JB Minton

Here is a teaser for the story. All subscribers get to read free for 1 week.

TEMPLATE NOTE: This is a trial journal template. I always start one of these notebooks when I agree to take a case because I find it helpful to capture details of what’s happening, along with my emotional reactions and thoughts about the circumstances of evolving situations. This planning template was last updated in January 2024. It should be reviewed and revised in January 2025.

Day One...

I was walking out the door when the alert hit our phones. My wife said, “Holy s**t, a shooting at your old high school!” I said something stupid because I think I was in shock. “But it’s a middle school now!,” I said as if that mattered in this version of America. We didn’t talk more about it because I was already late for the train to the city and had at least fourteen things to finish before noon. I forgot about the shooting until the following alert hit at 10:37 AM. The shooter was captured live and was a student at the school—no more details. Things were normal until 11:57. I remember this because I was leaving for a lunch meeting at noon and was already late. Up until that phone call came, this was just another American school shooting that happened to other people.

I didn’t recognize the phone number, but the 513 area code got me to answer. Who is calling me from Cincinnati? I accepted the call before I thought it through and later wished to God I’d let it go to voicemail.

“This is Benny.” I immediately knew who it was because some people’s voices are like that; they pull you into the past like a hook through your cheek on a taut line. I hear voices of people from the past in my dreams at night. Often, these characters of memory admonish me and fill my sleep with dread. Benny’s is one of those voices I hear in my dreams the most often, but hearing it coming from my phone in waking life sent fear into my nervous system like I hadn’t felt in years, not since before I met my wife, had my kids, and paid my mortgage off. I hadn’t felt fear since I hung out with Benny in high school.

“You. You’ve... seen the news? About the shooting?” I said yeah, thinking he was reaching out because of the horror in our hometown. I thought, Wow, he thought of me when this happened. I was honored at first, and then he said what he said. “It’s my kid. The one who shot the others.” His voice broke, and he cleared his throat to cover it up. “Darrel, I... I don’t know what happened to the kid. I lost him a couple of years ago. He just stopped talking to me. And he started scowling all the time. I could have... I should...”

I had mercy on him and interrupted. “Benny,” I said. “Man, I’m so sorry.” And I meant it. It was a damn sorry conversation I was having with this guy I used to laugh with all the time. And his voice was the same. It was killing me how much it was the same, like an old recording on an answering machine. And then I asked a dumb question. “How can I help, Benny?” I should have checked my compassion, but my wife got me back into the church shortly after we were married. You listen to talk about forgiving people long enough, and you start to make soft moves with inconvenient consequences. I drifted from my faith in high school and college, chasing superficial things that mattered more to me then than they do now. And that’s a problem when you’ve made bad choices and got lucky with the results. Being a better person means offering help when someone comes asking, but being a better person sometimes sucks.

Even though Benny didn’t say it, he was asking for my help because I’m a lawyer, a criminal defendant. Benny knew this because he’d been following my career for years. I’m no Warren Buffet, but I make good money compared to most earners my age. Church changed me in more ways than forgiveness. I’m not greedy anymore, either. I appreciate what I have even as I’m throwing it away. I’ve been working to set more reasonable expectations for my happiness. I don’t need much but love and a little attention. I want to die peacefully in my bed after having sex with my wife one last time, but I’ve been an absentee father and husband for so long that I don’t know if I can fix it with her and the kids. It’s why I’m in therapy and doing these journals to understand the balance between my work and personal life. The cost of getting to enlightenment may be simply helping friends when they ask for it, especially when it’s inconvenient.

