CHAPTER 83

 

 

#18: FUTURE ISLANDS

“Seasons (Waiting On You)”

from the album Singles

Released: March 2014

 

 

One of the main reasons why I listen to music – it may even be the main reason – is because I like to imagine that I’m making and performing it. In the mental bunker we use to shield ourselves from the horrible outside world, we have to indulge in such harmless fantasies in order to prevent insanity.

 

But I might go a little bit further than that. When I listen to a song or a longer piece of music, I can see myself performing it on television, at the school disco, at the works outing. If the notes come out, reach and penetrate me then they are converted into fuel for that fantasy.

 

And an awful lot of the awful time I do it with revenge on my mind, because I was programmed to put “life” in the background and either pay no attention to it or use it as miserable scraps of sources in order to imagine that I am pushing myself forward in doing so.

 

I do it to conceal the chasm of accumulated regret that I was never courageous enough to involve myself in life, that I almost always backed away from the possibilities that life might have offered (that “almost” is important). I have catalogue numbers and memorised chart positions rather than memories. Because, to use a lovely Glaswegian expression, I did not “get right intae it.”

 

I look at how I am now, which is the precise antithesis of photogenic, and know to my fingernails that I could never go in front of any public and perform those songs. This means that any enjoyment I derive from listening to them largely manifests itself as being at one remove because I cannot help but see (in my mind) me performing them. There’s a specific term for this and my brain has frozen trying to remember it. No matter (it isn’t “hoarded pleasure” although that concept would furnish an entire other book in itself).

 

Nobody really told me where to go with my life or guided me. The trouble with that is that because of the way I am I need to be told how to do things in minute detail before I go off and do them. By “minute detail” I mean the level of “That is a light bulb. This is a light switch. You press the switch to make the bulb light up.” That is how my brain works. Therefore I’ve mostly had to make it up for myself.

 

Since I received no guidance, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, whom I should or shouldn’t speak to, how I should or shouldn’t speak to them, the way things are supposed to work. And because I lack multiple fundamental human traits, I have never been able to get to such a place in life where I wouldn’t have to think about not possessing them.

 

In this way, and probably for that reason, I listen to music to remind myself – often painfully, masochistically – that it symbolises the life that I might have been permitted to live had I been different, and in this setting “normal” counts as different. Different from me, certainly. If I’d been a bit more forward, that one tad more self-confident, avoided the reflexive instinct to run away from any future offered to me – because my doing so was occasioned by my profound inability not to hear the voices of my parents, and particularly my father, in my head, or indeed those of my teachers or former employers, insinuating and insisting that I would fail, that I was not worth anyone’s risk. If I’d gone all the way with the piano and clarinet lessons and made it to grade eight (rather than grade six, which I did reach before hormones and career consideration took over my existence), I’d have been better at music. If I had just kept it up. If I’d owned the openness needed to connect with other people and not have them regard me as a weirdo or a bore.

 

And yet there arise periodic reminders that I could have gone really violently against all of the above, like when this guy comes on the television and he is the most magnetic and instant frontman to a pop group you have seen in maybe a generation. He acts, visually and aurally, as though he’s trying to wriggle out of the song, away from the bother of living.

 

More importantly, at least as you are concerned, he looks and sounds so much like you, such that you feel you are viewing a parallel universe where it’s you on that television screen, the you brave enough to tell people who deserved it to fuck off, because what he appears to be singing, this guy, is about how, if you’re going to live, you have to work it out for yourself, improvise your own guidance torch and to blazing hell with all expectative “rules.” Perhaps he’s meaning that I was right all along. But I lacked  the courage necessary to bridge the gap between me-me and on-television me, or maybe it was confiscated a long while ago, like Walter Benjamin’s Paris apartment. But I look at the guy on the television and imagine it’s me saying an elongated, growled FUCK YOU to far too many people to name here.*

 

*I did consider making an immensely long list of acknowledgements, naming everybody who has at some point had anything to do with my life or at least everybody I can remember, to go with this book, but I don’t know if some of them are even still alive, and for those still living, how many would be vexed and irritated by the memory of me (having most likely spent the best part of a lifetime trying to forget me)? Then I remember how many of my former school classmates got in touch with me immediately after my father died – which was, none of them – and finally elected not to bother.