Read: Part 1

The boys expected to find the hospital in chaos, with nurses and doctors rushing frantically around Grady. Instead, they walked into sterile white indifference. Grady, pale but otherwise looking the same as always, smiled at them from his bed.

Grady’s mother was there too, her enormous girth swallowing the chair beneath her as she held her son’s hand. She turned to smile at the boys, tears glimmering in her eyes.

“I knew you’d be here,” she said. “Such good friends.”

The boys squirmed, awkwardly picking at their clothes or running hands through their hair. Compliments were foreign…

12:05 AM, January 1, 1967.
Lower Haight neighborhood, San Francisco, California.

The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” emanates from a dilapidated house on an otherwise quiet street. The house’s windows glow with soft orange light. Darkness bathes the front porch. A match flame pops into life and illuminates the face of a prostitute named Sunshine as she lights a cigarette while standing on the porch steps.

Sunshine takes a drag, arches her back against the railing and exhales languidly into the night air. She can see herself perfectly in her mind’s eye, the way the curves of her body silhouette against…

February 9, 1967
Somewhere in the Mojave Desert, California

“Welcome to the chessboard, Agent Rose,” a tinny metallic voice said through the telephone. “Initiation configured.”

The last part of the statement confused Rose, but then again so too did the whole situation. In the space of less than an hour he’d had his partner draw a gun on him before telling him he had to leave behind his old life, walk to a payphone in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and do whatever the person on the phone said to do.

None of it made much sense, so why…

Two men in crisp black suits parked their Ford Fairlane on the shoulder of the service road and walked into the desert. The sun directly overhead cast few shadows either from the men or from the creosote and mesquite surrounding them. Dead wind hung over the Earth. Vultures like pinwheels in the sky.

“This whole thing is getting bad,” Agent Alex Rose said. He was the younger of the two men, black-haired, middling-height but thick and powerfully built.

“You have no idea,” Agent Raymond Albright replied. Older, sandy brown hair greying at the sides, tall and lean with an upper…

Okay, this is a weird hypothesis — but aren’t all the best hypotheses?

“Man in the Long Back Coat” is one of my favorite songs. It’s also unique in Dylan’s catalog. This uniqueness comes largely from the sound created by Daniel Lanois’ production, but lyrically the song is dark in a way that no other Dylan song is. At least, no other Dylan song I can think of.

People don’t live or die, people just float
— Bob Dylan, “Man in the Long Black Coat”

I stumbled upon my interpretation of the song quite accidentally.

I was reading Sinister Forces…

I like people that don’t fit neatly into any tribe. Even more than that, I like people that don’t fit into any tribe at all. So it was that I found myself interested in the work of one Fullmetal Magdalene: crypto anarchist, gnostic seeker, free thinker, and artist.

Her art combines crypto currency, the occult, esoterica, spirituality, comic book/manga culture, Gnostic Christianity, music, sex, and other things that I can’t name because I can’t identify. The sexual aspect is important to her work and is part of her personal artist statement.

The sexuality in her art is shameless, philosophical, exploitative…

Read: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12

Grady lay in bed with the window open next to him so that he could hear the laughter of the audience, the good-humored heckles, and the cheers. Only after these sounds faded did he finally take the pain meds.

He let the relief sink in as he watched a half moon burning over silhouetted treetops. Crickets chirped at the wood’s edge and the faint scent of smoldering cedar wafted in on every breeze. …