CAPSTONE

Five years is enough. It should be. Five years to process five days in August. That’s all this blog has ever been about. Finding a way through. Finding a way out. Finding a way back in. 26/8/17. That was a weird day. Reintegration with reality. Reinstallation of the operating system. Reignition of a fire. There are actually people who went to work that day. It was enough for me to get home in one piece. Trying to not get overwhelmed by the endless synchronicities on the way back. Dialling down the circuits of cosmic coincidence. Blinkering the apophenia in my brand new third eye. It’s still the same now. When you meet one of The Others. There’s, I don’t know, maybe a hundred. Twenty five percent is one hell of a hit rate. Was this always part of the plan? The business plan that is. The business plan needed a core consumer base. Early adopters. Brand ambassadors (eew). Influencers (double eww). They pulled it off. Somehow they pulled it off. Not every trick on the book, just most of them. The Foundations were created right there. Enough people felt the same. This. Can’t. End. Here. A group was renamed. A photograph added. Look at it. It’s fucking spectacular, and we did it. Well, we were part of it. By then we’d lost all agency. We were just following a script. A script we’d never read. A script that’d never been written down, edited or spell-checked. A script of blank pages. We knew every word. A script of blank pages. A void to be filled. Do you want to give it a name? Accidentalism comes close. A lot can go wrong in 72 hours. Maybe it did. Go with the flow. A million monkeys and a million typewriters. What was the point of that book? A product to proffer. A Bible to pledge on. Skip to the end. It’s all there. The business plan. That’s unfair. No one’s making any money from this. A legacy plan then. A concrescence. A singularity. The Trancentral transcendental object at the end of time. A collective final resting place that we visit every year to watch it grow. It needs no cement. The networks are the glue. We’re in this Whatever. We’re in this Together. We’re in this Forever. WTF is going on.

We were asked to react. To respond. To reboot. Fires were lit. Petrol was added. It went up like a bomb. Conducted like a symphony. What do we do? We need to do something. Let’s meet. Let’s plot. Let’s organise. Let’s take the torch. Let’s build more bonfires. Let’s listen to the mushrooms. A Mycelium Network. Always there for millions of years. Waiting for the threads to cross. Then boom! Pilgrimages. Baptisms. Laboratories. Tribal gatherings. Music. Laughter. The odd book here and there. More people bought my books than I could possibly conceive would be interested. Maybe it’s the same people and they keep losing their copy.

Making art to make artists to make art. A knowing nod to the Spacemen, but that’s what happened. A collective granting of permission. A network that supports and scaffolds and is a safety net. Something out of nothing. A rabbit from a hat. If it looks like it and smells like it, it probably is. But how, really, how did they pull it off. How do you even begin to plan something like that? Knowing everything that’s transpired over the last five years how do you even start? What was the first thing written down on that blank page? Was there a recipe? A business launch. A new direction. A five hundred year plan. We need to go from here to there. We’ve got five days at the end of August. The weather should be nice. We need call-backs to everything we’ve done. Together and apart. We need to organise and orchestrate chaos on the grandest of scales. We need to stop traffic and rebrand Starbucks. We need to make soup and fill a bucket. Science. Psychology. Academia. A religious experience here and there. What’s the budget? Forty grand. Seriously? Seriously. Like I said no one’s making any money here. We’re making a future. We’re steering a new path through uncharted waters. All aboard. All aboard.

Then there was London. Condense all of the above into five hours. Triggers being pulled everywhere. Whole new level. No buildings will be harmed. How far will you go? This is not a test. This is not a drill. Pulled off with military precision. You follow them. You follow them. You follow them. A community connects for a second time. Synapses fuse. Timelines sync. Do you fancy doing this thing? Absolutely. We can do this. Yes, and this. Yes, and. Yes, and. Yes, and.

The satellites were now in orbit. Liverpool. Sheffield. Brighton. The Vanadium Line. A great big fucking castle. Find the others. Find some more. Hull. Buxton. Corby. Great Yarmouth. Folk heroes appropriated. New myths unearthed. A pledge. A commitment. An oath. To meet every November. A movement. Momentum. Moments that take away your breath. Yellow smoke. A Brick on a cushion. A mallet and a bucket. The warmth of strangers. The maps. The walks. The songs. The songs. The gentle lament of an Ice Kream Van. A light. Ever expanding. Nothing at the centre. We’re all on the edge. Looking out. As the light grows into the darkness, I don’t fear death, but I do fear the admin.

I’m writing this to put it all to bed. Pop it inside a monument. Lower the capstone. Five years isn’t enough. I tried. I’m not sure five hundred years would be enough. There are days when I’m not sure if any of it actually happened. To the vast majority of the population it didn’t. How is that even possible? Memories of those days occupy the same place in my mind as daydreams and imaginings. Every now and then, my brain has a go at sorting through it all, resulting in the most incredible vivid dreams. They start again every year, around this time. Choice five: creating a narrative so utterly complex and so endlessly self-referential that it becomes to all intents and purposes alive. A twenty year master plan. It’s only a plan if it works. Don’t take five, take what you want.