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.

The Jazz Odyssey of Drake Marshall: Day 13 (353 Days To Go)

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Captain’s Log 2025.02.09.1225

I’m counting down days just like Star Blazers. There are things about my life that have never felt better, wild success is within my grasp, but at the same time there’s also the dark horror of wondering what it is about my life that I forgot. What were the experiences I had that I lost because my father knocked me unconscious so often.

I have a lot of the scene I’m on in the story planned but I’m having trouble getting language across the barrier of my memory.

Over the last several months I’ve gotten better. I’m in the zone now, where I feel amazing potential of storytelling. Whatever force or damage that has kept me from connecting the parts of my mind is being healed now. It’s like there’s a part of myself that’s aware and has ideas, and then there’s the person I am in the world, and when I try to act on the ideas it has some kind of strange … well, it’s a dark presence.

My long-term and short-term memory don’t work together very well, but I am using my blog now to bridge the gap … stories are evidence to one part of my mind that the other exists and it makes me uncomfortable because I can’t contain the vastness that I feel. David Lynch is somehow helping me do this, whether it’s the ghost of David Lynch or simply the thought of him in my fantasy world.

Who was the Angel Picard, this being I saw for so many years? Was it William Golding, was it David Lynch? Was it Jesus? Who am I writing for?

I felt a dark presence today that was very comforting because I was convinced it was real, but now I’m tracing details inside my mind to see what it is that’s supposed to happen when I write … I made a YouTube video about some of my coincidences.

I was at a restaurant I’ve been going to for years. When I gave my usual order, suddenly “Avocado Shake” popped up on the screen. Either it’s a synchronicity or the guy at the counter has been watching me. Either way, Lynch is getting stronger in my imagination and we’re pressing on to see the Avocado Girl on January 28, 2026.

The Jazz Odyssey of Drake Marshall, Day 8: The Alabama Song

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We leave the Porsche cooling in the sacred static of the drive-in, its black paint now seemingly absorbed into the night itself. The gravel crunches beneath our feet like percussion, keeping time with Crosby’s humming, which has shifted from “Eight Miles High” to something darker, more Weimar.

“Oh, show us the way to the next whiskey bar,” Crosby sings softly, his voice carrying both Morrison’s shamanic growl and Lenya’s Weimar world-weariness. “Oh, don’t ask why…”

“The drive-in was where twentieth-century Americans went to be alone together in the dark,” he explains between verses. “But bars… bars are eternal. They’re where we go to find the sacred in our dissolution, to practice the ritual of collective forgetting that somehow leads to remembering.”

We walk through the American night, a darkness so rich it feels like crushed velvet against our skin. The air has that particular autumn electricity – dry leaves scuttle across the gravel road, carrying messages in a language older than speech. Each step crunches with prehistoric precision, like we’re keeping time with some vast cosmic metronome.

Lynch walks slightly ahead, his silhouette seeming to absorb and emit darkness simultaneously. “Jim’s Whiskey Bar exists in every city,” he says, “and no city. It’s where Morrison met Brecht in the American night. Where Instagram mystics drink with factory workers. Where angels disguise themselves as bartenders to hear our confessions.”

Then Lynch stops. His silhouette becomes absolutely still in that way that makes you stop too, makes you hold your breath. We all feel it – something calling us to witness.

We turn.

The horizon is wearing a crown of fire.

The gravel crunches beneath our feet as we pause to watch the distant flames. Even here, we can feel the heat of transformation.

At first, it’s just beautiful – terrible and gorgeous the way only American destruction can be. The flames paint the belly of the clouds orange and crimson, creating a false dawn in the wrong direction. Sparks rise like inverted stars, joining their cousins in the night sky until you can’t tell which lights are falling and which are fixed in heaven.

The night itself feels alive around us – breathing, watching, participating. Power lines hum with secret frequencies. Moths dance in complicated patterns around the street lights. Everything seems connected to everything else, like we’ve stumbled into the nervous system of the continent itself.

The smoke carries the smell of burnt celluloid, of abandoned soundstages, of every dream that was too wild to be captured, of every story that refused to be contained. It smells like freedom and terror, like endings and beginnings too vast to comprehend.

That’s when Crosby says it, his voice carrying both awe and recognition: “Hollywood’s burning.”

The words land like a revelation. Of course. What else could it be? What else has enough concentrated dream-stuff to burn with such archetypal fury? The hills that once held the HOLLYWOOD sign are now holding something else – a pyre for the twentieth century’s dream factory, a viking funeral for celluloid visions.

Lynch’s voice cuts through the autumn air, which carries woodsmoke and something deeper – the scent of endings becoming beginnings. He gestures toward the distant glow where Hollywood burns.

