After The Long Dream

I just had the craziest dream.
My childhood band moved down to LA, but a worldwide pandemic happened and they all moved back home so I went solo, not long afterwards my song went viral on the same day my best friend committed suicide, and before I could catch my breath I started dating an actress and we traveled the world together, then we moved in together, then we broke up and I started a blog.

***Dreams, right?***
They’re impossible to piece together after you wake up.

After the long dream, my lawyer emailed me to tell me that the label wasn’t going to pick up the option for Codename: EP3. I knew from the jump that it was a Hail Mary, a 17.3% percent chance of success according to my Neuralink, but there was so much money on the table that I would be Remiss not to put 4 months’ rent into recording, mixing and shooting the promo video on 16mm film. And I am severely overpaying for my rent.
Clev called me to say, Damn Dude Did You See Rachel’s Email? AWAL Declined The Option. Before I could respond to him, I Stepped Outside.

　·　　　.　　　　★　　　✵　　*　　　.　　　　☆•　　　　　　★　　　°　　　•

In my dream, after the rest of the band went home, it was just Spud and I left in the Melrose house with Clev and Devon. It was the third house I’d lived in with Spud, after we had to kick him out of the previous two. We knew he had to Get The Fuck Out of this house, too, the smelly bastard, but we understood that a third time is probably a bit more permanent so we held off. In truth, I was scared. I didn’t want to cut Spud off. He was my friend. Was. But when the time came, I called him to tell him to get out of our lives once and for all. Before he could respond, I Stepped Outside.
I had the strangest physical sensation. An Optical Illusion. It looked like a dolly zoom in a Hitchcock movie, where the background retreats as the foreground stays in place. In front of me, the patterns in the asphalt wiggled and the trees at the end of the block pinned themselves to a vanishing point beyond the horizon. It was like a rift in spacetime, a pruning of a branching path. It was the visual representation of a fearful Possibility collapsing into dreadful Outcome.
The next time I Stepped Outside and experienced this sensation was about a year later, but it only felt like moments in dream-time. Jevandre’s mom called me and told me he had died. Her and I had just talked the night before, concerned about Jevandre’s declining mental health, and agreed to keep an eye out. My friends were at my house, gawking at the numbers going up, up, up on the TikTok we had made the day before. I couldn’t face them, tell them that the Possibility had just become the Outcome. So I Stepped Outside, and watched the trees run away from me again as I circled the block.
A little later on in the dream, or maybe years later – it’s so hard to tell – I got home from a trip I took to Wales to visit Codename: Didi. I unpacked my luggage in the house in Silver Lake that we shared, and the closet was too big and my clothes would never fill it, no matter how much I made a mess and left them strewn everywhere. In the dream – and by this point I knew it was a dream – I prayed that Codename: Didi didn’t already notice the same Possibility that I did. I didn’t want her or I to wake up. It was such a nice dream. But a few days later, she called me and told me she thought we should break up before she got home. We cried and cried, but we also laughed in relief because we both knew it needed to happen, or maybe it already happened and we were just pointing it out. Dream logic. After we hung up, I Stepped Outside and looked back at the house with the red door, and the Possibility of our life pulled far, far away into another Outcome.

***Does anyone else dream about phone calls?***
It really is that damn phone.

A few months ago, when the Lion’s Gate Portal opened, I burned Four Worldly Attachments representing the Four Horsemen of The Defining Forces Of My Life.
1 Object for The Old Band – a flyer from a show we played in Arizona.
1 Object for Jevandre’s death – a page from a journal he bought me.
1 Object for “Happy, Healthy” – a letter from Netflix (long story).
1 Object for Codename: Didi – a list she made of all the reasons she loved me.
Each of these Objects corresponded with the three¹ dolly zooms in my long dream where Magic and Destiny and Romance and Ideals stretched until they broke and left me with Machines and Coincidence and Mundanity and Truth. I burned them because I wanted to be released from my lingering dreams within dreams of longing for the impossible Possibility of different Outcomes. You Cannot Go Back In Time.
I guess getting Real Witchy With It worked, because in the dream-time since then I’ve flushed out any remnants of the Four Horsemen.

