STRAY COUNTRY
50 episodes
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Creator: C.K. Turner
Solo Horror Serial Audio Book
Synopsis:
There is a country beyond that which is known to humankind. A stray country. A country that exists west of October. Whose borders are somewhere between midnight train whistles and the distant howl of a dog. A country that lies somewhere in the stitched and jittering static between radio stations. A country that drifts through America like a traveling salesman, but every now and then stops to nest on a small town. A small church. A single street. And maybe, just maybe, some kinda delayed radio broadcast you’ve stuffed in your ears . . . STRAY COUNTRY is a fiction podcast. Original Novels. Delivered chapter by chapter. Come to the Country - www.straycountry.com. If you’d like to support the podcast consider leaving a rating, sharing it on social media/with a friend, or visiting my Patreon page https://www.patreon.com/ckturner See you in the Country . . .
Format: Audio Book
Continuity: Serial
Writing: Scripted
Voices: Solo
Genres: Horror
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Episodes:
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Trailer
Thu, 13 May 2021 13:02:05 -0600
1987. America. The suburbs. Old Lady Brogan dies on Halloween trying to light her cigarette. A cigarette held in the mad conquistador grip of a dead woman all Halloween day. A cigarette that falls from her hand as her body is carted away. A cigarette found by two boys who soon after begin being followed by a white plastic grocery sack. A cigarette they can no longer return because it's been smoked . . . somewhere in Stray Country.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Opening Narration
Tue, 18 May 2021 18:39:37 -0600
Portrait of a small suburban street. This is the world homecoming G.I.s built after witnessing death delivered on an industrial scale. Small. Quiet. Ordinary. Well behaved to the point of being boring. Green manicured lawns stretched out like slumbering cats. Polite little houses, all standing in a row. Two trees per yard. A streetlight keeping watch on every corner and smoke panting up out of a thousand chimneys like the soft plumes of faraway trains. There's something of a carousel quality to it all. Been here before. Seen this already. But this is where men who'd gone to fight the first fully mechanized war tried to forget about it. A war without horses. A war dedicated to the patron saint of internal combustion. Where cannons drove themselves, and gasoline was as good as gunpowder. A war governed by bombs and bigger bombs and bigger bombs until the bombs had grown so big there was fear they'd crack the planet like a nut. These poor boys came home looking for a quiet not even the churches could portion. Hushed corners of America had to be built to suit, named Southmoor, or Westmoor, or Moormont where former soldiers tried to drain their heads of all the noise of the frustrated, frightened century. The jangled century of hate and heavy industry and fascist wars. If you've ever stood on a quiet suburban street in the middle of the day and noticed the hushed picture has something of a cemetery quality to it, you may consider who it was built for, after where they'd been, and what they'd seen. Men who thought they were running away from the machines, but ended up in the same place. Like a ride on a carousel. Because their homes and streets were milled at a rate of thirty houses a day in a distilled twenty-six step process. Manufactured on the same scale, using the same principles and converted energy of industrial war engines. You see, a hungry beast built this peace and quiet. A hoggish, greedy entity that shows up once humankind starts playing with machines. A type of pig.
. . . and even though this is 1987, there is still something hungry on Eastmoor Road.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 1
Thu, 20 May 2021 10:57:38 -0600
Old Lady Brogan dies on Halloween trying to light her cigarette. A cigarette clutched in the mad conquistador grip of a dying woman all Halloween day. Turning a simple Marlboro Red into some kind of backwards and badly-spoiled relic.
This is a woman who began her dying early, hoisting her automatic knuckles, walking a long agonizing route through a maze of smoke and cellophane. A woman who lived for the spark of a flint wheel, the candle-like glow of a cheap plastic Bic, and the prayer-like ritual of the very first drag.
You see, this was Mary Brogan's very last cigarette. And she's not going to leave it behind.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 2
Thu, 27 May 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Halloween night. Four hours from November. Jack-o'-lanterns flicker on porches. Leaves fall from the trees. The street is washed in all the milk colors of the moon. And the trick or treaters have thinned to nothing.
A reverential hush has descended on Eastmoor Road after the passing of one of their own. Neighbors are tucked back into their warmly lit homes to think on the lost bits and pieces of a woman named Mary Brogan - here only this morning, now plucked out of the fabric of humankind.
Mary Brogan. The only smoker on the street. A woman whose arms were lifted and lugged by a company called Phillip Morris. A woman known for hoisting her automated knuckles, her marionette arms hauling tar and tobacco and the soft red glow of a cigarette.
