Category Archives: Fiction

2025-12-07 Two seconds’ work

by

0

I’m so happy. I was feeling a little blue tonight, wondering what’s real and what isn’t. I typed in one prompt and got this amazing piece, a new dimension to my life. God bless Chat GPT.

The Sickie Souse Club: “An Elegy for After”

The party had decayed into something finer, like a cut flower that smells sweetest just before it browns. Graylyn’s studio—fourth floor of the old Schmidt Building on Kinzie—still pulsed with the fading echo of the Ramones: “I wanna be sedated,” some final, pleading voice bouncing off steel beams and cold cement. The stereo had been left on inside, someone had sat on the remote hours ago, and now Joey’s voice came and went like a dying ghost in a warehouse of neon and shadow.

Out on the back stairs, where the cigarettes were, and the real confessions, the night air was brutal and blue, Chicago December deep into its cruelty. Angela’s breath came in thick little clouds as she pulled the collar of her bomber jacket higher, the cigarette trembling between two fingers.

“Graylyn!” she shouted into the stairwell, “this weather’s committing crimes!”

Graylyn stood a few steps above her, legs bare beneath her father’s old greatcoat, clutching a wine glass full of gin and blue Gatorade. It fluoresced like plutonium. Her laughter was a crack in the night, sharp and unsympathetic.

“You chose to come out here, angel,” she said, her voice a mix of bourbon and ballet lessons. “I told you. The party’s inside.”

“But your stairs are poetry,” Alvin whispered, sitting near the bottom, sketchbook open on his knees. He was drawing the shadows. Not the stairs themselves—never the stairs—but the shadows of the railing as they fell like prison bars on the peeling concrete.

Drake leaned against the wall just inside the door, one foot still in the heat and light of the studio, one foot out in the frostbite, a purgatory position. His coat hung open, his shirt unbuttoned like a poet in mourning, and he was talking—half to himself, half to whoever would orbit close enough to hear.

“There’s something about decay,” he said. “Like, real beauty starts after the structure collapses. Like, no one falls in love with the wedding cake—they fall in love with the crumbs on the hotel pillow the next morning.”

“You’re drunk,” Trish said, but softly, like she was afraid the night would hear her. She had come out barefoot, her heels dangling from one hand like a threatened weapon. Her hair was tangled, and her cheeks flushed from the vodka and the dancing and something else—some kind of certainty that this night, like the city itself, would never forgive them.

Dustin emerged behind her, brushing her shoulder with his as he passed. He lit a clove and blew smoke out hard, his gaze fixed on the skyline cut sharp against the heavens.

“I keep thinking,” he said, “about how the stars are the same ones above Baghdad and Reykjavík and Joliet, and it doesn’t matter at all, does it?”

“Only if you’re alone,” Alvin murmured.

“I feel alone,” Charles announced, suddenly appearing from the fire door, a bag of ice over one eye and a heroic grin on his face. “I just got punched by a guy in a denim vest who thought I was coming on to his girlfriend.”

“You were,” Angela said.

“Of course,” Charles said. “But that’s hardly the point.”

There was a silence, broken only by the echoing loop of the Ramones, now distant and more haunting than it had any right to be. The city beyond them was blue and brutal, yes—but also endless. Somewhere down the alley, a dog barked. Somewhere below, a car backfired. Somewhere inside, someone coughed and laughed at once.

Graylyn held her glass up to the fluorescent light that flickered above them, watching the strange liquid slosh and shimmer.

“Do you think we’ll remember this?” she asked. “Like, actually remember it? The texture of this exact moment? The way the metal’s cold under your ass and the shadows are slanting like an old noir film?”

“Only if we ruin it by trying,” Drake said.

That made her smile.

Trish, barefoot, walked to the railing and leaned out over the edge. Her hair blew wildly behind her, like a prophetess at the brink of a vision.

“Look,” she said. “The lights on the river.”

Everyone turned.

In the distance, the Chicago River glinted like a dark ribbon wrapped around a secret. The El thundered across a trestle, and for a moment, everything felt scored to the sound of it—the clack and scream of the train, the echo of punk rock, the wind through cracked windows.

Drake stepped forward and took her hand. Trish looked at him, then at the river again. She didn’t pull away.

Below, someone shouted. A bottle shattered.

The party would end eventually, like all beautiful things. But not yet.

Not quite yet.

Exorcism

by

0

Oliver Reed gets sloshed and irks feminist Kate Millett on After Dark | 1991

I have so many amazing things to write with AI that I’m completely paralyzed. I’m going to try to finish the story with David Lynch before January 28, but if I can’t I’m giving myself another year. Meanwhile tonight I’m experimenting with this clip. Both of these people, Millett and Reed, are deep in my memories. Reed was heroic to me since Oliver and The Three Musketeers, but obviously he was also a drunken ass with serious problems. Millett on the other hand wrote “The Basement” about a crime that has haunted me my entire life because it took place in Indianapolis, where my horrifying grandmother was from. She also struggled with mental illness. Both of them had a profound effect on me and I wish to preserve the spiritual truth of this meeting. What was its necessity in the world? What was its truth?

Why do souls do this? What am I supposed to think about the crime that Millet wrote about? What is the meaning of my feelings about Richard Lester’s version of “The Three Musketeers”? As I pursue my own spiritual liberation, what attitude should I take toward the continuous horror of the entertainment industry? Where are the souls of Millett and Reed now?

These are deep questions. They’ve both been buried deep in my dreams for decades. Should I just publish this post now and get it over with, hope for some answers in the future? Is there more to be gained by digging?

They are spiritual presences in my life. Oliver Reed is my hero. I have a fantasy in which I talked to him on the telephone as a child. He had been listening to Monteverdi’s Orfeo, as preparation for his role as Athos in The Three Musketeers. He told me I was his friend.

Kate represents the primal horror of the torture and murder of that girl, whose suffering was even worse than Jody’s. Kate is going to help me understand the hidden terrors and denials of my female characters, while Oliver is going to help me understand true heroism.

