OK, so this one’s at least partially on us. We’ve admittedly been slacking off here at the Hard Times, and the deadlines have been creeping up. We needed clicks FAST, and we figured we’d just revert to some nineties nostalgia, which is always a surefire way to get the job done. So we contacted every goth millennial’s artistic hero Stephen Gammell for an interview, and he invited us out to his house. Piece of cake, right?
Wrong. We should’ve known something was up when we were making the three-day trek through the Minnesota forest to reach his home. Our compass kept spinning wildly out of control and we would awaken to strange little stick figures propped up outside our tents. Nevertheless, we finally reached his dilapidated shack and prepared to begin our interview.
We had been expecting him to be eccentric, but we certainly had not been anticipating him uttering an ancient incantation while lightly touching each of us on the forehead with his pencil. All of a sudden, we were enveloped in a cloud of suffocating, black smoke while a booming voice cackled in our ears. Once the smoke cleared, we found that we were no longer in Stephen’s shack, but inside the haunted graveyard drawing that had been displayed on the easel behind him!
Now here we are: trapped in this horrifically bleak and clearly haunted graveyard, presumably for eternity. Worse yet, the shrouded specter of a weeping woman is perpetually wandering amongst the headstones. We’re not sure if she’ll cause us any harm upon seeing us, but holy fucking shit we don’t want to find out.
The arch at the entrance of the graveyard bears an inscription describing the “amulet of desolation which slumbers everlasting within the folds of the dark sorcerer’s robes,” which we think might be our ticket out? The only problem is, the graves aren’t marked, so we have no idea which belongs to the sorcerer. We’ve been scrambling to dig up each grave (with our HANDS, no less, because of course that asshole Gammell couldn’t have been bothered to draw us a fucking shovel), only to be forced to stop and hide in the shadows every time the weeping woman circles through.
So if you’re reading this, we’d appreciate it if you called the police on Stephen Gammell, because we’re pretty sure whatever he did wasn’t legal. At the very least, could you contact our editors to let them know we need another deadline extension? Again, we fully admit that our laziness led to this predicament, but an eternity of confinement in this nightmarish hellscape because we were too lazy to write an article about Vampire Weekend seems like an inordinately harsh punishment.