Don't Think Me Evil Trilogy Podcast

The summers my daddy was around, he drove us down to Grand Isle, and before he let any of us near the water he stood on the sand and gave the same speech. The water that kills you does not look like anything. The big waves do not get you. It is the flat, pretty stretch between the sandbars, with a current running straight out to sea. People think an undertow pulls you down. It pulls you out, so gently that by the time you notice, the shore is a long way off.

It is Wednesday, March 11th, 2020, and it is late. The last time you heard my voice was August the 8th. That is seven months, and I owe you an explanation.

We are still not using rooms. Tonight it is a parked minivan with a car seat in the back and a juice box I have been asked not to touch.

I will tell you the truth up front, because I always have. Either the world has gone crazy, or I have. Tonight I honestly cannot tell you which. Listen when you are ready, and eat something first.

Recorded March 11th, 2020.

THE TRILOGY

The Pattern Files is the evidence file. The story is Don't Think Me Evil, a trilogy by Elwood West. Book One, Confession, is available now at dontthinkmeevil.com.

Last time ended with a pleasant voice telling you the subject had been advised. I am the subject. Consider me advised.

In 1984 a computer scientist in Moscow built himself a little game with seven shapes that fall from the top of the screen. Some of you will remember what happened when you finally turned it off. You lay in the dark with your eyes closed and the pieces were still falling. Psychologists call it the Tetris Effect. There is one more thing every player learns. You cannot win it. It just gets faster.

This recording is going up the same day we make it, with no music and no polish, and you will hear partway through that we did not finish where we started. Scriven put one episode back on the feed on Tuesday morning, and I want you to know how long it stayed up.

I did what I know how to do, which is a legal pad, a pot of coffee, and one question I ask my freshmen every fall. Who owns what? Listen when you can, and tell me what you notice about where we end up.

Recorded August 8th, 2019.

THE TRILOGY

The Pattern Files is the evidence file. The story is Don't Think Me Evil, a trilogy by Elwood West. Book One, Confession, is available now at dontthinkmeevil.com.

Evening, y'all. It is the last week of July, it is ninety-one degrees at nine o'clock at night, and the air conditioner in this house is losing an argument with the Louisiana summer. Before we do anything else, Scriven wants me to play you a voicemail.

Her name is Suzanne. She has listened to every recording twice, and she is driving to Las Vegas to look at the tunnels under the Strip. I have thought about that call more than I would like to admit. I sit in a home study and say things into a microphone, and somewhere in Arizona a woman I have never met is packing a car because of something I said.

So we stopped recording for a while. There were things I had not told you, and tonight's episode needs them. Afterward my producer went through every file we have ever published, and she found something I do not have a good word for.

I will tell you only this: the microphone goes both directions. Listen when you have a quiet hour, and tell me what you would have done.

Recorded July 30th, 2019.

THE TRILOGY

The Pattern Files is the evidence file. The story is Don't Think Me Evil, a trilogy by Elwood West. Book One, Confession, is available now at dontthinkmeevil.com.

I want to start with a question that sounds simple and is not. What is the difference between losing something and burying it? When you lose a thing, it is an accident, and you retrace your steps. When you bury a thing, you choose. You dig the hole, you fill it back in, and everyone who held a shovel agrees never to bring it up.

I asked you not to go hunting for the two people I could not name, and of course you went hunting. The voicemail line was full in three days. Most of what came back was funny. One call gave me a chill I have not shaken, and by my own rule I set it aside.

Then I did what a man with a seminary-adjacent childhood does. I found a priest and handed him an index card with a word on it, exactly as it appears in the filings. He told me where the word comes from. I left the hall light on that night.

There is also a hill in Turkey, and a meeting with my department chair. Listen when you have the time, and tell me what you would have asked him.

Recorded July 18th, 2019.

THE TRILOGY

The Pattern Files is the evidence file. The story is Don't Think Me Evil, a trilogy by Elwood West. Book One, Confession, is available now at dontthinkmeevil.com.

So. That is new. I know. It sounds different in here. Last time, a former student of mine called the show, and what she did next was her own idea. She drove up with a trunk full of foam and a list of everything wrong with my recordings. She is my producer now. Her name is Scriven, and I am told that in here I rank somewhere just below the cat.

We have a phone line now. The first message on it settled a question I had about a cocktail.

The longer part of this recording is about four people. My colleague, the travel analyst, wrote again, at twelve minutes after three in the morning, and she is never long. Four profiles pulled from the August bookings. Two I could name, and they fit everything I had built. Two I could not, and they fit nothing.

And there is a word, in two sets of filings, that I had never seen before this month. Manassean. I do not know what it means. I am going to find out. Listen when you can, and tell me if the word means anything to you.

Recorded July 8th, 2019.

THE TRILOGY

The Pattern Files is the evidence file. The story is Don't Think Me Evil, a trilogy by Elwood West. Book One, Confession, is available now at dontthinkmeevil.com.