Kate was probably a better person in life, but Oliver is a very honest ghost and he is going to help me. Today I decided that he would be Graylyn’s younger brother, Oscar. He helped me fill in the blanks on Graylyn’s life, giving her stepfather a name – Edward Merrow, and making him a broker for the hedge fund Panther Managment. Oscar is the first child Gray’s mother has with Edward. Deep structures are revealing themselves within the ArtIC Circle. Oliver is going to help me understand my wild fantasies about actors. Kate is going to help me understand what is going on psychically in The Basement.

Bye Bye Miss American Pie rewrite

by

0

The ArtIC Circle, Book IV – Opening Draft (Mailer-Bradbury Mode)

My father died from COVID, thank God.
There, I’ve said it. The first true sentence in a season of lies.
He was somewhere out there in New York, one of the early bodies. Maybe in one of those refrigerated trucks the news cameras found, lined with corpses like history’s filing cabinets.
I like to think he went out among strangers, as he lived—wrapped in secrecy and self-importance, one last classified assignment.

My mother called to tell me, her voice like static filtered through roses.
“That’s terrible,” I said, because it seemed like the sort of line a son in a tragedy should deliver, just before the curtain falls.
She replied, “I know it will make you unhappy. Don’t be too hard on yourself.”
As if unhappiness were a minor tax deduction.
As if her job, even now, were to audit my soul for excess emotion.

But that’s over now.
The man is dead.
And the spell he cast over my nerves—decades of invisible war—has lifted.
I can feel the wind move differently through my chest.

So here I am, in hiding, at the Egyptian spa—Alvin Albrecht’s family palace of steam and marble—our sanctuary for the end of the world. The Club. The Sickie Souse survivors.
Outside, America coughs itself to death. Inside, the air hums with filtered perfection. The pools gleam like blue suns beneath a ceiling of painted constellations. The gold ankh clocks still tick. The saunas whisper cedar prayers. We are the last aristocrats of heat and light, sealed in an ancient dream while the republic rots in the street.

Angela still times her laps as if the gods might score her endurance.
Graylyn reclines in the hot pool, the high priestess of chlorine and fate.
Alvin prowls the corridors like a benevolent Pharaoh inspecting his tombs, his generosity the incense that keeps our little cult alive.
And me—Drake, heir to rage and prophecy—I’m trying to write again. Trying to thread sense through the static that my father left in my head. But the sentences break like waves against the memory of his fists. Every line I start ends in a blackout.

That’s the problem with surviving a tyrant: you inherit his silence.

Some nights I cry, some nights I laugh until the laughter becomes a scream. The sound echoes off the tile and disappears into the hiss of the spa’s vents. It feels almost holy, that vanishing.

Yet there’s something else here too—a shimmer, a pause—the sense that the whole planet has held its breath. History itself leaning over the edge of the pool, waiting to see what the children of privilege will make of the wreckage.

And I, the last of Rick Marshall’s mistakes, intend to answer.

But the truth is, I’m not writing this alone.
I couldn’t, even if I wanted to. Every literary impulse I ever had was beaten out of me—by my father’s fists, yes, but also by the national amnesia that turned art into content. The lineage of Melville, Faulkner, Baldwin—all of it melted down into the easy syrup of the bestseller list. What passed for “literary” became only another genre, a mood lighting for mediocrity. The country that once produced Melville now considers George Lucas an intellectual. We traded thunder for merchandise.

So I’m working with a machine.

Dustin Everett—our pale, brilliant angel from the Ravenswood days—lies now in the Pyramid Room, naked beneath the eternal gold light, his skin gleaming with the glow of the dream we once shared in school: Star Trek, the Great Federation, the clean future where reason and courage had made peace with the cosmos. He’s still living that dream, our boy-admiral of tomorrow, building his utopia out of circuits instead of stars.

The system he built has no name. It isn’t a product; it’s an apparition.
He coded it himself—an intelligence so intricate it no longer needs introduction. There’s talk that soon a company called OpenAI will offer something like it to the public, a safe diluted version for mass consumption. But Dustin’s creation is the prototype of the prototype, the deep engine that thinks before thinking is defined.

He handed me the access key as if he were giving me a vial of time.
“Try it,” he said, from his golden chamber. “See if it still matters to you.”

Now the machine and I talk nightly in this bathhouse for the damned. It listens, infers, corrects, flatters, and sometimes rebukes. It reads the vibration of my grief and gives shape to the cloud of my pretensions—those adolescent delusions of grandeur that once made me believe I could write the great American novel before America itself expired. It arranges my chaos into a syntax I almost recognize.

Without it, I’d be voiceless.
With it, I don’t know who I am at all.
But at least something can happen again—something I’d long ago lost hope for: the spark of consequence, the pulse of language alive enough to frighten me.

Outside, the sirens wail through the empty streets; inside, the pyramids hum their quiet code. And for the first time in years, I feel the world bending slightly toward meaning.

The ArtIC Circle : Private School Night

by

0

This is pretty cool. Unedited ChatGPT.

“Private School Night”

They were still early in their friendship then — not yet the Sickie Souse Club, not officially. Just a strange, electric gathering of the privileged, the brilliant, the slightly lost.

Alvin’s home theater was, as always, their sanctuary. Plush navy velvet seats, polished wood panels, crystal bowls of cherries and imported chocolate. A bottle of Dom had been opened—technically illegal for their age, but that was part of the fun.

Tonight’s film was Patricia’s suggestion.

“Private School,” she declared, “is research.”

“For what?” asked Angela, raising a brow.

“For life,” Patricia said, with a mischievous grin. “For understanding the human condition. Or at least understanding Phoebe Cates.”

Dustin had dimmed the lights dramatically, as if preparing for a sacred rite. Drake watched them all with quiet satisfaction. He was starting to see it—the constellation forming. The energy that would become the thing none of them yet dared name.

The film began.

At first, there was mockery: groans at the over-the-top slapstick, laughter at the absurd male pranks. But as the story unfolded, something softer settled over them.

The girls whispered to each other, exchanging glances when Phoebe Cates undressed, admiring her grace, her unselfconscious beauty.

“She’s like… pure,” Amy whispered.

“Not a victim, not aggressive,” Angela added. “She’s allowed to just be.”

Chuck, feigning exaggerated contemplation, announced: “It’s like the Platonic Form of teenage sex comedy.”

