Welcome everyone to 2 guys to the dark
tower came. A podcast where we discuss the
characters and connections in the ever expanding universe
that revolves around Stephen King's dark tower.
I'm Jay Russo.
And I'm Sean Mc.
You can email us at 2 guys dark
tower at g dot com. To support the
show, visit us at patreon dot com slash
to guys Dark tower.
In this bonus episode,
we'll cover a night surf,
found in night shift.
Let's start the show.
A super flu having wiped out most of
civilization, a group of young adults await the
end of the world on a beach in
New Hampshire.
They passed the time drinking beer, making out,
listening to the radio,
and half joking
sacrificing a man to the dark gods by
burning them on a pie,
but the flu has infected 1 of them
already.
Pretty dark.
Yeah. It's a very dark story, Jay.
It turns out that this isn't the happy
go lucky king that we're so used to.
Yeah.
So Jay, this story
night surf
was first published in the 19 69 issue
of Uber magazine,
you'll recall that that is the magazine that
first published a dark band poem. I think
that we talked about in our last bonus
episode. Yeah.
It was then revised heavily for later versions
The first of which was collected in Cavalier
magazine in 19 74,
that was a men's magazine that published a
lot of king short stories back in the
day. And then collected in his first
collection of short stories,
night shift in 19 78. So that won't
be confusing at all that we have a
Short story called Might surf in a book
called night shift.
Nope.
There have been multiple short films of this
release at least 8 dollar babies that I
was able to see on the dollar baby
tracker. We've talked about that that...
That's the dollar baby program that he's put.
And Somehow there's a few of these on
Youtube,
which is not part of the dollar baby
agreement. So I don't know if those are
official dollar babies or other people have taken,
but you could see a couple different episodes
on Youtube of night shift. 1 thing that
I found interesting that there's 1 director who
has a fairly
highly regarded
version of Night surf, that goes around to
film festivals,
and he since become a fairly well known
director
of hallmark movies and Sci f movies. So
he's had a a fairly
standard career making movies on a regular basis.
So you could look him up Think his
name was Peter Sullivan.
No. Okay.
Hallmark movies in. This story are quite a
ways away from each other.
Well, I I was thinking that this should
be on a a greeting card of some
kind.
Sorry you're dead. Happy end of the world
I don't really like you that much, but
we're here together. Mh.
I also found in doing a little bit
of research on this, jade that there is
a
instrumental sound garden song called Night surf, and
there was a short video that was played
before a lot of their concerts in the
early nineties.
I don't think it's related, but maybe if
you're a sound art fan, you can let
us know.
And there is currently a pump group, and
they are definitely named after this story.
They're based out of Brooklyn and, in an
article I read about them, they cited
the story as a...
Influence on their name. I gotta wonder about
that. Like, of all the king stories or
titles to choose from to name your band
after?
Why this 1? Was it something that did
they just really like this story? Does it...
Did it speak to their
perspective on the universe? I don't know. A
weird way to go. Like, everyone's dead, let's
go to the beach. Like on another hallmark
card. There you go. There you go.
And and that's really the publication history of
the story,
it's...
As we'll talk about it a little bit
somewhat related to the stand potentially, and which
is 1 of the reasons that we chose
it for this bonus episode, but we'll get
into into that in a little bit. But
there you go. It's only 9 pages. So
it's a quick read if you have not
read it yet, I would suggest pausing this
for 10 minutes. Go read the story and
I come back.
Yeah. It really won't take it that long,
and it'll be worth your time. 1 of
the things I wanted to talk about
It's a section of my notes that I
I titled not if you were the last
person on earth. And this group of teenagers
that were hanging out with there are potentially
the last people on Earth. 1 of them
even asked that question. Like, maybe where the
last one's left. Yep. And I try to
put myself in this situation. We've been reading
the stand and discussing it for a while
now, so this kind of thing has been
on my mind.
How would I react in this situation? I
kept finding that I wouldn't do or at
least I think I wouldn't do the same
things that these characters are doing.
Maybe I'm missing the point. Maybe
this is supposed to be a bleak story
about just counting the days to the end.
