Friday 1 May 2009

Finishing It Off.

Explanation: Well anybody who knows me will get who this is about after about ten seconds of reading what follows. This is however intended to be part of a much larger project which I feel has a great deal of promise but will also need a great deal of work to even complete, but I'll be updating the blog with news of that soon. For the meantime here's the latest, well, anything that I've written and one I'm particularly proud of.

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You know it’s funny to think of him as dead. Even now, when you know damn well he’s dead cause he hasn’t been around to call you a motherfucker OR a cunt for around 2 months. I don’t want to apply myself to that cheesy school of thought whereby he isn’t actually “dead” note the speech marks because he lives on in my memory. That to be seems to be such a stupid approach to the whole thing. People are always in your memory. Jesus when he was alive I remembered the stupid things he did daily, the triumphs as well. Death has just left me with nothing but the memories. With him not here, what else do I have left? 


But still it’s a very funny thing to think of your friend as dead. Sometimes when my mind idles I wonder where he must be still, what he might be doing then the logical part of my brain kicks in with the realization that he’s around 5 miles away underneath six feet of earth slowly decomposing. Not the most romantic of thoughts I will grant you, but logic is rarely a nicety is it?

No it’s not that he’s still here in memories, it’s that he’s still there in my head somewhere. In everyday life he still exists. Take for example the end of the bar.

The end of the bar was less the end of the bar and more a serene respite from work that was conveniently located some 5 feet away from where we worked. The end of it is warped and chipped from the countless spills, wet glasses and piles of washed cutlery set upon it. It’s the filthiest most unkempt corner of the entire bar but it was ours. It was our little place. The hours spent there are countless. To the point where it seems that the most part of work was spent there. There was always a very comfortable routine to it. Send out the last of the checks, clean down the sides, one sweeps, one does pots, we both mop out and one of us orders two pints of Carlsberg when we’ve mopped to the exit door. Then you go up and get changed laughing about the events of the night, whatever they may be and go down. In routine the first pint is always the best tasting, the coldest, the most satisfying. You drink it unlike any of the rest of them. You drink it with a sense of direct urgency. It’s an urgency born both from thirst and stress equally we decided one night when we both happened to question it at the same time.

And there you’d stand. Stood at the end of the bar drinking yourself into a small oblivion and feeling like you’d live forever. Life is full of small ironies that way. At the end of the bar you always had this sense of immortality in the fact that no matter what had gone wrong before that was now set perfectly right by the consumption, the heavy consumption of alcohol. There was also the oddest sense of unity, a sense never apparent when we were both alive, it’s funny how you only notice these things when one of you is dead. You both knew you were looking forward to this pint at the end of the bar all fucking night or all fucking day as applied. Then you’d neither say anything for those first few mouthfuls as you just sort of…savoured being there. That’s one of those incredibly odd things you realize when somebody close to you dies, you slowly gain a little more appreciation for those million moments in day where you are just simply glad to be exactly where you are stood. Those enchantingly tiny seconds of every single day where you are just happy to be where you are. The horrible thing to admit about this situation is that being around my friend, these moments came every single time I finished work and stood there at the end of the bar with him. 

Looking over it as the alive party in this situation you realize that when it was happening to you, you never realized. This leads you to realize that the greatest moments in life, the most perfect, the most content moments in life tend to completely pass you by. You spend your whole life hungering for being content or having lived in that perfect moment where everything is just…right. You hunt for them daily and never realize that you’re shooting past the target. We spend so many days festering on the worst part of the day, week. We look so much at the days when we have no money and payday is just a vague dot on the horizon. We pull ourselves through every lonely day of being single, each morning we don’t wake up with whoever next to us. Then when we wake up next to that person, when we’re with somebody we just find something else negative to focus on. I guess we have to scrape the gutter in order to appreciate the stars. What astonishes me now, looking over it, two months after he has died is that I never ever realized how perfect those small moments at the end of the bar were. But I suppose it’s forgivable in it’s way. How many times during the course of the day do you really take to think “What if this never happened again?”. That’s exactly what happens when one of your closest friends dies, you cold turkey in a sense, from the happy little moments. Thus in the most human of ways we can only realize the beauty of things that are dead, the serenity in more peaceful moments. 

I don’t know what I’m meant to say here. What little truism I’m supposed to comb from it. That’s what makes me alive and that’s what makes me human, I will never ever realize how great I have everything for me in this moment until it is all stripped away from me. I’ll never know I was sleeping in a cloud until I’m brought back down to earth. 

I opened saying how funny it was to think he was dead but truthfully, as of this moment I’m slowly realizing what an incredibly truant gift it is to be alive and to be able to experience this all. If I was a cheesier person I might say that is his gift to us all, but really he didn’t intend for that. It’s not a wake up call either, his death isn’t a fucking alarm clock to any of us.

I don’t know why I wrote any of this now. I suppose more so than anything else I guess I just miss my friend. I can’t be held to blame for that, it’s the most human of mistakes to not appreciate what is around you everyday.

The end of that bar is dry now. I won’t ever laugh with him on the end of it ever again, I’ll never again have those precious little parts of the day when you can simply relax and join together in the decadent art of drowning away stress in pints of beer. I’ll never have that ever again but it’s ok. Not because he’s alive in my memories, not because he’s made me wake up to what’s around me, these things are a given.

It’s because that whilst it’s funny to think of him as dead, all of a sudden it’s even funnier to think of myself as being alive.

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After a tough couple of months in many respect's I'm intending to bring the blog back better than it ever has been. I'm planning for a couple week's hiatus to write some new stuff and then I'll be back, apologies to my Newbury peep's.