The Summer of Night Vale Presents, Part 3

Did you know that Nightfall is not just a podcast, it's also books?

That's right.

It's like movies for your ears, but in written word form.

We have four script collections that are fully illustrated with behind-the-scenes intros for every single episode.

And then we have three novels.

The first Welcome to Nightfall novel, in which two women have their lives turned upside down by a mysterious man in a tan jacket.

We reveal the origin of that, the man man in the tan jacket in that one.

Then the New York Times best-selling thriller, It Devours, in which we really try to get to the bottom of a certain smiling god.

Finally, my favorite, the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home.

Part pirate adventure, part haunted house, all faceless old woman.

Find the three novels and four script books wherever you get books.

Okay,

enjoy this episode of a podcast.

Trip Planner by Expedia.

You were made to outdo your holiday,

your hammocking,

and your pooling.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

Welcome back to the Summer of Night Vale Presents, a celebration and sampling of some of the shows across our network.

I'm sick, so apologies for my garbage voice right now.

This week, we will be listening to special episodes of Alice Isn't Dead, my horror thriller fiction show, and Sleep With Me, the podcast that puts you to sleep, were in the middle of the third and final season of Alice Isn't Dead, and if you haven't listened to it yet, it would only take a few hours to get totally caught up in time for the finale.

Alice Isn't Dead is about a truck driver played by Jessica Nicole, who searches across America for the wife she had long assumed was dead.

In the course of her search, she encounters not-quite-human serial murderers, towns literally lost in time, and a conspiracy that goes way beyond one missing woman.

It features hours of original music and sound design by Night Vale's Disparition.

What started as a strange little detour from my Night Vale writing has turned into its own beautiful thing, and I'm so proud of the work that Joseka Disperition and I have done on this show.

To introduce you to the show, we're going to play you the recording from our one-off live show this past spring in Los Angeles.

This live show tells a completely standalone story, and you don't need to know anything about the podcast to understand what's going on here.

Let's listen in.

Oh,

I'm sorry.

I um

I didn't expect

that anybody would be listening.

Okay.

When you tell a story, you should expect an audience, but sometimes I don't think about that.

I just tell the story the same way I breathe, just

move life in and out of my body.

I suppose you can listen if you want.

My name is Keisha.

I'm a truck driver.

It's weird, isn't it, the way that we say our jobs as though they were an identity rather than a thing we do for money?

I mean, do you think that outside of capitalism we'd confuse our self-image with what pays the bills?

Sorry, I I got away from myself.

Story, not polemic.

Right.

I became a truck driver because,

well, that that's a long one.

I thought my wife, Alice, was dead.

But she isn't dead.

She's out there somewhere on the highways and back roads.

And I'm trying to find her.

Just driving my truck around and around looking for her.

That's who I am, really.

I am the one that looks for Alice.

And Alice is the one who isn't dead, but isn't here.

I was in Los Angeles.

All downtowns are the same downtown.

They're landscapes built for the facilitation of money and business without thought to the human experience.

We are tiny to these monuments, and that we are allowed to pass among them is a privilege, not a right.

Still, each downtown bears some mark of its city.

The LA downtown, despite surface similarities, could not be mistaken for New York or Chicago.

It's too eclectic.

It's too strange in its architecture.

LA is much more than movies, but movies infuse everything because movies are the only history the city will acknowledge.

The history of the indigenous people, the history of the Latino people, these are set aside.

The city looked at all the people that had already come and thought, ah, a blank slate.

And so they did not draw from the Gabriellino or the Schumash or even the Spanish and their missions.

They drew from the movies.

From the foundational idea that LA could and should be anywhere in the world.

So the style of LA is every style.

Each house in each neighborhood built in wildly different ways.

Art deco and Spanish stucco and mid-century modern.

In Brand Park out in Glendale, there's this enormous house-turned public library that is less actual Middle Eastern and more movie Middle Eastern, built by the wealthy white man whose garden that park once was.

There's nowhere in LA that feels stylistically of one piece, and it is that incoherence that provides the coherence of the city.

You see, I've come to town on your word, Alice.

Only it wasn't your word direct, of course, just

whispers through a network of safe houses and gatekeepers, those living on the fringe of society who can be trusted with the kinds of messages we send back and forth.

