How does one speak of a legend when he is gone? How does one stand before the weight of loss and summon words mighty enough to contain his spirit? Jerome was my friend, my brother. The world may remember him as a musician, as a clone—but to me, he was something greater—a force, a star burning at its highest peak just before it vanished.

It was music that claimed him—a passion fierce and unrelenting. He pledged himself to its pursuit with the devotion of a knight. But music, as any artist will tell you, is not always a generous mistress. A man with less resolve might have faltered, turned his back on the dream for something safer, more certain.

Jerome had no grand designs of conquest, no thirst for crowns or thrones. And yet, ambition stirred within him—restless, insistent. He wanted to be a beacon, especially for the young clones drowning in the black sea of dread. He wanted to show them that they, too, could shape the world. That they could write their own legends.

So he swore himself to music with a fervor few could fathom.

His striking appearance—an unintended gift of the cloning process—was often remarked upon, yet it served him little in matters of the heart. He had grown wary of love, suspicious of its cost. He had seen too many fellow musicians surrender their art upon the altar of romance, only to watch their dreams diluted, swallowed up by the slow grind of compromise. He would not be like them. He would not be ensnared so easily. Women might admire him, but he would remain beyond their reach—his heart bound to a higher calling.

He chose solitude. But loneliness is a cunning thing. It does not arrive as an enemy, but as a whisper, creeping into the spaces left unguarded. It was in those moments of silence, when his music could not shield him, that the darkness made its case.

His life had been a relentless pursuit of a song always just beyond reach. Music had been his salvation, his war, his love.

And the women adored him—chased him like he was some untamed creature they could capture if they moved quickly enough. But Jerome was not meant to be caught. He was beautiful in the way a panther is beautiful, in the way fire is beautiful—dangerous, elusive, mesmerizing. He would lean in just close enough to make them believe they had him, then he’d smile, whisper something they’d remember for the rest of their lives, and vanish into memory. He could have had anyone, but he let himself belong to no one.

But maybe—just maybe—it wasn’t despair that took him. Maybe, in the end, Jerome did what he always wanted to do: prove, once and for all, that he was human. That he had free will. That no scientist, no pre-written sequence of DNA, could dictate his fate. In that final moment, he was a man who made his last and most irreversible choice.

A requiem was sung—not in cathedrals or concert halls, but in dimly lit nightclubs and casinos, where glasses were raised in quiet tribute.

But some of us aren’t so sure. The details were hazy. The reports, contradictory. No one ever saw the body—just rumors whispered in the clubs, strange sightings in the far corners of the country. Maybe he left, disappeared into the night, slipping away into legend like Jim Morrison, like Elvis.

Maybe he understood that true immortality isn’t in living forever—but in the stories that do.

I was beginning to suspect he was mad.

That was my first thought when he leaned forward, grinning like he had just uncovered the final truth of existence. A madman’s grin—wide, unguarded.

“That’s because you don’t know the secret yet,” he said.

“What secret?”

His grin deepened. “It’s more terrifying than anything you can possibly imagine.”

I’d met him once before, the peculiar roommate of my esthetician.

“John Lennon, Bob Marley, Kurt Cobain,” he whispered, leaning closer. “They all knew the secret. And once you know, you can never go back.”

If you define power as “the ability to affect your environment,” then life is power. But power is nothing without its witness. It is not enough to live; one must prove to oneself that one is living. How else can a man know for certain that he exists?

I moved into an ancient church, abandoned by God but repurposed by my friend, King Dave III. A church turned recording studio. My living quarters lay beneath the studio, the nave, in the dark, in the depths. There were no windows, and my only light came from flickering candles, which cast shifting shadows against the cold stone walls.

The ceiling, a mere five feet from the floor, demanded humility, lest I be struck down by the unforgiving steel pipe that loomed just above my head. Twice already it had struck me down, an unholy initiation into my new existence.

On the night of my arrival, I shared communion with King Dave III upon his weathered deck, where we imbibed a sacramental bottle of Blue Nun beneath the indifferent gaze of the stars. I spoke to him of the secret that had been imparted to me. To my astonishment, he nodded grimly.

“Aye,” he sighed, as though recalling some long-buried sorrow.

With that, he poured the last of the Blue Nun and we drank in silence, two men bound by some unspoken revelation.

Sleep claimed me at the somewhat acceptable hour of six, dragging me into a dreamless abyss. Yet scarcely had I surrendered to slumber when a great tremor shook the foundations of the church. Thunderous wails and demonic howls erupted above, filling my chamber with their dreadful resonance.

I was hoping for sleep, for peace. But peace was not meant for me.

I took a hockey stick from the corner; a weapon fit for holy war, and crept cautiously towards the staircase. The door flung open with a crash, and in its frame stood King Dave III and a wizened cat named Sister Mary perched upon his shoulder like a pirate’s owl.

