It’s good to talk…… or pickle sharks.

So, here I am writing this and there you are reading it. Over the past weeks since I started this site and began “reaching out” again, it has struck me how much we (humans) seem to be enthralled by the process of connecting. Like atoms that seek their stable states and link on to other atoms, or spill off neutrons and protons until their binding energy holds everything in a state of connectedness, we too are ever searching for some sort of affinity. Why do I have to write songs, or blogs, or post tweets, or be or say anything to anyone outside of myself? If we are connected, we are somehow stronger and better able to deal with the shitstorm that whirrs around us and in us. Our little heads, filled to bursting with giant ideas, need other heads to acknowledge their spill so that the thoughts might garner meaning. When they pour out of us they belong to us, but when we feel them connect with another, they seem to grow and take on a new dimension of significance.

While I believe that this process is ever more prevalent or at least instant, I look back at Wordsworth, Yates, daVinci, Shakespeare, Mozart and past them to the mind who thought to scrape the story of his or her day into the side of a rock and make a picture of their dreams in a cave. I think then, and I am not at all educated enough but to conjecture, that this desire to reach out, to say something, is in our nature. It is as much a part of us it seems, as breathing is. It is carved somehow into the DNA that tells the next generation of cells how to shape themselves in the quest to prevail against the odds. Maybe this is what separates us from our tailed or scaled cousins, this engrained need to run our fingers along the edges of a sculpture or play a song until we cry, or merely to laugh at something funny that someone said so as to feel the lovely ache of joy in the pit of their belly when another “gets them”. I don’t know if anyone gets me, but I do know that until my lungs fill up for the last time with the billions of little oxygen molecules that happened to find their perfect partner and become O2, I will be reaching somewhere out to someone. For if it were so that we didn’t care, we would never have had a Kurt Cobain or a Johnny Cash nor would we have been inclined to listen to what they had to say. I am so glad that we do care and that the seeming emptiness of reptilian existence (apologies to owners of pet snakes or iguanas) does not extend to whatever it is that we are.

It is all so much more instant now, but a blog is, in its way, a binary cave painting and a song on an ipod is a musical one. It may not be as beautiful but then even this is subjective. I am sure that some of the millions of images and sounds that we are bombarded by every day are not meant to “say” anything more than the “blahh” they seem to, but equally I am glad that many of them do.

When we are spoiling for the chance to speak, we tend to speak. When we cannot, we rise against whatever rule or regime which prevents us from doing so. I am thrilled that I am lucky enough to be able to write this, whether I understand my reason for doing so or not. But more than that, I am lucky that you want to, or even just that you are, reading it. That said, this is not the utterance of a man who knows much about much, so take it all with a fist-full of salt and try something if you dare: Comment, discuss and debate and if even one of you do that, then this collection of letters strung together by me, means infinitely more to me.

Jx