Benny and I paid a cost of silence and distance to preserve our friendship in time, frozen in the ice of 1993. We didn’t have a blowup but silently agreed to leave each other alone. I haven’t spoken to Benny in more than twenty years, but I hear his voice in my dreams at least once a week. And hearing his actual voice brought up dusty boxes from the basement of my heart, and I dumped their contents on the kitchen table of my brain and started sorting memories and misrememberings into different piles of crazy. I told my wife over dinner about how we hung out with some crazy motherfuckers in high school, Benny and I; white boys with nothing to lose and nothing to live for but getting laid, drunk, and gaining a reputation for being crazier than the kid last weekend. We witnessed and often participated in flagrantly reckless behavior, most of which I conveniently forgot happened. In our hour-long conversation, Bennie brought up some of the old stories, but in his versions, he was the craziest one. He pushed the boundaries further than anyone else. There wasn’t a dare he wouldn’t take. Benny once jumped out of a moving car on the highway because some dickhead bet him five bucks he wouldn’t. He broke his foot and took the cast off after a week, hacked it up with a saw, and cut his arm deep enough to butterfly band-aid back together. “F**k that doctor,” he told us. “I can move my foot enough to kick your ass! Any of you needle dick motherfuckers!” And no one challenged him. That part of his story is true. We loved Benny. At parties, he made everyone laugh. Well, almost everyone. Benny could endure enormous physical pain without complaint, and that’s what made him tougher than the rest of us. Benny was a good friend until he was just a memory.

His mom was a special kind of mean and angry drunk. She left Benny’s dad the Summer I graduated high school, and I never asked or found out why. Parents can mess a kid up with words, silence, and bad ideas just as much as with their fists. Benny told me today she died a few years ago, having remarried to forget her old life with her old family. He said she eventually got her s**t together and started climbing the AA steps. She called him to apologize, and he got so angry when he started crying that he hung up on her and they never spoke again. I don’t blame her for leaving Benny’s dad after what happened that Summer.

I deliberately lost touch with Benny by the end of the Fall of ‘93, just after I graduated high school when Benny was entering his senior year. Some s**t went down at the time that couldn’t be undone. In retrospect, the situation could have likely been fixed if we had made a gesture to reconcile, but that didn’t happen. The truth is, I’m still fond of Benny. Despite the circumstances, the only possible good thing in this situation is for he and I to reconnect. This motherfucker made me laugh all the time. His humor started at crude and grew angrier the drunker he became and more whimsical and goofier when he was stoned. Stoned Benny was my favorite because his aggression and anxiety were lowered for a while, and it was like we were little boys again. We listened to great music while lying on the hood of his car for so many nights, passing bottles and joints while talking about the stars, God, and a life beyond Ohio’s sky.

Benny loved to chase women, but he never caught them for long, and that’s where he ran into trouble. I think it was because, back then, Benny was never told “No.” Or at least he never heard the word and understood its meaning. In high school, Benny expected things to happen a certain way for him, and mostly they did. There were a few exceptions; they all involved women or the girls they once were. He was always trying to f**k an older woman back then. None of our Moms were safe, but Benny couldn’t figure out how a woman worked, how to get her attention, or how to keep her happy. Instead, he professed to collect women and was always bragging about his teenage harem that never seemed to materialize in front of witnesses.

Shooter is Benny’s only child, and the more I learn about him, the more inevitable this tragedy seems. No mother in the picture. She’s in a long-term residential mental health hospital up near Cleveland, diagnosed with paranoid Schizophrenia. Benny sure could pick them. He was always a unique individual, far from perfect. Racist to the bone, the s**t I’ve heard Benny say would break libel laws as well as the edicts of ethics, reason, and common decency. He seems to have mellowed over time, but I’m worried about building my defense around his ignorance of what his son planned and did.

Day Four...

Things are getting official now. Meetings with printed names, signatures, and check-in and check-out times are logged in visiting ledgers. The fundamental legal work begins with planning what to do next to achieve what we need to accomplish.

I’m in Cincinnati, set up in the hotel, and hosting strategy meetings to develop Benny’s defense. I’ve conferred with Shooter’s attorney to see if there was enough common ground to combine our cases and marshal our resources into a unified defense like OJ Simpson’s legal team presented when Benny and I were in high school. That was the first time I understood what a defense lawyer did when they did it well. We create reasonable doubt, the measure of law when applied to a formal accusation in a case presented before a judge and jury. Watching Johnny Cochran get OJ off a murder charge with a strong prosecutor wielding solid evidence was a master’s class for me. Eventually, it became clear that I wanted to be a criminal defendant. But today, I wish I had become a race car driver instead.

