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by Miracle Jones
“Life is, to some extent, an extended dialogue with your future self about how exactly you are going to let yourself down over the coming years.” –-Charles Yu, “How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe”
You are too sad and chary to rage left and you aren’t pig dumb and blood racist enough to tack right. Have you considered becoming a globalist occult mystic oddfellow with me?
What if I told you that you could run an infinite tab at a secret tavern that has no blaring televisions where you could learn the ancient art of alchemy at your own pace, all while enjoying facultative access to as many grizzled veterans, viragos, scoundrels, and dealer’s reps for plumbing supply companies as you might could ever shake your dang crisp formal fez at?
What if I told you that Lodge 49 is the first show to ever capture the real contours of a soul in flux, of the transformative spiritual powers of despair itself, of the precise fascinating poisons that lead to madness and transcendence when honked up indiscriminately by pinwheeling seeker-gluttons famished for the holy ghost?
***
The plot of Lodge 49 is simple, almost elemental: twins in their twenties deal with the sudden death of their father and their subsequent rootlessness. They are each saddled with debts that overwhelm them. They cope in divergent ways, one by seeking authentic community anywhere possible, the other through only-mildly-ironic-and-self-aware self-destruction. One is tender as a wound, the other is a force of nature…scary, “like some magical, disgusting horse.” One is the Fool, the other is the Witch.
Meanwhile, as the community where they live crumbles as a result of the local airplane factory closing down, a battered but sly plumbing supply salesman and a bunch of his horseradish-piquant friends (the Wizard, the King, the False King, the Scribe)—-all of whom belong to a dumb pseudo-archaic sacred order of fraternal mystical nonsense—-still manage to meet up and drink together a few times a week in order to get through their collective mid-life crisis.
As a result of financial strain on every single character, this pipette tray of unstable human chemicals is dumped in the same crucible and the heat is turned way up. The worlds of these twins and this lodge sploosh together. Instead of an explosion, we get hypnotic goo, like a lava lamp. Dark, or possibly beige, forces circle around our heroes. Putin’s favorite method of murdering enemies was to smear poison on a lightbulb which would then be evaporated into an aerosol when the victim left the light on long enough. After the victim had a heart attack, the poison would then be burned up, leaving no trace. Are these good people of Long Beach, California poison for each other as they are rendered and clarified? Or is something else happening?
Actually, the stakes are very low. Maybe the lowest I’ve ever seen on nu-velvet caramel-smooth delux tv. There are no: vampires, zombies, dragons, murders, cops, antiheroes, superpowers, or acts of pornographic cruelty. There is magic, but only the most banal kind that you could definitely do yourself if you ever bothered to try. There is an epic quest. No one takes this quest very seriously. Every now and then the characters remember about THE SCROLLS, but only as an excuse to hang out harder in new locations.
The real villain of Lodge 49 can broadly be defined as systems. There’s nothing inherently wrong with systems, even savage ones that cripple the few to raise up the multitudes. Systems refine base chemicals into exquisite potions or value-holding currency, systems apportion resources and define limits, systems create boring skeletons that enable flesh and virtuosity. But the old legacy systems are breaking down in Lodge 49: work, debt, marriage, even secret societies. Stable new systems have yet to take their place. In the interim, there is an opportunity to confront the void. To find peace in the churn. To watch the lava lamp swirl.
There is a moment in the second season where the Lodge gathers together in their finest black robes to conduct a ceremony honoring the dead. Nobody really wants to do this on account of it being a very tedious thing to do versus say playing pinball. While they are thus engaged—-masked in their ominous Bible-black occult raiment—-a pizza delivery man arrives, opening the door on their dread Working. In terror, he drops all of the pizzas that he brings, shocked to come upon this ancient rite without warning.
It is a moment of low comedy, but it is also a reminder: to an outsider, the lodge seems like a dark nexus of conspiracy, even when its initiates are performing their most benign sacraments. The beige forces that the lodge itself is confronting are probably also all similarly shabby. All systems that you don’t understand seem wicked and inhumane from the outside. However, from the inside, these legacy systems might be the remains of some once-powerful animating spirit: the postdiluvian water-damaged rulebook, the quintessence of something overwhelming but not necessarily malevolent. World-shaping. The difference between the true lodge and the false lodge is therefore the difference between the mere architecture of group coercion and the love and friendship of actual community.
