[Author’s Note: this Blog Post was heavily changed and repurposed to function as a chapter in the TMR Novel. This is the Revised & Refined version. Toggle under the title to read the Original & Unedited form.]
What is Possible? What was Possible, what stopped being Possible, what might yet be? This blog has come a long way in the 8 months since I started writing it, but I fear it’s come to the End Times. I’m not sure what that means, anymore, though. I used to think The End™ meant something like it did in movies. Roll Credits! However…
— The Story™ in a movie doesn’t end when the credits do —
Think about it for a sec.
Finally watched Barbarian, so I’ll use that as an example. Right after [SPOILER] [SPOILERS] The [SPOILER], we cut to Written & Directed by Zach Cregger1. The movie is over. But… the characters live on (well, some of them). Duh! I mean, what, does the world just end, then and there, too? Just because the movie did? Do the characters not go home that night, do they not age, do they not tell the Story™ we just watched to their children someday? Do they do it as the credits roll? Are they aware? Why does the movie only show the part that’s the Story™? What happens after the Story™? Does the world really just end?
I always used to find movie plots so convenient. Oh Of Course The Bank Robbery Alien Invasion And Zombie Virus Outbreak Happens Right In Front Of The Person The Camera Is Following, I’d say. How Obvious. In my mind, it was all so contrived. Why didn’t we show the characters on more boring days? Wouldn’t that be more Realistic™? Why do we only show the most interesting days of their life as part of the Story™?
It took a while to realize the kind of Chicken-and-Egg argument I had created. Maybe the answer is that the camera is only on these people precisely because this day was the most interesting day of their lives. I think I avoided this conclusion because the idea was existentially terrifying. Not Every Character Gets The Camera Pointed At Them. If they are lucky enough to have the camera on them at all, they only have its attention for ~1-2 hours2. But this raises the question— why would you want to be the Main Character™ of a Story™? How many horrors and tragedies befall our protagonists? The Featured Extras and Background Actors get their seconds of screen time and exit unharmed3. Because if they were to be harmed in any substantial way, they would become a Main Character™. Congrats! One has to ask— Is Having Your Name Above The Line A Fair Trade For The Turmoil That The Main Characters™ Face?
— To the heart of the question —
Is it Possible to recover from chronic Main Character™ Syndrome?
As a precocious kid, before I knew anything else, I knew I was a Main Character™ of… well, something. My own Story™, to be sure. But I was also convinced I was a key player in some grander, bigger Story™. I wasn’t The Main Character™ of The Big Story™ — I was proud of my humility, here — but I knew I had some destiny that was directly intertwined with the Fate™ of mankind. I was inevitable. I was meant for the world.
I wanted to be an artist, and so I was destined for it. I had a gift, and it was my Divine Gift. The twists and turns of life were designed to test my commitment to the Story™. Wheresoever I strayed, I was met with a personalized syncretic punishment. Failures were Stabs At The Liver and deaths were Divine Judgments and global pandemics were Karmic Irony. But I would not waver. I would not lose faith. I would never, ever, let anything get in the way of the Story™.
— Let’s translate this into reality —
I’m starting to make myself sick.
I went to college, and almost gave up Doing Music. When The Old Band broke up, I almost gave up again. After “Happy, Healthy, Well-Adjusted” went viral and Jevandre died, I was bone-tired. I couldn’t hold on. When Codename: Didi came along, I ran into her arms. I wanted out of the Story™. When we broke up, I wanted the Story™ again, but I couldn’t find it.
I grew True Modern Romance out of the seeds of our wake. In zero-sum Story™ logic, one-in-one-out would have meant the music would have blown up immediately, massively and proportionally to the enormity of our demise.
No. Nothing.
None of the singles has had any response. People aren’t connecting with the Codename: TMR Show. Codename: Max Noir is a laughing stock. Was this project cursed, born not from life but from death? Was the Story™ over, or was this just more Cruel Kismet? None of this makes any sense without the Story™. But if the Story™ is the Truth, then the author is laughing at me, mocking me, telling me—
Yes. You Are Right— You Have Always Been Right. You Are The Best In The World At What You Do. But You Are Out Of Chances. I Gave You This Divine Gift As A Child But You Forsook It. I Favored You Above All Others But You Have Been Unfaithful. At Each Chance To Redeem Yourself You Failed. I Gave You One More Test. I Gave You Love— And I Said Leave Love Behind And I Will Give You Success. But You Didn’t Kill Love. You Let Love Die. You Failed. And Now You Are Left With Nothing.
All this, He says to me, in my dreams, before I sleep, when I wake up, and in my dreams again.
— Still reading the Book Of Max? Jeez —
Time to blow it all up.
