Welcome to Night Vale - News about books and tours, and "Our Plague Year"

Episode Date: March 17, 2020

Joseph has a few things to chat about with you, and then we present the first episode of our new show, Our Plague Year. Introducing a new kind of current events podcast. An island in a storm of bad headlines. An experiment in public anxiety. Let's get through this year together. Subscribe at http://ourplagueyear.libsyn.com/ or wherever you get your podcasts. Written and produced by Joseph Fink "Don't Look for the Helpers" by Cory Doctorow "Social Distances" by Nisi Shawl  The song "This Too Shall Pass" by Danny Schmidt  All other music by Joseph Fink Logo artwork by Jessica Hayworth A production of Night Vale Presents Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, Joseph here from this new world we all live in now. A couple things before we start with the main part of the show. Today, one, we have a book coming out in a week on March 24th, and it's a rough time to be releasing a book, but maybe it's a good time to be at home reading a book. We're so, so proud of this one. We've been looking forward to having people read it for over a year. It's called The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home,

and it is the entire backstory of that character. It's like the Princess Bride meets the Count of Monte Cristo meets the haunting of Hill House. It takes place all the way from modern-day Night Vale to 18th century Europe and everywhere in between. If that sounds like something you'd like, please buy it. And if you like it, please, please recommend it to friends. We need that now more than ever.

Our book tour got canceled, obviously, but we'll be doing a big launch live stream event, plus possibly some local bookstore-specific events, so keep an eye out for that. Two, all of our live show events in March and April are postponed until after all of this is done. Man, it was heartbreaking to have to do that. It was also, as you might imagine, a pretty big financial blow for us. So if you haven't joined our Patreon, man, we would really, really appreciate that. We want to be able to keep making this show for you.

We hope to add a number of fun stuff to the Patreon. a lot of ideas in coming weeks to entertain us all while we're all stuck at home. So join up, get entertained, and help artists keep making art. Thank you so much to those also who are already members. I know it's a really tough and uncertain time for everyone right now, so we really appreciate you. So along those lines, last week I came up with the idea for a podcast, and now one week later we are releasing it. It's called Our Plague Year, calling it a a new kind of current events podcast, an island in a sea of bad headlines, and an experiment in public anxiety. This is the first episode right here. I don't currently have any way to monetize it, but I just really hope it's useful to people.

So if you like it, please subscribe to its own feed wherever you get podcasts, and please let other people know about it, so that maybe it will help them too. Okay. Thank you so much. I've been waking up at 2 a.m. with panic attacks almost every night this week. Nothing is more lonely than panic in the middle of the night. It feels like you're swimming in a huge, dark sea. It feels like the water underneath you is bottomless. Hello, and welcome to our plague year. I'm Joseph Fink.

It's a scary time right now, for so many reasons, but it doesn't have to be scary alone. This is the show where we live this terrifying year together, and together get to the other side. This show is a little bit of an experiment. I'm not sure how it will work exactly. I just feel like I need it right now, and maybe you do too. The idea is just to observe and live together week by week this year, our plague year. The show will come out at least once a week. I might settle into twice a week, depending on how much work. it ends up being to make and how many people end up listening. I wrote the bulk of this episode five days ago, and it already feels hopelessly out of date.

I do know that it will not just be me on here. I'm inviting a number of writers to chronicle this year with me. I already have a few people saying yes, so there will definitely be a number of voices telling the story of this year together. And I eventually want to hear from all of you. but first let's just see how it goes for now. Recently, I flew from Los Angeles to New York. There were 50 people on the entire plane.

Meg pointed out that most of them were men. I'm not sure why. Maybe men are more likely to think they are invincible. Or maybe it's that men are still more likely to have the kinds of jobs that require business travel. I don't know. This isn't a research podcast. When we arrived at our little town in a...

state, New York. We went grocery shopping first thing because we hadn't been home in a couple months. And I was interested to see what that would look like. Things weren't as cleaned out at the grocery store as they have been in more crowded areas, at least based on social media. Still, it was interesting to see what was gone and what wasn't. Obviously, you know, all the hand sanitizer was gone as it is everywhere. But the cereal aisle was completely untouched, except that all of the Cheerios were sold out. And the frozen aisle was similarly abundant, frozen fruit, frozen vegetables, except almost every frozen pizza was out of stock. What we think of when we think of emergency provisions. My hands are so dry because I wash them, and I wash them. I watch other people

wash their hands, too, at the airport and in restaurants. I judge them if they don't do it as well as I'm doing it. I'm the king of washing my hands. If I wash them well enough, I'll never die. Does anyone know how to stop reading the news? If you do, please let me know. I don't really remember the swine flu thing, I think it was in 2009 at all. I was in my early 20s. I guess it just didn't register with me. I wonder if this is worse than that, or if it just seems that way because social media amplifies every murmur to a shout. Maybe that's better for epidemiology, because everyone is scared and keeping away from each other, but it's not good for me, and that I will read every word about this virus until it sneaks its way into my body.

