Story Sheets: "Y Signal"

It's been a good bit since the last edition of this series, so let us not waste any time getting into it today. Since this is the first free fiction I've offered on the site, it should be explored for the benefit of anyone else curious about the piece. There is quite a lot to go over.

This one is going to take a while so I hope you are strapped in. There is really nothing all that straightforward about this story's creation. It has been a long time coming.

Y Signal is a story that goes back the furthest of anything I've ever written. I came up with it while I was still in college, at least a large portion of it, specifically the character of Lenny and most of what he went through. Though that was long before I had any concept of pulp writing, reading and writing as entertainment, or aspirations of even writing at all, yet it was something that came to me to try to make sense of the changes happening around me at the time. The world became a very different place from the one it had been not even a decade earlier, but no one seemed to notice in the 2000s. They all know it now, as just about everyone can see the nostalgia obsession gripping western culture, but it's far too late to react on the knowledge of the loss that way. Those days are gone.

Of course, my idea wasn't actually Y Signal, but more like the literary junk that had poisoned my imagination at the time and tainted my opinion on reading and writing. I couldn't imagine a story that wasn't depressing, nihilistic, or pointless, so I just let it die. The last thing I wanted to do was inject more misery into a world that was already sinking deeper into it. There was, and is, already far too much of that out there.

What changed my perception was the passage of time, learning more about the world and the past, and understanding just what was it about that time and place that managed to stick in so many people's minds. Of course, I'm talking about Cultural Ground Zero. Only now do we really realize what was actually happening at the time and how long-lasting it would be.

The 1990s, and everything before it, were an entirely different world. Cultural attitudes were the polar opposite of today, communities (real ones, not online forgeries) actually existed, and there was this odd prevailing sense that everything was getting better both in our media and in general. None of this is the case anymore, of course, and pointing this out gets certain parties irrationally angry. It's always been just as bad as today, they say. But that is missing the forest for the trees. Were the 1990s actually all that different, or is that just nostalgia glasses blinding you from reality? The world has always been garbage, (post)modernists say: you were just too blind to see it. Just accept the trash heap, and all will be well! That is, if you listen to their prescription to fix it.

Well, that's actually the tension behind Y Signal. I wanted to look back into the past with eyes unclouded by anything that might be considered "biased" (whatever that means these days) and reflect on a time and place I know like the back of my hand. At the same time, I wanted the opposite: someone who lived during that time and saw the darker parts that the younger ones like us didn't see, and I wanted to mash them together to see what came out of the experience. Y Signal is an attempt to capture the feeling of the time in a single story.

Who do you think had it right between Ray, Lenny, or Yarbrough? They all started at different places and came to different conclusions by the end, seeing different sides of a world we think we all perfectly understand. The truth is that there is a lot of good and evil in this world, much we will never see or encounter, but the opposite is also very much also true. None of us have any idea what our future will hold, how much things will change or stay the same, or who will be there for us in the end. The world is a fascinating place and we should cherish our limited time on it. Looking back on it, the 1990s was the perfect time for such a reflection, being the eye of the storm called modernity. It was a time, like most others, that could only have existed at the exact moment it did.

But I've wasted enough time on the finer details. Let us talk about the rest of the story. There is a lot of other subjects to cover in it.

Of course, one of the most obvious subjects of the story is the one of music. Specifically, Gen X music, which is what Gen Y kids and teens listened to. The older generation always plays music for the one just under them, after all. What I wanted to do was have a band that emphasized the weirder side of Gen X music (Violent Femmes, Meat Puppets, Pavement) with the more abrasive side (The Replacements, Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins) to sort of encapsulate everything in one place. This is where the Panorama Agents came from as sort of a band that should have come out of that era, but didn't. Their spirit certainly has.

Yarbrough, the guitarist and lyricist of the band, is Gen X pushed to the edge. He is at the extreme end of the scale. This is a lonely and empty man doing his best to keep it together, until he can't anymore. Deeply unhappy with the state of the world, seeing injustices everywhere, money and fame not offering any sort of escape, he might seem like a take on Kurt Cobain. However, he's not. There is actually a real life person I took as inspiration on for Yarbrough, but it was not Cobain. It was somebody a lot more off the wall and obscure.

