12-5-2022: Day 337
Scrolling down the Lockdown playlist on my handheld brain device, I was searching for something. Something. Anything. To sooth a broken heart brought on by a weird manifest realisation of a missing component of my soul mission. The heartbreak was triggered by a deep trance vision of future raves in darkened basements, abandoned warehouses, and decommissioned power stations.
And, scrolling deep into the fifty-hour digital vaults, my finger hovered over the Joy Division tune ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’.
The sight of the fallen stone angel clasping one hand to her forehead precedes an avalanche of grief. And loss. For a lost life, left forever in this tiny bedroom, in a tiny semi-detached house, on a tiny pedestrian estate, in the tiny sleepy town of Shoreham-by-Sea.
And, a memory streamed into my mind, of the tragic Joy Division poster tacked onto the wall of my student accommodation, in the halcyon days before destiny came knocking.
13-5-2022: Day 338
Wolfing down a greasy beef burger at a gentrified munchie palace popped-up on Brighton’s seafront, I was gazing mesmerised in time and space, out to the deep blue empire of ocean on the future event horizon.
I was reflecting on the shifting sands of this great pleasure-seeking City – in all its hidden guile, guts, and glories. And I caught myself wondering how its seafaring mind, heart, and soul had fared since the first wave of the Virus breached its shores back in 2020.
The Virus might have momentarily spawned a zombie mentality, but the beating human pulse was still racing.
This was the enduring thought wandering past the brimming beer gardens knocking-out premium IPA and ghosting past the hard-knocked street drinkers propping up the Clock Tower in the May sunshine.
Sipping on a flat white outside a pink psychedelic café in the North Laines, I found myself staring up into the eye of the CCTV camera, remembering the time we sacked-off the network, for future generations cloned on another Virus handed down by the sleeping agents of Big Brother.
16-5-2022: Day 341
The sun was glistening, a thousand tiny diamonds, on the reflective water’s surface of the River Adur, as I gazed in a speculative trance out of the tall windows of the Tom Foolery coffee shop on the High Street.
I was musing over trauma and its long dark shadows, cast from the cradle to the grave, as I downed the umpteenth glass of water to rehydrate my thirsty soul. Running my index finger and thumb over the gold sheen obsidian stone purchased for a brave young school kid experiencing the Voices, I steadied myself on the razor-sharp precipice of this steep learning curve.
This was a baptism of fire, working with the extraordinary individuals suffering from the tragedy, trauma, and terror of the Voices – but casting my eyes across the brilliant blue watercourse, I had a deeper sense that gathering understanding of these stories of hard-knock lives would eventually fuel volumes in the future passages of The Soul Asylums.