I’ve been writing a bonkers novel called Subterraneaus Obscura about the mysterious world underneath Washington, D.C. (which has nothing to do with politics). It’s about three adventurers wearing suits who journey their way through ratweillers, the Mongolian death worm, organic server farms, Gnome Town, etc. They are:
Ember—thrill-seeker. They discovered the underground and keeps recruiting people to explore it with them. They’re optimistic and friendly, and they can’t hold their berry beet smoothies.
Juliette—career criminal. After committing the crime of the century, she is swept up in Ember’s wake when she is almost hit by a Metro train. She’s pretty relaxed, considering.
Mazel—charmed ad absurdum. Cursed with supernaturally good luck, Mazel is on the run from her father, the wealthiest man in the world. Her good fortune gets glitchy underground, so she follows Ember to see if it will run out.
I just finished writing a bananas novel called Subterraneous Obscura, which has dozens of supporting characters, from baristas to the richest man in the world. I’ve tried to give memorable personalities to all of them, and the best way to do that is to give them names. I pluck my names out of my life, and along the way, I named seven characters after the pets who are or have been living with my friends, Steve and Meredith, my former roommate, Nicole, and myself.
Here’s Steve and Meredith’s:
Cooper (Ginger Golden Retriever): A doctor who always wanted to do theater. He thinks he’s auditioning for Little Shop of Horrors, but instead, he’s cast in a sex tape.
Harmony (Golden Retriever): The preppy herald of an underworld goddess. (RIP)
Inkling (Sleek Black Cat): The minions of an underworld goddess.
Stardust (Small Tortoiseshell): An underworld goddess. (RIP)
Next is Nicole’s baby, Henry (Black Egyptian Mau): An FBI agent used to getting his way. He’s a Momma’s boy, and his Momma is a crazed, shotgun wielding old woman.
Following is my beloved Newcastle (Maine Coon): A butler who took a vow of silence. (RIP)
Finally, my current roommate, Oscar (Fluffy Black Cat): A sleazy teenage data broker.
I spent a lot of Friday making arrangements should I not come home Saturday afternoon. Ordinarily, that would be my emergency contact, Sophia, but she was my copilot yesterday. We were going to the No Kings Rally in front of the Capitol building, and I was pretty sure I was getting arrested.
The president and his consigliores had labeled this event as un-American. Despite his having been proved a liar repeatedly, people believed him. He is most definitely in the Epstein files, but everyone is giving him the benefit of the doubt. He brought troops into my city to use as a springboard to threaten his enemies in Democratic-leaning states, and people still think he’s trustworthy. He was certain to make an example out of us, so why not here?
The fascist takeover of our country has left me hopeless and alone. I have no reason to feel alone. Almost everyone I know agrees with me. But the media is, at best, wishy-washy when it comes to the anti-ethics of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party is not siding with No Kings because they don’t want to look soft on crime. Millions of citizens are angry and afraid, and no one is coming to help us.
I believed I was going to be arrested or worse at this rally, but I had to go. I had to be seen. Even if I was seen fleeing the scene while being chased down by tear gas. And I wasn’t going to let Sophia go alone.
The rally started at noon, but I had a dental appointment I was late to because of Metro fuckery. My trip there and to the meet-up point was jam-packed with people carrying signs. I spent the trip reading the ALCU’s Instagram post advising what to do in the case of a detainment or arrest.
I met Sophia, and we walked to the entrance point. She seemed determined, but I was tense. If we turned a corner and saw a pillar of smoke, I was going home. If I heard gunfire, I was going home.
What we saw as we got closer, turned out to be families and couples leaving our destination, looking chill. As we moved on, folks sat in camping chairs, some decorated in yellow balloons, and directed traffic. One such person was in a blow-up shark costume.
I said, “I’m not scared anymore.”
She snorted. “You were scared?”
“I didn’t want to get arrested.”
“Please,” she huffed, “like I’d go to a place where I would be arrested.”
The rally, like those leaving it, was chill. It wasn’t too crowded, and everyone was polite. There were vendors there, and they only took cash or Venmo. We bought a couple of big flags to wave around because I forgot our signs. Some people were selling water, but most people were giving it away.
At one point, I thought I was seeing a fight break out in the middle of a thick crowd, but it was actually a friendly dance battle.