Yarbrough is based on the real life case of James "Richey" Edwards of the band the Manic Street Preachers. He isn't a copy of Edwards, but they both have very similar origins and fates. Here is the background from wiki:

"Richard James “Richey” Edwards (born 22 December 1967 – disappeared 1 February 1995), also known as Richey James or Richey Manic, was a Welsh musician who was the lyricist and rhythm guitarist of the alternative rock band Manic Street Preachers. Although not a particularly prolific musical talent, he was known for his dark, politicised and intellectual songwriting which, combined with an enigmatic and eloquent character, has assured him cult status, as well as having been cited by some as a leading lyricist of his generation, leading the Cool Cymru."

Edwards was a very talented yet depressed and nihilistic fellow who wrote really dark songs at the time they were at their peak in pop culture. The band broke out big with their 1994 album The Holy Bible which is a fever dream of anger and vitriol about the modern state of the world, all featuring lyrics by Edwards. Turns out it was a bit too intense.

As for whether Edwards was serious about his position or not:

"On 15 May 1991, after a gig at the Norwich Arts Centre, NME journalist Steve Lamacq questioned the band's authenticity and values, keen to ensure the punk ethic was not abused. Lamacq asked of Edwards' seriousness towards his art, and Edwards responded by carving the words "4 Real" into his forearm with a razor blade he was carrying. The injury required eighteen stitches."

It goes without saying that he suffered from depression most of his adult life, needing alcohol and drugs to even sleep. While Yarbrough is very much not based on Edwards in any capacity other than their occupation and disappearance, I can't say what eventually happened to the young man didn't help shape the direction of the story.

Yarbrough's sickness turned into nihilistic wrath and his disappearance was fueled by entirely different motives than Edwards' was. Aside from similar events happening to them, such as vanishing from the world after hitting a creative peak, Yarbrough is very much a wholly different person with far more sinister goals.

As for the fate of Edwards, well, no one knows what happened to him to this day. There is plenty of evidence to suggest suicide or voluntary disappearance, and either could easily have been the case. Regardless, he has never been seen alive since 1995.

"Edwards disappeared on 1 February 1995, on the day when he and Bradfield were due to fly to the United States on a promotional tour of The Holy Bible. In the two weeks before his disappearance, Edwards withdrew £200 a day from his bank account, which totalled £2,800 by the day of the scheduled flight. Some speculated that he needed the money for the U.S. trip, and it was also mentioned he had ordered a new desk for his flat from a shop in Cardiff. However, there was no record of the desk having been paid for, and this would have explained only half of the money withdrawn.

"According to Emma Forrest, as quoted in A Version of Reason, "The night before he disappeared Edwards gave a friend a book called Novel with Cocaine, instructing her to read the introduction, which details the author staying in a mental asylum before vanishing." Whilst staying at the Embassy Hotel in Bayswater Road, London, according to Rob Jovanovic's biography, Edwards removed some books and videos from his bag. Among them was a copy of the play Equus. Edwards wrapped them carefully in a box with a note that said "I love you", then decorated the box like a birthday present and decorated the outside of it with collages and literary quotations. These included a picture of a Germanic-looking house and Bugs Bunny. The package was addressed to Edwards' on/off girlfriend, Jo, whom he met some years prior, although they had split a few weeks earlier.

"The next morning, Edwards collected his wallet, car keys, some Prozac and his passport. He reportedly checked out of the hotel at 7:00 a.m., leaving his toiletries, packed suitcase, and some of his Prozac. He then drove to his flat in Cardiff, leaving behind his passport, his Prozac and the Severn Bridge tollbooth receipt. In the two weeks that followed, Edwards was apparently spotted in the Newport passport office and at Newport bus station by a fan who was unaware that he was missing. The fan was reported to have discussed a mutual friend, Lori Fidler, before Edwards departed.

