Entry #4 Marina and the Diamonds: Obsessions

What is the point of this blog? I mean, really?

Don’t answer that.

I don’t mean to say ‘don’t answer that’ as a joke, like the answer would somehow be difficult to hear, it was an entirely serious suggestion. An order, really. It would really slow this entry down to a standstill were I to pause now to open it up for reader’s suggestions. It’s pretty much the definition of a rhetorical question, see? I’m not actually expecting you to answer, merely just asking it for dramatic effect. Do you see? Good.

I know what this blog was started for. I’ve written pointless album of the year lists for a shamefully long time, and believe it or not I actually used to email them off to people at the end of the year, like if that irritating Christmas message you got off your uncle-in-law-twice-removed that annually boasted of how much better their family was doing than yours also included his thoughts on the latest Les Savy Fav album.

This blog started as a way to keep writing these nonsense lists and also to hand over their preservation to The Almighty Internet to ensure their traces were not lost like every list I wrote pre-2007. If I did write any list before 2007. I mean, I think I did, but I dunno, I was drinking a lot back then. ‘Back then’ meaning any time prior to about 2014.

Is that still only what the blog’s for though? Again, don’t answer that, rhetorical device, trust me. I very rarely talk about actual music these days. I still list the best albums of the year*, but now I more often use the platform to whinge about Tinder or the Paris attacks or depression or the practical futility of war. Essentially though, I just talk about the most pressing and important topic of all. Me! ME! MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

(*truthfully! No matter what nonsense tangent I shoot off toward, rest assured that the year end list is still the scientifically verified best albums of the year)

Every year, I tell myself that I’ll try and bring more traffic to this blog* by writing posts more frequently. I started this series on the best songs ever last October, I keep threatening to write the first proper analysis of every King of the Hill episode, but still… nope…

(*leading to, inevitably, more riches and more sexual proposals. It’s well known that both the richest and most sexually attractive  men in the world first started out as bloggers. Amazon was originally just Jeff Bezo’s blog (www.livejournal.com/AmazoOrAmazon’t) for posting snarky reviews of the world’s biggest rainforests, arguing how few of them actually deserved saving due to their low productivity and- as he put it- ‘shitty trees’. Idris Elba first came to prominence with his blog (www.ElbaLotToWatch.geocities.com) singing the praises of Sky television, which he claimed was ‘loads of channels’. So, say what you will about those irritating adverts, Elba actually did them for free because of sheer love of the product, motherfucker’s legit)

I feel sorry for american poetry club (sic), who gave me early access to their new album in order for me to write a review of it to perhaps raise their recognition among the three or four people who actually read this piece of shit blog. Instead I again used the opportunity to bore on about myself and debated the very legitimacy of album reviews. Yeah, I know, meta as fuck, I’m a genius, but it was unlikely to be what the band wanted. Still, that’s now my most viewed post of all time, so fuck what they wanted- click click click! Yeah, it finally means that the post detailing my suicide attempt is no longer the most viewed page on this blog. This is good, as now my evidence of what’s likely to increase web traffic isn’t quite so morbid. Now, if I want to get me more of those delicious clicks, rather than attempting suicide again, I just need to…

…

…

…review albums?? Nah, fuck that, I’m more likely to try the former.

OK, OK, OK, so that suicide post may have been the first introduction to Hejjy, my on-off girlfriend from my time in China with whom a shared a relationship that redefined the word… erm… I don’t want to say ‘complicated’, because Facebook have pretty much co-opted it and it’s now borderline meaningless. To say your relationship is ‘complicated’ now means that you’re a teenage girl who got fingered by a year 6 student in the disabled toilets at school last Tuesday and now don’t understand why he’s unwilling to call you his girlfriend. It’s more complicated than that, do we not have another word for it?

Anyway, if you’re a long time reader of this blog (ha!) you will know about my relationship with Hejjy as I’ve detailed it in compulsive (read: creepy) detail on The Universe’s Greatest Blog. I wrote about her so much that, I dunno, that might come up again later.

