I think I'll go on a Walkabout
Find out what its all about
Spoilers ahead and Insert your own punctuation.
I think I'll go on a walkabout find out what it's all about if you recognize those lyrics that's from a little band called Red Hot Chili Peppers they're rock band that I like because I grew up with them and I don't think a lot of people respect them they think they're kind of nonsense rock or alternative and derivative of early 2000s late 90s rock and roll and maybe they are and maybe they don't have the most prolific lyrics and whatnot but all the players play and they do stuff but that song in particularly to me has always called to me walkabout I don't know what the fuck is about I do know that the only piece that I usually find in the world is I end up roaming I roam and I walk about and I remember hearing that song that funk bass rhythm from Flea fully and that's spoken kind of half sung lyrics of Anthony Kiedis I thought to myself this is how I feel when I walk about and just recently I found a film from 1971 called Walkabout it's about two Australian white kids who get left in the Australian Outback because their father brings them out there trying to murder them and then fucking pops himself and and they have to make it back to quote UN quote civilization and they get helped by an aboriginal man who is 16 and he's on his year long manhood journey called the walkabout the three of them just roam through the fucking movie and the editing is so frenetic and opulent but devastatingly smart that it shows not nature to be loving it doesn't do the noble savage it doesn't do the evil savage it just makes everybody trying to get by
and you see animals being eaten by ants and you see all these little weird idiosyncrasies of nature the brutalities of it and you start to realize as the movie goes on that the brutalness of nature is nothing compared to the walls that society quote UN quote civilized society create a critic said of the film that it was about communication which I do realize that but I think what it is it's about the loss of communication to ourselves and not so much of other people that's an obvious thing but if you're not connected to other people or you connected to yourself it brings up a great quandary of questions and I think there's a beauty to the movie in that idea there's also something about it of that it doesn't there's not a conclusion really the film ends with the girl who got lost out in the Outback with her little brother at her parents place it seems now that she owns it because they're both fucking dead with her soon to be husband I guess her boyfriend or maybe husband at that point and she's reminiscing fondly on her time spent in this true wilderness with this aboriginal man as her husband talks at her about his career which you give no fuck about and you realize in this moment none of us give a fuck about any of this none of us give a fuck about our careers it's fucking all bullshit who gives a fuck he's talking about his money and how they'll be good compensation and she is vacant in the eyes and it's flash editing to her in the Outback swimming with her brother and this aboriginal man and just there's that freedom that you realize that everybody seeks any person that lives in a city especially a city seeks this weird underlying freedom I've talked to so many fucking people and they all have the same stupid response that one day maybe they love to just have a cabin in the woods by themselves or have a house with some acres or you know far away and distant hundreds of people I've talked to and I swear that it's 70% of people have these dreams ironically I had this fucking dream so I'm just this fucking stupid I'm just this fucking playing I'm just as fucking boring and I think what it really comes down to is people wanna fucking Peace of Mind we're put in these cages that we feel almost more unkind and free to be in locking our doors with three locks but we have no idea how to communicate with each other we have no idea how to commune with actual nature we have no idea how to actually get in touch with real feelings that we have and if we do we don't know how to express them instead we yell at politicians or politicians yell at us and they make laws and drag bullshit and they have these ideas that it seems that humans should be locked away from each other and we do it to ourselves and the people that don't do it to themselves have been raised in society that says that they should do it to themselves so they do it to themselves and then we do it to other people and then we teach our kids to do it to themselves and in the end what happens is nobody fucking trusts anybody and that's why everybody has a fucking gun that's why I carry a knife on me at all times that's why they were all little bit doubting if we'll make it back through the door at the end of the day if you live in a city fucking in America you live in a small town in the Walmart gets shot up every other day and it's all the walls that we all put up I'm sitting here for philosophizing to my deadbolt to my chain on my door to my little slice of fucking paradise this boxy room this single small little insignificant apartment that I've chosen to imprison myself in I know there's forces beyond me like governments and money makers new ideas of jobs and society once again you know as fucking boring and pedantic as saying society and blaming it for anything the problem is it's us we won't take credit for our own bullshit and we never do so we sit in bad jobs we sit in bad relationships that they don't feel fully fulfilled and we do all this bullshit for what for what none of the masonry fucking sense and the film walkabout there's a very very very very fine job of explaining to the viewer that everything that is happening to you and that you've done is fucking bullshit it's a fucking bad joke and it doesn't preach that nature's perfect it doesn't preach that the Aboriginal people are perfect but it just says