I write live theater, which means I make a living bringing people together in a room and then amazing them. That's the goal. Theater is about community. It's about being present in a place all together, reminding us that that's a good thing to do. I think that's what all of our civilization is about. So it might not seem like much, this idea of social distancing of isolation, but I think it strikes at the heart of who we are. It's allergy season right now, so I've had a runny nose and sore throat off and on for weeks. This is not doing great for my own sense of safety. I've seen people say, I wish people would stop joking about this, but what are we supposed to

do? We're all so scared. And when we're scared, we joke. Doesn't mean we're not taking it seriously. It means that we're trying to breathe. But I do feel like a lot of people weren't taking this seriously. When they suddenly do, which they will, that will be panic, which is its own kind of danger. It may be more dangerous than this disease.

But it doesn't have to be a panic. We just have to be aware of each other. We have to take care of each other. We are all of us only as protected as the most vulnerable member of our society. You have to fight for them like you'd have to fight for them like you'd fight for yourself. That is the lesson of a plague. I hope we learn it. has this to say. A story he calls, don't look for the helpers. The thing is, I've been here before. I've written any number of apocalypses, so many that I sometimes get branded a

dystopian by critics and online audiences and catalogers. I'm not a dystopian though. Here's the thing. Assuming that things will break down does not make you a dystopian. It makes you a list. Engineers who design systems on the assumption that nothing could possibly go wrong with them are not utopians. They're dangerous idiots and they kill people. Assuming that nothing could go wrong is why they didn't put enough lifeboats on the fucking Titanic. When you read my fiction, you find a lot of stuff breaking down. Terrorists attack San Francisco and blow up the Bay Bridge and Little Brother. In Walk Away, economic and environmental breakdown turned the vast majority people into the unnecessariat, useful only to the extent that they're willing to dig holes,

climb in and pull the dirt down on top of themselves. In Mask of the Red Death, Civil unrest and societal breakdowns triggers starvation, cholera epidemics, mass deaths. And when Sissadmans ruled the earth, the people in hermetically sealed data centers watch civilizational collapse from bioagents and nuclear attacks and debate whether it is their duty to keep the internet running or kill it fast and clean. So I've been here before. I've lived here in my imagination. I wonder what I would do. My grandmother used to tell me stories about being inducted into the Soviet Civil Defense Corps when she was 12 during the siege of Leningrad, hauling ammo, digging trenches, hauling corpses, witnessing cannibalism, while on the verge of starvation for years. Those apocalyptic tales have haunted,

my dreams. People outside of the former Soviet Union don't really know about the siege of Leningrad. They often confuse it with the siege of Stalingrad, by which they mean the Battle of Stalingrad, which was also a big deal, but not like the siege of Leningrad. 1.5 million people died in the siege of Leningrad. It was and remains the largest ever depopulation of any city in human history. In the former Soviet Union, the siege is remembered for the bravery of the people of Leningrad, their solidarity, their mutual aid. Every disaster ends with solidarity and mutual aid, by definition, because that is the only way a disaster can end with people pulling together. If there's one lesson you should take from the Mad Max movies, it's that pulling apart in times

of crisis only deepens the crisis, and the crisis will not end until you start pulling together. It is not dystopian to imagine the crisis. It is dystopian to imagine that in its aftermath, we will all reveal ourselves to have been secret, barely constrained monsters who are only waiting for civilization to hit pause before we started eating each other. In Rebecca Solnuts, a paradise built in hell, the historian uses closely researched primary sources

to show how, in times of crisis, everyday people pull together, while elites look on in horror certain that the pores are coming to get them deploying their guards to preemptively strike against their social inferiors. This is called elite panic. Elite panic has a curious relationship with storytelling. The tales we tell ourselves about what we can expect in a crisis informs our intuition about what we should do come that crisis. Stories can justify elite panic

or they can rebut it. I've been telling stories about humanity rising to the challenge of crisis for decades. Now I'm telling them to myself. I hope you'll keep that story in mind today as plutocrats seek to weaponize narratives to turn our crisis into their self-serving catastrophe. My name is Nisi Shawl.

This thing I'm going to read to you now is called social distances. Here's the summary slash takeaway. Tip big. Smile when you can. Call people on the phone. Be kind. Okay. Okay.

So, I live in Seattle, King County, Washington. At the moment, per the King County Health Department, the number of deaths in the area of contributed to COVID-19 is 26, with the number of confirmed cases standing at 234. But as the many event-canceling emails I receive from local organizations constantly remind me, this is a rapidly evolving situation. That case number will probably not stand still long. It will probably move, probably run.

