Whatever Happened to the Brick Man Part 4: A Farewell to Guitars or Dr. Strange Brick or How He Learned to stop worrying and embrace the boring dialogue and depressing ending... Wow. Referencing Hemingway and Kubrick...and Deschanel? I guess someone could have been Brick's girl.

As you remember (or don't, hehe), Brick's recollections of his past dealings with G Mod had been wiped completely clean  somehow. We're not sure exactly how. Some said that Brick finally managed to repress the negative memories from his past (those seem to pile up quickly, don't they?). Others said that the massive soul destroying tower had begun to melt his mind. And still some others claimed that his high dairy intake had finally come back to haunt him. Regardless, we felt that it was time to relate to a lost tale about Brick before he gets dragged down by the storm like an Orwellian dog in a Roger Waters-penned song. We better hurry since no David Gilmour guitar solos could possibly save a charade like Brick, ha ha.

It was back in the summer of '10. Brick was a young guitarist. Not a good guitarist. A guitarist nonetheless. He was down on his luck but the sun still shone in the sky every day. It still did in those days.

One day his friend Tigerman brought him along to help impress a woman he liked. It was at an audition for a play. the building was nothing special. No need for lengthy exposition. We'll let Brick tell the story, starting from the former MFUJSF HQ. How he remembers, we can't tell you (Plot hole!)

"You will help me with the lady, won't you, Brick?"

"All right. Let me clean up first."

"Yes, you should wash away that fake stubble of yours."

"All right!"

I washed my face and combed my hair.

"Ready?"

We left the HQ and headed for the audition. We went to the nearby town and the sun was hanging high and it was nice. The theater house was a villa built before the grunge era. Miss Ruby was in the Garden. Another actress was with her. We saw their tank-tops through the trees and walked towards them. Tigerman saluted them. I just stood there and acted confused.

"Hey there," Miss Ruby said. "You're not an actor, are you?"

 "Oh no. I'm in a band."

Tigerman was flirting with the other actress. She was laughing at him.

"What an odd thing― to be in a band."

"Well, it's not all I do. I wrote a book."

"It's very odd though. Why be in a band? They don't make money at all."

"I don't know," I said. "There isn't an easy answer for everything."

"Oh isn't there? I was always instructed to think that it was 'my way or the highway.'"

"That's disturbing."

"Do we have to go on and talk like this?"

"No," I said.    

"That's a relief, isn't it?"

She was beautiful. Her light-brown hair glistened in the midday sun. Her slender frame felt good pressed next to mine, the softness of her bosom brushed up against my shoulder by a happy accident.

"Miss Ruby..." I began to say as I held her hand in mine.

"Yes, Brick?"

"I love you."

She smiled.

"You're a nice boy, but don't play this awful game with me."

"What game?"

"Don't be lame."

"I'm not, on purpose."

Tigerman was making some weird hand gestures at the other actress. She couldn't understand him.  

Miss Ruby was perfection personified. She sat in my lap, her legs crossed. Her arm was cradling my shoulder.

"I don't know, Brick. I've always been afraid of stone towers."

"Well, I don't see any near here. So I think you'll be fine."

"I guess."

"I love you."

"I wish you didn't have to return to your band."

"My record producer will kill me if I stay out too long."

"I didn't get the part anyway. I want to be with you."

"I'll love you no matter what, Miss Ruby."

"I like it."

"Are you really afraid of stone towers?"

"Not when I'm with you."

"Why are you afraid of them?"

"I don't know."

"Tell me."

"Don't make me."

"Please?"

"Alright. I'm afraid of stone towers because I see you dying because of one."

"Oh."

"But I'm an actress and crazy, so it's all nonsense."

"You're not crazy."

"You're right, I'm not...  I guess that's kind of foreboding."

Tigerman was ultimately rejected by his potential first ex-wife. Miss Ruby kissed me with all the passion and desperation of a star-crossed lover.

I didn't want to leave her but Tigerman reminded me of the wrath that G Mod might inflict if we missed the recording session.

"Oh Brick?" asked Tigerman as we headed back to MFUJSF HQ.

"Yeah, Tigerman?"

"You do know that Miss Ruby has a boyfriend, right?"

Lately, Brick appears missing. It seems like Amethyst has him falling off of cliffs. When reached for comment, all he could mutter was "Shock me awake, tear me apart..." I guess it's only falling in love because he hit the ground.

...And so time passed and minutes begat hours, hours begat days, days begat weeks. Time flowed seamlessly into a crimson spiral emptying down the drain of existence...

...And the award for most unnecessarily morbid opening sentence goes to...

...as Brick's world became more and more sullied by the complexities of the reality collapsing around him. 

To say that his life became complicated by the presence of Amethyst would be an understatement of Gulliverian proportions...

Are you sure you're using that adjective correctly? I thought Gulliver was the guy who smashed watermelons...

That's Gallagher.

The guy who plays Piper Perabo's boss on Covert Affairs?

No, that's Peter Gallagher.

You mean the lead guitarist of Oasis?

Ugh... that's Noel Gallagher.

Oh, the author of London Calling!

No, that's Noël Coward... or the Clash (minus the !)

Huh...

As we were saying, Brick's world was totally thrown out of orbit by the enigmatic Amethyst. Her entrancing glances at him in the hallway were as brief as the flap of a hummingbird's wing but they devastated him like a supernova. It was inexplicable. She was but one of several attractive women working at the office. She was just one woman amidst millions of women that he' see within the city limits. Just one woman amongst 3-4 billion on Earth.

And yet she dominated his limited attention span. There had been others of course. A singer songwriter, an actress and a humanitarian among them. But here was this producer who had flat out ejected him and yet there still seemed to be a bond, as malleable as a cloud, as stable as chaos itself. It was disarming, this influence Amethyst had on our unlucky protagonist. Despite his insistence on renouncing her, Brick was unable to rid her from his mind. I mean, how could you remove a thought once it has taken root in one's mind, huh, Christopher Nolan? hmmm?

There was no resentment for this one sided love affair either. The mere sight of her lifted his spirits into the magenta tinted sky only to drop him to earth like a human meteorite. She was the Louise de La Vallière to his Vicomte de Bragelonne, the key to his destruction disguised in a humbly beautiful vessel.

There was a caveat, an exception, a dread that lurked beneath the surface. Pterodactyl had warned Brick about Amethyst and that warning proved to be coming true. Much like the aforementioned Vallière, Amethyst's attention was dominated by another man's love.

What has become of this once mighty blog? We're talking about love instead of a faux rock band... the horror, the horror.

And it was this cold hard fact that disintegrated Brick's very being, leaving a hollow cavity in Brick's chest.

You mean like that Green Day video?

Except there was no stray heart here. Brick began to fade in and out between the world of Amethyst's misleading charms and a deeper, darker world that was familiar and estranged simultaneously. Although on the outside Brick seemed his usual goofy self, if one were to take a closer look, he appeared missing.