earning Valhalla.

Went to the park to battle some strangers. Took a foam sword to my left eye and a ball-tipped arrow to my right. On top of my two semesters of fencing at university, I'm putting these deaths in my Valhalla bank.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

o' how i burn brilliantly on my course.

Máni & Sunna run through the heavens,

just ahead of the wolves who will one grim day catch them.

They can expect nothing better than this.

But o' how they shine.



I run ahead,

the teeth of my dying father

and my dying marriage

that bloody my heels into sunset.

But o' how I burn,

brilliantly on my course.

the sound of separation.

Recently I began transferring my digital music to my BlackBerry, and in the process thought I was in a place in my life where I didn't need any of the sad music anymore. I had what I needed forever, and the things that the music wept for didn't apply. I was happy.

Now, suddenly, unexpectedly, I find I again need that music, those tracks that will weep with me in the days to come.

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or in the comments below.

on the imminent Death of My Father.

What we wanted from the second visit to the urologist was a tube camera surprise reveal of a Cracker Jack toy mucking things up inside my Dad's bladder, with its rapid removal, a pat on his back, and a release note saying he could go home and enjoy the next ten years of his life.

What we got was the laparoscope showing nothing wrong, which meant Dad's impassibly enlarged prostate had already taken its toll on his bladder's muscles, stretching it out to the point where it no longer functions, which leaves us with three options:

1. Wear a Foley cathether up your dick for the rest of your life, at the risk of your dementia forgetting what it is every fifteen minutes, and just yanking it out to cause injurious bleeding and risk of infection on top of the usual risk of infection for just having one up in there.

2. Surgery for a suprapublic catheter through the bladder wall for less discomfort, but still run the exact same risks of yanking it out and infection, with the all risks of surgery on top of that.

3. Remove the catheter altogether, let the bladder fill up until the kidneys toxify & fail, and let my Dad mercifully go.

Fuck you, medical science. You're still fraught with barbaric inadequacies, semi-educated too-late guesswork, and certain failure. Fuck. You.

Now it's just a matter of waiting, and while waiting I'm going to write this eulogy:

“Wealth dies. Friends die. One day you too will die. But, the thing that never dies is the judgement on how you have spent your life.”
― Hávamál, stanza 75 - The Sayings of Odin, The High One

[Dad was a Boy Scout.]

William Maytorena Jr was a simple man with simple pleasures. All he needed to be happy was a good comedy film, ice cream, or a bag of hot chicharrónes in one hand and a beer in the other. When I was a kid, I'd ride along with him every week to stop at Nana Mercy's to pick up a little blue enameled speckled olla of his mom's magic beans. Those beans were home in a pot to him.

Beyond this core of winning simplicity, he explored other things. After he got his first & only awesome rack stereo from Gemco, I would rouse in the middle of the night and find him awake well past midnights, sitting on the floor, listening to classical music on KUAT, fingers paused over the cassette deck's recording button to capture some timeless piece of Beethoven, Mozart, Hayden, or Tchaikovsky, a normal bias tape locked & loaded, pencil hovering over the liner notes. He'd compile nearly a hundred of these tapes, even branching out into some jazz selections, fostering a deeper appreciation for these genres, growing & broadening his artistic points of reference. The late night passion was inspiring, and I think I was the only one to ever see it in action.

[First date at the Tucson Hotel, 1968. Que suave!]

This broadness had its roots: The story goes that Bill was headed off to be a priest, and to safeguard this divine vocation he installed a strict three-date rule with the girls he saw -- but he went on a fateful fourth date with his Maria Elena, my mom, and here I am talking to you about not just another reclusive church father, but my father who chose to embrace right action in the broader secular world, and the reward of a loving wife along with it.

[Getting married at the justice courts, 1970.]

