#the birthday of lee marvin
Deb:Hey squishy humans! Deb at it again, as usual, talking until your mortal forms pass away. Welcome…
Dana:Once again, the sun has risen. Good one, sun. We’re all very impressed by the same trick on the millionth day in a row. I’m Dana Cardinal. Welcome to..
Computer:Computer
loves Night Vale. Night Vale provides home for computer. Welcome…
Deb:Welcome…
Dana:Welcome…
Steve: Heyy everyone! Oh uh, oh man, I’m supposed to prepare some sort of a start for this thing, huh? Dangit, forget every time! Every time! [chuckles] Come on, Steve! You have a responsibility here, Steve! You’re better than this, Steve. Sorry. God, sorry! Oh.
Uh,
Welcome to Night Vale!
Cecil: Listeners, it is a very special day today. That’s right, it’s Carlos and I’s sixth anniversary! Yes, we count that first night at the Arby’s, looking out at those lights, as the start. Why not? Something has to be the start. And that felt like the first moment of it, the rest of our lives.
It’s especially emotional this anniversary, because recently we did not exist for a brief period. Then we both did exist again, but I had forgotten about our entire life together. I have since remembered and it has been especially tender between us. Such things happen in any marriage that has gone on for enough years, and so it served us as a good reminder of who we are in each other’s lives.
But it’s not just a special day for us. Oh no. It’s also, oh wow – the 30th birthday of legend of stage and screen, Mister Lee Marvin. Let’s take a listen to a special message from the birthday man himself.
Lee Marvin: Hello. It is my birthday again. Huh. Well, happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to all of us. It’s all of our birthdays this year. Congratulations, us! But it’s only for so much longer. Uh.. I am tired of floating on time like a lazy river gone stale. It’s time for me to reach out, to cease. To alter. I’m so tired. I wish I could sleep. I mean I can, I can sleep. But also I wish that I could. Both the wish and the ability exist within me.
This will be the last day that I turn 30. I have been climbing a narrow rock chimney, but today I let go and fall into deep, clear waters. Hm. Thanks for all the birthday wishes. It really, really has meant a lot.
Cecil:OK, kind of a bummer of a birthday message, but let’s move on. And now, the financial news.
Intern Maureen: And now the financial news or whatever. Looks like stocks are up, which is great for people who own stocks, who are statistically already wealthy enough that stocks being up or down doesn’t fundamentally affect their lives. And those of us without stocks, well then the health of the stock market has little relationship to..
Faceless Old Woman: Toni I see that you are reading the financial news. Yes, I’m looking at you right now. No, not behind your shoulder. I see you glancing back. No, not out the window either. Toni, look up. Look up, Toni. The great work begin-
Steve:Now see I’m VP of counting at the Last Bank of Night Vale. I can count very high, so I’m uniquely situated to explain these figures to you. So uh, oh OK. See where the graph is going down? That means that the price is, uh, lower. Or-or maybe the stock is? Or it’s all going up oh hold on, huh, I’ve been looking at this sideways. Oh this isn’t graph at all! [chuckles] It’s a picture of Lee Marvin.
Dana:Why do bad things happen to good people? Wrong question. The question is: why do things happen?
Basimah:I have 17 dollars on my bank account and my teenage father is living with me. So things are going great here.
Cecil: ..up 8 per cent, the highest percentage in the last three years. And this has been financial news.
Meanwhile, a last minute birthday party for Mr. Lee Marvin has been arranged at Gino’s Italian Dining Experience and Bar and Grill at 5 PM. Where we will all celebrate the first three decades of Mr. Marvin’s life by taking advantage of some great happy hour deals. Gino’s happy hours are super appetizing. The most popular item is a small bowl filled with polished pebbles, but they are damn cheap, and that is appreciated in these tough times, when all of us are finding ourselves short on our bills. Except the estate of the late Marcus Vanston, which now contains approximately 15 per cent of all money in the United States, but still has no designated beneficiary.
