Please, stop preventing it from happening. I don’t know how you got this power, but let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. Welcome to Night Vale

Well, this is extraordinary. Night Vale, I’m sure you’ve noticed what I’ve noticed. Who could miss an event like this? First snow. Not of the year. Of ever. This is the first snowfall in recorded Night Vale history. Wow. Look at it. It’s coming down in dense flurries. This isn’t some technical snowfall, a slight dusting and “hey, look, I guess it sort of snowed”. No this is a blizzard, a real accumulation.

It’s funny how suddenly and starkly snow can change the landscape. What was the ordinary street outside of our radio station is reframed, recontextualized by the weather. Now it gleams, a blinding white not yet muddied by our world. This is snow at its purest, when it still belongs to the sky, before we tarnish it with our dirty boots and our oily cars.

All the children are running out of school to check out the snow, and none of the school staff are stopping them. The staff too are fascinated and Mr. Lennox, a 5th grade teacher, bounds about the snow, barking and wagging his tail in joy.

The City Council has declared it a Snow Day, which they explained is an old English phrase meaning “a day where it snows”. The City Council then ordered: “IT’S A SNOW DAY. GET BACK TO WORK. RETURN TO YOUR CLASSES. IT’S A SNOW DAY, NO REASON TO SLACK OFF.”

What a beautiful moment, Night Vale. I will of course keep an eye on the weather situation, but why listen to me describe what you could be experiencing yourself. Run out there! Get in the snow! Bring your radio though, because I’d hate to think that none of you were listening.

In other good news, the big clean up of Mission Grove Park has been completed way ahead of schedule. As you know, the Fall Craft Sale…well let’s just say it got out of hand. While the Sheriff’s Secret Police have successfully rounded up the last of the crocheters and suppressed the Macramé Uprising, the site of the event, Mission Grove Park, was left strewn with knitting needles and glitter, blackened by heavy artillery fire, and covered in paper plates and plastic forks. People, please remember to throw away your trash after eating your food. No one else should have to clean up for you. I think that’s definitely the main takeaway from this whole affair.

But fortunately Leann Hart and the Night Vale Daily Journal volunteered to sponsor the clean up of the park, and she was as good as her word. The clean up was accomplished in remarkable time, and I can see no evidence of garbage or debris. It looks like the good old park we all remember, except still with scorch marks. Not much that can be done about the scorch marks. Oh well, hopefully this unexpected snowfall will cover them up. I think the grand reopening of Mission Grove Park will look stunning draped in icy white.

And now, an audio puzzle. Today we have a word search. Your letters are (read slowly and carefully) M C H O H L O Z B G I Q O F W E N V N Q T E E T H. So please circle all the words you find and then swallow the paper. If they catch you, you don’t know nothing. Nothing, you hear me?

This has been an audio puzzle

Snowfall has continued over the general Night Vale area, and it is just a picture out there.

Madeline LaFleur, head of the Night Vale tourism board, is already rushing out a new campaign of mailers and billboards. The campaign slogan is Night Vale: It Snows Here Now I Guess with a cute little picture of a snowman melting in the intense desert heat. Well, if this doesn’t bring in visitors, I don’t know what will. This is the most convincing campaign that Madeline has run since “Night Vale: You Might As Well.”

The City Council, frustrated at its inability to convince people to ignore the snow and get back to work, is instead leaning into it by organizing a special Winter Festival in the newly cleaned Mission Grove Park, to celebrate this momentous day. “This is a day of carefree enjoyment,” intoned the City Council. “We’ve always thought that. We’re glad that everyone agreed with what we thought about this day.”

The Winter Festival will include sled rides, a snowball fight, and cross country skiing lessons from Trish Hidge who took a trip to Big Bear once. She keeps insisting that her trip was in the summer and she’s never even touched skis, but we’re sure she’s just being modest.

Everyone is getting in on the festivities. Some of the restaurants in town, such as Tourniquet, the Moonlite All-Nite, Gino’s Italian Dining Experience and Grill and Bar, Big Rico’s Pizza, and, of course, Applebees, will be setting up booths to sell some of their favorites in an al fresco winter wonderland environment.

Martin McCaffry will be selling caricatures. The only caricature he knows how to do is Jimmy Carter as a peanut farmer, but it’s a real funny one and he’s happy to draw it for anyone who pays him $5.

The entire event is sponsored by Dunkin Donuts, whom I have never heard of. Well, thanks Mr. Donuts, whoever you are!

And now a word from our sponsors.

Today’s show is sponsored by Sharpies brand Indelible Marker Pens.

Nothing is forever, you say.

My body isn’t forever. It will slump back down to earth. Memories of me aren’t forever, for even the most famous human in history will be forgotten in the eons.

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This planet isn’t forever. It will fall into a hungry sun that is expanding in its death throes to take back all the matter it gave us. The galaxy isn’t forever. It will someday collide with another galaxy, a cosmic accident on a scale our human minds cannot even begin to comprehend.

This universe isn’t forever. It will expand out to a heat death, or it will contract back into the microscopic dot that it all burst out from, once upon a time.

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But Sharpies Brand Indelible Marker Pens are forever. How is that possible? Don’t ask stupid questions.

Sharpies Brand Indelible Marker Pens. Always and Ever After.

This has been a word from our sponsors.

And now for our most frequent segment. As I do every broadcast, let’s once again dig into the mail bag. I will do my best to give wise advice for this week’s: Hey there Cecil.

Let’s get to our first letter.