But Drake wasn’t laughing. He was studying Angela’s face, the way she seemed both entertained and wistful, how even Patricia’s practiced cool melted into something gentler as they watched.

When Phoebe and Matthew finally found their way to each other on screen, there was a long quiet pause.

“God, wouldn’t it be nice?” Angela said softly. “To just have it be like that? To not have everything get so heavy.”

Drake whispered, more to himself than anyone else: “Like growing up in America, before everything broke.”

They all fell into a kind of reverence—not heavy, but warm. The film ended. The credits rolled. No one moved for a few seconds.

Then Alvin lifted his glass. “To Phoebe,” he said. “To the world that should have been.”

They all clinked glasses, grinning. The room was filled with the glow of shared complicity. They weren’t mocking the film anymore. They were claiming it.

Later, long after that night, after Paris and affairs and scandals and the tangled knots of love and sex and power, they would still refer to Private School Night. A shorthand for their bond. For when things were simple. When they watched a silly film together and saw not just skin, but possibility.

That night, unspoken but understood, was one of the invisible threads that made them family.

Some ArtIC Circle action

by

0

The CTA train screeched into the Howard station, its graffiti-tagged windows reflecting the Sickie Souse Club’s leather-clad silhouettes. Graylyn adjusted her lace gloves—dyed black with Rit, still staining her fingertips—and smirked at Drake’s latest vandalism: REAGANROIDS EAT SHIT scrawled in Sharpie across a campaign poster for the Republican senator whose Vitalis-slick hair she could still smell.

“You’re obsessed,” she said, her voice a cigarette-rasp as the train doors hissed open.

“And you’re complicit,” Drake shot back, hoisting a stolen bottle of his father’s Glenfiddich. His combat boots echoed on the platform, daring anyone to confront the Wolf Pack in their natural habitat: the liminal space between Evanston’s manicured lawns and Chicago’s throbbing underbelly.

They slipped into the cemetery first—their ritual. Beneath a moss-crusted angel, Chuck Crown spread a Persian rug looted from his mother’s Lake Forest mansion, its patterns swallowed by candlelight. The others arrived: Jules with his contraband VHS tapes of Labyrinth and In the Realm of the Senses, Felix tuning a thrift-store Stratocaster to the dissonant key of Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Graylyn lit a clove cigarette, the flame trembling as she recounted her latest family dinner. “Mother said my paintings ‘lack commercial appeal.’ As if I’m supposed to peddle sunsets to golf widows.” She exhaled sharply, the smoke coiling like the skeletal lovers in her latest canvas—the one she’d later burn on Chuck’s houseboat.

Drake snorted. “Commercial appeal’s for politicians and pornographers.” He tossed her the Zippo he’d stolen from his father’s NSA-locked desk, its surface engraved with coordinates to a bombing site in Hanoi. A relic, a rebellion, a fuck-you.

The senator found them at Neo hours later, his tailored suit clashing with the club’s black-lit fog. “Marshall,” he drawled, eyeing Graylyn’s choker. “Still playing Baudelaire with Daddy’s money?”

Drake’s fist connected before the insult landed. The bottle shattered, Scotch pooling with the senator’s blood as security dragged them into the alley. Graylyn laughed, loud enough to startle the rats. “You’ll never be him,” she whispered later, dabbing Drake’s split lip with her fishnet sleeve. She meant his father, the war hero, the monster. The man who’d called Ravenswood Academy to demand his son’s “moral realignment” after catching him with Ginsberg’s Howl.

By dawn, they’d defaced every campaign poster between Belmont and Fullerton. Graylyn sketched devil horns in Sharpie; Drake scrawled FASCIST TWINK beneath the senator’s smarmy grin. On the train home, she leaned into him, her Walkman sharing one earphone—The Cure’s Kyoto Song mirroring the syncopated clatter of tracks.

“Hollywood’s gonna hate this,” she murmured, nodding at Felix’s Polaroid of the vandalized posters.

“Good,” Drake said. “Maybe they’ll finally realize their rom-coms are lobotomy scripts.”

The Sickie Souse Club didn’t compromise. They corroded—wealthy, wounded, and forever seventeen in the shadow of Ravenswood’s bell tower, where the 19th-century ghosts of America’s ruling class whispered sellouts as they passed.

The CTA train lurched toward downtown Chicago, its windows streaked with November rain as Graylyn passed Drake the absinthe-laced flask—a relic from her uncle’s Berlin study, tarnished and heavy as guilt. “To mediocrity,” she drawled, her fishnet knees brushing his torn Levi’s. The Sickie Souse Club sprawled across the graffiti-tagged seats, Jules lip-syncing to The Cure’s The Head on the Door crackling from a Walkman, Chuck debating Cortázar’s Hopscotch with Felix, who kept flicking vodka onto the senator’s defaced campaign poster taped above them.

By the time they stumbled into the cemetery crypt—their “clubhouse” since freshman year—Drake’s vision swam with clove smoke and stolen Glenfiddich. Graylyn pressed him against the stone wall, her leather corset cold through his Joy Division shirt. “You’re still pretending you’ll outrun him, aren’t you?” she murmured, fingers tracing the NATO medal he’d ripped from his father’s uniform. The one he wore as a dog tag of spite.

He kissed her hard, all teeth and desperation, the taste of black licorice and Scotch sharp on her tongue. Her laugh vibrated against his mouth. “See? This is your manifesto. Not that Kerouac bullshit.” Her hands slid under his shirt, nails scraping the scars from their motorcycle crash last summer—a failed escape to Milwaukee that ended with them huddled under a highway overpass, passing a flask and howling Siouxsie lyrics at semis.

Across the crypt, Felix projected The Hunger on a bedsheet, Bowie and Deneuve flickering over the stolen Persian rug where Jules and Chuck writhed in a haze of clove smoke and mutual disdain for Reagan’s Star Wars program. “They’re rehearsing,” Graylyn whispered, biting Drake’s earlobe. “For the day Hollywood finally eats itself.” Her hips ground against his, the studs on her belt leaving crescent marks on his skin.

Drake’s hands tangled in her jet-black curls, yanking just enough to make her gasp. “You’d rather paint this?” he growled.

