This is just a “Start”…rough hewn and stream of conscious. It needs a lot of polish and much construction. But, since the purpose of this Place is to write? Well…

The story starts with rain, windshield wipers spreading smeared reflections across travel cracked glass and the filtered sunlight of mid-march dawn through a determined desert squall. Lost in altitude, lightning snapped, mute under the driving noise of commuting and a song by Candlebox playing through my stereo.

I half listened as my car began to glide, letting me know it was hydroplaning. My half-busy brain reacted for me while a broad sheet of gray water crunched up and away, hardly noticed by learned reflex. Hard curtains of cold water snapped the glass around me and the wipers seemed to increased their rhythm. Candlebox played on, there was another attempt at lightening and darker clouds closed down the struggling dawn behind a gate of steel colored mountains. The Chevy caught asphalt and drove on.

I know. Rain, lightening, foreboding clouds and dark mountains to start this story sounds like beginning twists of a gothic horror story. If this was a stained glass window you’d certainly see where those elements exist; visions of Hell filling the lower left corner, demonic figures rising from dark purple-red hues to stain the golden light filtering from above. Angelic figures soaring high in the vault of heavenly light, trailing clouds and shitting glory with the clueless clay lumps of humanity stuck right the fuck in the middle like prosciutto — the tasty treat crushed between two layers of stale, rotting bread.

So, if you’ll bear with me, I’d love to take a hammer to that stained glass expectations and shatter them. Every Elder God and Ancient Demon is asleep; they have been for a very long time — there’s no sign they’re waking up anytime soon. In the places where a “very long time” isn’t really such a stretch, the Powers That Be are starting to realize there’s a power vacuum forming. Things are shifting to fill it.

I imagine Rome burning…and taking the world with it.

But that’s not what’s going on now and we’re not writing about the Present. We’re starting this story with a Chevy on a wet freeway. It’s a March morning, 1993 and the wind is blowing.

I was driving that car, still a lump of clueless clay wrapped in prosciutto.