"On 7 February, a taxi driver from Newport supposedly picked up Edwards from the King's Hotel, and drove him around the valleys, including Edwards' hometown of Blackwood. The driver reported that the passenger had spoken in a Cockney accent, which occasionally slipped into a Welsh one, and that he had asked if he could lie down on the back seat. Eventually they reached Blackwood and the bus station, but the passenger reportedly said "this is not the place", and asked to be taken to Pontypool railway station. It was later ascertained, according to Jovanovic's account, that Pontypool did not have a telephone. The passenger got out at the Severn View service station near Aust, South Gloucestershire and paid the £68 fare in cash.

"On 14 February, Edwards' Vauxhall Cavalier received a parking ticket at the Severn View service station, and on 17 February, the vehicle was reported as abandoned. Police discovered the battery to be dead, with evidence that the car had been lived in. The car also had photos he had taken of his family days prior. Due to the service station's proximity to the Severn Bridge, a known suicide site, it was widely believed that Edwards had jumped from the bridge. Many people who knew Edwards, however, have said that he was never the type to contemplate suicide and he himself was quoted in 1994 as saying, "In terms of the 'S' word, that does not enter my mind. And it never has done, in terms of an attempt. Because I am stronger than that. I might be a weak person, but I can take pain".

"Since then, Edwards has reportedly been spotted in a market in Goa, India, and on the islands of Fuerteventura and Lanzarote. There have been other alleged sightings of Edwards, especially in the years immediately following his disappearance. However, none of these has proved conclusive and none have been confirmed by investigators. In 2018, it was revealed that the bridge's toll receipt was a 24-hour clock, meaning he would have crossed the bridge at 2:55 am, rather than 2:55 pm as previously thought for 23 years.

"The investigation itself has received criticism. In his 1999 book Everything (A Book About Manic Street Preachers), Simon Price states that aspects of the investigation were "far from satisfactory". He asserts the police may not have taken Edwards' mental state into account when prioritising his disappearance, and also records Edwards' sister Rachel as having "hit out at police handling" after CCTV footage was analysed two years after Edwards vanished. Price records a member of the investigation team as stating "that the idea that you could identify somebody from that is arrant nonsense". While his family had the option of declaring him legally dead from 2002 onwards, they chose not to for many years, and his status remained open as a missing person[ until 23 November 2008, when he became officially "presumed dead".

If you wish to learn more about Edwards, I suggest looking into the case yourself. However, as I said, his influence on Y Signal really only relates to Yarbrough's own disappearance and the usage of music to reflect the turbulent state of the soul. There isn't any other connection.

I should also add that the Manic Street Preachers also wrote an album using Edwards' left behind notes and journals for lyrics, much like the Panorama Agents did for the titular Y Signal album in the story. And that is where the two part ways.

The Panorama Agents, as I've said are a band that didn't exist at the time but should have. You can tell from the album covers I posted throughout all four parts of Y Signal and that I had a history planned out for them before the events of the story. In fact, I might as well state it outright.

Yarbrough formed the band in 1987 when he was nineteen years old with his childhood friends. Their self-titled album released in 1988 in the indies, and they soon amassed an underground following. One of their roadies was a young man named Lenny, who would go on to be one of the band's biggest fans as he traveled the country with them. This is where he got the trinkets he sent to Ray, who was just a runt at the time. 

Nonetheless, the Panorama Agents grew bigger as the years went on. In 1990, they were signed to the majors and put out Now I Got Trouble which was a minor hit. It soon went gold before their follow-up, Last Broadcast, stormed out of the gate and topped the charts. It was all over the radio and the band's music videos were on heavy rotation.

Here is their full discography:

Panorama Agents (1988)

End is Here (1989)

Now I've Got Trouble (1990)

Last Broadcast (1991)

"Live" in 1991 (1993)

Y Signal (1994)

New Babylon (1997) [as Panorama]

Endless (2000) [as Panorama]

I listed the covers backwards as the story went on to show just how backwards Yarbrough was and how is degeneration wasn't really normal. By the time of Last Broadcast he had already discovered the Y Signal and used it to learn the "truth" of the world. Of course, not before making sure to gift it to a very confused Lenny.