So There isn't anything to do. Except
try to enjoy the time that you have,
but
All of the characters we meet are very
un.
They're all jerks
just putting it
plainly. Jerk 1 does something not nice to
jerk number 2 when the jerk number 2
does something not nice back to jerk number
1 and the only reason why these people
are together is because of happens,
jerk They don't like each other. They don't
they barely even tolerate each other. And it
feels like they're sq,
what could be their final days.
By hanging out with people that they despise,
just
because they happen to be alive.
Right. They kept bothering me, Like, I don't
even like spending time with these people for
the 12 pages of this story. I couldn't
imagine living with them.
Everybody's dead. Let's go to the beach. So
like,
you guys go on without me Is my
my response to that.
Yeah. It's a very dark and it's not
just that they're jerks to 1 another, you
know, like, you're getting fat, you're mean to
me, you're making me cry, but it's also,
hey, look, there's a dude. Let's kill them.
So Beyond just being jerk also murdered a
guy, I think at 1.1 of the character
said maybe it was best for him because
he had... He was sick and delusional and
had the flu and was gonna die anyways.
So maybe we do what's right. But that
seemed a little bit of,
Monday morning quarterback backing after the after the
fact in that case. So I spent remarkably
little time pondering the... I don't know, implications
of burning a person alive who was dying
of the flu.
I know what this flu does. It's... It...
There is no... It is a certain, you
know, outcome. Right. And it sounded like he
was on the final
breath of his life. So it's kind of
like, if somebody falls off of a tall
building and you shoot them in the head
before they hit the ground. Have you committed
murder
Right? Yeah. It's kind of like that sort
of debate?
Maybe you have because you killed somebody,
but then 3 seconds later they, crash into
the ground. Right. Their fate was sealed no
matter what happens.
I am thinking more about the
the behavior between the the living
mostly healthy
characters in the story. Yeah. And I didn't
like any of them.
I'm not rooting for them. III don't hope
that they somehow get through this and
become the the people who survive this apocalypse.
Right.
And I'm not sure if King wants us
too, like, yeah. They're not particularly likable characters.
They don't have the skills or the know
how to know what to do. So
Yeah. What they do is drink beer, even
warm beer. The 1 guy like, hey, I
don't even mind warm beer, which is like,
whatever. Yeah. But, like, the... This is very
much the world going out with a Whim,
not a bank. Right? Yeah. It's not the
quick deadly flu of of the stand. It's
not a
a nuclear bomb going off. It's not a
biological
disaster. It is literally just
5 or 6 kids sitting on a beach
waiting for the end to happen and whether
that's gonna be today tomorrow or 3 or
4 months down the line, none of them
are able to think it's gonna be much
beyond that. I don't say this as a
criticism of the story because I actually appreciate
it quite a bit. But, like, these characters
seem to be
they are in the place where they already
were. Yeah. This story doesn't have any sense
of space or scope or travel.
The man that they burn
alive was from another town he was from
New York and they... They're out a beach
in Maine.
So that's the only thing that gives us
a wider
sense of what is happening outside of the
scope of the story.
But these are just people who are from
the town where they happen to be
and they just happened to be alive because
they haven't gotten sick yet. And
I feel like the story could have been
a bit more grand if
these were people trying to survive. And they
were on the go trying to get to
a place of safety or try to find
more people or trying to gather supplies,
prepare for the coming winter that is going
to be a deadly 1 in maine if
you're not prepared. Yep. But they're not. They're
not. No. And 1 of the reasons I
think that they
aren't, and we see this in other post
apocalyptic stories is that generally
the
people have some sense of community. And so
that's what we see in the stand. Right?
Where even the bad guys have a sense
of community. They're drawn some place. And they're...
They believe in something even if for the
guys in Las Vegas versus boulder, what they
believe in is is potentially evil and and
mimi me me and and not that larger
sense, But it is a sense of community
and there's something to rally behind. And like
you said, because these characters are just sort
of Hey. We found you on the street
and,
you wanna hang with us. Okay. Like, we
just need somebody else. And it's this...
