30th december.

A giant version of Frankenstein's monster was trying to stifle me, he covered my ears and nose with his hands. I breathed quietly so he would believe he had succeeded. I was pretending to be asleep while I was asleep, so of course I woke quietly this morning.

The sabotage took place in a hyper-ATP/Sonar. Surrounded by oversized arcade games and almost slipping inbetween stacks of day-glo fluffy toys piled up inside one of the Sonar by night rooms, I could see Hungarian signage. The walls were lined with labyrinthine corridors of narrow passage ways where I kept losing people.

This is what happens when I try to compile mental end of year post-it notes in a fevered state as I fall asleep. I don't really enjoy crudely isolating moments from their context and holding them up as some sort of cultural pinpoint. Bullet points just don't hold up. The < p >, the pauses, the ommissions stringing them together are worth more.

When I was too young to have a job (although it didn't stop me trying) I used to save up my pocket money in a cat (see that cat?) and every time I took money out of that cat I wrote the date on the underside, until space ran out because I'd written GIG FUND too big. Why I had written it that big, I don't know; by this point no one was ransacking my bedroom and I broke the notes on jewel cases. I used to write down every band I went to see in a cross-referencing and (sometimes) colour-coded list. It's somewhere. At some point I got distracted, and stopped noting things down. Despite all this documentation, I still remember what I bands I didn't see, and the reasons behind these non-events sometimes more vividly than what gigs I did go to. (Mostly melodramatic tales of sacrifice in the name of friendship and academia. Quite tiresome.)

So, I can't decide if I remember the things that didn't happen this year more than what did. Or whether end-of-year lists are overly dunked in solipsism. Or just not enough to make them worthwhile. Any which way, I'll be sticking some fluorescent off-cuts up with my good friends at dot-alt tomorrow.

I'll end up a little like the German in Last Year at Marienbad, I'm sure. Instead of some passive (yet beautiful) French conduit, I'll be convincing myself: this is what is concrete, this happened this year, and this is what was good about this version of this.