S*T*U*F*F* Reloaded

I recall a comment on a previous blog post (about what I believed to be the misplaced attempts by UK television journalists to shock us with their reports) by Dr. Andrew Scott, where he finished by saying “let’s not be stone hermits”… a cunning little phrase that said much… a plea not to switch off and ignore the plight of humanity.

The past couple of weeks have seen me become an incorrigible stone hermit, for one reason and one reason only - I can’t deal with the images of China and Burma that are reaching my eyes. I simply cannot cope with them. Maybe its back to having a child again, but seeing parents looking for lost children, all that destruction and death and confusion, just breaks my heart. If I so much as lend it a second’s thought, I disappear into a downward spiral of grinding to a halt, seeing my work and the album I’m trying to mix as lightweight unimportant bullshit that doesn’t deserve my time.

The other night there was a 10 minute sequence on ITV of the immediate aftermath of the quake… I was just about getting through it when a scene came on where a mother was just standing completely still with her boy on her back, unable to do anything, completely broken and stunned to the point of a daze. I had to go away from the TV.

Then the feelings of helplessness kick in and I’m left reeling. Even now, 2am on a perfectly calm spring night here, I’m blasting my head with the Foo Fighter’s track “New Way Home”, and iTunes random play just seems insane, a crazy thing to have at my disposal when somewhere else on this strange planet, people are waking to the loss of everything they had, wondering if they can get water, and will the rain stop today?

Life goes on here. Things are good. It seems all wrong…