Tension between the fact that humans are social
animals and they want to be together,
but also, generally,
when we're together in groups. It's because we
have something that binds us. Mh. There are
no binds here. There's nothing. And so that's
why these characters can connect like jerks themselves
to each other because they're not building a
community, and they don't have any ties that,
hey, you're my
cousin or a brother or we went to
school together or we have these same interests.
It's just no we're all just waiting for
the end.
It strikes me as maybe a wrong note,
though. Human behavior that I observed throughout my
life has shown that groups of strangers can
form bonds and even become friends in days.
If they're sharing a bunch of common experiences,
whether it's a few days at a summer
camp or
the same people you see on your for
a weekend vacation or something like that.
I know those aren't the same circumstances where
everybody else in the world has died from
a disease, but... Right. I would think that
if these people are all sharing the same
good things and bad things,
they're all still alive,
and they have each other to count on
that they would be getting to know each
other and they would be becoming more than
the sum of their parts rather than just
a loose ama of idiots and assholes,
you know, that... That's all it is. But
maybe that's also a coping mechanism.
That they realized that if they did get
close to each other, the chances are 1
of them is going to die in the
near future, and that's gonna be worse that
that whereas if you keep somebody at a
distance. Yeah. And then they die, well, no
big deal, and they've seen
hundreds or thousands of people die already. So
I'm not gonna make any sort of connection
that's going to
mentally hurt psychic hurt me. You know, it's
just gonna be o... Yeah. I hung out
with that person and I'm sort of knew
them, but I didn't know him close enough
that it affects me.
That's a fair point. And I think that
the main perspective we have in the story
is is through the narrator eyes, and he
seems to be particularly adept at at. Yeah.
Distance that that mental distance. Like, I am
not going to attach myself to any of
these people or even my own situation. I'm
just going to sort of pretend it's not
really happening. I'll just take a step away
here and say that it's great that king
it has this fertile imagination to imagine what.
Would be like. Mh. The end of the
world, like, this is not a situation that
any of us have ever been in and
yet, I think he's able to nail what
a certain type of character might be like
in that. Situation.
Yeah. Which is pretty unique because they often
say it right about what you know and
nobody knows the end of the world, so
good job by king there.
That's a good segue in our next topic
J, which is that King is somebody who
has written about the end of the world
on, more than 1 occasion. Mh. And that
is... The stand is obviously 1 of his
most beloved and well known works.
And this story
Is it a pre equal to the stand?
Is it related to the stand, but there
are a lot of commonalities and 1 of
the reasons that we're reading it and 1
of the reasons that people point to the
story is because of the...
The same subject matter as the stand, So
let's get into that a little bit. I
kinda wanted to challenge
ourselves with that question of, you know, is
this really
in any way connected to the stand. I
think there are some commonalities as you mentioned,
but there are a lot of differences too
and in the 12 page span of this
story, a story that King wrote
many years before he wrote the stand.
Clearly, the story existed for a long time
for at least a bunch of years before
the standard,
so it didn't need the stand to exist.
It could easily be interpreted as a a
first pass at an idea that king had,
so that he expanded on with the standard,
took it in a slightly different direction.
But, like, 1 of the commonalities
between them that's the closest to the surface
is
the nickname for the disease is kept in
trips. Yep.
So in 19 60 9II
assume this was in the first version of
the story,
king.
Has captain trips as the nickname for the
the flu and
characters in the stand call
the disease captain trips too.
So that could be, like, open and shut
case. Right? Right.
The defense arrests
I will point out that I I did
read somewhere that I don't think Captain Trips
was in the very first version of this
book or the story.
The Uber version did not have that. So
that was something he added later. I'd be
interested to know if it was in the
74,
1.
Versus the 78.
78 was also the same year that the
stand came out when this was collected a
night shift. But the fact that King changed
it obviously, made it in his mind that
he wanted to keep that nickname the same.
Yeah. So whether it was there already or
was a re con. King, the author is
bringing the stories in alignment.
At least from a nickname perspective from an
perspective. In both cases, the disease is a
deadly flu of some sort
Mh. We're told in this story that it's
called a 6, which I don't think it's
what it's referenced in
this stand. It's not a 6, but there
is a code number to it that the
military has, like... But it... It's like a
9 or something like that. And something blue
too isn't it? Or is that the the
the secret project? But, yes. But it is
a deadly flu in the same way that
the the the flu in the stand is
as well?
