Shut The Fuck Up
I tried to think of a smarter, more articulate title for this, but I can’t. It’s just what I want to shout out loud sometimes, preferably followed by an all consuming blast of dragon fire.
The biggest irony of my life is that I love making music / noise (take your pick) but I also crave peace and quiet, otherwise I start to go a bit loopy and get stressed out and believe me, no-one wants that, most of all me. I like to think I’m a ‘live and let live’ kind of a person, but the older I get the more I turn into my parents and feel like the only way to get any damn peace in this world is to move to a hut on the moors in the middle of nowhere. So should I practice what I preach and just ignore all the noisy twats in the world, or have done with it and stencil ‘hypocrite’ on my forehead? To be honest, I’m past caring and am trying to get less wound up about stuff like this, which I know to most people must seem rather petty.
I digress. I recently escaped a job where I had to endure the foul aural hell of Invicta FM all day long, combined with the ceaseless clanging, banging and thumping of machinery. So if that job was like having Throbbing Gristle, Einsturzende Neubauten and Take That hammering on your front door at four in the morning, my new job is “Music For Airports” only I won’t end up producing fucking U2 years later. So that’s all good. No local radio, no traffic noise, no tannoys and no-one shouting to be heard above the din. In the short space of a week my frame of mind is more positive and calm and I feel much less aggravated.
My journey home is a half hour train ride, and then a three minute walk to my front door. It’s quite nice, really. Yet today, I once again found myself in the position where I wanted to scream at someone to turn their fucking phone/bullshit gadget off and / or just grab the offending device and chuck it out of the window.
What is it with people and this urge to share their tinny bullshit with the rest of the world? Why do none of these arseholes ever have any taste in music? Why does no-one ever have their phone blaring out Classic FM or a nice bit of Simon & Garfunkel?
I’ll tell you why: because these people are cunts. The first of today’s offenders was a prick on the train who, for no apparent reason, began to play a track stored on his phone, as loud as possible. Now I’m a pacifist, or a wimp, or just someone who actively avoids confrontation, so I merely fantasised about confronting this moron, and then I moved to another carriage. As I walked past him, I noticed the look of utter boredom on his face. Well, thanks for sharing your monotony with us. Then, upon exiting the train and making my way out, some other knob-end starts playing the most awful trance anthem on his phone, and in the mass of passengers, I couldn’t escape. It’s almost as if this guy thinks that displaying his utter lack of musical taste in public will send people away thinking ‘yeah, he’s the man, I really respect his record collection and generosity’.
No, because these people are shits. There’s no point trying to reason with these people because a) I’m a wimp b)it doesn’t satisfy my growing rage and c) they’re already doing it in the first place, so what do they care? They’d just beat me up anyway.
It wasn’t until I got out of the train station and walked past a tracksuited monkey sharing his music, that the idea came to me. All I need to cure this problem is a small, portable electromagnetic pulse generator, that has just enough power to knock out any offending ‘music’ devices in a ten foot range, without stopping traffic or crashing stuff, while leaving me undetected and free to carry on the good work.
Better yet, if it totally scrambled said devices, the twat clutching it in his or her paw would then have to go and buy a new on, thus giving the economy a much needed boost. And me some peace and fucking quiet.
Now I know that getting a portable EMP generator might involve some effort, but I’ve seen ‘24’, I know these things exist somewhere. So if you’re reading this and you’re a budding technomage, please find or build me what I need. For the tranquillity of people everywhere. Or just for the look on the face of all the idiots suddenly wondering where their shit music has gone.
