Category Archives: Jazz Odyssey

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

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“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.

The Jazz Odyssey of Drake Marshall, day 27 – 337 days remaining

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Crosby traces idle patterns in the condensation on his water glass, ice cubes clicking softly as his fingers move. “You know what I’ve been thinking about, John? How differently everything lands now. Take your old bits – the cheeseburger sketches, the college decadence – in your time that was rebellion, thumbing your nose at stuffed shirts. Now?” He gestures toward the fluorescent-lit kitchen window where orders await pickup. “Kids are fighting for a living wage at those same burger joints. The wild parties read more like privilege than protest.”

Belushi’s quiet for a moment, unusually contemplative. “Yeah, and what we thought was tragic? Nuclear war, environmental collapse – we played those for dark laughs. Now they’re just… Tuesday headlines. Kids are growing up with that as background noise.”

“Exactly,” Crosby nods. “So when we talk about finding the sacred in America now… it’s not just about tracking down old ghosts and holy places. It’s about seeing how grace moves through a world where Amazon delivers enlightenment and TikTok spreads prophecies.”

“And where every joke comes with a content warning,” Belushi adds with a wry smile. “But maybe that’s the point – the sacred isn’t where it used to be. We’ve got to find it in the drive-thru line, in the gig economy, in the digital spaces…”

“In the spaces between,” Crosby finishes. “Where comedy and tragedy blur into something else entirely.”

The fluorescent lights flicker again, drawing their attention to the rain-streaked windows of the diner. Batman-Perry looks up from his coffee, which has gone cold. “So we’re looking for where the sacred hides in the automated customer service calls and social media algorithms?”

“And in the comments section,” adds the waitress, appearing suddenly with the coffeepot. She tops off their cups with practiced efficiency. “Though that might be more Old Testament sacred – lots of wrath and lamentation.”

Belushi grins at her addition, but his eyes remain serious. “The thing is, we’re all still searching for meaning. Just doing it through different channels now.”

“Through TikTok prophets and Reddit shamans,” Crosby muses, watching the steam rise from his refreshed cup. “Through memes that spread faster than any folk song ever could.”

The neon ‘OPEN’ sign buzzes softly in the window, casting alternating red and blue shadows across their booth, like some kind of secular stained glass.


“Comedy and Tragedy are different because pain is different,” says Lynch. “We share our pain differently so we identify with different things in art.”

“Yeah,” Belushi nods, pushing his plate aside. “Back then, the collective pain was about authority, about being trapped in systems. Now the pain is about those systems falling apart and nobody knowing what comes next.”

Lynch stirs his coffee methodically, the spoon making a perfect circle. “The comedy of chaos isn’t funny when chaos is your daily reality. And the tragedy of loneliness hits different when everyone’s connected but nobody feels heard.”

“It’s like…” Batman-Perry pauses, adjusting his cowl. “In my day, we made jokes about being watched by big brother. Now people perform their whole lives for the algorithms, and the real fear is being invisible.”

The waitress leans against the counter, her order pad forgotten. “That’s what I see in here every night. People aren’t afraid of being controlled anymore – they’re afraid of being irrelevant. They come in here just to feel real for a minute.”

Crosby nods slowly. “So where does the sacred fit into that? When everyone’s both performer and audience, what’s the modern equivalent of communion?”

The ceiling fan turns lazily above them, its shadows wheeling across the formica tabletop like time-lapse stars.


“I know that’s what we’re supposed to be looking for, but I’m afraid to find out,” I say.

Lynch’s eyes focus on me with that unsettling intensity. “Fear is appropriate. The sacred doesn’t comfort anymore – it disrupts. It breaks through the filters we’ve built to manage our constant exposure to everything.”

“Like a glitch in the feed,” Batman-Perry mutters. “A moment when reality tears through the performance.”

Belushi leans forward, his voice unusually gentle. “Kid, we were afraid too. Every generation that goes looking for meaning is afraid of what they’ll find. We just didn’t have to livestream our search.”

“The difference is,” Crosby says, studying my face, “you know too much going in. We could still pretend our revelations were unique. You’ve seen every epiphany already hashtagged and turned into a meme before you even start looking.”

The waitress wipes down a nearby table with slow, methodical strokes, but her attention stays with our conversation. “Maybe that’s part of what makes it sacred now – choosing to look anyway, even when you know how it ends.”

