Walls

Back in the day, I might have mentioned, I was in a band while in high school. It truly was something simply to do and a means to an end. I'm speaking of girls of course, rock stars get girls right? We played a few battle of the band events, actually won one of them but mostly we jammed in my basement, much to the chagrin of my parents. Like I said, it was something to do.

In our last year of high school we were entered into the battle of the bands again and I had made a suggestion on a tune and how we could make it theatrical, really give the audience a trippy experience. I suggested we could do Pink Floyd's Mother and part of the performance would be to have moi building a "wall" during the lead up to the crescendo of the song, and when that moment of heightened intensity arrived, kick through the wall in a perfectly timed display of music and theatre coming together. I got voted down. Probably for the best really, because while I was envisioning exploding Styrofoam bricks flying everywhere with my luck the wall would have simply toppled over in an anti climatic and silent whimper. Which gives these lyrics a little poetic justice in reverse...someone would have been breaking my balls for making fools of ourselves.

Mother, do you think they'll try to break my balls?

Ooh, aah, mother, should I build the wall?

I'm a little on the whole walls thing lately it seems. Maybe I'm a little more tuned into what people are really saying when they are saying whatever it is they are saying. What I'm hearing is walls, walls, walls. Or maybe it's me? Maybe I've erected one or two for a reason that I don't think about. A friend of mine, on her own blog, wrote about people and how cold they can be sometimes...their cold gates closing around their hearts and trying to force that upon others. And how she wasn't going to let that happen to herself. Good for her I say. I also say that no walls makes it pointless for there to be a gate in the first place. And this all reminded me about a line in The Outsiders, Dally imploring Pony Boy to get hard, you don't let anything in and you don't get hurt. I think most of us know that to be complete folly yet we all know people that are like that. Why I ask?

What has happened that you would force down your humanity, to abandon your sense of compassion and oneness with your fellow man, or woman? I guess my point to this all revolves around the idea that we don't know often what happened to this person and what made them this way. We haven't walked a mile in their shoes to know what kinds of things have transpired over their lives to make them the cold hearted bastards that they are. I'm not sure that we give a flying fuck in the end anyway because what we are seeing and reacting to is both immediate, often painful and excuses are like ass holes - everyone has one.

I bet if you sat down with someone and found out more of their story you would sing a different tune. A little light shed on a persons experiences can often give us that "oh, I get it now" moment on why someone is being a certain way. In the end though I don't think that in of itself is reason for someone to be a douche canoe all the time. 

Which doesn't absolve the many people that are simply dicks...and you should know who you are. Be self aware enough to take ownership of your own douche baggery so that the rest of us can adapt as required. These people I have no time for and neither should you, for them it's OK to build a wall around, and probably set it on fire afterwards. I might be a closet pyro...just saying.

In the end I'm just not a fan of walls, hypothetical walls to keep immigrants out (fuck you Drumph), physical walls, psychological walls, emotional walls...just walls. Unless they are bramble covered while strolling along the Irish countryside or white washed on the cliffs of Santorini (you get the idea), I'm all for avoiding them. Let things in and let things out I say.

Ciao
D