I’m starting to think me and Jack need to go our separate ways

One morning, in primary school, a new boy sat down next to me in literacy hour; we’ll call him Phillip (that was his name). By all accounts, Phillip seemed like a pretty great guy, and by that I mean he had a healthy stack of Pokemon cards and his conker score was approaching triple figures – I had an enviably straightforward understanding of the concept of greatness. He was always keen to hang out and talk about, I don’t know, the relative merits of playing ‘Tag’ and ‘Stuck in the mud’, and honestly, what more could you ask for from a friend?

But there are times when a nine-year-old needs his space, and Phillip didn’t seem to understand that. He was always there. He arranged it with our teacher so that he could sit next to me in numeracy hour, too, and soon it started to feel a bit like I couldn’t get rid of him. I can’t be sure how I did it, but one lunchtime I got the message across that his friendship was a little overbearing, and since I didn’t want to start resenting him and regretting the time we spent together, I thought we should try and cool things down. (Actually I think I said: “You’re weird, stop following me.” Kids are cruel.)

There’s a point to this happy little tale, which is that – even though Just Jack has really captured my heart and soul this week in a way only a skilled therapist will understand – it’s got to a point where, like Phillip, he’s just everywhere, at every time. I’ve realised that I sleep too much to be able to tactically arrange Jack around my social life, so I really do have to listen to him at every possible moment. I’m alright with the little inconveniences that come from this, like the constant iPod fumbling, or the fact that for the past six days, with Jack in one ear talking about worn-off plimsolls, I haven’t been at all certain which words are coming from him and which from my friends.

It’s the bigger inconveniences – no, let’s call a spade a spade, it’s the potential psychological harm that’s getting to me. Whenever I allow myself a few minutes away from Starz in Their Eyes, it finds a way back in. Most of the time, admittedly, it’s just my friends deliberately ruffling my mental feathers – because what’s funnier than causing deep-rooted emotional anguish? (I can’t talk. Poor Phillip.) This has ranged from the seriously ham-fisted – “Hey Will, why don’t you just jack it all in and stop listening to the song. Eh? Just Jack it all in” – to the nigh-on Machiavellian, like one friend who’s started framing all questions as “why do you wanna go and do” so-and-so (“Why do you wanna go and get a taxi into town?” “Why don’t you wanna go and make me a cup of tea?” etc.)

But there are other times that the song pops up and it’s quite clearly not the result of my friends’ machinations, and at these moments it feels a bit like Starz in Their Eyes has wormed its way so far into my psyche that it has become fully entwined with my life-path. I took out my headphones to watch Take Me Out just now, and one of the contestants had Starz in Their Eyes as his backing track. I jumped a bit and changed the channel, only to be confronted with some advert where two people sit in a car, quoting the song’s lyrics to each other (what on earth was it selling? I didn’t stick around to figure it out). This song’s been out for a good quarter of my life, and yeah, I was exposed to it a little when it was released but since then I’ve neither seen nor heard anything of it – until this week.

And, as if it wasn’t enough for my friends and the Universe to conspire against me, now amateur DJs around York have hopped on the bandwagon. I celebrated a friend’s birthday in Vudu last night, trying to get a bit of distance from the song. The DJ was given what should have been an easily rebuffed request but, even though I’m pretty sure it violated many key disc-jockeying guidelines, he played Just Jack’s Starz in Their Eyes. To a room full of people. Part of me was impressed that a man without a sense of hearing ever managed to perform a DJ set (ha! At least the song’s not destroyed my funny bone), but most of me was just plain sad, because of course I had to leave my comfy seat and do the patented shuffle-and-bop, and of course something weird clicked in my head, causing me to – despite my full resistance – Enter The Zone, and, of course, people had cameras. It’s not pretty:

On another note, I thought it was about time to let Jack know about my little project, because I imagine he’s curious why the Youtube count for his song has just rocketed up one or two listens (he definitely checks the Youtube count. Oh, no, maybe he’s too busy with his FOUR-TRACK EP that he finished last summer). I tweeted him, because even though he hasn’t thought of anything funny or interesting to say on Twitter since last June, I have a suspicion he keeps an eye on it:

He probably won’t be very happy with the blog – I’ve been quite horrible about the man – so, accepting that, I stuck the knife in a bit more:

This isn’t clever, I know (or true, I did buy it). I just wanted to in some way make him feel a little of what I’ve felt for the past six days. There’s a very unequal exchange of emotional hurt in my relationship with Jack, and I badly want to address that. And, just in case he checks my tweets, I messaged his Twitter rival – see Thursday’s entry – with some far more supportive words:

I’m sure it’s left him devastated.

I scrolled down his Twitter feed. He has a son. Why am I doing this?