01/02/2017 15:27:51 ¶ ●

## Episode 101 - Guidelines for Disposal

You are swimming distance from a shore you cannot see. If you choose the wrong direction, you will drown. If you do not make a decision, you will drown.

Welcome to Night Vale.

Despite an extensive public outreach campaign, there is still some confusion over which items are accepted at the new landfill facility that opened this fall in the Barista District, to replace the old outdated landfill facility, also located in the Barista District. Mandatory annual Spring Cleaning Day is just around the corner, so it’s imperative that all citizens know how to properly dispose of the wreckage of their lives. I have some guidelines from the Sanitation Department, received via the pneumatic tube that I discovered beneath the floorboards of my office, under layers of cement bricks, chains and padlocks, [chuckling] as if someone wanted to keep it sealed forever!

But before we get to that, the lost and found.
A cell phone has been found in the drainage ditch on Drainage Ditch Road. It contains no phone numbers of contact info, but there is a series of photos in the camera that I will now describe, so that the owner might recognize it. Photo 1: a closeup of what looks like charred bone. Photo 2: a man in a horse suit staring directly into the lens. Photo 3: shapes in the dark, reaching. Photo 4: a puddle of viscous liquid, shot at a Dutch angle in black and white. If this is your phone, you can claim it here at Night Vale Community Radio.

Another found item: a group of giant cardboard boxes have been found scattered haphazardly around the empty fields behind the abandoned missile silo. For reasons they cannot explain, Night Vale citizens have been crawling into the boxes. Most haven’t come back. The few who did emerge describe the interior as an elaborate puzzle maze, ending in a complicated array of levers and dials, which must be engaged in the correct combination in order to regain freedom. When one escapee was asked by box-entering hopefuls for a hint as to what the correct combination was, she responded smugly: “The dissatisfaction of failure is equally important to the satisfaction of success.”

If these sound like your boxes, please pick them up from the field. If that sounds like your smugness, get a grip on yourself, Lisa!

Now, the official guidelines from the Sanitation Department. Please, do not bring any physical objects to the new landfill facility. You can bring any item that you no longer want, as long as it does not take up physical space. The physical objects must instead be brought to the old landfill which no longer exists, as it has been replaced by the new landfill which, as stated, will not accept physical objects.

To clarify. You cannot bring old televisions. You cannot bring old refrigerators, you cannot bring old cars. But. You can bring the idea of the backseat where you lost your virginity. You cannot bring old radios, but you can bring the song that reminds you of getting your braces tightened at the orthodontist, that same year when the popular bullies stole your school pictures to laugh loudly about how ugly you were.

You cannot bring your old braces, nor the bullies. But you can bring the beauty you eventually found in yourself by doing beautiful things.

Um.. there’s a section for recycling. This is where you can put things that aren’t currently useful to you, but might be turned into something more useful by someone else. Like your current relationship, or your indifferent opinions about The Godfather 1 and 2. You can bring any habitual destructive behavior. And also the sheer exhaustion of constantly working to contain it. You can bring the memory of the smell of the vanilla incense, if it reminds you of something that’s not necessarily negative, but is nostalgic to the point of discomfort. You cannot bring the smell itself, as smells are made up for matter, which is physical.

There is a.. sealed chamber for all messages, emails and missed calls that you dread returning. You may speak these messages into the chamber and simply walk away.

More on these guidelines in a moment, but first, a correction, sent to us via ham radio by listener Lucinda Fierro. In reference to our previous report on found items, Lucinda informs me that a group of giant cardboard boxes is actually called a clattering of boxes. A group of complicated levers and dials is called a befuddlement of levers and dials, not an array, as I earlier report. We apologize for these errors, and remind Lucinda Fierro that a group of pedants is called a phlegm.

In sadder news, Old Woman Josie has returned to the hospital with further complications from her broken hip last year. It seems that certain infections that were thought to be gone, are not gone. Doctors said they were optimistic. Although not necessarily about her case, just more in general.
I will, of course, keep you constantly updated.

