Hodor

*******GAME OF THRONES SPOILERS*******

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Last chance-- if you haven't seen season six, episode 5, The Door, you should super stop reading right now.

image source

Listen, no one spoiled the Red Wedding for me and I just want to pay that forward.

Okay, so now that it's just us up-to-date fans (or those that don't care about spoilers), let's talk about Hodor. Let's talk about what happened to Hodor. Let's talk about destiny and plans.

The Door has a thread of destiny running through it. Sansa takes charge of hers in her rejection of Littlefinger; Arya and Jaqen H'ghar have that exchange about how death comes to everyone, not just those who deserve it; the Red Priestess called in by Tyrion has a clear destiny in mind for Danerys, even though the servants of R'hllor have gotten it wrong before. Varys even seems to have had a destiny set out for him long ago, or so the priestess thinks. Mixed in with that are characters making their own way-- Yara lived the Ironborn life, Euron has a plan for taking his life forward, Davos begins to believe the North can rise up again through their efforts, and we see the Children of the Forest create the Night's King, taking the destiny of the world into their own hands.

And then we have Hodor.

When the episode ended, one of my friends was sad, but content. This was his destiny, she said. That was what he was meant to do. I was adamantly opposite that idea. This was Bran's fault. He broke Wylis by messing around in these dumb visions. It was not a sacrifice Wylis ever chose to make. His mind was taken over against his will, pulled from this poor teenage stable boy into a man at the end of his life, whose only choice is to faithfully obey the order being shouted at him. And as much as I love and believe in Hodor, you know that Bran and Meera won't be saved forever from the white walkers. He can only hold the door for so long.

Was it his destiny, though? I think you have to dig into what Bran actually did. Did he time travel? The wikipedia summary of the episode says that he split his consciousness, staying in both the past and present, until he can't handle that anymore and accidentally wargs into Wylis. But this had always happened, so we're clearly dealing with a block time universe and in block time, the past is set. Bran always makes (what I deem to be a mistake but you can call) this choice and the person Wylis could have been is snuffed out. Hodor would have always ended the way he did.

But that does not to me mean destiny. Destiny is being part of a bigger plan; Hodor's life seems the tragic result of a boy messing around with powers he doesn't understand and terrible timing. Yes, it always would have ended this way, but was it destined, designed with a purpose and a plan? I don't think so. George R. R. Martin may have known from the start where Hodor's name came from, but that's not the same as Dany or Jon or anyone being the Lord of Light's chosen one. It may have been a noble sacrifice and a necessary cog in Bran's story, but Hodor's death wasn't destined. It wasn't purposed. It just was.

As with all Game of Thrones talk on the internet these days, tell me your thoughts! We're all just throwing out guesses into the night, which is dark and full of terrors.

The Highlands: Part 2

It may have been the country air, but I have been throwing around folksy expressions about the Highlands all week. It was just too pretty for words. You could trip and your camera would still take a pretty picture. I ain’t never seen that much green in my whole life. (I mean, I have, but it still surprises a body nonetheless.)

On the trip, though, I found myself repeating, “Ugh, nature,” over and over again, to the point that my friends could and did make fun of me for it. I said it in the same way that I say, “Why are there such lovely things in the world?”, which has the vocabulary of awe spoken with the tone reserved for “Someone puked in the Qdoba bathroom again.” I mean to convey exhaustion, resignation, and obligation. “Oh here it is, another beautiful waterfall. Guess I’ll take another gorgeous picture. Get it together, nature.” 

If there seems to be an overabundance of italics in the previous paragraph, it’s because there is. I only ever intended to play these lines for a laugh, which meant hamming up the dialogue. Usually I use these phrases when I’m surprised by how nice nature is, when I’m out on a run or have stepped out of a building into the sunlight. But everything in the Highlands was a surprise. It was so genuinely lovely. I didn’t have words. I couldn’t find the right words. All I had was the cheap, knee-jerk response. 

While my cheap, knee-jerk response is coated in layers of sarcasm and cynicism, I think other people have the same struggle with words in the face of beauty. We call things stunning, we talk about being speechless, but that’s all just a way to put a description on the indescribable. You have to be there, you have to see it, you have to be caught up in the rush of the wind on the top of the mountain or enveloped in the endless roiling smooth of the ocean. 

