Curse you
slim shady!!!! You and your most recent song have been played by that devil
Chris Moyles on the
BBC Radio 1 3-5 slot. Otherwise known as the driving slot.
It's not that the song isn't great, though it isn't. It's that after hearing it fifty or so times in the last week, I find I'm unable to walk, talk, or think without it popping into my head. Arg. The humanity. But it's made more irritating with my friends and family, all of whom seem to love this song and insist on hearing it in my presence. Will I forever be cursed to roam the prison of popular music? Dear lord, you know I've served my time.
A friend of mine died recently. When I say friend, I could have known him better, but he and I spoke and spent time together when we could, and we always stopped each other on the street to see how the other was doing. It was a casual friendship, to be sure, but it was becoming real and meaningful. To the extent that I was very glad when I found out through the grapevine that he'd received a First in his Degree, and was going to graduate in the top 5% of his year.
His name was Gerard McKenna, and he died a couple of weeks after finding out his results. It was a rally accident, he was there spectating, close to a corner, with another guy, and when the car came round the bend, it flew over the ramp, veered and smashed straight through both of them at nearly 70 miles per hour. I heard about it on Sunday and since then have been feeling a little strange.
It's odd, but the weather is fantastic over here, the sun is shining, the sky is blue, there are birds in the trees, and a gentle breeze plays with my face, cooling me. I can taste life, and yet, in my mind is the leaden, heavy fact, that Gerard is gone, younger than I, waiting for his life to begin, and just as it was about to, he was gone. The day I found out was also the day of the funeral and I can't help but think that my life has been waiting to begin for the last four years, and after a really crappy few months, why am I still left to face the future?
Not surprisingly, I think he deserved it more in many ways, but the lesson I'm supposed to draw from this, that I should get on, and DO something with my life before it's too late, belies something else. That I'm not as powerful as I once thought I was, and that death, so random, so final, so very real can take people as young and as ambitious as I.