In a world where the hidden infrastructure of American reality is breaking down and the aqua vitae has become toxic—-our world! this world!—-maybe what we need is a plumbing supply expert and a professional pool cleaner like good old Dud the Fool and good old Ernie the Luminous Knight to plunge the clogs, to replace the lightweight garbage piping, to purify the waters.
Because what if we go crazy and find out time isn’t real? Who will we even hang out with?
***
“Time isn't an orderly stream. Time isn't a placid lake recording each of our ripples. Time is viscous. Time is a massive flow. It is a self-healing substance, which is to say, almost everything will be lost. We're too slight, too inconsequential, despite all of our thrashing and swimming and waving our arms about. Time is an ocean of inertia, drowning out the small vibrations, absorbing the slosh and churn, the foam and wash, and we're up here, flapping and slapping and just generally spazzing out, and sure, there's a little splashing on the surface, but that doesn't even register in the depths, in the powerful undercurrents miles below us, taking us wherever they are taking us.” —-Charles Yu, “How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe”
After my freshman year of college, in the summer before 9/11, I went full-tilt spiral-eyeball cuckoo bananas. This wasn’t a fun kind of crazy. I whipped myself into a frenzy that led to a total psychotic break for a few months that felt like a few hundred years in my self-chewing mind. I tore all the scabs off my brain and then cheese-gratered down to the panic layer.
Luckily, a very sad and sensitive Texas psychiatrist put me on heavy Zyprexa and infinite lorazepam and didn’t think I was worth institutionalizing. I was allowed to convalesce with my family. I built several plastic models of working V8 engines (you turned a crank to make the pistons pump!) and painted them psychedelic colors. I read all the Harry Potter books a few times.
I know intellectually that the reason for my breakdown was not a result of special insight or gnostic revelation. I wasn’t sleeping for several weeks and I was in a strange town in the desert working at a mobile diagnostic imaging company, a company that drove trucks into even more abandoned places to scan the people there with MRIs and ultrasounds and then bring the scans back to the central hub for processing. I had too much time on my hands to read Jung and Joyce and to watch Evangelion and The Prisoner. There was a plague of grasshoppers that summer in Abilene. You crunched them underfoot as you walked into the supermarket. I was in the middle of the dissolution of my first real romantic relationship. I hated my first year of college and I wasn’t sure if college was ever going to get any better. I wasn’t handling recreational drugs very well.
All those external factors, however, were not what I experienced as my AT field was ripped open and the hot wind of perdition blew on my festering naked guts. These external factors were merely the context for what I actually remember and I only list these external factors because it is what one ought to do in polite company. What I actually remember about that time are my one-on-one battles with terror using whatever arbitrary metaphysics I could throw up to defend myself from day to day. I have never felt more lonely or misunderstood, especially once I realized how little anybody else cared about my war with the logos, especially as manifested by prosperity Christianity as practiced in megachurch-saturated turn-of-the century Texas.
Suddenly seized with the suspicion that the entirety of the modern entertainment and political superstructure was part of a massive unintentional conspiracy (the worst kind!) to keep us all from dealing directly with the true cosmic horror of the uncaring universe (a suspicion possibly born from accidentally getting really high and watching an episode of Saturday Night Live so unfunny that it made me terrified!), I stopped being able to sleep and stayed up night after night for weeks at a time reading poorly-kerned online articles about the synthesis of Eastern and Western philosophy, my entire body seized by chemical dread, while I tried to figure out if:
1. This is actually hell and we are being punished for things we don’t even know we did or which we haven’t even done yet. The logically-irreconcilable unfairness of this kind of punishment is part of hell’s torment, or maybe…
2. All of reality is actually a unified illusion with one face and one secret personal agenda. Possibly it is a deity trying to have a conversation with you in several dimensions at once, using all of your memories and inclinations to funnel you into direct contact by symbols and portents that only you might understand. Until one has a massive, life-changing “diamond cutter” insight into how this illusion actually works, one will continue to perpetrate this illusion for others, only helping to drag them further away from the imminent direct conversation with the unified entity that they could be experiencing as also manifested through you, helping with every false word to sustain the cloud of ignorance / division that tortures the ones around us into atomization, especially the ones we love…
“I am going fuckin crazy,” I told my Cousin Casey. I had been sent to his exquisitely-decorated Dallas bungalow at an emergency moment of extreme inner torment by my very wise and canny family who had seen this shit before, being a family of criminals and drug-dealers and people who survive emergencies. “I don’t feel crazy though. Not like you might think. No one seems to be able to tell me the truth about anything real. I want answers but everyone says I need to rest.”
