I have been thinking hard all day, I even dreamt about it last night! I will not tell you exactly what it was, because that would make it worse, but I will shed some light on the matter so you can see what I'm on about.
One day I landed myself in a bit of a tangle with my new found mischievous hobby. I spotted a building a while ago that was clearly out of business, because, well, all the windows were broken. Pretty much every single one. In between planning for bigger missions, we decided to have a look at it one day. The first door we tried had clearly been forcefully opened at some point, but now it was shut properly. The second one was open. Which I found slightly odd, but didn’t really take the time to reflect on it before slipping inside. Almost instantly, when inside, be realized we might have made our first blooper. Abandoned places hold all sorts of strange things, and some are like time capsules, but this didn’t seem right for some reason. First of all, there were forklifts. We had seen that before, but those had come trough hell (or rather a massive fire) while these looked fully operational. Also, the floor looked to have been swept recently. Which is something people don’t just happen to do to abandoned buildings. People might board up windows and door out of the goodness of their hearts, but they don’t sweep. There is just no meaning to it.
As you might have already gathered, this place was slightly less abandoned then we would have liked. It was certainly out of business, but it seemed someone was still using this place for storage if nothing else. At this point in the story (I'm sad to say you are not the first to hear it) my mother was slightly outraged over the phone: “Someone could have walked in on you! They could have been angry! It could have been dangerous!”. And yeah, someone could have very well arrived just then and it would have been very bad.
For fear of saying to much, I will not elaborate any further or go into details of the appearance, type or whereabouts of this building, so this is where I switch back to my pondering. As I may or may not have described at great lengths before (not sure actually), we do not steal, break stuff, break and enter, vandalize or any of that stuff. Outside of the constant presence of expensive (and quite heavy) photo gear, our objective is mostly to see and to make more or less qualified guesses as to why things are the way they are. We are good guys we feel, though you might not be able to tell if you ran into us in a dodgy place. I don’t care so much for labels, but I want to be good and not bad, not rude. But I feel that this whole situation is rude. To be in someone's space unbidden. It is at best, very rude. This is indisputable to me. However accidental, the result is still the same to the subject of out involuntary rudeness. Believe me, I would love to write this off as someone else's fault or problem, but there is no two ways about this. So what is there to wonder about? Well... I was wondering what to do with the pix. We were in agreement at once that we should not give out this location to anyone, not even almost, or accidentally, or partially, or by way of cryptic clues, as is the way of urban explorers. The pix would be published (the least incriminating ones, mind you) and no one would be any the wiser as to were they came from. After all, what were the odds that the wrong people would see them???
The I went on to the mental experiment of what would happen IF the wrong people did see them. “I would feel so bad” I though, and felt some of the imagined shame wash over me. Then I swiftly carried on deciding which pix would be published...
This is when the bullshit detector went off in my head, clearly, or it wouldn’t be a very good one. The consept that all reasoning seemed to travel in big circles around was this: If I know I'm going to feel bad about this later, then why on earth am I doing it? I would apologize with feeling I imagined, but all the while my subconscious was miles ahead of me, repeating a specific line from a song, for a suitable soundtrack (this is actually, I regret to inform you, no joke! I actually ended up having to download it). A fitting answer to my future plea for forgiveness: “Don't tell me you're sorry cause you're not. I know you're only sorry you got caught” (“Take a bow” by Rihanna). There is no real damage done, and this is an honest mistake so long as no one knows. But I wouldn’t be able to convince anyone (especially not myself) that I accidentally uploaded the pictures to the web. After all, I have to remember what so few people seem to realize; that the web is not like my diary at all. People can see and read, and respond and spread this stuff! So, what is not yours to share, do not put it on the web! Tell your trusted friends and your mum and all that, but do not put something on the web if you cant honestly defend it without blushing. And try not to step on peoples toes to much when they have done absolutely no harm to you. And preferably, don’t do stuff at all if you cant justify it.
In other news, this is our second explore in a row that has ended with someone asking us for directions.
“Why does this keep happening?” I wondered aloud.
“It's because we look so at home everywhere” Ramona concludes.
Later on we go to a store, and I smile at people. I only recently figured it was okay to spontaneously smile at strangers and now I do it all the time. Who know it was this easy to be just slightly more outgoing?! My lack of understanding for what falls withing the boundaries of normal conversations, still seems to confuse people, but when you smile a lot, random people might say hi or even start talking to you, which is nice :)