Sophia and I pushed forward, until we were near the front. The police on the other side of the barriers looked really bored, except for the snipers on top of the East Building of the National Gallery of Art.
Inching forward, Sophia brought us to a halt and said, “Let’s just wait here and people-watch!”
“People-watching is one of my favorite things to do,” I told her as if she didn’t know that about me.
I love to be around interesting people, and this rally was full of them. Some people dressed like Founding Fathers. Some people blew bubbles. Some people carried signs on pizza boxes. Other people had professional signs. One person had a painting of Donald Trump violating Lady Liberty with his hand. Sophia and I agreed that this wasn’t helping.
There were either four people wearing blow-up unicorn costumes, or the same person was moving place to place really fast. There were axolotls, sharks, and dinosaurs. Frogs were also popular, and someone explained to someone else while I listened, the frog mascot was seen at a Portland rally, making the cops look ridiculous. Also it was reclaiming the frog motif from Pepe.
A guy on an intercom announced something, but I couldn’t make out the words.
Sophia asked, “Did he just say Bernie?”
The voice from somewhere nearby said, “Thank you, I’m proud to be here.”
And I shouted, “Bernie! Woooooo!” I was elated. I felt seen, even though I couldn’t see where he was. He declared war on Trump, and he told us what we were going to do after the midterms, but I am not so hopeful.
Sophia and I left shortly afterward. I found out we were there for two hours, and I thought we were there an hour, tops. In addition, what I thought was a fifteen-minute speech from Bernie was actually over thirty minutes.
I’m not sure how I’d describe that rally. It reminded me of Speedway, Indiana during the Indy 500—just souvenirs and crowds of likeminded people, some in costume, celebrating. In DC yesterday, we celebrated our unity. Tidal waves of people flowed through our large cities.
I don’t know how the news is going to report it. I can’t think about that. I witnessed an electrifying politician voice his support for the Americans who are getting squeezed dry and criminalized. It was exactly what I needed to hear.
Since I can’t work backstage at shows anymore (last time I tried, I had to take a week off of work because of a manic episode), I volunteered some art for the community theater. For their show Puffs. Two qualifiers:
After I sent the art to the director, I haven’t heard a word back. I don’t know if they’re using it or not.
The subject-matter is problematic, I’m well aware. The good news is, Puffs is a parody, and it walks up to the line of copyright violation, but doesn’t cross it. There’s nothing that miserable c-word can do about it, and all the money this play makes is going to the authors.
Because the play is about the house the Sorting Hat would send me to, and because this play is stealing money from JK Rowling, I take pride in my work.
If you know me, you’ll know I don’t have much self-esteem. Even now, at fifty, with less fucks to give than ever before, I worry. I’ve never thought I was attractive, I’ve never thought I was interesting. Sometimes, though, I think I’m the greatest.
Once upon a time, someone—I suspect Evil Col, the editor-in-chief for The New York Post—threw a birthday party for Evil Col, the editor-in-chief for The New York Post. I arrived early because I arrived early for everything, and I found myself alone at the bar, waiting for someone I might recognize.
That someone was my office crush, Gretchen* who happened to be the most irritating person I’ve ever met in my life. We had interacted in the past, but not substantially, and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t recognize me if she ever saw me again.
That evening, she made me smell her hair, punched my arm affectionately, and ordered chicken wings that she performed unspeakable acts upon with her tongue and lips. While all of this was going on, an editor named Colin, Good Col, put everybody’s drinks on his card, promoting him to Great Col.
This was not when I felt like I was the greatest. Later, after my crush wandered off (I saw her the next day, and she had no idea who I was), I found my fellow copyeditor, Mike. We hung out for a minute, but he was itching to talk to someone more cooler. Before he left me alone, She swooped in.
I couldn’t see the color of her skin in the party lights, but she had the features of the Mediterranean. She seemed older than I, on the spectrum between skinny and curvy. She wore her dark hair up and an off-the-shoulder sweater, revealing an uninterrupted curve down her neck, as well as and her enticing collarbones.
Her name was Daniela.
I assumed she was there for Mike, who was better looking and more charming than I, but she kept turning to me for my opinions, or returning tangents to me. She was smart, but not high academia. She was well-read, and she appreciated Shakespeare.
At some point, Mike left, and it was just her and I. I don’t remember much about our conversation, just that she let me do all the talking while she sipped her white wine. She also laughed a lot, sometimes while touching me. Upon reflection, I think she was flirting with me.
