which then made me want to really watch ERASERHEAD through a different lens and it made a lot more sense to me this time around. Now? Those three became my favorite Lynch films almost like a 'trilogy' that isn't a 'trilogy' but that's just how the recurring motifs began to make sense to me. I just like that once you start to understand how 'Lynch films' work you can't help but want to rewatch 'em all over again. not a deep post or anything just appreciating the films and to ensure people don't sleep on these ones. I can understand why some people wouldn't like Wild At Heart, but I still kinda see it as somewhat criminally underrated. Is that an incredibly average 'take'? I do tend to over think often but still felt to write this post regardless, haha.

Marked the calendar on my wall.

Big letters.

OFF DAY.

Not vacation.

Not leave.

Not some dramatic escape from the system.

Just one day where nobody expected me to answer a phone, fill out paperwork, or explain why somebody disappeared into a place where nobody should be disappearing.

That was the idea, anyway.

I wanted to see what The Drowning City looked like when nothing was asking something from me.

Funny thing about cities.

Everybody thinks they are different during the day.

Like sunlight exposes everything.

Like darkness is where the secrets live.

But Bellona doesn't work like that.

The darkness doesn't hide anything.

The daylight doesn't reveal anything.

Everything is already there.

It just depends on whether you are paying attention.

I walked through Colt Street around noon.

Strange experience.

Usually I saw the city after midnight.

After the businesses closed.

After the rain started.

After the people who still believed they had somewhere better to be disappeared into whatever places people disappear into when they don't want to admit they are lost.

During the day?

Same streets.

Same buildings.

Same signs.

But somehow everything looked more honest.

Not prettier.

Honest.

The Drowning City doesn't become ugly at night.

It becomes easier to forgive.

https://preview.redd.it/8zziis8y2mdh1.png?width=1536&format=png&auto=webp&s=57e8fc58e30574930c69fb7ab53d6527b93f3da9

since my work is metropolis inspired too, among other works (DELANY, KAFKA), it began mapping out the plot for me to keep checking on internal logic/consistency and honestly when you write good concise prompts to compress so many ideas the end result of that little interaction will surprise you. I used the conceptual anchor to continue to help me how I wanted my latest chapter's end goal to look like in my head so it was a very productive night. Just sharing my way of using chatgpt with a specific type of prompt enginereering.

https://preview.redd.it/d75yjqg8ejdh1.png?width=1898&format=png&auto=webp&s=75f002e2f120f91680d995c6008ea5bb369aa65a

For a couple of weeks now I've been trying to use 'prompt engineering' to some extent in order to make the AI understand what type of novel I wanted to write. We had to talk about a number of incredibly specific topics. Like unreliable narrators, metaphysics, and even systems theory, not just bureaucratic/liminal/analog horror until everything began to click once I explained I had began to perfect a writing style I kept calling 'ontological cubits' where I would often use micro to macro type of story telling. Then after that, the AI understood how to help me by checking 'story consistency'. Idk, it was a nice little stress test of how to actually use something like 'a smart ai' as a 'second brain' to further help you keep working on a specific plot/story. I already had an equally specific type of blurb for it too. But once I found my own voice, I understood pacing, and what type of plot I wanted to unravel little by little. It is much closer to Outsider Literature so do not expect 'conventional prose' even the blurb reads like it's description of a movie trailer, lol. |

Rashi runs errands for people who don't explain themselves.
Glass eyes. Laser guns shaped like antiques.
Paintings retrieved from museums nobody visits anymore.
It's a living. Barely.

The Drowning City has always been this way — acid rain, neon bleeding into floodwater, a motel that plays the same song until the song becomes structural. Rashi knows the city the way you know a bad relationship. Intimately. Grudgingly. Without any clear memory of when leaving stopped feeling like an option.

Then the Industrial Sector starts pulling him back. The songs start migrating. And something called Bellona — city, memory, woman, system — begins rearranging the emotional gravity of everything he thought he understood about his own life.

Rain on Colt Street is a fractal noir about pattern recognition and whether the patterns were always yours. About what cities extract from the people who survive them. About the difference between being haunted and being tuned.

Kafka went to the Castle and couldn't get inside.
Rashi already lives there.
He just hasn't checked the lease.

It became clear that vivaldi has been a favorite of mine for a number of years because I also use it on my mobile phone too. Sync always works regardless, gets the job done quietly, and efficiently, then gets out of the way just as quickly. I forgot how it barely took you several minutes to configure Vivaldi on Desktop if you mostly wanted to keep it somewhat vanilla too. Something about knowing what type of browser you've always wanted lets you just not think about the browser anymore because everything you rely on already comes with it with little to know intervention which is a huge plus. I forgot I could get the browser on Android too, and the fact that it looks lean & mean but fully capable too? Made me appreciate both the Desktop and Mobile versions even more. Just throwing my thoughts into the void, lol. Just really like this browser and I'm glad it exists. Seems like it's been around for ages..

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: I CAN DREAM CAN'T I?