“Yes,” he said trippingly, utterly unworried. “But are you enjoying it?”
Was I enjoying it? Was I enjoying my brain boiling itself into gasket-busting steam? I wasn’t enjoying it. How was that possible?
He explained that transformation was a process. That it would be a wild ride and that it was enough at my age to just get started. That I couldn’t will myself to get to the end where I was all the way done understanding how everything fit together quite yet. I would need to have patience. While it could be absolutely true that all of reality was a unified being with whom I was finally having an authentic relationship by trying to see its coquettish face in every moment, there was no reason to rush any kind of permanent consummation. Epiphanies would come on their own schedule, not mine. It was my job to be attentive, not to make demands. And there were certain truths that could only be conveyed as object lessons, as stories in which I would be an active participant, as dramas that would require my input.
“I think what I need is more patience,” I said. “How do I get more patience right now?” I asked unironically.
“You could pray for it,” he said. “The best prayer is just 'help me,' over and over again. The only other prayer that matters is 'thank you.'”
It worked like nothing else. I got better. I think all I really needed was for someone to take me seriously but to tell me to be cool. Anyway, I got good enough to go back to school. When 9/11 happened the next month, I remember feeling like a big knot had been untied inside me. Now we would all have to deal with some real shit together. As America lost its fucking mind, I felt uniquely qualified to zip around inside our collapsing, increasingly-totalitarian mall of a country.
Anyway, the point is that everybody in Lodge 49 is going crazy in a way that feels utterly familiar to me, even hilarious in its specific gentleness, and I have never felt less alone while watching television. So again: are you ready to join the Lodge with me? We can start a chapter in Queens. Come on come on come on let’s do it
***
“...unfortunately, it's true: time does heal. It will do so whether you like it or not, and there's nothing anyone can do about it. If you're not careful, time will take away everything that ever hurt you, everything you have ever lost, and replace it with knowledge. Time is a machine: it will convert your pain into experience. Raw data will be compiled, will be translated into a more comprehensible language. The individual events of your life will be transmuted into another substance called memory and in the mechanism something will be lost and you will never be able to reverse it, you will never again have the original moment back in its uncategorized, preprocessed state. It will force you to move on and you will not have a choice in the matter.” —Charles Yu, “How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe"
Because we probably need new lodges, man, even in Queens, especially in Queens. There is no single religious or ethnic identity that binds us all together in this country. We are a nation of hateful conspiracies that sometimes row together for really disgusting and dubious ends. Lately, the internet has even dissolved the adhesive of shared sports, movies, television, and political narratives. We can’t even complain about these unhealthy casino joys together anymore.
But this isn’t the first time that our nation has choked on the unswallowable bolus of rage swelling the collective throat. I think this happens all the fucking time in America. It happens because we love jumping nards-first into new technology wearing big fat grins like goony skank-drunk test pilots velcroed into jet-powered Mercury shoes.
So Americans must always be perennially solving the problem anew of how to build a society out of nothing much in common. We are actually pretty good at it. Kids from all walks of life in cul-de-sacs and apartment courtyards everywhere in This Great Land gather together every day to play pretend. We all have some experience trying to suck fun from each other, despite being the world’s dandruff. From the Knights of the Ancient Order of the Mystic Chain to the Supreme Commandery of Universal Brotherhood to the League of Friendship of the Supreme Mechanical Order of the Sun, Americans have been joining secret societies to help each other since we were nothing but a mucous-covered baby bird of a dream crammed up George Washington’s asshole.
Selling mysteries has always been the best marketing pitch for these dark little rooms full of aspirational middlers. Seekers of esoteric knowledge are a certain sort. A fragile sort. An obsessive, persistent, kicked-puppy sort. One of the key problems of the Internet isn’t that it provides wrong information. I mean, it does--but even worse is that it provides answers without context. It gives people exactly what they are looking for, quickly and without meaning. You don’t gotta work for it. You don’t gotta accidentally hang out with a bunch of awesome losers who reflect yourself back to you.