But who knows how the messages mutate mouth to mouth?

But still,

even through this mutilation of intent, I can hear your voice

like a heartbeat through skin and bone.

It's Tanya in Omaha, a friend of the cause, who reaches out to me on my radio to finally lay your words to rest.

There's a meeting in Los Angeles, you've heard.

You don't know the exact nature and purpose of this meeting.

No one seems to, but the word is that it's a meeting of those at the heart of it.

The ones that are making the real choices, that shape every decision that we think we freely make.

And so I've come to town to find that meeting.

I will find this meeting and then.

Shit, I don't know.

And then I will decide what to do next.

I'm faced with a mystery that's so much bigger than myself that it sits like an uneven weight in my chest.

I feel off balance, so I take comfort in smaller mysteries, ones that don't matter at all.

In Pico, Robertson, a five-minute walk from six different synagogues and a celebrity chef kosher Mexican restaurant called Mexi Kosher,

is this strange synagogue with no windows.

The architecture is unmistakable.

Modern LA Jewish has a certain look and this place has it, right down to the arches designed to look like the two tablets of the commandments.

Except this synagogue is several stories tall and with no visible entrance.

What does it mean to blend in?

What does it mean to disguise?

What does it mean to stick out?

These are intrinsically Jewish questions, a people that has, throughout over a thousand years of oppression, variously done all three.

In this way too, the building is very Jewish.

Of course, it is not a synagogue.

It is, in fact, 40 oil wells, hidden inside a soundproofed structure designed to look like a synagogue.

And it is not the only one.

Just five minutes down the road is an office building with no doors and no windows.

That one is 50 wells.

The machinery of our system system is not hidden below us.

It is disguised among us.

Rocks that are actually utility boxes, trees that are cell towers.

That vacant house that we walk by day after day, the one with the opaque windows, actually a maintenance entrance for the Metro.

Which buildings are real and which ones are disguises?

I mean, it doesn't matter, I suppose.

But that's what makes me enjoy considering it.

Sylvia's here too.

She's really come a long way from the teenage runaway I first discovered on the side of a highway.

Did you tell her about the secret meeting, Alice?

She is both more vulnerable and far braver than either of us.

Did you send her to this place?

We reunited on one of the vacant cul-de-sacs near LAX, where neighborhoods that had once been in the airport's buffer zone were now demolished.

Hey, yeah, Sylvia said, as though we were meeting at the Continental Breakfast at a hotel, not on a dark, empty street after months of not seeing each other.

Hey, yourself, I said.

Why did you come?

She shrugged, performed nonchalance.

Same reason as you, I guess.

Well, then, I guess neither of us knew.

Because I had no idea why I was there.

I didn't even know who was meeting in this town.

Let's start with that.

Okay, what organization, what secret brotherhood, what ancient cabble that influences world events is now sitting around the table in some sterile backroom of this sunny, thirsty city?

I could have asked Sylvia what she knew about it,

but I didn't.

I felt like I would be following a script you gave to me, Alice, and I am not interested in your dictating my actions.

So instead, I asked her,

How you been?

And she took a long, slow breath that was more answer than words could ever be.

I've been good, she said.

You know, trying my best, finding places to sleep, finding a friendly face on the other side of a meal.

She shrugged.

I guess it's the same struggle for everyone.

But those of us who live on the road,

everything is amplified, you know?

I do know.

God damn it, I know.

I wasn't even sure where in the region this meeting might be held.

So I drove out east to the desert where the mountains looked like set backdrops, unreal and perfect, taking up half the sky.

Palm Springs.

The town killed by cheap plane tickets.

Why drive two hours from the city for the weekend when it's possible to weekend in Honolulu or Costa Rica instead?

Then, having died, Palm Springs hung on just long enough for everything dated about it to become vintage cool.

Now it's back.

A mid-century modern paradise of steel beams and rock balls and that style of beautiful but featureless wooden security fence that only exists in Southern California.

Old motels, not updated since the heyday of the 50s, now were converted to hip resorts with farm to table food and upscale tiki bars.

The city is an Instagram feed,

which is both snark and compliment because it is a genuinely beautiful place.

I wandered the town, feeling that there was something worth finding there, but unsure where it would be hidden.

I visited Elvis' honeymoon hideaway.