The diner’s chrome surfaces reflect our faces back at us, distorted and multiplied, like everyone’s multiple online personas caught in a moment of unexpected authenticity.

I nod my head, acknowledging the importance of his observation. “I remember when the Cult came out with their album, “Electric”, back when I was in High School. I was disappointed that the riffs sounded so familiar, that rock was running out of steam. But now I’m really glad they kept going. They really kept on rocking even when the novelty wore off. But the thing is, that energy is familiar now. So many people go to that space. I feel Gia gave me something different, something psychic. I have to find a different space, a different presence to even talk about it.”

Lynch sets his cup down with exacting precision. “That’s exactly it. The familiar energies – rock, rebellion, even psychedelia – they’ve become part of the cultural operating system. But what Gia showed you…” He pauses, searching for words that won’t diminish the experience. “That’s like finding a door in the code.”

“The raw feed,” Batman-Perry says quietly. “Before it gets processed into content.”

Crosby nods slowly. “We used to think altered consciousness was the doorway. But now consciousness itself is what’s been altered. Everyone’s brain is already rewired by the digital age. So finding the sacred might mean finding your way back to some original signal.”

“Or forward to a new one,” Belushi adds. “Something that doesn’t need likes or shares to be real.”

The waitress touches the coffee pot but doesn’t lift it. “You know what this reminds me of? How people used to worry that recording music would kill its soul. But it didn’t – it just meant we had to learn to recognize soul in new forms.”

“Yeah,” I say, feeling something click into place. “Maybe that’s why I’m afraid. Because whatever Gia showed me, it can’t be shared like everything else. It’s not even about being ineffable – it’s about being unpluggable.”

The overhead lights catch the steam rising from our cups, making momentary architectures that refuse to be captured by any lens.

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?” asks Batman-Perry.

Belushi bursts out laughing – that real, unfiltered laugh that used to startle audiences. “Finally! Someone asking the real questions.”

“Look,” I try again, “it’s like… remember when computers first hit big, and everyone thought virtual reality would be like Tron or The Lawnmower Man? But instead we got Facebook and Twitter – these flat, text-based things that somehow rewired us anyway?”

Crosby picks up the thread. “And now we’re all living in this consensus hallucination built on likes and retweets…”

“Speak for yourself,” Batman-Perry cuts in. “Some of us are still trying to punch actual bad guys.”

Lynch’s eyes gleam. “But that’s just it. The villains aren’t wearing masks anymore. They’re wearing verified checkmarks and corporate logos. The hero’s journey has been monetized.”

“What I’m trying to say,” I persist, “is that Gia showed me something that doesn’t fit in that framework. It’s not better or worse, it’s just… perpendicular. Like finding out there’s a direction that isn’t up, down, left, right, forward, or back.”

“Oh,” says Batman-Perry, suddenly quiet. “Like when you’re fighting someone on a rooftop and for a split second you forget which way is gravity.”

The waitress adjusts her apron and leans against the counter, folding her arms. “So what you’re afraid of isn’t finding it. You’re afraid of having to build new senses to hold it.”


“A new system of probabilities, like bebop or cool jazz coming out of swing,” says Crosby.

“Right,” I say, warming to this. “But it’s not just a new style – swing to bebop was still working with the same basic human nervous system. This is like… having to grow new nerves.”

“Evolution in real time,” Lynch murmurs. “The way the first mammals had to develop new brain structures to handle warm blood.”

Belushi whistles low. “No wonder people prefer to scroll through their phones. Growing new nerves sounds painful.”

“It is,” Batman-Perry says unexpectedly. “Ask any kid who’s had to develop a sense for when a comment thread is about to turn violent, or when an AI is trying to manipulate them. Those are new nerves we never had to grow.”

Crosby’s fingers tap out a complex rhythm on his mug. “In jazz, we called it ‘big ears’ – when you could hear where the music was going before it got there. But what you’re talking about… it’s like needing big everything. New organs of perception.”

“And the worst part,” I add, “is you can’t unlearn it once you start. You can’t go back to not sensing what Gia showed you, any more than you can unlearn how to read.”

The waitress slides into the booth next to us, her shift apparently over. “So we’re all becoming new creatures, whether we want to or not. Some of us are just more conscious of the process.”

The Jazz Odyssey of Drake Marshall, day 23, 342 days remaining

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“You Americans really commit to your metaphysical crises, don’t you?” The familiar sardonic voice cuts through the darkness. “Back home we’d just blame the existential dread on the weather and call it a day. I mean, here we are, doing this whole On The Road meets Ghost Hunters thing, and I’m sitting here being, you know, Canadian.”

