Mostly void, partially quotes

We understand the lights. We understand the lights above the Arby’s. We understand so much. But the sky behind those lights – mostly void, partially stars? That sky reminds us we don’t understand even more. Goodnight, Night Vale. Goodnight.

Each day the sun rises and sets. The moon pulls the tides. Our hearts beat. Our loved ones love us back. And we share our inhales and exhales with the great organism that is our tiny planet.

Look at the stars, twinkling silently. They are so far away that none of us will ever get to even the closest one. They are dead-eyed sigils of our own failures against distance and mortality. And behind them, just the void. That nothingness that is everything, that everything that is nothing. Even the blinking light of an airplane streaking across it does not seem to assuage the tiniest bit of its blackness – like throwing a single stray ember into the depths of a vast arctic ocean

Listeners, listeners out there, listeners out in the vacant night clinging to my voice as a simulacrum of companionship, remember: fear is consciousness plus life. Regret is an attempt to avoid what has already happened. Toast is bread, held under direct heat until crisp. The present tense of regret is indecision. The future tense of fear is either comedy or tragedy. And the past tense of toast is toasted.

There is a thin semantic line separating weird and beautiful, and that line is covered in jellyfish.

Time is like wax, dripping from a candle flame. In the moment, it is molten and falling, with the capability to transform into any shape. Then the moment passes, and the wax hits the table top and solidifies into the shape it will always be. It becomes the past – a solid single record of what happened, still holding in its wild curves and contours the potential of every shape it could have held. It is impossible not to feel a little sad, looking at that bit of wax, that bit of the past. It is impossible not to think of all the wild forms that wax now will never take. It can be overwhelming, this splattered, inert wax recording every turn not taken.   “What’s the point?” you ask. “Why bother?” you say. “Oh, Cecil,” you cry. “Oh, Cecil.” But then you remember – I remember – that we are, even now, in another bit of molten wax. We are in a moment that is still falling, still volatile – and we will never be anywhere else. We will always be in that most dangerous, most exciting, most possible time of all: the now. Where we never can know what shape the next moment will take. Stay tuned next for…well, let’s just find out together, shall we?

But here is the truth of nostalgia. We don’t feel it for who we were, but who we weren’t. We feel it for all the possibilities that were open to us, but that we didn’t take.

“Eggs aren’t real,” she said. “Nuh-uh! Show me an egg! That’s not an egg! What’s an egg? Who let you in here?”

I’m sitting at my desk, feet planted on old, thinning carpet, but in my mind I am anywhere but. I am above, in the sky above, looking down at our little Night Vale. I see the lights, in grids and curves, and the places where there are no lights, because they are off…or missing…or invisible. I see roads with cars and the cars have people in them. And the people are traveling through the dark in the comfort and light of the cars, and I see all of this from above. I see where the town gives way gradually to the desert; the last few lights from the last few homesteads, like stray sparks from a campfire, tossed out into the absolute black of the Scrublands and the Sand Wastes. I see the orbit of citizen around citizen. All these ordinary Night Valians, about their ordinary lives, in this singular, extraordinary place we call home. Moving higher into the cold, thin air of the upper atmosphere, I see below me the criss-crossed lines of contrails and chemtrails, the signature of air machines that have long since moved on; the footprint of our civilization upon the night sky. And looking up I see only the stars, and the void, all a little closer than they were before. All still so un-reachably distant.

Your existence is not impossible, but it’s also not very likely.

It always seemed that the only way to live without regrets was just to never regret anything you did. And that seems to be the only hope for the future, anyway. Regrets just bear us down. Regrets just bear us down.

Biologically speaking, we are all people, made up of smaller people.

Sleep heavily and know that I am here with you now. The past is gone, and cannot harm you anymore. And while the future is fast coming for you, it always flinches first, and settles in as the gentle present. This now, this us, we can cope with that. We can do this together, you and I. Drowsily, but comfortably.

Regret nothing, until it is too late. Then regret everything.

We lead frantic lives. Filled with needs and responsibilities, but completely devoid of any actual purpose. I say let’s try to enjoy the simple things. Life should be like a basket of chicken wings: salty, full of fat and vinegar, and surrounded by celery you’ll never actually eat, even when you’re greedily sopping up the last viscous streaks of buffalo sauce from the wax paper with your spit-stained index finger. Yes, that is as life should be, Night Vale.