Saturday, August 30, 2008

The Devils Dance Floor

Some time ago we got a new person working in our housing unit. He was to be our control room or "bubble" officer. The bubble officer stands in a little glassed-in room that sits higher than the rest of the unit and controls the house doors. We can't open a wing door or cell door or even go to the bathroom without the bubble officer opening the door for us first. A good bubble officer becomes our "eye in the sky" and watches our backs when we are working and will (hopefully) call for help if we need it. This one turned out to be a good bubble officer. He was always there and watching when things went south. Always ready to let us in or out if needed. Right now he's trying to get another position out on the yard for a change of pace. He will be missed up there. I won't feel quite as safe on the floor as I did. Hopefully we get another good one.
But I completely lost track of what I was trying to say. He turned me onto a band named "Flogging Molly", an irish rock/folk/punk/something or another group. Very cool music. I think so, anyway. They have a song called "The Devils Dance Floor" which is very high-energy. It has nothing at all to do with prison or fighting or even any element of danger, it's about dancing with a girl. But for some reason we adopted it as our theme song. Some of us did, anyway. The Devils Dance Floor seems an appropos name for where we work. I listen to the song in the mornings on my way in, to get me amped up for the day. And there have been times, when things were getting tense, I found myself singing the lyrics in the back of my throat:

Well swing a little more, little more o'er the merry-o
Swing a little more, a little more next to me
Swing a little more, little more o'er the merry-o
Swing a little more, on the Devil's Dance Floor

I've apparently said them out loud more than once because I've gotten a few strange looks while doing that. I hope the good folks in Flogging Molly will forgive me for using their lyrics as kind of a battle cry. But they are just so right.

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