Welcome to Night Vale - 199 - Guidelines for Retrieval

Episode Date: December 1, 2021

The Sanitation Department will now allow citizens to retrieve something they once disposed of but now wish maybe they hadn’t been so hasty. Weather: “A Lonely Impulse of Delight” by Twin Beds https://twinbeds.bandcamp.com/ Transcript available at http://welcometonightvale.com/transcripts 2022 EUROPE / UK TOUR ANNOUNCED! “The Haunting of Night Vale” Tickets on sale December 3! http://welcometonightvale.com/live New novel from Jeffrey Cranor & Janina Matthewson: YOU FEEL IT JUST BELOW THE RIBS https://www.withinthewires.com/ Hot Night Vale merch! https://topatoco.com/wtnv Patreon is how we exist! If you can, please help us keep making this show: http://patreon.com/welcometonightvale/ Music: Disparition http://disparition.bandcamp.com Logo: Rob Wilson http://robwilsonwork.com Written by Brie Williams, with Joseph Fink & Jeffrey Cranor. https://twitter.com/briezillionaire Narrated by Cecil Baldwin. http://welcometonightvale.com Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram. Check out our books, live shows, store, membership program, and official recap show. Produced by Night Vale Presents. http://nightvalepresents.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howdy y'all. It is Jeffrey Craneer. I'm not sure which episode of Welcome to Nightville you're listening to, but I am speaking to you from April of 2026, and I'm here to tell you we're going to be in Europe. If you want to see Nightville live and you're going to be in Europe, come check us out at the end of May. We're going to be in Edinburgh on May the 27th. We will be in Manchester on the 28th, London on the 29th, and Amsterdam on May the 30th. Just go to Welcome to Nightville.com slash live to see the show dates and to get your tickets. This is. our newest Nightville live show Murder Night in Blood Forest. It is so much fun. Please come check it out. Also, coming up this month here in April, it is the return of Alice Isn't Dead, brand new episodes of our other crazy hit podcast. This is written by Joseph Fink, produced and with music by disparition and starring Jacique and Nicole. So make sure you are still subscribed to Alice Isn't Dead and go get those on April the 13th as new episodes come out. Finally, speaking of other shows, do you want to hear us talk about other things? We have three other really great chat shows. First of all, there's Good Morning Nightvale for all of your Nightvale needs. You can hear

Hal, Meg, and Symphony talk about every single episode in order of Welcome to Nightvale. Also, we have Random Horror Number Nine. That is me and Nightville star Cecil Baldwin talking about horror movies one at a time in a random order. And then Joseph and Meg do best, worst, which is a really fun podcast where they look at hit TV shows and they review the best rated on IMDB, the worst rated on IMDB, and if you're a Patreon member, they will review the middlest rated on IMDB. So check out all of those at Nightvillepresents.com or just wherever you get your podcast. And hey, thanks. It's that time of year again. The days are getting shorter, minute by minute, hour by hour, decade by millennia. The darkness grows

even closer, and pumpkin spice lattes are back. Welcome to Nightvale. We are a long, long way from mandatory annual spring cleaning day. The winter is upon us, and it's time to stockpile. Do not clean, do not throw anything away. Don't even think about getting rid of those ill-fitting pants, or your stack of junk mail, or that box of stale flavor ruse. This season is shaping up to be an especially harsh one.

We're seeing snowfall for the first time in our little community, like a lot of snow. These are not the false snows that we've experienced in the past. This snow is heavy and cold and ceaseless. It blocks the doorways and freezes the pipes. It makes the air hard to breathe. So keep in mind, those baggy pants could provide an added layer of warmth. That junk mail could be used to feed a fire. Those hard-tax-style flavor ruse might sustain you when you run out of food.

