I don’t know if you’re aware, but there is a growing phenomenon on the internet where people are talking about odd occurrences, floating cats, glow clouds, and CARLOS a lot.  Well, I noticed it.  I saw it on pinterest, first.  Some guy, very dapper, pretty handsome, almost always drawn with lots of tattoos (I love well-done tattoos), and a third eye, right in the middle of his forehead.  And sometimes holding hands with Carlos.  With captions like, “Cecil and Carlos FOREVER!”

Friends, I had to know.  And if you’re anything like me, you’re thinking, “Are you going to tell me or am I gonna have to stop and Google???”  Don’t worry, I’m going to tell you.  A strange and convoluted series of searches later, I finally found a common thread.  Night Vale.  “What is this Night Vale?” we ask.  I’ll let Cecil answer that for you.  “Welcome to Night Vale. A small desert community where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and strange lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep.”

It isn’t too much of an answer, so here’s a slightly clearer one.  It is a podcast, friends.  A brilliant one.  A podcast that is, ostensibly, the community radio program of Night Vale.  Now, The Bear recently pointed out to me that it is, technically, horror literature.  (Can a podcast be literature?  A question for The Cricket.  Suddenly there are characters in this blog!)  Anyway, horror.  Which, I suppose, it is.  There are monsters and strange phenomenon and people die often.  But not on-screen, as it were.  And I really don’t find it profoundly terrifying.  Just mildly unsettling at it’s scariest.  There are also people who find it to be comedy.  And it is that, too.  It’s got a lot of clever satire of political and social conditions.  But nothing particularly challenging.  And that isn’t why I love it either.

I love it because of Cecil.  Cecil is the voice of Night Vale Community Radio.  He is not unflappable, he is not heroic, he is not overwhelmingly special in any way.  He is just a man, doing a radio show in his community.  But, my friends, his voice is perfection itself.  It is deep and soothing and expressive and genuine at all times.  And his character is alive in a way in which most characters in movies and tv fall short!  And throughout the chaos and the terror and the politics and the mayhem, Cecil simply does the radio.  He makes his deep, expressive, soothing, genuine shout into the void and if it reaches someone, then that is to the good.  But if not, the shout has been made and that is enough.

And that’s what this blog is, to me.  I’m not in this to keep my family and friends informed.  I’m not in it to keep people I don’t know entertained.  I’m in it to sound my barbaric YAWP over the rooftops of the world.  And it is enough.

Update:  If you need a little YAWP of your own, and think Night Vale might be just the ticket, it lives here.