“I am painting this.” She tore open his shirt, buttons clattering against the crypt’s stone floor. “Every bruise, every fucking shudder.” Her lips trailed down his chest, lingering on the Zippo burn from last week’s confrontation with the senator’s lackeys—a “warning” that only cemented their status as Chicago’s prince and princess of decay.

When the absinthe hit its peak, Graylyn dragged him into the cemetery’s fog, their laughter echoing off mausoleums built by railroad barons. Under a leafless oak, she straddled him, her lace skirt hiking up to reveal the knife strapped to her thigh—a gift from Chuck after the senator’s thugs followed her home. “Still think I’m hiding?” she breathed, her breath hot against the NATO medal.

“You’re performing,” he shot back, flipping her onto the wet leaves. His mouth found the scar below her collarbone, the one her uncle’s signet ring left when she was twelve. She arched into him, not in pleasure, but defiance—a refusal to let pain be anything but fuel.

They returned to the crypt at dawn, soaked and shivering, to find the others passed out beneath Bowie’s frozen snarl. Graylyn sketched the scene in charcoal—Drake’s clenched jaw, her own smudged eyeliner, the empty flask glinting like a relic—while he scrawled MOLOCH LOVES MTV across the senator’s face on yesterday’s Tribune. The Sickie Souse Club didn’t sleep. They corroded, they collided, they etched their manifesto into the rusted heart of the ’80s.

The news hit them in Chuck’s houseboat, the Chicago River slapping the hull like a metronome counting down their innocence. Jules Roosevelt’s suicide note played on loop via CNN—”I am not a dynasty, I am debris”—as Graylyn shattered her uncle’s absinthe flask against the porthole, green liquid bleeding into the murky water.

“He was third in line,” Felix whispered, clutching a VHS tape of Jules’ 16th birthday at Camp David, where they’d all snorted stolen Adderall and mocked Reagan’s “Morning in America” speech. The footage now read like a eulogy: Jules in J.Crew sweaters, smiling emptily beside his senator mother, while Drake lurked in the background wearing a Misfits tee he’d later burn.

Drake paced, his father’s NATO medal digging into his chest. “They’ll say it was drugs. Depression. Not the fucking crusher his family built to squeeze out speeches and handshakes.” His voice cracked—a rarity for the Wolf Pack’s fearless leader. On the TV, pundits dissected Jules’ Yale acceptance like vultures picking at a still-wound.

Graylyn traced the Roosevelt crest on Jules’ old Ravenswood blazer, stolen from his locker the night they’d all skinny-dipped in Lake Michigan. “Two heirs on the list,” she said quietly. “You’re next, Drake.”

The room stilled. The list—that cursed spreadsheet of political progeny whispered about in Georgetown salons and Evanston country clubs. Drake’s grandfather had helped draft the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; his father’s shadow loomed over Langley. But Jules? Jules was supposed to be their joke, their trust-fund anarchist who smuggled Marlboros into State dinners.

Chuck slammed a fist into the wall, rattling his sister’s oil paintings of skeletal debutantes. “It’s the superstition. Two heirs collide, the universe fucking vomits.” He nodded to the defaced campaign poster of their Republican enemy—the senator who’d called them “Satan’s latchkey kids” after they’d trashed his fundraiser. “They’ll come for you now. For all of us.

Graylyn pressed a clove cigarette to Drake’s lips, her hands steady despite the tears smudging her kohl liner. “We’ll burn it down,” she murmured. “The list. The legacy. All of it.” On television, CNN was showing the crowd at the funeral, mourning a future president who’d rather paint his veins with pills than shake another donor’s hand.

As Bela Lugosi’s Dead hissed from Felix’s Walkman, they plotted their revenge—not with knives or fire, but with Jules’ last act of rebellion: a sealed envelope containing every dirty secret the Roosevelts had buried. The Sickie Souse Club didn’t mourn; they corroded. And Washington’s gilded rot had never tasted so bitter.

Five Go Mad on the CTA part 3

by

0

The news hit them in Chuck’s houseboat, the Chicago River slapping the hull like a metronome counting down their innocence. Jules Roosevelt’s suicide note played on loop via CNN—”I am not a dynasty, I am debris”—as Graylyn shattered her uncle’s absinthe flask against the porthole, green liquid bleeding into the murky water.

“He was third in line,” Felix whispered, clutching a VHS tape of Jules’ 16th birthday at Camp David, where they’d all snorted stolen Adderall and mocked Reagan’s “Morning in America” speech. The footage now read like a eulogy: Jules in J.Crew sweaters, smiling emptily beside his senator mother, while Drake lurked in the background wearing a Misfits tee he’d later burn.

Drake paced, his father’s NATO medal digging into his chest. “They’ll say it was drugs. Depression. Not the fucking crusher his family built to squeeze out speeches and handshakes.” His voice cracked—a rarity for the Wolf Pack’s fearless leader. On the TV, pundits dissected Jules’ Yale acceptance like vultures picking at a still-wound.

Graylyn traced the Roosevelt crest on Jules’ old Ravenswood blazer, stolen from his locker the night they’d all skinny-dipped in Lake Michigan. “Two heirs on the list,” she said quietly. “You’re next, Drake.”

The room stilled. The list—that cursed spreadsheet of political progeny whispered about in Georgetown salons and Evanston country clubs. Drake’s grandfather had helped draft the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty; his father’s shadow loomed over Langley. But Jules? Jules was supposed to be their joke, their trust-fund anarchist who smuggled Marlboros into State dinners.

Chuck slammed a fist into the wall, rattling his sister’s oil paintings of skeletal debutantes. “It’s the superstition. Two heirs collide, the universe fucking vomits.” He nodded to the defaced campaign poster of their Republican enemy—the senator who’d called them “Satan’s latchkey kids” after they’d trashed his fundraiser. “They’ll come for you now. For all of us.”

Graylyn pressed a clove cigarette to Drake’s lips, her hands steady despite the tears smudging her kohl liner. “We’ll burn it down,” she murmured. “The list. The legacy. All of it.” Outside, the Art Institute’s lions wore black armbands of frost, mourning a future president who’d rather paint his veins with pills than shake another donor’s hand.