Mr. Marvin himself is not expected to attend his own party, as he is not feeling well, and also says that he has a plan to move himself from this tired wheel of time. Well, feel better Lee, and good luck on that hobby of yours. Sounds complicated and exhausting. I’ll have a Shiraz and a bowl of pebbles in honor of you.
Lee Marvin: Night Vale. We are a town of good intentions. Once there was a god. Her name was Huntokar, and she tried to save one little town. She acted with love. The missiles came and she reached out to shift the timeline, only a tad, only enough to save us. And in that moment, her little town shattered into millions of parallel towns. This place became a prison. A god’s love is a dangerous force.
Once, there was a woman who was a general. She wanted victory for a just cause, so she fought every battle, over and over until time was jumbled up and overlapping and worn thin. She returned home and she died, but the wreckage she made of time remained.
And once there was a man. An actor. Once, but not much longer. Here, time and space have been scratched and scrunched, worn down until they’re translucent. And what if I reached out a hand? And what if I pushed that hand to the thin places?
Happy birthday to me. My last 30th birthday.
Steve: Well folks, there’s the hour and it’s time to, uh, do our usual checks and such. Check in on it. On the uh, you know the, what’s the word?
Faceless Old Woman: I’m standing on your roof, Randolph. Yes, Randolph, that’s my pacing you hear, back and forth on these cheap clay tiles that needed replacing three years ago. There will be rain, Randolph, some day. And then there will be leaks. That’s a certainty.
Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look at…
Dana: That’s that for all that, listeners. I’m getting tired just reporting all this life. Can’t imagine how tired all of you are from living it. So let’s all take a break together and go to the…
Numbers station: 43. 12. 9. 55. 30. 17.
The weather. To the weather.
Cause I am the champion and you’re gonna hear me… roar.
[“Things Still Left To Say” by Mal Blum, https://www.malblum.com]
Lee Marvin: There are many Night Vales. This isn’t news, it’s merely the fact of it. There’s a Night Vale where the streets are rivers and the rain falls constantly from sunless skies. There’s a Night Vale where the mayor is a smiling man, and a Night Vale where the mayor is a brave woman. And of course there is a Night Vale that has no mayor and never will have again. There’s a Night Vale without a day. And there’s a Night Vale without night. There’s a Night Vale where the dogs sing and the birds bark. There’s a Night Vale with no people, only the angel who’s moaning and tapping their fingers. There’s a Night Vale where I was never born. And there’s a Night Vale where I’ll never die. There’s a Faceless Old Woman who secretly lives in your home. She’s in every Night Vale there is.
There’s Night Vale where time runs backwards and a Night Vale where time skips about, and there’s Night Vale where time doesn’t work at all. That’s this Night Vale. Time is weird here. Time is weird everywhere, but it’s especially weird here. There’s a Night Vale where Dana is the voice of her town, and a Night Vale where Deb, the sentient patch of haze is voice of her town. And a Night Vale where you are the voice of your town. An infinitude of voices, of an infinitude of Night Vales.
But here, in this Night Vale, our voice is Cecil. Hah, a voice like distant traffic. A voice like strong coffee at midnight.
Once there was a god with good intentions, and a heart full of love. She shattered us in two, many versions of us. Once there was a general, full of courage and victory. She twisted our time about itself, lost us in a labyrinth of hours and years.
And once there was a man. His dreams were simple. He wanted to be an actor, that’s all. To lie a little to audiences, in a way that they like being lied to. But time got stuck on him like – gum on a shoe. It was always his 30th birthday, from the Big Ban to the tedious heat death of the universe. His 30th birhday forever. Time weighed on him and so he looked out at every Night Vale that has ever been, and every Night Vale that will ever be, all of them swirling and swinging thru intertwining chronologies and he concentrated veery hard. And he reached out one tired ancient 30-year-old hand and stopped them all, just for a moment. He stopped time’s gyrations.