In the marriage, he was the more relaxed partner by far, and he knew when to leave the room when the yelling got louder than the sense. His patience, tolerance, and forgiveness were a saintly inheritance from his properly named mother Mercy. In retrospect, Dad tolerated alot of my gifted childhood arrogance, 1980s sarcasm, unnecessary teen attitude, and sophomoric overconfidence in a graceful fashion. He rocked, as fathers go, way more than I knew at the time.



On off days my Mom would call him useless around the house, and sometimes that was actually true. He never taught me to use his tools, not because he hadn't the time, but because he was hiding the fact that he secretly didn't know how to use them himself. A hammer & some duct tape would often mickey mouse it when it probably shouldn't have. But Gods bless him, he would try, which nowadays is surely more than most husbands.

[Dad & Mom loved to dance. It was one of their things. 1986.]

As a family, we had the privilege of travelling alot, and Dad helped show me the value of travel, of fearlessly going over the horizon to see the world in a broader sense. One summer off in my childhood, we hit 26 states, and he was the driver of impossible distances, getting us safely to all the places we enjoyed together pre-GPS. One year we went to D.C. There was a day where Mom was sick and stayed at the hotel. Dad & I got out of the room, and we figured out the city's Metro, and found a Chinese restaurant for lunch. The food was nothing special, but it tasted special to me because it was the first time I really appreciated Chinese food, and that was specifically because of my Dad's company that afternoon, a memory I'll always carry with me.

[Dad always used a double sided yellow comb/brush combo for his hair, and favoured wearing guayaberas of various light colours. He was fairly meticulous about shining his shoes, too. With Mom & I, 1985, at my junior high school graduation.]

Emotionally he showed calm stoicism in the face of a false heart attack, my three scorpion stings, and other maladies that would send normal people into a panic. Perhaps this was military training from the Air National Guard, or let-god prayering from the seminary, but he had faith that things would work out in such situations one way or another.

[Looking good in that guayabera at some event, 1981.]

For years, I didn't get what my Dad did for a living until one day after middle school I sat in his office at the Crippled Childrens' Clinic on Broadway. A weird looking kid who had something wrong with him took a moment to give me the elevator speech to explain his hydrocephalus, about how he would die if my father didn't arrange regular appointments to get his head drained, and find medical coverage to cover the exceptional costs of that. My Dad saved children, he saved families, he saved lives. What he did was that important. It took emotional fortitude & undefeatable optimism.


My Dad knew everybody because he would talk to anybody. He was socially fearless like that. Someone in any store checkout line everywhere knew him, which also meant leaving took an extra 20 minutes. And he'd always talk to babies or toddlers, making that strange elephantine noise with his compressed lips that always got their attention. I repeatedly suggested he should run for mayor, but he was too good a man for politics, and he knew it. At work he'd wear this completely ridiculous sculptured Mickey Mouse head watch with a mouth that moved and spoke the time. He wore it at the cost of any personal dignity because the kids he had appointments with loved it, and the spectacle of it saying the time allowed him to finish talks with their parents, who we're appreciative of this clever ruse.

Sometimes he'd uncharacteristically call himself a "rabble rouser", usually referencing his early days marching with Chicano activists & organizing the brown citizens to get El Rio Community Health Center built in the first place. After this feat he worked there for decades until they forgot who helped get them built & they laid him off.

[Dad doing his daily legwork on the telephone at El Rio. 1974.]

After that, he got an awful job at Child Protective Services working for the county, which was too many cases for any one man, but he soldiered through it better than most. One afternoon I happened to be in the car when he decided he was near enough to a case for a home check. He drove our humble VW bus up this driveway, and he suddenly stopped. "You see that dish?", he said, pointing at the two thousand dollar huge saucer currently following an invisible satellite in orbit. "These people are getting money from us because they told us their kid needed it. They don't if they spend that much on TV. You wait here." He got down, adjusted his belt like a gunfighter, and went inside to have some hard words that the parents in there needed to get told. He didn't shirk that kind of confrontation when it needed doing. He was brave & honest like that.

