This story will have no discernible plot. Like a dream or the immediate, it needn’t have one. It is here and now. It is a fantasy with no point, a distorted circus-mirror reflection of reality that punctuates the emotions and little fears that are usually hidden by the stress-static of everyday life.

This story will have no point, save only to be. Nothing matters; everything has meaning.

This story should be about pirates, passionate and impulsive, both base scoundrels and Poetic Terrorists extraordinare, who break laws only because they need to be broken, who answer to no one but Death, whose morals and ethics lie on a plane beyond the conventional—guilty of every deadly sin but mediocrity. Sufferers of wanderlust and ardor. It should be about pirates, because they are everything I want to be but am not; they are everything I admire and am frightened of being. They swallow like in draughts, live it to the brim on the edge, savoring every drop. They play dice with Death. They are toothy grinning skulls. They smell of salt and sweat and spice and lust and life.

This story should be a ‘punk: cyberpunk, or biopunk, or steampunk. It should be gritty and grey, sardonic and ironic, a dystopia clothed in computer chip implants and cosmetic gene-mods and hissing steam-powered shining brass androids. A utopia attempts to envision a perfect world, but a dystopia—by attempting the complete opposite—achieves it. A dystopia is perfect in its gross imperfections, a truer mirror of human nature than any of those put forth by Plato or Galton or the Mormons or your mom. Grungy, forthright, sexy, angsty, dusky, keen. A Paradise for a rebel. Overrun with corruption and hypocriticisms. A story that is the distillation of the discontent of a generation of youth.

This story should be about immortality. Haunting and drained of spirit; weary of life because of death; yearning for release. Empty. A brooding piece about the passing of life and a boredom born of eternity, jaded and cynical in taste.

This story should be about magic[k]. It is miracle and mundane. It is the means and the motive, the why and the how.

This story should be a dark fantasy, filled with seduction and shadows and mortals and monsters (not just the non-human kind).

This story should be about CHAOS, which “never dies,” because it is the wellspring of existence.

And this story should be about dragons, majestic and polymorphic and insightful, and gryphons, wise and mighty and vain, for many reasons—not the least of which, because they both kick major ass.

This story should be about all of this.

But

~~~

(Written circa 2003 under the heavy influence of Hakim Bey.)