Run to Greet the Child of Morning… Sailing Ambience — Sailing Odyssey ambience. I’ve been thinking of sailing lately, no reason — maybe I’m just missing the Vineyard (check out our MVY Harbor and Steamship ambience from this summer) or maybe it’s still on my mind from this week.

The Mediterranean was mentioned in my Night of the Living Dead episode from last week as well — a movie that was pushed in front of us on an AV Cart... we weren’t going to be finishing up with Polyphemus and heading back to sea with Odysseus. We were going to watch rural Pennsylvanians battle the undead.

We’re not doing either today—we’re justing going to sail without fear of interdiction from the sirens, the Laestrygonians, the lotus-eaters or worse.  

Let’s find Eos.

Night of the Living Dead from the projection booth, which includes lots of projector.

One of my teachers threw Night of the Living Dead on in middle school, and the chatter around the class was that the teacher was too lazy to get into anything. Which was probably true, but we were happy not to tackle more of Odysseus’ dangerous journey across the Mediterranean. Call me Outis.

Night of the Living Dead was my first true horror film.

The movie is groundbreaking, obviously, but not scary to modern eyes (even modern eyes in the early 90s when I saw it). The only truly frightening part happens in daylight at the end — the movie’s protagonist survives right up to the credits, then is shot unceremoniously by living men — authorities, ostensibly there to remedy the situation. The protagonist is then thrown into a bonfire with the undead he fought.

Which feels apt for this terrible world we’ve constructed for ourselves.

Rainy Night/ Highway Motel — spend a mid-90s motel overnight perched above a highway during a thunderstorm. 

So after graduating from military boarding school, I faced a nearly thousand-mile drive from deep in the Southeast to the Hudson Valley in New York. I believe we stopped to rest somewhere near Frackville, PA. It was late, and the skies were awash with rain and flashes of lightning. My father was exhausted, and he was almost immediately asleep after tossing the dust cover off the bed.

My heart was racing from the new freedoms I faced. No more reveille, no more taps; no more drill or retired military folks ordering me around. (I was a **** student who had to regularly navigate a retired Command Sergeant Major.) I was free—at least for a few months, before I would attempt another military school (college).

Whatever. That night I was free, old enough to try cigarettes or die in war. Mr. High School Graduate.

The summer felt like a budding verification of me. I had settled something, unshackled myself from societal expectations. I was going to be a big deal (oh, youth and your unobtainable optomism).

All of which is to say: I couldn’t sleep. I was excited. Also extremely bored. The motel room was stuffy. I couldn’t have the volume too high on the manual television—it would wake my father (not that there was anything on anyway). All my Wizard magazines and Mack Bolan novels were packed in the U-Haul box with wheels (the mid-90s being a decade or more before smartphones).

So I read Jonah in the room’s complimentary gold book… about a guy who refuses the Almighty and tries to escape across the Mediterranean. Jonah’s boat is hit with a giant storm, and the other folks on the boat are like, “**** you, dude,” and toss him into the sea. Where he’s eaten by a giant fish. And somehow lives half-a-week in a fish without a tv set.

I remember wishing I had packed Detroit Deathwatch in the car.

Missing the server room? Need someone to help with an offline printer? Spend eight hours among your favorite overly refrigerated colleagues.

Have you ever noticed how IT folks walk around with waiter eyes when they're outside their domain? You know, waiter eyes, like when you need a refill on your Mountain Dew and the dude or lady catches you in their peripheral… but just keeps walking?

And I get it. It’s lucky the people who make printers didn’t make Voyager, we’d have lost Voyager by the asteroid belt. You can just look at printer funny and it will go offline, but somehow just for your computer. And that's why IT is there right? Aside from guarding their overly air-conditioned domain.

Once, I had a manager ask an IT staffer to order him a new chair mat.

Usually, when I see IT roaming the office, I remember all those weird mouse issues I want answered. (Mac folks: have you noticed third-party Bluetooth mice acting up? Since updating to Sonoma, I’ve had nonstop issues with tracking speed resetting. And any time Bluetooth headphones are in use, it somehow causes lag in mouse movement. I’ve switched back to a wired mouse, for ****’s sake.)

So, I get why y'all hide in the server room.

Rainy Road to Reflect or Ruminate… Ambience

Sparse highway, light rain ambience. We are on the side of a small road just outside town. It’s night, and it’s raining. Imagine you’re a content Gene Kelly walking home after frolicking around main. Or Feel free to ruminate. 

That’s the general vibe around here. There’s a movie theater nearby showing cat videos (for a good cause) and it’s practically sold out. Catvideofest 2025 is repackaged cat timeline videos on a gigantic screen. And that it is pretty much sold out this weekend says something about our collective mood. 

Anyway, I did manage to get tickets and me my youngest will share an auditorium with a Spider-verse amount of other people.