The trouble started when Dad fell into a hole. There was a dwarf lemon tree at the new house that needed planting and he was moving some rocks in a wheelbarrow past the hole for the tree when the load unbalanced, and he fell in. His back was never the same, and he would never stand straight or tall again. Suddenly looking at the view from a few inches less and down at your feet has to change you, and damaging falls when you're older change you. The memory issues began sooner than later, and, unlike alot of people who get angry, violent, or depressed, Dad didn't fall into those emotional holes. He kept his sense of humour in the face of dementia with Lewy bodies & Parkinsonism because, under the shuffling, bent form he now appeared to be, Dad had the strength of character to remain the man he was: Funny. Lovable. Winning. He flirted with a nurse near the end. "You have pretty eyes," he said like the old smoothie he always was.

One night while at St Mary's Hospital for one of series of medical issues, he raised up his arms and "called a meeting". He told me to be quiet while he talked. For the next hour and a half he elaborated to Michelle & I a plan to take over the city. He called it "The Working Joes' Plan". Tucson would be divided into sectors, each ruled by a "working joe" to keep the people in line and see to their needs. These everymen would meet with him for updates, and he would problem solve with them, and personally see to the defense & control of all Tucson. There was to be a train with orphans & needy children who would be transported, fed, clothed, & cared for somewhere in there. And when he stopped speaking, we were amused, and more than that, amazed.

You see, this 81-year-old's plan was a metaphor for control of the world he could no longer neurologically understand. Mom would by habit put on the news, and on some level he saw things spinning out of control. Against this he came up with his plan for Tucson, the city whose people he loved and cared about all his life, an ultimate plan for municipal succession & protection of the city he grew up in, to safeguard it from rampant criminal elements within and political-economic forces without. Bill Maytorena would wear an iron crown and a velvet gauntlet. His heart was so large, he would've taken care of it all, for us, for you.

“Cattle die, kinsmen die, you yourself must also die, but he who wins word fame lives forever.”
― Hávamál, stanza 76 - The Sayings of Odin, The High One

[Dad's hesitantly humble grin in front of the room at El Rio that bears his name on the plaque behind him.]

Myself aside, an attentive wife, the countless children he saved & helped, and a room at El Rio Clinic named after him, his legacy is how much he cared & worked at caring with successful results. That was the grandeur of his life, besides knowing how to appreciate creature comforts, laughter, simple times, and priceless moments.

I know you people here won't forget Bill Maytorena Jr. As long as you tell his story and carry forward his nobility, he will be alive, and we will always be better people for knowing him. And he'd want you to have a good time at this thing, so go live it up for him today, and for the rest of your life, with his spirit in mind.





~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Addenda: A few nights after writing this, my father shushed everyone in the room, asked if "the papers to leave were in order", kissed us on the hands, told us goodbye, and closed his eyes. We thought that was it. My aunts showed up with a priest at my mother's request the next morning, who administered last rites, but my Dad was none too pleased to see him, spat out the host, and grabbed his bowl of oatmeal from his caretaker and fed himself breakfast for a change. There's fight in my old man yet.



Since then we've spent time together playing Crazy Eights, drinking fancy strong beers, and watching some Northern Exposure, which has been priceless because it's all something we both love. Still, I know the other shoe's going to drop, and he's going to swing the other way sooner than later, and die. Mentally, I accept that. Emotionally, I'm going to be a fucking trainwreck, but I'm glad I took the time to write the above so I'll have the right thing to say when that time comes, and "word fame" to give him so he will live forever through those words. Until then, my Dad'll still be beating me at cards, and I'm grateful for every hand he can still deal.



I love you, Dad. This is for you.

#    #    #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

how Internet 3.0?

Nearly everyday I make an effort as a dedicated GooglePlus user to read the feed and post some specialized content that my 500+ followers hopefully haven't seen. I've been writing for years, creating original articles & reviews for my blog Dark Entries, cultivating a global audience (thanks again Mother Russia!), and investing alot of time to curate material that I myself would love to see.