1 of the differences
is that in this story, there are 2
types of flu. There's like a less deadly
version and then, like, this newer, more deadly
version, but the... It seems like they both
kill most people. Yes. So I think the
first one's a 2, and it's also called
the Hong Kong Flu Well, that's a real
thing. Yeah. But they also call it a
2 as well. So I don't know it's
a version of the Hong Kong flu or
what, But
I think Bernie at the end of the
story says that, you know, A 6 came
came out of Southeast Asia, and that's where
it originated. Which is unlike
unlike the stand in that it didn't originate
in Asia originated in base in California,
In a military lab. Yes. And the flu
does not seem quite as deadly as the
1 in the stand. Mh. Well, let me
take that back. It doesn't seem to work
quite as quickly as the 1 in the
stand
Yes. Where it it seems like it spreads
within minutes, and you can have symptoms like...
Seconds after acquiring the the flu. We've we've
seen people sort of sneeze and then a
minute later, somebody else sneeze and coughs. And
so there there seems to be a quicker
spread in the fact that there's 5 or
6 people who seem to be surviving months
after the initial outbreak seems to suggest that
maybe this isn't.
Quite as quick or deadly as the 1
in to stand. Right. And it doesn't seem
to be that they are
immune in any way that just seems that
they just haven't gotten sick.
Yet. Correct. They think that perhaps maybe since
they had a 2,
they can't get a 6. They might be
saying that just to humor themselves. Mh. And
that... That's definitely the case you get by
the end of the story. And I think
that 1 important lens to look at... Or
to compare those stand to Night surf is
that Night surf is an apocalyptic story
but the stand is a post apocalyptic story.
Yes, we're there to see the apocalypse happen,
But
the bulk of the story, the the meat
of the story, the characters that we spend
our time with are survivors of the apocalypse
in the stand.
The characters in Night surf are people who
are still alive, but they are still in
a way participating in the ongoing apocalypse.
The apocalypse hasn't finished happening yet in night
serve. And we are given very strong or
clues that
every character in this story is going to
die. From this plague.
Whereas in the stand, we're starting to figure
out that characters like
stu are somehow immune from to the disease.
And so therefore, stew will carry on after
the apocalypse.
And
in genre fiction, post apocalyptic stories,
while typically bleak and dark and gritty,
they're also inherently positive stories because they are
talking about survival. They're talking about
overcoming the apocalypse.
So by their very nature, they have a
positive twist.
Whereas an apocalyptic story that night surface,
there's nothing more than
slowly marching to the end. Yeah. And that's
so bleak and and dark.
If these are the same disease. And if
the 1 is an offs shoot of the
other, and they they are linked,
1 is
very dark, and the other 1 is more
positive or at least more
more encouraging to, like some kind of survival
we get to be with these characters in
the stand,
that
survive the apocalypse, So we feel like we
we're survivors too. When we're hanging out with
these characters in night serve.
We're just another loser on the beach waiting
to die. Yep.
This story, and I'm sure it...
This was an influence on King 2. This
story has a lord of the flies feel
to it. Oh, yeah. A bunch of young
people
near a body of water,
and society is broken down around them.
Instead of a pig's head on a pike.
It's a dude from a car that you
get pulled out and burned on a on
a pie. Like,
similar type of situation and it just that
very bleak
ness of it. And we know in this
story that there is no
English sailor who's gonna come and rescue them.
They're they're done. They're they're never gonna be
rescued that these people are gonna add. Mh.
What's that great line that you picked out,
Jay? The line is, the vision was clear
enough to make me shutter. Nobody should think
about winter in August.
It's like a goose walking over your grave.
I love that line,
and it could even just stand apart, the
the nobody should think about winter in August.
Mh.
It's just... It's like you're ruining the summer
by thinking about the winter.
There's no hope on the other side. Mh.
Winter is the season of death, and he's
already thinking about that. He's not thinking about
spring. He's not thinking about renewal. He's not
being optimistic. He's thinking about the end. Yeah.