A garish airplane of a house with giant wings of a roof looming at the end of a cul-de-sac, providing kitsch to the dwindling population of Elvis enthusiasts.

That house was put on sale for $9 million a few years back and is now reduced to an easy force, so make those owners an offer, and you too could own a house that is listed as a historical site.

A place where Elvis had sex a few times.

It probably doesn't have a dishwasher, though, so.

Just south of Cathedral City, I saw a sign that looked familiar.

It says,

huge neon pink elephant, mouth wide and mid, laugh, splashing herself.

A pink elephant car wash.

The sign has a twin sister in Seattle.

That one is famous.

It was weird running into her in the desert too.

It was like driving through the suburbs and suddenly finding out that 150 years ago they also built an Eiffel Tower in Pomona.

I stopped the car and I just gawked up at her.

It made me so happy.

And then,

looking down from the sign,

the horror came to me.

I saw someone walking towards me with a shuffle that I recognized.

Like their legs had no muscle or bone, but were heavy sacks of meat attached to their body.

One dead leg thrust forward after another, and as the man came close, he looked up, and I went from dread suspicion to horrible certainty.

He's one of those creatures that I call thistlemen.

Sagging human faces hung limply off skulls that are the wrong shape.

Yellow teeth, yellow eyes.

They are serial murderers haunting the back roads of our highway systems, and one of them was here.

He made eye contact with me.

He laughed.

The sound like hanging knives clattering together.

And then he was gone.

The neon elephant's face no longer seemed friendly.

I mean, it too seemed to be laughing.

Sylvia and I, we split up for the day.

We just watched the traffic of people looking for suspicious crowds, folks that don't fit in with the tourists and the beautiful people working as baristas just for now.

Of course, we don't know what those suspicious crowds would even look like.

Gray men in gray suits going grayly about the tedious business of running the world,

or like the thistlemen, monsters of hideous aspect.

I reached out to my friend Lynn, who works as a dispatcher at my trucking company.

She and I became friends soon after I started.

She doesn't take shit, I don't give shit.

We get along that way.

Any unusual movements in Los Angeles, I said.

Strange shipments, unusual routings, anything?

You know I can't tell you that, she said.

What if I said please?

I said.

She snorted into the phone.

In that case, sure, she said.

I always like you when you're polite.

Let me see what I can find.

Sylvie and I saw nothing of note that day.

We ate together at a Korean barbecue place built into the dome of what had once been a restaurant shaped like a hat.

This is nice, she said towards the end of the dinner.

It was.

It really was.

You know,

a city is defined by its people, but it's haunted by its ruins.

There are no cities without vacant lots, the skeletons of buildings, ample evidence of disaster and failure.

Our eyes slide past them because they tell a different story about our city than the one we want to hear.

A story in which all of this could slip away in a moment.

Even though we know this fact is true, even more for Los Angeles than most cities.

This city will someday be shaken to the ground, or burned, or covered over with mud, or drowned by the rising sea, or strangled by drought.

The question is, as it is for each of us in our personal lives,

not if it will die, but how.

I like to go and look at these broken places where the refuse of recent history shows.

It allows me to

look at a region differently.

Maybe see what I was missing.

And if a secret meeting was going to be hidden here, where but in the cracks?

So, I peer in.

I search.

Above the Pacific Coast Highway and the hills of Malibu that are so beautiful when they aren't falling or burning is what remains of a house.

The house was a mansion built in the 50s and burned in the 80s when its location finally caught up to it.

There's now a popular hike that goes right into the ruin, so any walker can go see this place where people lived as recently as 30 years ago.

A ruin shouldn't be so new.

A Roman home destroyed by a volcano, well, okay, you know.

A medieval castle?

Sure.

Even an old stone settler's hut 100 years old.

Alright, okay, that makes sense.

But a house that once held a television and a shower?

It feels wrong to walk on the foundation, stepping over the bases of walls and around the chimney.

It was a home not so long ago, and now it is transformed.

Transformation is uncomfortable.

and easily mistaken for an ending.

In Griffith Park, I met with Sylvia in the old zoo.

All the animal enclosures are still there, and you can sit in them and look at where once caged animals lived, and now wild animals are free to come and go.

Sylvia and I sat in the artificial caves.

