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which items are accepted at the new landfill facility that opened this fall in the Barista District, to replace the old outdated landfill facility, also located in the Barista District.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.