I’m an exhausted puppy. I’m really looking forward to the end of the week because we get to play a more rocking kind of show. I’ve been feeling tense after the Open Mic Incident and I’m afraid I’ll go through another night of sleeplessness – maybe I need to run off to some OTHER open mic for a night and rock the Hell out just to let off some steam. It’s at moments like this that I intensely miss Tae Kwon Do.
I’ve been reading through the Game of Thrones books by George RR Martin and comparing it to other books I’ve read about medieval environments. Game of Thrones is thoroughly fantastic, with its exotic armour and high-born honour and constant sense of danger and pervasive violence – but from what I’ve read of the “real” medieval period , with its exotic armour, high-born armour and constant sense of danger and pervasive violence – it sounds like certain aspects of the way the books are written might be pretty accurate from a psychological point-of-view.
I think it’s Michael Crichton, writing about his book Timeline (?), who first caught my attention with the idea that a person from that era and a person from today wouldn’t see eye-to-eye: that their concept of what is and is not acceptable are completely different, that morality and societal norms have changed dramatically, that in short, modern humans generally can’t even IMAGINE that environment, much less appreciate what it would mean to survive in it.
The completely accepted idea that might-makes-right, the discrepancy of the haves and have-nots, the completely in(modern)human way of abusing one another’s bodies – we may THINK some of this sounds familiar, that we can grasp the concept as modern-day Americans, but in those rare transported moments when I’m Living and breathing these stories I know that we are an entirely different species. We have the roots, and there are throwbacks, but… it’s a brave new day and we just don’t do it like we used to.
I like rising back out of the horror of that world – knowing that it’s not just ACCEPTED that someone wandering the street with a weapon might just come barging through the door and take what he wants… you know, we’d be surprised. We’d have someone to call. People around us would think that something terrible and out-of-the-ordinary had occurred. We have great expectations.
Frank Cassel Banjo Man!!
Of course, that means we have to keep a lot of this inside. It’s not acceptable for us to spread our frustrations around. I’m tense and I’m angry, but I can’t then go smack my girlfriend around, or go strike those weaker than me – though there are still people out there who DO respond to their own stressors that way, I’d argue it’s not accepted anymore. I’m not saying these are urges I’m having (Kristen, you’re safe!) but I feel like that transference is something that is slowly becoming more and more abhorred by modern society, and with any luck it’s being eliminated from our collective pool of responses to distress.
It’s why I have to play a carbon fiber guitar – because all of the above gets channeled into my playing. I think humans, at their core, are still pretty violent, petty, selfish beesties – but human society is slowly (oohhhhh so slowly) evolving into something better. But “better” often means that we’re “better than” our safety valves (I should use some other term, like ‘emotional outlet’ rather than ‘safety valve’, because I think a lot of violence is cause by people letting off their internal pressure, but obviously not in a ‘safe’ way for others) – okay – But “better” often means that we think we’re better than our emotional outlets, and we frown upon the people that just crack under the pressure of our world.
I think we also secretly envy them. That’s probably what a lot of first-person shooter video games are about.
Whatever – I’ve gotten a LOT of comments from people who’d admired my calm in the face of provocation, threat and adversity this weekend. I’ve gotten such remarks before (one of my favourites was from a bartender who later kicked a drunk guy out of a bar after he came and got really on top of me and Heather at a performance. I kept eye contact and blocked his passage with my body and my guitar and didn’t miss a note – the bartender later came up to me and said “man, that was badass – I Love the way you did that – you just looked him in the eye and showed him you weren’t takin’ his shit!”) – and I sort of think that one of the reasons the other guy acted so threatening was that he was SURE I was coming back there to deal with him physically…
I guess he just hadn’t heard the news of how evolved we all are.
