[I’m going to do a pronunciation guide for the hebrew and yiddish words, you probably don’t need it but just in case.]

Sorry I'm not home right now, I'm walking into spiderwebs, I’m a spider I can’t call you back. Welcome to Night Vale.

Today is the second night of Hanukkah. It’s sooo cute in our household. We each have our own menorah. Mine is a traditional one that was left to me by my grandparents when they crawled into the tunnel out in the scrublands. The one that calls our names in a soft and gentle voice. The one we will all someday enter. They left me this beautiful brass menorah, and I think of bubbe and zayde [BUB-bee and ZAY-dee] every time I light the candles. I hope their torments in the dark places of the earth are as pleasant as they can be.

Meanwhile, Carlos has built his own menorah out of beakers. It’s really cool, although we do all need to wear welding goggles the entire Hanukkah dinner, or at least until the radioactive green glow goes away. But that only takes five to eight hours.

And Esteban has a cute truck-themed one from a couple years ago when he was obsessed with trucks. He’s kind of outgrown it, but that’s the one he has for now. Ever since he got into studying witchcraft, he has really enjoyed conjuring fire onto the shamash [SHAH-mahsh], and then floating it one by one to each of the other candles. Sometimes he catches a curtain or two on fire, but that’s what an extinguisher is for.

Anyway, given that it is Hanukkah, I thought we all might enjoy me telling the story of Hanukkah. Sure, we all know it, but what is more comforting to a human being than a story they already know?

So:

Hanukkah goes all the way back to the year 1981, when a woman named Ruth Kander moved to a town called Los Angeles. She moved there because she had vague ideas of being in show business, even though her ideas of what that entailed were vaguer still. Only the image of herself smiling in a light so bright it drowned out every disappointing thing she had done up to this point in her unremarkable life.

She got an apartment that’s rent she could barely cover, and a job at a local florist whose owner hired her out of pity. But that was fine, her talents lay elsewhere, she was sure. Again, the image of herself smiling in that bright light. The specifics were unimportant. Only herself, her smile, and the light.

The reason she chose that apartment, although the building could be charitably described as rustic, and the neighbors were simultaneously unfriendly and yet seemed to have enough friends for multiple loud parties a week, and the pool still listed as an amenity in the ad was empty and cracked and clearly had been so for years. The reason she chose that apartment anyway is that it had a view, however partial and distant, of the Hollywood sign. When she sat at the window and saw the word OLLYWO, she knew that the future was limitless and that by proxy she herself was limitless, and that by proxy the world was limitless and always had been.

More on the story of Hanukkah soon.

But first, a word from our sponsors. For that we take it to Deb the Sentient patch of haze.

DEB

Thanks Cecil. Always happy to serve at the altar of capitalism.

Today’s show is brought to you by Dude Wipes, the only wipes that are made out of 100% men. Other wet wipes may offer a comfortable, environmentally friendly way to access a moist towel at any given moment, but only Dude Wipes are made from ethically sourced and slaughtered men. Our men are raised in a cage free, pasture fed environment. They are able to wander anywhere within the 500 square foot enclosure, humanely capped at a population of 1000 men. There they are fed saltines and clif bars that are thrown into a pasture for them to eat. Finally, they are forced into what we lovingly call The Kill Box, where they are quickly and easily dismantled and turned into Dude Wipes.

Dude Wipes. We use every part of the dude.

CECIL

Thanks Deb! Back to the story of Hannukah.

A few years had passed, and Ruth found herself no closer to anything like show business. She tried, occasionally and half-heartedly, but since she had no real idea what it was she would be doing in that business, she never could get herself to move very far in any direction.

She went to a few auditions, but stopped after it became clear that the auditions were either for work as extras on infomercials, or for the parallel show business she wanted nothing to do with. She took one filmmaking class at the local community college, but became so sad seeing the kind of hopeful but talentless people that attended, all of whom still had more drive and aptitude than her, She stopped going after three weeks. Maybe she should write screenplays? She had that thought about once a month, but never did anything with it.

And cruelly, time kept passing anyway, despite the fact that she was not using it to her highest potential.

A visit to a doctor led to a concerning series of blood tests led to an MRI. She lay naked under the thin hospital gown and the grippy yellow socks. “Don’t open your eyes, there’s nothing to see in there,” the technician told her, but she did open her eyes. She didn’t feel claustrophobic. Instead she felt like a malfunctioning machine. She was merely a physical collection of parts to be examined and repaired. The MRI voice told her: take a breath in, breathe out, take a breath in, and hold it. And then there would be a series of hums and thumps that she somehow could feel in her skeleton. Her hair moved as though in a breeze, and the air in her lungs curdled, and became instantly difficult to hold, like someone was slowly but insistently sitting down on her chest.

Afterward her doctor called, told her it was a false alarm. Nothing to worry about. But Ruth could not make the physical parts of herself constitute any kind of whole person from that point on.

She bought a potted plant and put it by the window, blocking the view of the Hollywood sign.

The continuation of the Hanukkah story soon.