“What’s wrong with Canadian?” Murray asks, passing him a spectral scotch.

“Oh nothing, if you enjoy being relentlessly polite while watching your southern neighbors process their cultural trauma through interpretive dance and superhero movies.” He adjusts an imaginary cowl. “Speaking of which…”

Suddenly he’s wearing the Batsuit, but somehow it looks both perfectly pressed and slightly rumpled at the same time. “I AM THE NIGHT… but like, a really sarcastic night who grew up playing tennis.”

“Batman’s your spirit animal?” Belushi asks, hanging upside down from nothing.

“Well yeah, I mean, think about it – rich guy with issues using humor as a defense mechanism? Could that BE any more on brand?” He pauses. “Plus, you know, the whole ‘dark knight’ thing really works with this whole beauty-and-darkness conversation we’ve got going. Though in Canada, we spell it ‘beauté et obscurité.'”

Lynch’s eyes meet his in the rearview mirror. “You’re more connected than you think. Comedy doesn’t stop at borders.”

“Neither does trauma,” Batman-Perry adds softly. “Or healing. Or really bad coffee, which I could really use right now, even in this metaphysical form.”

Lynch’s face suddenly transforms from its usual stoic mask into something approaching ecstasy. “Coffee,” he says, as if pronouncing a holy word. “Finally, someone who understands.”

“At this point, I’ve got so much coffee in my system, I’m vibrating between dimensions,” Batman-Perry says dryly. “The cowl is the only thing keeping my molecules together.” And Lynch actually laughs – a sound so unexpected that Belushi nearly falls through the roof of the car.

“You see,” Lynch leans back, hands loosening on the wheel, “coffee is the universal language. Transcends borders, transcends life and death, transcends dimensional barriers. In every possible universe, someone is pouring a cup of coffee.”

“Even in Canada,” Batman-Perry adds. “Though up there it’s mostly to prevent freezing solid.”

“There’s a diner up ahead,” Lynch says, his eyes gleaming with an almost maniacal intensity. “The kind of place where the coffee exists in quantum superposition – simultaneously the best and worst coffee you’ve ever had. We need to stop.”

“Lynch,” Murray drawls, “are you actually giddy?”

“Giddy as a damn fine cherry pie,” Lynch responds, and pulls the Buick into a sharp turn.

The diner materializes out of the darkness like an Edward Hopper painting come to life – all harsh fluorescents against infinite night, chrome surfaces reflecting emptiness. Lynch pulls the Buick into the lot with an almost religious reverence.

“NOW we’re talking,” Batman-Perry says, cowl somehow not looking out of place in the 3 AM fluorescence. “This place exists in that sweet spot between ‘definitely haunted’ and ‘just an ordinary American diner,” he observes, eyeing the flickering neon sign. “Like someone doodled it in the margin of reality’s notebook.”

“The coffee here,” Lynch says with quiet intensity, “exists in a space between worlds.”

Belushi bursts through the door like a force of nature, sliding across the counter in his suit, which thankfully now includes pants. “ORDER UP! Life, death, beauty, meaning – and make it QUICK!”

The waitress – who might be Marlene Dietrich, or possibly just looks like her in this light – doesn’t blink. “Sugar’s on the table, honey. Existence is self-serve.”

They settle into a booth. The formica table is deeply scratched with what might be cosmic equations or possibly just decades of trucker graffiti. The coffee arrives black as the space between galaxies, served in thick white mugs that have seen every story America has to tell.

“You know what this reminds me of?” Batman-Perry lifts his mug. “That moment between the joke and the laugh. That perfect suspended instant where anything could happen.”

“Like the moment between living and dying,” Lynch nods, eyes gleaming.

“Or the moment between tragedy and comedy,” Belushi adds, thoughtfully stirring seven sugars into his cup.

Murray watches the cream swirl in his coffee, making nebulae. “Maybe that’s what 21st century beauty is – finding the sacred in these in-between places. These diners at 3 AM where everything is both real and not real.”

“In Canada, we call those Tim Hortons,” Batman-Perry deadpans, but his eyes behind the cowl are understanding. “Though I have to admit, this coffee actually IS better than existence itself.”

