The Bus Stop Sign Can’t Die: Cursed Media and the Loneliness of Bearing Witness

Our Queen of Ancient Pettiness

Dokincho! Nemurin was an ’80s Japanese kids’ show created to sell toys. Somewhere along the way, the writers went off the deep end. They realized no one expected coherent plots or moral lessons, they were just there to move merchandise. They used that freedom to go straight up Melrose Place in the writer’s room. Nemurin is a fairy queen awakened after 800 million years and adopted by a nuclear family in a suburban Japanese town, full of sentient infrastructure, weird desserts, and dimension-crossing freaks. The appeal crosses the oceans of time, as they say. Nemurin plush dolls currently sell for $300 on ebay, forty years after the show ended.

I watch it alone, drinking damiana tea in my bed, swaddled in black silk sheets on my day off. The most relatable star of the series is the bus stop sign who wants to die in episode 10. This static thing, civic-minded, waiting to be needed but wholly dismissed.

In episode ten、 バス停くん田舎へ帰る、 or “Kun the Bus Stop Sign Returns to the Country” everything crystallizes. Nemmy naps on her favorite neighborhood bus stop sign, a tired old pole in the city. I’m sure a few of you can relate to that. She wakes to find the pole scuffed up and abused by regular, rude-ass city folk. Leaned on, kicked, tossed around, but never seen. After cleaning him with quiet care, she returns him to his spot, only to discover he’s been replaced by a newer model.

Watching a Japanese children’s show take on suicide hits a nerve when you remember that Japan has some of the highest suicide rates in the world. The intention of the show seems to be to tell daddy to spend a few bucks on a train ticket to the mountains to clear up his after-work boo hoos. But here we are decades later, watching with our mouths agape and a tinge of recognition on our day off, as a bus stop sign fails at attempted suicide.

The pole vanishes. In the final act, we see Nemmy tearfully traveling to the countryside, where she finds him. Our sign is now dressed as a yokel, in oversized gardening gloves and the common hat of a bus stop sign that has clawed its way back from the depths. No longer a forgotten utility, but an object of the green earth. He’s traded in urban alienation for mountain air and quiet purpose. Ah, resolution.

Even without language, I read the moment. I’ve wanted to disappear without making a scene. I’ve felt used up, stuck in place, expected to perform while life moved on. Nature doesn’t need a show. Being alive is incredibly hard for entertainers, and those who serve the purpose of delivering information to the public are often overlooked but definitely fit into the paradigm of entertainment. Tears of the clown are real things, let me tell you, and at this point we’re all clowns. The stop sign isn’t just sad, he’s exhausted from being visible and ignored at the same time. I watched it. I was part of it, connected as the witness.

That episode feels like cursed media because it taps into a forbidden kind of loneliness that you can’t sell and mustn’t speak of.

“Cursed” is a joke, but it’s also dead serious. Cursed things hit wrong. They give you a feeling you didn’t consent to. My favorite is the haunted Kleenex commercial. A woman in white sings “It’s a Fine Day” to a red oni with green hair. He’s giving Nemmy vibes! She’s possessed, or trapped, or mourning. Maybe she just has allergies. We don’t know. But we feel that it’s off. Rumors swirled for years that the baby who played the oni was decapitated in a car crash. The cameraman burned alive in a sauna. The woman became pregnant with a demon and vanished. Some say if you watch it at midnight, it will curse you.

But the truth is simpler and worse. There is no resolution, it’s made to linger. It sells nothing. Media that foils the spell of consumerism taps into the honest need to break away from the eternal loop of consumption under capitalism, and acknowledges our base need to connect with each other.

Cursed media corrupts the feed. For a second, something leaks out like a raw wound in the 200mph section of rotten dot com. Like Christine Chubbuck, the TV news anchor who went live on-air in 1974. After going through the motions of the daily news, she quickly said the words: “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts...” And then she pulled a gun from under her desk and shot herself in the head. Coworkers thought it was special effects at first and laughed it off until the blood pumped too hard onto the floor of the station. Her final critique of the spectacle was the broadcast itself. It left the coppery aftertaste of agency in the mouth of a system that commodified violence. The tape is supposedly lost, confiscated by police because it’s, well, nasty. But you don’t need to see it to feel it. You already know what it means.

When media fails to perform its assigned role, it occupies the cursed airways. It doesn’t absorb you into the machine. Instead, it spits you out like afterbirth. Grieving the loss of reality becomes visible; it refuses to be contained within the frame, rupturing into an experience close to the bone. Media that says what it’s not supposed to say is the nightmare of civilized society. It gives us back what the spectacle took, which is proximity to the real. It is the deep ache for a state of existence that is gone forever, overwritten by the algorithm and branding. That grief is wildly alive and sentient, tucked in the corners of the screen. It wants nothing more than for you to bear witness while you search for love, community, the natural world, anything real. Anything. We’re often unaware of what is real, save for fleeting moments of horror and recognition that we’ve strayed too far away from the tracks.

I run an archive of work sourced from the internet, often scraped from the bottom of some really disturbing digital barrels. Some media feels wrong in the room, like it brought something with it. I’ve watched files so unclean that I’ve had to open the windows and rosemary my whole house after.

Our Grimace Gobbling The Witness

Once, I bought a Grimace sing-along tape from McDonald’s at a flea market. I brought it to a friend’s house and we laughed as it played a warped, distorted, blown out purple tune. Later we biked to a party, still joking about it. But when we got home, we heard something inside. The tape was playing. It had been hours. Someone or something had pressed the chronically difficult to press play button hard, and flipped the tape numerous times while we were gone. I walked into the dark, pulled the tape from the player, and threw it in the street. A car ran it over. That was the end of that song! But I still hear the hiss of the tape sometimes, somewhere inside. A reminder that there is mystery. That the things which exist even when we don’t understand them still exist even if we don’t believe.

Magnetic media remembers. I don’t know if ghosts live in machines, but I know the shape of grief does. Like a white sheet floating in the dark. Every playback is a small haunting, placed onto the tongue of the passive consumer like a sacrament by something that wants us to remember. A Sophia of syndication.

When I watch old files, passed through too many rounds of digital decay, especially the ones worn down by love, grief, and desperation, I’m not moved by nostalgia. I long for contact and memory in a time when disconnect and erasure drives sales. Cursed media, haunted commercials, suicide-ridden kids’ shows brush against something raw and necessary. They wear their damage openly. Under harsh lights, in forgotten aspect ratios, pixels lost like a stop sign in a suburban town, they show you your own hurt, and the generational legacy of trauma and longing that we have to reckon with or it will return. Like a recurring nightmare.

We are lonelier than ever. Caught in an endless doom scroll, drowned in curated intimacy. Loneliness has become the product, the platform, and the spectacle. Cursed media looks you dead in the eyes, watching you back.

The things we forget are still here, and they want you to know: We were alone. Just like you. Witnessing.