Hey There Cecil: I bought too many knives! I don’t know what a normal number of knives is, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t it. You may be picturing how many knives I have, but I promise: you are thinking too small. It’s way more knives than that. I can’t even confidently sit in my house without worrying about being stuck by a knife I had forgotten I had. I don’t even know why I wanted all these knives. What should I do?

Sincerely,

Knife Haver in Desert Creek.

Hey there Knife Haver: I hear ya. I feel like we’ve all reached a point in our lives where we looked around and we thought: wow, how did all these knives and swords and chainsaws get here? Why did I buy all this stuff, and why did I think it would make my life better? Life is a gathering of clutter. It accumulates, like dust on a shelf, and eventually it dissipates again. Maybe because we die, and it is passed on to the living but mostly just thrown away. Maybe because, like you, we realize we don’t need all that stuff, and we give as much of it away as we can. The first step is the realization. You have too many knives. Good! Now you can start the next step: getting rid of most of the knives. I recommend driving to a remote part of Route 800 and tossing them out your window. Thanks for writing in!

Let’s get to our next letter.

Hey There Cecil,

I’m a little bit at a loss as to what to do next. I graduated high school last year, and I didn’t bother applying to any colleges because I already had a good career going. (The specifics don’t matter, but what I do is run a heavily armed teen militia that protects our town from outsiders.) Except I worry that this isn’t actually the career I want for the long term, and now it feels too late to do anything else. Maybe I should have applied for college, or traveled abroad, or something else. But now I feel lost, and I feel too young to be lost. What should I do?

Sincerely,

Book Lover in Old Town

Hey There Book Lover,

It’s totally ok to feel a little lost at your age. In fact, it would be a little unusual not to. We all are in such a hurry, to get to where we’re going, to figure out who we are, to become who we will become. But all of that takes time, and there are no short cuts. You are waiting, right now, for your real life to begin. Most of us go through a time like that. Just know that almost everyone comes out the other end. The waiting isn’t forever. Don’t rush the rest of your life. You have the whole rest of your life for that.

Finally,

Hey There Cecil,

After a long time away, I’ve returned to Night Vale and I’ve been trying to reestablish my barbering business. People are mostly being pretty nice, but I feel a little insecure that…

I can’t read any more of this. I know who you are. Vile, vile Telly. You will not get advice from me. Not after what you did to my darling Carlos’s hair.

No more letters for today.

We are no longer giving out the mailing address, as we already have questions enough to give advice for the next several decades. So if you’re waiting to know what to do with a situation, just tough it out for a bit. We will get to you eventually! Hopefully within your natural lifespan!

Oh man, it has been so hard sitting here in my little booth watching the falling snow outside. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity, and I can’t just sit here while it happens. I’ll see you all at the Winter Festival. Save me a hot apple cider and a sled ride! While I go out into the first snowfall Night Vale has ever seen, snow that all of us are out there together celebrating, let’s find out what’s going on with the weather.

WEATHER: “Modern Fear“ by Marble Season https://marbleseason.bandcamp.com/

I am back, listeners, from the Winter Festival. Well, what an unexpected turn of events that was. We are all still reeling in shock. It doesn’t seem worthwhile to explain what happened. After all, the entire town was there, and witnessed ourselves the strange and sad events. But still, who am I if I am not telling a story? My body is 90% story, 5% water, and 5% “assorted”.

It all started out so normal. Well, normal for a day where it was snowing in the desert. I rode a sled for the first time in my life, which wasn’t as exciting as I wanted it to be. The snow wasn’t as slick as I had imagined and the sled kept getting stuck, even when Josh Crayton took the shape of a sled dog team so he could pull some of the kids around. The snow was bitter tasting and not nearly as cold as I had hoped. There is a gap, I suppose, between the dream and the reality, and the Winter Festival thrust us all into that disappointing gap.

Still, the whole community was there, and I suppose it could have just been a nice outing if my niece Janice hadn’t noticed the source of the snow.

“Hey,” she said, pointing to the other side of the park, “doesn’t it look like the snow is going upwards over there?”

And it did. Confusingly, the snow seemed to be emanating from somewhere inside of Night Vale, only then drifting back down to earth in this unprecedented weather event. Gingerly, afraid of what kind of unruly god could have the ability to create a snowstorm, we crept as a community across the park, shushing each other and doing our best to walk on our tip-toes. In this way, we arrived at the vacant lot out back of the Ralph’s. Which is where we found Leann Hart, standing next to a gigantic bonfire of trash.

She turned to see us staring. “What?” she said, moving a little as if to hide with her body the towering pyre. It seems that Leanne Hart had cleaned up the trash from Mission Grove Park by merely shoving it to a nearby vacant lot and lighting it aflame. There had been so much trash and the fire had grown so large, that ash had started to drift over the surrounding area, and it was this which we all had mistaken for snow. It was only then that we noticed how much we were coughing, how much our eyes stung from the smoke, how what was falling from the sky did not resemble in any way except shape and color our understanding of snow.

Without speaking, we started to drift away, a little bit embarrassed and a lot bit disappointed. The magic of the day had been burned, as surely as the trash that Leanne stood next to, continuing to shout “What? What are you all staring at?” as we glumly dispersed to our homes and schools and workplaces.

And so here I am. Today was not the first snow in Night Vale. That is a shame. But consider this: That only means our first snow is yet to come. Think how magical it might be.

Stay tuned next for a man trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to explain how oceans formed using only what he vaguely remembers from high school.

And until our true first snow, some time in our glorious future:

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.