Billy used to walk past her house nights and see her Marlboro Red blinking on and off like a radio tower. The signal is gone. But as Billy passes her house tonight, his ears tune into something else . . . something that sounds a lot like radio static.
A white plastic sack, fluttering in her willow tree . . .
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 3
Thu, 03 Jun 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Marlboro Country. Stray Country. Two countries that share a common border. Spend enough time in one, and you're likely to find the other. One exists in the semi-gloss pages of 1950s American magazines, a country once stumbled upon by accident, waiting in a dentist office or driving past a billboard at the side of a freeway. The other is similarly a country entered by pure chance.
Both may kill you.
Mary Brogan, former citizen of Marlboro Country, expatriated. Current status - refugee. Location - somewhere in Stray Country.
There is a nightmare endemic to the soil of both countries. A nightmare by the name of nicotine. It is the same nightmare as prison bars, leg irons, and state penitentiaries. The kind of nightmare ghosts basted themselves in night sweats over.
Mary Brogan. Died trying to light her cigarette. A woman who spent her life working on a single, solitary puzzle. Morning. Noon. Night. Kitchen. Living Room. In front of the television. An enigma unraveled thread by thread. Year by year. A single-gram puzzle made out of tobacco, tar, filter, and paper that a woman needs to solve no matter how dead she is.
No moral, no message, no prophetic tract, just a simple statement of fact
Mary Brogan's not gone. She's just crossed borders. And she wants her cigarette.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 4
Fri, 11 Jun 2021 03:33:00 -0600
A school off script.
What makes up a school? Kids. Textbooks. Teachers. Noise. Daylight. Strip these away, one by one, and start stacking up midnight hours against the vacant building, what might you find?
Maybe, a small corner of Stray Country.
You see, if you're a boy like Billy, a boy who's begun to wonder if he's being followed by a white plastic grocery sack, then you're also a boy that can see a school is only a school when all the right ingredients are stirred together. But take them away one by one, mix in silence, space, quiet, nighttime, flickering fluorescents - and the tight threads of school begin to unravel . . .
There's a science book in there somewhere. At least, there was by day.
And a janitor.
The type of man who might just whisper to white plastic sacks.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 5
Fri, 18 Jun 2021 03:33:00 -0600
There is a building not far from your home. A squatty, ugly building. Expansive. Long. But small, in the eyes of the world. Of little historical consequence. It will have no historian. No lengthy narration. No bound and shelved chronicle. Someday, it will be torn down and built anew. After which it will exist in the memories of those who were unlucky enough to have passed through it, until the bodies that hold those memories are eaten by worms or shut up in a furnace. It is a building that haunts folks no matter how far they run from it. No matter how many years they put between themselves and it. A building that does as much to shape a kid as a rigid church, a broken home, a drunken father.
It is a building composed in the main of bricks and mortar. But in truth, built on the strange shifting tides of adolescent years. A building where children are forced to inter their childhoods, and try on the strange, starchy, and ill-fitting funeration clothing of adulthood. A burial ground for song, dance, and invisible friends. A corner of the country where Americans lose the faith, in the religion of being children.
Which means an ill-lit corner of Stray Country.
And would you believe there is a man who chose this building as his place of employment? He's called a janitor. And he's the man who mops up the molt of kids' childhood shells. After hours. Alone. By himself. Perhaps looking . . . perhaps, wondering . . . just where he misplaced his own childhood.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 6
Fri, 25 Jun 2021 03:33:00 -0600
There is a man in this tale who is never named. A man simply called by a singular title, same as Prophet, Priest or King.
Janitor
A man who once upon a time had much in common with Mary Brogan. And though the two never met, both were disciples of Phillip Morris's strange religion. Both engaged in faithful worship. Daily prayers. Morning study. Sunday service. And all the other sacraments of the religion.
But while Mary Brogan died in the faith, the janitor is a man in a state of apostasy. A man who shut his Bible years ago, so to speak. A fence-sitter in the war for people's lungs. A man who did his damnedest, but never could give up cigarettes. So he gave up matches. Lighters. Fire of all types. A man who still plants an empty prayer on his lips by the name of Marlboro Red. A lonely cigarette that never meets a match. Like a prayer that gets written down, but never sent to God.
This is a man who once upon a time blessed the sacrament at The Church of Phillip Morris. A priest familiar with the alter cloth of white plastic grocery sacks used in service. A clergyman whose own golden years were the incense in the censer.