Keep everything. Our survival depends upon it. In response to the extraordinary conditions, I have new guidelines from the Sanitation Department about an opportunity for citizens to retrieve certain items from the landfill facility. As you know, the landfill facility does not and has never accepted physical objects. The landfill facility only accepts non-physical waste such as memories, ideas, relationships, behavior, thoughts, and regrets. All items interred at the landfill are guaranteed to be safely locked away forever, or they were until now. The Sanitation Department's Holiday Horder Special will allow citizens the chance to retrieve something they once disposed of, but now wish maybe they've been.

shouldn't have been so hasty. Each person may only select one item and other very specific conditions apply. We will get to those shortly. First, the news. There isn't much news right now since no one is leaving their house and everything is closed due to the storms. But in its place, I'm pleased to announce a new feature on our program, the night veil tree of the month. The current tree of the the month is the Creeosote bush. Fifteen thousand years ago, giant camels roamed the American West. They were called camelops. When humans arrived in the area, they began hunting the camelops.

The humans would make weapons out of their bones, and so the creatures would be killed by the sharpened bones of their own children or parents or friends. They soon went extinct because this was so insulting. But before they all died, they were a piece of. society who enjoyed lumbering walks through the desert and eating tough, fibrous shrubs. One such shrub is called the creosote bush. You know it well. It thrives here. It strangles any nearby species of plant and prevents other roots from forming anywhere near it. Nothing really eats it anymore because frankly, it's disgusting. Nothing at all like a tasty flavor rue,

even one that has bricked from days of dehydration on your kitchen counter. Occasionally, a jackrabbit, if it's very hungry, will eat the bitter, smelly leaves of the creosote bush. Is this because the jack rabbit has lower standards? Or is this because the jack rabbit has the ability to transcend? Shout out to our new intern, Carol Holmes, for putting together that segment. Carol wanted me to share that they are aware that a bush, is not a tree, but all the trees around here are, quote, really boring. Not sure why she pitched

this segment in the first place, but I suspect she didn't think it would actually get approved. Be careful what you mumble at the morning staff meetings, Carol. Now back to our special offer from the sanitation department. Let me read directly from the organization's press release, just as I was trained to do in journalism school. We saw you that day. You came here alone as everyone does. You stood at the edge of the shrieking chasm, careful to stay behind the yellow safety line. You didn't bring merely one item, but a lot of items. Things you had accumulated for a long time that were now so heavy they were approaching the weight limit of acceptable refuse. As a side note, we can technically accept any amount of heaviness at the landfill, but for your

own good you should never let your garbage exceed an 8 on our 1 to 10 scale. If you are unsure of the weight, we have paper evaluation forms available, which allow you to circle the cartoon animal that best illustrates the size of your load. It ranges from small rat to large rat. We also have a scale which translates weight to heat, and you can select from a simmering pot to the face of the sun. We also have a blank piece of paper and crayons. You must fill the entire page for an accurate measurement. Orangish green means you are at capacity.

As a reminder, please do not recycle your paper evaluation forms at the landfill as they are made of physical matter and will be rejected. That day you were at orangish green, the face of the sun and a large rat. You did a deep clean. You spent a lot of time collecting every scrap of waste from every hidden corner and crawl space and locked drawer you've ever owned. I'm going to walk away from that landfill a new person, you said to yourself with determination. I've kept this junk around for long enough. It's time for a fresh start. That was what you thought, anyway.

But you made some mistakes that day. In your eagerness to be rid of it all, you accidentally threw way something that was very important to you, and now you want it back. More from the sanitation department on exactly how to do that after a message from our sponsor. Today's show is brought to you by Flavoroo's. After being discontinued for decades, you can once again enjoy the popular after-school snack made from synthetic kangaroo meat. Take a trip down under with Flavoroos. peel off the plastic wrapper and transport yourself to the wild bush of the outback. You're in a Jeep.

