A Milliion Miles Away:  In the End

9:24 PM 7/23/2017  I’m writing two texts simultaneously tonight, because I’ve had one of the most intense, confusing, and successful weekends I can remember and there is a lot to sort out.  And not only am I sorting it out, but it’s coming down to specifics after years of vagueness.  For years I’ve wanted to write a book called “A Million Miles Away” based on rock singles that have influenced my life.  Baudelaire wrote a book called “Paris Spleen” which is my model – a series of prose poems depicting with “single-effect” precision various qualities of consciousness evoked by each song. 

I have felt prompted to begin this by the death of Chester Bennington.  As I’ve been recording in elsewhere, Bennington’s death was synchronous for me, in that it came two days after I had a vision of suicide by hanging right before I watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which a character commits suicide by hanging.  Bennington’s death by suicide was enough of a synchronicity, but then to find that he died by hanging, and that did so on the 53rd birthday of his friend Chris Cornell, who also died by hanging. 

There was a lot about his death that is going to take time for me to unravel.  It’s going to be a magical process.  The first step was that I was talking to his ghost, and the ghost of Chris Cornell, and I felt prompted to actually begin “A Million Miles Away” on my blog.  I already have a Pinterest board with that title, but I’ve begun to post lines from my story “The Darkening” on my blog and I’m finding they have a magical effect.  So now here’s a second book that I’m working on by means of this same technique, which I call “fractal zoom”.

9:40 PM 7/23/2017  I think Chester is going to help me heal damaged parts of my “mind”, or the fields of energy I perceive when I’m daydreaming about popular music.  Synchronistically, this process began a couple of days before I saw the Rolling Stones exhibit, “Exhibitionism” at Navy Pier, and then that night went to Ravinia to see Exene and John from X, Garbage, and Blondie.  It was a magical experience that clarified a lot of interior states for me and gave me even more to write about. 

There were other things that happened this weekend that also have to be tied together, like the sun entering Leo, Brian’s astrology salon on Thursday night, the release of a new Nine Inch Nails ep, and the opening of Luc Besson’s film Valerian and the struggle I had to get tickets for that.  There’s also some relatedness to upcoming events like the movies Atomic Blonde and Dunkirk, Flashback Weekend, and Wizard World.

I’m not sure what it all means but the synchronous death of Chester Bennington was the tipping point that brought me to begin writing about it, to take the process I began with The Darkening and apply it to “A Million Miles Away”.

So these entries will just be tentative lines and then later I’ll go back and pull them together for a finished manuscript, an effort to emulate Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen.