Thank You For Your Patience, Ft. Rebecca Campbell

like me. You use a microphone, it's very real. Yeah, you thieve we're recording. Let's let's do this. Hey, it's time for stories. We love. We love stories here at Etiquet Happen Here pod the podcast about how things are kind of falling apart and too maybe some ways to put them back together. Um, I'm Garrison. I'm starting this episode today. I'm not sure why roberts here. I'm real hungover. Robert is real hung because I didn't trust Robert to do his job today. But I trust you, Garrison. You

didn't really not trust me to do my job. I know. That's that's that's fun. We also we also have Christopher here and and we have uh writer Rebecca Campbell. Hello, hey, and uh, why don't you briefly explain who who you are and what what's what's going on today? Okay, Well, I'm a Canadian writer and sometimes I'm a teacher, but mostly I just write really sad stories about climate change

and ghosts and aies and near future stuff like that. Um. This story I'm reading is called thank You for Your Patients. It came out and Reckoning for I guess last year. And uh, it's based on my partner's time when he was working in a call center and the kind of nightmares stories that I heard from them every time he home from work. But it's also about me being on the other side of the country from the part of the world that I love the most, which is the

Pacific Northwest. Um. And you know, watching Fukushima a few years ago and watching wildfires a few weeks ago, and um, being separated from the things that are important to you, um, as they're all falling apart. Well, I'm just excited that this podcast is now two fifths Canadian, so that's that's the main thing I'm excited about. Uh. No, oh my god, I just a tim Horton's cup just appeared next to me. It's terrible donut home I have I do have a

Tim Hortons cupt in my kitchen. Um, anyway, let's uh, let's let's let's start this, start this, start this reading, Let's eat this popsicle stand as they say a thing, Let's continue, Let's let's eat this. Okay, thank you for your patience. I'm lucky because they replaced a bunch of chairs last month and I got a new one. A good chair is important when you spend ten hours a day in a cubicle talking to strangers about their problems.

I've been here three years and worked on most of Western Morgan's services, which means I can, with no thought, help grandma set up her WiFi, or troubleshoot banking software, or set up your cell phone plan, or help you with some app designed to find your soulmate that nevertheless feels you with hopelessness. I can't help you with the hopelessness. It's nonstandard, but I'm Western Morgan's floater, and Jordi, your Kirsty just dropped me. Where the calls are heavy or

turnover as high. On Twitter, I can answer questions within five seconds of some asshole in Toronto saying, what the fuck my TV doesn't see the house network, and I respond, I'm sorry to hear that Toronto asshole. Let's see if I can help. I'm at possible to rile because I've heard everything, every possible stupid question, every strange request regarding lapsed policies and mispayments, every paranoid rand, every sort of impotent rage. The management is shitty and the customers are irritable,

but there's beauty and problem solving. The really bad stuff started at the end of last month, when I had to do on one on one majority team lead for the floor. I've been fielding a bunch of questions regarding a recent patch that had broken everything. I had this rhythm, hitting my thirty second age T and typing without thinking, Mark here, how can I help you? But one on one is mandated interruptions, So I listened to Geordy brainstorm

about improving morale. They stopped having barbecues because it was too expensive, even when the burgers were sawdust and soy. Also, no one wanted to be outside because Detroit was still burning, and the PPM up to something like Beijing. Listen to this Western Morgan idol. Jordy told me we judge three of the top right calls, and we have a thing and someone walks away with a Timmy's gift card like fifty bucks. Jordi said that like it was a good thing. What about a key fob? I asked, we can't get

out with what without one? After hours? But only management could hold or the winner gets to wear Janes or keep their phone for a shift. That didn't write an answer. The most frustrating thing about Western Morrigan is that team leads have to hold your phone like you're an untrusted teenager who's been grounded. I feel like I'm lost in a cave or a space station. When I do a lot of overtime. I arrived when it's dark, and I

leave when it's dark. And while sometimes I go around the corner for coffee or McNuggets, it always feels like I'm just visiting the world. I don't know what's happened, if a government's fall on, or if an ice shelf has collapsed, if Detroit is burning again, or maybe California or the Great Lakes are dying at a slightly faster rate than they were before I left for work, never knowing what's going on outside. I sit in my good chair and say that sounds frustrating to everyone, no matter

who's talking or what they want. Let me see if I understand your problem. You could judge, Geordie, Stead said, still talking about Morrel. You're impartial. You hate everyone. I don't hate everyone, Georgy, I said reflexively, though, to be fair, I hate a lot of people here. After my mandated fifteen minutes with Jordy, I saw that Misty had a problem with my documentation, which has been rough since they changed policy on me. She's in the Philippines, where most

of the real work happens. Upper management is all in India. They only have us because they need Canadian accents on the phones, and they get tax breaks bringing jobs to one of the more desolate parts of the country down when from Detroit, rampant West Nile and of the province's heavy metals processed at the plant out by the ball of the baby's born. Here are girls something to do with residual b p A. Misty is on the other side of the Pacific in Lagaspi. But you think she

was right here considering how aggressively. She organizes us your ship at filling out forms. Mark the rite up is going to kill your rank. We're stack ranked. Every shift it gets you points you can redeem. You can redeem, which honestly is worth it for the grocery store gift cards. Just tell me what I did wrong, Lagaspie. We were

in the middle of a rough month. The flu hit everywhere at once, and no one could afford to lose the work, so we had a bunch of people come in, sick coughs and juicy sneezes all over the floor, and half the time you got on the elevator and everyone was gray faced and weaving. I came in over the weekend to cover Mobile because they lost half their staff, so I'd been on for eight days by Monday, when Jordy was manic trying to call people in so he

wouldn't have to go on the phones. He always says, when we're smoking outside and he's pointedly not looking at the place where the gam building used to be, It's not the extra fifty cents an hour, it's the fact I don't have to deal with people. He hated taking calls. He offered me overtime so I started coming in at six and leaving at ten, and I didn't even notice

the weekend. I do remember going home those nights and thinking how hollow my room felt with my roommates playing Call of Duty in the living room, and how my body seemed to vibrate caffeine maybe your pseudophedan. I heard phantom time warnings and chimes, and when I closed my eyes, I could see the screen and call after call flooding the queue. By Saturday, Western Morgan was a haunted house, but I still wasn't sick. That sounds frustrating. Let me see if I can help. I was dealing with this

woman on Vancouver Islands who couldn't generate invoices. We'd been at it for two hours and I could feel her getting upset when I told her to wipe the whole system and start again. I could help her with that, but she was like, no, we'll lose two weeks of work. There's nothing I can say to that, so we keep troubleshooting even though it's pointless. Okay, I said, you can go back to your route invoice and try. Oh, she

said what, And that was it. I didn't hear anything but the line itself, which just went dead, that kind of absence you get when someone hangs up on you. Are you there, ma'am? I called back, but I got a reorder tone, not voice mail or an old fashioned busy signal, but the one that means the whole system is busier, blocked or down. I dropped out of the queue then, which you're not supposed to do, obviously, and went looking for Jordy, who was chatting with Kirsty about

Western Morgan idol. I asked if they knew anything, but of course they didn't. And when I asked if I could at least grab my phone to see what was happening, Kirsty did a kind of elementary school teacher sigh. Documentation for three eight zero your overdue mark. Collar dropped. I saw that explanation happening across the board. Looks like the

problems at their end. I didn't find out until Moe came back from Brake Street to wet in the way you are if you run out into that rain blowing in from Detroit because you don't want it to touch your skin, saying earthquake on the West coast, You know anyone out there? I thought about the woman trying to get the invoice together for a tiny order of sea salts from some equally tiny place on Vancouver Island. Her business so miniscule it's still fit into our cheapest subscription.

In my unsubmitted documentation for Misty, I had written that her voice sounded like a hopeful but slightly overwhelmed great aunt trying to make the remote control work. No one, how bad like nine point six, the worst since forever, like for hundreds of years, Jesus, I said, Jesus, Jesus,

I've had similar moments on calls. When the shooting happened in Montreal, not View ma Real, but the one with the kids ran downtown from McGill and the photographer caught the girl as the bullet tour at her right kneecap. I was on the line with this dick wad in a coworking place on Maisonneuve, who was talking, who was asking to talk to my supervisor? Then midwine, he stopped talking like he suddenly didn't care about my attitude. I could hear his phone pinging, sir, are you there? Can

you hear that it's happening on the street. I can see a faint popping, voice raised and doors slammed. Then he cut the call. I kept in the queue. I helped someone update, I did a subscription renewal. The next person, though, needed a backup, and that took forever. So we chatted about hockey until she said, did you hear about Montreal? No, ma'am, I said, thinking about the sound I may be heard before his phone cut. Firecrackers, backfires. Some guy shot up

the whole downtown. I think it was terrorists, who knows, fl Q or Muslims, maybe Red Power fifty dead, but it was going up every single time ever fresh the page. She kept going on like this while we did a backup, and then I made sure everything worked. And it had been like three hours at that point, and I kept thinking of the guy in his silence and what was going on in the streets while we talked about his log in and how unprofessional I was. I don't have

any friends in Montreal. I went there once to drink when I was eighteen, but that's it. I just had that guy and the thump of footsteps fleeing the coworking space. When I took my break, the rain was falling again, the faintly gray kind that runs down the sidewalks and the gutters, and when it builds up enough you can see it's a little milky because it's full of ash.

If you think too hard about what's running into your eyes as you stand outside smoking until your pack is empty, you go eat a twenty four box of tim Bits or six Big Max, or you stopped for one beer on the way home, and only leave when they push you out the door. Geordie was outside. I gave him a cigarette, even though he doesn't smoke either, and he said, it doesn't seem to be getting cleaner. Wasn't it supposed to get cleaner. He grew up in Detroit, though he

was already over here when it burned last year. Maybe it's safer. The ham is worse. I thought the ham was supposed to go away. When they sent in the cleanup cruise. We watched the warm, ash colored water run down the gutters until it was ankle deep. This city is a wetland, and there isn't far for water to go,

so it ends up in people's basements. All that ashy, bony water unning through foundations and drains, a constant trickle in the background, sort of like the faint pop you might hear while you're on the phone with a guy from Montreal wants to talk to your manager. Does it feel Jordy said, and lit another cigarette. What Jordy I hate how often he doesn't finish his sentences. Does it feel like it's happening more? Now? The sort of thing. I dropped my smoke into the rain water and I shrugged.

Then I said I wish I knew what to tell you, which wasn't a real answer, and I used my tech support voice when I said it, because I didn't want to have that conversation. On my first break after the earthquake, I smoked and watched the rain and videos on my phone. Someone live streaming the moment it hit bored talk about food or weather, than a strange look on their face,

their eyes dart upward. Then the phone falls overhead. Footage from helicopters of downtown Vancouver, all those green towers swaying and falling, and the bridge swinging until the cable snap like rubber bands, the worst in recorded history, worse probably than the last megathrust in seventeen hundred. I just kept thinking of that woman and the sort of quiet shock

in her voice her, Oh is that? And then nothing, and I was standing out in the rain, still warm, when it occurred to me that I might have heard her last words. I kept thinking about the texture of the silence after the call dropped, and what had happened the moment after that, if that had been the worst of it, the shock of the whole world rumbling, or if it had been worse for her after that or right now or tomorrow. I only had ten minutes because

call volume was increasing. My throat started to tickle in the world just suddenly out of nowhere, started to look glassy. The light thick from the ceiling squares, and my skin prickled when I ran my hands over my arms, which were covered with goose bumps. The floor was nearly empty except for Jority running around supervising and not taking calls, and the cue was packed. My first call was round way north along the coast Prince Rupe heard a woman

calling about a password reset. I want Mark, she said, he helped me before. Can I talk to Mark? While I was documenting, I thought, fuck it, I'm gonna tell Misty what the old woman told me while we were waiting for the password reset email about how when you're that far north, you don't notice time passing, and you feel good in an unimaginable way in summer, luminous and hopeful, and how in winter all you want to do is die and drink yourself into a coma. So you know

it balances out. After that, I reopened three zero. An elderly woman, I wrote on a phone, trying to print invoices for locally produced sea salt, looks over at the rack of glass jars in which she keeps her stock because she hears a rattle, then another. Then she says, oh, is that and nothing else, because at that moment, the force of rashimas lit the Cascadius abduction zone, on which Vancouver Island rests like a cork in a bottle. Centuries

of continental tension released. I type that, then I hit send. Then I added a secondary note on her file. At eight thirty two p s t A nine point eight hit the Cascadia subduction zone, and Misty was right there on chad hive, not telling me it was inappropriate. She wrote, rest their souls, and I was comforted by those temporary words, which surprised me. My grandparents were on minda now in the nineteen seventy six earthquake, You got anyone there? No,

I heard the hum from Detroit. It was somehow a relief to know that across the world, Misty was in a similar room among people evaluating documentation for apps and I s p s and accounting software. People saying that must be frustrating. Let's see if I can help. Something occurred to me. Do you hear anything about tsunamis no word so far? Do you have your phones? You can get the alerts. They'll let us know we're so bad. I'm taking calls, so I won't be fixing your dog

until tomorrow. I wondered if Kirsty would let us know, or if she would dither about it until all we could do was climbed to the top floor of the building and watch a way consume what was left of Detroit before it swamped us to five more calls, and I refilled my water bottle, the one with the slogan on it fueling small business with the tools to succeed that some now lost Western Morgan contract brought in. And I was looking at my skin reflected in the sink,

which was the color of those pale, lumpy smokers. You see outside the entrance the color of a raw filet o fish. I felt adrenalized, like a moment before it'd been terrified, but I could not remember how or why. I wondered what it was doing to me inside. All those cells now remade into virus factories, turning to goog and wash and sloughing off while the virus proliferated through my system, and I left traces of it on everything I touched. The water ran over the top of the

bottle clear. So far the ash hasn't worked its way in through the city's water system, or maybe it has, and it was invisible like the microplastics in the lake. So you're gonna judge it, was Jordy. We're gonna do it next week. I was thinking, we set a time limit, like five minutes, you and me and Kirsty judge it. I'll grab a fifty for the Timmy's card too, man, I said. Georgie just stared at me. You're getting sick.

You know what you need to do. He went on about ekenesia and flu effects, and I thought about the tsunami that was or was not traveling across the Pacific, or just hammer your system with antioxidants to take a double dose of night quill. Without thinking, I pulled my phone out of my pocket. You know you can't have that anywhere on the floor. I was already googling Pacific tsunami alert, and it was rolling rainbows, and I stared at it so hard that it seemed to take over

the whole world. And then I shivered. But Jority was still talking, don't make me write you up. I don't want to deal with it, okay, I said, It's about privacy for our users. They need to know that they can trust our integrity, our word, and our system. The poster on the far side of the break room said integrity, word and system. I saw that the alert had been issued for Japan. That's when he took my phone. You fucked the dog. I have to write you up. I

don't want to write you up Japan. And six hours, eight pm I'd still be on. Then, while very far away, a wave crested on the sea coast, filling the river basins and the car parks. I know you don't have to surrender your phone, even if they can require you to leave it at home. I know they're not supposed to lock you in either or let you smoke within three ms of the door, even when the ashes falling.

They're not supposed to pay you in points. You can then exchange for grocery store gift cards, which you need because the new minimum wage wasn't even covering rent. But I needed a job. The next call I got was farther south, closer to the epicenter. The first thing I did was asked about the earthquake. Oh, we felt it, and there's a tsunami warning. But we're far enough inland it shouldn't be tsunami warning. So when I go try to log in tsunami, I keep getting the same error.

It says my accounts frozen. What does that mean? I need to do some invoices And yeah, I just got the text like half an hour ago. Landfall is like an hour. The account was frozen due to misspayments. So I pointed that out and the guy insisted no. He set up an automated transfer, and he kept me on the line while he chatted with the banks tech support on another line to sort out the direct deposit, and

then I reactivated his account. All this time the tsunami traveling towards the coast or the shallower bottom would raise the waves height by narrowing its length. Because the last time I'd been outside, I'd looked at a gift on Wikipedia that demonstrated how tsunami's crest as they traveled through shallow waters. The last thing he said wasn't thanks it was there. It is. The tide's going way out. I

hope everyone's out of downtown. Then he was gone, and I can imagine it, the water running away from the shore like a huge exhalation and then collecting into a rising wave that would destroy them all the tsunami warning I wrote in chat hive, hoping Misty was there. Kirsty responded instantly that is not appropriate. Chat hive is for important work stuff. We haven't heard anything, but we were swamps, so who knows what's going on outside. Chat Hi channel

will only be used for appropriate business related business. Maybe you should get out. Chat hi channel will only be

used for appropriate business related business. I've been there for sixteen hours and I couldn't remember the last time I slept a full night at home when I hadn't been buzzed on cold pills in exhaustion and the sound of call of duty from the living room that week when I did sleep, I kept saying, this is Mark from Magnicore, or this is Mark from wherever I am right now, and heard explosions and the way voices carry over the river from Detroit, the screams and the crowds and the gunshots.

Or maybe I was never actually asleep, Maybe I was just off my head. I shouldn't have washed the pills down with beer. But there's that thing that happens when you stop in for a beer after work, and the inertia of the whole thing, the job, the shitty beer, and the fact that a person brings you food even if you can't afford it. It sticks you to your seat.

It was bad last summer when we couldn't afford to run the a C. But the bar on the way home could, and it was full of familiar guys, broke and lonely and trying to avoid looking at what was left of the Detroit skyline, or the gray green clouds boiling to the north, and the hail and the lightning storms every afternoon like clockwork. The summers are definitely hotter, and the mosquitoes are definitely worse. And the last summer I noticed that the birds don't sing anymore, all their

whistles and like video game lasers. I stepped outside for another cigarette and realized the door had been locked. And I don't have a fall because I don't rate a fob. Jordy was there too, setting up his stupid Western Morgan idle piles a bright pink and green and blue post it. Now it's all over his desk. I need to go out. The doors are locked for the night. I need to go out. We lost another girl from online. You'll have to take over social media if we lose anyone else.

Take your break here. I just kind of stared at him, and my skin prickled, like all the suit of a phedron I had taken had rushed to the surface and was blasting every single nerve ending in my body. I need to go outside. You can't, like you physically can't. I kind of stood there, and I'm ashamed to say I wanted to cry, like a little kid who isn't allowed to use the bathroom, who just wants to sit with his dad but keeps getting dragged away by unfamiliar relatives.

The kind of crying you see on the bus at rush hour when some little kid coming back from the mall loses it and lies in the aisle wailing, cramming road salt in his mouth, and you just think you and me both. I didn't actually cry. I hate myself because I just said, begging, can I please have my phone back? Please? Jordy looked at me like I was an idiot him in the middle of all the post it notes that read congratulations, and You're a winner and

Western Morgan idol. I didn't say anything. I left at first. I just sat in the lunch room, shivering and nauseated, staring at the plastic solo cup left over from the barbecues they used to give before the ash. There will be worse moments in my life, no doubt, more pain, more sadness, but I can't imagine anything so wide ranging in its desolation as that moment. The only thing I could focus on was telling Missy to get her phone back and watch the horizon and be ready to escape.

A girl from online staggered through, sweaty and pale, and I knew that Jordy would be there in a minute to ask for another eight hours overnight answering stranger's questions so perfectly that they treat me like a shitty customer service AI built to serve. There aren't a lot of choices in life, are there. You can choose to have kids or not, to leave your hometown or not, or to stay in a terrible job you are, for some reason, very good at. But other than that, what is there?

Just a lot of compliance and non compliance. This moment didn't feel like a choice. I said to the girl, we need to get out of here, and she nodded. Then we headed down to the lobby. The doors were locked and no one caring a key was in the building, and the girl just looked bad. But when I went to the fire escape, she still said, no, no, we're not supposed to. We need to get out. They'll fire us. And I could hear the fear in her voice, and I wondered how badly she needed this job, that she

was here in the middle of the night. It's so sick she could hardly stand. Tell them I did it, I said, and hit the bar, only it didn't move because the fire escape was locked too. The next thing I did was stupid, but I don't know what else I could have done. I walked back to the lobby and picked up a garbage can and began slamming it into the glass door behind me. She was coughing and coughing and said maybe stop, stop, but so faintly I

could ignore it. Then we were out, and she was staggering towards the emergency room on wilette and I was alone in the rain water the same temperature as my blood. Then I went looking for a pay phone, because the only way to sort this out was to call in. But I couldn't remember which of Western Morgan's departments Misty was assigned to. So when I finally found the city's last pay phone in the bus depot, I called them all, all the sad voices of men and women here and

on the other side of the world. Welcome to Kyphus Business Systems, Jane speaking, Can I help you? Welcome to Tesla Mobility. Can I help you? Welcome to ross Am Account Services. Welcome the Lighthouse Mobility. I'm looking for Misty, she helped me before. I'm sure I can help you. What's your user number? Misty? Misty knows, I said, my voice, queer less and elderly. Put on Misty. I could hear the exhaustion in his silence. Than the compliance one moment,

I'll transfer you. Hey, Misty, I said, Misty, Misty, you need to get to high ground. What who is this? Just promise, Kay, there's no tsunami warning. It's on its way. It's passing Japan and Hawaii. It hit the Allusians California. I hope she didn't mistake me for what I felt like right then, a crazy old man mad with loneliness, longing to hear a voice in the void, even if it was only to harangue them for the weakness of their service and the terrible nature of their product. Mark,

another six hours to landfall. I know you'll still be on shift, promise. I waited for her to disconnect, which was okay because at least I told her then. I think maybe she said thank you, Mark, or maybe it was just the noise in my head. I held the line another moment that hung up. I felt okay because I got through, because I wasn't in a cubicle anymore, because I could walk home and enjoy the silence before call of duty marathons in the living room, enjoy the

ashy rain falling across my slowly cooking skin. I walked home. Misty I walked home hoping. Misty said, thank you Mark.

It felt like I was slipping through a gap in the world between noises, a kind of silent passage, the way kids slip along the abandoned rail easements in town below grade, the corridors of grass and rats and squirrels and birds, between the noise of the phones and call of duty, between heart beats, between crusting waves, the silence you hang on to for just a moment when someone hangs up, before you go on to the next call, because there is temporarily a respite from the tyranny of

the queue, The silence after a bullet connects or a wave hits on the other side of the world. I just hope harder and harder and harder that Misty would insist they unlock the doors and break the windows, and they would escape before the wave arrived to wash the rest of us away. I don't know how to add a clapping sound effect without it just sounding horrible in the audio. Airhorns, you know what, Daniel um already straight seconds of air horns or or or not? Um? I

think the air horns are good. I was beautiful. Yeah, that was wonderful. It's really incredible, Thank you so much, and particularly relevant now Yeah yeah, unfortunately, Yeah yeah, it's with what's happened. Yeah yeah, that is extra extras thinking about the whole town, what happened in the past week. Yeah, yeah, that is a it sucks. HM. If people want to find more of your work, or if there's anything you'd like to plug, now is the time, okay. UM. I

have a website. It's called where is here dot c a UM and I have jeez links to a bunch of my different short stories there. I have a novella coming out next year. A few years ago I postulationed a novel UM. But if you're interested in the climate change stuff, there's probably one I'd recommend called UM an Important Failure that was in Clark's World. It's available to read online. It's been translated into Polish. It's in a

couple of different collections. UM. And if I'm allowed to brag, which it won this the the Sturgeon Award last year, which is a science fiction award handed out by UM, an academic organization in the US SO and it's about it's about climate change. It's all set on Vancouver Island in Vancouver. I've heard you. I've heard you also have stories about ghosts. Yes, I have a genre I'm trying to establish that I call obstetrical horror that I started

writing when I was pregnant. Yeah, giving birth is just such body horror. So ghosts, childbirth, all that stuff. Yeah, I read a lot about ghosts as well. You can find, like I say, a lot of that stuff on my website and links to anything that's available for free online. So yeah, where is here? Dot c A and I'm on Twitter a um at Canadianist, but I don't really use it that much. So I am excited for the

combination of climate change fiction with horror fiction. Um, And by excited, it's like half half actually excited, half dreading because a lot of it's gonna probably be horrible in terms of people being like, you know, what's scary climate change and you're like, okay, but yeah, but oh sorry,

go on. I don't know, but I think there definitely is a good way to combine the the exsential elements of both of those things to something that actually is really impactful that plays on human fears and emotions and how we can get over those fears and move towards something useful. Yeah. And it's also that horror going back for well however long you want to we've been telling stories has given us a series of structures to kind of process that. UM. And I think that's really valuable,

that their patterns we can use to work through. And I mean writing climate change fiction for me, I just finished another novella UM that's specifically about like near future stuff and about the wildfires a lot um. But you know, having a story to tell about it as a way of process sing all the research I was doing UM was really valued. It's super useful. Yeah, and just um, I mean, you can call it therapeutic if you want,

But I don't think it's that. I think it's organizing information in your head that is just simply too large for you to actually grasp. I mean I can't actually grasp this stuff. But no you can't. It's it's too bad. Yeah, exactly exactly trying to me. Yeah, horror does that probably

better than almost any other genre. Yeah, I mean, look what it horror does with adolescent anxieties or um, you know, all sorts of different the fear of dying, the fear of aging, the film if your illness and stuff like that. So yeah, I think we have structures in place with horror fiction, um and with sort of science fiction horror that kind of are gonna let us start to process things that are otherwise just too intellectual or not intellectual.

But to abstract that's too it's too Yeah, abstractors, I think is the right term, because I mean, like, guess my fear of that is that, like climate change fiction is just gonna resort to like the disaster story and it has very like glamorized, weird versions of like apocalypses and disasters and like collapse and very like big ways

that impact everything around you. When in actuality, the effects that they have are very localized and small and are still horrifying, but the way that they're framed is always frustrating.

In films, and you look at like, you know, a typical like you know, like apocalypse themed movie, I think is I'm afraid that the bigger you know, if you turn turn talking about like big movies, how it's going to frame in that way instead of these more kind of personal stories of like the horror of being trapped inside a warehouse as a tornado comes and you're not allowed to leave, which is a way more horrifying than Oh, look, all of New York City is crumbling because of this pseudami,

which is so big and like possible, I guess, but like that's so big you can't feel that. And what's more like gonna happen is people getting trapped in buildings and not being allowed to leave. And that's that's that's like, that's actual horner. Yeah, and it's intimate too, write like it's not it's not in distant idea. It's intimate. It's the particular consequence of something for a community, for an individual,

for relationships. And if I can go on on this um, there's an entire genre of apocalyptic fiction that kind of comes out of the early Cold War, and they're always these weirdly cozy apocalypse is where one white guy survives and in the new world he builds this kind of

feudal fantasy. So I've actually this one filled the Last Babylon, where a character says, of these two spinster ladies that were miserable before the nuclear war, after the nuclear war, they're really happy because their lives have meaning now, And it's this it's those are the apocalyptic stories that we've had we need a new kind of story, a new kind of horror that I think, um that does exactly what you're talking about, that doesn't default to that weird

heroism and one guy surviving kind of thing. There's a wonderful Corey doctor short story that that I think pivots off that idea nicely. Um In his his book What is Unauthorized Toast, I think Bread an authorized Bread is one of the stories in it, But the book is has a different it's a collection of his short stories.

But there's um a post apocalyptic story that kind of follows a bunch of tech bros trying to do the traditional like survive the the apocalypse makes everything you know better for me, I get to be a cool warlord thing.

It's it's good. It doesn't end well for them. Um, yeah, I I think the I think the thing that is important to do is like focus on the horror of the little things, like the little things on like a global scale, Like like the thing that is so frightening about climate change is that all of these the terrible things it's bringing are going to hit the same way mass shootings do, where it is a calamity for a community and people fifty miles away, try to pretend it

didn't happen and get to doing like their their daily stuff. Like that's what's that's what's so scary about it. It's not like you said, it's not the buildings in New York collapsing from a tidal wave. It's the birds stop

singing and you still have to go to work. I'm I'm I'm writing a script right now for probably the show about how climate change is hard to think about because because how how big it is and one of like the models that I'm trying to draw a comparison from this, Like it's almost like climate changes is like a type is like a type of Cathulhu in terms of the way it affects you, but you'll probably get by it's it can affect your neighbors, and you can watch it and you can watch it have other people,

but like it doesn't mean that your life is going to end this way because it's so it's so ma can uncaring, it can attack so many places at once, but you don't know how like how big this effects are and how and what what what what the scale of them will be on your local area. So it's like this it's this thing that is way more existential than anything else because it it does not, it does not care, it has it has no morality. It's it's

not it's not out to get you specifically. It's this weird, this weird thing that's just getting imposed upon us now. And that type of horror in fiction, I think is something that at least I want to explore in my next few years of writing. And I'm excited to read other people's work who kind of covered that similar side of horror and combining with like climate change and the small ways it's going to start affecting us in places

around the world. I think, um, that what you said and isn't isn't there so many talks about the Catholic scene. I don't know. That's Donna Harroway, Donna Harroway, that's it. Yeah, Um, But but also just how weak some of our previous narratives like you can't you can't bring in you new Judeo Christian apocalypse is to this kind of thing because we can't. There's not you can't. We can't have that

kind of moralizing in it, um that we need. And that's honestly, Cathulo is really handy for that cosmic horror because it forces you to, as you say, face something on an existential level. Um that how you feel and who you are and your individual experience does not matter. So it's like a lot of people, like you know us, we're watching what's happening in Kansas right now, and like I'm not in Kansas. I don't know anyone in Kansas. I'm looking at this calamity and it's so distant from me,

but yeah, it's also very close. And that's a weird feeling to deal with. UM. And I can see oh yeah, corporations are contributing to this specifically, like climate change as in general, but like like Amazon trapping people inside inside these warehouses. It's like, I can there's ways to fight extensions of this, but you can't fight it. You can

only fight its extensions. And that's and yeah, it's it's it's a super it's a super interesting thing that I'm gonna I think, Yeah, we are going to see you know, this, this idea get dealt with more and more as these things start happening more and more. Um and yeah, I mean climate change, cosmic corps maybe maybe the way to go. Yeah, yeah, I think that's I think that's a good line to end on, or at least a good thought to end on. Well, thank you so much, Rebecca for coming on and sharing

your story. Would you mind plugging your website one last time since we extra like fifteen minutes. No, no, no, no, that's that's people may not have noted it last time before the conversation. We should give them another chance. Okay, So the website it is, where is here? Dot c A so w h E r I s h E r E dot c A excellent all right, Well, thank

you very much, Rebecca. Um, until next time, everybody lose your mind with the cosmic horror something something anything, any kind of cosmic car that causes you to to your your mind to scramble and you to begin worshiping in the dark corners of the world. Any anything that does that is good. So well, thank you so much for having me. It's an absolute pleasure, very very happy to have you with you. It could happen. Here is a

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