02/12/2018 20:41:58 ¶ ●

## 139 - The Birthday of Lee Marvin (I)

To err is human. To forgive is also human.
The possibilities of human action are a multitude.
Welcome to Night Vale.

Today is a very special day, listeners. Yes, for once your calendars are not deceiving you. Today is the 30th birthday of longtime Night Vale resident and Hollywood legend, Lee Marvin. Mr. Marvin is on break from the filming of “The Rise of the Hobbits, Part 4,” the anticipated next chapter of Peter Jackson’s 8-part film series, based on the copyright page of “The Hobbit”.

The town has declared the birthday a civic holiday, and are holding a fair in honor of Mr. Marvin in Grove Park. The man himself is said to speak later today, but head over now to play fun carnival games and eat local snacks. John Peters – you know, the farmer – will be there selling boiled imaginary corn dipped in theoretical butter. A tasty and extremely healthy snack, containing practically no calories at all. More on these birthday celebrations, as there continues to be a birthday to celebrate. Ah, I’m just so excited! I’m sorry, I really get into birthdays, always have. I just, I wish I could remember when mine is.

But first, some important facts about the moon from local moon scientist, or moon-ologist, Ross Sutherland.
The moon is a weak egg, set to crack at a glance.
The moon is a maniacal scent sniffed out by tidal waters.
The moon is a barbarous necklace upon the neck of our barbarous world.
The moon is a (ritzy) cloak, too gaudy for daywear.
The moon is an accidental height, one that may some day be catastrophically adjusted.
Thank you, Ross, for those fascinating facts.

The birthday celebration is in full swing. This is a town that loves our local legends, and no one is more local or legendary than movie star Lee Marvin. And not only a movie star, he has also been doing work in the theatre. Just this year, he staged a one-man version of “Angels in America” at the community theater, playing every single character over seven and a half hours, except the angels. Angels have a strong union and it turns out that no one is allowed to play an angel, unless they are themself an angel. The angels who participated in the production also found the play offensive, saying that it stereotyped angels as flying beings shouting prophecies and wrestling with divinely chosen humans. “Yes,” said an angel who once was the town’s richest man. “I have shouted a prophecy or two in my life, and yes, I wrestled a human over a divine message. But that’s a tiny part of my lived experience, and I want this work to better represent my whole being.” As such, the play was drastically rewritten and was mostly about angels attending school board meetings, throwing dinner parties, and hanging out at the parking lot of the Ralphs. I was deeply moved.

Anyway, come on down to Grove Park. You don’t wanna miss this birthday party. The angels brought sheet cake.

And now a public service announcement. Trish Hidge and Simone Rigideau are seeking volunteers for their new community service organization that puts cute paper hats on dogs. “Sure,” said Trish Hidge from within her darkened house, speaking through a narrow gap she had pulled in her blinds. “Dogs are cute, but have you ever seen a dog in a paper pirate? Or, or, or a chef’s hat? Wha-wha-what about a paper the shaped like another dog, perched on top of the first dog’s head. It is these kinds of experiences we wish to bring to the world with our new organization. What was that?!” she finished, suddenly snapping the blinds shut and disappearing. There was a series of loud thuds and a slow dragging sound from inside, and then the whites of her eyes against the blinds again as she hissed: “Did you see that? What did you see? You saw it, didn’t you?” Until your friendly reporter decided it would be best to back away from your house and then, having reached the sidewalk, turn and run, his breath rattling in and out of his chest.
Simone Rigideau only commented that she is happy to devote her time to such a good cause. And that also, the world ended a long time ago. “This isn’t the world,” she said. “I don’t know what this is, but I know dogs are in it and so that’s what I’ll focus on.”
Anyone wishing to sing up with the organization should just tell the next dog you see, and they’ll take care of the rest.

And now, traffic.
A scattering of roads in the desert, far from human habitation. These roads are only roads in the most theoretical of senses. They are merely packed down dirt, cleared of plants, and no vehicle has passed over them in years. Is a road that is never used still a road? Or is it something else? A marking, a monument to movement that never came to be? One of these not-roads meanders its way over a rise and back down through chapallar.

