A Year is a Flat Circle.

Your end-of-year existential wrap-up.

Happy New Year!

Sorry I’m late. But then, what is time?

I’ve spent the last twelve months traveling through vast areas of space - over 6000 miles, across twelve states and two continents - only to find myself starting a new year back where I was exactly eight years ago just before I moved to the US; living with my sister and her husband in South London.

I started 2024 with my dog, Winnie, on my lap flying into San Francisco on New Year's Day - blinked- then found myself coming into land at Heathrow on Christmas Day, with Winnie curled up by my feet.

Time passed me by and yet I’ve somehow done a loop.

Basquiat once said, “Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time”. I saw that quote for the first time this year on a meme. (I haven’t read an art history book since university and even then I was only skimming) But it’s not just music. This year I decorated time with epic hikes, moving rituals, deep conversation, essay writing, classic TV shows, new films, and a range of books - from humorous novels to serious non-fiction.

As I look back on the culture I’ve consumed and the things I’ve written about this past year, there have been some recurring themes- from liminal spaces and American History (All the Beauty, Bloodshed & Homogeny, Civilwarland in Bad Decline and Lincoln in the Bardo) - to aging and nostalgia (Chaotic Good Begins at 40, All Fours, and Goodbye to All That Again) - to reality and fiction (On Writing, Reality Hunger, God Human Animal Machine, and How to Write an Autobiographical Novel)

In Reality Hunger, David Shields argues that non-fiction writing is a superior artform to the novel, the latter being too much a slave to plot, character arcs, and neat endings. He thinks fiction is predictable, formulaic, and, ultimately, dishonest. But as he lays out a million arguments for the pursuit of Truth, he reveals the paradox of attempting to recreate reality by telling a story. As soon as you try to recount an experience, you start editing, omitting, and exaggerating to shape a narrative into whatever format and length you wish. Say more, say less. Change the focus, the theme, the hero, the tense. There are many ways to skin a life.

How much truth is in what I have written this year? If I am rarely in the present, forever preoccupied with thoughts of the future, then have I been writing about what happened or only what I think happened while my mind was somewhere else? I’ve definitely padded out a few stories with some choice details borrowed from other memories. But most of the time, I have been as honest as I can be - as someone with imperfect recall and a brain that only allows her to sleep a few hours a night. And if I can’t remember the exact facts, I always attempt to write out the truth of the feeling.

One thing I know is that writing these essays has helped me find logic and meaning in experiences that may have otherwise had none, or worse, would have just been forgotten. Being able to package a year up into eight neat essays with specific themes and recurring jokes, has provided structure to a time that felt random and chaotic whilst in the thick of it. I have changed my reality simply by taking a second look.

In God Human Animal Machine, Meghan O’Gieblyn explores AI, consciousness, and the meaning of life. In the book, she touches on a theory that challenges our widely held philosophy of materialism - the belief that reality is fixed and entirely composed of matter. In the late 90s, scientists discovered the “observer effect”, a phenomenon that suggests that you cannot observe anything without changing it. In the realm of quantum physics this means that subatomic waveforms collapse when you look at them. Perception literally changes reality.

This is a form of non-fiction storytelling. Collapsing wave forms and reporting back. Never fully seeing things as they really are, or were, but still telling the truth, nonetheless.

In another chapter, O’Gieblyn explores the theory that we are living in a computer simulation. Many scientists, celebrities, and Silicon Valley technocrats believe the world is too rational to be random and that there is clear evidence of coding, numerical patterns, and meaningful synchronicity underpinning everything in the known universe. But, she is soon to point out that this is just what we humans are predisposed to do.

“Our brains have evolved to detect patterns and attribute significance to events that are entirely random, imagining signal where there is mostly noise. This tendency is particularly hypertrophied in writers, who are constantly seeing the world in terms of narrative.”