I know this sounds like Marius in Les Miserables, when he starts off his song saying that there’s a grief that can’t be spoken and then goes on to speak about it for five minutes, but I feel like these words are a rainstorm— with enough time, they’ll weather down the mountain chain of beauty into a thing you can hold and understand, little pebbles that once meant might. I know that’s not true, but I feel like I have to try something. I do not do well with the incomprehensible, though I’m learning. 

Anyway, if you want to experience the same of dumbness in the face of nature that I have, come visit me and we’ll take a trip! In lieu of that, here are some pictures! 

Oh nature. Why you gotta be so nice? 

Glenfinnan viaduct

Glenfinnan

Old Inverlochy Castle

That waterfall on Skye

... flowing out to a loch and then to the ocean.

Fairy glen on Skye

And again 

And again. 

And down the hill.

Kilt Rock, Isle of Skye

Eilean Donan

Ferry to Iona.

And the other side.

On Iona. 

The beach on Iona. 

Iona again.

Seriously, y'all. Iona. 

Near Glencoe

Sunset over the Atlantic on Iona. 

The Highlands: Part 1

I have so many things I could say about last week's trip to the Scottish Highlands. It was such a good trip, good in the sense of the word that bounces forward from the back of your throat and uses your entire mouth on the way out from your lungs into the world, the kind of good that God called creation at the beginning, the kind of good that settles your soul down and says, "This is what you're meant to be." It's peaceful and vibrant at the same time, this kind of good. I've missed it.

I could talk about the people, but I think it's easier to say that I haven't laughed that hard or smiled so much or enjoyed myself so easily in a while. I smiled at a baby every day and played with toddlers and ate a proper dinner and did the dishes afterwards while we talked about anything. We told stories in the car and built up a small pile of inside jokes and sang along to music with the windows down. I've missed so much of that too.

I could tell you about going to see the Harry Potter train or about staying with the family of a friend of our's on a croft farm or riding along on the single-track roads or the adorable coffee shop in Fort William we spent some hours in or the experience that was Skye or Iona. I might yet tell you about all those things still. Those might be stories best told in person with gestures and laughter and the occasional misremembered or repeated detail because that's rather how I want to carry most of this experience. I want to hold it in my heart as the good memory it is, rather than letting pen and paper or zeroes and ones remember it for me, and I want to feel the happiness as it bubbles out of my voice when I talk about it. Fingers on keys only dance the one song when you're telling a story. Out loud, you get to sway and jump and lean into the sounds again and again.

I don't want to be long here because there's another idea that's needling in my back of my mind. I'll talk about it on Friday, I think. But hey, we took a boatload of fun pictures this trip and I'd rather tell you about them than dig too deep right now. So for those of you who haven't stalked them all on facebook or were wondering where we were at when we saw that highland cow, this post is for you!

We were staying in Fort William and using that as a base for all our travels. About twenty minutes down the road is the Glenfinnan viaduct, over which the Jacobite Steam Train runs. You might recognize it as one of the locations that the Hogwarts Express travels through in the Harry Potter films.

 It's like being at Universal, BUT REAL.

We were staying on a croft farm just outside of Fort William and the big mountain near Fort William is Ben Nevis. This is not Ben Nevis in the background, but they are other mountains in the Grampian Mountain range.

The distillery in Fort William (which I think is called Ben Nevis Distillery) has some shetland ponies and highland cows in a pen just outside the parking lot. We stopped by to say hi. (There's a fake highland cow in a storefront on Princes Street that Melanie and I had taken a picture with and so we were trying to recreate that. The cow was more or less obliging.)

Heather took us to the ruins of Old Inverlochy Castle in Fort William and we decided to take a climb.

It was rainy and mystical.

AND SO HIGH. 

The day we drove up to Skye, we were getting ready for our day about the same time as the family we were staying with and their two year old decided that she wanted her hair done in two little adorable hair buns. I did the same as a joke but then found that it was super comfortable, so I left it up. While we were waiting on one of the ferries to Skye, Melanie and Viola joined me in my hair adventures. It lasted like ten minutes.

And this is the waterfall I made Heather stop the van so I could go take pictures of it. I'm fairly certain it's actually on the Isle of Skye but I don't know it's name, so let me tell you instead that Skye is the most northerly major island in the Inner Hebrides, which is pronounced Heh-bruh-dees and not He-brides as you may have guessed.

THE HIGHLANDER CASTLE YOU GUYS. I HAVE IT IN MY HAND. (It's Eilean Donan castle.)