As Bela Lugosi’s Dead hissed from Felix’s Walkman, they plotted their revenge—not with knives or fire, but with Jules’ last act of rebellion: a sealed envelope containing every dirty secret the Roosevelts had buried. The Sickie Souse Club didn’t mourn; they corroded. And Washington’s gilded rot had never tasted so bitter.

Five Go Mad on the CTA part 2

by

0

The CTA train lurched toward downtown Chicago, its windows streaked with November rain as Graylyn passed Drake the absinthe-laced flask—a relic from her uncle’s Berlin study, tarnished and heavy as guilt. “To mediocrity,” she drawled, her fishnet knees brushing his torn Levi’s. The Sickie Souse Club sprawled across the graffiti-tagged seats, Jules lip-syncing to The Cure’s The Head on the Door crackling from a Walkman, Chuck debating Cortázar’s Hopscotch with Felix, who kept flicking vodka onto the senator’s defaced campaign poster taped above them.

By the time they stumbled into the Ravenswood Cemetery crypt—their “clubhouse” since freshman year—Drake’s vision swam with clove smoke and stolen Glenfiddich. Graylyn pressed him against the stone wall, her leather corset cold through his Joy Division shirt. “You’re still pretending you’ll outrun him, aren’t you?” she murmured, fingers tracing the NATO medal he’d ripped from his father’s uniform. The one he wore as a dog tag of spite.

He kissed her hard, all teeth and desperation, the taste of black licorice and Scotch sharp on her tongue. Her laugh vibrated against his mouth. “See? This is your manifesto. Not that Kerouac bullshit.” Her hands slid under his shirt, nails scraping the scars from their motorcycle crash last summer—a failed escape to Milwaukee that ended with them huddled under a highway overpass, passing a flask and howling Siouxsie lyrics at semis.

Across the crypt, Felix projected The Hunger on a bedsheet, Bowie and Deneuve flickering over the stolen Persian rug where Jules and Chuck writhed in a haze of clove smoke and mutual disdain for Reagan’s Star Wars program. “They’re rehearsing,” Graylyn whispered, biting Drake’s earlobe. “For the day Hollywood finally eats itself.” Her hips ground against his, the studs on her belt leaving crescent marks on his skin.

Drake’s hands tangled in her jet-black curls, yanking just enough to make her gasp. “You’d rather paint this?” he growled.

“I am painting this.” She tore open his shirt, buttons clattering against the crypt’s stone floor. “Every bruise, every fucking shudder.” Her lips trailed down his chest, lingering on the Zippo burn from last week’s confrontation with the senator’s lackeys—a “warning” that only cemented their status as Chicago’s prince and princess of decay.

When the absinthe hit its peak, Graylyn dragged him into the cemetery’s fog, their laughter echoing off mausoleums built by railroad barons. Under a leafless oak, she straddled him, her lace skirt hiking up to reveal the knife strapped to her thigh—a gift from Chuck after the senator’s thugs followed her home. “Still think I’m hiding?” she breathed, her breath hot against the NATO medal.

“You’re performing,” he shot back, flipping her onto the wet leaves. His mouth found the scar below her collarbone, the one her uncle’s signet ring left when she was twelve. She arched into him, not in pleasure, but defiance—a refusal to let pain be anything but fuel.

They returned to the crypt at dawn, soaked and shivering, to find the others passed out beneath Bowie’s frozen snarl. Graylyn sketched the scene in charcoal—Drake’s clenched jaw, her own smudged eyeliner, the empty flask glinting like a relic—while he scrawled MOLOCH LOVES MTV across the senator’s face on yesterday’s Tribune. The Sickie Souse Club didn’t sleep. They corroded, they collided, they etched their manifesto into the rusted heart of the ’80s.

Five Go Mad on the CTA

by

0

I’m getting so much better with AI. Obviously, this is non-canonical but what fun! Deepseek kicks ass.

The CTA train screeched into the Ravenswood station, its graffiti-tagged windows reflecting the Sickie Souse Club’s leather-clad silhouettes. Graylyn adjusted her lace gloves—dyed black with Rit, still staining her fingertips—and smirked at Drake’s latest vandalism: REAGANROIDS EAT SHIT scrawled in Sharpie across a campaign poster for the Republican senator whose Vitalis-slick hair she could still smell.

“You’re obsessed,” she said, her voice a cigarette-rasp as the train doors hissed open.

“And you’re complicit,” Drake shot back, hoisting a stolen bottle of his father’s Glenfiddich. His combat boots echoed on the platform, daring anyone to confront the Wolf Pack in their natural habitat: the liminal space between Evanston’s manicured lawns and Chicago’s throbbing underbelly.

They slipped into the cemetery first—their ritual. Beneath a moss-crusted angel, Chuck Crown spread a Persian rug looted from his mother’s Lake Forest mansion, its patterns swallowed by candlelight. The others arrived: Jules with her contraband VHS tapes of Labyrinth, Felix tuning a thrift-store Stratocaster to the dissonant key of Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Graylyn lit a clove cigarette, the flame trembling as she recounted her latest family dinner. “Mother said my paintings ‘lack commercial appeal.’ As if I’m supposed to peddle sunsets to golf widows.” She exhaled sharply, the smoke coiling like the skeletal lovers in her latest canvas—the one she’d later burn on Chuck’s houseboat.

Drake snorted. “Commercial appeal’s for politicians and pornographers.” He tossed her the Zippo he’d stolen from his father’s NSA-locked desk, its surface engraved with coordinates to a bombing site in Hanoi. A relic, a rebellion, a fuck-you.

The senator found them at Neo hours later, his tailored suit clashing with the club’s black-lit fog. “Marshall,” he drawled, eyeing Graylyn’s choker. “Still playing Baudelaire with Daddy’s money?”

Drake’s fist connected before the insult landed. The bottle shattered, Scotch pooling with the senator’s blood as security dragged them into the alley. Graylyn laughed, loud enough to startle the rats. “You’ll never be him,” she whispered later, dabbing Drake’s split lip with her fishnet sleeve. She meant his father, the war hero, the monster. The man who’d called Ravenswood Academy to demand his son’s “moral realignment” after catching him with Ginsberg’s Howl.