From high up in a plane or sitting in the clean white interior of a flying saucer, it would appear as though someone had taken a pen and let it trail loosely over the earth. Eventually, it meets up with another scattering of dirt roads. These have a few farms and businesses along them, not many but these roads are sometimes used. Maybe the people here are aware that one of their roads drifts off far into the desert, ending at an abandoned cross-hatching of lanes. But more likely, they only know that one of their roads goes nowhere, and they ignore that road. From this barely populated area, one of the dirt roads heads out, becomes paved, goes its two-laned way into a small town with a high school and a Walmart. This small town has a road that ends at the highway.

The highway merges eventually onto the interstate, an 8-lane river of cars pouring into and out of the city, a vast pool of life. Some of that life is only there for the day. Others will live and die never having left their neighborhoods. And you could, if you wanted, get in your car in the heart of this metropolis and take the interstate to the highway, to the two-lane road, through the small town, to the sparsely populated dirt roads, and follow that one meandering road over the rise and come to an intersection of markings that are only roads in the most theoretical of ways.
And you could get out of your car and walk along these roads, the first human to touch them since their creation, and perhaps even then, but no one ever has, and no one ever will.
This has been traffic.

The party is still rolling along down in Grove Park. Martin McCaffrey, local representative of the TSA, has set up an art sale with some of his works, all of which contain strange dark hunched figures. It seems wildly inappropriate that he has chosen to set up a private art sale at a public birthday party for someone else, but you go Martin, I guess.

Oh, oh! The crowd is buzzing! Lee Marvin has arrived. Everyone stop buzzing, I’m trying to hear what Lee is saying! He must be so happy about celebration. Uh he’s approaching the mic, it appears he has prepared a speech to thank us for this party. Ah, that’s wonderful. We will return with that speech in just a moment, but first, we absolutely must
Check in on the weather.

[“Impasse” by Juliana Finch, https://music.julianafinch.com]

Lee Marvin: Hello. Thank you for coming to my birthday party. [chuckles] It has been my 30th birthday for a long time. Hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years. Continuously my 30th birthday. [chuckles] I never grow a day older. I don’t know why this of all the days that are my birthday is the one on which you chose to throw a party, but it’s sure nice of you to think of me. That cake looks fine.

How is a person supposed to track time outside of the context of the world? If it was my 30th birthday when George Washington declared himself god-king of America, and it was my 30th birthday when Stanley Kubrick staged the moon landing. And my 30th birthday today, then how old am I? How much time has passed? It is impossible for me to have a sense of time, I’m not on a ship sailing to some great destination, I am floating on my back in the sea of time staring up at cruel and alien stars. The currents take me. I will never wash up on any golden shore. Perhaps I will someday sink. Without the context of history, my memories are flat, each holding equal weight. Each with the possibility of having taken place the same amount of time ago.

I remember standing on this land, when no one else was here. Even the land wasn’t quite here yet. It was still part of a larger land mass that would shiver out all over the earth, holding in the contour of its coast lines the memory of its schism. The air was heavy and warm and breathing felt like drinking. It was my 30th birthday that day. I sat under a few branches to protect myself from the rain. This was thick forest then, the sea lapped up against it and all of this, all of that, has dried up. It hardly ever rains.

On my 30th birthday, I stood with the town elders as they declared the formation of this community. I signed on the original charter. Go see for yourself in the civic history museum, in the lobby of city hall, admission is free. And anyone with a secret or top secret clearance with any major government agency is welcome to take a look. There you will see that tattered bit of paper and on it, among the scrawls of men whose names have decayed along with their bones is a signature that remains as clean and clear as the day I wrote it. It says “Lee Marvin”, and in parentheses it says “30”, with several exclamation points.

Perhaps we were wrong to create this town. Even in the moment of signing, we were avoiding each other’s eyes, there was much we didn’t understand about this place that we were naming and giving boundaries to, but we felt in debt to something much larger than us. And the town of Night Vale was one of its demands. Later, on my 30th birthday, I watched missiles streak across the sky and knew we were all doomed. And then we weren’t doomed, and it was still my 30th birthday. I don’t know what happened. I only know what it smelled like. There was a smell like cloves on the wind, and a smell like plastic wrap that has gotten warm in the sun. A-and a smell like an elevator just after it’s been cleaned. I stood outside and I took great whiffs of air, understanding that by all rights I shouldn’t have been able to do that anymore. In that moment, I shouldn’t have existed. But I did. And so I breathed and breathed. Maybe it had smelled like that before outside, maybe it always had and I just never truly noticed until that moment.