Day Five...

Details are coming out about the shooting. They aren’t good.

Being a kid is hard and always has been. High school is a time of self-discovery, growth, and often raw vulnerability. In "Wigger Gets Started," the opening short story from my upcoming collection, "Wigger," we meet a freshman attending a new high school in a strange state, navigating the jagged edges of identity, cultural dislocation, and the painful realities of growing up in 1990s America.

The story follows Wigger, an unnamed 14-year-old boy uprooted from an urban childhood steeped in the rhythms of hip-hop culture to a small suburban town in Ohio. His journey is a visceral exploration of belonging and survival in a world that sees him as a small outsider. Through this lens, we witness the collision of urban grit and suburban sterility—and the quiet resilience that comes with it.

Wigger Gets Started offers a raw and unflinching look at how cultural and personal identities collide. The full story, told through these ten interconnected short stories scattered throughout the decade of the 1990s, will become a richer tapestry—layered with humor, heartbreak, and moments of unexpected human connection that resonate far beyond adolescence.

Here’s a teaser:

“All these boys are bigger than Wigger, so he keeps quiet and swallows every insult, but the mercury in his angry thermometer is rising. He dresses in focused silence and tests the lock numbers before hanging it through the hole of his shut locker and latching it. The problems started almost immediately during calisthenics, which he had never done before. Sure, jumping jacks and the simple s**t, but burpees? Never. He was learning on the fly and looked small, bouncing, and ridiculously uncoordinated...”

This moment captures the relentless tension of Wigger’s world—a young boy outmatched by his environment yet determined to hold his own. It’s not just a coming-of-age story; it reflects the silent battles many of us fight during our formative years.

For paid subscribers, you’ll also discover the layers of complexity in Wigger’s relationships, particularly a pivotal interaction that sparks a turning point in his struggle for acceptance.

Click below to read the full story and experience the raw humanity that lies within Wigger.

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Paid patrons get access to my entire back catalog of my essays, fiction, poetry, and music.

Because, if it’s not love, then it’s the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb, the bomb that will bring us together.

The Smiths “Ask”

When the bad guy gets shot and dies, everything is set right in the storytelling genre of the crime procedural. For most of the history of serial drama, death has been the metric of narrative justice and the culmination of many plot outlines. However, in this dangerous dream layer of Twin Peaks The Return, the whole world blows up to reset itself when the bad guy gets shot. Cooper’s struggle for his soul intensifies while nearly everything in this demented dream layer-killing floor aligns against him. 

Cooper’s dark half (Mr. C) has escaped from prison with a man who has valuable knowledge. Ray Monroe is a double agent and a hero, and he has committed to memory the location of coordinates that potentially serve as the exit of this dream. Mr. C very much needs (not wants) this information despite his earlier posturing before underlings.

The Palmer home is the last place Laura Palmer was safe during her life and the first place she was violated by the person she trusted most, while the person she trusted next most turned her head away from the horror. Sarah Palmer is guilty of a moral crime. Her character is put on trial in this dream and found guilty, sentenced to the consumption of misery that would ground most characters to ash, even in this dream. In the fiction of Twin Peaks, Laura Palmer suffered tremendous trauma, and she died. There is no saving Laura Palmer or bringing her back in any timeline of this drama; save one. This one.

From the perspective of a murder investigation, it doesn’t matter if the victim had an angel watching over her in her dream. The case is solved. And yet... Dale Cooper cannot let it go. This obsession with understanding the evil that killed Laura Palmer and wondering how much she was complicit in her demise has mixed up victim and predator. Being unable to save a dead girl who suffered (and probably chose not to pass it on to the world) has driven the mind of Dale Cooper into madness. 