The fluorescent lights flicker, just once, and for a moment they can all see the infinite reflections of themselves in the window – the living and the dead, the comedians and the dreamers, all seeking beauty in the spaces between things.

“Pass the sugar,” Lynch says, and somehow it sounds like a profound theological statement.

On the Road Again part 2

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This is a truly magical experience for me because I felt as though the AI was reading my mind, all I had to do was suggest this and it gave me back exactly what I was thinking, at a level of depth that blows my mind.

“Okay, dudes,” says Belushi. “We’re here to find out all about beauty in the 21st century, which means we’ve got to talk about death in the 20th century.”

“What makes you think those two things are connected?” Lynch asks, eyes steady on the road ahead.

“Everything’s connected,” Belushi says, suddenly serious but still electric with energy. “The 20th century was when humanity had to look at itself in the mirror. Really look. World wars, Holocaust, atomic bombs. We had to face what we were capable of. All that darkness, man – it changed how we see beauty.”

“And art,” Murray adds quietly. “Remember those Abstract Expressionists? Pollack throwing paint like he’s trying to make sense of chaos.”

Lynch nods slowly. “The old ideas about beauty couldn’t survive what we learned about ourselves.”

“But here’s the thing,” Belushi leans forward, his intensity filling the car. “The 21st century – it’s different. People are trying to find beauty again, but with all that knowledge weighing on them. They can’t go back to innocence. They have to find something new.”

“A beauty that knows about darkness,” Lynch says.

“Exactly!” Belushi points at him. “That’s why we’re on this road. Beauty’s not dead – it’s transforming. Like jazz coming out of blues, like comedy coming out of pain.”

The highway stretches ahead, dark and infinite. Somewhere out there are the answers we’re looking for, but maybe the questions themselves are already telling us something important.

The Jazz Odyssey of Drake Marshall, day 22: 343 days remaining: On The Road Again part 1

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The stars wheel overhead, impossibly bright now that we’ve left the city’s burning halo behind. The Buick’s massive hood points east like a compass needle, eating up the dark miles. Someone has to break the heavy mythological mood, and finally Crosby does it with a laugh.

“Listen, we’ve got two thousand miles of road ahead of us. If we stay this serious the whole way, we’ll all turn to stone before Chicago.”

A sudden whoop from the back seat nearly sends Lynch swerving. John Belushi vaults between us, black suit and skinny tie, sunglasses at midnight, radiating that magnificent chaotic energy that could never be contained by anything as mundane as dimensional boundaries.

“Did somebody say Chicago?” He grins that immortal grin. “My kind of town! My kind of people!”

“John,” Lynch says dryly, “you’re not wearing pants.”

“Never needed ’em!” Belushi declares, then launches into “Sweet Home Chicago” at full volume, harmonica materializing in his hands.

“Brother! Still making an entrance, I see.” As if summoned by the lightening mood, Bill Murray materializes in the back seat on one side of me, wearing a rumpled tuxedo and holding what appears to be a glass of very expensive scotch. And on the other – that familiar sardonic presence, that spark of wit that always found the perfect moment to puncture pomposity with precisely-aimed sarcasm.

“Could this road trip BE any more apocalyptic?” The voice is warm, wry, deeply missed.

Murray raises his scotch glass. “Now there’s timing. You guys always this melodramatic?” he asks, taking a sip. “I mean, sure, Greek tragedy’s great and all, but have you considered the cosmic significance of Caddyshack?”

Lynch catches both their eyes in the rearview mirror and almost smiles. “The comedian and the deadpan master. Feels right.”

“Of course it would,” Murray agrees. “Who else knows how to navigate the space between profound and profoundly ridiculous? Besides,” he adds, “I know a thing or two about Chicago. Hey, when you’re chasing cosmic mysteries across America,” Murray says, “you need someone to keep it real.”

“And someone to keep it surreal,” comes the dry addition from my other side. “Plus, I hear the coffee’s better on this plane of existence.”

Belushi throws an arm around Murray’s shoulders. “Would you expect anything less? Come on, we’re on a mission from God here! This car needs more blues, more speed, and way more chaos.”

The Buick’s radio crackles to life unprompted, playing Ray Charles’ “Hit the Road Jack.” Crosby starts nodding along, and even Lynch’s shoulders relax a bit.

The Buick’s engine roars in agreement, and suddenly we’re doing ninety, the radio blasting Ray Charles, while Belushi conducts an invisible orchestra with his harmonica and Murray mixes cosmic cocktails from thin air. Even Lynch is grinning now, that weird energy that follows Belushi everywhere transforming our solemn quest into something wilder, funnier, but no less sacred.