It is Tuesday night, a little after ten, and I am standing in my kitchen with a lime in one hand and a paring knife in the other. You should know what I am making. It is called a Dick Woody, I met it in a Las Vegas hotel bar, and I have not recovered.

I had a technology podcast playing while I mixed. The guest was Jeff Tanner, the head of Prism, relaxed and generous. About twenty minutes in he explained which signal the platform cares about most. That is when I put the knife down.

I played the interview for different people. Odell heard what he feared. A former student of mine, who sells earrings on Prism and needs the platform to work, heard what she needed. I heard what was already on my legal pad. Same forty minutes of audio, and everyone walked out carrying what they walked in with.

There is also a roof in Natchitoches, a cat named Walter, and a question I should have asked back in May. Listen when you can, and tell me which of the three of us you hear.

Recorded June 25th, 2019.

THE TRILOGY

The Pattern Files is the evidence file. The story is Don't Think Me Evil, a trilogy by Elwood West. Book One, Confession, is available now at dontthinkmeevil.com.

I am in a good mood tonight, and I am going to tell you why, and then I am going to tell you something strange, the good part first, because I have earned it.

After twenty years of "we really should," I said yes. A bunch of us from college, the old crew, are going on a cruise next April. Beautiful people I have not laid eyes on in the better part of thirty-five years, a group that should not have survived the eighties, statistically. I will not tell you what the young lady in the Laura Ashley dress does for a living now.

We started catching up, and five of them, in five industries, had the same odd week at work. A hospital group, a retailer, a financial technology firm, an airline, a freight company. Each had been running a drill for a disease from another century. And one of them dropped his voice and said they had been told not to talk about it.

It is probably nothing. I went and looked anyway. Listen when you have a few minutes, and tell me whether it sounds like nothing to you.

Recorded June 17th, 2019.

THE TRILOGY

The Pattern Files is the evidence file. The story is Don't Think Me Evil, a trilogy by Elwood West. Book One, Confession, is available now at dontthinkmeevil.com.

I have been wrong about something, and I would like to say it before I lose my nerve. For a month I have been treating Las Vegas as the beginning. It is the newest room in a very old house.

So I stopped looking for a man and started looking at a place. A conference paper cited an unpublished survey of the gatehouse at Edinburgh Castle, and the retired lecturer who wrote it told me he had been asked to take that citation out. In 2018 a maintenance crew opened a wall behind an old fireplace and found a passage of cut stone. A university team spent eleven weeks down there. The press release about it stayed up for nine days. Then it was gone, and some weeks later somebody poured concrete into the access point.

I wrote to the university, politely, professor to professor, and I will read you the reply.

I have read the last paragraph of that press release perhaps thirty times, and I still do not know what to do with it. Listen when you can, and tell me whether you hear what I hear.

Recorded June 13th, 2019.

THE TRILOGY

The Pattern Files is the evidence file. The story is Don't Think Me Evil, a trilogy by Elwood West. Book One, Confession, is available now at dontthinkmeevil.com.

It is a little after one in the morning, and I am standing in a parking garage in Las Vegas, waiting for a man I have never met who told me to come alone and bring cash. I am fifty-four years old and I know better.

Before this, I sat down with a retired concrete man I will call Royce. In the spring of 1992 he poured floors under the Saqqara, at night, for double pay and a signed promise of silence. He does not know what the walls were for. He knows what he poured, and that a second floor went over it a month later.

Then there is Vesper, who gives a walking tour with no license and no website and has a hundred stories about that building. Most of them are folklore. Two details do not sit right with me.

I am trying to stay a careful man. This recording is me sorting what I can check from what I cannot. By the end of the night I had a new place on the map, and it was not in Nevada. Listen when you have time, and tell me if you hear what I heard.

Recorded June 8th, 2019.

THE TRILOGY

The Pattern Files is the evidence file. The story is Don't Think Me Evil, a trilogy by Elwood West. Book One, Confession, is available now at dontthinkmeevil.com.

My name is Asa Thibodeaux. I teach political science at a state university in Louisiana, and I have never done anything like this before, so bear with me.

Between January and May of this year, I counted forty-eight times that the same piece of content disappeared from at least two of the big three platforms inside the same seventy-two hours. Three companies that are supposed to dislike each other, agreeing quietly. I went looking for the reason and kept running into the same Delaware holding company, a contractor in Houston who found himself inside a convoy of black SUVs, and a pyramid of black glass in Las Vegas with floors that used to exist on paper.

My department chair suggested I take the summer and rest my eyes. This is me resting my eyes.

I do not know yet what this is. I am trying to be careful with it, and I would like you to be careful with it too. Listen when you can, and tell me whether the number bothers you as much as it bothers me.

Recorded May 31st, 2019.

THE TRILOGY

The Pattern Files is the evidence file. The story is Don't Think Me Evil, a trilogy by Elwood West. Book One, Confession, is available now at dontthinkmeevil.com.