Behind the scenes of reality TV, there is a person called a story producer. Their job is to stand over an editor’s shoulder and craft countless hours of quotidian bullshit into compelling drama, transforming lumpen schmos, curveballed into uniquely bizarre situations, into unwitting heroes and villains. What I’ve done here with these people is no different. They’re all, obviously, so much more than can be gleaned in a five-minute interaction or described in 200 words, and for all I know, they are nothing like these one-dimensional caricatures I’ve pasted on them. With my first subject, Shannon, our cover girl, I’ll try to offer the purest unfiltered recounting I can. I took few notes, but the exchange was so strange, awkward, and ultimately sad that I can scarcely forget it. I’m a shithead. I’m a fucking moron who should not have been trusted with a tongue. I’ll tell you why

Papillon

Hart to Hart.

Venice, Anyone?!

Logan’s Run

They say you won’t know you’re trapped in a black hole until it’s too late. Cruising through uncharted space, you’d slip by the event horizon, completely uneventfully as it turns out, and there’d be nothing left to do but to drift inexorably toward the only possible destination left to you: oblivion. And yet you’d be none the wiser until gravity started pulling you into spaghetti. Dreams are like that. Not your nightly REM sleep dreams, but your I’m-one-in-a-million dreams. Those grand, American dreams. Maybe it starts with Gene Simmons spitting up red dye No. 4 and corn syrup, and then it’s nurtured by a charismatic homeless guy telling you that you’re somebody. But despite the fact that you’re rationalizing against ever-diminishing returns, like a desperate actor shitting in the bushes ’cause he’s hoping to get the lead in Shakespeare in the Park, you never realize you’ve made an all-in bet until that unquenchable, outsize longing for greatness has been finally whittled down to an essential nugget of need, that someone, someday, will tell you that it wasn’t all just a waste of time.

I met Marla and Los! one after the other. They were both so warm and welcoming, and desperate for a sympathetic ear, and though they probably have nothing in common other than circumstance, they’ve become linked in my mind. If the universe is infinite and so an infinite number of Earths are scattered across the cosmos, each an expression of some small facet of discrete possibility, then on one of these Earths, Los! and Marla have found each other and they spend their nights together in a $20-a-night room making beautiful music without care or silly dreams. And they breathe marshmallows, talk in a language that’s like squeaky door hinges, and have long, spindly arms like spider monkeys.