Yeah, fuck that and Fuck You. I refuse to believe I live in a Story™ ruled by this^ malignant, spiteful God. No: god. I’mma lowercase that guy. If there is an uppercase God, he’s not whoever I’ve been hearing in my nightmares for the last 10 years. I was going to take matters into my own hands.
Friday was 8/8/25, the Lion’s Gate Portal Opened. From what my Witchy friends told me, the Lion’s Gate was a day of release, manifestation, alignment. I’m not sure what that even means, necessarily, but I had decided it was going to be the day my Everything Changed again at all costs.
I turned my phone off, along with my logical brain, and acted purely on Spiritual Intuition. Where there’s chaos, there’s Magic, right? I was fucking terrified. I self-destructed a bit before. Stayed awake until 8AM. Smoked countless cigarettes. Ignored texts from friends and calls from Mom & Dad. I took out a personal loan to cover my rent through January4. I cleaned out my entire loft. I got rid of 25% of my possessions in a manic, sweaty frenzy and did some classic Psychotic Shit I’m wont to do. I stared at myself in the mirror for ~10 minutes. I did my own David Goggins-esque accountability routine where I sat in the shower and shaved every square inch of my body5 . I grabbed Four Worldly Attachments, each representing a major pressure point in my life.
1 Object for The Old Band— a flyer I kept from a show we played in Arizona.
1 Object for Jevandre’s death— the last unwritten page from a journal he bought me.
1 Object for “Happy, Healthy”— a letter from Netflix6 congratulating me for the song.
1 Object for Codename: Didi— a list she made of all the reasons why she loved me.
I turned all the lights off and got Real Witchy With It.
On each Object, I wrote what it was about each of these Forces that I wanted to release. And 1 by 1… in a large stainless steel pot in front of a dark mirror, I looked myself in the eyes and burned them.
— Bloody Mary be damned —
I feel like a fucking crazy person.
When everything had burned, I said— Hey God You Up There? It’s Me Max. I’m Going To Brute Force A Win Now. I played the Finesser’s Gambit against The Algorithm™, wagering that I could collapse the wave function of Schrödinger’s content series in my favor. True Modern Romance would blow up, and AWAL would pick up the option for Codename: EP3, and they’d give me my advance, and I could pay back my loan, and everything would end up okay. It was a Hail Mary, and it all needs to go in exactly the right order.
It’s one thing to notice Fate™ and Coincidence and synchronicity and kismet, and it’s another thing to try to induce it yourself. But that’s Manifestation, right? The Secret? Witchy People believe in these things. Godly People do, too. When they say, “It’s all in God’s plan,” it’s the same thing as the Worldly People saying, “Everything happens for a reason.”
The Crazy People like me say, What If You Could Pick The Reason? Why should I only get to know the Reason in retrospect? Is that not just manufacturing Meaning post facto to rationalize the meaningless tangled mess of reality? Is that not just telling yourself a Story™?
Well, universe, God, god, Algorithm™, Campbell, Camus, Melville, Mosby, Plato, Prometheus, fucking Dr. David— either there is a Story™, or there is not. I think this time, it really is that Black & White.
True Modern Romance next Friday
—mbk
What is possible? What was possible, what stopped being possible, what might yet be? This blog has came a long way in the year since I’ve started writing it, but I fear it’s come to the End Times. I’m not sure what that means, anymore, though. I used to think The End™ meant something like it did in movies. Roll credits! However…
***The story in a movie doesn’t end when the credits do***
Think about it for a sec.
Just watched Barbarian so I’ll use that as an example. Right after [REDACTED] [REDACTED}s The [REDACTED}, we cut to Zach Cregger1. The movie is over. But… the characters live on (well, some of them). Duh! I mean, what, does the world just end, then and there, too? Just because the movie did? Do the characters not go home that night, do they not age, do they not tell the Story We Just Watched™ to their children someday? Do they do it as the credits roll? Are they aware? Why does the movie only show the part that’s the story? What happens after the story? Does the world really just end?
I always used to find movie plots so contrived. “Oh, of course the bank robbery, alien invasion and zombie virus outbreak happens right in front of the person the camera is following,” I’d say. “How obvious.” In my mind, it was all so predictable. Why didn’t we show the characters on more boring days? Wouldn’t that be more realistic? Why do we only show the most interesting days of their life as part of the story?
It took a while to realize the kind of Chicken-and-Egg situation I had created. Well, maybe the camera is only on these people precisely because this day was the most interesting day of their life. I think I avoided this realization because I found this idea existentially terrifying. Obviously not every character gets the camera on them. And if they are lucky enough to have them on them at all, they only get it on them for ~1-2 hours2. But this raises the question— is the Main Character of a story even lucky at all? How many horrors and tragedies befall our protagonists? The Featured Extras and Background get their seconds of screen time and exit usually unharmed. Because if they were to be harmed in any substantial way, they would become a Main Character. Congrats! But one has to ask— is having your name Above the Line a fair trade for the turmoil that the Main Characters face?