That’s all from me — Oh, so if I controlled the universe for a day aside from solving every important global issue I would want to sneak a cameo of Ice Cube into that animated Will Smith fish movie that also stars Katie Couric as “Katie Current.” But I would add in Ice Cube so he could be like “even saw the lights of the Goodyear Blimp and it read ‘Ice Cube’s a shrimp.’” Which may occur in that movie, I haven’t seen it. 

New plan: I’m bringing back that short-lived trend from early-pandemic days that social media tried to cook up — shoe-kicking as greeting. I only saw people on my phone doing that dumb ****. I want to ingrain into humans that shoe-kicking is now retroactively high-five. Every famous high-five from history now feet kicking. From the business meetings to competitive sports. The mayhem.

PS: if you are interested in listening to cars pass but you would rather imagine yourself not being rained on -- check out last year's Vermont Route 100 episode recorded from the Mad River Valley.

Oh, My Neo Pleasant Purgatory… Ambience

Digital Purgatory—Neo-noir-ish but chill purgatory ambience, I was thinking of a (techy) modern island of Purgatorio mashed with elements from the Heavenly Kid and “Neo Bowser City” from Mario Kart.

Take a break on one of the rings as folks move about you, working out the flaws of their souls. I imagine mass transit and people movers nearby, working their way up to the next ring amongst stationary kiosks and sidewalk vendors.

But why purgatory? Global calamities have had me thinking more about the Inferno, and as summer loosens its grasp upon us and the morning chills of fall hint at the spooky season… It’s hard not to watch the television and be like, “I hope you go to hell.” (Preferably the one with her gate in Philadelphia).

Which is off-the-chain talk for a podcast meant to be chill.

How about purgatory? Talking purgatory won’t raise as many hackles (right?). So—I attended a religious military boarding school. My first course on Wednesday was Bible; during lights-out, a night guard would check to make sure I was in bed (and not setting fire to anything) and occasionally hand over a rapture comic book. All this is to say, even the underground thinking at school was, “there has to be an enchanted place to hold the so-so souls.”

So purgatory is accepted—just unloved, and underrepresented in popular culture. Aside from Purgatorio or Beetlejuice, there aren’t many mega-hits that focus on limbo. (And we covered Beetlejuice last year.)

I am an afterlife aficionado, and of the big three soul deposit locations, purgatory is represented the least in popular culture. (And I mean big three in the way that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin could be counted as a big three of something. And purgatory would be Litecoin... also, I’m not equating the other two.)

There are notable purgatories to be found in pop culture. One deep-cut purgatory construction I’m fond of is from the 1985 movie The Heavenly Kid. The film’s afterlife layout is a mall hallway that leads to escalators carrying people into a blinding light, presumably heaven. It’s guarded by a couple of bouncers dressed like Vegas clergy, standing in front of an Applebee’s-looking “please wait to be seated” lectern.

Down a dark tunnel motorcycle ride is "Midtown" where an unhinged bar entertains unclaimed souls. The bar feels like a smokers-welcome 80s airport bar was smashed with Oscar's restaurant selection in Follow That Bird.

In the Heavenly Kid, a grizzled angel with probably an alcohol problem (portrayed by Richard Mulligan) drags the film’s hero into that unhinged bar. There’s a classic 80s “food is gross” buffet scene followed by a mission briefing. You, Heavenly Kid, are not quite good enough for paradise (because your a greaser). But if you can rescue this other downcast 80s kid—and turn him into a cool 80s greaser (take that almighty)—you will be cleared for the escalator.

The movie is garbage but contains one of my favorite purgatory moments in film. Have you ever feared an awful bar mirrorverse where every exit is the entrance so when you try to escape you just keep ending up in the same ***** bar. (BTW the angel character is charming—I would describe his vibe as Doc Brown from Back to the Future but played by Gary Busey).

The film’s purgatory mission begins on an afterlife subway train taking our likable bumbling dummy, the heavenly kid, back to Earth. I should mention that he originally dies a cliff-chicken loser. Who is offered the chance to be the hero, to "rescue" a kid from making his exact same mistakes. And rescue kid makes the exact same cliff-chicken mistake with the heavenly kid in the car. The heavenly kid drives off two cliffs in this movie... And then is let into heaven.

We didn't have much else going on in the 80s so we watched it. WOLVERIIIINES!!!

PS: to the purgatory heads (hello!)_drop a popular fiction purgatory below!

A Dying Summer’s Suburban Slumber (part 2)... Ambience

Evening pool aerator/ lawn mowing/ bugs ambience. This recording plays in three acts, the first bit is all mowing, then mostly pool aerator and birds, then a curtain of night insects descend.