But think ahead: When the goggles of Internet 3.0 go on, what happens to Internet 2.0's collections, community associations, expressions of fandom, 140-character blatherings, your unboxing videos, that food photo gallery you made, and especially the network of online professionals/friends/strangers you've built? Will internet 3.0's new paradigm of altered reality & virtual reality interfaces just write those off like a wind into a house of cards, scattering your decade of 2-D wall postings into oblivion?



Granted, there's a majority of user emphasis on the moment, on the post of the now. The backcatalog of content isn't usually gone through, as it seems viewers only want the new postings from the time forward from when they joined or subscribed. (Yet I know I scroll back, feeling like I'm digging for buried treasures when I discover a subject for the first time, playing catch-up to the group's reactions to episodes, or news, or evolutions in that subject.)



And granted, there's alot not to like about the current circle jerk of material, those deformed viral cats, the overposted meme, political/religious outrage, historical fingerpointing, racist interjections, trolls, and a safe anonymity from which to flare out any unintelligible, unfounded, or unmerited thing they please. There are no sacred cows, no respect, and thus no real convincing anyone about anything. Unattributed content is a particular pet peeve of ours as originators of artistic & informational value should always be recognized.



There's a lawlessness that's beyond apology, and a freedom that produces great beauty, and as audiences & authors we suffer one to enjoy the other.

[Where have you gone, ASCII art?]

 Fixtures of Internet 1.0 didn't weather the transition  with the prestige it once had. Large 2.0 social media hubs quickly usurped the attention & content from former giants like The Well, Usenet, LiveJournal, Angelfire, Geocities, and other once-established specialty niche threaded forums with participation ranked user mini-profiles.



Thus it's our concern that our irreplaceable time, our recognitions, and our creative output not be unmade, or left behind in the ignored cyberbasement. We wouldn't have bothered if we hadn't felt they were worth posting in the first place and at this point we feel having them sidelined would be unacceptable.

We would like to trust the current social networks to create an importing tool, something that will transform our postings into galleries or collections that will attach to our avatar or float near our person or decorate our virtual castle to summarize this cyberpublic history of ourselves, perhaps a recognition emblem of legacy content that can still be carried forward & explored by others. Yet watching how companies abandon software & applications with no consideration for the loyalist user who believes in the platform or format more than they do, we fear they may do the same in this newfound digital arena.



[Yes +Google VR , we're specifically asking you on behalf of your 300M social media users & the internet as a whole. And +Magic Leap & +Neal Stephenson , we're curious if you've considered our concerns, as we like your ideas.]

[The Augmented Reality overlay as drafted by Magic Leap.]

  We'd love some sort of Tronscaped interface option, which would clue into the cyberspace aesthetic we've anticipated since William Gibson first wrote & +Steven Lisberger first imagined.

[Map of The Grid!]

So we wonder with 3.0 just over the crest of the digital tomorrow, should we still be bothering to post & look as much as we do if it's all going to be binned? This uncertainty makes us hesitant, the unanswered question disturbing in its consequences.



I've got books to read in the meantime, which aren't going to change anytime soon, and a map to make. Someone do let us know before this continues, yes?

#    #    #

While
a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo
Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals
for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan,
airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a
craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally
interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

do you know what it means to miss the Kingdom of New Orleans?

Dreamt I visited the Kingdom of New Orleans. A cloaked Mardi Gras cult kidnapped my girlfriend, ceremonially sacrificed her, then shot & left me for dead.

A princess in disguise as an urban "prince" found me, tending my wound. Waiting to regain her throne from the interim republic, she DJed dirty beats, living in a rundown five-story house where she threw underground parties & exotic illegal fundraising dinners in. The city was walled like Carcassonne with additional giant saurian sculptures, a much larger Vieux Carré inside accented by medieval stonework & gargoyles, neon & glass, the sprawl extending all the way down to the Gulf Coast. The suburbs were composed of both brownstone and the raised gabled roofed houses, with bright but peeling shutters the Big Easy's known for.