We're on one of the ferries to Iona in this picture but do I remember which one or know what we're looking at? Nope. But I figured no one would say no to some sun and water. The weather was so nice, y'all. I got a sunburn. It was magical.

This is from the shore on Iona (which is, like, three miles big, so it's basically all shore) but it's here because (1) it looks like a picture you'd take for a calendar and I'm super proud of it and (2) THOSE ARE THE ACTUAL COLORS. That moss or algae was actually that green and that seaweed was actually that red. In this world of filters and digital image manipulation, I feel the need to share something that was genuinely surprisingly lovely with everyone. 

On Iona. Not pictured: ALL THE SHEEP. SO. MANY. SHEEP.

We found a boat called the TARDIS. It was the same size on the inside as out, but still.

We caught the sun setting over the Atlantic Ocean on Iona. It's not quite down yet (it didn't set until 9:30 or some such nonsense), but this was our vantage point from the highest point on the island before we went down to the shore to watch the end of it.

Even our drive back from Fort William was beautiful. Ugh, nature, why you gotta be like that and why you gotta be so far from me?

Follow-up

It's not a metaphor and there's not always meaning hidden and that's a lesson that I sing to myself over and over again while the scenarios play out in my mind as to what this or that meant or could mean or signified.

Sarah Kay performs "Useless Bay"

So it doesn't really matter what my grades were, in terms of who I am as a person. I get to be me either way and I am functional either way and there is a determined practicality to the denial of metaphor, the denial of meaning. You can take a shout into the void and make it just compression dissipating in the atmosphere, the existential dread neatly packaged into an equation or two and if those sound waves happened to fall on listening ears, it wouldn't mean anything more than proximity, not unless I made it, took it to be something significant.

(Well, actually, the grades really do matter, especially if I'm looking to be an academic, and there is a real sense in which they numerically reflect my performance and are representative of the effort and ability I can display, so being slightly sub-excellent in a situation that requires excellence is a real and significant status. There's actually not much of a metaphor when it comes the practical implications of the numbers assigned to my work.)

What I'm saying, I guess, is that life is complex and sometimes it's easier if you don't assign meaning to every little thing. It's wonderful to be able to stand on the edge of a sunset and feel the tension in the world waiting to rest, and it's powerful to be able to lay in the whisperquiet of night listening to the rustle-thump of your heart and lungs and grasp the beauty that is a living body, but shit, y'all, I also pick my nose and pop my zits and I can't pretend that isn't a part of the "beauty of living" too. Everything can fit on a spectrum from crass joviality to pensive sobriety if you try hard enough.

I embedded the video above because it's so rare that a random youtube suggestion brings a perfectly distilled counterpoint to your spirit. The poem might be driven by pain but there are other things here too. There's a weariness with the need to search for a better idea of what's going on, a weariness that I feel all to frequently. Let a storm just be a storm. Goodness knows we get enough of them here. They're a fact of life.

Just life.

My Ghost (Or, An Exercise in Skepticism)

I was recently on a walk in Greyfriars kirkyard, taking in the end of a sunny Scottish afternoon before a concert in the church that evening. It was so nice, I decided to take some pictures. I do love me some graveyard tourism.

First quarter Moon above the church

I'm in love with the blossoms on this tree. 

By now, I'm sure you've all noticed the little green dot in those middle pictures. I actually didn't see it until I had already put a picture up on Instagram, but as soon as I saw it, I went back to look at it. It's nothing on my lens- I included the pictures that I took immediately before and after this set here just so you could see that. For reference, here's a similar angle taken shortly after but in a slightly different spot with the sun (and castle) in the background, but without the green dot:

Now, I'm a good scientist and so I'm going to go in for natural explanations first. It's probably some optical effect. Secondarily, it may be some errant electromagnetic field messing with my camera. There's the outside change that it's ball lightning, but from the wikipedia page, that seems less likely to me-- either my friend who was walking with me or I would have noticed that on a sunny afternoon. I'm not ruling it out, especially if my only other option is that it's a ghost.

But let's also be sensible here. The facts are these: I was in a graveyard, it was Friday the 13th, and Greyfriars has a reputation for hauntings. Plus, if it's an optical effect, it's not a consistent one. It's enough to make a body wonder.