We hit a wall of silence, and she drifted away. I didn’t know anything about her. Mike didn’t know her. She may have been a regular patron at the bar Evil Col’s mysterious benefactor had booked. If she was with The Post, the odds of her working on Sunday nights were slim to none. She was gone forever.
She struck me as someone who liked to meet people. Whether she held onto them longer than that, I’ll never know. She may have decided at the end of our conversation that I wasn’t worth the effort. Maybe she tried to find me later, but I had already gone home. I just know that, for half an hour, forty-five minutes, this divine, older women thought I was the most fascinating thing in a crowded bar.
Twenty years ago, Kate and I attended an opening-night screening of a movie called Serenity, based on a short-lived show nobody saw. Imagine our surprise when we saw the line.
People were in costume, and there were a lot of hideous orange pom-pom hats out there. One fan created her own steampunk look, not based on a specific character. She stood on her seat (which had probably lived through a lot at this point) and led a sing-along to the show’s theme song.
I’ve been to a lot of conventions since then, and I haven’t seen the kind of energy from that movie theater. Cut to years later.
Welcome to Night Vale was a huge hit while I was in Doha. I discovered it through some fan-art on Tumblr at the same time everybody else did. It made lists of cool and underappreciated entertainments in a lot of news sources.
It was enough to make me check it out. Starting from the beginning, the first thing you hear is a long announcement not to go into the new dog park. You are told not to approach the dog park and to ignore any hooded figures inside.
Welcome to Night Vale is a local radio show, hosted by the honey-voiced Cecil Palmer, played by Cecil Baldwin. He says something profound and/or spooky, and then “Welcome to Night Vale!” He reads the news, the community calendar, the ads, the horoscopes, traffic, and so on. Everything he reads has a twist of the paranoid and supernatural, as well as just plain ordinary.
Helicopters circle overhead because the government is watching everything you do. The producers of the Night Vale community radio station are insectoid creatures. I lost count of how many gods they had to make sacrifices to.
It is one of the cheeriest and uplifting shows I’ve ever enjoyed, soothing with its formula. I followed religiously for years, but sometime after I moved to DC, I stopped listening. Some of it was because I didn’t have the time, but some of it was because the formula was working against it. The quality of the writing wasn’t going down, but the juxtaposition of mundane life with cosmic horror didn’t feel as fresh as it used to.
They added new characters to keep things alive, such as Tamika Flynn, who once spent an entire night in the library, being stalked by those foul, insidious librarians, and Deb, the sentient cloud. They’re great, and the actors are great. They even got nerd favorite, Wil Wheaton to voice one. Along with storylines that stretched over much of the seasons, it was getting too complicated.
I saw the ad and debated going for a while. I thought I’d give myself something to look forward to on September 11, so I bought my tickets, took the short hop to the U Street station and pulled out my phone for directions to the Lincoln Theater. My phone told me it was not going to do that. I looked up to get my bearings and beheld the Lincoln Theater, right across the street.
You can’t nail down a demographic here. You saw the goth crowd, piercings and pink/blue/green hair. There were a lot of nerdy girls, two in lab coats, wearing goggles. There were men in business casual, women in their nicer dresses. There were older people, there were younger people. There were infants, and there were grade-school kids. This is fine because, for all the horrifying deaths, Welcome to Night Vale is a surprisingly wholesome show.
One of the reasons Welcome to Night Vale has such a dedicated fan base is that it is inclusive. Cecil will always call you by your preferred name and pronouns, his courtship of scientist Carlos, who has amazing hair, was the only long story arc I was invested in. The audience had a queer vibe to it because they felt welcome here. Welcome to Night Vale isn’t a gay show, but it’s a show where it’s okay to be gay.
To my left was a family with an infant. That could bode poorly. I didn’t have to listen to the kid’s wailing because, as soon as the kid got uppity, the dad took him out of the auditorium. I feel bad he had to miss the show, but thank you, sir.
To my right were the T-shirts, shorts, and sandals type. The feminine one talked non-stop about being engaged then not engaged, then pursuing boys, then what to call themselves now that since they can’t be called a wife. Maybe “spouse”? Then they talked about their wife. Then, when the show started, they and the masculine one took hands.
