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Did you ever listen to the episode of Coast to Coast where a distraught man called in and claimed to have worked at Area 51? He said that what we thought of as interplanetary beings were actually interdimensional, and that his location was being triangulated, then the entire show cut off. Good stuff.

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Exhaustion sets in after another day of elation and overexcitement... So glad I didn't (p)regift that Pixie Project bookmark...resplendent with our wedding colours...mirroring the once-in-a-lifetime purchase of my Milan-made winter coat (definitely worth it btw!)...validating my life choice to make purple my hallmark.. and you didn't even know it was going to me.

Bravo! That gesture is absolutely going to create positive ripples across the universe.

Plus I'm not going blind!! (passed my vision test with flying colours for the first time in a good decade).

You'll understand my pun machine being in stunned mode.

Thanks for the tall (?) tale. ;)

Glad you had a less eventful flight than in Survivor

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Alex Jones?

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Most nights out it used to be Worcester for me but now it’s Providence. A fucking lovely town, it has a lot more heart and personality. Plus there’s an actual gay community there. The old one in Worcester died some time back in the early 2000’s and now all that left is a dive called “The Malebox,” with nothing but old men waiting to pounce on unsuspecting teens and 20 something’s. If one could stand to ride a half hour south from old Woosta, there is brighter light with colorful drag queens and glory holes.

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Art Bell and endless discussion of contrails on Coast to Coast. Usually listened to on AM radio while driving somewhere on an empty highway at 2 in the morning. Looking back, given the time and the dark highways, I can imagine we were all a little more susceptible to the most outlandish of tales.

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"In another minute we’ll be strangers once more. We will never again see each other. But part of me will always be sitting next to her, staring at the skyline of Manhattan and hearing her whisper."...Too good Mr Palahniuk. Just lovely.

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LOL. Speaking of outrageous stories. My friend slipped me the most outrageous story to add to chapter two of my essay. Apparently feral cats have been breaking into body farms and eating the fresh human dead bodies laid out for study at the universities. LOLOL They stated "Cats showed preference for bodies in relatively early decomposition.” https://www.newsweek.com/feral-cat-eat-human-corpse-1482549 ...You're welcome. LOL

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Didn't mean to e-Rhode the quality of the dialogue, or the gift wrapping. 😜

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last section, what a beautiful moment of anonymous intimacy

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The tips of trees a silhouette in teals and navy blues. Fence posts made from thick old tree branches a blur as my Jeep dips into the cool valleys of the back roads. The road patches that snake the tar pressed roads begin to fade into darkness as the sun disappears under the horizon. Frogs and insects hum at each stop sign as I drive down the empty pavement.

This road my regular route home to Peculiar. A small town with a few stop lights and gas stations. Sometimes folks make comments about the town name. The local lore is that someone got tired of requesting names for the town that had already been selected. After multiple name submissions they finally asked to be given a peculiar town name, so they got what they asked for.

The headlights illuminate the fading striped lines and over grown grasses along the fence lines. Everything else is darkness. Suddenly the night sky lights up a strange shade of blue. Similar to the lighting of a lighting strike, but it lingers for a few seconds. Then the light recedes like a giant squeegee pulling it across the sky. Then darkness. I instinctively hit the brakes and hunker down in my seat a little. Peeking over the steering wheel I scan the night sky. Are we getting shelled by an attack? Was it a boulder burning through the atmosphere? There is no sound. No more lights. The gravel cracks under the tires as I start to head home once more.

I talk to my room mate about weird light that filled the entire night sky. They said their work mates saw it too in the town south of the area. Folks wondered if it was the military doing testing or UFOs. Maybe it was some big government experiment.

To this day, I still have no idea what lit up the sky that night out in the middle of no where. Never seen anything like it since. About a decade later, while watching Elon's space trash lighting up the night sky, I saw a video with a large meteor landing that did something similar to the night sky, so maybe it was a big space rock making its final landing after a long journey through space?

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Been a listener of coast to coast since the 90’s. Glad to know you are to , Chuck! Have a great tour!

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Do you think that anyone in a creative pursuit has to believe in magic on some level? Could someone who participates in absolutely no sort of magical thinking be a good musician, writer, or painter?

Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs is good stuff, and my life has been vastly improved by entertaining the idea that magic exists the past couple years.

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This story brings back memories of the time I was stranded at Belgrade airport in December 1992.

The Bosnian War was in full swing and the airport was completely dark and empty except for about a dozen passengers heading to various European destinations.

My only source of entertainment during my wait was a television that played "Take On Me" by Norwegian synth-pop band A-ha on an endless loop and my only source of sustenance was a duty free bottle of Absolute vodka I had bought with me from Australia.

As I waited for the next flight to Athens the airport slowly emptied and I found myself completely alone in the airport and half drunk.

Just before midnight the Olympic airlines plane arrived and before I boarded I was joined by a middle aged man dressed completely in black.

A huge round gold medallion shaped like sun hung on a thick gold chain over his black turtle neck and he also wore a quarter length black leather coat.

We arrived in Athens around 2:00 am and reached Greek customs together.

As I opened my luggage for inspection, the man in black produced a burgundy passport and I heard the customs officers discuss his diplomatic status and they waved him through without checking his briefcase.

Moments later I was standing at the taxi rank and I saw him standing next to a black Mercedes, as he was getting in he turned to me and smiled with sharp gold canines.

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I was just listening to George Noory's Coast to Coast the other night around 2am because Steve Shippy was on to talk about a recent paranormal documentary about Danny Rollings. One enthusiastic man from the East Coast called in and he was convinced that bisexuality was the key to becoming in tune with the spirit world. He was 100% sure it was the only way to fully experience the paranormal and that it aided in communicating with ghosts. I want two of whatever he was on :)

Also I am never canceling that subscription, Coast to Coast is exactly what I've been missing since Weekly World News left store shelves.

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What’s this technique called of going vast before ending intimate? I feel it’s a good trick to infuse the small specific moment with the wonder and weight of the universe. So here, you touch on Russia, China, Bigfoot, Mothman, nationally distributed tabloids, an eternal desire for spirituality, radio, evolving but familiar mythology, unchanging hatred and constant aspirations… And then you narrow your focus to the very specific and rare instructions to sit in the middle of the plane, and then you narrow further to a secret shared… that you’ll never forget because of the uniqueness of the moment… but I feel the weight of the moment is communicated to us by the expansive everything you first led our minds to consider before narrowing the story to that small moment. That this story moved me, (and, yeah, there’s the dynamic tension between “never” and “always” in the final paragraph), but I feel the story would have had less power if you had cut the expansion out of the tabloids to the world of wonder and instead simply started telling it from your boarding. Was that an intentional spell?

If not, it should be. I feel it’s a good short short story structure.

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My favorite adult bedtime stories during the first lock down here in France were the crazy absurd horrific adventures that were told in the podcast Welcome To Night Vale. The narrator has the deepest hypnotic voice ! I always fell asleep dreaming about this strange place that glorifies a purple cloud and even though times were uncertain in real life and the stories were between creepy and poetic, I felt safe here in my bed.

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