, amazon, google, yahoo, the whole Internet . . . . . it all blurs together for a graying old rocker like myself. For a young guy like canuckie, though, the whole net thing is truly “write on” . . . . . as in “right on”, an expression we used to use such a long, long time ago. Back when we were cool.