Tag Archives: music

Black Clover #12: Happy Birthday, Shakespeare

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I didn’t have time to watch Black Clover today, but I have been ruminating on it, and on Satellizer, and I have come up with several threads to develop overtime, weaving with the narrative of the show.

I was listening to Garnidelia’s theme song for Freezing, and Apple Music recommended this artist’s music, which I love. Some of her songs are exactly the kind that would annoy me if they were in English, because of the tedium of the lyrics I would be expecting, but I find that listening without understanding the Japanese I can appreciate the sound of the singing, and the translations are very interesting as well. I think the subject matter is much more sophisticated than your average American radio hit, although obviously it’s still pop. This is my favorite. I find it an interesting space for entertainment, the uncertainty about intended meaning and foreign assumptions about the relationship with the audience gives me freedom from the oppressive monotony of overcoded American corpotainment – although I’m not suggesting Japanese entertainers are saints, it’s wonderful not to be able to automatically see through them.

Secondly, I’ve decided to write in detail about my injuries. For instance, my eye was put out of its socket when I was four years old, and I believe that’s one reason I love to spend time browsing in stores and libraries and wandering in museums and malls – my right eye can wander freely without the strain of coordinating with my left. From other head injuries I’ve sustained I have amnesia and difficulty coordinating between my long-term and short-term memory. Because my long-term memory is monitoring one set of perceptions about the story while my short-term memory is monitoring another, it has been uncomfortable to connect them until recently. I’m hoping to develop that ability by blogging about entertainment.

My third observation today was that it’s Shakespeare’s Birthday and one thing I really want to do is develop a way to write about the difference between genuine drama, represented by Shakespeare, and Hollywood garbage. I feel that I can do that by reflecting on the world of anime.

My fourth idea is to develop the world of Boosnobia (Boo – Snobby – ah). Boosnobia is a phrase Satellizer and Angela keep giving me. It’s a Dungeons and Dragons setting of total jerks who reflect all the things I hate about America. This will also precipitate from reflections on Anime.

The fifth idea is to articulate the Synergetic Self/Non-self axis, the blurring of personal boundaries that takes place during the watching of anime, as contrasted with writing blog posts, and consuming other types of entertainment. I’m thinking that by intentionally writing first from one side, and then another, back and forth in succession, I’ll be able to get a feel for exactly where that fault line is. I think this will have some effect on my ability to distinguish between fantasy and reality in spiritual intuitions. And probably it will also reveal some things about the conflict between long-term and short-term memory, although I’m not sure the issues are exactly the same.

The sixth idea came when I listened to “If You Leave” from the Pretty In Pink soundtrack today. I feel like I can find some way to relate all of these observations to my lost 80s. There’s some way I can steer the mood of this blog to the emotional fulfillment of some mood I wanted for my life back then. I was also listening to “Bad To The Bone”, remembering how exhilarating and perfect that song seemed back then, and I know I can use this and other songs, and possibly some AI, to find the style I want.

The seventh thing I wanted to mention is that a gaming store I’ve been visiting since I moved to Chicago seventeen years ago has suddenly closed. It just wasn’t there tonight. That’s pretty amazing. It was one of the place I started my toy collection years ago, and the first place I bought Magic the Gathering cards. I still remember talking to one of the guys who worked there about MTG novels and Star Wars figures. I used to sit on the floor and pore over their racks of 3.75″ figures. The last time I saw him he said they were starting an EDH league and I said maybe later … I still think maybe I should have joined. I miss those days, when collecting toys was new and the dreams I put on them were volatile. I shopped weekly for years, but now my collection is very static and I’m getting rid of a lot of it, piece by piece.

Writing that made me think about the dreams I attach to anime, and that goes back to the Axis. But developing all these ideas is for another night. I can barely believe I wrote this much without being self-conscious at all. I’m definitely bringing my mind into one piece with this.

And finally the eighth idea is that I can somehow develop the story of the Nuunar, my epic fantasy heptalogy, by entwining it with the story of Black Clover. I’m not sure how it can work but it’s worth a try.

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 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.”

The Jazz Odyssey of Drake Marshall, Day 7: Name That Tune

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As the three transformed saints complete their ritual, Lynch touches my elbow with the gentleness of someone handling a rare butterfly. “Time to go,” he says, though his lips move like a film running at the wrong speed. “The next part requires wheels.”

We exit through a side door of the cathedral—though I’m not entirely sure it was a cathedral when we entered it, or if we entered it at all. The door opens onto a street that exists in at least three decades simultaneously, and there, gleaming under streetlights that pulse like distant galaxies, sits the black Porsche 911 SC Cabriolet. It’s 1983, except when it’s not.

“The Lost Highway,” Lynch explains as we slide into leather seats that feel like they’re molded from pure midnight, “isn’t just a road. It’s the space between what America thinks it is and what America dreams it could be.” He turns the key, and the engine speaks in tongues of precision German engineering.

The cathedral recedes in the rearview mirror, becoming smaller or perhaps just more distant in time. The saints we leave behind are still dancing their eternal algorithm, but now their light follows us like a comet trail through the gathering dark.

“Kerouac understood part of it,” Lynch continues, steering us onto a street that might be every street in America. “He knew the road was sacred. But he could only see it from ground level. We’re going to see it from the level of dreams.”

