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”.