Reverend Green's Bible Of Misanthropy

A song dedicated to the memory of Alphabetti Spaghetti the cat

10/03/19

4:24pm

A song dedicated to the memory of Alphabetti Spaghetti the cat

4revgreen: The other day, after burying my cat, I stumbled across a song named "A Song Dedicated To The Memory Of Stormy The Rabbit" by Andrew Jackson Jihad. It was in a playlist I found on spotify, and I listened to it over and over, the lyrics really hitting home for me. I know it's not really about a Rabbit called Stormy, and to be honest, I don't know why the song is titled that way, but it gave me an idea.

After a long day at the computer, tangled up in all the relevant and irrelevant wires, I have created a little song dedicated to my deceased cat. Laugh at me all you want, but I felt better.

The software I used, plus my computer, probably cost me around two thousand pounds altogether. And that's not even factoring in the instruments I have accumulated over the years. I'm no musical genius, but I have my fun and like to keep it to myself.

Whilst sifting through drawers of junk, I came across a USB stick labelled "Year 9" on one side and "Music" on the other. It was just a plain old memory drive, and I remembered buying it specifically for school, because our computers were not wholly reliable upon for safely storing work without corrupting the files. I hadn't seen this contents of this USB since I'd finished secondary school, not really caring about the subject any more. Out of curiosity, I plugged it into my iMac.

The drive was named "Fuckoffmr" which must have been an indirect statement towards my teacher at the time. He was the kind who would insist you do everything his way, whilst also insisting that it was your piece of music and you were the "creative director" or something. He was also very touchy feely, and I'm sure he was fired at the end of the year after one of the girls made a formal complaint.

Anyway, the USB contained all the work I did in music class: year nine and a little from year ten. I never did the work we were actually set, I was convinced that I could become the new Animal Collective. They were all saved under a title and the date. For example, there was"IdentityCrisis2/3/09" and "SmileForLucifer1/10/09" etc.There must have been hundreds of files, ranging from short riffs and hooks I'd never done anything else with, to three minutes long songs with very shitty vocals, to minute long piano pieces. None of it was particularly good, a lot of it just consisted of unquantized messes or too many odd instruments forced together. One piece, named"Death15/06/09" I could remember feeling extremely proud of at the time, no caring that the teacher hand his hand gripped tight around my wrist as I showed it to him. Listening back to it, it was awful. Nothing fitted together, the aspects I thought made it unique really made it worthy of deletion. It made me rethink a lot, about recent events, about childhood memories.

I mentioned before that one time in school I deliberately got myself into a fight because I knew that Jamie who jump in and take over for me. I didn't mention how I knew what he would do.

It was maybe a year before, when I was in year eight I believe, when I got my first taste of someone else's knuckles. It was lunch time,which in my school meant a frenzied rush to the canteen to snatch the freshest food followed by lurking in corridors or, if you were me,hanging in some distant corner of the library with Jamie, or with a book.

The library was a sort of safe haven for anyone who didn't "fit it"which is some sort of mega cliché, I know. But it was, and I was never the only one crammed into a corner. The table were filled with  the same kids everyday: The group who played Dungeons and Dragons,the two boys that could solve a Rubik's cube in seconds, the girls who buried themselves in books, and then me and Jamie. I might have hated everyone, (and still do) but this room was filled with people who I could just about stomach. Most of the time. The librarian was young, and strict, but bent the rules for us regulars. She didn't care if we ate our lunch in here, despite the many signs warning us not to.