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.”