I endured the musical guest. She could play the guitar well, her voice was good, but I do not like Ani DiFranco music. Every time she finished a song, I had hope we’d see the main event soon, dashed when she started again. I haven’t been this demoralized by singing since I watched Les Miserables at the Kennedy Center.
The show went on, introduced by Jeffrey Kramer, the co-creator. Cecil Baldwin took the stage, and he’s just as good looking and charming as he sounds. Tamika Flynn worked the crowd. And it was fine. It was a bit stripped down from past live shows, and it stuck the formula. It felt like a an episode of the, which I could get for free (with ads).
What did I pay fifty bucks for? To see Cecil in person, for one. But mostly for the crowd. I didn’t know anyone who listened to Welcome to Night Vale, so I felt along in my love for it. I was surrounded by people who had been swept away by the imagination and the cleverness of everything. There were people there who felt seen by the show.
In the End Times, that’s worth more than fifty bucks.
Of everything I saw, there is one thing about that morning I can never forget: the weather was perfect. The summer had been difficult for me. I lost my job, and I had sunk into a deep depression, and my relationship with Andrea was getting rocky. The weather was full of peace, the sky was blue, and the leaves were still green. My step picked up a spring. I sat down at my desk and stuffed envelopes with energy and panache. That day started out so full of hope.
I was having coffee in Union Station recently, at one in the afternoon, enjoying the little market that I didn’t know they had every Saturday, when she entered. She wandered out of the part of the station where the commuter trains came in (though it could have been anywhere in the building), and she was tipsy.
She may have gone to one of the nice restaurants and had a liquid lunch. She may have been with a friend in Maryland or Virginia and had a few drinks before hopping on the train. She may have still been drunk from the night before.
She was happy, flitting from table to table, trying on jewelry and talking to the vendors about what they’re selling. She was charming to watch. She eventually wandered over to the coffee kiosk near me and stood in the line for people waiting for their drinks, and that’s where I left her when I decided to head home.
On my way to the Metro, I nearly collided with her, but she didn’t notice. Halfway to the turnstiles, I decided to get some Gatorade, so I headed downstairs to the drugstore. Immediately ahead of me in line, there she was, buying the largest bottle of water you can find, as well as a 16-ounce can of Red Bull.
I don’t know what happened to her after that, but I’m assuming it was fun.
Fourth of July weekend, Owlman and I went to the National Portrait Gallery/Smithsonian American Art Museum, which share a building. It’s in Chinatown, so we had to take the Metro.
This is our stop, Fort Totten. Independence Day revelers still weren’t out of bed.
We arrived fifteen minutes before the museum opened, so we had to hang outside.
Our first portrait was abolitionist John Brown. Owlman is evil, but he agrees with me that owning another human is bad, so he was happy to see him.
Owlman says, “Keep practicing, you’ll get it someday.”
Like Thomas Edison, Owlman fancies himself an inventor… of death traps and lethal gadgets.
Owlman remembered to bring his camera today.
I told Owlman that this was my favorite painting in the museum, by John Singer Sargent, who is my favorite painter. He memorialized it for me.
Owlman has a thing for redheads.
Owlman knows full well he’s not supposed to touch the sculptures, but he’s evil, so he wants to do it anyway.
Owlman, what did I just tell you?
Owlman wants to know if the TV art installation can get the latest episode of Real Housewives, which he watches because he’s evil.
He terrorizes the streets of alternate Gotham, but this statue from Clover Adams’s grave is really scary.
This year, for TYSTWD, I invited Owlman. Owlman comes from an alternate reality and is essentially the anti-Batman. He was thrilled to see what I do when I am not home.
I like to come to work early and do some sketching before I begin my shift. It’s nice to have the place to myself.
As you can see, Washington DC is still sleeping.
We took a tour of my desk, where I had to relocate my owls once Oscar started being feisty. (The glass cat on the hammock is the gift my boss gave me when Newcastle died.)
Same goes for some of my toys. (The red guy is the mascot for the American Society of Hematology.)
And my miniature painting, which has Owlman contemplating the meaning of beauty.
I hang up my art up at my desk because I like looking at it, and it’s a great conversation-starter.
Owlman works from home, so he brought in his laptop.
He had to go to the storage room to take an important call.
Now it’s break time. I don’t like Starbuck’s, but he insisted on going, and he’s evil so I don’t want to get on his bad side.
Jeremiah Murphy 