And though he's no longer practicing, you never outgrow the religion of your youth. Which makes him the type of man who may just notice if a boy were being followed by a white plastic grocery sack.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 7
Fri, 02 Jul 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Only one day ago, there was a stray corner of Stray Country kept hemmed in by a retired seamstress on Eastmoor rd.
Mrs. Mary Brogan, who by the sacraments of her religion was aging. An over-the-hill husk of a woman who now and then caught a reflection of a woman who'd left too many pieces of her youth in too many ashtrays for too many years for too few executives at 120 Park Avenue.
Mrs. Mary Brogan, a woman who kept the faith, but left a second chance lying in a pile of smoke in a glass-blown ashtray somewhere on Eastmoor rd.
A woman who always believed the next cigarette was her last cigarette, and her last cigarette was her last chance.
A woman who still believes it . . . even in death.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 8
Fri, 09 Jul 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Mom.
Dad.
Two actors who headline the Broadway pageant of our lives. But in Stray Country may play bit parts to a cigarette. Third billing to a dead lady down the street. Be upstaged by a white plastic grocery sack.
Two people who may as well be in another country.
Because they are.
This is how Stray Country works.
It is not a country a man decides to visit. It is not a country a woman flies or drives to. It is not a place anyone can point to on any map.
It is a country that finds you.
Takes you far away.
Somewhere very staticky.
Somewhere between radio signals.
Somewhere beyond the range of parental radio towers.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 9
Fri, 16 Jul 2021 03:33:00 -0600
We've reached the part of the story where it may be time to ask yourself, perhaps it's time to consider the origin of the white plastic grocery sack. What it is. And how it got here.
Don't bother reaching for your phone.
You don't need it.
Because you already know it was made by a group of people. Men or women who hog-tied one dollar. A dollar they were trying to turn into two. So they could take both dollars and breed them like dogs. Men who wanted to stud Benjamin Franklin. Women who took the forefather's maxim 'money begets money' quite Biblically. People who saw Grant, and Jackson, Lincoln and Washington as heat-cycle bitches.
You see the white plastic grocery sack was not an invention.
It's a byproduct.
Same as soot. Same as slag. Same as smoke. Same as straw. A byproduct of breeding dollar bills. Something that shows up once humankind starts studding dead presidents on an industrial scale.
The moral of today's chapter?
I'll let you decide.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 10
Fri, 23 Jul 2021 03:33:00 -0600
In 1981 the Federal Trade Commission of the United States issued a report to the American Congress that concluded health warning labels had little effect on public knowledge and attitudes about smoking. As a result Congress enacted the Comprehensive Smoking Education Act of 1984, which required four specific health warnings on all cigarette packages and advertisements.
They are, as follows:
- SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking Causes Lung Cancer, Heart Disease, Emphysema, and May Complicate Pregnancy.
- SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Quitting Smoking Now Greatly Reduces Serious Risk to Your Health.
- SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Smoking by Pregnant Women May Result in Fetal Injury, Premature Birth, and Low Birth Weight.
- SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide.
May I suggest a fifth:
- SURGEON GENERAL'S WARNING: There is No Risk-Free Level of Exposure to Secondhand Smoke.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 11
Fri, 30 Jul 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Just exactly how many cigarettes does it take to kill you?
Most smokers lose count. But they say there's a guy in the sky who is counting. Who will never lose count. And they say come death there'll be a scoreboard of sorts, where a man or a woman or a person's life will be tallied-up and measured. Something, perhaps, not too dissimilar to the witches calculus, hen-scratches and check-marks it takes to get a loan from a bank. Where all your human activity is quantified, measure and weighed. Where people are distilled into ones, zeros and decimal points to determine who gets into Heaven and who gets turned away.
Whether or not that is all true is irrelevant.
Because there's also another guy in the sky counting. Perhaps a woman. A person, up in the heavens but not as far north as God. Somewhere on the 26th floor. Philip Morris Building - 120 Park Ave. These are people counting just how many cigarettes it takes to kill someone. They have an answer. A very specific number.
I won't claim to know the number. But, I can promise you one thing -
That number isn't one.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 12
Fri, 06 Aug 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Edward Walter Schneider
1972-1987
Edward "Eddie" Walter Schneider was called home to a greater purpose in Heaven. We will miss his smile, his voice, his calm demeanor, his laugh, his hugs (rare as they were), his late mornings (trying to pull 'the bear' out of his cave), asking him to turn down his music (again), and watching him grow into 'Switchback Jack' - the stage name he'd picked out for when he became a famous rock star. Mom, Dad & Bethany miss you, Eddie. Add some color to Heaven's choir. In lieu of flowers, please support a musician.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 13
Fri, 13 Aug 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Billy.