Kinda reminds me a little bit of when
we're talking about missus Todd shortcut,
and we were talking about how winter
is a season where everybody has to hun
her down. Mh.
Once you're in a place in winter, you
don't tend to move. It's harder to move.
Right. Because of the weather
So if you're gonna make a move, you
have to do it before winter starts.
That means you gotta plan ahead, you have
to know winter coming and you need to
know what winters are gonna be like and
these kids on the beach are not
planning that far ahead, and our narrator Bernie
is like
Yeah. I don't even wanna think about winter.
It's August, dude. Yep. I might not even
be alive by the time winter rolls around.
So... Why even think about it, or he
could be taking the yellow cadillac
that
the sick guy showed up in and
start driving south Yep. Find a place where
there aren't a lot of other people around
and maybe you can ride out the winner
in a place where you're not gonna freeze
to death. That's just me.
1 more thing that kind of sets these
stories
apart from each other,
is that Night surf
because it pre the stand,
I'd say that it's more fair to call
an early inspiration,
to the stand then a spin off.
In some ways, this could be a more
interesting story if King wrote it after he
wrote the stand and he said, okay. Well,
this is like this sort of
side sideline episode, it doesn't have the main
characters if you will. Right. It's like, if
you wrote an episode of Star trek where
it entirely takes place with, like characters that
aren't in the the main cast
kind of thing. Yeah. That could be really
cool, but it's not what King did. He
wrote it before he wrote to stand. So
Because of that the order of creation, I'd
say that it's... It feels more detached from
the stand less of a piece.
It's funny because we talk a lot about
in the in the normal podcast about how
often
King mentions the Jfk
assassination and how he
drops hints about time travel and stopping it,
and he finally got it out of his
system in 11:22 63, and the difference there
it seemed like it took 20 years. Right?
Like, that he was talking about talking about
talking about. Here is, he wrote a story.
It got published for mainstream readers
in a short story collection. The same year
as the stan came out, so it very
much is... Oh, I had this great idea
and look, here's how it plays out in
an 800 page novel.
Yep. Whereas at 11:22 63, we had a
we had to wait for a while to
get there. Yeah.
Overall,
For me, at least, this doesn't seem like
a a true pre quote to the stand.
This is more of a... There are other
worlds than these type of thing.
Here's what a world would look like with
a super flu in which we focused on
these characters and maybe it's just a little
slightly different, and so let's look at this
story. So I I saw someone mention, like,
this is another level of the tower perhaps,
way of way of looking at it. Yeah.
Yeah. I think view through that lens and
it's a very forgiving lens with the dark
tower and the the parallel worlds and the
multiverse and
all that, it's it's far easier to say,
yes. These stories are certainly connected.
K. They don't necessarily
exist on the same level of the tower
as you put it, but we're talking about
basically the same situation and basically the same
disease.
And we even know that if we count
Night surf and the stand as 2,
there's at least a third,
and probably more
parallel
worlds. Right. Levels of the tower where something
like captain trips has broken out and killed
the vast majority of humanity.
Because in book 4 of the the dark
tower, they find that newspaper. Yeah. And it's
from, yet another world that isn't this 1
isn't the stand.
But there is captain trips.
If Stephen King were George Lucas,
they would hear Larry underwood, can you dig
your man on the radio while they're sitting
on the beach? And at some point, Fran
Gold would be driving through the town and
ask for directions to
Nebraska, and 1 of the characters would give
them to earn. He'd interconnected it that way,
But King is not like that. He's got
multiple multi to work with. Yeah. He doesn't
have to work that hard. Yeah.
I think that's a a pretty good segue
into our
dark tower thin
section.
We've kind of already made this point, but
basically
this story and the stand, share captain trips
and
as we just made the point, Like, if
we wanna link them directly to each other,
we can easily do so through Dark tower.
Right. And so in that sense, this is
a this whole story is a thin. Yeah.
And it's a very different look at what
the stand does.
Just because
there are very few
books or stories that talk about the apocalypse
as it's happening, and then it ends before
we get on the other side of it.