The following is a test of our emergency broadcast system. If this were a real emergency, you would not hear me, as I’d be running out the door screaming “save yourselves!” followed by a lot of dead air. Test commencing now.

[three woops, but it’s just Cecil doing it with his mouth]

The town of Night Vale and all surrounding areas are under a Code Indigo level emergency. This is a life or death situation that requires immediate and decisive action. Please be aware that local broadcasters might be influenced by the Code Indigo event to say that this broadcast is a test, but it is NOT a test. Unless it is, because we do have to test the Code Indigo emergency broadcast just like any other.

If this is a Code Indigo emergency, and not a test, which it may or may not be, you must start driving out of town. You must drive out of town and never come back. If it is a test, don’t do that, because then you will lose your house and all your stuff and have to make a new life somewhere else.

[three woops, but it’s Cecil again]

This has been a test of the emergency broadcast system. Or has it been?

Ruth had a daughter. She had been fully grown before Ruth moved to Los Angeles. This isn’t a story of an absentee parent. But it’s not a story of a good parent either.

There was no animosity between them. They talked on the phone once in a while. But also her daughter had not visited, not once in all this time. Ruth instead had flown to her, when she could afford to, which wasn’t often.

Then finally her daughter did fly out, just for a visit she said, but really it was to check in on her mother, who did not seem well. Her mother was well physically, the machinery of her body was working as smoothly as it could at that age. But she did not seem well in a general life sense. It had been a long time since Ruth had talked about or even thought about that image of herself, smiling in a bright light.

Ruth’s daughter wanted to try In & Out, had heard so many amazing things. And the food was good. It was fine. It was totally ok. They sat eating totally ok burgers and Ruth’s daughter took the little paper packets of salt and started laying them on the table. A mindless bit of activity. But Ruth stared at the packets. Because it seemed to her that her daughter was spelling something out, a word in a language that neither of them understood. And if Ruth could only decipher that word, then she would finally be free. But she couldn’t read it. And soon enough her daughter swept the salt packets back into their little container.

“You seem to be doing ok,” her daughter lied, because her flight was that afternoon and she didn’t want to change it.

“Yeah, I am. I totally am,” Ruth lied, because she did not know how to express the truth.

And now, traffic.

Humanity is about division. A world of walls, of fences, of lines in the sand, of neat little dividers, of signs saying “Do not enter”, of signs saying “Private Property”, of concrete medians and sunny little grass strips, of moats and decorative fountains and other lines constructed of water, of artificial beaches and artificial islands, of signs that say “members only” or “employees only”, of languages that are unintelligible to each other but describe the same basic human experience, of people that imagine those around them to be profoundly different from themselves, of people who are working from a set of misunderstandings they aren’t even aware exist.

This is what humans do. They divide. They map out divisions.

Well, today one green Prius crossed one of these divisions. The division in the middle of Route 800. The resulting crash has stopped traffic in both directions, and EMTs are on the scene to shake their heads sadly and mutter “what can be done?”

Divisions can be harmful, but ignoring divisions, especially those in highways, can be even more harmful.

This has been traffic.

Ruth got home from taking her daughter to the airport. She placed her hands, which contained many tiny parts of the mechanism of her body, on the table. She didn’t move for a while. Then she went and got a candle from the closet. She put it in a Shabbat candlestick that she had inherited from her mother and hadn’t used since moving out here. She lit the candle, without a blessing.

“When this candle burns out, so will I,” she thought. It was the easiest thought she had ever had.

Let’s take a look at the weather.

WEATHER

Ruth sat for a long time and watched the candle. Her candle. The one that burned for as long as she would.

And then she decided there was no need to watch. She could go about her day. And when the candle went, it went and then she would go too.

So she read a book, and watered the potted plant that blocked her view of the Hollywood sign, and made herself a simple dinner with whatever was left in the fridge, and did the dishes. She checked in on her candle, but it was still burning. So she went to bed. When she woke up, the candle would be out, and that would be that.

But the candle was still burning when she woke up the next morning. It was a work day. So she went to the florist shop. The owner couldn’t move around that well anymore, and depended on Ruth for most of the physical work these days. They weren’t friends exactly. It was something more specific and deeper than that. They relied on each other the way they relied on gravity and the continued existence of the sun.

Ruth came home from work, and the candle was still burning. So she watched some tv, went for a walk. Said hi to her neighbors who weren’t as unfriendly as they had first seemed when she moved in, and had in fact started inviting her to their parties although she only went to them occasionally.

The next day the candle was still burning, and the day after that. She went to work. She did her chores. She waited. Soon enough it would burn out.

The candle stayed lit for eight days.

After eight days, Ruth sat down and looked again at the candle. It should have gone out by now, but it stubbornly burned on. She nodded. Fine, she thought. I get it. She smiled into a light that was not bright, but she didn’t need the light to be bright. There was nothing she was trying to drown out anymore. She blew out the candle, got her coat, and walked out the door into another day.

There is an old Talmudic saying. It goes like this: The day is short and the work is vast. You are not required to finish the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

This is the story of Hanukkah. Or a story of a Hanukkah anyway.

Good night, Night Vale. Good night.