This year, I rewatched a lot of old TV shows, a form of time travel and a source of comfort when my physical location changed so much. There was Girls, Will & Grace, and all eleven seasons of the original Frasier. That’s 264 episodes. Seattle in the 90s is just soothing; I think it’s all the rain and bookstores that are also coffee shops. It is physically impossible to be anxious in a world of sepia tones, peppy jazz, and wall-to-wall wood panelling; an aesthetic that I just found out Gen Z has rediscovered and labeled “Frasurbane”.

Nostalgia is a potent force that keeps us in loops of trends that always seem to come back around. Past aesthetics become cultural touch points that seem to hold greater meaning than they did at their inception. We eulogize the past, handling it with greater love and tenderness than we did when it was alive and in front of us as the present, perhaps because we know we can never go back.

Last month, I rewatched the first season of True Detective, a show released in 2014, set in 1995, that made it onto my list of 2024’s Horniest Moments for a problematic sex scene featuring a drunk and mentally disturbed Matthew McConaughey having sex with someone out of confusion. PHWOAR!

It’s the show where McConaughey’s character, Rust (inexplicably hot name), uttered the immortal line “time is a flat circle”, quoting Nietzsche’s theory of eternal recurrence; the idea that there is only one life and we live it on repeat, in the exact same way, every single time. It’s a thought experiment, in the spirit of Carpe Diem or YOLO, that attempts to ground us more deeply in the present and the choices that determine our life’s trajectory. Would you be happy to do it all again? To relive every love affair, triumph, mistake, and tragedy? What about all the really tedious bits?

It’s the idea that life is greater than the sum of its parts; that taken as a whole, like a great novel with imperfect chapters or a long movie with slower scenes, it is epic and beautiful.

In True Detective, Rust was using the theory to express frustration at not being able to bust everyone involved in an Illuminati-esque-human-trafficking-ritual-murder case, but you get the picture. There is only this. We are creatures of patterns, habits, and loops. We can only live life imperfectly, always for the first time, making the same mistakes for an eternity. We will literally never solve all the Illuminati-esque-human-trafficking-ritual-murder cases.

But knowing this, how do we carry on? What details would we want to change? Is this the only way to live? If you believe in free will you can just make new choices and if you believe in the multiverse then you can just rest easy that the choices you didn’t make are being made by an infinite number of different versions of you in a parallel universe.

God Human Animal Machine explores the multiverse theory as a way of explaining how we ended up in a universe with the perfect conditions to create the only habitable planet we know. Religion explains our world’s seemingly perfect design with the existence of God, the multiverse theory says we all just happened to have the dumb luck to end up in the one timeline, out of infinite timelines, where everything went right.

In another life I studied Philosophy instead of History of Art. I imagine it’s good for perfectionists because there are no wrong answers and you can basically get a degree for stroking your chin and shrugging for three years. It’s conveniently ambivalent. Like how we all ended the fairy tales we wrote as kids when we didn’t know how to tie up all the loose ends,“Then I woke up and realized it was all a dream…. Or was it? I was still wearing the fez!”

Sitting here in a living room surrounded by kids’ toys and half drunk cups of tea, with the theme tunes of quintessentially British shows like Gogglebox, I’m a Celebrity, and BBC News floating in the background, it's as if the last eight years in America never happened. It was all a dream.

There is even a multiverse to this end-of-year essay. There were many other topics I wanted to focus on and many different formats I imagined I’d present them in. In one version, I was going to show you my end-of-year vision board made up of images representing all my future hopes and dreams, including my goal to have hornier year than last (#StayHorny2025) It would have been a very different essay that would have left you with a very different feeling. You’d come away thinking some new things about me. You’d probably laugh more. You’d certainly be less confused.

Or would you?

But instead, you got a rambling jumble of half-facts about quantum physics and philosophy, two topics that, in this timeline, I know very little about. Yet, here we are. This was my choice.

Or was it?

I can see why Nietzsche went mad.

Suffice to say, this year was a real thinker. I did thunk. And I shared a lot of that with you.