The road is deeply rutted and you're going too fast. Sweat rolls down your neck as you jounce up and down in your seat. Slow down! The constant jouncing causes a throbbing ache at the base of your skull. But you don't want to slow down. Something tells you you must go quickly. Movement rustles the tall grass. Your fevered eyes catch a glimpse of,

Good God, what is that? The road ends. You are surrounded by grass, like a whispering yellow ocean. You have entered its territory. Each single serving package of flavoroos contains 10 synthetic meat discs, one cubic inch of frosting, and a pouch of rainbow sprinkles. This has also been traffic. And now back to the updated guidelines.

from the sanitation department. Quote, You come here almost every day now, even though the roads are closed and your coat is too thin for the weather. You don't even have a hat or mittens. You must be freezing. You stand behind the yellow safety line

peering over the edge just as you did that first day. You don't know exactly what you're looking for. All you know is that something is missing. After that first big trip to the landfill, you felt great. You were living inside of each moment, weightless. There was so much joy, almost aggressive joy. Even things that you used to think were mundane became sources of pleasure. Driving to the store was an opportunity to sing with the radio.

Doing the laundry was a sensory feast of color and texture. It was actually kind of annoying to some of the people around you, but they didn't say anything. Mostly, they were happy for you. You had no desire to ever come back to this place and you felt no regrets about all the things you'd left here. Not at first. Not for a long, long while.

It started with snow. When the first snow came, the power went out. Your neighbors gathered candles and cooked on camp stoves, but you did nothing. You sat in the dark, shivering. When you mustered any energy, you used it to weep and curse. Before you came to the landfill, you were the one taking food to the neighbors or calling the public utilities department to make sure things were getting fixed.

You used to take care of so many things and people that it became overwhelming because once you started doing it, they expected it. They grew dependent on you. To stop would be an act of cruelty, you felt, and you weren't a cruel person. You were a nice person. Instead, you resented people. Instead, you were frustrated with yourself. You need to create some boundaries, an Instagram therapy meme told you,

but that only seemed like more responsibility on top of everything else. Then, thankfully, the landfill opened up, so you simply added it to the pile, those feelings of frustration and responsibility and guilt. But now you wonder, as you watch your breath steam into the air and hear your stomach grumbling, did I lose the ability to take care of myself when I stopped taking care of other people? That could be it. But then again, there are so many things it could be. You got rid of so many things.

Maybe it was the estrangement from a relative, or the shame from flunking eighth-grade math, or the words you left unspoken to a lover, the one at the hostel in Madrid, who had asked tentatively about buying a ticket on with you to Barcelona, but you left the next morning on your own? Maybe it was that deer you hit with your car on the highway, or the look on its face when you got out and approached it,

both of you covered in blood and embarrassed. When you started down into the ditch, shaking as it looked up at you and hissed, This shall not be forgotten. And then it melted away before your eyes into a pile of bones, as if it had been dead for years. After you got rid of all that garbage, the positive things in your life became ecstatic, and the neutral things became positive. But now you're realizing that the negative things, even the smallest annoyances,

did not downshift to neutral, as you'd expected but upshifted, to devastating. It was like you were starting over, and each new pain was fresh and harsh and unexpected. You have no defenses left, no resilience. And there it is. That's the problem, isn't it? There isn't any one single thing you throughout that day,

but the sheer quantity of things. You kept nothing to offer you protection or to guide you from experience, you got rid of all the monsters in the closet, but you also threw away the bravery you found when you opened the door and look them in the eye. We at the sanitation department have seen this happen before. We're working on new guidelines for the amount of waste

that any one person can drop off at a time. We're between communication directors, though, so it will be a while before that guideline is released. Our interim director isn't really up to the job, to be honest. This isn't their field at all. They went to school for television broadcasting, not for writing municipal press releases like this one. What is a press release supposed to look like? Is this a press release because we say it is a press release?

If one were to just release something to the press, would that be a press release? What about a freeing of pet cockatiel? I mean, if you say, hey, bird, go to the press, is that exotic avian now a press release? We have no idea what we're doing because our interim communications director got a meaningless broadcasting degree. They wanted to produce feel-good human interest segments on a local news channel somewhere. Not in a huge metropolis, but not a super small town either, a nice mid-sized city, they thought. somewhere like Tulsa or Knoxville or Santa Rosa.

