Jarett Kobek - Only Americans Burn in Hell

It ain’t the elves.

It ain’t the fucking dragons.

It ain’t the kid who can see the future.

It ain’t the snow zombies who function as an obvious insult to the people of Scotland.

What makes Game of Thrones diverge from our universe is one very special magical rule.

This is the magical rule which creates the divergent universe: no male character in Games of Thrones ever experiences erectile dysfunction.

The three young men were stoned enough that they all imagined someone had left the front door unlocked. They thought that the women of Fairy Land had the wrong apartment.

One of the young men chatted up Celia while Rose Byrne demanded to know about Fern.

Another of the young men made a joke about the absurdity of inquiring about ferns when clearly another green plant was the apartment’s dominant spirit animal.

The women of Fairy Land didn’t get the joke.

And this wasn’t because the language of the joke was slightly mixed in its metaphors.

The joke was like all jokes about marijuana.

Terminally unfunny.

On it went, apartment by apartment, floor by floor.

They burst into apartment #403 and found a woman named Ashley Lopez sitting on her living-room floor.

She was practicing Transcendental Meditation, a technique in which the practitioner repeated a mantra, in the silence of their own mind, after having blown about $1,000 on a seven-day course to learn an easy trick that any old asshole can Google in about five minutes.

With her mindfulness practice disrupted, Ashley opened her eyes and saw the women standing over her.

She didn’t question their presence.

It was one of those faery things, a biochemical process. The supranatural entities were emitting pheromones that calmed the human psyche.

“Can I help you?” asked Ashley Lopez.

“We are looking for my daughter,” said Celia. “Have you seen her?”

“What’s her name?” asked Ashley Lopez.

“Her name is Fern,” said Celia.

Rose Byrne looked at the decorations on Ashley Lopez’s living-room walls.

It was some witchy nonsense: a reproduction of The Tower from the Thoth tarot, the hieroglyphic monad of John Dee, a banker’s cheque endorsed by Austin Osman Spare, a Stele of Revealing, a mural of Tiamat, a painting by Steffi Grant, the logo of the Builders of Adytum, and other bullshit.

Ashley Lopez was locked into a ceremonial magick groove.

Ashley still believed in things like gods and primal magic and art nouveau and the manifestations of expression that dominated human consciousness before the psychic cataclysm of World War One.

What can you do?

Everyone’s got something.

Ashley Lopez was confronted by the women of Fairy Land, who were actual magic.

All of her ceremonial magick was of no use.

On those lonely evenings when Ashley Lopez crossed the Abyss and went on the Dark Pilgrimage to Chorazin, the whole thing was about psychological insight into her own self and the limits of identity.

Which was a real change from the old days.

In the old days, magick used to be goofy shit like necromancy, which was the art of raising the dead, and demonology, which was the art of making the Spirits of Hell do your bidding.

The defining aspect of demonology was the bathetic juxtaposition of its methods and its aims.

The Spirits of Hell, who were supranatural beings capable of unimaginable feats, were summoned by the demonologist and asked to perform silly little tasks like facilitating intercontinental travel, or making another person have sex with the demonologist, or causing the reputation of a demonologist’s enemy to suffer grievous ruin.

By the Year of the Froward Worm, no one needed the Spirits of Hell to help them travel to Asia or get fucked or ruin an enemy.

Now people just owned smartphones.

Ashley Lopez’s tenancy in the Fontenoy was foreordained by a lifetime of practicing ceremonial magick.

In addition to challenging the limits of her identity, the ceremonies had blasted open her seven chakras and made her susceptible to the unseen but very real magical currents running throughout Los Angeles.

When she signed her lease, it was like a magnet being drawn to metal.

The Fontenoy was the most magical place in Los Angeles.

Way back in 1989 AD, a young man had moved onto the ninth floor of the building.

He was, just, like you know, this guy.

His name was Matt Drudge.

He’d been raised around Washington DC, which was the capital city of the United States of America, and that proximity gave him a fixation on the currents of power.

He bummed around Hollywood for about half a decade. And this was the old Hollywood, the Hollywood of the Yucca Corridor, the Hollywood that existed prior to the infestation of the international capital class’s money laundering.

It was gang territory. It was full of drug dealing. It was full of prostitution.

In 1994 AD, Drudge’s father paid him a visit.

He was appalled by his son’s life.

At the time, Drudge was selling T-shirts at CBS Studios in Century City, which was on the other side of the hills that hold the HOLLYWOOD sign.

The old man bestowed a gift upon his son from Circuit City on Sunset Boulevard: an IBM PC compatible computer.

This was before the release of Microsoft’s Windows 95 destroyed the American West Coast, another psychic cataclysm, and oddly, one that’s never been written about in any meaningful detail.

Drudge’s computer had a modem, which was a stupid little device that connected to telephone lines and allowed his computer to call up other computers.

Using his modem, Matt Drudge discovered the Internet. And this was the old Internet, the Internet of Usenet and #hack on EFnet, the Internet that existed prior to the infestation of the international capital class’s money laundering.

Drudge’s first utterance on the Internet, ever, was three days after Christmas 1994 AD at 1:48PM.

It said:

hello from sex drenched hollywood

Drudge replied to himself at 3:31PM. His response said:

we are so sex drenched here in hollywood. 65% of us city dwellers have herpes

And so, on a cloudy Wednesday afternoon, on the ninth floor of the Fontenoy, the Twenty-First Century AD was born.

Ashley Lopez had lived in the Fontenoy for five years, performing ceremonial magick and using all kinds of magickal phrases, and she’d never said anything with as much power as the one phrase which had baptized a century.

She’d never said anything as important, or as ominous, as hello from sex drenched hollywood.

No one could have known that Matt Drudge was the only authentic genius of the Twenty-First Century AD.

He was the only person in the world who understood how the Internet really worked.

And he had found his demon.

Not long after he’d written about 65 per cent of people in Hollywood having herpes, Drudge founded an email newsletter obsessed with the currents of power in American life.

The newsletter was about the entertainment industry and politics, which, by virtue of the Celebrity branch of American governance, were the same thing.

The newsletter was called the Drudge Report .

It offered its readers a very gossip-inflected take on the issues of the day.

Everything broke in 1998 AD.

Newsweek , which was a magazine that offered milquetoast political and cultural reporting, decided not to run a story about an alleged affair between the sitting President, William Jefferson Clinton, and a twenty-two-year-old White House intern named Monica Lewinsky.

Drudge learned about the spiked story and sent word to his mailing list.

He didn’t know it, but he’d murdered the gentleman’s agreement between news journalists and politicians, which was more or less a tacit acknowledgement that politicians could fuck around in private as long as Washington bureau chiefs were invited to dinner parties in Georgetown.