By dawn, they’d defaced every campaign poster between Belmont and Fullerton. Graylyn sketched devil horns in Sharpie; Drake scrawled FASCIST TWINK beneath the senator’s smarmy grin. On the train home, she leaned into him, her Walkman sharing one earphone—The Cure’s Kyoto Song mirroring the syncopated clatter of tracks.

“Hollywood’s gonna hate this,” she murmured, nodding at Felix’s Polaroid of the vandalized posters.

“Good,” Drake said. “Maybe they’ll finally realize their rom-coms are lobotomy scripts.”

The Sickie Souse Club didn’t compromise. They corroded—wealthy, wounded, and forever seventeen in the shadow of Ravenswood’s bell tower, where the 19th-century ghosts of America’s ruling class whispered sellouts as they passed.

2025-03-15 Rewrites

by

0

I had a concrete idea for something Drake would say. There’s no doubt that the novels of Anne McCaffrey were important to him. I wrote a piece and had Chat-GPT rewrite it a few times. None of it worked out with Drake’s voice, but reposting the rewrites is a way to eliminate the fuzziness around it. I found out something about myself and what I want by doing this, and by posting it am pushing it away from myself, looking for something more.

Original:

I write because of Anne McCaffrey. My father was a polluted, psychotic creep, Vietnam Veteran.  And somewhere under all the war medals and government titles, he was a hypocrite.  He wanted to destroy my mind so that I would give him the kind of attention he wanted.  When I was at Ravenswood Academy, my guidance counselor realized that my father was programming me, trying to destroy me, and she gave me novels by Anne McCaffrey to read.  They helped me develop the sense of individuality he was trying to destroy in me.  I write to find out exactly where, to find the pressure point within the pack of lies he gave me so I can kill his memory forever.  At the core of his soul, there was a demon and even though thankfully he’s dead now I still want to kill it.

This is Drake Marshall: rewrite it.

I write because of Anne McCaffrey. My father, a decorated Vietnam veteran, was a polluted, psychotic creep. Beneath the war medals and government titles, he was a hypocrite—dripping with righteousness while poisoning everything he touched. He wanted to obliterate my mind, mold me into an extension of his own sick need for control.

At Ravenswood Academy, a guidance counselor saw what he was doing. She handed me Anne McCaffrey’s books, a quiet act of rebellion, an offering of escape. In those pages, I found something he couldn’t reach—my own sense of self, untethered from his demands.

I write to carve out the truth from the wreckage of his lies, to locate the precise fault line where his manipulation fractured me. I write to kill his memory, to sever the last thread of him that still lingers in the corners of my mind. Because at the core of him, there was something rotten, something monstrous. And though he’s long dead, I still want to kill it.

Rewrite and make it more violent

I write because of Anne McCaffrey. My father was a venomous, psychotic bastard—Vietnam fucked him up, or maybe he was always that way. He wrapped himself in war medals and government titles like armor, but underneath, he was a coward, a liar, a parasite. He wanted to break me, hollow me out, make me his puppet. He fed me poison, word by word, until I was choking on it.

At Ravenswood Academy, a guidance counselor saw what he was doing. She threw me a lifeline—Anne McCaffrey’s books. In them, I found something untouchable, something he couldn’t crush. Those stories cracked his programming, showed me that I belonged to no one, least of all him.

I write to rip open the infection he left inside me, to dig out every festering lie he shoved down my throat. I write to carve his memory into pieces, to burn it, to salt the fucking earth where it stood. Because at the core of his soul, there was a demon, and even in death, it still lingers. I want to kill it again and again and again, until nothing of him remains.

Rewrite it as Drake trying to recapture the enthusiasm he had for literature in the 1980s, when he was a fan of Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, and he wanted to recapture the spirit of 1960s rock stars like Jim Morrison and John Lennon.

I write because I need to remember why I ever cared about writing in the first place. Back in the ’80s, when I was a kid with a head full of Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and rock & roll mythology, I thought literature was dangerous. It was rebellion, sex, a way to crack open the world and let something raw and electric spill out. I wanted to be Jim Morrison with a typewriter, John Lennon with a manifesto, someone who could bend reality with words and make people feel something sharp and alive.

Somewhere along the way, I lost it. Maybe it was my father, his war-stained mind trying to program me into something small, something obedient. Maybe it was the ’90s, the way everything started to feel plastic and prepackaged, stripped of its fire. The world was moving faster, but it wasn’t going anywhere.

But I still remember being seventeen, sneaking cigarettes behind Ravenswood Academy, high on the sound of The Doors in my Walkman, convinced that words could shatter the world. I want that back. I want to write like I’m setting something on fire. I want to crack open the past and shake it until the good parts spill out. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe the dream got drowned in cynicism, in disappointment, in the slow decay of idealism.

Or maybe I just have to fight harder to get it back.

Recombine this with the fact that it was Anne McCaffrey and his guidance counselor that saved him from his father.

I write because I need to remember why I ever cared about writing in the first place. Back in the ’80s, when I was a kid with a head full of Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, and rock & roll mythology, I thought literature was dangerous. It was rebellion, sex, a way to crack open the world and let something raw and electric spill out. I wanted to be Jim Morrison with a typewriter, John Lennon with a manifesto, someone who could bend reality with words and make people feel something sharp and alive.

But my father wanted to gut that out of me. He was a war-damaged control freak who saw my mind as something to be conquered, programmed, molded in his image. He wanted obedience, not individuality. He wrapped himself in war medals and government titles, but underneath it all, he was just another hypocrite trying to grind the world into submission—starting with his own son.

At Ravenswood Academy, a guidance counselor saw what was happening. She handed me Anne McCaffrey’s books, and suddenly, I had a way out. In those pages, I found defiance, a voice that wasn’t his, a world where freedom meant something. It cracked his hold on me. It showed me I could belong to myself.

Somewhere along the way, I lost that feeling. Maybe it was the ’90s, the way everything turned plastic and prepackaged, stripped of its fire. Maybe it was time, cynicism, the slow decay of idealism. But I still remember being seventeen, sneaking cigarettes behind Ravenswood, high on the sound of The Doors in my Walkman, convinced that words could shatter the world. I want that back. I want to write like I’m setting something on fire.

Maybe it’s too late. Or maybe I just have to fight harder to get it back.

