Adventures in Empty Spaces

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Allow me to digress for a moment. I know, I'm supposed to write about running around like a lunatic, falling off of things, crashing into stuff, and generally seeking out trouble wherever it happens to be residing, but the fact of the matter is, I have something on my mind. I can't always be doing stuff - there is inevitably a bit of downtime and I get to thinking about things. Well I thought of something, I'm thinking about it now, and I expect to continue to mull it over for the next little while. It is this weighty burden that I propose now to share with you. Feel free to pour yourself a drink first, it can only help.

You see, once upon a time I had a summer job. I worked in an oil refinery. A couple of different ones actually. Anyway, in a refinery there are these very tall towers - you've probably seen some, or at least pictures of them. These towers, mostly used for distilling different components out of the oil, are giant cylinders of pure metal. Five or eight story monoliths of coarse steel, designed to contain thousands of pounds per square inch of pressure, filled with liquids and gases that hurl through them at temperatures in the hundreds of degrees, only ever longing for that tiny breath of oxygen that would allow them to explode into catastrophic, combustible, life. The towers are built to withstand these tremendous pressures and strains but, and this is the kicker, they can't survive even a little bit of a vacuum. They were never meant to be empty.

... let's not discount the powerful balm of watching a heaping plateful of troubles that you don't have yourself.

I don't know who it was that said "nature abhors a vacuum," but dear Lord they were right. You pull a few pounds per square inch of vacuum in those mighty steel obelisks at the refinery, just a tiny bit of emptiness, and God help you they'll collapse like they were made of Play-Doh. They're built to operate under extremes of pressure, but they were never intended to be truly empty. I think that people are the same way.

You see, just as nature will go to great lengths to fill a vacuum, like crushing an eight story, steel, pressure cooker like it was a pop can, I think that people will go to great lengths to fill in empty spaces in their lives. We rush to fill a vacuum before it causes us to collapse under the damp weight of our heavy worlds. It's how we try to fill those spaces that interests me.

It's a tricky business, filling in the holes, because I think that we often don't know what's missing or what we really need. So we do some odd things. In fact, I think that it is this very phenomenon that may explain a lot of the seemingly ludicrous stuff that people do, and speaking as someone who does his share of ludicrous stuff, this seems like a reasonable hypothesis.

Some people become alcoholics, using booze to fill in their unhappy personal voids. Others become workaholics, jamming the unwanted spaces full of good, productive, socially acceptable activity, at the expense of all other things. Some people watch daytime talk shows. Yes, talk shows. These seem like a good example of a dysfunctional behaviour meant to fill the void left by some other deficiency. I mean, think about it, why else would you choose to spend your days learning about other people's horrible problems?

Love life bland and stagnant? Hey, fill your deep, resonant, emotional wells up with the fiery passions of people caught in tragic southern love triangles. Marriage turned empty and lifeless? Stock your cool, lofty, psychic caves with the righteous wrath of the emotionally spurned, even if only for an afternoon. It beats sitting on the couch feeling the dense, relentless, atmosphere squeezing down on those cold, hollow, spaces in your own body. In fact, I happen to know a former workaholic who now, having become unemployed, fills his days with the dark emotional freight of those desperate spirits who haunt daytime TV.

Of course, let's not discount the powerful balm of watching a heaping plateful of troubles that you don't have yourself. You don't want to experience everything, after all. Better to just watch some stuff from afar.