Melange

I think the book that absolutely upended my world at the tender age of 13... and hear my out... was the book... Gone With The Wind.
 
I was a great reader before that. I had read a few Harry Potter books, Famous Five, Enid Blayton, some abridged Dickens and all assortment of young adult fiction and books prescribed for young readers.
 
Reading Gone With The Wind at the age of 13 (and it is a huge book) just suddenly destroyed what I knew about the world and threw everything open. Now suddenly here was a book, where there were NO heroes or villains, the lead character is an absolute scheming lying selfish entitled bitch, and there is an extremely wide spectrum of acts committed, there is no judging and no knowing what is right and what is wrong. The lead character is a bitch but also the most monumentally jaw-droppingly human figure I had encountered in fiction, a person who was petty and selfish, but had dreams and desires, and acted on impulses of self-preservation but sometimes also acted out of nobility and net to net, wondered about what was right or wrong and was extremely unsure and there was no way of knowing how a life is to be lived or what is right or wrong.
 
And that just destroyed all notions of good and bad for me forever and the concept of heroes and villains, and what remained at the age of 13 was this sledgehammer blow that there is no right or wrong, we are all extremely flawed people and that we will be wondering throughout our lives whether we are doing the appropriate thing and we will have to face the consequences of our actions and there probably will be no solace (the book has a tremendous downer of an ending where Scarlett O'Hara is left all alone with just her wits and courage and wealth about her).
 
For a young person, such an adult realization at such a young action can be truly earth-shattering. It can basically alter the course of your life and even alter the person that you become when you grow older and want to become when you grow older. It also shrouds all existence in a grey mist where everything is subjective and a matter of perspective.

I'm going to have to come back to this after considering it for a while. It would be a long list. 
 
It became evident only in recent years how some of the most silently influential were in childhood, like a seed was planted. 
 
I once said to someone that I don't remember ever having had a strong desire to travel, and that is just happened somehow. 
 
But then when you consider things like these three examples below, travel,  adventure, search was a major theme in them all.
 
It freaks me out now when I look back at these and see places / representations of them that I actually ended up visiting. 
 
 

A great song, with a sad, tragic history.

For most of my life I thought the lyric was "I guess the rain's down in Africa".  I only recently found out that I've been living under a delusion.  I mean, the rain could be in Africa, it's possible, you don't know that, who knows these things!

More proof that radio music used to be better! 
 

 
And it should be listened to on this and not with some iPhone earbuds.

Yeah, could end with a louder bang, otherwise how is the audience supposed to know when it finishes?

Magnificent!

Ahh! After a hard day at work, and a long drive home, I'm sunning myself to RISE, by Herb Alpert.
Honestly, it's the aural equivalent of a day at the beach. Track 3 could be a mini Bond score.

Sigh 

Trouser-wettingly funny!

I don't mind the avatar changing, but this trend of name changing combined with avatar changing, needs to end.
 
 

"I'ms gonna compose me some real woe is my ayz sheeet today" - Wolfgang Mozart, 14th August 1780
 
 

Alex no longer needs the weirding module!