The world is full of oddities, from strange uncharted waters that give us fish we have never seen before to the structures and symbols of generations long gone before us. We analyse it all and put our spin on each and every thing that is found. Proving and disproving a theory becomes tantamount to truth from the mouths of a few so called experts. Even we, as human beings range from the troubled and fanatical to the weird and wonderful and we classify beauty in the shallowness of vision and not what lies beneath our skin. Our characteristics are judged and compartmentalized to maintain a caste system no matter how free we think we are.
I spent an entire life being judged different from the normal range of what human’s decree is the right and proper way to live a life. From a child who challenged herself to the curiosities of learning rather than simply agreeing with opinions and spending time with what private school deems the outcasts from the pretty and popular; to somewhere in amongst the nerds, geeks and other assorted names given to us we found a common playground to exist in. We never saw each other as plain or ugly, smart or dumb, fat or thin, we interacted by finding that place from within that connected us all together. A common bond that is unshaken and faithful despite growing up and growing apart with our own individualities.
We became a strange family of thrown together people in a scene that accepted the outcasts of normality with a thread that knitted us with a single note. A single note and an infinite beat that never broke rhythm and we called it ‘House’ music. The daytime lepers became night time vampires, searching the night for that sound that made your heart vibrate in your chest and gave you emotions that nobody felt unless you were able to give yourself to the music you heard.
We were part of this vibrant scene of pulsating bodies and sweet smelling smoke that permeated the air in a dark warehouse or club and the only light was what highlighted the DJ on the decks who gave us our salvation in minor notes and repetitive beats that made your body move of its own volition until the world above you seemed the furthest thing from reality you had.
It was the time you finally realized how normal felt so weirdly strange and how strangely weird felt so right when hundreds were around you all hypnotised by the same feeling and welcoming you like a long lost brother or sister without having known you for more than a minute.
This was the art of music, the art of self expressionism and the realization that we had no names here. We were all one and the same and treated accordingly and love was emanating from the lasers and the drums and nothing felt wrong in the world as long as the night held you right here.
Not your parents or teachers or the beautiful normal set of humans who lived on the surface could ever take this from you. Each person here had a story, each person had a demon they slayed with the music and we all understood each other without a word being spoken.
While the autocratic world suggested we were fiends with drug habits and bad breath, unkempt hair and attire of hippies, we saw each other as rainbows with light and life that lifted us above the madding crowd, where we could close our eyes and be in that moment that the world could dazzle you with its brilliance and noise and not once was there a sad thought or a tear that was shed in anything but sheer joy.
I am older as are the many I experienced that with but the joy of it never left because if there was ever a time sadness threatened to flood your life with its irretrievable agony; the music became your blanket to safeguard you. It highlighted that no matter how nomadic life could be with people that came and left, music would always be there to pick up those pieces, find you that memory you could hold with both hands and rise above the darkness that ached inside your heart.
Life is strange and that seems normal to me, a strange life is to seek the sunlight always and never find that shadow that holds excitement for a few hours with the underground people who will smile and open their arms for you to invite you in without judgement.
People may think they have what it takes to embrace the world with all it has to offer and never be curious enough to search below where we take ourselves away from the corporate capitalistic life we were thrown into reluctantly as we reached adulthood.
The crowds who never understand how music can become an emotion that will never leave you and how it is as clear as the anger is real to those living life in their offices and houses without ever inviting a rainbow inside.
We live it with peace, love, unity, and respect despite being strangers bound only by the threads of music but they are unbreakable.