Back to the new landfill guidelines. You can bring an entire year to the landfill. But you are limited to one per resident. So please make sure you’re selecting the right year. We invite you to remember that a year that seems uniquely terrible could in fact be merely the gateway to an era of terror, the launching point and not the peak. Choose wisely.

Remember, too, before you throw away an entire year, that any given unit of time also contains positive effects whose shape aren’t apparent yet. Because the universe doesn’t function in increments of human-made time, but on an unbroken plane of incidents and outcome. But all that said, feel free to throw out a year if you want.

There is an area for dumping things that you aren’t yet sure if you regret. For example, this is where you can put the crush you have on your platonic friend. The moments where you catch yourself distracted by their mouth, when they’re speaking instead of fully hearing them. The overcompensating excitement to display [fake-excitedly] when they get a new partner! And the satisfaction you suppress when they break up. This is where you put that one night when you were both a little drunk and ended up fooling around. This is where you put the next morning, when you both pretended nothing happened, and you laughed and joked around like normal, or a slightly exaggerated version of normal. When they left for work in too much of a hurry, and you let your coffee get cold while you just sat there on the couch, wondering if you should text, but any message you could think of seemed to be distorted by coded significance. “Thanks for a lovely evening” was too loaded, while simply “left the key under the mat” or “good luck with your meeting” was too casual, almost cold. But the absence of a message would also send a message. In the end, you settled on all three, placing “thanks for a lovely evening” in the middle of the other two, as one might put condoms on the checkout between a roll of scotch tape and a few apples.

You cannot bring scotch tape nor apples here. Please, stop bringing apples. They will not biodegrade here, nothing biodegrades here. Apples are only accepted at the old landfill. Which has been closed due to the opening of the new landfill.

You cannot bring piles of mysterious magnetic shavings that blew into your yard after that last big storm. But you can bring the sounds you heard in your house after the electricity went out.

Please, do not bring any lost cell phones nor a clattering of lost boxes.
Whew! These goodlines are really detailed. [mutters under his breath] Maybe the Sanitation Department needs to get over itself.
Oh, I mean, I would never say that. Be-be-being um, being an objective journalist but I can report that others might say it. Reporting strong opinions that I’ve never heard expressed by anyone else, but that someone somewhere might be thinking, is an important part of being an objective journalist.

Anyway. We pause now to bring you the weather.

[“Letters” by Lera Lynn]

There is a place at the landfill where you can put that summer. You know, that summer? You went to the beach that summer, everything seemed great. You had cool sunglasses that made you feel cool. Everybody’s coconut-scented bodies were sliding around on each other, and you did things you weren’t proud of. You don’t remember what they were anymore, it was so long ago, but they’re always there, those things. Always hanging around in a sandy corner of your mind. Along with the cool sunglasses you lost, when you stopped feeling cool.

You remember that a black hole opened up in the sky that summer, over the waves, and no one else saw. You looked straight into it. It slid open and closed like the aperture of a camera. You felt a deep desire to be sucked into it, but no matter how hard you willed your body upward, you stayed stuck to the street, surrounded by the scream-bursts of people on the rollercoaster down the boardwalk, and the monotonous drone of the roving street peddler mumbling as if to themself. Water, sunscreen, sumbrellas. Water, sunscreen, sumbrellas. Unsettled, you got a churro from a passing cart, and it did not sit well. In fact, it feels like that churro is still a part of you. You never digested it. It’s still inside of you, attached to the lining of your stomach like a parasite. It might.. be growing. It might be absorbing your nutrients and gaining strength.

