I grew up on an island. It isn't a very big island. Walking around the perimeter takes about 3 days. A good hiking trip. It's not the island from Lost and it's not in the middle of nowhere. The mainland which boasts a fairly decent sized city is visible from the beach. The only way to access the island is by boat. It's both a boon and annoying as hell. I've been thinking lately about how the environment shapes us and how living on an island at some point (or always) seeped into my pores and propagated itself into every cell of my being.

When you leave an island behind you realize what shelter really is. The world is not an island. It wouldn't work if it were an island. You can't just one day secede from the land around you. You need it and we needed the mainland. It was only a luxury that we were a floating plot of land in the ocean. We are not independent. The people who live on our island have jobs and bring infrastructure home with them on the ferry. Without the continual exchange between our island and the land nearby we would all have to move back. And yet, we are independent. We do not hold a kinship with the landers and they don't with us. We aren't as different as foreign countries, but there is something missing that would constitute a real relationship.

It's almost as if I live two different lives. Island mode or not island mode. Island mode means you need to take the ferry to reach me. It can exist in two fashions, polarities. On an island as a kid you learn to scream. You scream to boats passing by, you scream to friends down the street and to neighbors who want to know how your parents are doing. Living on an island comes with a certain degree of freedom which allows you to be the king of the domain. Everyone owns the island, not a piece of it, but the entire thing. Everyone is a monarch in their own kingdom. And kings live the high life. There are times on the main land or in a city when that comes out and I can't help that. It means I am overly gregarious and loud and probably annoying. But it also means I've made you a king with me. So it does help more than it hurts.

The other polarity is silence. On an island you may be king, but the only person that lives in your territory is the water, and somehow it seems like he is ruling us. We are surrounded by water all the time. We are at its disposition and it reminds us with storms in the middle of the night. The world is not ours. And living on an island reminds you of that. The images of my island mode polarities are characterized by the waves. The first image is sunny and the waves are calm. Picture the beach with no sound. Let the yellow sun be the only thing you hear. Picture children on the beach in green bathing suits with their mouths open as if they were screaming, but don't think of the sound, think of the image. The happiest beach moments are always characterized by their silence, as if we all live in a photograph of a beautiful beach day. The second image and the second polarity is characterized by the noise. The noise of a storm, the noise of snow on a television screen, the radiating sounds of the big bang reaching us through our television sets. It's night and you're at the beach and it's raining and all you hear is the big bang, it's so loud and vibrating that you can't hear it so much as feel it. You imagine it's the noise of millions of red and purple demons in hell screeching as they torture us for centuries of sin. The water in front of you looks like ink and it's as if Poseidon wants to draw over the island's very existence.

I carry those images with me everywhere. I ferry them to the mainland and they inhabit my personality. I'm in love with sound. I play the bass and the drums because I was raised on an island. I try to recreate the waves, the stormy and the calm, and I put my very being right in the middle, right where the island would be. I let the rhythm crash into my banks and I let the music color right over me like Poseidon and his inkwell. But it doesn't happen, because I am there, and the waves of music can't deny that there is a beach in its way. And that beach is screaming with the same vibrations of the big bang. And I'm yelling so loudly that in 14.6 billion years someone watching TV might hear and hold his ears because the noise of my existence is so shrill and consistent that it might even be the impossibly loud and hellish sound of silence.