Tag Archives: Fiction

2025-03-15 Rewrites

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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

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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 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 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.”

ChatGPT #3: Write 1000 words of fiction about 7 high school students from Chicago who go to a Goth rock show.

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The seven high school students from Chicago had always been outsiders. They were the kind of kids who didn’t quite fit in anywhere, who never felt like they belonged. But they had each other, and that was enough.

One night, they heard about a Goth rock show happening downtown. It was the kind of music that spoke to their souls, the kind of music that understood the darkness within them. So they decided to go, to let go of their inhibitions and embrace the night.

They arrived at the club, dressed in black and eyeliner, ready to lose themselves in the music. The air was thick with smoke and the smell of alcohol, and the sound of pounding drums and screaming guitars filled their ears. They felt alive, like they had finally found a place where they belonged.

As the night wore on, they began to make friends with other Goth kids who were there. They danced together, lost in the music and the energy of the crowd. They talked about their favorite bands, their favorite books, and the darkness that lurked within their hearts.

But then something strange happened. A group of jocks from their high school showed up, looking for trouble. They saw the Goth kids and started taunting them, calling them freaks and losers. The seven friends felt their stomachs clench with fear. They had always known that they were different, but they had never faced this kind of aggression before.

The jocks started to push their way through the crowd, getting closer and closer to the seven friends. They felt trapped, like they couldn’t escape. But then, something unexpected happened. One of the other Goth kids stepped forward and started shouting back at the jocks. He was tall and skinny, with jet black hair and a leather jacket. He looked like he belonged in a different world than the seven friends.

But then he turned to them and said, “You guys came here to escape the bullshit of the real world, right? Well, let’s not let those assholes ruin our night. Let’s show them that we’re not afraid.”

The seven friends looked at each other, and then back at the Goth kid. They felt a surge of courage and determination. They weren’t going to let the jocks ruin their night. They were going to stand up for themselves and for each other.

They started dancing again, more fiercely than before. The Goth kid joined them, his movements wild and free. The jocks tried to get closer, but they couldn’t break through the wall of bodies. They were outnumbered, outmatched.

And then the music stopped, and the lights came up. The seven friends looked around, disoriented. They had lost track of time, lost track of themselves. But then they saw the Goth kid, smiling at them.

“Hey, I’m Tyler,” he said, holding out his hand.

The seven friends introduced themselves, feeling a sense of camaraderie that they had never felt before. They had faced a challenge together, and they had come out on the other side stronger.

As they left the club and walked back to their cars, they felt like they were walking on air. They had found something new, something powerful. They had found a community of people who understood them, who accepted them for who they were.

And as they drove home, the music still ringing in their ears, they knew that they would never forget this night. They had found something that they had been searching for all their lives: a sense of belonging, a sense of purpose, a sense of hope.

On the Phone With Alvin

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3 am, the phone rings, Drake picks up.

Alvin: Do you love me or not?

Drake: Where the fuck are you?

Alvin: Do you have any idea what I gave you by introducing you to Graylyn?

Graylyn (on the other line): Alvin, who are you with? Are you safe?

Alvin (crying): You don’t get it! You just don’t fucking get it!

Drake: Alvin, you tell me exactly where you are right now. I’m coming to get you.

Alvin: I don’t know. It’s a house, I think. I’m in the living room or the basement. Everyone’s making out.

Drake: How did you get there?

Alvin: I don’t remember.

Graylyn: What do you remember? Chuck, get ready to go.

Alvin: I was getting ready for the show. We were putting on makeup.

Drake: God damn it, that was five hours ago.

Alvin: What happened?

Drake: You showed up late. You tried to fuck everyone, and then you started screaming “I just want love!” You ran out into the street and no one could find you. Were you at the show?”

The Dirty Gang #4

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John was working away at the door and at last with a wrenching shriek of metal he flung it open — and a breeze so hard it was almost a wind blew their torches out.  Theybha screamed and Jason put his arms around her.

