Director's Notes: Ep 202 - The Day After The Day (Patreon)

Sometimes you can't be subtle. 

Years ago, I sat down to write an episode about the town of Desert Bluffs merging with the town of Night Vale. It was an episode about movements of people, about the necessity of embracing the stranger. The refugee crisis in Europe was all over the news, and I was faced with an impossible task: how do I write this episode without it seeming like an episode about the refugee crisis?

The answer, I realized, is that I could not. So I did the opposite. I wrote episode 83, "One Normal Town". It is an episode that is entirely and directly about the refugee crisis. It might as well be a NY Times op-ed. Sometimes you can't be subtle. Sometimes the best way to write about a thing is to write about it.

And so here we are, with episode 202. The idea was a simple one. We haven't talked about Valentine's Day in a while. Maybe I should do another episode about that. Then I started thinking about what Valentine's meant in a town like Night Vale, where it manifests as a natural disaster. It is a traumatic event. And I started thinking about natural disasters and trauma in my own life. 

So yes. This an episode about covid. And about the last two years of our lives. It is trying to map the invisible trauma that is now laid over every mundane decision we make in our mundane days. 

It was an easy decision to keep covid out of Night Vale. Night Vale is a strange little town existing far out of our everyday world. Why would we bring the depressing reality of our lives into that little town? That's not why people listen. But I couldn't keep out the emotions of covid.

I have been writing this show for almost ten years. When I wrote the first episode, I was an unemployed 25 year old living alone in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. I am now 35, living in a house with my wife and child. It has been long and eventful years between those two versions of myself. And the scripts I wrote during those years are a map, in their own weird way, of the emotional journey I was taking. 

The weeks I was scared, I wrote anxious episodes. The weeks I was happy, I wrote joyous episodes. There are episodes where I felt playful or angry or tired. I could put it all into Night Vale.

So now here is this: I am deeply traumatized, as are we all. But that Frasier episode sounds pretty fun.

-Joseph Fink