I assume you’ve read all 439 blog posts on this site so far, I don’t like pandering to you insufferable ‘new’ Necessary Evil fans who don’t know the lore inside out. Think of ‘Avengers: The Last One Whose Name I Can’t Remember’: how much would the film suffer if it felt the need to pander to the casual fans by explaining why Ant Man was carrying an empty pizza box all the time or why Thor only spoke Finnish and was suffering from motor neuron disease? No, the movie has to assume that the audience has already seen ‘Thor: Fins of Desire’ and ‘Ant Man: Seriously, What the Fuck Is Up With This Fucking Pizza Box?‘ and so understands everything completely.

Sigh, fine, I’ll quickly pander to the casuals by giving a quick breakdown of Hejjy and my relationship:

• Girlfriend in China
• I liked her very much
• Oh, I lived in China at the time. Probably should have said that first.
• Hejjy was a Hui ethnicity Muslim, so seeing me was explicitly forbidden by her family and friends. Our entire relationship had to remain secretive
• I attempted suicide on May 1st 2013 by jumping out of my eighth story flat window, for reasons I’m not going to go into. I smashed my spine to pieces and necessitating a flight back to the UK’s NHS
• Hejjy still stood by me when I was a fat disabled knobhead, thousands of miles away. We still spoke every day
• I started to resent an attractive young woman wasting herself on a fat waste of space such as myself, and so got angry with her and passive aggressively pushed her away.
• This worked and we split up
• She soon got married to a Hui guy chosen by her parents and we broke off all contact
• Until…
• Probably didn’t need it’s own bullet point that, just wanted to build tension, y’know?
• In April 2018 I was, in typical punctuality, I was writing about the greatest albums of 2017. In my ‘review’ of SZA’s ‘CTRL‘ I basically just jabbered on about Hejjy for a few thousand words.
• Somehow, the article actually found its way to Hejjy (that comment is actually legitimate) and she got back in touch. She said that she also still had feelings for me and that she was beyond miserable in her marriage.
• We devised a plan where I could bring her over as my fiancee when I earned more than £18’600 a year. All she would have to do was divorce her husband and more than likely be disowned by her entire family as she moves her life to a new country. Simple.

Fuck, even in bullet point form that’s a fuckload of information, and I left out a lot. Our relationship is definitely very… Daedalean…

In February of this year, the plan of Hejjy coming over as my fiancee and living with me in the UK was officially off. Yeah, yeah, boo-hoo, etc, we’re already at 1400 words so I really don’t have time to talk about it here. By happy coincidence, almost immediately afterwards a friend at work introduced me to Hugo (erm, do I have to say that’s not her real name?). Hugo’s lovely, and when I’m with her I’m usually happier than I am when she’s not there. Hearts weren’t quite being set aflame and undying love was never professed, but many beautiful relationships start off initially with two people who are merely absolutely fine with each other. Hugo didn’t hate me, and the feeling was mutual.

However, I was still in contact with Hejjy. Yeah, I know, warning signs and red flags are spewing out of this situation’s arse. One night in June, Hej phoned and texted me while drunk, basically just confirming that we were over. Because of how my mind works, I realised that this exchange would be great to talk about on my blog, so took screenshots of it.

Yes, I imagine the smarter readers will have already worked out where this is going…

I took numerous pictures of Hejjy detailing how life with me was impossible, and even of her teary video call exchange. Yeah, I know, very weird, very creepy, very probably illegal if I don’t get her permission (which I… kinda did…), but chronicling moments like this are what my blog has become. I can never discuss my life with the people I know, I always consider my own life the dullest possible subject (I live with my own life every single day! I don’t want to bring it up in my down time!) and I’m always weary of turning into that friend who just uses every social occasion as an excuse to psychologically analyse their life in a shared space. You know that friend, don’t you? Don’t you fucking hate hanging out with them? If you don’t know that friend, then more than likely you are that friend. I almost never talk about my life, my relationships or my mental state with my friends. I’ve never once talked about my suicide attempt with anybody despite bringing it up roughly every other paragraph on this blog. Because, seriously, who wants to hear that shit?? They don’t want to hear about it, I don’t want to talk about it. This blog has become the dumping ground for subjects and conversations I don’t want to talk about in real life. It’s my therapy. So, I think you’ll agree, I had to take screenshots of my conversation with Hejjy, yeah? Yeah? Yeah??