that somewhere down the line we fucked everything up and it does lean towards that the cities that we've created are not so spectacular and that I do agree with I think they're fascinating but I think they're soul crushing and people will always go back to the memories of 1 little good time and usually it's intertwined with nature instead of any fucking moment from a city any I have hundreds of times in bars I've had thousands of interactions in cities I've always lived in Boston and when I was younger East Haven New Haven all this bullshit all these cities all these concrete jungles and I'll tell you none of them not a single one of them come close to the memories that I have of sitting by a little German lake on the edge of the Black Forest with the giant Ant mounds in the distance 1 Lone Tree with my feet soaking in this murky pond scum that's the memory I always go back to that's why I'll never be happy because I've touched something that seemed authentic and real or me remembering when I was on the mountain tops in Italy and New Zealand and you really feel like you touch the stars it feels like you have a moment where you could believe in God cities don't make you believe in anything that I know and people that tell you that they do or that there's something spectacular in this that whatever are lying First off to themselves and then they're lying to you and trying to convince you of the lie that we've all been spun to churches are so beautiful in cities to try to bring some conception of natures art there but never fully works in a flawed institution like organized religion it's all maddening honestly but her at the end of the film is thinking about that time it was so nice about the film as you realize going forward she'll never be happy and you know why that's comforting cause that's all of us none of us will be happy there's a few of us that get out a few of us that are happy but I'd say majority of people that live in a city are not really happy 80% let's say we're always trying to get back to something else some other little moment in time it might be a childhood thing I remember sitting out in the back sunroom of my grandparent's house watching Dragon Ball Z and eating cookies do you know why that memory sticks it's not because of the show for the cookies it's because I could hear the bugs outside I can still hear them now I could feel the warmth of the sunshine I could smell her flower garden outside all of those things inherently exist right now in this moment somehow how fucking amazing is that in our DNA nature is true we came from the primordial goo and our bones remember doesn’t matter how tall we build a skyscraper I can tell you what a bar room sounds like but it's not a good memory I can tell you what it smells like smells like piss and vomit most of the time or some aerosol trying to cover it up or a liquor that's soaked into wood it's a very distinct smell but it doesn't conjure up happiness it conjures up guilt that I ever wasted my fucking time in those places that's what you do in a city especially a city like Boston there's some cities that are just drinking cities maybe this is a whole parable amounting to on alcoholism or maybe I'm just blabbing on because I have nothing better to do with my fucking time try to but I won't do it because I'm lazy or scared or whatever the fuck it may be I guess it's nice feeling tortured because at least I feel like I'm everybody else just for a moment that's what walkabout does it shows you how we can't connect to each other it shows you what we've done to each other it shows you how starkly we fucked up my own belief we've gone too far there might be hope for some people but for the majority there's no hope that's OK one day the earth will be like Coruscant the grand city planet of Star Wars you know that's my favorite planet in all of Star Wars and ironically I fucking hate cities isn't that a brain fuck isn't that funny how the mental gymnastics of me have made Coruscant my favorite place I know if I ever actually went I would hate it it'd be too overwhelming I freak out when I'm in New York
Why do I love it then is it because I become a true nobody then maybe but the desert does that too and I've been out in the desert and that scares the fuck out of me in a spectacularly beautiful way so I don't know if I wanna be nobody I think that I wanna be somebody but somebody doesn't matter either I guess but at least I’ll be part of this large collective of nobody’s bumping into each other in the streets feeling together alone but what I'm getting at is that at first you're afraid of the wilderness for these kids in the film but through connection of this Aboriginal man who is so tethered to real nature you want them to stay there forever because society starts looking like the true tyranny not the ambivalent nature and somewhere primordially inside each human I think we all want to go back to that place we want to go back to the muck and the mire to the ants eating kangaroo skulls because I think deep down we know we'll be back there letting the world continue on without us we've only made cities to act like we have control when God knows we don't but we build up to the heavens we fictionalize planets that are whole cities just to escape the drab idea that maybe society civilization big old cities have no fucking point other than to quench our fears of true communion with nature ourselves and others.
You tap into only for a moment something long past forgotten but not gone from our humble beginnings crawling from mother natures magical slime and all encompassing time It makes you ponder what would humans have to of done to live In more harmony with ourselves and this natural world Would we have to let things die more Would we have to go against our nature of creating and inventing and building would I be typing this now Fuck no I presume
So maybe we were always fucked an inescapable fate a natural stated fate I love that comforting thought.