***In no particular order:***
Because that’s how dreams go:

When Jevandre died, our Pact died. We were in this together. What was keeping me doing music now that my brother was gone? I was so afraid that I was going to end up like him, once I gave up my purpose. Once I realized that there is no purpose, there’s just living, and there’s really no living, there’s just dying. There’s a certain unshakeable logic to madness, and I went down the rabbit hole further than I want to admit. I’ve thought about it, too, going to follow him where he went. But when I let go of the Pact, earlier this dream-year, I realized I was selfishly holding onto a spirit that wanted peace so desperately that it resorted to violence. I was turning his death into my burden. I let Jevandre rest, and began living for myself.
This dream-fall, I finished Codename: EP3, which sounds like The Old Band. It’s full of songs about Arizona, our youth, our dreams of LA. They were my oldest friends, and I haven’t been able to make any new ones since. The last of my youth slipped away from me before I got to say goodbye. LA had become a nightmare. But lately, I’ve been in this new friend group, and I love them so much, and we’ve been going out and laughing like kids, and LA is suddenly what I always wanted it to be, and I don’t feel so lonely anymore.
A few dream-days ago, Codename: Didi called me out of nowhere, unceremoniously breaking No Contact. I knew at some point we would talk again, and I had been building up everything I wanted to say to her, everything I had learned. But instead, we just talked about Milo. There was no catharsis, no answers. But I wasn’t upset. I didn’t need any of that. I had already said everything I needed to say in my last blog post. I had already decided True Modern Romance was over. We talked about the dog, and she was just Ella again, and I was just Marcello, and that was how our story ends.
After “Happy, Healthy, Well-Adjusted” I got a manager(s), then another manager, then another manager(s). I got a hotshot lawyer, I had all these fans, I got a record deal. I started hating music. In the dream-time since, all the manager(s) left, and now Clev is my manager. My slimy lawyer left, and now I have Rachel, who is a rock and a real hotshot. I haven’t made a hit like “Happy, Healthy” since, and all the fickle fans are gone, and now I have all these new fans who I actually connect with. I started making music I love again, rather than music I thought I had to make, and now I love making music again. All of the things “Happy, Healthy” had so quickly brought to me that I so willingly welcomed, regardless of how ill-fitting they were– all gone. Except for the record deal.

***Clev called me to tell me AWAL dropped me***
And I woke up from the long dream.

Before I could respond to him, I Stepped Outside. In the few steps it took me to get from my kitchen to the front door, I mentally prepared for every fearful Possibility to collapse into its respective dreaded Outcome.
I was relying on the money to pay off my debt, and now I’m going to be broke.
I’m going to be broke, so I’m going to have to get a job.
I’m not just going to have to get a job, I’m going to have to get a full-time job to pay for my overpriced rent.
I’m going to have to break the lease because there’s no way I can pay for my overpriced rent.
I’m going to have to go bankrupt and sell all of my music catalogue.
I’m going to have to go home.
I’m going to have to quit music.
I’m going to have to quit.
I’m going to quit.
I quit.
I Stepped Outside and looked at the trees, expecting them to dolly zoom into the horizon. But they didn’t. The palm trees sang to me. There was a wind, a violent maelstrom. It blew through their leaves and they rustled and screamed. They flung their branches at my face and down the street and into parked cars. Dust devils picked up littered cigarettes and receipts. I watched them dance in the air. I watched the lights flicker in the houses as the wood bowed and creaked. The wind, so angry, so raging, so alive.
I knew it was Jevandre.