And then there’s the car, that charcoal-gray car that started following you afterwards. You couldn’t prove anything, it was never closer than two blocks away. Sometimes you think you still see it parked across the street from Ralph’s when you come out with your groceries, or when you go to the bank. Or when you’re driving home from work. But then you think, no! I’m imagining things. And you drive out to your childhood home, which is now abandoned, and no one knows you go back there sometimes. And you fall asleep on the downstairs sofa while listening to the broken gate creaking in the wind. You vaguely remember you have to clean everything out of the house before demolition next week. You wonder how you’re gonna get rid of all these things. I-I-I-I can’t bring the downstairs sofa or the broken gate to the new landfill facility, you think. But I could take those.. or other physical objects to the old landfill, except it’s been closed because of the opening of the new landfill.
You did a great job listening to the guidelines from the Sanitation Department.

Another thing you can’t bring to the new landfill is the Duran Duran poster that you bought to hide the hole that you punched in your wall, after that summer that you went to the beach. Mice began nesting there almost immediately and reproducing at an alarming rate. Every day after school you put on work gloves and peeled up the bottom of the poster and reached into the hole, and scooped out handfuls of baby mice, and threw them out your bedroom window in a frenzy, like pailing water out of a sinking boat. You spent so much time doing this that your grades dropped and you lost weight. And still, you hear them scratching all night long, chewing, and shredding, and rustling, and reproducing. One day, you lifted the poster and instead of mice there was a black hole, a miniature of the one you saw over the water years before. It slid open and closed, like the aperture of a camera. You haven’t gone upstairs in years.

You cannot bring your mother’s half-finished needlepoint that will never be completed, and so is now finished in its own way. You cannot bring the stain on the carpet from when you and your friends snuck in a mixture of everyone’s parents’ alcohol, collected in a jar, wine and gin and beer and tequila.

You cannot bring your journals, but you can bring the secrets in them, even if they’re written in a code that you can no longer decipher.

You can bring the view from the attic that looks toward the high school track, where you would sit and watch a certain somebody during practice, and tell yourself it wasn’t creepy as long as you don’t get the binoculars.

You cannot bring your long dead childhood dog’s favorite tennis ball that you aren’t yet aware is under the downstairs sofa, where you still sometimes sleep when you imagine that the charcoal-gray car is following you. But where you will no longer sleep after the demolition next week.

You cannot bring your deceased pet. But you can bring the moment when she woke you up in the middle of the night with her last breaths, and you cried into her fur.

You can bring the ghost of your grandmother that you saw many years before she died. You can’t bring the fox with human eyes, the one that they used to tell stories about at camp. The one that you saw running on two legs beside your car one foggy night when you were coming back from a party in college, and the next day you found out your grandmother died that night.

You can bring recurring nightmares to the new landfill, but not fever dreams at this time. Fever dreams must be taken to the recycling center in Pine Cliff. You can bring the decoy replacement dreams that you get when you are abducted by non-humans or government officials that help you repress the memory of the actual abduction, but it is not recommended that you do so. Those dreams serve a valuable purpose.

There has also been some confusion about whether or not we take physical pain, because it is both physical and intangible. Unfortunately, we do not have a way of processing this right now, but we are able to take the fear of pain, which we think you’ll find counts for a lot.

Nothing that you bring here, of course, is truly lost. But it will remain hidden from view… forever.

Please double check to make sure nothing you wish to keep is attached to anything you plan to discard. If you still have any questions about the items we do and do not accept, please call ahead before bringing them in, thank you for your cooperation, signed: the Night Vale Sanitation Department.

Well, listeners. I know I’ll certainly be utilizing the new landfill this spring! You know, I’m finally gonna tackle the underground passage way that connects my basement to someone else’s basement. I don’t know whose basement it is. It would be inappropriate to walk upstairs into their kitchen to find out. There are certain social boundaries that must be observed to maintain order. But I know they have a lot of the same things that I have in my basement. Stockpiled cases of the burning wood smoke flavor of La Croix, all family photos of mine, my own voice heard faintly through the basement door..

Anyway, that other basement is a nice place to go when I need to get away from it all. But a lot of emotional baggage accumulates in that passageway after a while, it really does.

