Thunder

Excuse me while I nerd out hard for a second.

So it’s a couple years old, but there is a ridiculous video making the rounds today of a guy playing AC/DC’s “Thunder” to the rhythm of his off-balance washing machine. If you haven’t had the pleasure, you should click here immediately.

I find this video hilarious. For the obvious reasons, yes, but my brain always runs away on stuff like this. Anyone who’s followed me for any length of time may be aware I have a special fondness in my heart for music. I feel like it describes the human condition more uniquely than any other phenomenon. Part of what I love so much about it is the idea that nearly anything can become music – or rather, that the human mind is capable of finding beauty and rhythm in almost any situation. This video illustrates that wonderfully, and makes me laugh.

But it also makes me laugh because of how recursive it is. I tend to go back to the source in these situations. I mean, just start at the beginning of this story and imagine the millions of years of evolution, of molecules bouncing around in just the right way, to get to this point: a bunch of apes in Mesopotamia, climbing out of their safe little jungle and setting off into the plains. Developing the most basic of tools. Discovering fire and the wheel. Discovering that with rocks pounded at the right time, grass blown on just the right way, they could make music – a discovery which, according to some theories, may have ultimately been responsible for differentiating Homo Sapiens from their less advanced cousins.

Irrigation. Hygiene. Modern science. Progress on top of progress.

But at the height of it all (so far), we’re still just banging on the things around us, taking the noises in our environment and transforming them into music – even when those “things around us” are things we created that are making noises they aren’t supposed to.

To me, there’s just something uniquely joyful – and hopeful – about that. May we continue transforming all the universe’s random bangings into declarations of joy for eons to come.