Jack.
Smart boys. Able to understand much. Bound to be successful at most things in life, but not in the one thing all humans try and fail - looking over the lonely country we call death and grasping what they see.
Two boys still young enough to climb a tree. Taking in the view every man, woman, or person must take in at some point in their life. Forming a question that will never be answered. Not by a poet. Not by a pastor. Not by a physician. Not by a prayer.
How is it the knots that moor us here feel so tight yet slip so easily?
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 14
Fri, 20 Aug 2021 03:33:00 -0600
If you entered the bedroom of a dead boy what might you find?
Maybe a stray corner of Stray Country.
There's an old saying, "Every human is put on Earth condemned to die. Time and method of execution unknown." Case in point: Edward Schneider. Lately deceased. A brash boy, yearning to impress a girl. Beaten by a cigarette, by his own ego, and by the shifting winds that blow somewhere in Stray Country.
What has he left behind?
Less than you think.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 15
Fri, 27 Aug 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Edward Schneider. Not the first, and certainly not the last American who died precisely the way he lived, chasing a hunger across shopping malls and retail outlets only to wind up suffocated by the little world he'd built. Edward Schneider, body removed, just this morning lying on the floor of his bedroom between so much commercial flotsam, all his gathered goods worthless as the white plastic sack that carted them home.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 16
Fri, 03 Sep 2021 03:33:00 -0600
You are about to see the last microscopic puzzle pieces of Eddie Schneider lying in a latex dumpster, lying in a white plastic grocery sack moonlighting as a bedroom trash liner, soon to be carted away to a steel-rimmed garbage can, only to be swallowed by a mammoth steel beast, only to be vomited into a city landfill, where it will be buried and buried and buried until sunlight is some kind of fairy tale. A puzzle that will forever remain a jumbled mess of jigsaw pieces. Never to be put together. So the story of Edward Schneider comes to a close. A narrative much different, and yet the same as your average American smoker.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 17
Fri, 10 Sep 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Billy.
Jack.
Two boys who are now being followed by a white plastic grocery sack.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 18
Fri, 17 Sep 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Portrait of a junior high school. Deep autumn. A carpet of red leaves rolled out on the walk. The sun sliding away into the trees. But the glitz of Hollywood is far away. This is a cheap sun. A nickel and dime sun. With a cheapness that goes past half-hearted rays and clocking out early. This is a sun that sang its loudest songs somewhere on a stage last July. Last August. An aging lounge singer. A faded star. No longer part of the sky. Eclipsed by movement of earth and time. A tawdry little shine soon to flame out west. Forgotten. A sun that doesn't give a shit that it's leaving two boys alone, with a junior high school.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 19
Fri, 24 Sep 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Consider the following calculus. Two boys. Going into a junior high school after hours. To count the number of condoms in a dead boy's locker. In order to determine whether the boy smothered himself with a white plastic sack or was murdered by the ghost of a dead smoker looking for their very last Marlboro Red.
If this kind of arithmetic makes sense . . .
Welcome, to Stray Country.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 20
Fri, 01 Oct 2021 12:22:00 -0600
An evolutionary biologist would tell you humankind lost their tails twenty-five million years ago. The janitor of Bonneville Junior High would tell you it was lost sometime after Thomas Edison started flicking on lightbulbs across the country.
One of them is more correct than the other.
He may wander. He may ramble a bit. His voice may be cattle-branded by Phillip Morris. But there's a story in there. A tale about how humankind only lost their tails 100 years ago. And consider, if you will, what a tail was originally for - to keep from tipping over.
It's 1987. The world is feeling a little topsy-turvy.
. . . and we've reached for something else to steady the wobble in the carousel.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 21
Fri, 08 Oct 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Once upon a time folks looked at breeding money the way Americans look at breeding siblings. Something that shouldn't be done. A perversion. An act that takes a thing that's supposed to be barren and makes for bad offspring.
The janitor's about to review something I told you back in Chapter 9 -
Breeding money's how we got to plastic sacks
Although truth be told the janitor should have used the term 'inbreeding'. Because once humankind had wrangled a couple dollar bills they took to mating them like dogs. But don't forget. The first two dollars they started with were family.
It's 1987.
We're twenty generations deep in a bog of inbred genes.
If you've ever seen a white plastic grocery sack blowing across your tidy suburban street and found the sight ugly, grotesque, malformed, revolting or offensive to your senses . . .
if you've ever stumbled upon a white plastic sack stuck in the muck of a gutter and thought of all the disagreeable aspects of the frustrated, frightened century in which you live, this jangled century of trash and heavy industry and total waste . . .