The city was attacked by a sorcerer who came from the West with thousands of troops and gargantuan automatons, and I thought the city was done for.

[Carcassonne lit up. The city walls were like this but with neon accents.]

Then the outer wall's saurian sculptures animated, slashing with claws and breathing fire in their city's defense. The troops got in via many of the entrances, but the citizens of N.O. were no slouches, all taking up arms to defend their kingdom. The princess discarded her disguise, donned ballistic armor, and organized the people more effectively under her royalist banner. We fought the troops, but the invaders were overwhelming. She used magick to phase us into the depths of the city, but somewhere along the way I found myself displaced back in our world.

Weeks passed, and the phone rang. "It's the princess on the line," my Dad said, pausing, then, "At least that what she says she is." She told me that the city had been kept safe and she'd regained the throne, and was wondering when I'd be back for cake, champagne, and her latest setlist. But I knew that I couldn't get back there, that however I got there in the first place wouldn't be available again for a long time, and I was left saddened by the lack of means to return ...

... or couldn't I?

This dream of the Kingdom of New Orleans was amazing and all-too vivid. It felt more real than imagined. Sure, I could craft a short story or novella from this New Orleans that never Louisiana Purchase-d, that was discovered by France pre-Columbus and broke away from European colonial rule early. Instead I'm inquiring about the realness of the city, the feeling of its being out there somewhere, a solid in the chaos of dream, a true place.

[Crescent City Bridge. photo by Fred Gramoso.]

We can entertain the possibility of another thread on the Web of Wyrd, a variant design woven by The Norns to awe & explore, a quantum tapestry warp & wefted of a differing time & place, a shadow of choices not made here but elsewhere, where another version of ourselves louches purple absinthe at Duke Lafitte's Parlour House and eats ghost pepper & blue okra gumbo on cobblestoned Saint Peter Street.

This seems akin to a geographic slippage from the Berenstein to Berenstain universe, the rustling of cousinly leaves together from near branches of Yggdrasil, touching and aware of each other for a long, strange, wondrous moment.

In its Calvino-esque way, this Invisible City of New Orleans overlays, nests within, or is hidden upon the one we already know. Could the Texan Wizard's attack & invasion be the destructive Katrina of that world? Could the defensive saurians be our Louisiana swamps' aggressive alligators, memories of ancient colossi, or perhaps fossils & petrifactions given life in our foreshadowed future?

[Pink Alligator sculpture by the Cracking Art Group.]

Maybe the calls that say nothing from unknown numbers on your cellphone are coming from there, the princess dialing, looking for sleeping tourists who were once heroes of her kingdom's greatest battle. The city & her androgynous princess will haunt me, and I will miss them. So we ask: Have you been to the Kingdom of New Orleans? And if so, how did you get there?

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By day, Guillermo Maytorena IV is a happy bookstore fixture, but at night he's an Investigative Norse Mythologist! He's also willing to entertain the idea of being an adult film star, gynobot tester, or a tour guide in Scandinavia. Should you have any interest in his expertise or opportunities in those arenas, do contact him.

accepting my deification.

Yesterday a man whom I consider locally influential and seriously accomplished emphatically insisted on telling me:



"You're famous in this city. Tucson knows who you are. Accept it." 



Tucson, thank you for confirming my inner superiority complex and giving me the apotheosis to local god I know I've been worthy of. I love you back.

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

the politeness of melee weapons.

If it were again socially acceptable to carry the melee weapon of one's choice, we feel the level of condescension in dialogues would quickly evaporate.

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

NorsePlay: A Yank At Valhalla.

Not to let the hokey Twain-ist title fool you, Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla delivers a Norse-inspired genre mash-up in fine pulp style.

[Original pulp from January 1941.]

