Many people think the singer is Mazzy Star but the singer is not Mazzy Star. The band is Mazzy Star. The singer is Hope Sandoval. I cannot remember the name of the other half of Mazzy Star, the man who played guitar and wrote many of the songs. His first name is David, I’m pretty sure, but I cannot recall his last name. I know that he died some years ago, and that Hope Sandoval was heartbroken because she expressed as much.

These days I am turning to and singularly trusting in my subconscious and memory, as I have sworn off the Internet (while writing) as an experiment to see how my brain will function and operate without the aid and abetment of this powerful tool. A part of me is itching to Google Mazzy Star and find out David’s last name and then plugging it into this piece as if I knew it all along. I will create the impression that there is a flow and fluency to my recall, an ease, which of course would be a technology-enabled lie. The truth is, I cannot recall David’s last name, and so I am confronted with a blank. I have options here. I can confess to you, the reader, that I do not remember David’s last name and go from there. Or, what-I-don’t-know will become the inspiration and catalyst for the way in which the story unfolds, how the narration manifests, the direction in which it goes. Its form will be in line with and spaciously accommodating the gap of what-I-don’t know. I will have to create from and offer up blanks as I experience them. I am curious to see where this experiment leads.

The Japanese principle of zuihistsu, “follow-the-brush,” is a stream-of-consciousness way of approaching writing, because, as one person suggested, it is “less dishonest than creating fiction.” It is like putting oneself into a trance and in your trance-state, what will come out of it? You do know what you are saying or why you are saying in the trance-state, whatever comes comes, free of willful volition or consciously engineered intent. This may be the equivalent of what we would say when no one is listening, and by no-one-is-listening, that includes all the listeners living inside of you, every listener, judge, and appraiser, all of that is transcended and you are operating from a place of silence and returning to a place of silence, and you are doing so with words as your escort. I can tell you about Hope Sandoval, as I planned to. She was the face and voice of Mazzy Star, she was melancholy incarnate that I had the deepest crush on.