I tried to imagine what the purpose of this secret meeting was.

Sure, generally, the word was out that it was a meeting of those in control in order to further control us, but specifics were, as they often are, lacking.

Sylvia asked me,

Do you feel like this story's too convenient?

And I had no way to respond but nodding.

But we still have to look for it, right?

She said.

And I nodded again.

As the sun moved behind the hills, it got very cold.

She said,

Yeah.

And I said,

Yeah.

And neither one of us meant it.

Gentrification comes for us all.

Let's leave aside for a moment the many issues of endangered communities and rocketing prices and consider just two cases of what people will look past to get access to LA property.

December 6th, 1959, in the hills just below Griffith Park, a doctor lived with his wife in a mansion with an incredible view.

The Christmas tree was up for the season, wrapped gifts underneath.

At 4.30 in the morning, the doctor got out of bed, retrieved a ball-peen hammer, and murdered his wife with it.

Then he attacked his daughter, though she survived.

And then he took a handful of pills and was dead by the time police arrived.

That house stood empty ever since.

Still filled with the family's things, the furniture, the tree with wrapped gifts underneath.

A prime house in a prime LA area, but who would live in a place where such horror had happened?

For 60 years, no one.

Well, the house sold for 2.2 million last year.

A view of the city, just above Los Vis.

Well, at this point, who wouldn't take some hauntings and a terrible bloody past for that?

Meanwhile, the Cecil Hotel in Hollywood, site of an inordinate number of murders and suicides, where the Night Stalker lived in the 80s while causing terror across the region, where just a few years back a body floated in the water tank for days before being discovered, is now the boutique Stay on Main.

A rebranding for this rebranded city.

Even our murders are getting gentrified.

Maybe it's me.

I don't know.

Maybe, maybe I just don't like change.

Change is often wonderful.

But we should definitely think hard about what we are changing into

and what that change might mean.

We should just spend a little time thinking about that.

Still searching for this meeting, I went up the coast, over the grade, and down toward Oxnard.

Not as cool as Ventura or as rich as Camarillo.

Oxnard gets by.

As I waited to hear from Lynn, I walked the beach on Silver Strand, just watching the surfers, many even now in the winter.

Nothing will keep them out of those frigid Alaskan currents.

I headed south to Channel Island Island Harbor.

It was absolutely peaceful on its shore.

The ocean is chattering and restless.

The harbor sleeps.

It does not stir except to send grumbling waves in the wake of the few boats in and out.

During my walk, I saw a rowboat, old practically falling apart.

Something about the occupants of the rowboat made me look closer.

Stooped figures in awkward postures that looked painful.

One of them turned to face me, though the boat was 60 feet offshore, and even at that distance I could see.

Two thistlemen floating in a rowboat in the sound.

One of them shouted at me in a gentle, high-pitched voice.

There was something that looked a lot like a human arm poking out over the rim of the rowboat.

I returned to my truck.

Not everything is my problem.

Worship is a feeling so all-encompassing that it can be easy to misunderstand from the outside.

Take the worship of Santa Muerte, a Mexican folk saint of death, likely a legacy of pre-Columbian devotion, dressed in the clothes of the colonizing religion.

The church has spent a long time trying to suppress her worship, but of course, the church has never been good at actually suppressing much, and devotion to Santa Muerte has only spread in recent times.

Like many figures of death, she represents healing and well-being.

Religion often lies in embracing contradiction.

Those on the outside, they see this as a weakness, but those on the inside recognize it as strength.

The Templo Santa Muerte in Los Angeles is just down on Melrose Avenue, sharing a building, as everything in LA does now, with a weed store.

It is a one-room shrine established by a husband and wife, full of life-sized skeletons bearing scythes.

It would be easy as an outsider to default to one's own associations with skeletons and come to one's own emotional conclusions, but it is healthier to embrace the contradiction of these symbols of death that, after all, physically hold us up for as long as we live.

To deny Santa Muerte is to deny our own bodies.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum, the Bob Baker Marionette Theater carries a different kind of worship.

Devotion to a performance style that time has left behind, and the outside of the building is,

let's face it, it's creepy.

Because, like skeletons, puppets have taken on a certain cultural connotation in the wider world.

But we should try to see it from the inside,

as the earnest expression of performance and joy.

