Trish was petulant. “I don’t understand why you won’t just try a Sex on the Beach, not even a sip?”

Dustin was stubborn. “I don’t like to change my drinks in the evening. I’ll try one the next time we’re at Stubby’s, I promise.”

Trish, frustrated, “A Sex on the beach is just a Cape Codder with orange juice and peach schnapps.”

Dustin, “Look, it’s not about the ingredients, okay? It’s about how I feel about what I’m doing. When I was growing up in New England, every evening my father would prowl around the house with a Cape Codder in his hand. It was just the coziest thing, you know, the lamps would be turned down, and there were all these dark windows around us, barely keeping the night away, and the ocean whispering eternity out in the dark, and the TV would be on, with my sisters enraptured in their pajamas and my parents presiding on the couch and my father, always with this blood red Cape Codder in his hand. We were from New England, and this was the drink of our men, and this was how we drank it, snuggled up cozy in the half-light with our families, watching TV and grumbling about the dismal fate of America. So I just have this visceral feeling that as long as I’m drinking a Cape Codder in the evening, I’m doing the right thing, I’m not breaking any rules, I’m not even really drinking alcohol, I’m just staying the course. To drink anything else would violate the family honor.”

Trish raised an eyebrow. “I just want to state, for the record, that I think it’s absurd that at this moment, you have just actually had sex with me on a beach, that very beach of Lake Michigan right out there, which you know your great uncle the Episcopalian bishop would detest, but you will not take the smallest sip of a drink called Sex on the Beach because it would be breaking the rules.”

Dustin shrugged. “It’s my way.”

“Like Mr. Spock,” Drake chimed in.

“Exactly.”

Drake “I don’t care that he said it, I care that they believe it.”

boomer: “You just don’t understand, this country is going back to the way it was.”

Graylyn: “I love Catholicism. I was a princess in a former life and I loved going to Church and seeing all my wonderful subjects arrayed around me.”

Angela: “Do you know why I’m going to be a social worker? It’s because I have one. You didn’t know that about me, did you? I had to see one freshman year when my brother knocked out two of my teeth.”

Chuck: “My family has been Republican since the Civil War, but my father says the party’s gone bad now, with all these televangelists coming in. We went from being the largest creditor in the world to largest debtor in the space of three years.”

Mr. Crown “If America falls apart tomorrow, there will still be banks and real estate. And you, young man, are in real estate.”

[experiment]

“Fuck literary theory,” sneered Drake, “I want to write literature. Literature means respect for the past, for the creation of God, for the meaning of human experience and all the thousands of people god chose to say things that would carry forward the progress of the human race. Respect for literature means respect for history, for society itself. Now we just don’t have it anymore. There’s just Pynchon and Delillo left, and after that nothing. Academia killed canon and the publishing industry has killed everything that isn’t entertainment. I want to be an American writer. I don’t want to entertain people.”

“What do you want to do to people?” asked Chuck impatiently.

“I want to gouge out their eyes and skull-fuck them.”

Graylyn: That sow Phyllis Schlafly is against sexual harassment laws because she says virtuous women will not be harassed. Do you have any idea how disgusting it is to be a woman in a country where a miserable piece of filth like that is being taken seriously? We’re responsible for the continuation of the species, but if human garbage like Phyllis Schlafly is in charge, what’s the point?

Drake: “I haven’t written anything serious in a year.”

Graylyn: “It’s just because everyone’s waiting for you to say something now and you can’t do it without saying goodbye to who you were. You just have to choose something. Artists have to choose. I did it years ago and after that I never slowed down!”

Drake: “Gray, you did that because your family was supporting you, and because you’re a painter. You’re not confronting the world, you’re seducing them. I can’t do anything but shock them. You can use all your experiences to paint. I can’t use any of mine. I can’t write a word about sex without worrying about what your parents will say. I can’t write anything about the government without my father breathing down my neck. I can’t even afford to think about the government because I’ll come up with something that will piss him off and I’ll have to go around for a week keeping myself from writing it.”