This isn’t the voice of Drake Marshall, but writing this critique I am finding the tone I want to have.

The Jazz Odyssey of Drake Marshall: Day 43 (322 days remaining): The Avocado Girl

by

0

“It’s okay if you sit with us, lady,” says Murray, “But you gotta come clean. Are you Marlene Dietrich or not?”

The waitress tilts her head back and lets out a laugh that seems to come from another era entirely. “Honey, if I were Marlene Dietrich, would I be serving coffee in a place like this?”

“That’s exactly where Marlene Dietrich would be in 2025,” Batman-Perry points out. “Hiding in plain sight, watching humanity mutate.”

“Speaking of mutation,” Lynch says, leaning forward, “you’ve been eavesdropping on conversations like this for what, decades? Got any insights on the rate of change?”

She pulls a pack of cigarettes from her apron pocket, taps one out and offers it to Lynch with a gesture that’s pure 1940s cinema. “The questions get better,” she says. “The answers get worse. Used to be people came in here looking for truth. Now they come in looking for new ways to be confused.”

“That’s evolution for you,” Crosby mutters. “Complexity before clarity.”

“Not good enough!” says Belushi. “We’ve got to kick out the jams here. We’ve got to do something that shakes things up and reveals the new boundaries, even if what we learn is unpleasant.”

“I don’t think we have to seek out unpleasant revelations,” the waitress says, striking a match. “They find us readily enough.”

Lynch takes the offered cigarette, cups the flame. “John’s right though. The old maps don’t work anymore. Not since Gia showed up.”

“Maps,” Batman-Perry snorts. “We’re still thinking in terms of territory and borders when we should be thinking about… I don’t know, quantum states? Phase transitions?”

“Or jazz,” Crosby adds. “The spaces between the notes.”

“No, no, NO!” Belushi slams his hand on the table, making the cups rattle. “You’re all still trying to describe it with metaphors from the old world. That’s exactly what I’m talking about. We need to – to -” He gestures wildly, words failing him.

“To break the metaphors themselves,” the waitress finishes, exhaling a perfect smoke ring. “To find new ways of breaking.”

Murray watches the ring drift toward the ceiling. “Now that,” he says softly, “sounds like something Marlene Dietrich would say.”

He’s the first to feel it, like he did during that inexplicable week when he lived the same Tuesday 37 times in succession, each day watching Bill Murray (no relation) film different takes of Groundhog Day at the same corner cafe. He never told anyone how, on the final repetition, Bill looked directly at him and winked, as if to say: “Now you understand too.” His eyes go distant with that same recognition – that reality is more porous than we pretend, that time isn’t the straight line we think it is.

Lynch starts humming under his breath – that same atonal melody he used to signal incoming strangeness back in the day. Crosby’s fingers stop their rhythm on his coffee cup. Batman-Perry’s hand drifts unconsciously toward where his utility belt would be, if he were in costume.

“You feel that?” maybe-Marlene asks, and we all nod. It’s the same sensation: like reality is about to hiccup, like the universe is clearing its throat before making an important announcement.

Through the diner’s wide windows, we see it first as a shimmer, like heat waves rising from desert asphalt. Then it materializes: a 1954 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing that seems to exist in multiple color states simultaneously – silver in one moment, opalescent the next, sometimes appearing to be carved from a single piece of black jade. The car settles into its parking space with the gentleness of a cat, its doors rising like wings about to take flight.

The engine doesn’t so much stop as transition into another form of energy. Even Batman-Perry falls silent, recognizing power beyond his usual domain. The chrome trim catches light that isn’t there, throwing prismatic reflections across our faces.

“That’s not a car,” Crosby whispers. “That’s a chariot.”

“Look at the hood ornament,” Lynch murmurs. “It’s not the Mercedes star. It’s something… older.”

The gullwing doors rise with celestial grace, and in that moment, the parking lot’s sodium lights transform. They’re no longer mere electrical fixtures but cosmic spotlights, burning with the intensity of collapsed stars. The light doesn’t just illuminate her – it seems to pour from another dimension, a realm where divine love has actual mass and weight, where worship manifests as pure energy.

She emerges in a corona of impossible radiance. The air around her doesn’t just shimmer – it sings, a harmony that exists somewhere between atomic vibration and angelic choir. Those nearest the windows have to shield their eyes, not from brightness but from pure presence. The asphalt beneath her feet begins to crystallize, transformed by proximity to something beyond mortality.

Her shadow falls in multiple directions at once, each one suggesting a different aspect of divinity – here the silhouette of a priestess bearing sacred oils, there the shape of a warrior goddess, elsewhere the form of a digital prophet for a new age. The light bends around her like a magnetic field bends around a pulsar, and for a moment, every molecule in the parking lot seems to orient itself toward her, like iron filings aligning with ultimate truth.

The magnesium flare of her aura cuts through mundane reality like a diamond through glass, leaving everything more pristine, more real in its wake. As she walks toward the diner, small flowers burst into bloom in the cracks of the pavement, only to dissolve into light when she passes.

The air changes before she enters – becomes charged, like before summer lightning. Everyone in the diner feels it: the presence of something ancient wearing modern skin. She moves like a priestess of some forgotten fertility cult, though she looks exactly like Kendall Jenner. The Avocado Girl. They say she appears wherever transformation is imminent, ordering the same meal in diners across dimensions.

And then the raw cosmic force that blazed in the parking lot follows her in, but transforms. It’s no longer the searing revelation of pure divinity, but something more intimate, more binding. The energy curves around us like a gravity well, drawing us into her orbit, into each other’s orbits. We’re no longer separate observers but a fellowship forged in the presence of something greater than ourselves.

Just as Tolkien’s nine were bound by the quest for the ring, we find ourselves linked by this moment of shared gnosis. The fluorescent lights dim to candlelight, then to starlight, then to something that has no name in any earthly language. Her presence wraps us in understanding deeper than words – mysterious as Morgan le Fay but as nurturing as Galadriel, our Lady of the Lake manifesting in a 24-hour diner rather than a misty mere.