I love Night Vale. But I’m afraid of Night Vale. I-I think many of us feel that way, although we don’t speak of it. We announce our love of civic leadership and of our town pride but – sometimes we find that we are standing in front of a shed in our garden, and the door is cracked open a little and in that darkness of the shed there is a depth of terror so great that no one world could contain it. And we stand barefoot in grass made sharp by drought and we gape at the shadows within the shed, without knowing what we are seeing and by the time we realize what we are doing, the sun has long gone down and the stars have infested the sky and we are still standing in front of that garden shed with the door ajar. Or, well, maybe that’s just me. [chuckles] Certainly that has happened to me on, on many of my 30th birthdays, but no more. I seek for my unchanging life to change. I seek context, I seek one moment in which I understand what time it is.

Thank you for coming to my birthday. Well, I don’t believe it’ll be my birthday much longer. Looks like the cake is all gone now.

Cecil: Wwwwwwwwwhatt is there to sayyy about ssomeone on the date of their birth Iiii.. I suppose, uh the same things to say about them on any other day although – too often we don’t. He is… a kind man. Uhhh, a good friend. He helps sometimes, and thinks about helping often. He tries. It doesn’t always work, but he tries, or he doesn’t. But he thinks about trying. He is, in other words, like any of us, and today is his birthday, and so for today we say about him the warm things that we perhaps should be saying about each other all of the time. Why wait for a single day to say a kind word?

Lee Marvin, happy 30th birthday. Here’s to many, many more.

Stay tuned next for this one weird click that your elbow makes if you turn it just so. Did you hear that, that click? What do you think that is? Better search online and read the most frightening answers and sit in your bed for long waking hours of dark, moving your elbow and listening. Click, click, click.

Good night,
Night Vale,
Good night.

Today’s proverb: Every example of irony in the song “Ironic” is completely correct, because that song singlehandedly changed the common parlance definition of “irony”.

15/12/2018 23:29:50 ¶ ●

## 140 - A Blood Stone Carol

It’s winter and the weather’s freezing, quite appalling.
You stay in, aloof.

But footsteps, yes, there’s someone creeping, crying, calling. A stranger up upon on your roof.
Welcome to Night Vale.

It’s the holidays, listeners, when the majority of this country celebrate how their experience of this season is defined as the default universal experience. While every other cultural group’s experience is expected to be in reaction and comparison not the majority’s experiences. And if a person doesn’t wish to live in reaction to this default experience of the season, they are seen as hostile or (beliterant) merely for their wish to not participate in what is, after all, a celebration of the erasure of their culture under the dominant violence of another’s. all to say, happy blood stone day to those who celebrate it!

Now last year, your air waves were unfortunately taken over by a horrible pirate podcast, telling a story that was quite unfit for any listener’s ears. So I’d like to remediate that by telling a story of my own. A Night Vale holiday classic, one I’m sure all of you know. But isn’t there pleasure in hearing once again the story you can recite every word of? It is like visiting a friend.

Night Vale Community Radio presents to you, dear listener, A Blood Stone Carol.

Our story begins on the evening of Blood Stone Day Eve. A Mr. Scrooge was being quite horrid to his employees: underpaying them, shouting, some light flaying, et cetera. His employees howled their displeasure. “Take it up with HR,” said Scrooge. This was his way of a jokes a HR had been cats into a pit several days before because they suggested perhaps there could be slightly less flaying in the office.

Scrooge valued three things. One, himself. Two, his money. Three, nothing else. He went home from the office quite content with the way he had spent his day. He had made a good deal of money and a good deal of misery, and both seemed fair and right to him. His bed was made by a housekeeper he’d never met, who came while he was at work, and set everything in his home so it looked like no one had ever lived there. Signs of life bothered Scrooge. So I guess it was good news that the person sitting at his kitchen table was dead.

Mr. Marley, a business partner of Scrooge’s who had died some time before. And he looked it. his skin peeled and bubbled, where there was skin left. The smell was tremendous.
“My god,” Scrooge said, “What is this?”
Marley turned toward him as best he could, for he was wrapped in heavy chains. And he said, as best he could, for his tongue was mostly missing: “You will be visited by three spirits.”
“I’ll be visited by what?”
Marley muttered “three spirits” again and then fell heavily to the floor, and rolled out of the kitchen awkwardly in his heavy chains. The smell lingered, and Scrooge felt ill.
“Well this won’t do,” Scrooge said. “I’m going right to bed and forgetting all of this.”

