The Ghost in "Dylan's Ghost Story"

Weavers Banquet Talk, November 2023

I want to tell a story about community building. But in order to tell that story, I have to tell another story about Battlestar Galactica. But to explain the relevance of Battlestar Galactica, I have to tell you a story that I call "Dylan's ghost story".

This is all very confusing, but I might be able to explain.

Now, we've just come from Halloween, we've just celebrated the spooky season. Most of you are young adults, and there is always that conundrum, for young people, to figure out how they're going to celebrate Halloween. There’s that limbo when you are too old to trick or treat and you're too young to have kids or just stay home and distribute Halloween candy while watching reruns of The Twilight Zone. For myself, this was roughly the period between my mid-teens and my mid-30s, and in that time, there was always a tradition of the Halloween party.

Everyone always does this. People have music, people have party games, and there's obviously a costume contest. But if you're among a certain kind of people, a certain kind of literary friend group made up of theater kids and math nerds, often some person will get the wonderful idea to gather around the fire and tell ghost stories.

I think people get this idiotic idea from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which was supposedly developed at one of these 19th-century storytelling parties. People have this notion that their friends are going to sit in a circle, tell stories, and then have a serious contest of who can tell the best ones.

Now, guys. I hate to break this to the 20-year-olds out in the audience. But, unless you are in the very deep woods, or very drunk, this never works.

Just don't try this.

It's not the 19th century, you're not in a group of literary romantic poets, all itching to write the next great gothic novel. It’s not going to pan out.

Invariably, no one volunteers. Or I should say, no one volunteers seriously. And even in groups comprised of creative types who love coming up with stories on the fly, you will have a hard time getting anything better than “hook-hand” for the 32nd time. These are the guys who would love to tell you about their summer vacation in some place like Burma. They would talk your ear off about the latest book they read, or if you were really unlucky, the latest book they were writing. 

But once the challenge comes to tell a serious story about something that's meant to inspire awe or fear, everyone closes up. People just retreat within themselves and become jokey, ironic, and subversive Millennials.

I think I've seen the "Let's All Tell Scary Stories" game fail at least four times, and only once did I hear a story that sincerely held the audience's attention with something approaching suspense, which should be the critical part of any ghost story.

This was the time when I heard Dylan's ghost story.

Now,  Dylan was a friend from my hometown, I never knew him very well in high school. But we went to the same college and hung out around the same crowd. He was kind of a strange dude, sorta in the theater crowd, kind of a stoner type, obviously, higher than average intelligence, very well connected with Silicone Valley parents, but also what we used to call a “space case”.

In fact, I'm not even so sure he was even enrolled full-time in college. He seemed to be in classes one semester, then off the next. That type of deal. And Dylan would do anything just to get a new strange experience or a new weird story.

Therefore, I suppose it wasn't too much of a surprise when my friends had that crazy idea of telling ghost stories one Halloween, for Dylan to stand up and say.

"Let me tell you about that one time that I saw a Ghost."

Okay, great.

And it started off well enough, auto-biographically, with Dylan relating his experience hitchhiking outside of Whistler, British Columbia. He had been walking along the road when he caught a ride from a truck driver headed north.

Already, the perfect intro to a ghost story. I knew Dylan had hitch-hiked to Alaska, or at least he claimed he had. And nighttime roadside encounters are always a classic trope, the setting for a thousand spooky stories, not to mention Tim Burton's eternal classic "Pee Wee's Big Adventure".

So here we are waiting for things to get nice and Gothic, but instead, all we hear about are the various stops the trucker takes. Each time the guy takes a stop, he goes to the back and returns with a weird tick. Then they keep on going on their way. But each time the truck accelerates a bit. And then Dylan realizes that at every stop, the trucker is retiring to snort a line of coke. He has them all set up around his back cab and at every stop he's taking more and more smack into his system. And then just as this revelation hits Dylan, the big-rig edges 40 miles an hour over the highway speed limit, plowing into the night on Canadian Highway 99 at 100 miles per hour.