Consider its pedigree. Consider the family tree.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 22
Fri, 15 Oct 2021 03:33:00 -0600
There is a slaughterhouse not far from your home. Chances are you've never thought much of it. Chances are it makes you feel safe.
Go for a nighttime stroll. Wait for the month of rain. Let the cold into your bones. And tell me whether or not you feel some kind of ancestral hearthstonian warmth swimming through the cone-sized glow of a street light.
They were originally put in for safety.
Because no matter how old we get, no matter how many atoms we split, no matter how much money we print, no matter how many steel birds we put in the sky, no matter how much we reign mother nature we're still afraid of the dark.
But on this nightly walk stop, if you will, beneath the warm soup of light and look up. Chances are you'll find a slaughterhouse. You see there is a horror story in the insect world. A machine that culls bugs by the millions. Located on every corner of every street in every city in every country. Something mother bugs warn their young about. Something father bugs feel calling to them. Something children bugs baste themselves in night sweats over.
Just how many insects were slaughtered to keep you safe at night? This is a cone-sized corner of Stray Country. A pint-sized lens by which to see perhaps the modern world is not as safe and clean and carcass free as it pretends to be.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 23
Fri, 22 Oct 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Have you ever considered what a ghost of our time would look like? A ghost from the world of today. Not something out of books. Not something out of stories. A real ghost. Perhaps, it would still be white. Maybe, it would still be wispy. But it would no longer favor graveyards. It would no longer haunt church grounds. It would grow out of the real world. The greedy, dusty, dollar-bill world. It would no longer moan. No longer howl. But speak in radio-static gibberish. Just picture it. A synthetic shifting face with the blistering scream of the advertiser, the clenched fist of the pit-boss, the desperate prayers of the manufacturing class. Such a ghost would reflect all the tangled and transient, uprooted parts of society. Reflect Americans who cashed out their churches and doubled down on office space. A ghost with the pig squeal of television-static in its throat and a vapid, plastic soul. The kind that would blow around behind office buildings, slip across four lanes of traffic, and hang off fences in schoolyards.
Just what would a ghost of today look like?
Perhaps it would look very much like a white plastic sack.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 24
Fri, 05 Nov 2021 03:33:00 -0600
Consider the sounds you've never heard inside a chapel. A gunshot. An advertisement. A politician. A smoker's drag. Pornography. Sunday football. Radio static.
For the churchgoers among us, past or present, consider if among the catalog of sounds you've ever heard inside a chapel includes a white plastic grocery sack.
Strange, isn't it, that an item crawling through every American rain gutter, blowing across every American highway, clinging to every suburban chain link fence has never come inside.
Almost as if God has an opinion on the matter.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 25
Fri, 12 Nov 2021 03:33:00 -0700
Friday night. The church is dark. Empty. All dust and dry silence. Two boys hide among the left-behind lint of good choir men and women. Nose to carpet in the strange downpour of scents. Ears open for the pig squeal of a white plastic grocery sack.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 26
Fri, 19 Nov 2021 03:33:00 -0700
Consider whether the world you inhabit belongs to you. Portrait of a quaint suburban street. Green manicured lawns. Polite little houses standing in a row. Pansies in the flower beds. The family dog on the porch. Children's bicycles left on the lawn, playing cards in the spokes. And remember, it's all on lease. A type of loan. Costing three percent on a good year and ten plus in a bad. Laprell Ferris, Ken Paul, Kim Gardner, Gloria Earl, Lyle and Susan Mumford may be the faces you see waving every morning, opening their garages every evening, but they are guests living in someone else's house. If they salt the city with their own sweat for forty years, maybe, just maybe they'll get to keep it. But if they fall behind in this dog race we call life the real owner will come home. A tall man in a dark suit. A cheap man. A nickel and dime man. A man without a face. Without a heart. A man nobody ever sees but by what his hands soiled in the grime of dollar bills do - which is take, and take, and take some more. Because to you this may be a 'home', but to him it's only a commodity. An indistinguishable good. Something to be bought, sold and traded in open markets. Same as corn. Same as salt. Same as grain, gold, beef and gas. If his transient treatment of the American family's roots disturbs you, perhaps you'll understand why white plastic grocery sacks follow in his wake.
Perhaps you'll understand why suddenly, the boys don't want to go home.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 27
Fri, 03 Dec 2021 03:33:00 -0700
Let us credit the Mormons with bringing the churches to the suburbs. For building brand new churches in a brand new world. America moves to the suburbs, and the Mormons followed suit. Because Mormonism always was a frontier religion. A religion looking west. A religion that got out ahead of the roads. A religion that saw a city in a dried-out primeval lake bed.