Yeah. That's it's good point. This is 1
of those. King is in and out. I'm
gonna introduce you to these characters. They do
some bad things. They're horrible people, and they're
probably all going to die, and you're not
gonna find out anything more about him, and
it's not hopeful at all, and it was
written in 69 and King was what.
21, probably when he wrote this, like, that
might be the view of a pessimistic
kid who grew up in the sixties, like
maybe he thought that this way. It does
have that
more pessimistic way of looking at things and
apocalyptic view that you don't get in some
of his other work. I'm sure that every
1 of us has had at least a
1 or 2 dark moments in our lives
or we thought you know, it would solve
all the problems in the world.
A whole, like, like some sort of
somebody just wiped out the human race, and
the world could just be
be fine, and King probably had that idea
in. Wrote a story about it.
Well, on that note,
fun stuff.
Yeah.
So I'll kick us off with something that
I I feel very be...
I feel like I've learned much too late
in this
investigation of the stand and and things related
to it. But in researching this story is
when I learned that
captain trips is sort of a
delusion to
Jerry Garcia of the Grateful dead.
Personally, I'm not a fan of the Grateful
dead.
I hope we're not losing too many listeners
by announcing that on the air, but
because I'm just not that familiar with the
the band, I didn't know that that was
like 1 of Jerry Garcia nickname.
The bulk of my knowledge of the Grateful
dead is that
there's an ice cream flavor that sorta named
after Jerry Garcia?
Yep. And
apparently now, there's a disease that's got named
after Jerry Garcia. So that's that's it. Well,
there you go. That's all you need to
know really. Yeah.
So I'm not gonna say that the first
line of night surf is as good as
the first line of the guns sling that
we've talked about. So many times on our
podcast, but it has a very similar cadence
and it's very evo.
I would agree. After the guy was dead,
and the smell of his burning flesh was
off the air.
We all went back down to the beach.
And there you go. Like, there's a dead
guy somewhere, and he burned to death, and
we don't find out about them for a
little bit more, but it really sort of
sets the stage that this is not a
happy story, and these characters are almost oblivious
to that fact that they're just gonna go
and hang out on the beach.
Yeah. I agree. Like, this is not as
strong a line as not as strong an
opening line as the first line of the
dark tower.
But it is a pretty strong opening line.
Yeah. Not only does king
sort of bury it, by just just going
on with the story without, like, wait. You
just talked about burning somebody to death, and
you just... You stay there. Right. But in
that 1 sentence, he tells us that this
is a dark story. He tells us that
the characters in it are gonna be little
off putting.
It sets the scene and set and tells
us so much about
the characters involved in just those few words,
which is what a good opening line should
do. And it's not like, we're 19 year
olds on the beach.
After the guy was dead.
What?
Yeah. Oh, yeah. Good good
Good job. It's very much what you need
to do as a short story writer
is
hook somebody.
Mh.
But also, because you have so little to
work with, you cannot waste lines,
and you need to...
Create a sense of the story
right there at the beginning. And I do
think that that captures sort of the whole
mood of the story. Yeah.
There is death and there is the...
If not fatal of death or even sort
of, I'm gonna ignore death we're just gonna
hang out at the beach and pretend it's
not happening. But that's sort of all captured
sort of the themes of the story right
in that first line? Yeah. It even includes
the fact that that 1
dead or dying man
represents every other person in the world who
has died of this flu, whether they died
an hour before the story began or
I don't know months before the story began.
These characters have been living with that, for,
however, long that is and each time it
happens. It has less and less of an
impact on them. It means less and less
to them, and it's all just conveyed in
that
that sentence. So... Yeah, It's it's really good
person.
We've mentioned before it that King is a
good short story writer, and
I think this proves it once again.
This story had a really nice
o kirk moment for me.
Not too far into the the story,
the line and the surf, the night surf.
Throwing up great bursts of foam,
breaking against the headwind for as far as
we could see an endless attacks,
Of course, when I read that, I'm like,
and that's why they call it nicer.
Right?
Good times indeed.
Yeah. That's just another
point of the isolation, like,
somehow they're on a... I live in Ohio.