Don’t ask me how I know it was Jevandre, in the wind, all these times. Maybe it’s not True. But I Know it’s him. Sometimes, you just have to suspend your disbelief.
We live in a world that worships Truth above all else, because modernity is terrifyingly complex and tangled, and Truth is answers and certainty and safety. Truth is hard-earned but often falls apart when you look at it too closely. What then? Truth is subjective, Truth fails. So in the few sacred moments in my life where I Know something that may not be True, you better not fucking ask me how.
You Can’t Just Give Up Now, the wind yelled at me as it raged, Stay On The Path Goddammit.
Jevandre crossed truth and transgressed reality, traveled backwards through the Lion’s Gate Portal against dimensional planes and existential boundaries, pushing the black stone wall across lightyears of spacetime to deliver me a gust of wind with this message:
Don’t You Dare Quit.
This had nothing to do with the Pact. This wasn’t me holding onto his memory as it tried its best to fade away. This wasn’t me co-opting his death as part of my own life’s story. I’d already let all that go. No, this was my brother, slapping me in the face to wake me up, telling me to keep going. Telling me, You May Have Let Me Go But You Better Not Fucking Forget About Me. Two Plural Truths. Can You Handle The Dissonance Kuya? Suspend Your Disbelief.
All this, he said to me in the wind, and after a year of machines and skepticism I shut up and listened. I held out my arms and let the wind run through me, to feel his embrace, because just like I Knew it was him, I also Knew it was the last time I’d be hearing from him before he returned through the Lion’s Gate and fell back to sleep forever.
The wind didn’t stop. Turns out Jevandre wasn’t going to go quiet into that goodnight, he was going to rage, rage. It was his Final Guest Appearance, after all. The wind kept slapping me in the face and throwing dust in my eye so I got in the Mustang and drove, anywhere, nowhere.
Hollywood was chaos. The wind had knocked over a palm tree and there was a traffic jam, police sirens and firetrucks and people honking as Jevandre thrashed and laughed his maniacal, mischievous belly laugh in that particular way I could never quite put into words.
I weaved into the shoulder lane and drove to the diner to see Jess. She asked if I was okay. I was crying because of the dust in my eye but also because I was just crying. I ordered a tuna melt. The diner was busy, so we didn’t really get to talk much, but she asked what I got up to today.
“AWAL didn’t pick up the option,” I told her.
Jess waited for my reaction before saying anything. I think she expected me to fall apart, and I expected to fall apart, too, but I didn’t.
“How do you feel?” she asked carefully.
I didn’t answer, but I knew how I felt. The long dream was over. There were no more branching paths. The Other Shoe had dropped, but there was no dolly zoom. No fearful Possibility collapsing into a dreaded Outcome. Because this wasn’t a dreaded Outcome. This was, secretly, in my truth within Truth that you cannot deny but simply Know, the Outcome I wanted all along.

***How did I feel?***
“I feel freeeeeeee.”

Spoiler alert: Codename: EP3 is called Eternal Underdog. This was always going to be how it went. It was written in the stars, in the place outside time where ideas are born. Eternal Underdog was never going to be released by a “distribution company” owned by multinational megaconglomerate Sony so disingenuously named “AWAL: Artists Without A Label.”
Eternal Underdog was always going to be the story of everything falling apart, the Other Shoe dropping, and picking up the pieces and fighting, raging against everything I fucking hate. Being Realistic™. Growing Up™. Getting What You Get And Not Throwing A Fit™. I’m going to throw a fucking fit. I’m the Quit Your Day Job guy, at the end of the day. And it’s the end of the day. I Am No Longer A Hypocrite.
“Jesus, do you see that wind?” Arda, the other server, pointed outside where Jevandre was still howling and screaming and gnashing and clawing.
I Stepped Outside to join him, and Knew that I wasn’t going to stop fighting either. Even when he did, even when the wind stops.
I drove home and there was still a traffic jam, palm trees were still flying everywhere, and people were honking and sirens were wailing and the cacophony continued as I went to bed. I let Jevandre’s ghost haunt me to sleep, because I knew I wouldn’t hear from him for a long time.
‘Til we meet again, brother!
When I woke up, it wasn’t from a dream into another dream, it was into my life, and I sat down and started making a plan.

FOOTNOTES:
1. “Happy, Healthy” and Jevandre happened on the same day, so it was a 2-for-1 reality distortion.