Though they look successful from the outside, the band was not doing so well internally. Yarbrough, specifically, was losing his grip on reality and the others didn't know how to deal with it. This is reflected in what they did after he vanished.

When Yarbrough disappeared in 1992, the band was at a loss how to continue. They put out a live album recorded at their peak and then released Y Signal in 1994, an album containing lyrics entirely composed by Yarbrough using his left over lyrics and scraps. The band used the time between albums to craft another masterpiece, but they knew they couldn't go on like this. Though these songs were still hits for the band, it was clear they had to reinvent themselves. Nonetheless, they never replaced Yarbrough at all, deciding to go on as a trio.

In 1997, they would release New Babylon after changing their name to Panorama. They completely overhauled their music to add electronica and industrial sounds. The album did better critically than commercially, with lyrics that appeared hedonistic and detached, making it a bit of a contention among fans if it's even from the same band. But it was a mere stumbling block for the people in the group. The singer/rhythm guitarist left the band for a solo career, you've probably heard him lecturing plebs about politics on TV in recent years, leaving two members left from the original lineup to carry the load. Unfortunately, the drummer was found dead of alcohol poisoning on the train tracks of an abandoned trainyard in 1998. Despite the suspicious circumstances around it, the death was declared accidental. It looked as if it the band was finally over.

In 2000, Panorama put out their final album, Endless, a largely acoustic and lo-fi affair out of joint with everything they had done before. Only the bass player remained in the band, using his acoustic guitar and a drum machine when needed as well as other spare instrumentation, blues rhythm, and a very stripped down production. The album was rejected by fans of the band for being strangely hopeful and reflective, with odd appeals to God and thinking back on misspent youth and looking toward the future, and critics similarly dogged it for not having the sonic experimentation of older releases. Though reappraisal in recent years has looked better on the album, most fans agree it is simply not a proper Panorama Agents album. Then again sentiments for New Babylon were much the same. The album barely reached gold, but it was just not enough.

The lone member quietly called it a day in 2001, and that was the end of the Panorama Agents. They became nothing more than hipster trivia for music nerds on hipster websites. They faded away like every other band that was big in the '90s. Last anyone heard of the bass player, he had joined a monastery somewhere in Vermont.

One final thing about music before we move on: there is band that directly inspired a lot of the creation of this story, though you wouldn't be able to tell if I didn't say something here. The band Less Than Jake, specifically the lyrics of their drummer Vinnie, were what finally pushed me to write this story. It might seem odd that a ska band would inspire this, but if you remember that post I wrote on the band then you definitely understand how that is the case.

LTJ's drummer Vinnie successfully wrote about the worries of the Gen X life to the younger kids in Gen Y better than any other band that didn't turn to emo hipsters or political tools. Their first album released in 1995 (it wasn't even out yet during the events of Y Signal) but their formation in 1992 makes them a prime Gen X band. I specifically looked at the early lyrics and wonder: what would have happened had someone had never found his way out of this world that the generation was trapped in at the time. What would they be driven to do? Well, you would get Yarbrough and Lenny.

I created a City Medley based on 25+ year old Less Than Jake songs specifically because I was writing Y Signal at the time. If you haven't heard it, I posted it on youtube here:

The medley consists of songs written and recorded before the events of this story and were what I used to get into Lenny's head. I imagined this was very close to his experience growing up and figuring out his place in the world. Arranging them in this order made the songs tell a story I don't think the songwriter originally intended, but the theme exists regardless.

The story is simple and not very complex at all. Listening to a narrator living in an urban hell as things just get worse for him before he realizes they'll never get better and he finally leaves it behind tracks with Lenny's life perfectly. After all, he is the one who spurs Ray into action.

The tracklist of the medley is as follows:

Intro

24 Hours in Paramus

St. James Hotel

Down in the Mission

Blindsided

Last Train

Did you notice something familiar about those titles? That's right, I named the last two chapters of the story after the last two Less Than Jake songs in the medley. To understand why, you'd have to know the lyrics and get into the headspace of what Ray was struggling against. It is very much about a particular time and place.

Though Blindsided first released on the band's debut album Pezcore in 1995, it had already been written by the time this story occurs. Last Train, however is an older song and appears as a rarity in early compilations. Even the sound quality is lower because it is so rare.

