Our tales for today are...

First Date - First dates can be a bit rough. Books, tv, and movies have found rich fodder in the awkward, uncomfortable act of two people auditioning each other for romantic purposes. Food in the teeth, digestion issues, conversational dry spells, awkward plays for the bill, or uncomfortable physical realities. Any number of things can go wrong on a first date. Of course sometimes it’s the opposite. Everything goes right, the two people click and they just don’t want the night to end. Those are the good ones, the conversation rolls, multiple locations are hit, and the vibe is just right. If everything goes perfect that first date becomes the cornerstone of a long term relationship, the moment regularly shared and referred to when recounting a couple's early days. How odd must it be to realize years, maybe decades later, that what you thought was maybe the greatest, most romantic night of your life was something else. That it wasn’t even the lesser, comedy riddled version of itself. Your first date, your meet cute was straight from a horror movie and the third wheel that night, unbeknownst to you, was one of America’s most monstrous evils… from poster TychaBrea

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Drive of Nightmares - Confirmation is a good thing. Affirmation is rewarding. When we want to be heard or seen and understood, having another human being stand in front of us and say “I believe you…I get it” is a big deal. It means our word is good and our standing with the people and community around us is high enough to merit trust. It also means our own inner narrative is reliable, we can trust our own eyes, our own thoughts. Building up a lifetime of honesty and straightforwardness is hard but it puts us in a position of moral authority, what an honest person says should be believed. But there is a danger there, particularly for the honest individual. Because sometimes we see things that it would be a hell of a lot easier to just unsee, just not trust ourselves, just chalk it up as a trick of the light… from poster blackcatsblackbats

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Boy in the Woods - The term doppelgänger ironically has many identical versions of itself from around the world. The spirit double or ka in ancient Egyptian lore, in merry old England it was known as a fetch, Stephen King called it an outsider, most recently the movie Us added “the tethered” to the doppelgänger conversation. There is something perversely grotesque about the idea of a version of ourselves living out its own life somewhere on this globe but at least we have a buffer of 7 billion people on the planet. The odds of running into your own changeling are very low. But of course very low isn’t zero... from poster eijtn

Thanks for coming back to our little audio campfire. We are about to kick off another week with some weird and creepy stuff from the treeline. But first, some quick housekeeping,

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Music and SFX - A Hand In The Dark by Underbelly and Ty Mayer courtesy of YouTube Free Studio Library