Director’s Notes: Episode 262 - The Man Who Is Not Tall

Twelve or so years ago, Meg and I took a bad beach vacation.

It rained the whole week we were there, and we both got a cold right after arriving. So we mostly sat around the room, miserable.

Bored, I started a writing experiment. I wrote the title at the top of the page: “A Story About You – an experiment in Night Vale storytelling”. I wanted to see what would happen if I wrote a Night Vale episode that wasn’t at all structured like a Night Vale episode, but was instead a short story written in second person. And I liked the result, so we put it on the show.

Thus the man who is not short and the man who is not tall were born.

We expanded on the mythology of that organization considerably in the novel The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home, and I would recommend reading that to get more background for the current storyline, but it is not required. Suffice to say that Labyrinth is ancient, it is everywhere, and its purpose is mysterious. A lot like life itself, I guess.

We’ve done a few years of Night Vale where the fate of the town or the world was at stake, and so we decided it would be interesting to make this one about something more personal. The soul of Steve Carlsberg. The man who we all hated and now all love. Who knows how we’ll feel about him next.

Some other quick notes:

There are bits in here that I can’t believe we’ve never thought of doing. This traffic, for instance. And a Children’s Sad Fact Science Corner.

Meg and I spent 9 years living in the Hudson River Valley, which led to the Cloud Perverts section of this episode. The Hudson Valley gets a lot of tourists in the fall to look at the leaves, and they’ll just straight up park their cars in the middle of roads to look at some trees, forcing locals to awkwardly inch around them. As a result, Meg and I started referring to these tourists as “Leaf Perverts”.

The word from our sponsors this episode, in one sense, just a little pun on “a quick word from our sponsors” (get it? he’s reading quickly?) But the text is about the east winds in LA, when the winds blow out from the desert instead of inland from the sea. It is loosely based on a section about the east winds from the Thomas Pynchon book Inherent Vice, where he describes how the planes landing the wrong direction at LAX because of the change in winds meant everyone’s dreams also run the wrong way round. It’s a beautiful piece of writing that has always stuck with me. I wrote this script before the east winds caused the recent fires in LA, so this passage reads a little different to me now.

If you haven’t listened to it, I recommend the recent bonus episode with James Urbaniak before the next Night Vale episode. That’s all I’m saying.

Ok, I love you.

-Joseph Fink

Listen here.

Want the illustration as a print? Buy it here.