Nonetheless, these are the songs that helped me to write the story.

Blindsided

Isn't it funny?

It all comes down to money

Running on a treadmill, wasting time

Keeps you too busy to lose your mind

I was blindsided out on the street

The tension was so thick I could hardly even breathe

And I don't like the way things are going down

I don't like the way things are going down

That's all, it's all

It's enough to knock me down

I was blindsided this guy walked right past

Calls for help from some guy from under the pass

So I guess it's the "problem will go away if you block it out"

It'll go away if you block it out

That's all, it's all

It's all enough to knock me down

Isn't it funny?

It all comes down to money

Running on a treadmill, wasting time

Keeps you too busy to lose your mind

Fall to the middle class

Heading for the lower class

The times can't always keep you down

And it's enough to knock me down.

Last Train

It's got me on the run, it's got my brain tied

It's got me down as the trains pass by

All these people crowding my sight

I wonder if my head was ever screwed on tight

Concrete buildings are all that I see

I used to never let it bother me

I used to never let it bother me

Last train, remember me

Walking past the cracks on 2nd street (Watching!)

Lights and sounds, the city doesn't sleep (And I say!)

Get this fucking city out of my brain (So I!)

Guess I'll have to wait for the last train

Remember me

Concrete buildings are all that I see

I never let it bother me

I used to never let it bother me

Last train, remember me

Walking past the cracks on 2nd street (Watching!)

Lights and sounds, the city doesn't sleep (And I say!)

Get this fucking city out of my brain (So I!)

Guess I'll have to wait for the last train

Remember me

Last train, remember me

Remember me

You gotta remember me

Last train.

It was definitely a way to help me understand someone like Lenny a lot better. Though Less Than Jake grew to become far more hopeful, Lenny wasn't there. No one of their generation would be way back in 1995.

Lenny's outlook on life was also not the same as Yarbrough's, which is probably how he came to his decision at the end of the story. At the end of the day, he was just looking for a little light to shine through the constant storm clouds. I'd like to think he found it in the end.

This is probably how Lenny came to have a good relationship with his younger cousin Ray. Gen Y was a very optimistic generation when we were young, pretty much the opposite of Gen X. However, as the story showed, much of that optimism was based on material things and artificial patterns that wouldn't last. Ray telling Lenny to stick around and wait for the next Quentin Tarantino movie wouldn't be enough to reach him because Lenny had already seen what the world had to offer beyond the good art of the time. They wouldn't see each other's point of view, just as Gen x and Y didn't really seem to have much in common back in the 1990s when this tale took place. So Ray instead offered him what Yarbrough couldn't: a place in the world again.

Gen Y has been called a materialistic generation, but I think that's not actually true. We tent to think people of this age bracket just want to buy old brand toys and pretend its the '90s because they think of this stuff as a religion replacement. However, I think it is a bit less complicated than that. They act this way more because they miss the cultural climate those things were created in. They are trying to rediscover a world they woke up one day to find was gone.

While Gen X is a hopeful generation that never had the chance to be hopeful; Gen Y is a nostalgic generation that tends to miss the forest for the trees. We were both sold futures that never happened, but Gen X smiled through the disappointment while muttering under their breath. Gen Y retreated to the past to get some semblance of understanding.

I suppose that might be why I wrote this story. As I said, I came up with the general idea around Lenny long ago, for a reason. But the character of Ray is not actually me. Ray is the Gen Y kid who is willing to face the unknown with one foot in the past and one foot in the future, understanding the world he is in (the one my generation lionizes) has its warts but is willing to do what is needed to move ahead. I'd like to think Gen Y can turn out to be the scribe generation we need in an era of constant revisionism and lies.

Speaking of revisionism, part of the other reason this was written is because Hollywood is currently attempting, albeit rather poorly, to try to retroactively turn the image 1990s inside out to weaponize against those who do not remember a world before Cultural Ground Zero. They are trying to sell the world on a past that didn't happen. Much like they successfully turned the 1950s into a living black and white cartoon centered on one political issue, they are trying to warp the 1990s into a garbage can of pointlessness with revisionist post-9/11 misery.

