Octopus's Garden

Hey, so I just signed up for Twitter, thinking "aha, now I can be a part of the online community and be more active in the world!"

But then I realized... not being the most concise person in the world, expressing my feelings in 140 characters or less may prove to be quite frustrating... :P

So here's my overlength thought for tonight. I've been listening through some old Beatles stuff lately, and I'm continually amazed at how creative, talented, and experimental they were. I always thought of the Beatles as "from a previous era" but really they only broke up a few years before I was born. Their music reminds me of my young childhood - whereas at the time I was mostly preoccupied with fascinating things like plastic cups, crayons, and laundry baskets, in the background of my memories I often see the record sleeves of Beatles albums lined up leaning against the stereo cabinet, and although I don't explicitly remember a lot of these songs, they conjure up a strange mix of feelings (half-imagined, I'm sure) from a simpler time when my parents had long hair, my toys and clothes were handmade, and my family would go on picnics in the mountain fields, singing along with my dad playing Peter, Paul, and Mary songs on his acoustic guitar.

So, to my point...

The song "Octopus's Garden" weaves a beautiful image of a safe, secret hideaway beneath the ocean, where we can dance around without a care and be happy and free. Why does this image work? I mean in reality, the ocean is filled with dangerous predators, pollution, and fish poop, right? So it wouldn't seem particularly safe to a creature born and raised in the ocean. It's only with contrast to our world with its harsh and changeable weather that the bottom of the ocean seems like a safe, calm place.

So I started wondering, is there any perspective from which our world would seem like the Octopus's Garden? Off the top of my head, the thing that comes to mind is someone living outside the Van Allen belts. Out in the harsh vacuum of space, buffeted by radiation and solar flares, life down on Earth inside of our warm and protective atmosphere and magnetic field must seem pretty cozy and safe! If we could live down there life would be so wonderful.. we could sing and dance around without a care in the world!

Kinda makes me want to go outside more.