More on the origins of the blog title in a bit, but lately, I do feel as if my world is in the margin of something bigger than it. My thoughts and actions sometimes feel like scribbles, written with a 2H pencil that’s rapidly being worn away over time. I press harder, hoping to make an impression that pushes through to other pages, and it works, on some days. On other days, all I end up doing is breaking my pencil. There is a lot of lead left, though. Mainly because there’s no room for an eraser on the pencil of time.

Today’s track is by In Flames. It’s a bit more screamy than some of their other stuff (although the Reroute To Remain album was pretty screamy), but I really dig it. It has some very catchy guitar riffs. If you’re listening along, here’s the first stanza.

Buds abloom in all directions
from which events occur
relations and virused meetings
catch fire and explode
In the margin of butterfly wings
entire cycles of evolution
outplayed and faded
sparked away back into
vacuum-filled nirvana

I was curious about what my top iTunes tracks were for 2009, so I had a look. The list is probably skewed a bit because of my play list for my morning ride, but Iron Maiden’s “Wasted Years” was the most played track, by quite a large margin. I’m not really sure why that is — maybe I had it on repeat. That track summons so many childhood memories for me. The whole Somewhere In Time album does, really. Many are good, like the ones I have of me and my brother playing pool on a rickety table we had in our parent’s basement (we had this old black ghetto blaster that we’d set on the floor and lean up against the wall), and some are sad. I had a friend and neighbour who died in a car accident years ago, and remember him when I hear certain songs off of the album, because we listened to it together. Other albums conjure up the same sorts of emotions. I really think that this is why folks gravitate toward specific eras of music. Countless radio stations play “classic” music in the hopes of capturing the attention of those listeners who are making attempts at snatching fleeting moments in their past.

At any rate, the top five tracks for 2009 were these:

1. Wasted Years, Iron Maiden
2. Demon of the Fall, Opeth
3. Forever, The Sins of Thy Beloved
4. Back in the Village, Iron Maiden
5. Daughter of the Moon, Insomnium

It’s no surprise that Maiden ranked two in the top five. Back in the Village is such a great track. When I was younger and listened to it (it’s off of the Powerslave album), there were phrases and lyrics in the song that I didn’t understand. This was, of course, because I had no idea that it was based off of the BBC TV series “The Prisoner”. Fact of life, growing up in rural New Brunswick.

Interesting, anyway. Time to reset the track counts.