“Forgive me,” he said. “I neglected to mention—there’s a primal scream class upstairs this morning.”

Above us, the poor wretches screamed into the void, clawing at the silence, as they stumbled upon a cold, indifferent world and found themselves unprepared.

I wondered then: Were they trying to purge the knowledge from their bodies? To scream their way back into ignorance? Had they been driven to perform this kind of exorcism not of demons, but of the truth?

John Lennon sat slumped on the studio couch, his fingers curled around a cigarette that had long since burned down to its last embers.

“You ever screamed so hard you thought your throat would rip open?” he muttered, voice rasping like a needle grinding against a worn-out groove.

Yoko glanced at him, her expression unreadable. “Every day in my head,” she murmured.

John exhaled sharply. “Arthur says it’s good for me. ‘Let it out, lad. Scream like you’re five years old and someone’s just torn your mother away from you.’” He shook his head, his fingers absently tapping ash onto the floor. “Turns out, that’s not so hard.”

But some truths, once known, sink their claws in and never let go.

I lay in the dark and listened. I no longer feared the damp walls, the low ceiling, the candlelight that flickered as if it, too, longed for escape.

I had a companion of sorts—a bat I named Ozzy Osbourne, who flitted through the air ducts above me. I respected Ozzy. We had an understanding: he’d keep to himself, and I wouldn’t bite his head off. Such a fragile peace was more than most men ever achieved.

Then came the rat.

He was a hideous thing, enormous, gorged on filth and shadows. I saw him one night, rifling through the garbage near the door.

The bat I could accept. But the rat was something else. A rat is a mockery of life—a creature that thrives on what has been abandoned, on what no longer serves a purpose. It was an insult, and I could not abide by insults.

Sister Mary was perched upon the kitchen counter, eating lazily from a dish of treats. Without a word, I lifted her and carried her down into the basement, where the rat still lurked.

She became alert. A predator once more. She moved with a deadly purpose, her eyes gleaming. And then, with a furious pounce, she seized the vile creature by its tail, and in a display of merciless justice, she began to thrash it against the unyielding stone. Again and again, the sound of cracking bones echoed through the chamber. The rat shrieked—once, twice—then silence. A crimson stain blossomed upon the cold concrete.

The rat had screamed, as though it knew, in those final moments, that it had always been doomed.

Sister Mary released the lifeless body and gazed up at me, proudly awaiting my approval. I stared at her. The blood dripped. The walls bore witness. The candle flames flickered in the damp air.

What was I to do? Praise her? Mourn the rat? Mourn myself?

Instead, I found a shovel. I gathered the remains and discarded them as one discards anything that has outlived its use. I stood in the blood-soaked basement and asked myself the only question that mattered. How in God’s name do you clean up this much blood?

To explore one’s own consciousness, to wrestle with angels and demons alike, and to emerge, bruised but enlightened. In the act of creation, we confront the duality of our nature—God and the animal, the sublime and the base. We grapple with our contradictions, our sins, and our virtues, all in the pursuit of truth—a truth that is not imposed, but discovered.

Yet, in a world so often governed by pragmatism, the creative act is defiant and resists the pressure to conform. To embrace it fully is to reject the forces that would have us march in lockstep, devoid of individuality and imagination.

The artist knows the cost of this path. They are often misunderstood, dismissed as dreamers, their motives questioned, their sanity doubted. And yet, they persist—for what is a man without his dreams, without the ability to express the inexpressible, to give form to the formless?

The creative force is relentless. The artist continues their work, not for glory, but for the love of God. In the act of creation itself, they find their purpose, their reason for being, and their ultimate salvation.

Even though shooting up cop cars while armed with two hot chicks and some paint-ball guns is terrific fun, we decided to quit while we were ahead, go to the mountain, and finish the Jack Daniel’s.

There, in the dizziness of the early morning, I started to climb down the dark mountain side. I hoped the girls would follow me so I could ask them important questions like why their shoes didn’t match their hair. But then it happened. I lost my rapport with gravity and tumbled a hundred and fifty feet down the mountain. Luckily, I landed on top of a lonely tree.

It was on this lonely tree where I began to reflect on my life, a life devoted entirely to music. I won’t claim it’s a noble pursuit. My biggest mistake was trying to create music simply for the sake of art. I now see that music and art don’t always mix, and I’ve checked my idealism at the door, along with my soul.

I’ve always valued individuality, and as a kid, strived to express it through music. Recently though, I’ve come to the conclusion that individuality can be a detriment to musicians. Why try to create something unique when it takes much less effort, and the rewards are potentially so much greater, to copy something that people already accept?

I often become frustrated when I get on stage and hear, “He’s cute.”

“But I wish he’d smile more.”

“What’s with the hair?”

“That’s all right,” I tell myself. “One day, there will be a beautiful princess who will understand. She will be the one.”