Stay tuned next for a 12-hour binaural meditation track of a rain stick being used to tenderize meat. Happy purging, Night Vale!

And good night.

Today’s proverb: There’s no harm in trying. Really depends on what you’re trying. Either way, give it a go. It’s probably fine.

15/02/2017 13:43:31 ¶ ●

## Episode 102 - Love is a Shambling Thing

Look at it from the raindrop’s point of view.
Welcome to Night Vale.

Yesterday, of course, was Valentine’s Day, our first in four years, after that last Valentine’s Day, which destroyed much of Night Vale and left many innocent victims buried under piles of rubble, and candy hearts. The city government built a large concrete dome over the Hallmarks store in the mini-mall downtown, thus keeping its dangerous sentiment from leaking into the outside world. Four employees of the store were unfortunately sealed inside, but there was just no time to remove them during the seven-month construction of the dome. It would have thrown everything off schedule. However, City Council has a renewed interest in love, since starting their on-again off-again romance with the Station Management here at Night Vale Community Radio. Currently their status is on, although they fight a lot, and their fights have caused considerable structural damage to the Arby’s and displaced a number of town citizens through time. So the Council wants to create a controlled, safe, Valentine’s celebration, in order to impress Station Management. Despite strong protests from the Night Vale citizens who do not believe there is any way to safely handle Valentine’s materials. City Council announced yesterday that Valentine’s was a celebration of love, and deemed that the official slogan of the day was “Love is”.

More on that in a moment, but first, some.. [clears throat] Listeners, I am sorry to have to report what I next have to report. Old Woman Josie, your friend and mine but more my friend than yours, I, be-beyond Carlos she is who I am closest with in this strange and friendly town of ours and she is…
[sad, despondent voice] Well, she is under hospice care at her home. There is no upside to this story, other than on the broadest, most distant view of time. This is not a surprise, but even with a long time to prepare for the worst, we are still in shock. As though we stepped out onto a sunny street and found ourselves falling into a lake, just on the liquid side of frozen and that is maybe the best way of describing it? I feel cold, barely able to act. My words feel slow, my hands tremble. Only Josie seems not upset about her own condition, she lies on her bed surrounded by the beings who describe themselves as angels and the woman, Alondra, who describes herself as Josie’s daughter. Josie smiled and said, “What a joy that I have gotten to live so long. What a relief that I don’t have to live forever.”

Anyone wanting to visit Josie and say their goodbyes, um.. please dig a hole in your backyard or any public garden, whisper your wishes for Josie into it and the angels will hear you. I know it’s illegal to acknowledge to acknowledge the existence of angels but right now I don’t care. Please understand that Josie has limited strength and even more limited time and she may not be able to see you at all, I… [clears throat] Of course I will keep you updated. But the trajectory is certain. Only the timeline isn’t known. I suppose the same is true for every person, but we are always surprised at the literal truth of it every time, over and over.

And now listeners, the classified section.
Lost: moths, all of them. Reward if found. Contact us by dialing numbers into your phone at random. If you were meant to reach us, you will.
Notice: that veiled woman who sits motionless in the shadows of unlit parks at 3 AM gives really great relationship advice. Bring raw meat and never look directly at her.
The schedule of events at the public library is up. It’s just your name, listed as an event once an hour, with the word “cancelled” next to each.
Found: something that you will never notice is gone and that we will never return. You don’t even remember having it, but you did have it, once. Not anymore.
The Night Vale Psychic and Medium Society would like to let you know the answers to all your future questions. These answers, in order: the porch light. Eight. Because we could. A distant star. Green. Also green. We’re sorry, but we have to. If you have any follow-up questions, then we won’t have done our job correctly.
This has been the classifieds.

