Kickstarter: PATREON:
BigTroubleInLittleCanton.Org
PHOTOGRAPHER: Jason Daniel Myers
AUTHOR/NARRATOR: Jason Nichols (
Freesound.Org: hantorio_thunder-close-boem
My name is Jason Daniel Myers, and the veil was torn from my eyes, as it is for so many, when I ventured into territory where I did not belong. In this case, the tangled deep forest of the dark web. What can I say, I was curious when I should have been content. But what I stumbled on wasn't your run-of-the-mill illicit trade in sex and substances, but something nobler and stranger and more disturbing: the ephemera collected by one Mr. Elliott Miller, a digital version of the narrative an obsessive might construct on his wall: audio files, artifacts, notes, sketches, photographs, news articles, rumors and testimonies, strung together with the tenuous connective tissue of pushpins and yarn and conjecture.
I suspect that I stumbled upon it simply because Elliott Miller did not expect anyone to be looking for it. This cache of information created a disjointed narrative of the darkness pulsing in Elliott Miller's hometown of Canton, Ohio, a town which, though I had lived outside its limits for decades, also happened to be my hometown.
At first I assumed all this to be simply a product of Elliott Miller's imagination, whether mentally unbalanced or creative or a spiked cocktail of both. But the more I dug into his cosmology, and the more I looked around, the more I could see those webs of yarn trailing from the digital ephemera to the flesh and blood and concrete world around me. People, places, events, graffiti, a random encounter on the street, one single line in an otherwise mundane news article or broadcast. Everywhere I went those pushpins pierced my tender reality, everywhere I walked I found myself brushing aside or ducking under or tripping over that connective tissue. There was a dark heart pulsing in Canton, Ohio, pumping black slush through arteries and veins and capillaries from the city to the state to the country and, I can only assume, beyond.
Elliott Miller heard that dead heartbeat, and now so do I.
And we are not the only ones.
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