The Porsche moves through the night like a thought moving through the subconscious. We’re searching, Lynch explains, for the places where the American Dream cracked open and let the sacred leak through. For the moments when parking lots become temples, when diners become sites of revelation, when the ordinary transforms into the infinite.

The night spreads out before us like an invitation, like a mystery, like a song about to begin.  The Porsche slides through darkness like black silk through darker silk. Lynch’s hands rest on the wheel at precisely ten and two, though we might be driving through time rather than space. The dashboard glow creates a cave of comfort, a mobile sanctuary where past and present perform their intimate dance

“The Kilimanjaro Device,” Lynch says, his voice harmonizing with the engine’s purr, “isn’t just for hunting Hemingway. It’s for finding the frequencies where truth still broadcasts.” He adjusts the radio dial with movements that seem to bend probability rather than merely change stations.

The song pours through the Porsche’s speakers like liquid light, McGuinn’s twelve-string guitar creating spirals in the air that match the curves of our temporal trajectory. Lynch turns the volume up just enough to let the sound fill the cabin completely, until we’re swimming in it, breathing it.

When David Crosby materializes in the back seat, it feels as natural as dream logic. His presence brings with it the scent of ocean mist and burning sage from another America—one that existed in the spaces between definitions. He’s not the youth from the covers of old albums, nor the sage of later years, but something in between: a quantum superposition of all his selves.

“Listen,” Crosby says from the back seat, his voice mixing with his own younger voice in the recording, creating a strange stereophonic wisdom. “Right there—that moment when the guitar sounds like it’s falling upward, like angels descending but in reverse. We didn’t know it then, but we were building a ladder of sound.”

The song fills the car like a presence, like a visitation, like a reminder of what it felt like when the world first cracked open and showed us what was possible. We drive on through the night, carried by music that sounds like revelation, like memory, like prophecy, like prayer.

“Beauty had to change its disguise,” Crosby continues, watching the night through windows that might be portals to 1966. “We thought we were just making music, but we were really learning how to pray in a new way. Every time that song plays, somewhere, someone is understanding for the first time that transcendence doesn’t have to follow the old maps.”

Lynch steers with one hand now, the other conducting unseen frequencies in the air. “The angels in that song,” he says, “they weren’t the ones from scripture. They were new ones, born from electricity and light shows and consciousness expanding in all directions at once. The kind that could only appear over America in the middle of the twentieth century.”

“The old maps don’t work anymore,” Crosby says, his voice carrying the weight of decades. “The sacred places have gone underground, gone digital, gone sideways into spaces we never expected to find them.”

Lynch nods, taking a turn that seems to bend us through the membrane between realities. “That’s why we needed the saints to come back as influencers,” he replies. “The signal adapts to whatever frequency the people can receive.”

The harmonies swirl around us like aurora borealis trapped in the car’s interior. I can see what they mean—each note a golden thread connecting earth to something higher, something that speaks in the language of pure vibration. The song isn’t just playing; it’s happening, unfolding like a flower made of sound and memory and possibility.

The Porsche glides through a darkness that seems to shimmer now with the same iridescence as the music. Lynch nods slowly, understanding flowing between all of us like an electric current. “The angels are still descending,” he says. “They just use different frequencies now. Sometimes they come through phone screens, sometimes through memory, sometimes through nights like this when the past opens up and shows us its secrets.”

The night outside the car windows begins to crystallize into patterns—sacred geometries that might be stars, might be distant phones lighting up with notifications, might be prayer beads in the hands of medieval pilgrims. All at once, I understand that we’re not just driving through Hollywood or Los Angeles or even America, but through the idea of America, through its dreams and nightmares, its prayers and prophecies.

“The thing about highways,” Crosby muses, “is that they’re all connected. The one that led to Monterey Pop connects to the one that leads to Coachella. Different revelations, same search.” He pauses, watching the signs we pass that seem to be written in a language that only makes sense at night. “People are still looking for that moment when music turns into prayer.”

Lynch takes another turn, and suddenly we’re driving through what might be the 1960s, might be 2025, might be both or neither. “The sacred,” he says, “is like water. It finds new channels when the old ones get blocked. Sometimes it flows through TikTok dances, sometimes through late-night drives, sometimes through conversations that exist in all times at once.”

“That’s why we needed the saints to come back,” Lynch adds softly, almost to himself. “Because beauty keeps finding new forms, and somebody has to help us recognize it, help us remember how to see the angels even when they’re wearing designer clothes and posting on Instagram.”

The song continues its spiral journey through time, through us, through the American night. We’re silent for a moment, letting the interweaving of guitars and voices paint mandalas in the air around us. Each note seems to carry all the possibility that was contained in that moment when music first learned to fly, to shed gravity, to carry human consciousness to places it had never been before.

The Porsche purrs onward, our Kilimanjaro Device carrying us through the American night, searching for the places where old magic still hums beneath new frequencies. In the back seat, Crosby hums a melody that sounds like the future remembering its past, while Lynch navigates by stars that might be pixels, might be prayers, might be both.

We drive on, through the darkness that isn’t darkness, looking for the next sacred broadcast.