10 Years in Twin Peaks

On February 26, 2014, the (in-world) twenty-fifth anniversary of Agent Cooper's Red Room dream, I casually picked up a book and began to read it while taking the train to work. At the time I did not know it was the silver jubilee of the events in Twin Peaks (which took place in 1989, over a year before the pilot aired). Nor did I know that a blu-ray release of the series was a scheduled for that summer, and neither I nor the general public had any confirmation that the long-awaited deleted scenes from Fire Walk With Me would be on that collection. And certainly no one aside from the original creators themselves had any clue that David Lynch and Mark Frost were already hard at work on a script for a new limited series season, which would be announced that autumn. The year 2014 was destined to be the biggest year for Twin Peaks since 1990, but my own decade of Peaks enthrallment was sparked independently of all those other unknown and/or forthcoming factors. I'd finished another book the day before and decided it was finally time to pick the used copy of the Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks which had been sitting on my desk for several months. Having sat in an online cart since my first - and much briefer - burst of enthusiasm for the series in 2008, I'd finally ordered it as an afterthought, to round out a gift card purchase. When I cracked open its moonlit cover, I had no idea where it this modest path would lead me.

Flash forward to today, February 26, 2024, the (in-world) thirty-fifth anniversary of Agent Cooper's Red Room dream - and the tenth anniversary of my own awakening. The Return has come and long gone, various expressions of fandom have waxed and waned, and I've spent nearly two-thirds of this site's history primarily writing, podcasting, and creating videos about Twin Peaks. I'm both grateful for what this world has given me and slightly weary of my inability to move on from it; while I wouldn't take back any of the hundreds of entries logged on every aspect of Peaks, my coverage - especially the three biggest (and still ongoing) projects - carried on far longer than I expected and have, as a result, delayed other endeavors at a time I thought they'd have long ago begun. This focus also swallowed up almost everything else; a few months ago, I felt compelled to halt all non-Peaks public writing and podcasting. There's something wryly apropos about all of this, isn't there? (Especially since my journey began on the anniversary of the Peaks hero's first glimpse of his own eventual trap in the Black Lodge.) Anyway, I've written in more detail about my personal odyssey in the first, second, and third parts of a behind-the-scenes reflection on the creation of my video series. Eventually there will be a fourth. For now, I'm deep in the weeds of my prose TWIN PEAKS Character Series (begun in 2016) - currently a month into grabbing screenshots for the top twenty. The public release of my audio Lost in Twin Peaks podcast (begun in 2019) finally capped off season three, but I still need to rewind and present season two. And the conclusion of my video Journey Through Twin Peaks (begun in 2014) still hovers on the horizon. These stories will have an ending, however slow the process of getting there.

There are satisfying pleasures and deep joys to be found by getting lost in these woods - funny and melancholy, cosmic and earthy, profound and trivial. Even if we sometimes wonder how we'll ever find a way out...