Outside it’s raining. Gwen’s asleep, the cat’s curled like an ellipsis, and I’m heartily stoned — tuned to that soft inner frequency where the world hums in minor key. I’ve got Halloween Jack spinning in my head and the 1976 Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea flickering across the screen. Nihilism rendered as silk. Rebellion as geometry.
Zag messaged me today. Said he’s been thinking about writing again — a short story, maybe more, depending on how my review lands. I already know it’ll be brilliant. Me and Gwen both think he’s one of those rare ones — a writer who never tries to sound like anyone but himself. His lineage runs through Algren, Bukowski, Kerouac. Mine overlaps only partly: Kerouac, sure, but also Wolfe and Miller. I’m the maximalist — the one who keeps trying to build a cathedral out of static. Zag just sketches one perfect line and lets the rest burn away.
Dad’s birthday is tomorrow. Born in ’56 — I always forget the number but never the tone of his voice when he said, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” He quoted Milton like someone dropping a match into gasoline. That line never left me. I bought Paradise Lost in high school, tried to write about it, and got a zero because the teacher couldn’t read my handwriting. The other one said they couldn’t believe a fourteen-year-old was writing about Milton at all. Maybe that was my first review.
Now it’s rain on the street, the kind that turns the night into a slow dissolve. The room feels underwater. Somewhere in the house, Gwen breathes evenly. The cat’s dreaming of something soft and ancient. I feel the pull to step outside, to breathe in the wet air and remember that everything beautiful eventually leaks.
Editor’s Note — Buzz Drainpipe
This fragment was found on a page that smelled faintly of rain and dispensary weed, dated only “October.” No location given, though the references suggest the northeast — maybe Boston, maybe nowhere at all.
It reads like a weather report from the interior: rain outside, sleep inside, and one of those nights where consciousness drifts between Bowie lyrics, Milton quotes, and the soft machinery of memory. You can feel the narrator leaning into the static — that liminal hum between loneliness and revelation. The kind of night that reminds you art is a form of survival, and friendship a form of translation.
The mention of “Zag” appears in other notes: a figure of quiet precision, the mirror to the author’s excess. Their contrast feels almost architectural — one builds towers, the other chisels stones. Somewhere between them lies a shared devotion to the unexplainable.
What lingers is the final image — rain on glass, the impulse to step outside and inhale the world. It’s not a conclusion, but a continuation. Notes from Overgrowth isn’t meant to end. It just keeps raining.
— Buzz Drainpipe
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