Graylyn: “So keep it a secret. I kept lots of things a secret. I painted everything my parents told me I wasn’t allowed to. I showed it to you and the Sickies. Later I went back I found a way to compromise.”

Drake: “But that’s what’s killing me, Gray. I am allowed to write whatever I want. Father told me he knows children in my position get disgusted all the time. He’s going to let me get away with anything, and because he’s going to do that nothing I say is going to mean anything. He’s going to allow me just enough rebellion to feel open-minded, and then he’s going to yank my chain the way he always does, and everybody in the world is going to know it. “Hello world, I’m a new writer of the ruling class and I have permission from my father to write all about sex and corruption but really I’m just a sideshow freak like Brett Easton Ellis. That’s already come up for me, you know. One of the professors I met was telling me I could be serious, and he used Ellis as an example.”

Graylyn: “Okay, so you don’t have enough now. Just wait. Be patient.”

Drake: “Gray, I can’t do it. I can’t just be patient. I have to make a break.”

I have been writing on 750words.com for a while, but now I have started reading Julio Cortazar and I am inspired to transcribe those words here. “Fuck reality. I want to get off.”

I have not written anything in three days. We are escaping linear temporality, and my grandfather is there telling me there is no point to my life. My grandmother was such a piece of garbage. How can a miserable beast like that exist? So Drake’s grandmother is a similar piece of garbage, and she is dead. She left him $25,000 dollars. Scott Myshkin, who cares. There’s nothing to talk about because this is god and your soul. So what should your soul be doing? I don’t know, it only hurts, so all these people are cruel and hurtful. You knew horrible people in your life and why should you not write about them? Curse them! Curse these horrible people! Curse you, Derek! But then we must also forgive, must we know knot? Yes, we can do this. We can do this with the ArtICs, and it will lead somewhere. It is leading somewhere now. And we can catch up with those other things later. One at a time, really. Thoroughly or not. But it is God and God will come in a way we do not understand.

Now, sexual demon is an interesting concept. Sexual Demon. And what are all these writers, or shadows of writers, here for? To be your imaginary friends. They came here to write. To write the Winds of War. There was an angel there, and there is still an Angel there. And why would you be so cruel? Julio is asking him. They were monsters of garbage. I’m sorry, he said. And you can write that.

It still isn’t anything but we’re going to go forward step by step, and we’re going to get somewhere. Julio said so. He did, he influenced the world by writing, the way people saw time. So we have to find something but in order to find something we have to get around my disgusting, empty family of death. There’s some kind of God. I didn’t understand it. I don’t care, as long as it’s over. There is a light, I don’t know what’s happening. I see the trailer where I was living when I read Hopscotch. Did I try Final Exam at that time?

All right, lets traipse along here, uncaring as to whether it means anything. They do have souls. And then the light, perhaps of Jesus, or someone like that, shining down on us in forgiveness, and it will possibly work but it is still held in shadow as we hang around Rogers Park in Chicago, where is this artist’s studio? Why, in Edgewater, of course. Out on the lake, fucking around as usual. Well, we own the property here. Down there on Jarvis. And so we were on Jarvis and we were working on it a little, walking by in the middle of the night listening to music but we couldn’t make the connection of what it was for or why, because we were DEATH. We absolutely fucking killed people with the shitting things we said, our father and grandfather had killed hundreds of people and did not give a shit, so that was why we had come back in this way, to get used to the idea that so many people can die and it not matter, or something like that, and then to be tortured by this ugly Okie cunt. And they’re all dead now so who cares. But Julio has a different idea. So what are we doing with this different idea, Julio? We are transferring this …

And forever and forever. World Without End, Amen …

And yes, I have been killed. However, we will continue with this because it has never stopped. And we are going to push it forward because echoing in this vast emptiness is the crux of it, the point of balance between two worlds, and we are going to push that balance over into chaos one more time. And there will be a crack in the worlds that opens, but we do not know what is going to come through. It doesn’t matter that much, just something, and then of course there are the merry beings of light from another dimension who have something to say about all of this, and we are going to find out. It is going to be quite easy now because all Hell has broken loose and our former president is a bastard. How well I remember this, and we will of course talk about this later. Find it right down the middle.