Great story. I can't wait for the punch line. Maybe this is a joke?

But oh no! A twist! Apparently, it's at this very crazy moment that the truck driver launches into his own story. I guess cocaine does that to old teamsters. And, this guy was old. He was an ex-hippie roadster who had been involved in the whole rock scene back in the early 70s in the Bay Area. While he was there, he got involved in a bunch of new-age cults in the area, including one that had tried to reach out to dark native American spirits that used to inhabit the coastal areas of the Pacific Northwest with psychedelic drugs. But the trucker was convinced in fact, that these were extra-dimensional alien entities who still wandered the region with malevolent intentions.

Okay, great. This is another opportunity for a great ghost story that we're hearing secondhand from this crazy, drug-addled driver.

But oh no, inside the truck driver's story, we encounter another man who tells a different tale about his experiences in the company of Grady McMurtry the leader of Ordo Templi Orientis and the successor of Allister Crowley, one of the great sorcerers and Satanists of the early 20th century. This character had his own story about trying to abscond with secrets and relics from the temple, and his paranoia of possible retaliation from the other cult members and maybe, even, darker demonic forces.

Altogether, really creepy stuff. So maybe this is a historical tale about demonology and the occult?

But then the story turns again

Soon, Dylan's narrative had switched back to the first person as he was deposited at the side of the road, and some road stop outside of Whitehorse where he encounters another strange figure in charge of the motel with a strange slouch and yet another cryptic story.

And so, you can probably figure out how Dylan's ghost story proceeded. It was digression after digression, plot change after plot change, twist after twist. The story just seemed to keep tumbling forward. It had its own will, its own autonomy, its own life.

And everyone listening was wrapped in suspense. The story was entrancing, especially since so much of it was told in the first person with delicious true historical facts inserted at just the right moments.

But then we realized that this had been going on for more than an hour and a half. The story was essentially a feature-length movie. But there was no continuous plot throughout the entire thing. It was one interchangeable digression after the other, twist after twist never coming to a point.

I mean, no one was expecting this to be a real ghost story like there would be some supernatural entity that appeared or a classic scare point. No one was even expecting that the story was at all real to life. We were just waiting for some kind of catharsis.

But catharsis never came. Everything was simply the anticipation of resolution, the profound endpoint of Dylan’s story always was over the next hill, always to be revealed by the next plot twist, or discovered by the next digression. 

In fact, I don't even really remember the story (or the party) ending. People gradually filtered out as they lost patience with this strange guy going on and on and on, about the time that he saw a ghost.

Later I would learn that this type of extended digressive story with no point, or a self-negating conclusion, was typically called a "shaggy dog" joke, presumably, because the original was about a shaggy dog or something (though I never heard that particular one).

The point of the shaggy dog joke was to intentionally waste people's time. Really more of a prank than an actual joke, which is why I have never been good at telling them. 

Usually, these jokes were also intentionally boring, as an additional sadistic punishment for anyone who was willing to give the teller a platform. But this is where Dylan's ghost story” broke the mold.

Because, despite being ultimately pointless, each individual component felt real and weighed on my mind just like a deeper story might, further vexing me with the meaninglessness of it all. It was hard to dismiss. And, before I lost touch with Dylan, I heard him tell his story several other times, each time it was different.

Later, I would see a very similar type of story in the work of radio personality Joe Frank, who was a master at delivering monologues with uncontrolled digressions, each containing a deeply evocative feeling that would keep you wondering what would happen next, even though no resolution was ever delivered.

I was a huge fan of Joe Frank, and I remember buying two or three of his CDs. And this style of monologue became an oddity in my own imagination, a kind of artistic form that I always felt could be more fully developed. And, for a while, I forgot this affair, until, a few years later, when I got really into this show called Battlestar Galactica.