And the rest of Christianity followed suit.
But if you've noticed God doesn't quite have the sway he used to. If you've noticed prayer just isn't a punchy as it once was. If you feel like there is radio static when you tune your ear to Heaven. If you've ever felt like Old Scratch mechanized sin for the industrial age - you might consider the cost of dilution. If spreading worship and prayer, psalmody and communion across too many chapels built too quickly have spread God's grand fist too thin.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 28
Fri, 24 Dec 2021 03:33:00 -0700
Consider the most silent character of the American horror film. The character always sketched in silhouette high on a hill. As stark and tall as Mother Bates. As ramshackled as a cannibalistic family of killers in west Texas. As small-town boring as Judith Meyers. There's a reason the house is center of American horror. It tells us who's inside. It tells us with its gables, with its eaves, with its rain gutters & with its windows. With its porches & with its storm doors. If you listen, it'll whisper.
Pack 100 of them together on a converted plot of farmland and what might they say, whimpering all at once? Maybe something about the animals inside. Hungry beasts with bottomless stomachs growling like chainsaws. Beasts a lot like pigs.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 29
Fri, 07 Jan 2022 03:33:00 -0700
There's a little story about a family in west Texas who learned the gross skill set of butchery in order to survive in the capitalist world. This same family was later replaced by machines. Country folk who bent their minds to slaughter for a place in the world and the world spat them out once they were no longer needed. Some folks called them killers. And be assured, killers they were. But let us consider another term for such folks - victims of industrial capitalism.
If a ramshakled family of cannibalistic killers in a derelict farmhouse in west Texas horrifies you, maybe you should have a good long look at the road we're on. Because there is no outlet this way. Only the dead-end of the industrial capitalistic experience.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 30
Fri, 14 Jan 2022 03:33:00 -0700
.- -.-. .- .-. --- ..- ... . .-.. ..-. --- .-. .--. .. --. ...
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 31
Fri, 28 Jan 2022 03:33:00 -0700
Imagine, if you will, you are being followed by a white plastic grocery sack.
What would such a thing want from a person? Sacrifice? Worship? Or just fear? What could you do to stop it from troubling you?
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 32
Fri, 11 Feb 2022 03:33:00 -0700
Let the record state that there was something impressively abnormal about the Janitor’s childhood. From perhaps his third to ninth year he was what we might call a sensory prodigy. The ability to see through walls, read letters through envelopes, books through their covers. Fence and play ping-pong blindfolded, find things that were buried, read thoughts.
While night may be a blindfold to the rest of us the janitor’s got a kind of sight the sun doesn’t set on. While our polite little houses sown in neat little rows may be a pair of blinders for all, he can see through it still. The type of man who could look over our tiny little world of tarred roofs, tarred roads and smoking bricks and see something amiss.
anything amiss . . .
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 33
Fri, 25 Feb 2022 03:33:00 -0700
Billy, Jack and a janitor. Staring at a junior high school window. Hoping . . . wishing . . . sweating . . . maybe, even praying the only thing out there is night. Stray cats. Slumbering houses. Autumn leaves. November wind . . .
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 34
Fri, 22 Apr 2022 03:33:00 -0600
Commonplace – if somewhat strange – unsocial location known as a janitorial closet. On the short list of places to hide. Absent from the list of places to wax philosophical. But this is the very place the janitor of Bonneville Junior High has been rubbing two thoughts together for years seeing if they catch fire. The janitorial closet. The halls. The bathrooms. His own bush-league ivory tower. His mop a lectern podium.
Today’s lecture -
How come the churches aren’t as churchy as they used to be?
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 35
Fri, 13 May 2022 03:33:00 -0600
Portrait of a smokestack at work, the only work it’s ever known, doing the same work as Mrs. Mary Brogan at the sacrament of her religion – the strange Church of Phillip Morris. Consider, if you will, whether or not a smokestack and a church steeple really are so dissimilar.
In the rolling mills and sheet mills, in the harr and boom of the blast fires, iron and carbon are pounded into a bar of steel. By the process smoke comes out the stacks.
In the rolling pews and sheetmetal chapels this Sunday, like every Sunday before, sit iron men and carbon women. People taking a pounding. Ready to be alloyed. A fiery process that turns sinners into saints. A process that uses the hammer of the Holy Bible, the flame of the Holy Spirit, and certainly, most definitely, must send smoke up the chimney – or in this case – steeple.