At the same time, I'm also self-aware enough to know that I'm susceptible to believing in ghosts. I'm pretty certain that the house I grew up in was haunted and I've been around the planetarium at night enough times to be dubious of the idea that that creepy sensation crawling up my back is just old exposed wiring. Plus, I eat up gothic fantasy and the macabre like it's my job. I love Supernatural and everything Stephen King's ever written and I'm addicted to the Lore podcast. Ghost stories are my jam and I am unapologetic on that front. I love to dream about something being there.

But dreams have been the typical limit of my ghost stories (other than the aforementioned growing-up-in-a-haunted house thing). I've seen Ghost Hunters. I know how frequently claims of the supernatural are faked. My pragmatism tells me to focus on the here and now, on the atoms that make up matter. Goodness knows there's enough there to be scared about without introducing spooks.

All that pragmatism went out the window when I saw the little green spot on my photos, though. I felt like I had seen a celebrity. Actually, no, I was much more excited than I've ever been seeing a celebrity. I've kept my cool around the Pope and royalty and Mark Ruffalo, but show me a little unexplained, classically supernatural blip on my camera, and I tell basically everyone. I sent the pictures to my friends, I wrote a (much less analytical) blog post about it, I even considered going back and making a video there, just to see if I could catch anything again. I was so excited for my little ghost.

And I don't mind that about myself, not really. I don't mind a little belief in an existence after this one. I think eternity sounds exhausting and that Jesus will have a lot of working selling me on the idea of living forever in heaven. I mean, I trust the man, but I have my earthly doubts in the heavenly realms. But a couple centuries haunting the living? I could be about that. As long as I wasn't tethered to wherever I died, I'd go ride rollercoasters for free all the live long day and come back in the evenings to hang out with the other deceased. There's a sitcom in there, I'm sure.

I think it's normal to want to put occurrences we can't immediately explain in the realm of the supernatural. No one's good enough of a skeptic to not get a little tingly when walking through a cold spot. It adds a little whimsy to our lives, and that's fun. Though I remain on the side of natural explanations, I think it's worth a wonder when the world around us surprises us. Maybe some ghost stories aren't as absurd after all.

Pictures, Podcasts, and Penseés: Part Ten

Welcome back to another installment of Pictures, Podcasts, and Penseés, the blog posts I've written in order to not have to think about writing blog posts. Each one contains a picture taken by me, a link to an episode of a podcast I love, and a quote from Blaise Pascal's Penseés. Enjoy!

Picture

This is the river Arno in Florence, taken in 2011. To read about the adventures I had in Florence, hop on over to Churches and Something.

Podcast

Find it on iTunes, listen to it on SoundCloud by clicking here, or listen by clicking play on the video below.

I listened to this episode on a plane back from Chicago and cried all by my lonesome. Even if you're confused by The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretely Lives In Your Home or put off by Michele Nguyen, listen until Steve Carlsberg finishes his bit (voiced by the inimitable Hal Lublin). It's worth it.

Penseé

[124]- We view things not only from different sides, but with different eyes; we have no wish to find them alike.

Science, Religion, and Film: Steel Magnolias

This is not the post I had planned to write for today, but I was watching Steel Magnolias last night and thinking about it in the context of the conversation around genetic engineering and in vitro fertilization and cloning. Movies that touch on our uneasiness where manipulating nature is concerned abound-- Jurassic Park is always my go-to. The cloning of the dinosaurs and the manipulation of their DNA is frivolous, superfluous. "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could that they didn't stop to think if they should." It's Frankenstein again, it's the concern that creating life is the bridge that we should not cross because we can't do it right.

But dinosaurs and monsters aren't the current debate. They're the distant future concern but they're not the current debate. The current debate has a concern for people, real people trying to conceive or thinking about the consequences of any given conception. As a speaker said in a talk I went to last night, speaking about having a child, "Everyone has the right to try." That's different from the right to conceive, or the right to bear a child to term, or the right to remain a parent.

There's a hornet's nest there that I don't want to poke today, but its existence is exactly why I think Steel Magnolias is important. This is a story about a community whose lives are permanently affected by a pregnancy that's not medically recommended. It is real and down to earth and shows us the wants and desires that go into the choice to become a parent. It shows us the heart behind the debate, makes us ask ourselves what we would do in that circumstance. "I would rather have thirty minutes of wonderful than a lifetime of nothing special."

