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I'm getting used to being on the radio. Took me long enough
Friday, 14-Mar-14 06:55:14 UTC from web-
@prettypurpleprincesspublicprincesstimeline This, is a story about you, said the man on the radio, and you were pleased because you always wanted to hear about yourself, /on the radio/
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@prettypurpleprincesspublicprincesstimeline You live in a trailer, out near the Car Lot, next to Old Woman Josie’s house. Occasionally, she’ll wave at you on her way out to get the mail or more snacks for the Angels. Occasionally, you’ll wave back.
You’re not a terrible neighbor, as far as it goes. -
@prettypurpleprincesspublicprincesstimeline At night, you can see the red light blinking on and off on top of the radio tower. A tiny flurry of human activity against the impeccable backdrop of stars and void. You’ll sit out on the steps of your trailer, with your back to the brightness of the Car Lot, watching the radio tower for hours. But only sometimes. Mostly, you do other things.
This story is about you. -
@prettypurpleprincesspublicprincesstimeline You didn’t always live in Night Vale. You lived somewhere else, where there were more trees, more water. You wrote direct mail campaigns for companies, selling their products. "Dear resident," you wrote often. "Finally, some good news in this dreary world! At last, a reason not to kill yourself!" Then you would delete that and write something else, and it would be sent out, and it would not be read by anyone.
You had a friend, and then a girlfriend, and then a fiancee — the same person. She cooked dinner sometimes, but sometimes you cooked.
You often touched. -
@prettypurpleprincesspublicprincesstimeline One day you were walking from the glass box of your office to your old Ford Probe, and a vision came to you. You saw above you a planet, of awesome size, lit by no sun. An invisible titan, all thick black forests and jagged mountains and deep turbulent oceans.
It was so far away.
So desolate. And so impossibly, terrifyingly dark. And that day, you did not go home. You drove instead. You drove a long time, and eventually you ended up in Night Vale, and you stopped driving. -
@prettypurpleprincesspublicprincesstimeline You have been haunted ever since by how easy it was to walk away from your life, and how few the repercussions were. You never heard from your fiancee or your job again. They never looked for you, which doesn’t seem likely, or maybe it’s that in Night Vale, you cannot be found.
The complete freedom.
The lack of consequence.
It terrifies you. -
You have a new job now. Every day except Sunday you drive out into the Sand Wastes, and there you find two trucks. You move wooden crates from one truck to another while a man in a suit silently watches. It is a different man each time. Sometimes the crates tick. Mostly, they do not. When you are done, the man in the suit hands you an amount of cash, also different each time, and you go home.
It is the best job you’ve ever had.
Except, today…it was different.
You moved the crates. The man in the suit, a stranger, watched. But then, as had never happened before, the man in the suit received a phone call. He walked off at some distance to take it. “Yes, sir!” he said, and “No, sir!” Also he made hawk shrieking sounds. It wasn’t terribly interesting.
You moved crates. -
@prettypurpleprincesspublicprincesstimeline But then, an impulse…an awful impulse came over you, and for no other reason than that you are trapped by the freedom to do anything in this life, you took one of the crates, and put it in your trunk.
By the time the man came back from his phone call, you were done with your job. He gave you the money (it was nearly five hundred dollars today, the second highest it had ever been), and you drove home with the crate in your trunk.
When you got home, you took the crate into your trailer and left it in the kitchen. The crate did not make a ticking sound. It made no sound at all. Nothing made a sound except you, breathing in and breathing out.
You cooked dinner (you always cooked dinner), the red light on the tower blinked on and off in your peripheral vision, a message that was there and then wasn’t, and that you could never quite read. -
@prettypurpleprincesspublicprincesstimeline You wondered how long it would take them to miss the crate. You did not wonder who ‘they’ were. Some mysteries aren’t questions to be answered, but just the kind of opaque fact — a thing which exists to be not known.
Which brings us to now. To this story.
This story about you.
You are listening to the radio.
The announcer is talking about you. -
@ceruleanspark I get home from work to see ye olde radio show drama typed all over my page. da hell. (trust me, I'm laughing)
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