Remember, you can’t see men shucking sin. You can't smell a woman’s prayers. You’ll never find the molt of a person’s mistakes. But that doesn’t mean that a church isn’t a refinery making angels out of men. Angels made from clay, fired by a ghost, with a byproduct of smoke going somewhere. . .
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 36
Fri, 03 Jun 2022 03:33:00 -0600
Phillip Morris. R. J. Reynolds.
Competing denominations of the same religion.
Which is to say the religion of angel making. Churches who took the doctrine of the Good Book – dust unto dust – quite literally in forming their religion.
A religion dedicated to many things, but above all the conversion of men and women to dust.
And though both denominations are dedicated to the cause let it be known it is R. J. Reynolds who’s made the most angels.
Because R. J. Reynolds’s sermonized cigarettes would become the greatest angel makers of all time. 50 years before Mary Poppins would teach us all ‘a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down’ R. J. Reynolds had already learnt the lesson. You see, sugared tobacco has a transmutative power coveted by Jesus Christ himself. It takes a doctrine that’s very hard to swallow and makes it easy to inhale. Yes, R. J. Reynolds’s and his candied tobacco figured out how to get his religion into people’s lungs, not just their mouths. Convert a man’s mouth and they’ll sing your hymns. Convert a man’s lungs and he’ll give you every last breath he’s got.
But religion, as in life, is as much discovered by pure happenstance and chance. The specific valence of sugar-soaked tobacco opening the floodgates on folk’s lungs is owing to a strange, sad, and singular fact - an aspect of R. J. Reynolds’s American heritage. One the janitor is about to harp on -
Because pound for pound sugar was cheaper than tobacco.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 37
Fri, 01 Jul 2022 03:33:00 -0600
Ritual you’ve seen before. One of the coarsest threads in this curious American tapestry. Once upon a time practiced on occasion, by accident, via cattle-drivers scratching their names in the American dirt. Codified and enshrined by the motion picture camera for a generation. Two men. A couple guns between them. An itch in their fingers. Dust in the air. And American’s most sunburnt backdrop behind them. Now updated for the suburban era. A janitor in one corner. A white plastic sack in the other. A junior high school the new American vista. And a swinging lightbulb keeping time.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 38
Fri, 05 Aug 2022 03:33:00 -0600
Family reunion of sorts. The kind that pulls distant cousin into each other’s orbit. We’re a long way from summer. A long way from fried chicken in a bucket in a park. A long way from a family tree in the corner connecting the vague lines between people. It’s November. Long after dark. The long dark of a junior high school hall. Two boys and a janitor are about to learn a white plastic grocery sack and a light bulb are distant cousins, once removed.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 39
Sat, 13 Aug 2022 03:33:00 -0600
It’s howl outside. Kite flying weather. The kind of wind that gives plastic sacks legs.
Two boys.
A junior high school janitor.
About to step outside. Into the trade winds of plastic sacks. On a night they could run their legs dry and still fall behind.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 40
Sun, 21 Aug 2022 03:33:00 -0600
They ran through the streets like they were being chased.
Because they were.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 41
Mon, 29 Aug 2022 03:33:00 -0600
Once upon a time there was a deep burrow for the American man, woman or person. Because, let it be known and contrary to popular opinion, humans are den animals. Same as dogs. Same as wolves. Same a bears. And humans built these dens themselves out of sticks and rocks and trees pulled from the great American loam. They called them homes. And they built them with their bare hands.
Sad, forgotten ritual. Long ago passed away. Given over to interchangeable parts and the commodification of labor. Remember – The Levitt Brothers new way of life was built on the same industrial principles that drove Bethlehem Steel. Homes milled at the blistering rate of thirty houses a day in a distilled twenty-six step process. A factory that walked from plot to plot. Street to street. Neighborhood to neighborhood.
In other words every modern home was built by machines. Which makes them distant cousins of the white plastic grocery sack.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 42
Fri, 09 Sep 2022 03:33:00 -0600
Imagine if you will you’re on a carousel. A carousel you can’t stop no matter how sick you are over the side. Some may call this amusement. The janitor calls it America.