So there's not much beach. And what little
beach there is is not Ocean Beach it's
lake Beach, and you can see
you could see the ends very easily, but
they're on a beach where
they say they can see in sort of
endless directions both ways and there's nothing there
and think that adds to the isolation that
these characters are feeling.
They can't see beyond it and to your
point earlier where you said like there's no
sense of think space Mh. In this story.
Like, the characters are sort of stuck in
1 way. And that's because when they look
up and down, all they see is beach,
and the night surf. And so where are
they gonna go, what are they gonna do?
There's always something inherently
romantic about the shore of a vast ocean.
But it's also something that is, like, you're
on the edge of the world. You are
at the limit of how far you can
go.
Yeah. When you're there,
unless you get in a boat or something
or there's a bridge.
But the point is when you get to
the Atlantic coast and you faced East,
there's nowhere left to go.
Except turn around,
same for
any other coast that faces
any of the big oceans in the world.
And I think King setting it there.
He tends to end up in maine a
lot because that's
that's his home turf,
but he could have set this in other
places, but putting it right there, putting them
on the beach. Yep. They're not just in
a beach town. They're not just... Near the
water, they're on the water, and that helps
give us that greater sense of isolation.
It helps us put them at the
extremist
of
the human race and geography
together. Yeah.
And elsewhere he talks about how the surf
has
cleansed the beach.
This is a popular tourist resort area. Like,
1 of the places that they're hanging out
is an old gift shop
with t shirts and and things of that
nature. But all the d that would be
on the,
beach is gone, like it's just what they've
made at this point because the the surface
has coming in and out so often
that the beach has been cleansed, and it's
almost as if the earth is gonna cleanse
itself of humanity. Yep. By the end of
the story and that surface is that they're
doing that. Just in and out in and
out in and out.
That gives me 2 kind of
Mac mccabe thoughts. 1 is
when I read that line about how the
ser
reclaimed the refuse of humanity.
I thought about how, like, today, how
humans have polluted the world to such an
extent with plastic,
that there are now new species of animals
being discovered that have so much plastic in
their internal structures
that I think 1 was recently named for
the plastic in it
wow.
So thinking about this, like, let's carry this
story forward. The all the characters and then
all the all human beings die. And then
all signs of civilizations slowly are or re
absorbed into the into the world. All that
plastic is still gonna be there. Yep. So
as the rest of of nature continues to
evolve in these new circumstances.
That plastic is gonna be part of that
evolution. Like, there are gonna be plants and
animals that
adapt to having this extra plastic around. Right?
So it made me feel kind of it
it was sort of a bummer thought that
I just inserted on top of the story
about
pollution. Like it wouldn't be so easy for
the ocean to just swallow up our mess
Right. It's just not visible on the sand.
Yeah. That's true.
The other thing I thought about was...
Not quite related to that, but it's... When
Bernie talks about how he wants to create
this like,
giant plaque that just says,
it was just the flu. Yeah. Right? The...
As an explanation to some
potential alien visitor that's gonna come Eons from
now.
All traces of humanity are gone except us,
3 mile
long plaque in Salt lake City, to salt
flats that just says, it was just the
flu. And
taking this a little bit into current events,
like, we're all living through a pandemic right
now. Yep.
If
circumstances
were to go terribly
worse
than they currently are.
That's kind of gonna be our gravestone too.
So I was just, like,
it made my skin crawl a little bit.
You know, this was a spooky story that
I finished, but spooky for... Different reasons than
a lot of King stories. Yeah.
I've read through some of his books over
the years and been like, oh, I gotta
put this down for a minute kind of
thing. This, I was like,
this is
a little bit too on the nose for
what I am living through, and so... And
we are all living through today. Right.
Well, that was a bummer ending to fun
stuff, but there we go. So that's gonna
be all for this bonus episode of 2
guys to the Dark tower came. Thanks, Jay.
Thank you.
Links to all of our social media is
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Look for more exclusive content at patreon dot
com slash 2 guys dark tower.
For Jay Russo, I'm Sean.
Thanks for listening.
Or you could just say ever expanding universe
Ever expanding universe.
Ever expanding you Ever expanding good.