The ridiculous organizations that bound together Western democracies before NATO (the Freemasons, the Rosicrucians, the Knights of Columbus) knew what they were doing. People came through the doors as supplicants, seeking the truth, and then they had the truth parceled out to them by degrees, in exchange for service and sacrifice.
Honestly, the truth is, that there aren’t any muggles. We are all Jedi. We are all immortal vehicles for swirling silver Horace spunk smeared on holy lettuce. Everyone can swan around changing reality in ruby slippers if they want, as nimtopsical as vape lice.
Honestly, I don’t see why we can’t all be Illuminati.
***
I love Twin Peaks and Nathan for You and I love Columbo even more, but it is hard to argue that a medium that is bound to the needs of advertisers and is only allowed on the national airwaves by the benevolence of the government can ever really be art. I mean, it can’t be, right? However, we all recognize the soft power of television in America, so we have tended to identify with the careers of actors and showrunners, praising their craft, being grateful for the free escapist pleasure that this utterly circumscribed medium provides.
So television definitely isn’t art. But then again, art is generally overrated. Most of the time, television is better than art. You can talk about it with other people, for instance. These conversations have some of the same formal qualities and subversive powers of art. Television creates art-like ripples. It is as art-adjacent as cathedrals, hymns, and turnpike diners.
The rise of streaming platforms has made these art-like ripples even more wild and wide. Succession is the Addams Family. It’s fine. It’s fun to talk about. I like Bojack Horseman a great deal, although it is good that it is ending since its rhythms have become sort of predictable. I can’t really imagine any frothing fandoms spurting up around Lodge 49 in the same way that people sit around speculating on the intentions of the writers of Game of Thrones, Watchmen, Breaking Bad, or Succession. The show appeals to the sad and lonely, but not the bitter and skeptical. It has nothing for them. There is nothing in Lodge 49 that feeds the bad impulses of the cornered masses trying to turn their frustrated analytical capacities on something they can pause and rewind. The show urges la compassion not le ressentiment.
Anyway, maybe I am overselling this show. Maybe I like it for the same peculiar vagaries that anybody likes anything. Maybe there is nothing special about it and it is merely my own persistent anomie and (confessed to you just now!) psychosis that has caused me to read more into it than I should. Honestly, the show that Lodge 49 most resembles is EastEnders, which I like because it is also interested in the day-to-day economic circumstances of its characters who—-like me, like you—-don’t seem all that interested in any kind of glamorous life beyond the bar on the corner and the street stalls outside. It tries to infuse daily life with all the enchantment, drama, and deviltry that it deserves.
So far, I have not been able to get a single person that I personally know to watch this show. I have tried to describe it thusly: if all of Twin Peaks takes place inside the Black Lodge, then all of Lodge 49 takes place inside the White Lodge. This line of persuasion hasn’t worked. I guess that is fine. I wonder what they are all watching that is helping them model friendship and community, though. What world are they living in that they can give to me the next time we hang out?
At some point in Lodge 49, every single person seems to sit down with every other person for a beer and a heart-to-heart (or some acid or a donut and a monologue about Bitcoin). The way people try to listen to each other is something I have almost never seen on television before. The way they read books and watch shows together and play games and try to learn each other’s histories and fears is sublime. This isn't some idealized utopia: these are just the versions of us that I recognize, the parts missing from the internet. It is easy to root for these bastards and it feels good to do it. Makes you feel like maybe somebody is rooting for you.
***
I would be a complete fucking asshole if I didn’t remind you that what makes the show work are the performances—-performances which must surely be elicited by a production that must be, come on about it, fun as hell.
It is a show made-up almost entirely of genius character actors working with material that they finally deserve. Everybody in this show is trying to make life! Every actor in this show knows exactly how much change their characters have in their pockets.
Brent Jennings is incredible. I could watch him eat sandwiches, do the crossword, iron shirts. David Pasquesi has never been more perfect as a relentless seeker whose passion spurts out of every pore. Even his glorious nose is put to work. Eric Allan Kramer and Linda Emond are soulful as motherfucking shit. Emond’s character is the only one in the show with a true superpower: she can type 130 words a minute blindfolded. I love some of the more ancillary characters just as much. Obviously everybody loves David Ury’s Champ, but I am actually a tremendous fan of Vik Sahay’s supercilious Tarquin. His over-the-top corporate pronouncements have amused me more than anything in years. "A bullwhip, a chalice, a snow globe! Out of these objects, you will dreamstorm a marketing plan for your shadowchain!” Somebody give that dude ten million dollars and put him in a movie where he plays Jeff Bezos.