Upward, no doubt. It could take off at a gallop even in the next few days, depending on test distribution and reliability. I don't look to see the number of confirmed cases around here halt or fall for weeks, maybe even months. I'm 64. I have asthma. Two factors placing me in what we're calling the high-risk group. I've learned how to make my own disinfectant wipes. I've backed out of public appearances. With trepidation, I'm planning my next trip to the grocery store, strategizing where in my car I'm going to stash my disposable gloves, when and how often to hit the hand sanitizer. What to substitute if hoarders have bought all the bleach and bottled water? This morning, as I returned from the cafe across the street with my pastry and tea,

the waitress serving me, by the way, wears gloves and I scrubbed down my mug before drinking from it. As I say, as I was returning, a woman headed toward me stepped off the sidewalk to make sure I passed her with more than six feet leeway. I was reminded of the old south, except of course, if this were the old south, I would be the one stepping off the sidewalk for her. She was white. I'm not. People will tell you this town's unfriendly. They'll refer to the infamous Seattle Freeze, its citizen's supposed lack of emotional warmth. I'm here to tell you, that's not what I have experienced. previously. In the 24 years since I moved here from a small town in the Midwest, I've always felt rocked in the neighborly bosom of the loving kindness to which I'd grown up accustomed. Trucking down unfamiliar streets, I'd say hello to strangers, and they would say hello back. Fellow bus riders would recommend tasty restaurants to me. Occupants of nearby beach blankets offered helpful

opinions on where to take my out-of-town visitors. Is this about to change? Social distancing is the hot new phrase here on the forefront of the battle against COVID-19, along with frequent hand-washing, social distancing is meant to reduce the virus's spread. Tiny airborne drops of spit are apparently the disease's main vector, and keeping apart to prevent getting sneezed on and sprayed with them. That certainly makes sense, but isolation has other effects we should keep in mind. First of all, in prisons, total isolation is used as a form of torture. Reputable research confirms this fact, we humans need contact.

Really, truly, physiologically need it. Another bit of advice offered to those of us in COVID-19 ridden areas. Stop touching your face. One study revealed unconscious face touching, occurring in its sample population, over 20 times per hour. Why? My theory is that when we can't get enough of anyone else touching us, we wind up doing it for ourselves.

Second, social distancing runs counter to many, people's innate response to catastrophes. Besides the more widely referenced fighter flight reaction, there's a tendency in emergencies to tend and befriend. Rebecca Solnett examines it at length in her book, A Paradise Built in Hell,

which looks at the many strong communities arising from natural disasters. I'm one of these tend and befriend sorts myself. But my impulse to reach out and make sure everybody is all right is being partially thwarted by social distancing. Thirdly, now how can I put this delicately? There's just no way. I can't. Social distancing lends itself to bigotry.

It creates thems out of uses. It divides people, and people divided are easily ruled. I'd rather not play into the ruler's hands. Jay Inslee, or as my pal Trump and I like to call him, Governor Snake, has tried to mitigate this third problematic point by decreeing that viruses don't discriminate. Other efforts to soften social distancing's unintended evil consequences include a Facebook group called Corona-proof economy, There's a Seattle branch.

A crowd funder for Seattle artists hurt by gig cancellation, launched by journalist Ijauma Oluo, and the nonprofit organization Humanities Washington's Cabin Fever Questions email series. It's writing prompts, links to archived discussions, and invitations to social media interactions. In fact, social media seems to. to be taking up a lot of the slack that social distancing leaves hanging. Here are my suggestions for some more ways to make the most of being near each other less.

Tip big! If you're using a grocery delivery service like Instacart or Postmates, double your usual tip. The people doing this work deserve to be rewarded for their persistence and bravery in the face of a bona fide. pandemic. And if you can, smile, laugh. Take it for granted that anyone you encounter in person or electronically is experiencing at least as much stress as you are and add a little humor to the situation so it becomes bearable. Also, call people on the phone. Yes, it's more intrusive than a text or email. It also gives your recipient more of your presence, your voice, breathing patterns, background noises. That's a real cornucopia of

non-contact physicality you can give them. And finally, be kind. Extend yourself to your neighbors, friends, kin, anyone in need in ways that don't pose a threat to their well-being or to yours. Pay their bills. Drop staples at their door. Walk their dog, whatever it takes. whatever works. That's all I got for now. Stay deep. We think too big. We think ourself is one whole thing

and we claim that this collection has a name and is a being but deep inside when every cell divides well it sets upon the rule that state self-interest is divine and cancer too lives by this golden rule

that you must do unto the others as the others unto you all for the best because it's all that life except so we kill it like a buffalo with awe and with respect our plague year is a production of nightfield presents it was written and produced by me joseph fink the other essays were written by corey doctor o and nisi shawl the song throughout is this two show passed by danny schmidt get his music at dannyshmit dot com it's incredible all other music by joseph think. The logo artwork is by Jessica Hayworth. See her artwork at

jessica dash hayworth.com please subscribe for more episodes soon. And if you found this show helpful, please tell a friend. It's a really scary year, but it doesn't have to be scary alone. I just never did

believe, so I never prayed myself except Lord.