But if there’s one thing I learned during my recent conversations with God, affectionately known as Eddie Van Halen, it’s that I’ve been dreaming, and there’s precious little space reserved in the world for dreamers.

On the lonely tree, I thought about a girl I used to know. She was the most beautiful girl I ever saw. Not that I’d ever tell her that. She knows, they all know. I imagine it must disappoint women when they first realize how simple men really are.

Sometimes I wonder what’s so special about being human. Like monkeys, we watch and mimic all the other monkeys we see on TV. If I were in charge of the world and wanted to control the monkeys, I’d show plenty of examples on TV for them to follow. I’d reward psychotic behavior of all kinds. I’d feed the monkeys drugs, then lock them up for getting high. I’d encourage the monkeys to fight over such stupid things as the color of their fur. And if I was feeling particularly ambitious, I’d start a religion and say, “I know you’re only a monkey, but pretend you’re not. If you just sacrifice all your monkeying around in this life, in the next one you’ll have a hundred monkey-whores feeding you grapes.”

Then, just when the monkeys were about to give up their hopes and dreams and their faith in the greatness of monkeykind, I’d fake a Mars landing.

Paranoid monkeys have a fancy word for this, and it’s the paranoid monkeys who know what’s really going on. They call it imprinting. They say the head monkeys use imprinting to encourage certain types of behavior in lower-class monkeys, like musicians. If the whole idea of imprinting doesn’t disturb you, it might not have dawned on you yet.

Distracted, I heard a concerned voice call from the top of the mountain. “Are you all right?”

“I don’t know yet,” I answered as I checked for broken bones. My right knee appeared to take the worst of it, but my ego also took a bruise.

“Good thing you’re so cute, because you’re dumb as shit.”

As I climbed down the lonely tree, I came to realize why Eddie Van Halen invented Jack Daniel’s. I took a deep breath and embarked on my journey back to the top of the mountain, but this time I was especially careful because just like art and music, gravity and Jack Daniel’s don’t mix.

The clock struck three in the somber night as the four of us journeyed towards our grand performance. In music, the space between the beats is important. Life, too, unfolds in these spaces.

The relentless snowfall painted a thick veil of white upon the perilous black ice of the mountain highway. Our windshield wipers battled valiantly, their efforts hardly enough to reveal the treacherous path that lay ahead or the abyss of the valley beside. Shrouded by dense fog, in the bitter cold, we pressed on.

Then, in an instant, a booming thud resounded through the night air. Jerome, the valiant helmsman of our carriage, grappled with the wheel as it bucked and fishtailed violently along the icy road. In the back seat, I quickly accepted the fate that seemed imminent, a fate of being reduced to nothing but a mangled mess upon the desolate highway. Next to me, Keefer raised his arms and opened his mouth in dramatic slow motion.

But, onward we pressed, albeit amidst chaos.

“By the stars, thou hast done well, my friend!” I extolled Jerome for his admirable navigation.

“I aimed for the smallest of them,” he replied earnestly. “Three creatures there were, but alas, they appeared before I could discern their presence.”

“Aye, indeed,” added Thud Pumpkin. “Fortunate it was a deer and not a towering moose, for with their long limbs, they could thrust through the very windshield.”

Nonetheless, a hundred leagues still lay between us and the next village, and our headlights had relinquished their radiance to darkness. We found ourselves bereft of warmth, frequently halting in the middle of the highway to replenish the radiator now adorned with six antler holes, spewing the lifeblood of antifreeze. With steady perseverance, we inched closer to the next haven, repairing the beleaguered radiator upon our arrival. The culmination of our efforts allowed us to grace the stage precisely as the hour struck for the grand performance.

The evening greeted us with a throng that stretched for blocks, and the elixir of tequila flowed generously, akin to the flowing streams of Dionysian revelry. From the stage, we beheld the fervent punk maidens, their spirits alight with vivacious dance. As the night unfolded, Keefer and I ventured into the chamber of reflection, where a pair of shoes betrayed their presence beneath a cubicle. Curiosity beguiled Keefer, compelling him to peer over the cubicle, revealing a familiar fan. His unbuttoned sleeve, rolled past his elbow, bore witness to a needle embedded below a small tattoo of a heart with chains.

“Dude, dost it prove effective for thee?” Keefer inquired.

He seemed unaware of Keefer’s intrusion, but Keefer persisted, “Pray tell, does it avail thee, my friend?”

In that moment, I felt a gentle tap upon my shoulder. A fervent punk maiden appeared before me.

“Would you not desire to embrace me passionately?” she questioned with fervor.

“What might you offer in return?” I inquired with a measure of nonchalance.

“I knew it,” she exclaimed in excitement.

With that, we departed from the jubilant assembly and made our way back to the sanctuary of the hotel. The curtains had fallen upon the grand spectacle, and now it was time to embrace the space between the beats.