Bonus Fiction

The Way of Wildfires and Hard Luck Believers by Brian David Cinadr

I love this book, so I wanted to share a few favorite passages as a little gift. Brian David Cinadr's The Way of Wildfires and Hard Luck Believers is a raw, poetic meditation on love, fate, and survival. Set in a vivid, unforgiving Los Angeles, it follows Michael—a man haunted by his past—through a journey both tender and brutal.

Cinadr’s writing is lyrical yet gritty, capturing the contradictions of modern life and the emotional wreckage we carry. From Chinatown’s neon glow to California’s burning hills, every scene pulses with longing and atmosphere.

This novel stays with you. It's a fierce, beautiful reminder of how we’re shaped by the fires we survive. - Liz Dubelman, ThewriteKit.com

This is the beginning. This place is the end of things, of Marilyn and Morrison, the edge of west and all this America, an ocean always and always. This is what we’ve been waiting for, what has been ceaselessly waiting, what I feel in my blood when there’s nothing else, water to water, salt and salt, the pull of the moon and pisces. I hear it at night, the waves at my windows, what you hear clear into the canyons after all the traffic and the cell phone signals in the air have stopped, something that is somehow everywhere and nowhere else.

We come here to be from somewhere, to be someone amongst the millions and the streetlights like stars. All of us on Sunset or Sepulveda, Hollywood boulevard or the freeways, Mulholland and the coast highway like a story we’ve been told again and again until it’s ours to tell. All of us in the same sleep and a late September, a California dreaming and a coming heat. Everywhere the weather and the long afternoons of shadows, the hills in the distance thru the smog and the sun off the cement, the cement run off running to the ocean like a secret everybody knows and never even whispers.

Los Angeles, it seems is where dreams come true, where we hope it never rains again even though we all know we need it. I was headed somewhere. I was a long way from where I started, everyone out here dreaming like they do, sleeping past noon, thinking the stars were two stories high, all of them never knowing if they were flying or falling. I guess luck just found me, I wasn’t looking. I was just standing where I stood, on top of my feet like the old man taught me. I was in the scene, but I wasn’t part of it, like a planet shining in some night sky, a moonlight or a moon shadow at the bottom of the trees, what is somehow here and only far away for sure. My world was between worlds, between the lights and the dark, the acts and the adoration, the press of the crowd and the stage. God is not among us, but above us, rock n’ roll a religion of the religious. We can only love what we can’t have. I kept the line between that love and knowing, and for the few girls made angels and taken back stage, heaven was a hard place.

All of us here are always waiting, all of us in our cars, in our little lives and luck. We all want to know what’s ahead of us, twisting up our necks like birds to see, an accident or some sort of road construction, L.A.P.D. maybe, searching thru some poor Mexican’s busted up Toyota truck. It seems we’re never quite still or really getting anywhere we haven’t already been. All of us always starting and stopping, choosing between surface streets or six lanes of traffic, trying to decide whether to roll the windows down or to keep the windows up and the air conditioning on, wondering what burns less gas and what’s the best way there, wondering what lives are lived out on the other side of the freeway wall, what Google Maps doesn’t tell you.

Maybe this city is something you can never see, fog at the beach and smog in the valley, all the people in this life only driving by and by, all the people always on some number, the ten or the one-ten, the one-o-one or the four-o-five. This place is ten thousand places, ten thousand names on the same t.v. news, six stations, and the same old story told six times. Everywhere here is like a dream you won’t remember, what you’ll only know was a restless sleep, Silverlake and Los Feliz, Echo Park and Culver City, Rampart and South Central, west Los Angeles and east L.A.. Everywhere here is a myth except for this or that traffic app, except for the radio traffic report every twelve minutes and the mundane murders counted up in the Times.

It’s hard to know what you have and what you’re stuck with, what you shook off and what you lost. There’s ten thousand things and ten million people, all of them with a past and a future that’s longer than all of their lives laid end to end. What we share and cannot touch, what we had to lose to get here. Los Angeles at the end of everything as if this is where we were going. I can’t say where it is we’re headed, there’s 12.2 traffic related deaths a day, what the California Highway Patrol statistics say. I wonder if we’re not all ghosts driving the same road, the same time everyday. Everyone rolling along on fossil bones, on animal oil and old tree sap, talking in the air on mobile phones like magic, like they’ll never be alone again.