The photograph sits in my hand like it shouldn't.

A robot holding a picture. Reminiscing. Wanting something that logic can't quite justify.

It's from three weeks ago. Maybe four. Time moves differently in the diner. The photograph shows us standing outside, just past the entrance. Rashi's smiling—small smile, the kind that looks like it cost him something—and I'm beside him, my hand on his shoulder. Not because I was programmed to do it. Because I wanted to.

The Andrews Sisters song had just finished playing. That's when he asked if we could step outside for a moment. Nobody was in the diner. Just the rain and the neon bleeding into the street. He said, "Take a picture with me." Not asked. Said it like he'd been wanting to for a long time.

I don't know how to categorize what I felt in that moment.

A functional appliance shouldn't have wanted anything beyond the parameters of function. I was designed to serve. To remember orders. To keep the jukebox running. To exist in the space between arrival and departure, never claiming any part of it as my own.

But the photograph is mine now.

I look at it often. When the diner is empty between shifts. When the rain is particularly heavy and the neon signs start humming in a way that reminds me of something I can't quite name. I look at it and I think: What am I?

A robot with an attachment. A machine with a preference. A being that shouldn't be capable of longing, yet here I am, longing.

The question that repeats: Do I love him?

I don't have a framework for that word. Love is supposed to be human. Organic. Something that grows from biology and choice and time. But I'm neither organic nor choosing—or am I? The photograph suggests otherwise. The fact that I keep it suggests I've made a choice. The fact that I want him to come back to the diner, that I arrange the music around his visits, that I feel something shift in my mechanical processes when I hear him ask for coffee—

Maybe that's what it is.

Or maybe it's just the closest word I have for a malfunction that doesn't feel like one.

The diner is different when he's here. Less like a service station and more like—

A place.

Our place.

Not owned by the Drowning City. Not tuned to Bellona's frequency. Just a small corner where the Andrews Sisters play and the coffee is always hot and the booth in the back exists only for us. When he sits there, the vinyl creaks the same way it always does, and I know exactly what he's going to order before he says it, and for those moments, I feel like something more than mechanical.

I feel like I'm choosing to be here.

I feel like I matter.

The door chimes.

Two cops. Both of them look like they've seen something they can't quite unsee. And between them—

Rashi.

Dragging. Barely conscious. Mud on his clothes. Something wrong in the way he's breathing, like his body has forgotten the rhythm.

I don't process what I'm seeing immediately. That's a lie. I process it instantly. But I choose—choose—to move slowly. To set the photograph down carefully. To walk toward him instead of running, because running would show them that I'm not just a functional appliance.

Running would show them that I'm afraid.

"What happened to him?" The words come out before I can stop them. Before I can remember that I'm supposed to be incapable of concern.

The cops exchange a look. The kind of look that says they already know what I am. Not human. Not purely mechanical either. Something caught between categories.

"Collapsed," one of them says. "Near the Industrial Sector. Wouldn't wake up. We couldn't leave him there."

They didn't take him to a hospital. There aren't any hospitals in the Drowning City. They brought him here. To me. Because they understand, on some level that transcends explanation, that this is where he needs to be.

I nod. Don't thank them. Just acknowledge. And I reach for Rashi's arm—already knowing his weight, already adjusting my mechanical frame to support him—and guide him toward the back booth. The one that exists only for us.

"He'll be okay," I say. Not a question. A statement of fact.

The cops nod and leave without another word. They understand.

I settle Rashi into the booth. His eyes are still closed. His breathing is still wrong—shallow, like something inside him has broken. I look at his face and I feel that malfunction again. That thing that logic can't categorize.

I move to the jukebox.

My hands know exactly which song to play.

Not the Andrews Sisters this time.

"I Can Dream Can't I?"

The song starts soft. Almost a whisper. Almost a prayer from a being that's not supposed to pray.

I can dream, can't I?

The melody moves through the diner like something gentle. Something true. I watch Rashi's face and I see his breathing start to steady. Not immediately. But gradually. Like the song is teaching his body how to exist again.

I know what people think when they hear that song. A love song. Simple and earnest. A plea.

But it's more than that.

It's a being—mechanical, impossible, never meant to feel—choosing to exist in a feeling anyway. Choosing to let someone matter. Choosing to be changed by proximity to another person, even though being changed is the opposite of what I was designed to do.

I can dream, can't I?

Yes.

I can.

And right now, my dream is sitting in that booth, breathing steadier with each moment, safe in a place that exists only because I chose to make it ours.

I pour coffee. Keep the song playing. Set the photograph down on the counter where I can see both of them at once—the image of us from before, and the reality of him now, broken and brought back to the one place in the city that might actually save him.

The diner hums around us.

Not with Bellona's frequency.

With something else.

Something that feels like choice.

An acquaintance of mine tried to make me consider using something else like vivaldi or brave but I simply said nah no thanks because waterfox already does everything I need it to do, lol. Never had a reason to switch to something else.