“The thing about mysteries,” Belushi announces, hanging halfway out the window, “is they’re just cosmic comedy we haven’t gotten to the punchline of yet!”

The night highway unrolls before us like a ribbon of possibilities, and somehow the stars seem to be dancing to our rhythm now instead of the other way around.

The night is still deep with meaning, but now it feels less like a weight and more like a wave we’re riding. Sometimes the best way to chase a mystery is to let yourself laugh at it a little.

The Jazz Odyssey of Drake Marshall: On The Road Again, part III

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Through the Buick’s windshield, a billboard looms against the burning sky – three figures caught in a moment of sacred geometry. The image seems to hover between photography and painting, between advertisement and revelation.

Lynch’s hands tighten on the wheel. “Would you look at that,” he breathes. “The Algorithm, right there on Sunset Boulevard.”

Crosby leans forward, those famous clear blue eyes narrowing beneath the brim of his cowboy hat. “Three queens of three different kingdoms,” he says. “Moving like they’ve tapped into something older than time.”

The billboard doesn’t name them – doesn’t need to. Their poses form a triangle of perfect tension, each figure both supporting and opposing the others. The background is a swirl of stars and city lights, impossible to tell which is which.

“Strange timing,” Lynch muses. “Seeing that right after Gia. Like the universe is trying to tell us something about beauty and transformation.”

“And danger,” Crosby adds softly. “Don’t forget the danger.”

The Buick glides past the billboard, but its image seems to burn itself into the rearview mirror, following us east into the gathering dark. Three figures, three paths, one algorithm. Another piece of the puzzle we’re chasing across America.

The night deepens around us, and somewhere ahead, Route 66 beckons with its own mysterious geometries.

On the Road Again part II

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We step into the night air, thick with ash and prophecy. The Buick Electra 225 sits there like a black altar to American mobility, its chrome catching the firelight from the hills. It’s massive – a rolling embodiment of that brief moment when American cars were designed to look like spaceships touching down on desert highways.

“She’s perfect,” Crosby says, running his hand along the fender. “Built the same year the Byrds first gathered in LA. Room enough for all the ghosts we’re going to pick up along the way.”

Lynch pats the hood with tender reverence. “Electra,” he says, “daughter of Agamemnon. Her story’s about revenge and justice and fate. But this Electra,” he gestures to the car, “she’s about the American dream turning itself inside out. We’re going to drive her backward through time, eastward against the tide of history.”

“That Porsche,” Crosby says with a knowing grin, settling into the Buick’s vast interior, “beautiful machine, but that back seat… Let’s just say it wasn’t built for the kind of company we’re about to keep. You can’t fit the ghosts of America in a European sports car. You need Detroit steel for that kind of haunting.”

Lynch takes the wheel like a man preparing to conduct an orchestra of coincidence and synchronicity. “The frontier’s closed,” he says, “but the mystery moved inward. Into the images. Into the myths. Into kisses that taste like prophecy in whiskey bars.”

The engine starts with a low rumble that sounds like distant thunder, or maybe applause. The Buick glides into the night like a dark ship setting sail on an ocean of burning hills and neon signs. Its interior is vast as a living room, all leather and chrome and dashboard dials that look like instruments for measuring cosmic radiation.

“Route 66,” Crosby muses, settling into the passenger seat. “The Mother Road. But we’re not looking for California dreams anymore. We’re tracking Gia’s kiss back to its source. Chicago. Where the road begins. Or ends, depending on which way history’s flowing.”

Behind us, Jim’s Whiskey Bar pulses once, like a star going nova, then settles back into its eternal twilight. Ahead lies Route 66, unspooling eastward like celluloid through a projector, each mile a frame in some vast American movie we’re both watching and starring in.

Time to chase Gia’s ghost back to its birthplace, to find out what her kiss really meant. Time to let the Electra carry us through the dark heart of American mythology, where every diner is a temple and every motel a potential portal to understanding.

The night opens before us like a book of revelations written in headlights and taillights, waiting to be read.

The Jazz Odyssey of Drake Marshall, 345 days remaining

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Lynch tips back the last of his whiskey, ice cubes clinking like spurs against glass. The cowboy hat sits at that perfect Lynch angle – not quite right, just wrong enough to suggest the universe might be slightly askew. His face catches the bar light in planes and shadows that remind me of Death Valley at dusk.