And so he did go right to bed. But hardly had closed his eyes, when he heard a noise. A guttural slurping sound like someone inhaling paste. Scrooge sat up and looked about the room, but it was as empty and dark and clean as before.
“Is someone there?” he shouted, knowing that the answer was no, and also that the answer was yes. There was no one there, but no one was there. Stubborn, he closed his eyes and tried to send himself (determinedly) to sleep. But no sooner did he try that he heard a whiffling sound quite near his ear, like loose lips flapping. His eyes snapped open. The room was still empty.
“Are you the first of these spirits?” Scrooge shouted. “Well, then show yourself!”
And again, nothing. But a nothing that held weight. A nothing that was very much something in itself.
This time, Scrooge decided he wouldn’t try to go to sleep. He would sit up in bed and wait out this so-called spirit. If anything occurred, his eyes would be open to see it.

Then, he blinked. When his eyes opened again a microsecond later, there was a face inches from his face. The face was too close to perceive any details except a sense of – clammy paleness, of eyes that were wide but with no pupils, of a mouth that drooped sideways.
Scrooge yelped and scrambled backward along the bed, but it was no good. The face stayed with him, still being exact same distance, nearly pressed up against his own. The face hooted at him, a bad joke of a voice, but Scrooge didn’t find it funny. He got out of bed, tried to escape, but the face was with him the entire time. No matter where he turned, no matter where he went, this yowling hairless face hung in front of his own.
“What are you, spirit?” he cried. “What have you come to teach me?”
But this was the ghost of Blood Stone Day past, and like the past, it was inescapable, but had no point, no lesson to impart. It merely was.
The ghost moaned, and he felt cold saliva spreading over him. The face came even closer, until their noses touched, and the face’s nose came apart like wet paper machete.
“Go away, go away, go away!” Scrooge cried. And it did go away, as quickly as it had come, the ghost had left. Scrooge had gained nothing from the encounter. In fact, much had been taken from him.

Scrooge was speechless and breathless. And if he had breath and if he had speech, what could he say? There were no words for what he had seen. He went and made himself some tea, but couldn’t find a way to swallow it. He kept feeling the nose dissolve against his nose like marshy soil, like our memories as we age. Three spirits, Marley had said. How was he to face two more of them?

He went warily to his bed, waiting at any moment for a ghastly visage to swim toward him out of the shadows. But nothing came. He sat on the bed, still nothing. He got in bed, nothing. He closed his eyes and opened his eyes, nothing had come to his room. Instead, he was no longer in his room. He got up bewildered. His bed was now in a forest, dense enough that it was impossible to see more than a hundred feet in any direction, but sparse enough that it was well lit, although he could not see any sun in the sky. There was some detail about this place, other than his abrupt appearance in it, that was setting him on edge. He spun around, waiting for a devil to pounce on him from the underbrush, but it was silent.

Hold on. It was silent, absolutely so. That was what was making him nervous. There was no rustle of the trees, no call of birds. He had never felt so alone. And it was, as he thought this, that he saw in the distance a figure. The figure was tall and gray and shaped like a human, mostly. It had a wide mouth and it was screaming. Scrooge couldn’t hear it. He wanted no part of whatever this figure represented and turned to run. But when he turned, the figure was there too, absolutely still, absolutely silent. And screaming in mortal terror. Scrooge did not know how he knew it was terror, only that he knew. Fear was thick in the air. He could taste it on his tongue. This figure was terrified and it was still and it was silent.

Scrooge set his back straight and remembered who he was, an important business man after all, a powerful man that caused other men to wither and quake. So he walked toward the figure. But he was not able to approach it. No matter how far he went into the forest, the figure remained in the distance. Its limbs were splayed, it was dozens of feet tall, its mouth was wide, it was screaming and there was no sound at all.

Finally, Scrooge couldn’t take it. He screamed back, and that’s when he found he could make no sound either. There they were, the figure and him. They were both terrified, and neither of them could make even the smallest squeak, even the tiniest whisper of fear. Without release, the fear had nowhere to go, and it prowled Scrooge’s rib cage, a wild animal seething in captivity. If he could, Scrooge would have torn it out of his chest, but he couldn’t. He could only stand there and face the figure of the ghost of Blood Stone Day present. Both of them could scream silently.