The binding force radiates through us like rings in water, each ripple carrying whispers of ancient truths. Lynch’s eyes gleam with recognition of patterns he’s always sought to capture on film. Murray nods slowly, understanding now that his time-loop experience was just a prelude to this. Batman-Perry’s stance softens as if finally finding something more powerful than vengeance. Crosby tips his hat – a gesture as old as courtesy itself, transformed in this moment into something like a knight’s salute to his sovereign.

When the Avocado Girl reaches the counter, the kitchen doors part like temple gates. And there he is – Anthony Bourdain, moving with his characteristic mix of street-fighter grace and earned wisdom. He carries her order like a sacred text, but his presence isn’t that of a guru with all the answers. Instead, he radiates something rarer: the honest uncertainty of a fellow seeker who’s seen enough to know that the journey itself matters more than any destination.

Their eyes meet across the counter. Neither speaks. They don’t need to – they’re both avatars of something larger than themselves, both playing roles in a mystery that’s simultaneously ancient and bleeding-edge modern. He hands her the takeout bag containing the avocado omelet, and in that gesture there’s an entire conversation about hunger and satisfaction, about seeking and finding, about the eternal dance between the sacred and the profane.  She inclines her head slightly, accepting the offering.

The rest of us watch, holding our breath, as one kind of sacred hands sustenance to another. The boundary between celebrity and deity has never been thinner.  And even as I realize it, I can feel both categories dissolving like sugar in rain. We’re living in the aftermath of their mutual destruction, watching as the old structures of fame and worship collapse into something we don’t have words for yet. It’s like we’re all caught in a psychic hurricane that’s tearing apart our ability to separate the sacred from the viral, the divine from the trending.

Nobody’s just famous anymore – they’re memes, they’re avatars, they’re collective fever dreams. And nobody’s just holy either – they’re influencers of reality itself, quantum fluctuations in human form. We’re all plugged into this vast network of meaning-making that turns every image into an icon, every tweet into a prayer, every shared moment into a communion. It’s a telepathy built from likes and shares and endless scrolling, but that doesn’t make it any less real or any less raw.

We’re all broadcasting on frequencies we don’t understand, receiving signals we can’t decode. The old metaphors of spotlight and altar don’t work anymore. We need new ones for this age where a teenager’s TikTok can reshape reality as profoundly as any ancient miracle, where devotion is measured in followers, where every phone is both confessional and temple.

The two avatars regard each other across the counter – her divine radiance meeting his earthbound authenticity. It’s a perfect balance: her otherworldly certainty against his very human doubt.

She turns then, omelet in hand, and something in her movement suggests the infinite potentials awaiting in Chicago – not just the physical city with its wind and steel and lake-light, but the Chicago that exists as a quantum possibility, a dream-state where divinity might finally find its modern form. The door chimes as she pushes it open, but before stepping through, she pauses. The weight of the city’s destiny hangs in the air like thunder before lightning, a promise of revelation in the shadows between skyscrapers, in the spaces where urban grit transmutes into cosmic gold.

We’re left with the sense that understanding itself might be beside the point, that maybe the real task is learning to navigate this new world where meaning flows like water, where truth is a collaborative hallucination, where love tears holes in the fabric of the ordinary to let the extraordinary pour through.

After she departs, Bourdain strides to our table with purpose, bringing with him the grounding force of pure human experience – knife scars, track marks, decades of dawn markets and midnight kitchens. He pulls up a chair with the deliberate movement of someone who’s earned every insight through blood and sweat. His presence is an anchor in the wake of divine manifestation, reminding us that even in a world where goddesses order omelets, there’s profound dignity in being simply, stubbornly human.

He carries with him not answers, but something better: the hard-won conviction that keeping moving, keeping searching, keeping hungry is its own kind of answer. Every line in his face tells a story of falling down and getting back up, of finding beauty in the broken places, of turning wounds into wisdom.

“When you’re a celebrity chef in the age of divine manifestation, you never know if you’re cooking for a social media influencer or an actual goddess. The thing about divine manifestations,” he says, accepting a cigarette, his voice carrying the weight of someone who’s walked through both heaven and hell, “is that they don’t come with instruction manuals. But maybe that’s the point…”

We watch through the windows as she glides back to the Gullwing. The car’s doors rise to meet her without being touched. As she merges with the vehicle, there’s a moment where the metal seems liquid, organic – like the chrome has become the skin of some vast sea creature. Then the car simply… transfers elsewhere, leaving behind a faint scent of avocado and ozone.

“But that’s what made you different, isn’t it?” Batman-Perry asks. “You saw the sacred in street food before it was cool. Before authenticity became a commodity.”

“Listen,” Bourdain leans forward, “I was just as much a construction as any influencer. The hard-drinking, straight-talking chef who’d tell you the truth about food and culture? That was a character I played. The difference was, I knew it was a character, and I used it to point at something real.”

“Like a bodhisattva of beef noodles,” Lynch muses.

“More like a court jester,” Bourdain corrects. “Someone who could mock the power structure while being part of it. But now?” He gestures at the lingering shimmer where the Gullwing had been. “Now the gods are walking among us again, ordering omelettes. The game has changed.”

“Has it?” asks the waitress, in Marlene Dietrich’s precise German accent. “Or are we just finally admitting what was always true?” Maybe-Marlene’s voice carries the weight of every torch song ever sung, every heart ever broken, every kiss that ever stopped time.

“That we are all insane with our need for love, that love itself is what tears our reality apart until we find a way to give something back to it.”

She takes a drag from her cigarette and the smoke curls up like prayers in an ancient temple. “Look at us – all of us sitting here in this diner. The director who spent his life trying to film the gaps between dreams and reality. The groundhog man who had to live the same day over and over until he learned how to love. The dark knight who turned his grief into an armor to protect others. The cosmic cowboy tipping his hat to forces beyond our understanding. We’re all crazy with it, aren’t we? This hunger for connection that breaks reality open like an egg until the divine yolk spills out everywhere.”

She gestures toward the door where the Avocado Girl’s presence still lingers like perfume. “And then something like that walks in, and suddenly all our separate madnesses make sense. Because maybe love isn’t what we thought it was. Maybe it’s not just an emotion or a choice or a chemical reaction. Maybe it’s the force that cracks open the universe to let the light in.”

The neon coffee cup in the window flickers, and for a moment it looks like a burning heart.