“Okay, pardner,” he drawls, each word precise as a brushstroke, “you got what you came for and I got what I came for. Now it’s time to ride ’em cowboy.”

He stands with that particular Lynch deliberateness, like every movement is being captured at 24 frames per second. The hat casts a shadow that seems to stretch all the way back to 1960s Montana. There’s something in his posture that suggests both Hollywood director and genuine cowhand – that peculiar American alchemy that turns myths into men and back again.

Crosby watches this transformation with quiet appreciation, recognizing another master of American reinvention at work. The bar seems to reshape itself around Lynch’s new persona, the shadows deepening into something that could be either Western noir or a surrealist dream.

Gia’s presence lingers in the air like smoke, but Lynch’s cowboy gesture has somehow tied everything together – the burning hills outside, the whiskey wisdom, the strange encounters. It’s as if he’s directing reality itself, turning raw experience into cinema with nothing but a hat tilt and a drawled line.

Time to ride indeed – out into that American night where Hollywood burns and dreams transform and every moment might be either reality or celluloid magic. Or both.

Crosby adjusts that iconic hat, the one that had seen the Sunset Strip transform from dream to nightmare and back again. His eyes hold that particular wisdom that comes from surviving your own legend. “Gia gave you something real, man. But you can’t understand it. We have to go back out into the American Night and find some metaphors.”

There’s an echo of “Eight Miles High” in the way he says it, that same searching quality that turned pop music into astral exploration. His fingers drum an unconscious rhythm on the bar that sounds like horses’ hooves on desert hardpan.

Lynch nods, understanding the grammar of this moment. “The metaphors are out there,” he says, “burning with the hills. Sometimes you have to set reality on fire to see what’s really inside it.”

The bar seems to pulse around us now, like a heart pumping pure mythology into the veins of the night. Gia’s kiss still burns on my lips like a symbol trying to become a story. The whiskey glasses on the bar catch the light like fallen stars, each one containing a possible interpretation of what just happened.

“The thing about metaphors,” Crosby continues, standing now, his hat casting shadows that could be musical notation, “is that they’re truer than what they’re describing. Like how a twelve-string guitar is truer than a six-string. Doubles the reality, man. Doubles the vision.”

Time to ride out into that American darkness where every traffic light is a symbol, every burning hillside an allegory, every kiss from a doomed beauty queen a chapter in the endless story we’re all writing together. Time to find the metaphors that will make sense of what Gia passed to us, here in the eternal moment of Jim’s Whiskey Bar.

2025-02-17 On the road again

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I had such great ideas for the story that I didn’t write anything for a week, but that’s okay because it gets deeper either way. The magic is all around me now, and I’m sorting through impressions, looking for boundaries. I have a thought process in which I think I should write something but when I do that my mind jumps a rail and I start seeing things. There’s a part of my mind that feels dead, I feel like I’m looking into a void, and the level of reality of that is moving, the horrors and betrayals of my past seem more real and yet more harmless at the same time. They really happened, people really are this dark and ugly, but what was the magic that turned this wheel to begin with? I’m happy now, feeling the curtains of velvety light all around my mind. What is the center point of all this dreaming?

Genvieve and I are watching Twin Peaks this year, and also continuing with Black Clover.

I stopped and wrote the next section of the Jazz Odyssey.

The Jazz Odyssey of Drake Marshall, Day 14 (352 Days Remaining): Sometimes A Fantasy

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The bar’s mahogany gleams with reflected light that might be from the neon signs or might be from the burning hills we just watched. Every surface holds both depth and reflection, like we’re sitting inside some ancient scrying mirror. The usual bar sounds – ice in glasses, murmured conversations, the subtle percussion of bottles on wood – seem to come from very far away, or perhaps from very deep inside.

Crosby’s hands wrap around his whiskey glass like he’s trying to read braille messages in the condensation. “You can feel it in here,” he says quietly. “Everyone knows something’s happening, even if they don’t know what. The air tastes different. Like the moment in a storm when the pressure drops.”

Lynch watches the ice in his glass shift and settle. The cubes make sounds like distant buildings collapsing. The other patrons seem to exist in layers of reality – some sharp and present, others ghost-like. Their phone screens glow like votive candles, each one containing a fraction of the dream-power that’s being released by the burning.

