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opiated song for hospices & care homes & care pathways

by sonja berlin-jones

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opiated song for hospices & care homes & care pathways 26:16

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SUNDAY 20 JANUARY

This one is very pretty and very repetitive. It is also very hissy - but of course that is deliberate. Everything you hear is deliberate. Everything was planned months in advance and researched for days and days on the internet to get it exactly how I wanted it blah di blah di blah - of course it is all just one huge hasty cock-up that turned out far more beautiful than I could've hoped.

It was going to be the tenth in the Abortive Downtempo series. But there is something bisexual about it. I thought of an old man lying on his final bed in a hospital and wondered how much he'd yearn for a sexy young lady-nurse to slip a hand under the covers and give him one final hand-job. It wouldn't be much of a chore for her - surely less unpleasant than changing a catheter or emptying the colostomy bag.

Then I thought perhaps not. The thing about dying is that you don't want living to be so wonderful that people won't let go. If an old man is getting the best sex of his life in his final few days - and with the internet-trained expertise of the young ladies nowadays I am sure he will be - even if it is just a hand-job - then he might be tempted to recover and get some more.

My mother is in a care home with gyppy feet among other things and once the lift door closed on them when I was pushing her wheelchair and she surprised me by not screaming or making a fuss - she just quietly wept - and that was when I knew life had stopped being a joke for her. That is when the euthanasia should kick in.

Life turns into a wearying battle as you try to stay in your tiny room and the nurses try to encourage you to sit in front of the big communal television downstairs with all the other sleepers. That is probably my biggest fear about death - that I will spend my dying days trapped in front of a noisy television. I will really want to die. I am quite sincere that this piece is for hospices.

It is very immediate and it stays beautiful to the ear for about two hours of non-stop playing. That should satisfy the visitors. But the residents will be hearing it on a loop for days. And after a few hours it will start making them suicidal. That's good. They will no longer fear death. The nurses can wear ear-plugs. Or - as in my mother's nursing home - ipods - away in a dream - perhaps listening to one of my more resilient pieces of music.

In spite of the huge amount of music being made - very little of it has any strong purpose any more. Punk tried to start a revolution. So did DHR. Hippy music tried to make drugs less boring. Nowadays no one is making music for a riot or a trip or a dance or a sleep or an acquiescent death. Music is just a thing you do with a bit of software on the computer - doing stuff that fits in neatly with several well-known tags.

But this music has a purpose. It holds your hand and pulls you in and you willingly follow because it is beautiful and for a while you are timeless and happy and a hand goes under your bedclothes and massages you to regular moments of relief and then she gets a bit rough and your balls get bruised and the music goes on and on and on and there is no end to it at all and you wish there was and then there is.

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released January 20, 2013

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sonja berlin-jones Southampton, UK

katharinebeastman.bandcamp.com

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