Here is an example:

This is not my childhood, and I'm tired of others trying to force this lie on the rest of us as if the 1990s were like this for everyone. Normal '90s kids did not live like these rich Hollywood kids did, and it sometimes feels as if we didn't even grow up on the same planet. Which might actually go a long way to showing just why things currently are the way they are.

For another example, I wrote about one such subversive lie a few years ago. This sort of thing is all over the place: an attempt to demonize the past to pretend things were always exactly as bad as they are right now in order to guilt you into doing what they want to fix the world. I can tell you as someone who was very much paying attention to the changes at the time, due to not having much in the way of a choice, that these people are lying.

The 1990s were not a paradise free of corruption, but it was a very different world than the one we live in now. Objectively there are many good things we had back then (real neighborhoods and communities, local and regional identity and clubs, and faith in higher callings and purpose) that have all been homogenized and boiled into the modern goop that nobody alive even likes today. The 1990s are a different universe, at this point. 

No, the world was not always as bad as it is right at this moment. If someone is saying this, they have something to sell you, and it's probably a pamphlet with all their solutions carefully written out on it in detailed points. Surprisingly convenient, no?

I would say to talk to the older generations about it, but I've never found a Baby Boomer consistent on this topic. I know boomers who would say back in the day that The Simpsons was trash and terrible now unironically say that they've always liked it and that I'm misremembering what they said to me. But that's not the only subject this happens to. I know others that called video games a giant waste of time that now play more video games than I do. It's a weird consistent inconsistency this generation has. It is as if they are always updating their software.

This is why the Baby Boomers in Y Signal are kind of off in a whole other world, mostly because they all were. And probably still are. They are a non-factor in the story because the Baby Boomers didn't really offer much to the 1990s except helicopter parenting, stricter rules for institutions, and working on the same day in day out loop they mastered in the '80s. It was just another decade to them and they probably think nothing of it now.

Truth be told, if they weren't Baby Boomers, then the entirety of the events of Y Signal probably never would have happened to begin with. Would any of the characters be better off if that were the case? That is hard to say. Things just have a way of working out in strange ways.

Same goes for the references. I'm not going to list them out, but you probably saw them for yourself. I'm not a fan of nostalgia bait stories, of which Y Signal is most definitely not, but having time and place atmosphere and attitudes is necessary for a period piece. I don't tend to write about different times in the past, but I had to make an exception for this story. This is a tale that could only have taken place in the time period it does. Recognizing the references is less important than knowing just how much they mean to the kids in the story. And I'm not saying that is necessarily a good thing. It just is what it is--Gen Y kids defined themselves by what they consumed and where they were when doing it. Ignoring that is ignoring the era.

So you might be wondering why, if I came up with Lenny so long ago, it took me so long to write this story. Shouldn't I have written this years ago?

Well, the truth is that I wouldn't have been able to. Without knowing what I know about weird fiction today, from Appendix N and Weird Tales to StoryHack and Cirsova, I never would have been able to write this. It is the same with learning about Cultural Ground Zero and the events surrounding it, as well as discovering more about the world and the Truth of existence itself. The story would not be what it is today. In fact, knowing what I was like and going through back then, I can't even say if it ever would have been written at all.

You might be confused at how long this post is for a single novelette distributed for free on my own blog when other Story Sheets posts were much shorter and straightforward. The reason is that this one was a long time coming and something I think I needed to write. It's only when I thought back on the history of this piece and edited the post you are currently reading that I realized just how much I put into this one. Hopefully if you haven't yet read Y Signal that this post will convince you to do so. It's definitely a blast.

As for whether we will see the world of Y Signal again, the answer is yes. I have three total tales planned with a definitive endpoint. You will see Ray again, but he probably would have preferred if I left him alone. Unfortunately for him, that isn't really my call. If the story needs to be written then it needs to be written. He's not getting away that easy!

So thank you for reading and enjoying the story. I have more surprises in store, just you wait! It's gonna be a good time. I assure you that I'm just getting started.

More stories of adventure!