Under the corrupting psychic invasion of a demonic force of evil that only knows power and suffering, Dale Cooper undergoes a psychotic breakdown, like Leland and Windom Earle before him. Twin Peaks The Return is a story about the corruption of a good soul and whether what is good inside us can only overcome what is worse when we let go of the controls and let Natural Law unfold before us in our life and through the love we briefly share.

There is hope in Twin Peaks The Return. Something that a strange lady did to the Purple Power station reversed a polarity unmeasured by the instruments on the roof as they floated in the void between layers of a dream. Leonard Cohen sang that a crack in everything is how the light gets in. That sewn-face lady made a small crack in this dream prison, rapidly becoming a pit of danger and death for our hero. Through that crack, we are the light that breaks into the narrative. The viewer’s passion, attention, and compassion will pour into this dream and help to guide Cooper through this dark maze of his soul’s underbelly.

As we enter Part 8, Cooper remains simple, pure, and lost in his dream, with almost no allies.

* His new wife tolerates him with slow-growing affection. 

* His new boss is bewildered by how this simple man uncovered a crime ring involving his insurance agents, third-party inspectors, and the police. 

* Cooper has the Twin Peaks Sheriff’s Department convinced he was compromised after interacting with the forces of darkness in the Ghostwood Forest. 

* Cooper has the Blue Rose Task Force, who think they’ve found him but are still chasing a shadow in a maze Mr. C has concocted.

* Philip Gerard works overtime from the Red Room, trying to wake Cooper from one layer of dreaming that’s a death sentence to return to another that’s an endless trap.

* The Fireman waits in his mansion of Cooper’s Frontal Cortex for the signal, prepared to do what must be done to save his Dreamer’s soul.

But in the Amygdala of a dark motel, incredible malfeasance gathers into clouds of storm. Something dark is coming.

When all these investigations converge, will a truth be revealed that solves this mystery? Probably not. Simple answers aren’t the ones we carry like the stone in our shoe that has become comfortable pain over time, duller and more digestible.

We viewers are the expression and experience of Cooper’s frustration. Why can’t he wake up and invoke his agency to control this madness and escape all this damn dreaming? Cooper’s final weapon is we, the viewers. We are part of this story. The affection we’ve built for these characters over all these years is a powerful psychic energy. We pour these warm feelings into our viewing of The Return, and the narrative is impacted strangely by our attention. When you feel it and then see it, you’ll know.

Cooper, as Laura’s angel, fit too perfectly. It was a sappy, romantic ending, like classic Hollywood. It meant too much to be authentic. Romantic endings will never be enough to explain away incest and murder in fiction or life. Can we ever fully understand a situation that we watch with our eyes and hear with our ears but is not aligned with what we feel in our hearts? 

Something is wrong in the town of Twin Peaks, manifested through this dream lens. Overall, this experience doesn’t feel good. But there are moments of potential here, launch pads towards transcendence, which, in its most basic definition, means to rise above. If your mind had to create a dream metaphor to explain that a parasite of evil has invaded your psyche, what form would it choose? Giant marshmallow man? A big guy in a black mask and cape with a laser sword and wires everywhere? No, those metaphors belong to other mythologies. In Twin Peaks The Return, a nuclear bomb is a perfect image to convey this painful truth of moral and spiritual corruption. When the bad guy gets shot in The Return, this dream resets, and a truth is revealed through a fevered rush of metaphors that begin with a mushroom cloud explosion and end with a repeated poem we can never un-hear.

It will take small miracles to free Dale Cooper from the prison of his mind. So far, he has dodged each killing blow with the grace of a man walking an inch above a minefield while blinded by sunlight. Yet, damaged and lost inside his dream, he is constantly threatened by ejection and non-existence. Like Cooper in this weird nightmare, corruption is the most significant threat we face as human beings, far greater than the death we are each promised at birth. Soul corruption is measured by the tics of those we hurt when our behaviors are powered by greed, fear, and stupidity. Yet, when we let go and allow natural impulses to guide us to that which brings joy and warmth into our lives, it’s a magic trick we pull on ourselves. Tada! This is happiness in motion!