Nope, I can't.

Mm-mm.

I just not with puppets.

Skeletons, fine.

Loose-skinned monsters from whatever world.

Well, I've dealt with them.

But puppets?

Mm-mm.

Lynn got back to me.

You didn't hear this from me, she said.

Well, that goes without saying, I said.

No, it doesn't, she responded, because I just told you that.

Now, there have been some shipments that don't belong to any company.

Or the company info is missing from them.

I can't understand what I'm looking at.

They certainly don't hold up to any scrutiny at all, so I don't think that they were expecting scrutiny.

These things stand out so bad that they might as well be big red arrows pointing at a location in Los Angeles.

It was late afternoon.

Sylvia was asleep in the back of the truck's cab.

I lowered my voice.

Where?

She told me.

I looked at Sylvia, knowing she would want me to wake her up, to take her with me.

But I didn't.

I let her sleep.

I went alone.

Better that one of us survive.

I went where Lynn told me.

Up La Cienega, past a mall and a hospital.

Came to the address she gave me.

An unassuming place.

If it weren't for the brightly lit sign, I might not have even spotted it from the street.

I went through the gates.

There's a courtyard there.

Deserted.

The air was still, and there was no sound.

But the stillness felt temporary, like the pause after an act of violence before anyone can get over their shock and react.

I continued through the doors into a dark room.

Not the grand hall I might have expected for a meeting like this, but a cozy place.

Rows of theater seats.

A stage draped in red curtains from which a speaker stood addressing the crowd.

There was music.

Was that music?

Or was it the shifting and squirming of inhuman bodies?

Because there was something inhuman in this place.

I could feel it.

Not the people in the seats, they seemed completely human.

Looking up at the person speaking, following the narrative, and slowly having information dawn on them.

In fact,

the people in the seats did not at all seem like the kind of people I would expect at a meeting like this.

Were these the powerful?

The wicked?

Were these the unseen hands ushering us to disaster?

Looks can be deceiving.

Everything can be deceiving up to and including the truth, but no.

I did not think that these were monsters.

I thought they were people like me.

People lured to this spot for the same reason I had been.

Because the story of the meeting had been a very good story.

It played exactly into how I had thought the world works.

It fed my suspicions and it led me to this place.

And I think the same was true for every person in that room.

They were there, like I was there,

looking for a good story.

But why were they led there?

If the meeting itself was a decoy, then what was the true purpose of this moment?

And that's when I saw them.

Lingering in the shadows at the edges of the crowd.

Men with faces that sagged,

flesh that peeled,

yellow teeth, yellow eyes.

Thistlemen ringed the crowd.

Wolves to sheep,

hawks to bunnies,

hunters,

prey.

Did the people in their seats notice?

Did they look into the shadows and see the inhuman eyes peering back at them?

Did they smell the breath of the thistlemen like mildew, like soil?

A smell of rot from deep within, cold lungs.

Did they hear the occasional laugh coming from a gurgling, broken throat?

Did they look beside them at seats that were empty and think, but wasn't someone here just moments ago?

Or was there?

But surely there wasn't, because where could they have gone?

And in the shadows, at the edges of the crowd, the people that had once sat in those seats were led into a place from which they could never return.

I understood.

A simple plan, tell an irresistible story.

A story that is exactly what all of us fighting Thistle might want to hear.

That we were right all along.

That the world really is against us in so simple and easy a way that the culprits could all meet in one room.

And we would come to hear that story, and then thistle would take us.

Why hunt when instead they could lure?

Standing in the door to that hall of horrors, I saw the faces of the Thistlemen as they turned and noticed.

One gave a yelp and started to lope towards me, and I fled.

Where the courtyard had been empty, it was now packed shoulder to shoulder full of men with loose faces and eyes that went yellow at the edges and wet lips hiding sharp teeth.

They were waiting for the crowd inside.

Hungry creatures preparing to feed on any person who stepped out of that theater.

I pushed into and past them, using their momentary surprise to escape, and I ran until my throat was dry and ragged through that courtyard and out to where the lights of the strip club across the way flashed back and forth, back and forth, and then into my car and then onto the maze of freeways where it is so easy to disappear.

I kept my eye glued on the mirrors, but no one was chasing me.