***Alright, alright, I’ll say it loud and clear***
I’m definitely a prime candidate for Main Character Syndrome™ of the year over here.
As a precocious kid, before I knew anything else, I knew I was a Main Character of… well, something. My own story, to be sure. I was destined to be a big, famous Artist. But I was also convinced I was a key player in some Grand, Giant Story. I wasn’t The Main Character™— even I wasn’t that arrogant— but I knew I had some destiny that was directly intertwined with the fate of mankind. I didn’t necessarily do anything about it. I just strutted my stuff, walking around the little town I grew up in with disdain. I was meant for bigger and better things.
***But all along, a little voice said***
“This is All True but… just in case, let’s play it safe.”
Yes, I wanted to be an Artist. This was my Divine Gift, the thing that justified making me a Main Character. But I wanted to do well in school too, in case that didn’t pan out. But, oh no, I couldn’t just be good at school— that’d make me a nerd. No, I had to try being popular, too, throwing parties and having friends. Maybe that’d make me cool. Maybe. Just in case, I had to date the fucking prom queen.
This Rube Goldberg machine of distractions— and I knew they were distractions then— took me further and further from my Divine Gift. All the while I was chasing these other things, I knew I had my Art waiting for me, whenever I decided to give it attention. I was never wrong. I’d live a little, laugh a little, love a little. And each time, I’d return to my guitar, better than I was the last time! I got cocky. This is easy. I smooth-sailed my way through squandering my Gift all the way through college. But then I looked a career in finance right in the eye and said… Fuck You. So after college, and years of procrastinating my destiny, I decided enough was enough. Time to go all in on music, finally. Finally. And although I had delayed it, I was not going to compromise. Oh no, I was going to do it exactly My Way, word to Sinatra. This meant moving to LA with my best childhood friends. And by fucking Jove, against all odds, we made it happen. We were going to do the thing. Go to LA, make music, play shows, go to wild parties, meet celebrities, become famous, whatever. And so we signed our lease.
***Start date:***
March 2020.
Covid killed any chance of my dream panning out. By November, every member of The Band had went back home, save for Clev3. We never even got to play a show. We didn’t even get to meet anyone new. We were in LA, but it wasn’t the LA I dreamed of. A Monkey’s Paw. An asymptotic world line. I, in my raised-Catholic guilt and myopic egotism, immediately understood this to be some esoteric mixture of divine judgment and karmic irony. Yes— there was no way around it— I was being punished for forsaking the Gift. If only I had went to LA instead of going to college… I just had to do the safe thing. I was a hypocrite. I thought I was divinely fated, but I doubted God himself. If I really knew God Got Me™, what was I so afraid of? My only interpretation, in my hubris, was that Covid was my own personal punishment for doubting the Destiny God had given me. It was a punishment, sure, but the timing was so kismet that I rationalized it like— well, at least I’m still part of the Big Story. So I vowed— never again. No more distractions. I would move forward towards my goal, at all costs. I would never even get a job again. I would never, ever, let anything get in the way.
***And yet…***
If you’d read the blog before, you’d know this is where I start going Job-wing-Sisyphus.
I’ll give you the SparkNotes version. Next, I start actually getting good at making music. I get a huge lucky break— “Happy, Healthy” goes viral. Same day, my best friend dies. I was distraught and scrambled, lost my way in the grief. I couldn’t help but see the parallels to moving to LA the same day Covid starts. But I was getting wiser, humbler, and knew even then how ugly and fallacious it was to make Jevandre’s death about me and my dreams. But I couldn’t help it. Was this more Cruel Kismet? I was bone-tired. The summer of “Happy, Healthy” was hanging over my head, like a cloud I couldn’t escape. When winter finally came, I ran into the arms of Codename: Didi— who, if you know anything of the story, was another 1-in-a-million chance encounter. And what do you know, we fell in love. But this started to get at odds with my career. I couldn’t be both a Family Man™ and Chasing My Dreams™ with the ferocity I needed to. It was yet another giant, lucky break with a huge cost. But this one I knew was special… so I stuck around for 3 years. I think, in my head, I knew it would never last. Music was on the backburner, but just like before, I knew it’d be waiting for me. So when that relationship ended, I ran full force back into my career. Made the breakup album, True Modern Romance. I put my heart and soul into it, put everything on the line. I am almost $70,000 in personal debt. I have 3 months left of rent before I run out of money. I needed the breakup album to blow up, so I could re-sign my deal and start to pay everything off. And… nothing.
