I've been to Meow Wolf Houston once before — and it wrecked me in the best possible way.
For the uninitiated: Meow Wolf's Radio Tave is a surreal, radio station-themed immersive art experience. At least, that's the pitch. As an east Texas country boy, "surreal radio station" didn't exactly set my boots on fire. But the moment I stumbled into Cowboix Hevvven — a neon-drenched, psychedelic honky tonk dive beamed in from some glittering parallel universe — I was a convert. That place rewired something in my brain.
So yeah. Tonight, we're going back.
This time, I'm not just passing through. I'm going deep — lingering in every room, hunting down hidden mysteries, and actually earning my understanding of this place. Camera in hand, eyes wide open.
Prepping for the Weird
To get in the right headspace for an evening of beautiful strangeness, I spent my morning commute tuned into SiriusXM channel 148, Radio Classics — old-school radio dramas crackling through my speakers like transmissions from another era.
Three episodes. All absolute fire, in that slow-burn, mid-century kind of way.
A deliciously sinister tale of machines quietly conspiring against the humans who built them. Timely? Maybe. Terrifying? Absolutely.
This one had me gripping my steering wheel. Jessica Monroe is being squeezed by the slippery Joe Arnold, who's crafted a manuscript capable of torching her reputation and her family's along with it. When Jessica silences Joe with a pair of bookends in her own office, she thinks the nightmare is over. It isn't. Her assistant editor Mark Harris cleans up the scene — and then promptly presents his own bill: $25,000. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Then he confesses his love. Then the police show up. Then Mark starts rattling his cage a little too loudly… and Jessica, with a gun in her hand and nowhere left to run, makes sure his lips stay sealed. Permanently. Where it goes from there? I'll let you find out yourself. Trust me — you want to.
A welcome gear-shift into pure comedy — and a reminder that Radio Classics doesn't just do dread. "We're not combustible!" is one of those lines that lands out of nowhere and just absolutely floors you. I may have laughed out loud at a red light.
There's something almost sacred about that era of storytelling. No visuals. No algorithms. Just a voice, some sound effects, and your own imagination doing the heavy lifting — long before prestige TV, long before six-second clips designed to dissolve your attention span. These stories are timeless. They still land. They still hit.