Tonight’s lecture – The Curious Fear of Getting Old
Not unique to Americans but in many ways uniquely American. They say you can fairly judge a society by the way it treat its poor. The janitor may posit you can fairly judge a society by the way it treat its elders. If you live in a reductionist world where people are only the sum of their outputs, if you live in a world where elders are nothing but spent labor, a draw on society, pulling us down, takers not makers, may I suggest you are part a cult. White hoods swapped for suits and ties, but a cult all the same. A cult dedicated to the riding of this merry-go-round no matter how many people are sick over the sides. No matter how many people fall off to be ground in the gears. If you’re afraid of getting old, perhaps it’s time to ask yourself if the fear is truly lodged in the pit of your stomach or rather part of the birthright of a society that views your labor as a commodified good to be bought, sold, traded, and most of all depleted. A society that views people as depreciating assets the same as trucks. The same as tractors. The same as commercial buildings and livestock. A society that only pays lip service to the notion that all men (women and people) are created equal. Because once upon a time, not that long ago, society looked to the longest lived for the bulk of their wisdom. But wisdom is a wash in a world of widgets. Aged-bones a bust in the building of Bethlehem Steel.
He may ramble. He may take the scenic route. But resist your American instinct to tune out the man on account of his age because once upon a time living this long meant you had something to say.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 43
Fri, 16 Sep 2022 03:33:00 -0600
3:33 a.m.
Seconds, half-seconds, quarter-seconds – they crawl by on hands and knees inside the farmhouse of the janitor whose gaze is thrown out the window, into the wind, looking for a flash of plastic in the brand new world that somehow stood up around him. The janitor, now just part of a cellophaned landscape, just a piece of trash, a relic of the past inhabiting a plastic world. Stretching his ear, listening closely . . . for a fragment of what humankind has deeded itself.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 44
Fri, 23 Sep 2022 03:33:00 -0600
The best-laid plans of mice and men . . . and the American suburbs. A plotted landscape plotted against by plastic sacks. A corner lot trying to corner a piece of parkland . . . somehow leaving one junior high school janitor and two boys cornered.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 45
Fri, 30 Sep 2022 03:33:00 -0600
Witness if you will a world that gave birth to the white plastic grocery sack. The red, white and blue American neighborhoods - red carpet communities rolled out to escape the sins of the cities, but only downstream of the muck.
Remember, the white plastic grocery sack is the offspring of unbridled American passions. And let it be known that the child is a serial killer. Hell-bent on matricide, patricide, homicide and last but most critically Terracide. Remember, Bundy, Dahmer, and Gacy were once babes in cribs incapable of swatting a fly. But they grew.
And tonight, outside a farmhouse with a city grown up around it, one junior high school janitor and two boys are watching a white plastic grocery sack try its legs and flex its muscle.
This is what’s meant by paying the piper. This is the comeuppance awaiting every man, woman and person when the bill of fare from our unchecked appetites is opened and examined, the tally made, and penalty paid.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 46
Fri, 07 Oct 2022 03:33:00 -0600
Playing dead. Colloquial term for a universal phenomena. Exhibited by vertebrates and invertebrates alike. Seen on land, sea, and air. Practiced by birds, fish, snakes, possums, frogs, ants, spiders, ducks, rabbits, chickens, sharks, and even humans. Tonight, our study a specific strain of human – engineered sometime after WWII and manufactured on an industrial scale. Yes, tonight we are about to witness the modern suburbanite’s version of playing dead.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Chapter 47
Tue, 25 Oct 2022 03:33:00 -0600
Portrait of American run to its logical conclusion. Someday she’ll find herself in the same place as Billy, Jack, and the janitor. Cornered in the storm cellar of an old farmhouse by a white plastic grocery sack.
This is the dead end of the American experience.
Stray Country - Season 1 - A Carousel For Pigs - Closing Narration
Mon, 31 Oct 2022 03:33:00 -0600
Maple Street. Elm. Oak. Moormont. Westmoor. Eastmoor. Different names for the same place. A tree-line little carnival of front porches, backyards, sweeping lawns, laughing children and polite little houses. The cost to get here? Perhaps we haven't quite done the accounting yet.
The next time you see a white plastic grocery sack floating down the street, you may consider that what you're looking at is a legacy humankind left to itself. Generations previous we climbed on a carousel, pushed the button, and began the ride. A ride we were hungry as pigs for. A ride which, left to its own devices, has no end. A ride that will keep spinning, no matter how many times we're sick over the side. No matter how full the world is of vomit. A ride we could stop, if only we'd all agree to push the button.
Out there, out there in the tangled knots of suburb streets, in the dollhouse void that is the Levitt brother's new way of life, out there is an enemy known as the white plastic grocery sack. A byproduct of our greed. A byproduct of our hunger. A byproduct of our amusement. It sits there in the streets waiting, tangled on fences waiting, drifting through schoolyards waiting, waiting with the patience of plastic, forever waiting . . .