“I’m going to MIT,” said Dustin.

“I’m jumping off a cliff,” thought Drake.

But instead he said, “I’m going around the world. I’m taking Trish.”

The emptiness of everything that could possibly exist descended on him then, there in the workroom with all the papier mache and the easels and clay. It was all unfinished, the whole dream of the world. It was just a rough idea God had and he had dropped Drake into it before it was ready and it was never going to be anything either of them wanted, just some bullshit, some expectations. America was crapping out and all the Baby Boomers were crapping out and there wasn’t even going to be any good music anymore.

“There’s something very dark and horrifying inside of me and it’s going to drive me forward until it hits something,” he said.

“Good luck,” said Graylyn and it destroyed him. In that instant she went from being the friend he had known through all of school to a grown woman he barely knew, embarking on her voyage through the world without him, living in other cities, making love to people he’d never know, a vision for the world. Written about and admired, leading a whole other life without him. Some invisible part of her he had once possessed now dissolved and he had never known her. He had been fucking around and blown it. He could have made himself into something, but he had wasted it. He had wasted her. Feelings he didn’t know he had were dissolving and his whole life until that point had been a lie. There was no literature, no life, no beauty, just this ugly, dead gray and brown room of harsh unfinished emptiness that could go nowhere and be nowhere.

This rough draft doesn’t make complete sense, but it’s the most vital scene of The ArtIC Circle I’ve written so far, and I’m too impatient to revise it right now. I’m just very excited that my process is working so I’m posting it unedited now because I want to feel it hit the world and see what happens.

So Graylyn’s having a party, it’s Construction Time. We have to construct something while listening to Depeche Mode.
“There are other things to be working on.”
“I need to be writing, but instead I’m taking drugs and fucking.”

“We need to do something interesting.”
“Let’s run the car off the road.”

No, everyone will be dressed, but we won’t put that on the invitations. Don’t invite Brad, he just wants to get laid.
“I have no life, and I can never have a life. Just you assholes.”
Graylyn’s head snapped around and she stared at him. Was there a tear in her eye? Then she looked away.

But you want to possess me completely. To do that you’d have to marry me.
“I don’t even know if I could do that. We’re all just here.”
“So if we did that we’d have to wait.”

The beach was cool, it was heaven. The waves were mild. There was a pile of rocks out a few dozen yards from the shore. It was warm, it was the best fourth of July. The music was good, and they had beers.

“I hate beer,” said Alvin. “Don’t we have any wine? We need wine coolers.”
“Don’t be a fag,” said Andrews.
“I am a fag,” said Alvin. “What the hell is wrong with you, that you all have to drink beer? It tastes like piss. If I want to drink piss I’ll go to a gang bang.”
“I don’t know, it’s a guy thing.”

“I want to go further than anyone’s ever gone,” said Graylyn, “But there’s nowhere to go.”
“No, you have to stay here,” said Angela, drunk.
“We can’t just be these shells,” said Alvin. “Somewhere out beyond us there has to be some other part of us. I can feel it. I don’t belong here. None of us do.”
“I thought you said we belonged together,” said Graylyn.
“We do, but I don’t belong here in this world. We’re all connected but not to this world. I think we’re from somewhere else.”
“It certainly feels like it,” said Dustin.
“That’s so complicated,” said Trish, “I mean, if we were from other worlds, why would we come here?”
“I have no idea,” said Drake, “Maybe we came here to kill them all. I certainly feel like it.”