Especially in light of mother's day this past Sunday, we can have a whole conversation about what it means to be a parent. I suspect that everyone would agree that you can be a parent without having your own biological children, that there is a real and current need for people to step into that role for children whose biological parents have left the picture. In a sense, the debate around in vitro fertilization is doubly frustrating, a discussion the morals of creating children while ignoring the children that are. But looking ahead while leaving past consequences behind is something humanity always does, something we are always doing, and so it is a discussion that must be had, especially as the technology we have makes us ask how far we can go.

Steel Magnolias is a human story and it does not do to divorce humanity from science. As we think about scientific discovery and medical technology, it's important to keep the broader human story in mind, to acknowledge the joys and pains that can be created or addressed by what we do. This movie is a crystallization of one set of joy and pain, a side set of feelings forever in my mind whenever a double-helix is unwound in front of me or a pipette punctures a cell.

May

I’m seeing all the graduation pictures pop up across my facebook, the friends back home that went to law school or pharm school or PT school finishing their degrees and posting cap and gowns that fit differently and yet somehow the same as they did some years ago. It’s nice to see. Time and again, I’m so proud of the people we’ve become, the places we’ve gone and the things we’ve done. 

But it doesn’t feel like May to me. I know that’s what the calendar says, but I can’t believe it. Captain America: Civil War came out and then it was Star Wars Day (which has a surprising number of anniversaries associated with it among my Facebook friends) and then it was Cinco de Mayo and somehow we’ve barreled on a week past all that. It’ll soon enough be June which will roll blinking into July and after that I’ll stand on the edge of August preparing myself to belong somewhere new. 

That’s just timekeeping, though. I’m brutally aware of how time appears to run on faster the older you are, how we all exclaim “I can’t believe it’s [insert name of month here] already!” for almost every month on the calendar, November and February excluded. I know all those feelings. I know how this happens. I’m used to how horology changes with age and still, it doesn’t feel like May to me.

I think it’s the weather. Outside, the days have long since passed the length that indicates June in my mind, with the sun getting up earlier than I care to think about and staying up later than I can process. When I see the sun out, I assume that I’ll be greeted with a wall of humid heat when I walk outside. That’s what May feels like, like the whole world has been turned into a shower. It’s a month of untamable frizz and capricious curls, prepping you for the marathon of warmth that won’t let up ’til October. You leave your jackets at home or in the office, for the times when someone has the air conditioning turned up too high. Even the evenings only call for a cardigan and that’s if there’s a breeze to disturb water-laden air. 

But Scotland does not treat the seasons the same as North Carolina. At best, we’ve been in a perpetual chilly March, with the trees thinking about blooming and the temperature flirting with comfortable. It was downright pleasant in the sun the other day and I had a small moment of panic, wondering if this was all the heat I was going to get until I moved back to the States. I have been able to reduce my jacket layering down to just one, though, so I count up my small mercies and try to adjust. The weather doesn’t seem to be bothered by my protestations, no matter how many times I assure it that I am a delicate southern flower and I will wilt. 

It’d be not great sacrifice to stay here forever, though. I know I’d complain every year as May and June rolled around that the weather here just doesn’t know what summer is and I’d moan every year as November and December approach that the sun’s quitting too early, but these are tiny problems on the grand scale of the difficulties of life. They might control my mood more than I care to admit, but it’s fine. It’s tolerable. It’s a livable sacrifice. 

I guess it just floors me every time I’m reminded of how much where I’m from feeds into how I see the world. May feels a certain way to me because all I’ve ever known is a North Carolina May. That’s how it’s supposed to be. When May does not meet my expectations, I’m thrown off balance more than I thought I’d be. Every time I think I’ve gotten Scotland figured out, I’m reminded that it is a fundamentally different place from what I’m used to. How exciting. And frightening. And life-giving. 

Pictures, Podcasts, and Penseés IX

Welcome back to another installment of Pictures, Podcasts, and Penseés, the blog posts I've written in order to not have to think about writing blog posts. Each one contains a picture taken by me, a link to an episode of a podcast I love, and a quote from Blaise Pascal's Penseés. Enjoy!

Picture

This is the airplane wing from my post-Christmas flight from North Carolina back to the UK. I do believe that this is London from the sky, with just a bit of dawn showing up on the edge.

Podcast

Thrilling Adventure Hour #23: Down in Moonshine Holler- "The Lottery"

Find it on iTunes or listen to it on SoundCloud by clicking here.

I have a lot of thoughts about Moonshine Holler, but the finale to it (much, much later in life) is one of my favorite endings to a series. This episode is based off the Shirley Jackson short story and is just so good. Don't tell anyone, but Moonshine Holler is my second favorite TAH segment.