After hours of this, perhaps even days, he found he was back in his bedroom. Yet no time had passed at all. Scrooge wept. He was envious of the ghosts whose job it was to haunt. He no longer wanted to be himself, whose job it was to be haunted. He muttered as he wept, a matter of envy.
“I wish I were dead, oh, I wish I were dead.”

From outside, the sound of the weather seemed to echo his words.

[“Draggin’ Me Down” by Travis Love Benson featuring Yo! The Moon
travislovebenson.com] [the song begins with “I wish I were dead”]

Scrooge lay in his bed, shivering, waiting for the visit from the third spirit. Given what he had experienced so far, he had to believe that the spirits had saved the most terrible for last, and he could not imagine what hideous phantom would gather itself in the darkness. He kept his eyes closed and awaited cold breath on his ear, or a dry finger caressing his cheek, but nothing came. The tension was enormous and he felt his stomach tighten. In fact, he became quite nauseous. He put his hand on his stomach, an instinctual gesture to calm his own body, and one that was utterly futile. It was as though his abdomen were an altar and his placating hand an offering placed by a condemned man. The offering would not be accepted. The man would remain condemned.

Scrooge felt within his abdomen – a movement, and realized he was feeling the clenching of his intestines seized by the terrible feeling within him. They tightened and released, tightened and released, and he could feel the strange twitching of them. He became aware all at once that this coiled creature lived within him and could at any time turn against him. This awareness, and ht dread still hanging over him about the approaching spirit, brought with it a wave of panic. With the panic came dizziness. Now his stomach lurched and his intestines clenched and his head swam. He did not feel in control of any part of himself. How could it be this awful? And the ghost was yet to even appear to him.

Scrooge shambled up out of bed and moved blindly through the malevolent darkness to the bathroom. He kneeled before the toilet, a pitiful supplicant, but nothing came. Relief would not be so easy as a purge. This feeling (waltzed) in him, it took him, and he was not in control of his body. His feet felt numb. Had his feet felt numb this entire time or was this a new symptom?

He stumbled up and to the mirror and saw himself, and here was the final horror for him. He looked no different. The same face, the same flesh, the same hair. His eyes were his eyes, only with the light of panic in them. And in that moment, he knew, and in knowing, he despaired. There was no third spirit coming for him, there was only the failure and strangeness of his own body. This, truly, was the ghost of Blood Stone Day yet to come. For as the years passed, his body would drift farther and father from his own conception of it. He would rebel and he would suffer strange torments that would alter his life, and the doctors would furrow their brow and be unable to diagnose anything, because the symptoms were too diffused. “You’re just getting older,” the doctors would say to him, and he would scream: “But this isn’t my body, I want my body back!” But it was his body, and like all bodies, it would not remain loyal.

His intestines writhed harder and his tongue felt thick. And he didn’t know if he was breathing, and his hands were also numb, and then he was falling. And then – he was gone. Elsewhere, children slept. Elsewhere, the religious prayed and the not religious wished. Elsewhere, sleepers dreamed. Elsewhere, there was a near infinite multitude of lived experience of which we each only get to live one.

The next morning, it was Blood Stone Day. Scrooge awoke and stood stiffly from the bathroom floor. He went to the window. Tiny Tim was there on the street bench, backward and chittering, as Tiny Tim did. All around Tim, the people of Night Vale went about their preparations for Blood Stone Day dinner. Scrooge didn’t see them. He watched Tiny Tim shake and shake, bending farther and father backward. He watched Tim. Tim shook.

And so ends the story of Scrooge. There is nothing to learn from this story. Most stories have nothing to teach us.

It’s winter, dear and frightful listeners. The days are hot and the nights are cold, and I hope you have someone out there who cares for you. And if you don’t, then know that I care for you. And know that you are never truly alone, for in the darkness, there are always others with you, whether you like it or not. Don’t open your eyes unless you want to see them.

Have a happy Blood Stone day, and good night, Night Vale,
Good night.

Today’s proverb: The universe contains, among other things, black holes, vast clouds of gas and light, a planet made of diamond and –your tiny body.