Writing Prompt Demonstration
Rico said: Kit, Rolling Stone Mode, go: (Shared track name/YouTube link)
🎸ROLLING STONE MODE: ROAD TO NOWHERE
By Ricardo Pereyda, Burn Slow Doctrine Division
(feat. Talking Heads on the tape deck)
🎥 Watch: Talking Heads – “Road to Nowhere”
There’s a grin behind the madness in Road to Nowhere—that ironic, almost gospel march into the absurd.
And if you’ve ever sat in a government waiting room, a VA psych ward, or the back of a patrol car wondering if anyone up top actually knows what the hell they’re doing,
you already know the lyrics by heart.
“Well we know where we're goin'...
But we don't know where we've been…”
It’s a veteran’s anthem.
A bureaucrat’s lullaby.
A national hymn hummed by survivors who stopped asking for permission to heal.
🪞This ain’t nihilism. It’s surveillance footage turned spiritual.
David Byrne's white suit isn't just a fit—it’s a flag.
That marching band? A funeral parade for American clarity.
The floating heads? The fragmented voices of a nation too medicated to notice it’s on loop.
The song dares to be joyful about the absurdity.
It leans into the collapse—not with surrender, but with a smirk and a stomp.
Because when the system’s a joke, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is sing anyway.
🔥Real Talk from the Road to Nowhere:
Veterans marched for access and got labeled “high-risk” instead.
Survivors told the truth and got branded “noncompliant.”
Organizers built clinics and gardens while politicians held summits about “equity.”
Meanwhile, the machine keeps playing this track on repeat.
Only now we’re remixing it—with FOIAs, spoken word, and scars turned script.
“There’s a city in my mind
Come along and take that ride…”
That “city” is in every archive we refuse to let rot.
Every testimony we refuse to sanitize.
Every cannabis conviction we drag into the light.
Every young writer learning how to weaponize their voice before the silence sets in.
🛠️Deployment Instructions:
Watch the video again.
Picture it projected behind a testimony at Congress.
Or looped on a jumbotron outside a dispensary still denying access to veterans.
Then ask:
Who really built this road?
And who’s still walking it—barefoot, defiant, humming a song they didn’t choose?
🛣️ Burn Slow. March Loud. Write Like There’s No Map.
The road to nowhere is where we start building the next thing.
And yeah—we do want company.
—Rico
International Veterans Leadership Committee
🎺 Powered by Burn Slow Doctrine, Field Kit No. 4