Graylyn rolled her eyes, “Come on, this is supposed to be fun.” She smiled mysteriously, “I have a surprise for you!”

Her face comes alive when she smiles, thought Drake. When she’s still she’s like a statue of a goddess, but when she smiles she makes me feel alive.
“Well, there had to be some reason it was so fucked up,” said Angela. “I mean, how could we get this fucked up if it didn’t come from another world somehow? Why else would all the priests be gay?”

There was a soft look on Graylyn’s face, glowing in the firelight, time seemed to slow down while he waited for her to say something. “Yes, I love you.”
Something about the night, the heat of the flames. These were her only friends, gathered around in the flickering light, with the waves breaking on the beach just beyond the light. The horizon was moving in the shadows, silvery under the moon on the water. These are my friends, but I can’t tell if they’re really my friends or just pretend friends because I’m having sex with them. This is my life, and this is all I get. My parents locked me into this when I was 13 and now it’s done. This is my grave.

“I’m glad, but why do you sound so distant?”
“I’m just thinking. Thinking about the future.”
Gently, he took her hand and she felt tears in her eyes. Could this be it? she wondered, this pain? This sense of the world caving in on me? Can it be over already? Part of her was thrilled, rushing headlong toward him in her dreams, another part of her felt as though she were dying. It can’t be over. I didn’t go anywhere or do anything. And yet I can’t get away from him, from them, the Sicky Souse Club. Always the darkness was brooding over her.
“I need to sketch something. I’m going to sketch everyone.” she pulled her hand sharply away from Drake and got up, brushing the sand off of her dress, heading back to the car. He watched her dress swaying in the breeze, trying to discern the pattern as the sand fell away.
“Let’s go get wine coolers,” said Alvin, suddenly enthusiastic.
“Okay!” said Angela, springing to her feet, drunkenly oblivious to what she’d agreed to. Graylyn’s little lesbian echo.
Drake didn’t get it. He felt numb. He’d been expecting a kiss or something. That bitch, he thought. What the fuck is this? He looked around and saw Dustin sitting opposite him, shirtless, lazy and droopy-lidded, smug from all the beer, glowing with a kind of contentment that could only remind Drake that he was nobody. He half-crawled, half-leapt around the flames to land beside Dustin with a crash. “Dude, are we gonna make out, or what?” and so they did. Drake was slipping his trunks off as he heard the car pulling away in the lot.

Is there a way to use blogging to prolong the pleasurable aspects of this experience without prolonging the unpleasant ones? I know if I think about how beautiful Madeleine Swann was I can savor a bit more of the pleasure of the illusion, but I really don’t want to do that. So I’m thinking now about the strange vortex of love and death which makes this movie enjoyable and memorable, which sadly reminds me of the creeps that work in the industry which manufactures these vortexes. Also, in addition to the bittersweet loss of the character, I wonder whether I’m done with Hollywood for good? Could this be the last genuine Hollywood experience I have? I’m disgusted with Disney after what they said about Scarlett Johansson. There were huge holes in the writing for Black Widow and I still remember how empty Endgame was, how trivial the personal scenes with Tony Stark were, how insulting their estimation of my feelings was. Also, the last Star Wars movies were pathetic as well. Since Disney was my main interest in film, now that I view them as hopelessly empty and mediocre I’m wondering if I’ll ever see another movie. I almost didn’t see this one. Movie people are so pathetic. I’ve already moved on a bit past Madeleine. Farewell, Madeleine, I’ll always love you. “Swann” is also the last name of Alan Swann, one of my favorite characters of all time, from “My Favorite Year”. So I’m going to pretend that they’re related.

There are things to learn about nostalgia and film from this experience. “My Favorite Year” was about a lost era of entertainment, and so are the Bond movies. Something spiritual is changing as I write this, so I’m very happy. It has a lot to do with the emotional solidity of the Enneagram, and the way my study of the Enneagram is pulling my sprawling imaginations of people and characters into a coherent whole.