Somewhere behind me, an audience of innocents remained in Thistle's trap,

and I wouldn't help them.

I couldn't.

Instead, I went back to the trunk.

Sylvia was still asleep in the cot.

I sat in the driver's seat.

I was exhausted.

The sun had fully set,

and I allowed my eyelids to drift downwards.

Hey,

said Sylvia.

She was in the passenger seat, turned sideways towards me.

It was light again.

I don't know how long I'd slept.

I know I didn't dream.

There are small mercies in life, I guess.

Did you find out anything?

Sylvia said.

I looked in her eyes.

She's so young.

It wasn't right and it wasn't fair that she was out here like me on this labyrinth of roads and rest stops.

But that's just what it was.

For her and for me, and for so many others.

She looked at me with trust

and I looked right back and I said

I didn't find anything

I don't think the meeting is even real

Let's get out of here

Sylvia yawned she stretched she nodded

Yeah, okay, she said

might as well

Too bad this turned out to be nothing.

Too bad, I said.

So

now here I am telling the story from just outside of Ashland, Oregon.

Los Angeles is hundreds of miles behind me now.

It isn't far enough.

I love you, Alice.

I stayed alive another day.

You do the same, okay?

Okay.

Alice Isn't Dead, Part 3, wraps up this August.

Catch up now by visiting AliceIsnDead.com or by searching for Alice Isn't Dead in your favorite podcast app.

Also on AliceISNDead.com, you can pre-order the Alice Isn't Dead novel coming this October.

This is a total reimagining of the story that can be read entirely on its own.

And if that sounds interesting to you, please consider pre-ordering.

Pre-orders help authors out a lot.

I am also going on a 17-city book tour this fall.

Check out all of the locations and dates at alicendead.com.

Okay, earlier this year, we announced that Sleep With Me was joining our network.

We were so excited to join forces with this incredibly inventive and unique storytelling podcast, and one that I personally listen to every night.

That's true.

Ask my wife.

Each Each episode is designed to help you fall asleep.

And honestly, it works so well that you might fall asleep before Scooter even gets to the main story.

I wanted to play you an excerpt from episode 672, Alice Isn't at Brunch, which is very loosely based on the first season of Alice Isn't Dead.

Be forewarned, you might start nodding off before this excerpt is through, so don't listen while driving across America looking for your wife.

And without further ado, I want you to settle in

and

start to settle into your bed and kind of feel

the gentle presence of your pillows and your blankets with the room and the air around you

as

you're getting closer

to my door

and I'm opening my door and greeting you with a smile.

Hey, come on, Esco.

So good to see you.

I'm so glad you're here.

I definitely needed your help.

So I'm glad you're coming over.

And

yeah, if you say, Scooch, you may look a little nervous and

sweaty.

I say, well, yeah, don't worry, I'll turn the fan on.

I'm not sure if my sweat is related to that or if it's

something else.

And that's why you're over here is to help me with this brunch and planning this brunch.

And that's all we're really going to cover and talk about at all is this brunch I'm planning.

And yeah, I know, you know, I was telling you, like I was telling you, I used to have such great brunches with my friends, Keisha and Alice.

And

you were saying, who?

And I said, oh,

my brunch mates.

And we used to have these great brunches.

But then when you said that to me, it was almost like I forgot who I said, who did I say?

And I said, was that a dream?

Or did I used to have brunch all the time with them?

And you said, well, maybe it'll cheer you up to playing another brunch.

And I said,

who or whom would I rather plan a brunch with you?

A seasonal, one seasonal brunch.

And I know you're getting ready to go on a road trip, so I thought it would be perfect timing to have the brunch.

Oh no, that was your idea, too.

Maybe I'm still in a dream, but you said omelets, and I said,

Okay,

he said, Is that foreshadowing the omelettes?

And you said, Yeah, foreshadowing of a great brunch.

And I said,

Right as rain.

And then I was thinking, since we were going on a road trip, maybe we should have like omelets-styled, like diner-style omelets.

And then you said, What about a diner inside a gas station?

And I said, Holy road trip memories.

I could see it on the side of the road,

the parking lot going way back in the windows of the diner past the gas pumps

and the pitted gravel

of the truck stop.

And why do they call it truck stops when it's everybody stop?

Did you ever think about that?

