‘One Day This Movie ...’

EDITOR’S NOTE | My apologies to readers who follow both my Facebook feed & WestVirginiaVille, as you will have seen much of this post and the music video below.

By DOUGLAS JOHN IMBROGNO | August 19, 2026

TOMORROW WILL MARK A WEEK since my 36-year-old son, Lucas Dulio Imbrogno McKeown, took his own life. Those who knew, love, and esteemed him — and there were many in multiple states — knew his big spirit, smiling face and creative talents. They knew him perhaps as a dear friend, a playful fellow traveler, and also as a collaborator and mentor in his role as the electronic dance music DJ/composer Lucas The Flow, with his music featured on more than 30 small labels globally. He also experienced serious dark times and mental health challenges which he bravely fought against, but which led to his passing. My family and I ask that you lift up and pass forward the bright, big-spirited soul he was for all who loved him, recalling him that way as so many have in the astonishing outpouring of love, loss, grief, and respect we have seen this past week on Facebook.

FOR THOSE WHO KNEW LUCAS personally, and who may wish some final glimpses of him in his beauty and sweetness, below is a music video in honor of his passing from this life on August 13, 2026. The music video dates way back to 2008. As a high school graduation present for him and his dear cousin, Neil Ross, the three of us traveled to Italy in June 2008, to hear Santana perform in the remarkable Roman coliseum in Verona (a complete one, not the more familiar partial ruin at Rome’s heart). The concert was part of a two-week jaunt across Italia — from Milan to Verona and then Venice to Rome, with the boys as photo starlets along the way.

I let them go post-midnight clubbing in Rome one final night. Meanwhile, I returned to our lodging near the Termini train station, polishing a draft of the wistful song below on my Washburn Rover, a tiny traveling guitar Lucas and I played on the trip. After our return to West Virginia, I multi-tracked the song on my Macbook, with multiple vocal and guitar tracks and a shaker for rhythm, adding photos of our peregrinations around Italia, mostly of the boys. The final scenes of departure are maybe too heartbreaking in their poignancy, given the way things have played out these 18 years later.

Peace along your way, dear man, sweet son, and dear heart.

‘I WON’T BE FAMOUS’ HAS SINCE BEEN re-titled ‘The Mountains of Instead.’ It appears on a CD with a full-on studio-recorded treatment released a decade ago by my former band, The BrotherSisters, featuring Albert Frank Perrone and Marylin McKeown and masterfully engineered by Bob Webb. Yet it had it birth in a fifth-floor Rome apartment so many years ago. The revised title and respective reference in the lyrics comes from the end of a glorious, affecting 1936 W.H. Auden poem called 'AUTUMN SONG.’ Maybe also heartbreakingly poignant:

'Clear, unscaleable ahead
Rise the Mountains of Instead
From whose cold, cascading streams
None may drink, except in dreams …’

READ THE FULL POEM HERE: https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2013/11/autumn-song-by-w-h-auden.html

IF IN CRISIS, Call or Text 988

If you or a loved one in your life is in psychological crisis overwhelming your ability to function, leading to thoughts of desperation and exiting this life, please please please call 988, the three-digit, nationwide phone number to connect directly to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. By calling or texting 988, you’ll connect with trained counselors in the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline network. Live chat services are also available at 988lifeline.org, and videophone services are offered for people who are deaf or hard of hearing and use American Sign Language. I have used the text version of 988 scores of time in the worst of my own mental health challenges and wishing to leave this world — and have always found compassion, support & ease there.

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