Creative writing by Adam Solomons
The Unbearable Whiteness of Being
Listening to happy music when sad is a terrible idea. Listening to sad music when happy is a terrible, terrible idea. In the former case, an entire playlist of upbeat songs can be ruined by the unavoidable, perfectly agreeable observation that they actually mean nothing, lyrically or musically, and that the artist was probably depressed producing it, anyway. R.E.M. are an iconic band, for the most part uncontroversially so, but when Shiny Happy People plays on VH1 you wouldn’t offend anybody by asking quite why that is. You don’t need to be a Beatles fan to know that Across the Universe is far, far superior to Hey Jude, or Beach Boys conscious to realise that Good Vibrations is fine, but isn’t God Only Knows. Right? (I accept there’s an inbuilt inequality in that Beatles example, because John Lennon wrote Across the Universe and Paul McCartney wrote Hey Jude.)
Happy songs attempting to inflate a deflated soul succeed only in showcasing said soul how shit being inflated is. The superficiality, the insincerity, the emptiness. I thought it was supposed to mean something, to be happy.
Sad music when happy is a whole different breed of awful: the strange, as of yet unevidenced idea that the premature puncturing of one’s elusive sense of satisfaction – that “good mood” every White Girl on Twitter pines for, or the “good vibes” every urban posh boy places carefully below their Instagram post – might lead to some kind of long-term improvement. (Improvement could be better replaced by the word utility, there, but, hey, it’s the holidays.)
Unsaucy
If I sound bitter, it’s because my friends dragged me to Saucy. I’d never been and, well, it was the last day of term, so why not? I later found out that was a rhetorical question, my detailed and descriptive answers not as instrumental in changing minds as I’d hoped.
Clubbing has always seemed to me an odd exercise, in which everyone attempts to have Quite A Good Time; no one seems to be enjoying themselves too much, though nor is anyone sitting in the corner, hating it. I’m almost certain we’d all be much happier doing something we chose for ourselves, but then no one else would be there. My perfect Friday night is sat in front of a Noah Baumbach movie – not alone, I might add, but rather with a woman, who I haven’t met yet, or who doesn’t exist. Baumbach offers three-quarters of Woody Allen’s laughs and two-thirds of the charm in return for absolutely none of the guilt, which seems a bargain.
Okay, so they didn’t quite drag me. And it wasn’t my friends – it was my idea for us to go, and she felt sorry for me, so we did. I just wanted to see all of those rumours I’d heard, and the gruesome pictures I’d seen, play out in real-time. To experience a bit of that music and those people who are young and alive, if you catch my drift.
Except the music – I’ve not the faintest idea what that mood is. I suppose with a music taste predominantly in the region of electric guitars and usually-male singers, you build your own radar of what is happy and sad, reflective or forward-looking, regretful or opportune. And I’m standing, swaying, slightly, wondering what Marshmello’s latest song is about, or even what it really sounds like.
The Funeral (Band of Horses)
“Jet fuel can’t melt dank memes” was virtually the first thing Ewan ever said to me, and even after his death I’m not sure I quite know what it means. He was analysing the respective intellectual strength of various 9/11 conspiracy theories, an apparent hobby of his, while gesticulating to the anxious, out-of-place newcomer – okay, I’d been there almost a year, but I couldn’t say I’d had a substantive conversation with anyone – while handing them cans of Foster’s, generously.
At Westcliff there was something of a divide between “internals” and “externals”, those who had been at the school for five years already and outsiders who got in for sixth-form; (there was a certain mystery toward some of us externals in the early stages, but barely enough to motivate further social inquiry, and most of us remained wilful nobodies until after that summer.)
Ewan never gave a shit about the bullshit grammar school politics. At least, he didn’t to me, because he was nice. I don’t mean nice as in friendly or polite or agreeable, I mean nice to say kind and caring, and deeply so, interested in pretty much whatever you had to say, even if you weren’t willing to put it into words. I suspect everyone who knew Ewan would agree that their relationship with him was exactly what they wanted out of a friendship. Even if, somewhere deep down, he couldn’t care less about the topic of your conversation, he listened. He always listened.
So you can imagine the sense of collective disgust when the curtain drew around the casket and the little wheels drove it into the incinerator. Ewan used the only harmful bone in his body on himself, one that most of us didn’t know about. And yeah, it’s hypocritical of me to wax lyrical about a person I didn’t get to know well enough to find out how he really felt, but I thought I had more time. I just assumed we would get to argue, again, about Brexit or Greedo or Pinter or Coutinho, be it on Twitter or at the Post. If it sounds like I’m pointing the finger at myself it’s because I am; or, truth be told, all of us Friends Disconnected, for letting this happen. Wasn’t our surprise at the news only evidence that we should’ve done more? And how do we learn from a tragedy we don’t understand?
I hadn’t seen most of those faces since the Leavers’ dinner last summer, and it felt strange and awful for our reunions to be over this. These people I’d grown eventually to like, love, even, turning out for the Most Popular Guy in School, the first holder of that title who truly got on with everyone. Who cared about everyone.
We’ll miss you, Ewan. So, there.
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