Listen, the acting in this show is incredible and all of the actors are generous to each other and seem to be buzzing off each other’s joy pheromones, even as they perform roles that are sad and small and still and hurting. Even the cameos feature actors that have always carried a similar jagged-swingery vibe and I won’t ruin who any of them might be. I don’t really understand why this show isn’t everybody’s favorite new show. Maybe it will be soon?
***
“life is long like a CVS receipt
not much to do unless you eat your cake and dance like wedding guests
life is long, there's no laundry left to clean
not much to say unless you have a
slow joke you wanted to tell, i guess”
--Cheekface, “Wedding Guests”
But what if it is too late? The second season of Lodge 49 is done. It is unclear if the show will be able to finish its proposed four part structure: water, fire, earth, and then air. The second season was satisfying enough that it won’t be a total catastrophe if the work isn’t completed. It will just be a senseless, pretty normal tragedy that proves television is not worth taking seriously yet.
If Lodge 49 has not earned the right to at least finish its story—-to deliver explicitly on the narrative promises built into its detailed architecture (strategic narrative promises that are far less important than the tactical joys of the show’s wonderful dialogue, though)--then what the hell is TV even for? Why were all these inferior shows made and marketed, making cash to spend on more shows, fighting to keep us all on board the project of television, promising that WAIT, JUST WAIT, ONE DAY THIS WILL BE REAL ART YOU’LL SEE?
If I were a Hollywood screenwriter, I would be mad as May butter, vexed as the raging sea, that my craft has been nullified so demonstratively by the cancelation of this show in an age when so much time and ink is spent proclaiming that television is now finally good. Oh yeah? Oh really? I don’t see anybody canceling Elena Ferrante or Karl Ove Knausgaard halfway through their projects. We are all waiting quite patiently for the next Hilary Mantel book to come out.
I don’t know who needs to hear this out there on the West Coast, but you will look like fucking fools to future creators and art historians if you don’t see this one particular show through to the end. It has done nothing wrong. There were eight seasons of Home Improvement and I dare anyone to sit down and watch one single episode without wanting to die. Aren’t you making bets on the legacy of the shows you are creating? The legacy of Home Improvement is that it is a good show to have on while you are huffing car exhaust in your garage from a tube and weeping. Don't you owe us something for putting us through eight years of that? Aren't you trying to establish the medium of television as valid? To win Oscars even, using television as your platform?
Do you think it is just trivial to put together such a hard-working ensemble cast with such perfect chemistry?
Do you want to retain the love and loyalty of all the people who work for you on other, dumber projects, hoping that someday they might get a part worth doing?
Lodge 49 feels like it was a show made specifically for me and I didn’t even learn about it until it was almost finished--why should anybody working for you trust that you will ever be able to market their products to the right people if you can't sell this pure goddamn gold?
Do you have a job lined up somewhere for Brent Jennings so that he can win the Emmy that he has already earned?
Can you actually tell the difference between a magic spell that might save us all and nihilistic trash? Is your palate just totally fucking dead?
I mean, obviously not enough people watched this show or will ever like it for it to be a successful commodity. But if an industry can’t create and support a show like this, then why is this industry something good for humanity instead of just another way that clever people have hijacked our loneliness to maneuver cash into their pockets? What will these clever people watch, though, when they find themselves overwhelmed by despair and grief? Let me tell you something: we will all want to watch a show like this eventually. It may seem like you are making something for no one, but you are really staking out guideposts in dark lands where people seldom go. We are all headed there soon, individually, maybe even as a country. And you are going to cut the funding for the very few people willing to explore this terrifying territory together?
I guess I just want everyone who made this show to know that it didn’t just reach Tom Hanks and reddit. You reached some authentic fucked-up weirdos who have maybe unsuccessfully tried everything to get rid of the same crippling insights that this show instead explores and celebrates with utter grace, people who have therefore really benefited from seeing people struggle with darkness in a way that does not end up with the characters becoming assassins or zombies or (shudder) rich.
We say we want shows like this but maybe we don’t deserve them yet.
It's not your fault. You have all tried your goddamn level best and I don't know what else to say but thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you
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(c) Miracle Jones 2019