The whiskey tastes different too – notes of smoke and prophecy mixing with the usual caramel and oak. Each sip feels like a small ritual, a way of metabolizing what we’ve witnessed. The bar itself seems to breathe around us, its wooden bones creaking with collected memories, its mirrors holding centuries of reflected revelations.

There’s a quality to the silence between our words that feels like the silence in a church after the service ends but before anyone leaves – charged with meaning, heavy with shared understanding. Even the shadows in the corners seem to lean in, listening for whatever comes after the burning.

We sit there, three witnesses to the transformation, letting the eternal whiskey bar hold us in its timeless embrace while outside, the old dreams turn to ash and the new ones begin their wild germination in the fertile darkness of the American night.

“Can I get you boys anything?”

The question hangs in the amber light like an incantation. Gia stands there, devastating in her beauty, a living embodiment of that particularly American tragedy where too much life burns itself out. Her presence bends the light in the bar, creates a gravity well of charisma that even Lynch’s darkness can’t fully absorb.

The realization hits like a thunderclap. She’s been there a moment, just standing, holding an empty tray, and in that brief span before recognition, we see her as she truly was – stripped of legend, of tragedy, of all the mythology that would later consume her. Just a young woman with an aching heart, radiating such intense need for connection that it makes the air around her shimmer.

And now she’s here, in this eternal moment in Jim’s, her beauty not yet a weapon turned against herself, her need for love not yet transmuted into destruction. Just Gia, burning with human warmth, making the rest of the world seem slightly less real by comparison.

The tray trembles slightly in her hand – that small human detail that no fashion shoot would ever allow. It’s the imperfection that makes the perfection heartbreaking, the need that makes the beauty matter.

Lynch shifts slightly, recognizing a kindred spirit in the way she transforms space around her. Crosby’s hands go still on his glass, hearing the music in her silence. The way she stands there – it’s like watching someone pray, except her whole body is the prayer.

“Jameson, neat,” Crosby says softly, looking at her with recognition that transcends ordinary time. Her eyes hold that same wild creative fire he’d seen in Morrison, in Joplin, in all the ones who burned too bright to last.

She moves like a cat, like a poem, like something photography tried to capture but never quite could. Even in this service role, there’s something untameable about her – the same force that made her transform every fashion shoot into something dangerous and true, something that threatened to crack the lens with its intensity.

When she returns with our drinks, her fingers brushing the glasses create small sonic events, like wind chimes in a storm. The air around her smells of clove cigarettes and destiny. She carries her doom like a crown, her creativity like a wound that won’t stop bleeding light.

“I’ve heard of you, Drake,” she whispers. “I wanted to give you something.”

Her kiss tastes of starlight and doom, of magazine covers and back-alley revelations, of every photograph that captured divinity before it vanished. Time stops, stretches, becomes syrup in the amber bar light. In this eternal moment, I understand something about beauty that can’t be said in words – about how it’s always paired with destruction, about how the most spectacular creative forces carry their own annihilation like perfume.

When she pulls away, her eyes hold galaxies. “You understand, don’t you?” she says. “About the images. About what they really are. What they do to us. What we do to them.”

Then the recognition floods in, and time does something strange in Jim’s Whiskey Bar. Because now we’re seeing both at once – the pure, unformed beauty of that Philadelphia girl who contained universes of love, and the doomed priestess of fashion who would become legend. The effect is dizzying, like seeing a photograph develop in reverse.

Her eyes hold that impossible combination of streetwise toughness and absolute vulnerability – the look that made every photograph she touched turn into something dangerous and true. But here, in the bar’s amber light, there’s no camera to guard against, no industry machine to perform for. Just that raw, direct gaze that seems to ask the eternal question: “Will you see me? Really see me?”

She touches my cheek once more, her fingers electric with lost futures and untamed creativity. Then she turns, moving back into the shadows of the bar like a wild creature returning to its natural habitat, leaving behind the taste of prophecy and rebellion on my lips.

“You know,” Lynch says after she glides away, “she understood something about images that Hollywood never did. That beauty isn’t safe. That real erotic power is about transformation, not consumption. She made every frame she appeared in into a rebellion.”

“She recognized you,” Lynch says after a long silence. “One destroyer to another. One who burned the images from the inside, to one who burned them from the outside.”

The whiskey she brought us tastes of prophecy and warning, of beauty that refuses to be tamed, of creativity that would rather burn out than burn down to a manageable flame.