Now, Battlestar Galactica was another one of these classic “golden age of television” shows, with wonderfully acted and written episodes. Battlestar Galactica was a sci-fi show like Star Trek, but updated to be darker and more gritty with more human elements to it. There was another longtime friend that I used to watch the show with, and we were really into watching it for the first two seasons. The show largely focused on a war between humans and humanoid robots, which could perfectly impersonate humanity and infiltrate civilization. It wasn't exactly clear what these malevolent robots were doing. But at the beginning of every show, there would be this little teaser that would assure you that they were everywhere, they were hiding, they were undetectable, and they had a plan.

They had a plan.

The show was moving somewhere, the show was slowly revealing what these creatures' cryptic purpose was, good or evil. And every episode of the show was one of these perfectly remixed television narratives. Every show resolved the previous tension in the first 20 minutes, and then slowly led you to another cliffhanger so you were waiting for the next episode. I think we are all familiar with the pattern. It is the “mystery box” of J.J. Abrams's Lost, or George R.R. Martin's epic cluster fuck Game of Thrones.

The point of these sprawling television shows was not to draw you to a conclusion, but to draw you into a fandom, to make you a consumer of the show.

But for those looking for something bigger in fiction, mere fandom is not enough. And we all get to that point with modern media where we begin to learn our lesson that not all that glitters is gold.

For me, the beginning of this lesson was Battlestar Galactica. I remember watching the show as it evolved. The third season was good, and the fourth, and the fifth were lagging a little bit. Then we get to the last season and the mystery is worn off, the usual holes are appearing in the plot, and everyone can see the mechanics working behind the scenes to keep us hooked from episode to episode.

I mean, the creators did promise that there was a plan at the beginning of every episode, didn’t they?

So naturally, we are expecting that there is going to be a big reveal, a point behind the plot that the writers are working towards which you don't know, but they do. And then finally, at the end, you will be given something to think about that might affect your life. The same kind of spiritual conclusion that there is in a Shakespeare play or any other magnificent masterpiece of cinema; a moment of poignancy and human revelation.

But that's the thing with these shows, it starts becoming very apparent that there is no point, every one of these episodes is simply a digression, a dramatic flare-up that's started and then left partially unresolved. You're led along with some plot scraps to go on to the next episode to keep on keeping on, but not to receive anything. Because, ultimately, there's nothing to be received. The plot is what it is. The characters are just who they are. The show is just a show.

What were you expecting? Greater purpose? Greater meaning? Something more?

Well, that's not the business. The business is distraction and diversion. They're part of a magic trick that's trying to get you to look away from the magician, who's doing all the magic tricks off to the side. I remember experiencing this revelation sometime around the fifth season of Battlestar Galactica, and then turning to my friend and saying: "I think we've just sat through five seasons of Dylan's ghost story."

And that's the thing with most millennial media, that's the thing with most stories from our generation. It's all perfectly entertaining. It all has a kind of internal consistency. It's well done.

But it unravels. Once you tug the thread hard enough, once you follow everything down to the bottom, you're left with all the narratives in tatters. All plot elements and character developments lead nowhere, simply resolving in self-referential gibberish, and culminating in a pointless cleanup by some “Deus ex Machina” (or maybe just a “Machina”, since we no longer believe in God).

I feel like this ephemeral nature inhabits everything the later generations put their hands to, anything we have come to understand in the later part of the 21st century. We are haunted by a spirit of the past. Like the listeners of Dylan's ghost story, we're always waiting for a supernatural purpose to reveal itself in order to give our lives the catharsis we need to have anything make sense.

And this is where we arrive at our modern crisis.

As a relatively new parent, I think a lot about what I want to give to my son. But more than anything else, I want to give my son what I can't give him, I want to give him the 1990s

More than anything else, I want him to experience the world as I remember it. The world of the 1990s had hope, it had community, and more than just that, it had optimism and an eagerness for the future. There was a humaneness and presence and a kind of magic that I remember from my childhood.

And I am not just speaking of the general magic that comes with childhood itself. There was something that was deeper in the adult world. It was a world that was filled with mature people who believed in a country that they wanted to build. A place that they wanted to exist after they were gone, and not just a place that they wanted to retire into.