It seemed like such an attainable dream. So how did they end up writing sanitation guidelines press releases in this god-forsaken town? How did they even get to this town in the first place? And more importantly, how do they get out? The point is, you got rid of too much, too fast. And now you want to get it all back. Resort it, be a little more methodical, and make some calculated decisions. But unfortunately, it doesn't work like that.

As we have stated, you may only retrieve one item. So the only thing I can do now, you think, as you start to panic, is figure out the single biggest thing I left that day. The scariest memory, the heaviest burden, the worst experience. the biggest struggle. I have to dig it back out and take it home with me forever, you think. I need it because the snow is still falling and I have to build a fire and feed myself, and the snow will soon be the least of my problems. Certainly, worse things are coming. Worse things always are. We at the sanitation department took the liberty of adding

forever to your thought there because that's another guideline of our limited time special. You may only choose one item and you can never bring it back here. Like, never, ever. Did you also hear us say that this is a limited time offer? The hours are ticking away. Back to the guidelines in a moment, listeners. First, as the snow drifts down and down and down. down. The weather. Here now is the remainder of the sanitation department's press release.

A press release day is a good day because I don't actually have to research or prepare anything. Happy holidays to me! And so, you've made your decision. You've come once again to the shrieking chasm, one toe edging over the yellow safety line. The item you've chosen to retrieve is large. It's one of the biggest things you brought that day. This item alone is the size of a medium rat and the heat of a noonday desert. You don't really want it back, but you aren't sure what else to do. Don't hesitate, you tell yourself, just take it, take it quickly, and leave. But still, you do hesitate. You hesitate, and you hesitate. You are standing there still, and the snow is falling still.

We can't make any guarantees, but would it help to tell you that items often become lighter the longer they're left here? It's not a particular service that we offer, just an observation we've made. Many people find that once they're separated from their non-material waste for a while, it has somehow become more manageable in the meantime. Even that thing you saw behind the abandoned warehouse and never told any of the, one about, though you really should have. Even that sudden loss, the one that felt like you were being sucked out of the window of an airplane right in the middle of eating or snack, and watching

a Tiffany Hattish comedy. Even that period of time in your life that you already buried once, long before you ever buried it here. Of course, you don't have to take anything back at all. This is merely a one-time courtesy from the sanitation department. It's your decision and we don't want to rush you. We are here for you. We support you. Please take all the time you need. You have until midnight tonight.

And thus ends the new guidelines for retrieval. Oh, that's such a nice offer from the sanitation department. A little long-winded maybe, but I don't want to be too critical. I know their public communications department has had a lot of turnover lately. Anyway, I definitely will be taking them up on that offer this week. There's this super vivid recurring nightmare I used to have that would make a great NFT. Stay tuned next for the audio-only presentation of the 1925 Silent Movie, Battleship Potemkin.

Be sure to listen for the six-minute visual montage sequence that made this film an enduring classic. Happy hoarding, Nightvale. Good night. Welcome to Nightvale as a production of Nightvale Presents. This episode was written by Bree Williams with Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Craneer and produced by Dysperition. The voice of Nightvale is Cecil Baldwin.

Original music by Dysperition. All of it can be found at Dysm. Spirition.Bancamp.com. This episode's weather was A Lonely Impulse of Delight by Twin Beds. Find out more at twin beds.beds.bantam.com. Comments, questions, email us at info at welcome to nightvale.com. Or follow us on Twitter at Nightvale Radio.

Or scream at a tree. What is a tree ever done for you? Check out Welcome to Nightveal.com for info about our upcoming 2022 live tour. We are once again bringing our weird little town to your little town. Today's proverb, sick beat dude. Absolutely diseased beat, bro. That beat is a plague that will devour the earth. None shall remain.

None. Are you squeamish about horror movies but kind of want to know what happens? Or are you a horror lover who likes thoughtful conversation about your favorite genre? Join me, Jeffrey Kramer, and my friend from Welcome to Nightville, Cecil Ball. for our weekly podcast, Random Number Generator Horror Podcast Number Nine, where we watch and discuss horror movies in a random order. Find, here's the short version, Random Horror Nine, wherever you get your podcasts.

Boo.