I mean, I don't think they could call it everybody stops.

And

what I mean by that, I'm not quibbling.

I'm saying at one point, was it a truck-only stop?

And then sometimes, you know, depending on the, well, you say, well, maybe it's best said it is truck-only stop.

But this one, I can see the diner.

I can see the windows.

I could smell the omelets and the hash browns.

But let's not get carried away.

You know, I could picture the trucks and the truckers like riding on high horses

above us

and I guess you could say that truckers are the authority figures of truck stops

oh no they're not that the manager of the truck stop is the authority well I mean now you're quibbling I say symbolically

because if everyone could be a citizen of a truck stop or a guest okay so you're saying citizens versus guests

Okay, well, I was thinking more high up, like almost like an earthen tower.

Those would be, the wizards live in earthen towers, tower, like in the myths.

So the truckers, would they be the wizards of

oh, some truckers would be wizards and other truckers?

Okay, you're right.

We're getting off topic of the brunch.

So we're going to have omelets, so we should figure that out.

You know, it's just strange planning a brunch for you as a prize for you, but you can invite guests because I have great ideas

for a road trip theme to brunch, which would be travel size

instead of party favors.

Like, you know what I mean?

We could have a little travel size deodorant, travel-sized stuff at everybody's place setting, place settings, I think they're called.

So, like, don't you think that would be cute and useful for you?

Though I've heard that it says, well, you're just going to bring your regular size stuff with you

because it's already kind of travel sized.

And yeah, we're only going to plan and talk about this brunch.

Not how much I'm going to miss you on this road trip.

That'll be subtextual.

Anything else will be subtextual.

Our friendship

is our sub or being is a friendship our pretext or our subtext?

Because we love texting each other, especially those.

Well, I know I don't text back exactly fast.

How come we don't use stickers?

I've never learned how to use that.

I know how to use emojis,

but I haven't.

Okay, right, the brunch.

So, how many dozen eggs do you think we could use?

And

why do eggs come in a dozen?

I mean, I'm sure there's a historical reason or something.

Yeah, no, I'm over talking because I do have some resistance to your road trip

just because I'm not coming.

I guess I have some jealousy

of you getting to be out on the road.

And that's why I have a nice brunch for you.

Also, I think we should have fruit.

Ripe fruit.

I mean, I know like the ripest fruit that I associate with brunch as far as smell.

I mean, I like ripe bananas,

but I was thinking of cantaloupes

and maybe honeydew.

Because I usually think of that with brunch.

I think maybe my dad, he likes cantaloupes,

but that has that ripe smell,

but it doesn't always like maybe you scoop your own cantaloupe.

What do you think about that?

Have you ever been, has that ever been a thing?

Ball your own melons.

And because another thing I was thinking about the cantaloupe, and this might be a stretch, is that the cantaloupe usually has empty space in the middle.

And I was thinking about the empty spaces on the road.

And when you're on the road, out on a road trip,

a lot of times you're just in between.

And I got, you know, I was thinking about that because I said, well, are you there on the road or are you there in between?

The empty spaces.

So maybe the empty, and maybe that could just be between me and you, the empty space and the melon.

And also the empty look people would give when I say, well, it's a scoop your own melon.

They say, well, how are we supposed to eat this?

I say,

wash your hands and start scooping.

Oh, another thing I was was thinking that I this is something I wish I learned is

when I was thinking about the empty space, I was thinking about space out there, the night sky,

and how that is empty space.

I think this came up on a brunch I had with my two friends a long time ago.

I can't remember.

Did I say who they were, whom they were

like

chipmunk or something?

But

like, is the sky, is there empty space in space, or is it full of dark matter?

Had they made a decision on that?

And also, what was the final decision on Pluto?

Because I keep forgetting, because I thought they made a decision.

They said, nope, planetoid.

And then they made a decision, well, planet.

And I always forget what the and is it final?

I mean, I'm tired of like, I think of all or nothing.

I say, why do we have to have all or nothing in space?

Planetoid is kind of,

I guess it is a nuance.

It's planet and an

okay, well, you got me there.

But I was just thinking about that dark matter.

And maybe the road in between and the road trip in between places is full of dark matter too.

Even when it's light out, because then it could, I don't know, could we get a scientist to confirm that?

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