The kids are back in school, and our local department store has already put up Jack-o’-lanterns. Summer is over — dead. I found eggnog at the grocery store. The bugs you hear are just one frost from calling it an existence. It’s time to recapture the sounds of late summer (to maybe revisit during hollow, depressing February).

I can say it was exactly a year ago if it’s been 364 days, right? What’s one day between friends? I’m sure Neil deGrasse Tyson would be like, “Well, wait a minute…” But he’s not a friend. I don’t even know him.

So — exactly, precisely, literally one year ago — I published the first A Dying Summer’s Suburban Slumber, an audio portrait of late summer bugs and hums in a Northern Virginia backyard (complete with manmade sounds like cars and the low buzz of an Applebee’s sign in the distance).

One year ago today (in the strictest possible sense), we bring you the sequel — this time from the Buckeye State, land of Cornhenge, the Wright brothers, and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. #Ohio

Special thanks to the folks who let us record from their backyard — and to regular contributor Dr. April for capturing the sounds.

I was in the middle of folding my laundry when I heard a crackle of thunder — so I grabbed my microphone and ran out to the shed, pressed record, and dashed back to the house. My watch congratulated me for hitting my move goal.

My whole young life I had been naive to calamity, feeling the universe must revolve around me and thus of course I would be some famous screenwriter with a sports car and a mansion with like fifty hot tubs (hot tubs always being my barometer for success — ever since that childhood stay at a swank Courtyard by Marriott in Augusta, GA). 

My feeling of indestructibility never shifted into the realm of weather. I’m amazed I couldn’t use that reality to break my narcissism elesewhere.

Whatever, lightning; lightning scares the **** out of me. Whenever the sun is blotted out by a massive thunderstorm I am positive that any second I could be speared by Zeus.

I don’t know where I’m going with this other than “fear the sky;” so I’ll stop. And finish by saying the episode cover was a bit of fun in Photoshop. I wanted to visit an old muse, the Unholy Cumulus, a mischievous cloud that starred in a Nike Presto ad from the early aughts by my first production house crush, Shynola. When I saw the ad I was like, “that is the type of ‘what’ I want to do for a living.”

We're back in Appalachia! This recording captures about an hour on the banks of the New River in the southeastern part of West Virginia’s pan — you can call it a pan right? When I lived in Jefferson County folks to the west called us panhandlers.

You’ll hear Sandstone Falls, the calls of local birds and insects, and a couple of trains rumbling by (midway and end).

This week’s episode was recorded by regular uncommon ambience contributor Dr. April Blakeslee (who is a researcher and associate professor of Biology at Eastern Carolina University).

Her travels brought her recently to New River Gorge and specifically the Sandstone Falls area. Thank you Dr. April!

(obviously the New Rive Gorge Bridge is twenty miles as the crow flies from the Sandstone Falls but as a bridge freak I couldn’t resist adding a fave bridge to my episode cover... and don't get me started about CBBT).

LOST EPISODE: Microphone Inside Domed Grill During a Thunderstorm... Ambien

“Look hon! I’m using the grill.” This is a thunderstorm recording from under the dome of my (Weber Original) grill. The grill she gifted me on Father’s Day and I promptly pushed to the back corner of our yard because I am terrible at it. 

Not as bad as the turkey scenes in Christmas Vacation, but close enough. The charred pieces are claimed by my wife (who likes overdone) and the rarer pieces get cut and passed to me (who only likes it that way) and the rest is disseminated amongst the kids.

Do I lose my man card for being terrible at grilling? Is that still a thing? I will never understand how outstanding outdoor cooks are maligned by some ridiculous notion that a man and grill will make magic sans practice. Perhaps that’s why all the grill masters I know won’t shut the **** up about grilling and how good they are at it. They must need to drown out the expectations that ordinary folks who can’t even cook inside will somehow be ****** Emeril Lagasse⁠ outside. 

And I’m not invoking Emeril because I wanted to link to his 90s cooking Tonight Show. That dude is from (viva) Fall River, Massachusetts where the undercurrent of Americana and revolution still flow out to sea under the Bragga Jr. bridge (which feels less sinister since the cooling towers came down). 

This slice of Southern New England paints visions of cannons being fired into bellies of British warships, “take that you ************* tax-loving sons of *******!”

Revolution! Americana! Visuals of a distressed eagle balancing arrows and olives as fireworks pop around it. Extruded stars and bunting and “**** yeah, dude!” 

We should ditch the olives at this point, because, who are we kidding? Our bird should clasp a grilled hot dog. Just not a hot dog I grilled. That’ll be charred and half-exploded.

--this is a lost episode in that it should've run a month ago — I had published a more relaxing episode for July 4 (to cover for folks who wanted counter-programming to all the explosions happening outside their homes) and totally forgot to run this episode (which was my original July 4th episode)... whatever happy August 4th.