To those of you who decided to open my emails and actually read what was in them, thank you for deciding to decorate parts of your time with me. The thought of you reading this in some other place, in some other time, is as comforting and reassuring to me as Frasurbane.

Who knows where I’ll be by the time you read this; most likely driving, walking the dog, or pretending to sleep. But I’ll certainly be out of this particular moment, this medium, this message. I wont be with you as you read this, and yet, I am.

It’s another form of time travel. Future You has travelled into the mind of Past Me. In a way, you’re a lot like Matthew McConaughey’s character, Coop (inexplicably hot name), in the 2014 Christopher Nolan movie, Interstellar, but instead of being an astronaut traveling through a liminal corridor of squiggly time spaghetti to communicate with your daughter in the year 2067, you’re just a person who is reading.

These trains of thought lend themselves to this strange dead zone of time between the holidays and returning to work; before we slip back into the predictable patterns and routines that make us feel like we’re back in our real lives. On top of not knowing what day it is, I’ve also been stripped of all the usual markers that orient me - my apartment, my job, my people, my city - and I’m waiting on a revelation to point me in the right direction for this next part of life.

Until then, I’m floating in a channel or frequency just outside of the regularly scheduled programming. Not quite purgatory, more like wherever we were before we were born. A liminal place from which identity, purpose, and life can be created. I’m pre-inception, guys!

Honestly, I’ll be unstoppable once I find the plot.

This year I also read Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at The Wedding, in which Cassandra tries to convince her sister that she’s going to be OK, despite having no real plan for her life, “I wanted to tell her that I didn't need much. Just a few essentials- faith in something and a little sense of location” I wrote this line in my Notes app while crashing at a friend's place after returning to Brooklyn at the end of summer. At the time, I felt entirely unmoored, having lived out of a suitcase for eight months with no set plans to go home or a clear sense of where it even was. For months after that, I attempted to keep faith exclusively in my career, hoping the job market would inexplicably pick up, the fate of the industry would suddenly change, and that I would be saved.

But the feeling I have now, as I enter this new year looking back on the last, is a greater faith in myself. I can pretty much do anything with faith and a few essentials - the dog, good people, and a safe place to land. Even if imperfect, I always end up somewhere interesting, feeling braver and more capable than I was before.

In a way, I’m a lot like Matthew McConaughey during his 2014 Oscar acceptance speech where he frantically explains how his hero will always be himself in ten years’ time. Which is a tall order considering that- as you can now see- 2014 was a fantastic year for Matthew McConaughey and ten years from then is basically now.

When I checked in to see what he’s up to these days, I was tickled to find that he’s started a blog called Lyrics of Livin’. This information is quite literally hot off the press, it only launched yesterday. His plan is to release a 5-minute musing, at 5pm, every Friday, the 5th day (555) I watched the launch video where he described through spoken word poetry, maybe even rap, the feeling he wants his blog to leave us with, “Think of it as Jiminy Cricket with a beer, a giddy up in your spurs, a little sticky note on your fridge, or that tattoo you’ve been wanting to get on your eyelids”.

I subscribed immediately.

And wouldn’t you know, here’s a little coincidence, when I added up the total amount that my little blog raised for Palestinian charities this year it came to $555. The records of which can be found here for all the Doubting Thomases.

OK, technically my actual Substack paid subscriptions brought in $540.20, but that’s not a very sexy amount - unlike $555 which is basically the Rust or Coop of numbers. $540.20 is a Gordon, at best, so I rounded up the donations in order to #StayHorny2025.

If you want to give more, you could do worse than the Palestinian Youth Movement which works alongside a bunch of other established organizations, the DSA included, to find smart and strategic ways to slow the genocide death machine down - from boycotts and lobbying to effectively interrupting weapons supply chains.

Thank you again for your time, I hope you’ll stay a subscriber and stick around a little longer. Never forget, you are a Baby Head, you are loved, and it took a billion subatomic coincidences for us to end up in this perfectly imperfect timeline reading this last sentence together.

Stay Horny!

Katy x