The City Council made careful preparations for a day of [sultry voice] love. They put up streamers around City Hall, and reserved a table at Tourniquet for a fancy dinner date with Station Management. The rest of us also made preparations for Valentine’s by stocking up on bottled water and canned goods, and discussing with loved ones where we would meet if we needed to evacuate. Several volunteer firefighters kept a brave watch for candy hearts, or teddy bears with anatomically correct glistening hearts stitched onto their bellies. The City Council revised their earlier slogan saying they had misspoken. Their slogan was not “Love is” but “Love is a shambling thing”. They nodded vehemently, whatever head-like protrusion the multi-body entity uses to nod and repeated, “Love is a shambling thing”, in a whisper before dissipating into the air like evaporating liquid.

Apparent leader of five-headed dragons, Hadassah McDaniels, has responded to the fatal shooting of one of her brother’s five heads with an understandable mix of grief, and rage, and fire-breath. She has staged a several week long protest outside of City Hall, in which she peacefully held up signs and peacefully ate, mauled, or burned anyone attempting to enter or exist the building. There has still been no sighting of word of Hiram since the shooting. We reached out to the five-headed dragons to see if they had any updates on that front, but they took our microphone from us and devoured it in a quick, twirling series of bites like it was a cob of corn. I did not get any follow-up to that, since I fled screaming before they could put me through the same treatment, but I will take this response as a sign that they also do not have news about Hiram.
Hadassah has said that she seeks justice. Specifically, the justice she seeks is pain inflicted on Night Vale equal to or greater than the pain inflicted upon her own soul. She said, “You don’t understand the true nature of your splintered world. There are terrible forces surrounding you held together in a fragile truce. That truce will end, and with it, your town.” Then she saw Jeremy Godfrey emerge from City Hall, there to pay a small municipal fine for wearing unfashionable sweaters, and she set his hair on fire.

And now a word from our sponsors. Today’s show has been brought to you by Sears. Sears would like you to know that they offer quality products at low prices. And also that there was a miscommunication and they thought this was a television station. They prepared a TV ad and aren’t sure what to do now. Um, I guess we’ll just describe what you would have seen, had you seen this commercial on TV. This is not the level of quality we want you to think of when you think of Sears, but here goes.

Exterior: a house. Snow drifts down onto yard already piled with snow. A warm glow on the snow, reflected light. We pan up. It is the light from the house’s windows. So cozy, so warm! Why would anyone ever want to leave and go to Sears? What kind of commercial is this? Wait, stick with us. Interior: living room. A woman looks out the window, bites her lip. “Bad weather,” she thinks. “I’m not going outside.” We don’t hear this as narration, the performer expresses this with her face, she’s a great actor. I wish you could have seen her, she doesn’t even talk in this commercial, all visual performance it’s, what a waste. So bad weather, she doesn’t want to go outside. She goes to the computer, loads up Amazon. It’s not Amazon, because we don’t want to advertise another company, but it’s like clearly Amazon, you know? We see her clicking on stuff, stuff she could be buying at Sears, but is instead buying on Amazon.

Flash forward a day. She got next day shipping, I guess. Same house exterior, it’s still snowy, the snow is high, the pavement is icy. A mail truck pulls up. A mail carrier gets out. He has her package. We see her in the window, so happy about her decision to buy from Amazon. He starts up the drive to her, he slips on the ice. Her package goes flying. It says “fragile” in the package, so that’s probably ruined. He falls badly, fractures his leg in three places! We don’t know this just by looking at it, but the filming of the stunt didn’t go like it was supposed to, so I can tell you: fractured in three places. Horror on her face. She does a great job acting this scene, I really wish you could have seen it.

We’re now in a court room. She’s being sued! The jury looks stern. She’s going to love. All of her savings will go to the mail carrier, but he isn’t happy either. He is in incredible daily pain, and what is money going to do to fix that? No one. Is. Happy.
We fade out on the two of them at their separate tables in court, both facing a future that is diminished, that is diminishing. Next time, get in your car and go to Sears.
This has been a message from your sponsor.