“You had to do it,” he says. “Not because you wanted to, but because the role found you. Like Morrison with his Unknown Soldier, like Crosby with his harmonics that opened the sky – sometimes the cosmos hands you a script you didn’t ask for.”

“But understanding why – that’s your next role,” Lynch continues. “The destroyer has to become the witness. Has to testify about what needed to fall so something else could rise.”

“The old dream factory had to burn,” Crosby adds softly. “So the dreams could go free. Return to the people. That’s what we were trying to tell them in ’67, but they turned it into product. Had to burn eventually.”

Crosby hums a few notes that seem to harmonize with the crackling of the distant fire. “Every revolution needs its singers and its fire-starters. Sometimes they’re the same person.”

We stand there in the ancient-young darkness of the American night, watching an empire of dreams return to raw light and shadow. The gravel beneath our feet feels solid but temporary, like everything else except the night itself, except the burning, except this moment of witnessing.

Lynch lights another cigarette, the flame momentarily rivaling the distant inferno. “Here’s what they never understood – Hollywood wasn’t the dream. It was just one way of dreaming. Now the dreams are distributed, decentralized. Every phone a projector, every user a studio.”

Lynch’s cigarette ember pulses in rhythm with the distant flames. Crosby’s breath carries the ghost of a harmony. And the night wraps around us like a living thing, holding us in place until we’ve seen enough to remember forever, until we understand that we’re not just watching Hollywood burn – we’re watching the old ways of dreaming transform into something else, something that needs this fire to be born.

The fire reflects in our eyes as we finally turn away, resuming our walk toward Jim’s Whiskey Bar, carrying the vision with us like a torch, like a secret, like a map to whatever comes after the burning.

The cosmos continues unfolding its strange script around us, each step an acceptance of roles we never auditioned for but somehow were born to play.

The street we’re walking seems to fold in on itself, origami-like, until we’re approaching a neon sign that reads “JIM’S” in letters that throb like a migraine halo. Below it, smaller letters spell out “WHISKEY BAR” in a font that might be Helvetica or might be ancient runic script, depending on how you squint.

“Oh, moon of Alabama,” Crosby intones, and now the song is casting its spell, transforming our walk into a procession. “We now must say goodbye…”

“In the twentieth century,” Lynch says, reaching for the door handle, “we needed big screens to share our dreams. Now we carry little screens everywhere, but we still need physical spaces to make the virtual visceral. To let the digital divine take flesh.”

The door opens onto another kind of sacred darkness, where the glow of phone screens replaces the stars we’ve left behind, and every face is illuminated from below like a renaissance painting of revelation. Inside, the eternal ritual awaits, ready to transform us once again.

“We must die…” Crosby finishes the verse, but the words sound less like defeat and more like a prescription for transcendence as we cross the threshold into Jim’s eternal night.

“I have unfinished business with Morrison,” says Crosby. “I never liked him that much, but now I realize that he did something necessary in that time, acting out the sacrifice of the Unknown Soldier. He had a piece of the puzzle I missed.”

Inside Jim’s, Crosby’s words hang in the amber light like smoke finding its level. He settles onto a barstool that might have existed since the first bars opened in Mesopotamia, his presence somehow both substantial and gossamer.

“Morrison understood something about the theater of it all,” he continues, gesturing at the bartender for whiskey. “While we were trying to elevate consciousness, he was down in the mud of the collective unconscious, wrestling with older gods. I thought we could transcend straight to the light. He knew we had to go through the darkness first.”

Lynch nods, studying the way the bottles behind the bar catch and fracture the light. “The Unknown Soldier,” he says. “That’s exactly it. Every empire needs its beautiful corpse, its sacrificial king. Morrison volunteered for the role. Played it to the hilt.”

“We were all working different parts of the same mystery,” Crosby reflects, as three glasses appear before us. “We had the harmonies, the mathematical precision of voicings that could open the doors of perception. But Jim… Jim had the chaos magic, the dionysian current. He understood that some doors can only be broken down.”

The whiskey in our glasses looks less like liquid than like concentrated time, distilled memory.

“I see it clearer now,” Crosby says, his voice carrying both resignation and revelation. “We needed both approaches. The precise and the raw. The angelic and the chthonic. The Byrds flying high, and Morrison crawling in the ancient mud. The new saints understand this – they’re integrating both streams.”

He lifts his glass, studying it like a crystal ball. “Morrison was reading Nietzsche, doing his dark-prophet act, while we were reading the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But maybe they were the same book all along, just translated differently. The Unknown Soldier and the Bodhisattva – two ways of describing the necessary sacrifice.”

The bar seems to pulse around us like a living thing, like the heart of something vast and ancient that keeps time for all the rituals of night.

“I owe him an apology,” Crosby says finally. “Somewhere in the great beyond. He held the line I was too pure to hold. Kept a door open that needed to stay open, even if it led down instead of up.”