Watching Twin Peaks The Return with deep scrutiny is like sitting in a pew and listening to a father’s story about taking his son to the killing stone on the mountaintop. Some moral crimes cannot be atoned. Over seven hours of drama, we’ve experienced a man enmeshed in his shortcomings become an outcast from his higher reasoning and the better angels of his nature. Yet, as the love pours from each viewer into Dale Cooper’s Dream, we call on him to wake with love and hope, to stand for justice, loyalty, and friendship. Despite his faults, we manifest him to be better, and I believe we’ll get there together with Cooper. But first, we must survive this bomb in Part 8. Pay attention. Be here now. Here we go...

Please note the paid version of this podcast and essay offers a second experiment using AI to compose the lyrics and music, along with details of how I prompted the technology. Consider your paid subscription as an investment in an independent artist. Consider your Substack annual subscriptions as an index fund of art and scholarship where you support other human beings in creating words, music, and videos of value to you. I greatly appreciate your support!

Okay, this all started a few years ago, before any of us had heard of Chat GPT or would have been able to answer the question, “What is Generative AI, and how do you use it as an artist without destroying the industry of commercial art?”

It started during a gaming session with old friends while playing Destiny 2. We are all parents of children across a spectrum of ages. One of my buddy’s young sons grabbed his phone because the child wanted to play a game like his Daddy. My buddy was almost pleading with his child, “You’ve got your own phone. Leave my phone alone.”

I thought this was hysterical and would make a great jingle. So I went and wrote one:

You Got Your Own Phone (Version 1 - 2022)

(Music & Vocals by JB Minton)

You've Got Your Own Phone Lyrics by JB Minton

This song was designed to loop forever, and it’s a benign earworm at best. There is no real meaning to it.

Fast-forward to this week, when I became curious about how easy it is to make a song using AI with a conversational interface that prompts humans for creative directions. I’m sharing the journey results here with all subscribers, and I’ll dive deeper into how I did it and what I used for Paid Subscribers below the paywall.

I thought about this little jingle and wondered what I could do it with through these modern music-making tools.

So, I pasted in the lyrics I had and directed the application to create a song with two genres of music: Reggae and Stoner Rock. Here is what came out:

You Got Your Own Phone (Version 2 - 2024)

(Lyrics by JB Minton Music Created By A.I.)

I think this sounds pretty dope, but the lyrics are too sparse. This inspired me to revisit and expand.

The back-and-forth between human and machine has taken a unique direction for modern life, but it is still a story about the inspirations of life manifesting and emerging into art. What began as a funny impression of a moment in someone else’s life has now become an asset I can click play on and hear an expression created as the product of a machine hallucination guided by the prompting of a human artist. The expression returned could contain more beyond the initial prompt. And if the expression surprises the creator with delight, concern, or even fear, then is this not art of the highest magnitude?

Here are the new lyrics I wrote:

Your Phone Lyrics by JB Minton

This time, I wanted to see how the AI did with two different versions for the same prompt (would it create the same song?). I also shortened the song title to "Your Phone."

Your Phone (Version 1 - 2024)

Your Phone (Version 2 - 2024)

Here’s the verdict on this technology: It’s incredible. And it’s scary as hell because it proves that the future of art belongs to those who control the prompting—owning the prompt means controlling the purpose and flow of the art. The artistry is now a known commodity. What were once feats of superhuman achievement are now patterns of tokens that can be manifested and applied to a clear prompt composed with deeply felt purpose and finely crafted detail.

When I graduated High School in the early 1990s, our technology was the Dewey Decimal System, the typewriter, and the telephone. As I wrap up my journey into the world of AI-driven songwriting, I can’t help but marvel at how far technology has come in my life, hell, in the past two years! What once required hours of creative struggle is now a process so effortless it's almost unsettling. Yet, within this ease lies a sobering truth: the magic of music isn’t just in the notes or lyrics but in the intent of the human touch, the emotional labor that breathes life into a melody.