Part lost civilization fantasy, part science fiction, Hamilton plays with the idea that behind mythology lies a greater truth.

Physicist Keith Masters, during an exploratory survey flight, gets blown into a hidden area of the arctic where he discovers the secret lands of the Norse Gods.

[An Ace double version from 1973.]

Stylewise, the many typos (a pulp given) are unexpectedly balanced out by some lovely .50-cent word selections, and it's neat shifting gears as a reader between scientific terms and medieval descriptors. This integrated juxtaposition aside, a lot of the presentation is stirring with cries of "Our swords for Asgard!", impressive feasting hall settings, and saga worthy melees & martial battles.

[UK re-titled version from 1950. And Freya's going to fall out of that top at any moment.]

While the start isn't as fast as Lester Del Rey's The Day of the

Giants (1950), they share a conceit that a mid-century modern man can think more clearly and problem solve better than an immortal, which here is still a false conceit, and one finds Masters a few times saying things like, "Score one for my science!" to convince us, but not successfully. Anachronistic of this, Masters flies a "rocket plane", which is more than bleeding edge technology in 1940, even for a well-

funded polar expedition.

[Interior art from Fantastic Story 1953 January pulp.]

We suspect this early NorsePlay also possibly influenced Ian Cameron's Island At the Top of the World from 1961 where a polar foray stumbles onto a Viking civilization survival. And

the mix of high-tech with ancient dress reminds us of Stan Lee & Jack Kirby's Thor, which began in 1962, where the science is implied, but not overt, and one wonders if either of them read this beforehand.

[More interior art from Fantastic Story 1953 January pulp.]

In terms of what was going on in 1940, we have an American character with no horse in the race between the Aesir & the Jotuns, getting involved for various circumstantial reasons in what may very well become Ragnarok. This raises the question if Hamilton possibly wrote this as an appeal for a

U.S. entry into WW2. While the text always has the battles as being against the odds, the Viking ethos of combat being a necessary facet to support civilization and that risk being celebrated is prominent in the novella.

[This same side-saddle valkyrie on colourless Bifrost art was also used for a later NorsePlay: Lester Del Rey's The Day of the Giants, except it was re-titled When the World Tottered.]

With pulp motifs, A Yank at Valhalla also presents the idea of the hidden subterranean. Using the dwarves (here labeled the Alfings) and a radioactive Muspelheim as a pre-surface dwelling and advanced technological world, this presages The Shaver Mystery's pulps/memoirs by half a decade:

"This was no mere cavern, but an enormous hollow such as many have believed was left under the planet's surface by the hurling forth of the Moon." (p.96)



In a current young adult novel landscape of Riordan's Magnus Chase and Armstrong's The Blackwell Pages, where overweening teen sass underqualifies as optimism, going back to an early NorsePlay like Hamilton's A Yank At Valhalla yields more imaginative treasure.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+. 

Twin Peaks: The Resolution.

You waited 25 years for Twin Peaks: The Return. You finished it. And you still want answers. Here they are as only Dark Entries can provide them:



Alt-dimensional Dale: The secret no one knows when Laura whispers in Dale's ear is how to save her. In order to save Laura, Dale travels back in time to pull her away from her bondage cabin date with Jacques, Ronette, & Leo. By doing this, Dale effectively prevents her from meeting her fate at Bob/Leland's hands in the train car. When the past gets pulled out of true, Laura is whisked away to an alternate reality where she (and Dale, and Diane) are no longer who they originally were. The Twin Peaks we knew is in the dimension that Dale & Diane drive away from to follow now-displaced Laura, leaving behind the changed dimensional reality where Laura never got murdered. When Dale asks what year it is in his final line, it's the wrong question because he's made the false assumption that people in the parallel dimension are going to be in the same place.