Penseé

[118]- Chief talent, that which rules the rest.

Peace in the Journey

As maybe a counterpoint to Wednesday, here's my latest Flight of the Vlogyries video. Our idea for this set was to show off a place that's peaceful and there are piles of them around here, but there's a real sense in my life where being on the road and traveling is where I find profound peace. Peace in the journey.

Traveling feels a little bit like running away and that doesn't sit well with me but I suppose it's like anything in life. We're all still trying to figure out the best way to live and there's a way of life on the road. I feel nostalgia for highways, for windows down and hours on the road ahead of me. Grass is always greener, I suppose.

Journey vs. Use

I never used to be intimidated by the future. I mean, there is a way these things are done. You go school, you go to college, you get a job. Ba-da-bing, ba-da-boom. Along the way, you make friends for a lifetime/find the love of your life/discover your passion, whichever. I know how these things work. I’ve seen movies. 

And we laugh at the naiveté of that last sentence but we continue to live our lives like they’re stories. What is making a five year plan but plotting out the next few chapters? What is living in the moment but describing the scenery? In the end, we all get carried along with the plot of our life no matter who we think the author is. Some people are just more self-aware of the writing than others. 

Yes, I’ve been watching a lot of Community, but I think the point holds beyond the story metaphor. We talk about being on a journey or walking a path. There’s direction implied. There’s destination. There’s purpose. In a way, there’s control— we chose this path and it is our feet that carry us along it. There’s responsibility too, a real sense in which we need to choose the right path. Or choose the path that’s right for us. That part’s gotten a little hazy in recent times. 

The path metaphor is what drives my intimidation about the future. If you have to pick a path, you can be wrong and what if I’ve picked the wrong path? What if I’ve wasted years of my life? What if I’ve missed out on the person I could have been, the person who is happier than me in several very specific ways? What if I’ve missed out on the life I could have had?

I can’t think like that anymore. It’s not helpful to me. And I know that anybody can what-if until the cows come home but I obsess over potential futures and potential futures that have passed. It’s a constant itch I have to scratch or a pebble in my shoe or a tick box I can never check because there’s no way of knowing the future and there’s no way of knowing what could have been. The journey of my life will always end with me sitting on the dock of a bay, wasting time.

The two most impactful prayers in my life have been the Prayer of St. Francis and the Covenant Prayer in the Wesleyan tradition. They’re both beautiful sets of words with so many thoughts that you can pull out of them, but what’s important here is the language of use in the poems. “Lord, make me an instrument,” “Let me be employed for thee or set aside for thee,” the idea in the words is that we are tools that can be shaped and formed, instruments used for a purpose. I don’t want to mechanize humanity or the world around us, I don’t want to make us cogs in a machine, but I do find the language of use freeing.

The best thing I can do with my time is to make myself into the best tool possible, to train myself and my heart to hear the needs of others and respond, to get better at responding, and to be willing to be used in every situation I’m pulled into. I don’t need to think about where I’m meant to be. I can think instead of which place, which choice, which opportunity is going to help me be the best version of myself I can be. I don’t necessarily care where the future version of me lands, as long as she can do a good thing when she gets there. 

The hardest thing in the world is to live in it.

Here’s to doing our best to work in it too. 

Pictures, Podcasts, and Penseés: Episode 8

Welcome back to another installment of Pictures, Podcasts, and Penseés, the blog posts I've written in order to not have to think about writing blog posts. Each one contains a picture taken by me, a link to an episode of a podcast I love, and a quote from Blaise Pascal's Penseés. Enjoy!

Picture

This was an art installation I saw at Christ Church in Oxford. I'm ashamed that I didn't record the name of the piece or the artist, but what you're looking at are flowers sitting in a field of machine gun shells. It was beautifully powerful.

Podcast

Welcome to Night Vale: Parade Day

Find it on iTunes, listen to it on SoundCloud by clicking here, or click play on the video below.

This is an episode that does dig into the serialized plot that Night Vale had in its second year, but it is so powerful. The setup, if you haven't listened and don't mind *****SPOILERS***** is that StrexCorps, a corporation that has taken over nearby Desert Bluffs, has moved into Night Vale and the citizens are looking for a way to rebel, a rebellion that the narrator, Cecil, is in full support of. The post-weather speech is one of the most moving things I've ever listened to.

Penseé

[81] It is natural for the mind to believe, and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.