Tuesday, April 1, 2008

A Great Day for Freedom

Originally Posted on Jul 4, 2007

Well it has been a long time since I have wrote one of these. I have been observing lots of things this summer but I never wrote anything down so a good number of my thoughts on these things I see are now buried somewhere in my mind, perhaps to resurface suddenly one day when they are needed once again or maybe they will just fester until they come out in the form of some sort of public freak-out.
Anyway, as some of you may know I have recently attended a Roger Waters concert in St. Paul (Roger Waters was one of the lead singers of Pink Floyd, and the founder as far as I am concerned). But it was basically a Pink Floyd concert, which was perfectly OK with me. Since I was able to understand music, and probably before, my dad would always be listening to Pink Floyd around me, so I have been a fan of their music for pretty much one hundred percent of my life. After actually seeing them live, it seems to me like some sort of door opened in my head and I have now moved up the ranks from big fan of Pink Floyd to a Pink Floyd fanatic, if you were there, you would understand, but you weren't(except for those of you that were) so I don't expect you too.
So today I was working, and while I was working I was listening to Dark Side of the Moon (Which, by the way, was performed in its entirety at the concert). And I think I might have figured out what he was trying to say at the end of the album on the song "Eclipse".
Now before I get into that I would like to offer a quick explanation of what the dark side of the moon actually is for my less astronomically minded friends. The moon is orbiting the Earth every twenty-eight days which is why we get a full moon about once a month. In one of those strange cosmic coincidences, the moon rotates on its axis once every twenty-eight days as well. The result of that is that for those of us on the ground, we only see one side of the moon. The other side, or the dark side, is actually in the sun as much as the one side we see, but since the rotation takes the same amount of time as the revolution we only see one side of it.
Getting back to what I was talking about, when NASA’s Apollo missions were underway, and we first started orbiting the moon, men were seeing this “dark side” of the moon for the first time. When they started walking on the moon, one guy would always stay in the orbiter while the other two would go fuck around on the surface of the moon. While this one guy, I believe his name was Michael Collins, was orbiting the moon, half of the time was spent on the dark side of the moon. While he was there, he commented that he was the most alone any human had ever been. The nearest humans to him were over two thousand miles away, and the next nearest person was over two hundred thousand miles away on the Earth. Even all the radio signals humans are constantly pumping out into space were blocked by the moon. This meant this guy was in total and complete isolation from all of mankind.
In the lyrics for “Eclipse”(see below), Roger Waters seems to be saying that when people start getting to him with all the things that they do, he can go into the dark side of himself and all these troublesome things are eclipsed by the moon. This theory makes sense to me because that is one of the reasons he built the Wall, so I have been told.
I should probably go on but I think this is getting a wee bit long so I am going to cut myself off. Have a good Fourth of July.
--Seth

"Eclipse" by Pink Floyd
All that you touch
All that you see
All that you taste
All that you feel
All that you love
All that you hate
All you distrust
All that you save
All that you give
All that you deal
All that you buy
beg, borrow or steal
All you create
All you destroy
All that you do
All that you say
All that you eat
everyone you meet
All that you slight
everyone you fight
All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come
and everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.

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