Back to our Valentine’s report. How was it? Honestly, uneventful. Casualties were limited to a few neighborhoods, and only two out of three gas mains exploded. Most of the town isn’t completely burning, only a little scorched. As far as Valentine’s goes, it was a huge success. The date between City Council and Station Management also went well, as far as we can tell. Tourniquet’s entire building was enveloped in a thick fog that pulsed a strange blue, and there was the reverberant harmony of a children’s choir. When the fog lifted, every human customer in the restaurant had vanished and were replaced by figures shrouded in white cloth, slowly twirling in place.
City Council and Station Management were.. intertwining their.. torso appendages and.. cooing. Ugh.

Oh, it does seem I got the slogan for yesterday wrong again. It was actually “Love is a shambling thing, grey-faced and gasping.” Ah, that’s pretty good branding. It’s very romantic. Wait, what was that? Oh, I’m being told that that’s still wrong. OK, hold on, let me figure this out. And in the meantime, let’s get to that weather.

[“Listening to TPM” by Brook Pridemore.]

“Love is a shambling thing, gray-faced and gasping. It moves in from the west, the setting sun behind it. Those who see it avert their eyes. Love stumbles and shutters, love grasps but is not grasped. It sees a man, and the man does not look away. Love reaches out a gray hand. The man touches the band just lightly, just on the palm, and the man feels heat inside of him. His heart is on fire. This is not a metaphor. His heart is on fire and so, soon, is his skin, his hair, his teeth become more and more visible as his face shrinks and melts away. Love watches dispassionately. Love does not love what it does, love only does it. Love does not have eyes and neither, now, does the man.

Love is a shambling thing. It climbs through a window into an infant’s bedroom. When one of the mothers comes in to check on her baby son, there is love too in the crib, curled up inside him. Love murmurs, and the baby spits restlessly. The baby does not burn, the baby will eventually burn, but by then he will not be a baby. The woman looks down at the ghastly form of love curled up beside her son and she thinks, “What have I done?” She cries, not because she is happy or sad, but because that is what her body needs to do next. Love rises from the crib and passes her without a glance. Love is a shambling thing. It shambles out of her home.
[very unsettling music] Love, with skin that peels and pops and joints that moan and snap, climbs to the top of a tall building and surveys its surroundings. So many people. It opens its mouth. Its teeth are the only part of its body that look new and healthy. It has so many teeth! It yelps and howls, an inarticulate sermon of lost and loss, and everyone hears it. They hear it as a shudder in their stomach and hitch in their step. Love does not eat or drink, love separates its many teeth and consumes.

Love is a shambling thing, grey-faced and gasping. It moves out to the east, the night drawling closed behind it. Those who see it avert their eyes.”

So that’s the final version of the City Council’s slogan for Valentine’s Day. It’s.. um.. It’s catchy? They also sent over their current draft for a Night Vale Valentine’s Day logo design. It’s not really a logo per se, it’s an actual physical rusty bear trap, hidden in a set position below a pile of loose tissue paper in an undisclosed truck stop restroom. And I like it. Again, great branding. It’s very eye-catching, depending on how you look at it.

We seem to have all made it through this Valentine’s Day, except those of us who didn’t, but any given day there are those of us who did not make it. Every day is a new opportunity for danger. Every day is another day survived. Every survival, another chance.. for love.

From one who loves to all of you out therew ho love,
Good night, Night Vale,
Good night.

Today’s proverb: Live every day like it’s your first.

18/02/2017 3:32:32 ¶ ●

## Hi, still happily following! I just wanted to say that I think the line is "like evaporating liquid" instead of "like a vaporating liquid" in about the 5th paragraph down of episode 102. But Cecil's vowel pronunciation was kind of weird on that part and it did sound like short "a" instead of short "e." You are doing the most secularly holy work, thank you for all you do!

Ah, you must be right! “Evaporating is much more likely - not sure why it didn’t come to mind. Thanks so much!