“Damn!” said John, jumping back a foot, holding up his doused torch defensively, but nothing came forth from the darkness but the strong breeze.

“Oh, crap, what are we going to do here in the dark?” asked They.

“I hear water running in here.” said John, feeling his way into the room.  “It’s not that big.”

“Watch out for spiders!”

“You know what?  I need a rest.” said Jason, deciding to sit down where he was.  Thay sat down beside him and snuggled under his arm.  “We’ll see the torches when those two catch up with us.”

“I’m tired too,” said Beth, closing her eyes.  “It’s got to be after midnight.  We should just sleep.”

“There was some stuff back in the storerooms.” said John from inside the room.  “And there’s a stream running in here!  You can drink from it.”

“Well, thank god for that,” said Beth, dreamily.

“This is overwhelming.” said Jason.  “Nothing ever happens to us and then suddenly this.  It’s crazy, it’s just like a story or something.”

“Mmm.  We’re going to be rich.” said Beth happily.

John returned and sat down beside them.  “Yeah, even if the grownups find this and take it over, we can get a ton of that stuff from the storerooms out of here before they do.  I guess we could sell some of it in Verbobonc, but I want to see if we can get horses or something, go even farther.  I want to see the Kingdom of Furyondy, and Newhon.”

“Well I never believed Newhon was anything but a legend but at least you’ll get to find out.” said Beth.

“It’s amazing how it can all change in a day.” said John.

“We deserve it, for putting up with this crummy town our whole lives.”  said Beth.

“But we’ll share it all, five equal parts.”

“Of course,” said Jason.  “All for one and one for all.  Just like the stories.”

“I know I feel that way.  I shouldn’t have to say it but it’s a big change.  We’ll have to make decisions, decide who gets what and where we’re going to go.”

“I want to stay together.” said Beth. “I don’t trust you not to get killed, anyway.”

“Me or Jason?” asked John.

“Either of you, but mostly you.” replied Beth.

“It would be stupid to separate now,” said Jason.  “I mean, I’ve thought about striking out on my own, but we found all this money together and why would I want to go off and find some other people to be around.”

“You’re right,” said John.  “It’s best really, to stay together.  But I really really want to see the world, you know?”

“All in good time, my friend,” said Jason.

“And we are friends,” said John, “Friends to the end.”

Whee!

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Whee!  I’m writing again.  It’s very frightening because there is so much information on the web, and so much of it carrries a negative, fraudulent psychic wavelength with it . . . i don’t want to add to this emotional chaos.  But the world is ending anyway and also it’s a matter of slogging away, practicing for years with tedious crap like this until someday I write the Great Post-American novel.

My guru says there may actually be a big apocalyptic meltdown of civilization.  Now I don’t know ANY contemporary spiritual figure who doesn’t think this is possible.  It’s such a contradiction — everyone says the key to happiness is abundance and tranquility, but they also expect the Apocalypse any day now.  hardly anyone thinks humanity is worth saving anymore — except for fundamentalists who are gearing up to kill us all or imprison and torture us for supporting terrorism.  

I was just thinking the other day about those bogus “orange” alerts the government used to issue all the time, how they herded everyone like cattle to the 2nd Iraq war, and how that dumb “war” is still going on over there . . . on the other hand i was looking at photography books at Barnes and Noble — there’s a big one out called “aftermath” which is all images of NYC after 9-11.  the magnitude of it is staggering.  

i’m afraid of humanity.  i’m afraid because there are terrorist among us and there are fascists running a government with unlimited technological power to monitor and oppress.  the orwellian nightmare is here and i’m glad i’m 38 so i won’t have to see too much more of the future.  

i don’t trust human beings.  the “american experiment” is over and the results are in — we cannot govern ourselves collectively and furthermore we have proven ourselves unworthy of our freedoms.  

on my mind now is a novel about a writer who wants to write himself to death, somehow magically shift his energy on a quantum level into a higher plane because he’s sick of this world and human beings don’t have enough dignity or conscience anymore to make interesting characters . . . it would be a true story . . .