Like fucking Clockwork, the second I need it most, my social media stops responding. Nothing is going viral. So I pick up content production. I start making better content. I fall in love with making content, even. I fall back in love with making music, making fans. And still, nothing. Numbers dwindling… I made a giant bet on myself that I could make this work. And I feel as if a dark, cruel God is laughing at me, mocking me, telling me— “**Yes, You Are Right— You Are The Best In The World At What You Do. But You Are Out Of Chances. I Gave You This Gift As A Child, But You Forsook It. I Gave You A Lucky Break With “Happy, Healthy” As A Chance To Redeem Yourself, Along With A Test— You Must Not Waver, Even In The Face Of Personal Tragedy. But You Failed. I Gave You One More Chance. I Gave You Love— And I Said, Leave The Love Behind, And I Will Give You The Success. But You Didn’t. You Waited For Her To Leave. And Now, You Are Left With Nothing.**” All this, He says to me, in my dreams, before I sleep, when I wake up and in my dreams again.
***Fucking Max 3:16, right? Jeez***
It’s getting pretty difficult not to listen.
Yeah, fuck that and Fuck You. I refuse to believe we live in a world reigned by this^ malignant, spiteful God. No: god. I’mma lowercase that guy. No, if there is a God, and I don’t doubt that there is, He is abundant and conspiring with the universe to make dope shit happen all the time, if you’re Open to it. And I have not been Open to it. I’ve been Closed like a motherfucker, and completely missed that for the last five years, I have actually embarked on my own epic quest— and, thanks to my sheltered suburban upbringing— actually experienced hardships for the first time in my life. And like the Main Character asshole I am, I interpreted all of these events to be catalysts in my own story. But I release all that.
Friday was 8/8, the Lion’s Gate Portal Opened, and I’m not sure what that even means necessarily but I had hyped the day up for so long without even knowing its astrological significance. I knew it was going to be the day I posted the first 1st TMR Promo Short. I told myself, for weeks now, that Friday 8/8 was going to be the day that my life changed. I was fucking terrified. I self destructed a bit before. Stayed awake until 8AM. Smoked countless cigarettes. Ignored texts. Didn’t call my parents. And then when the day came, and I posted the Short…
***What happened?***
Aren’t you listening? Nothing.
No immediate blowup. No changing my life with the velocity that “Happy, Healthy” did. I spiraled. Led me to that fucking ramble you read up there^. I went fucking crazy. It was the Lion’s Gate. The day of release, manifestation, alignment. A powerful day. I turned my phone off, and my logical brain, and acted purely on Spiritual Intuition™. I cleaned out my entire loft. I got rid of 25% of my possessions in a manic, sweaty frenzy. I did my own variation of a David Goggins-esque accountability routine where I sit in the shower and shave every square inch of my body4. I grabbed an Irreplaceable Object™ of each of these pressure points in my life. 1 Object representing The Band. 1 Object representing Jevandre’s death. 1 Object representing “Happy, Healthy.” And 1 Object representing Codename: Didi. I turned all the lights off and got Real Witchy. On each object, I wrote what it was about each of these objects that I wanted to release. And 1 by 1… in a large stainless steel pot in front of a dark mirror, I looked myself in the eyes and burned them.
***Bloody Mary be damned***
Yeah, I’m a fucking crazy person.
The second I notice myself getting into a pity party like you read up there^, I gotta do something drastic. And you know what I noticed? 5 fucking years of pity party. 5 years of lucky breaks and epic stories and— yes— tragedies and heartbreaks and failures, some of which have accumulated too much baggage. I had to go nuclear. I don’t know if any of my little magic spell did anything, but I choose to believe it did. And I also said my Our Fathers and Hail Marys like a good lapsed Catholic because not only do I like to mix my metaphors, I like to mix my spiritualities. And I said— Hey, God, you up there? I’m going to brute force a win. Because I know— and I’ve always known— that You Got Me™.
For a few years, I started thinking— this type of magic only works in the periphery. I’ve never really let myself have true Faith, and yet— things kept Happening for me. My logical conclusion was— “What does God have to prove to his loyalists? Does he only want to prove his doubters wrong?” But I hate this. I refuse to believe it. That died in my little bonfire on Friday. I decided, I’ve came far enough, I’ve taken on enough risk, the safety net is gone, and I’ve proven myself to myself. I am in alignment with my Divine Gift, finally, and now— forever, always. Those 4 Worldly Attachments I burned? The last things to ever get in my way. And I realized those 4 Horsemen represented a chapter in my life that I didn’t even realize was only one chapter until, on Friday, it was over. The End.™ And now, for the first time in how long, I breathe clear and fresh, Open to the universe and God and whatever else there is out there, and maybe I am not the Main Character or maybe I am but there is a big story out there and if the camera isn’t on me now then Fuck You. I’m going to make it look.
True Modern Romance next Friday
-mbk
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