Three Dimension Shell Game: Dale travels across three dimensions. First, he's in the prime dimension where the action for the whole show mostly takes place and where Laura stays dead. Second, he goes into the past to rescue Laura, and this action alone creates this secondary dimension/branching timeline where Laura never gets killed that runs parallel to the first. His intention is to bring Laura back to the primary future, but time proves too inelastic and moves Laura into a tertiary dimension where Dale & Diane then follow her to.



Diane Once-Removed: Diane & Dale both drive into the alternate dimension knowing on some level things aren't going to be the same. When Diane sees her double at the road motel, it's a presentiment that she's not going to remain herself, and weeps during her sex with Dale, covering his face/identity with her hands, sad that so soon after getting her freedom from the Black Lodge, she's only going to lose herself again so soon. The note Dale finds in the morning proves this as Diane has unwillingly assumed the alt-dimension's identity of Linda on the parting missive.



Laura-Now-Carrie: Although Laura has effectively helped rescue herself, her saving isn't what Dale or she expected. When Dale shows up at Carrie's house in Odessa, she pauses at the mention of Sarah Palmer's name. There's a frisson of recognition that occurs, and in part for that reason goes with Dale on the road trip up to Twin Peaks. After finding the Palmers' house occupied by the Tremonds instead, that frisson increases to a disturbing remembrance of her previous parallel existence as Laura when that realization evokes a momentary overlap of dimensional reality and we hear Sarah Palmer calling for Laura on the morning of her death.



Not Who but What is Laura?: The White Lodge creates Laura as the firestopper response for Bob. She's the irresistible attractant so Bob doesn't wreak a worse havoc in the greater world (as seen by Bob/ersatz Dale's globally spanning criminal activities after Laura's death). This irresistible attractiveness manifests in her becoming prom queen and her ability to win and manipulate the suitors/lovers/clients in her life. Being such a being made flesh also has its stresses, by which Laura copes with cocaine & other base distractions.



Sarah Palmer's Temporal Cul-De-Sac: Sarah Palmer is Jiao Dai/Judy. Her killing the redneck at the bar unveils this. The repeating fight scene on the TV and looping moment where Sarah tries but cannot damage the iconic picture of her daughter shows that Jiao Dai's machinations have become undone by Dale/White Lodge/Laura's changes to reality and trapped the angry spirit in a looping temporal pocket.



Jiao Dai: The dugpa black lodge wizard otherworld being behind all the misery gains a toehold in the world through a dimensional rip created by the atomic bomb test. As fission destroys matter on a fundamental level, such action allows this dark being to seed Bob into our world, along with the tulpas, the thought construct doppelganger replacements for people, who act as further agents of misery. This misery is what Jiao Dai and many of the other Black Lodgers feed on, which in turn gives them more power. The stalking horse that is Laura draws Jiao Dai & Bob into the Palmer household, and ultimately this attraction to Laura puts them both in a position from which they get defeated.



Institutionalized Audrey: There was always something off about Audrey -- her non-sequiturs, the easy immersion into jazz music, the overconfident near-delusion that she could easily run the hotel or become Dale's intimate assistant. Note her father's mental slip into an imagined Civil War alternate history, her brother's special needs state, and her uncle's manic social disconnect and descent into drug abuse. Given that fragile genetic background (and probable brain damage from the bomb), when waking from her post-bank explosion coma to find herself pregnant from ersatz Dale's hospital visit, her breakdown & father committing her probably came soon after. Audrey's last scene shows her facing a makeup mirror reflection in a white room, revealing that she never was at The Roadhouse. This implies that Charlie is a delusional stand-in for her therapist, given his detached attitude toward his "wife" and her infidelity. The Billy she mentions being involved with is another patient at the asylum, who's passingly talked about by a pair of girls at the club earlier on as scaling a six-foot fence and subsequently bleeding from his nose & mouth from his recent escape, which is why Audrey's worried over his absence and keeps plying Charlie with questions as to where he is.



Richard Horne's Father: Ersatz Dale reveals this when Richard is electrosploded at the false coordinates with his line, "Farewell, my son." While we spend most of the show presuming Richard to be John Justice Wheeler's or possibly Charlie's offspring with Audrey, he's a truly badder breed of seed.



