The Splashback

A Sandwich Short of a Picnic

My ears ring. Alarm in perpetuity. The

hammer and pluck of too many questions.

A fighting chime of chords made from

clashing notes of doom and

discombobulation. They flow along staves

of shady tidal waves, scouring open

wounds with salt as they bite down to chew

on the rot of my grey matter.

Above and below, the moon swims limp

and flat, leached of purpose and offering no

destination. I howl into its mirror as my gilt-

edged tears slosh down my cheeks in rivers

of orange. Ironclad life rusting out of me in

heavy metal groans—a tinman of brittle

bones and weight.

My mouth is dumb, filled with a pink

marshmallow tongue that has spent too

long licking saccharine walls, ceilings, and

floors. Searching for doors. My teeth have

melted in the constancy of the candyfloss

storm clouds that spin, unending, in my

lipstick-stained walk of shame sky.

Once, I was one note in the dark beating a

solitary and expectant rhythm—an

incubated womb dweller dreaming of

life—reverberating with diastolic and

systolic ebb and flow. Harmony, my primal

beat, my yin and yang. Then,

the orchestra

of joy and fear began. As the conductor

tapped the baton, I screamed.

Will humanity ever fill its void? The

auditorium has grown so big, globalised

and homogenised. It hums with white noise

and hankers for syncopated beats. I

cannot find my feet. The light fantastic has

tripped out, and I keep falling over in the

dark.

It has a lot to do with this beige straight

jacket of civility. It isn't me. I may drown in

the sweat that pours as I try to wriggle free.

It's either that, or I will throttle myself trying.

Choke holds where blood should flow.

Pedal to the metal. A hyperventilated state.

Hope has anarchised into a four-letter word.

I have tattooed it on my head because no

matter how much I pack it with ice into my

heart, it thaws its way out of me. A dose of

salts seeping from my pores, leaking from

my eyes, crusting on my lips. Bittersweet

and antiseptic.

My heartstrings are soggy. They play loopy

tunes that nobody can sing along to, and my

picnics are always one sandwich short. I

used to know how to make a meal of it. One

day, I will have a gathering where everyone

laughs at themselves. I shall attend, and I

shall arrive naked.

THE END

***

There was no way on earth that I was going to unpack my 2024 in a linear and meaningful way because, mechanics of chronology aside, it wasn't a linear experience. Stuff, sure as the sun rose, happened, but it all overlapped, coalesced, jumped over, fell over, sang songs, wriggled wantonly and kissed long and languidly in a mishmash of every weather.

2024 was a haywire fire hydrant of a year, the spray from which I am still wiping off the walls.

It was the year I turned fifty, the year I got put on the cancer pathway again and removed from it twice. It was the year my son was diagnosed with ADHD. The year my Dad started radiotherapy. The year I travelled to Greece, Spain, Rome, Pompeii, and Berlin. It was the year my dog died. The year I completed a £3.5mil capital refurbishment project. The year close friends and my cousin got married. The year I learned to play the piano. And the year I decided to move house.

Amongst other things.

There is no way I could ever do my 2024 justice by simply pairing its episodic stories with music. The flood of it ran far too deep. I needed a narrative device bigger than an essay, something that went to the gestalt core of my waters, to the kaleidoscopic rainbows of emotion that eddied underneath all the superficial splodgy, splurgy, dribbly stuff.

I nearly gave up.

The challenge of it had me soaked through and drained. How the hell was I meant to get a handle on and craft a story about a year that was as unpredictable as a geyser on a newly discovered planet? Then, a couple of days ago, I was sitting flicking through the notes on my phone, and I realised that trickling away in the background of all the big fountainous stuff, tinkling in the cracks between to-do lists and meeting minutes, were hundreds of glinting streams, untapped rivers, and puddles of creative writing all neatly, digitally, chronologically, organised—documented splices of my creative life, droplets of existential essence.

Having had a year-long (okay, lifetime-long) obsession with The Beatle's Sergeant Pepper Album, an album that includes on its cover creative greats and personal heroes like Edgar Alan Poe, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, H G Wells, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll, Aleister Crowley, Fred Astaire, and William Burroughs, an idea was born. The way to express 2024 was by the medium of a poem. It seemed an obvious and illuminated way forward.

However, like Sergeant Pepper is not any album, this would not be any poem.

I gathered all of the glinting glimmers from my phone notes and started shredding, mixing, arranging, and glueing them together in ways that were far more meaningful than their original, digitally diarised form.

David Bowie once described this cut-up method, pioneered by The Beat Generation Hero William Burroughs, as a very Western tarot.

So true.

Like tarot cards, the events of 2024 are ultimately meaningless. It is their emotional amalgam, how they pool together, and the direction in which they have moved me epistemologically and phenomenologically that is important. My interpretation, the artistic vibes, the reverberations and flows that now pass through me as a consequence of the events of 2024 is where the real significance thrives.

Now, I don't know if wringing out my 2024 creative mop will make sense to anybody. I have toyed with the idea of explaining all that drips from it, but I think I will doff my cap to the 1920s Gestalt theorists and Dadaists who conceived the cut-up narrative device and leave it to speak for itself.

At the end of the day, all good art, like any good joke, should not have to be explained to be felt.

I shall await questions.

Below is a collection of songs by artists who have used the cut-up technique during their creative journeys. Arguably, none of these songs correlates directly to an episode of my 2024. Also, arguably, all of them do. They are songs that have swum around my cultural consciousness my whole life, but it is only now, after this gargantuan year, that I feel an empathic kinning with them. They are all so much more than their constituent parts. They are a tremendous force of creative connectivity, and in the wake of 2024, I am profoundly humbled and renewably moved by each and every one.

Final thoughts...

Here are some screenshots of the raw glimmers I used to create A Sandwich Short of A Picnic:

With Love, CJ xxx