14-10-2021: Day 125
The tunes are mashing it up, and its Jamaican reggae and dancehall artist Capleton giving it bifters on a banging drum n’ bass remix. The tune dropped into my radar this morning, a pleasant wake-up call, waiting in my digital in-tray on my streaming music app. Oh, how the times they are a changing!
Gone are the cold winter evenings when you would wait for the tune to drop on the analogue radio and cumbersomely synchronise ‘play’ and ‘record’ on the boom box. Gone are the cold winter mornings when you would queue for a new vinyl release outside the record shop on the high street.
New tunes dropping get the digital treatment, tailored on algorithms and streaming data. My streaming service even prepares an annual report, a sort of reward points for the most listened to tunes and albums. No longer a music fan by numbers, but a music consumer by gigabytes. Next up it’s the microchip implants – with the latest Coldplay or Sam Fender tune plugged in fresh off the mixing desk – beamed straight into the brain waves of consciousness.
16-10-2021: Day 127
Looking out of the backyard, the moon was waxing, accompanied by a cluster of stars between the drifting illuminated clouds. A week off the full moon, I was thinking about lunacy, and the judge, jury, and executioner of the modern-day lunatic. Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock.
The judge presiding over the high court of sanity, and chief wig wearer, is the Psychiatrist. And the Psychiatrist dishes out the diagnoses and drugs like candy to a child, one gavel rap after another.
Psychiatry holds all the aces, owns the roadmap, and speaks the language of power to the millions of ‘patients,’ tarnished with the brush of judgement, caught wandering in the treacherous mine field of mental health. A fifteen-minute meeting with the Psychiatrist can blot a human copy book for a lifetime, and in a script sign off a lifelong diet to pharmaceutical pills.
And gazing out into the universe, all these thoughts and a multiverse of others tagged a ride on a shooting star overhead.
17-10-2021: Day 128
Last night I had a dream of courting a suitor for my book ‘The Soul Asylums’. The suitor was a high maintenance, aristocratic, and wealthy publisher with axes to grind, money to be made, and reputations to earn and burn. And I was pathetically fawning over him to read my manuscript, as he tosses failed book proposals into the enormous mantlepiece fire of his stately home.
His decision to publish comes as the dream unfurls. He says he digs the ‘Luther’s Dream’ chapter, and my heart explodes with pride before he cuts me short with a thrown-in reality checker or two. The book is going to be no overnight success, but a slow flame burner.
Another dream sequence and I am sitting at a long regal table eating with the publisher and his extensive family swigging back rum n’ cokes by the bucketload. Drunk as a skunk, I drop my crystal tumbler and watch it smash into smithereens on the antique wooden floor. Amongst the jeering and jibes, I desperately try to gather up the broken glass, as the dream fades into the gloaming of the night.