While AI offers a fascinating and powerful tool, it also reminds us of the irreplaceable value of human creativity. I thought something my buddy said to his child was funny, so I took a moment to write it down. Later, I came back to it and expanded on the idea. I took action to put it into the music, then I took a different action and put it into technology. This is now the reality of modern art. Sanctimonious old-world artists can rage against the machine all they want, but my prediction is commercial artists of the near future won’t get paid unless they authenticate in to prompt and guide the art.

As we stand on the brink of this new era of humans wielding the simulated creativity of machines, perhaps the most significant challenge is not whether AI can write a good song but whether we can preserve the soul of music in a world where the line between human and machine grows ever thinner in an arc bending towards Singularity. In embracing these innovations, let's not lose sight of the reverence and respect we hold for the craft—after all, the true artistry lies not in how easy it is to create music but in the stories and emotions that only human beings can tell.

Want to know how I did it and how A.I. worked on a completely brand-new song, from the lyrics to the music?

Subscribe to a Paid Plan for a Month or a Year to learn the technique and support an independent artist. Think of it like a tip that tips you back.

The song above was composed using the following AI software tools and methods… (Paid Subscribers Only From Here)

Scott Ryan is the author of The Last Days of Letterman, Fire Walk With Me: Your Laura Disappeared, Lost Highway: The Fist of Love, and the best seller Moonlighting: An Oral History. He hosts the YouTube series It’s Our Time and Tiger Talk, is the copresident of Fayetteville Mafia Press and Tucker DS Press, and is the managing editor and creative director of The Blue Rose Magazine and co-creator (along with JB Minton) of The Red Room Podcast (2011-2023). Yes, he does collect vinyl records, is against streaming, and thinks the internet made everything worse.

In The Last Decade of Cinema, Generation X Critic Scott Ryan picks twenty-five unique movies released in the nineties and analyzes their impact on pop culture and why they still matter today, from Goodfellas to Magnolia and a ton of classics. This thoughtful book conveys how the fall of 35MM and the demise of the video rental market resulted in fewer movies being made that took risks. Interviews with Natasha Gregson Wagner (Two Girls and a Guy), Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth), Helen Childress (Reality Bites), Tyger Williams (Menace II Society), and Patricia Arquette (True Romance).

STOP! Before navigating to Amazon to buy Scott’s book, consider buying directly from Scott below. He’ll sign your book, and you will put more money in the pocket of an independent writer and publisher.

A new song.

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This record took about 2 years to make, mostly space in between making songs. I write and perform nearly everything, and yes, I include pulling loops together and mastering them as “performing.” If you don’t, that's your opinion, and you’re entitled to it. But this is my art, not yours. I hope you enjoy listening to these songs as much as I did creating and publishing them. I hope you find them compelling and sometimes juvenile. I hope you feel the joy I put into them.

JB Minton - Sept. 2023

All Music and lyrics by JB Minton

Listen to all the songs for free but only paid subscribers beyond this line where the lyrics and artwork live amongst constructive contextual conversation. Subscribe monthly or annually below with a discount.

Welcome

I saw a diplomat sitting on a white-tailed horse,

The Best Of ‘93

The old guard ain’t ready for the new

Gardens of Furnas

Out past the cooking fields,

He woke up alone this morning with his unit on

The Philosopher Stoner

This song is about a stoner dude that I once knew.

Lunatics and Candlesticks

Buddy got rich off the blockchain, pilfering NFTs.

The Middle

*No album art has yet been created for this song.

You set fire to the edges

A Ripple In The Sky for Ray

In my life there was no sweeter

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Before we were both Substackers, Joe Mayalland I were just writers flailing around on Twitter. Joe had come across my Red Room Podcast (2011-2022) and asked if I’d be willing to discuss the show Yellowstone. He had just written an article and advised that our politics were likely not the same. Joe’s a Socialist, and I’m whatever passed for a traditional Liberal in the Mid-West of America. I didn’t care that we thought differently. I was thrilled with this conversation, and I hope we do it again. This was before 1883 and 1923.

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