Dead Becky Briggs: We see bombed out of his mind husband Steven Burnett in the forest holding a gun, being held by his lover Gersten Hayward. Gersten tries to absolve Steven by saying "it" wasn't his fault, it was his wife's, and he was stoned. He's inconsolable and when Gersten hides herself to conceal her affair from the other trailer park resident walking his dog, Steven takes the opportunity to kill himself. The why of "it" all is that he killed his wife Becky sometime before this scene in retribution for her shooting through the door of Gersten's apartment in trying to kill them.



The Poor Bagboy: Sarah Palmer keeps Deputy Hawk firmly outside the door, while we hear a few noises from inside the house in the background. Later we see a thick line of dark fluid across the TV room's carpet and alot of miserable noise coming from offscreen. While some of this is Sarah Palmer/Jiao Dai, some of it doesn't sound like her at all. When Sarah has the episode at the grocery store checkout line, she leaves her groceries there. The bagboy haplessly decides to take them after the event to her house ... where he is tied up & gagged in the kitchen and subject to the untender ministrations of Jiao Dai!



Probable Happy Endings: Big Ed & Norma live happily-ever-after. Witnessing this influences Shelly to reunite with Bobby. Nadine's fangirl hookup with Dr Amp/widower Jacoby becomes something more. Josie lives and ends up with Harry. Reunited construct Dougie & Janey-E continue far better off than when they started. The Mitchum Brothers enjoy being beneficent to others with their settlement money and share the polyamorous dedication of their girlfriend trio under one roof.

[Zoom in to the detail on those individually decorated doughnuts!]

Final Explanations: In David Lynch's Mulholland Drive & Lost Highway, identities become a malleable construct, and characters becoming unmoored from who they are is a mechanism in the Lynchverse. Lynch originally drafted Mulholland Drive as a spin-off from TV to movie where Audrey goes to Hollywood to try her luck as an actress, and the film uses a very shadow hobo-like figure of dread to provide a box that unlocks an alternate dimension where the main character's situation is distinctly different. A Lynch interview mentions that Lost Highway takes place in the same world that Twin Peaks is in. Lost Highway's protagonist at a certain point in the film passes through a doorway and becomes another person, but at film's end is aware of his dual identity. The one identity's wife and the other identity's girlfriend are both played by Patricia Arquette as two different characters, which also illustrates the overlapping realities of those identities. Also a Mystery Man shows the uncanny ability to be bi-located at a party in front of a protagonist and on a landline phone from that same protagonist's house. Maddie & Laura as "twin cousins" and Maddy's feelings of identity-displacement also support the above. Lynch draws heavily from dreams, an experience where one often is themselves but also not themselves at the same time. Lynch also runs an organization for transcendental meditation. Given the Buddhist context of meditation, plus their karmic wheel of existence where one expunges attachments in order to find enlightenment, leaving behind the ego of identity to become one with the divine, or reincarnating to try again and forced to forget ones previous incarnations, follows. Also moving away from secular explanations in general is perhaps Lynch's punchline as "jiao dai" literally means "to explain" in Chinese. Lynch applies these possibilities of polyvalent identities/realities to expand the boundaries of narrative, to make us unsettled at our own valued sense of self, to evoke the fear of the unreliability of perceived existence, and to make us listen for the divine secret that can be whispered into our ear if we only know how to hear it.

[Afterword: Thanks to my wife +Michelle H. for staying up last night after the finale to talk for four hours (since we weren't going to sleep anyway until we figured it all out), thanks to Mitch +George Proctor for hosting us this whole season and sharing our love of Twin Peaks and forwarding the Chinese translation to add to this piece, and +Natalie Carey  for theming out the dessert tray & coffee that fueled this Black Lodge explanitory fire. Also to Óðinn & Baldr who inspired that last line with their story and its secret.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.