But, yeah, Hugo saw the screenshots last week. She looked through my photos (with my permission, I didn’t believe I had anything to hide) and saw clips of a drunk Chinese woman yearning for how good our relationship was. Hejjy also talked about a sex dream she had about us, which- you know what?- probably didn’t help.

Yikes. Hejjy really needs to invest in a spellchecker.

This would all probably be explainable. Perhaps even forgivable. Maybe even the drunk yearnings of an ex would actually work in my favour, showing how much of a stone cold fucking stud I am and convincing Hugo of how freaking lucky she was. Maybe. Perhaps. Possibly.

However, one of the conversation pictures catches me saying seven fateful words.

Fuck. Fuckity bollocks. Hugo, unfortunately, is not stupid, she knows those seven words indicated some desire on my part. Suddenly, this conversation wasn’t a one way drunken yearning, but the sober party had indicated that the feelings were perhaps mutual. I was fucked. All because I felt the need to take pictures of a private conversation so I could use it on this fucking blog that nobody reads.

I can’t remember the context or the reason I felt the need to say those words. I certainly can’t remember the reason I felt the need to screenshot them. Why did I ask something that I already knew?? Perhaps I was trying to coax the perfect line from Hejjy that I could use for this blog. This stupid blog that nobody fucking reads.

The context is irrelevant though, the more I tried to explain the conversation to Hugo the more I started to sound like the fat white CEO trying to explain to the press how he obviously used the N word as a joke and that nobody had a sense of humour any more. Hugo saw that she was by no means the only woman in my life. I had told her about Hejjy almost as soon as we met, I thought I was being honest, but I think the depths of the emotion in the relationship obviously disturbed her. She would have also noted that we have never had a conversation that passionate. I’ve not spoken to her since Thursday.

So that’s what this blog has become. It’s a public therapy session that has the occasional potential to ruin my life. I don’t know what’s going to happen with Hugo, but I will have loads of things to talk about when I do Necessary Evil 2019!!

So yeah, ‘obsessions’, geddit?

I hadn’t even thought about the lyrical relevance of this song. I have twin obsessions. One is the obsessive maintenance of this shitty blog that no fucker reads, the obsessive chronicling of my life only in the form of album ‘reviews’.

And, unfortunately, I may still possess and perhaps share an obsession with Hejjy. I want to erase every nasty thought that bugs me every day of every week. All I ever think about are sick ideas involving me involving her. Those are lyrics from the song, you see? It was really clever how I worked it into the writing there. I’m a fucking genius, why does nobody read this blog?

But even before I considered this relevancy Obsessions was already on my list of Greatest Songs Ever that I plan to talk about. Firstly, it’s a cracking choon, which along with Marina’s next single I’m Not a Robot pretty much ensured that I’d be a lifelong fan. In fact, I’m Not a Robot is probably the better song, but Obsessions gets into this prestigious list simply because of Hejjy. It was her favourite song, and quickly became ‘our’ song. See her avatar on the left there (or possibly up above. I don’t know how this post is going to look on your weird smartphones)? Marina.

Hopefully, this blog post will be the end of it.  I know that Hejjy’s in the past, I know that we have no future together. Maybe writing this will draw a line under everything and I’ll be able to give women like Hugo my full attention.

I just don’t know how many blog posts I’m going to get out of Hugo. Gotta think of those clicks…