All is frozen. Water hangs in the air below a leaking tap. The trees are sculpted by a gust of wind and haven’t yet swung back to their natural state. The clouds form a frozen pattern, like snowdrifts in the sky. A voice of Night Vale sits in front of a microphone, mouth open but no words coming out. All of the voices in all of the Night Vales.
On the highway out of town, the cars are stopped dead. Their drivers caught glancing at their phones or scratching their ears and thinking about what would finally make them happy, or looking in the mirror and trying to gauge whether the car behind them belongs to the Sheriff’s Secret Police.
Farther out, over the mountains and to the coast, the waves are stopped mid-fall. Foam caught, rising water caught, tumbling.
An old man in Canada trips on a shoe discarded by his grandson, and there he remains, hands out mid-air, too late for anyone to save but not yet colliding with the earth. He will dislocate his knee.
A soldier in China squints at a bird, trying to decide which type of bird it is. Really it’s too distant to tell but the soldier makes a game of this to pass the tedium, and so here they are squinting at a bird that is stopped mid-flight, its wings outstretched, catching wind that is no longer moving. Observe the solder in this moment, a thin slice of a long life.
Out in low orbit, a spindly silver being in a graceful silver craft, is caught in an instant when its appendages that are not really fingers but we’ll call them fingers, even though technically are closed in function to kidneys. When its fingers phase thru the skull of a sleeping human that it has brought abroad, reaching into the human’s memories, seeking out a clear understanding of a planet that the being has been tasked to observe.
That planet and all the other planets cease for a moment in their senseless hurdle thru the vacuum. They are suspended. The way they are in diagrams.
The story we tell ourselves of stasis, and clear spacial relationships is, for a moment, true. An entire universe holds its breath.
Huh. Then I shift my hand a little and the gears of time click back into place and start again to move. Not quite as they were before, they-they are on track now. Their tread a little truer.
The beginning of my end. The start of my death.
I take in air, I let out air, and in the moment where the universe starts again, something happens that has never happened before. Not in all of history.
Cecil: Today is a special day, Night Vale. Lee Marvin, star of stage and screen is, oh wow! - turning 31 today. Happy birthday, Lee!
You know, it feels like our thirties just fly by. Enjoy them while they last.
Lee Marvin celebrated his birthday in a notably somber way. He stepped out onto his lawn, nodding at passers by and various idiot birds. He spit thru his teeth, placed his hands on his hips, watched the sun move for a while. Then he nodded in approval of everything he’d seen and stepped back inside.
Well, we all express happiness in our own ways.
A few minutes ago, I got the most interesting voicemail from my most interesting husband, Carlos. It’s our sixth anniversary today, you know. Anyway, he was so excited, I’ve never heard him talk so fast in his life. Carlos said he opened the clock that was on our mantelpiece at home, the one that was given to him by his mother the day he received his PhD. The one he brought with him to Night Vale, the one that after having come to Night Vale, he opened to find that it was full of moss and fur and human teeth. Yeah, time doesn’t work in Night Vale, he had realized and he mourned the transformation of both the clock and his experience of the days and years of his life, but he still believes in keeping possession in perfect condition, and so today he opened the clock to brush its teeth, only to find it was full of gears and a battery and was ticking away. He measured the movement of its minute hand against the sun, and found that the sun, instead of disappearing at wildly different times, was setting on a normal schedule. He called me up, his voice cracking with excitement, bordering on terror.
“Cecil, Cecil!” he said to me. “Cecil! Time is normal in Night Vale.
Well. It is night, Night Vale. Soon the sun will rise and we know exactly what time that will happen. Our lives have all lurched forward. Is that – good?
Stay tuned next for exactly what was scheduled to run next, at the exact time it was scheduled to do so. And from my mouth to your ears, even after all these years,
Good night,
Night Vale,
Good night.
Today’s proverb: Technically, the first human being and the first human being in space were the same person.
