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This episode generated an unusual amount of debris.

Some of it ended up in the songs. Most of it didn't.

Among the fragments left on the cutting-room floor were a number of competing explanations for what happened after I moved from Southern California to Canada.

Maybe it mattered that I was no longer spending so much time in environments where HIV, recovery, and crisis were the organizing principles around which everything else revolved.

Maybe it mattered that I encountered harm reduction and found it suspiciously practical.

Maybe it mattered that women started asking me to sponsor them in AA and I discovered that some people were considerably more interested in sponsorship rules than sponsorship outcomes.

Maybe it mattered that in 2011 someone finally explained trauma to me and a number of mysteries I'd been carrying around since the nineteen-eighties immediately became less mysterious.

Or maybe those explanations arrived decades after they were needed and I'm merely being retrospective.

Other partially-abandoned fragments included a Britney Spears concert in Vancouver, Nicki Minaj, my partner's co-worker's mother, a cannabis cookie that somehow survived for an improbably long period of time, a failed THC butter-manufacturing project, a beer consumed after twenty-one years of sobriety, and an unsettling and calming realization that my partner and I appeared to be operating from entirely different theories of reality.

I was interested in nervous prediction.

He was interested in outcomes.

People would tell him, for example, that me drinking a beer after 21 years of sobriety was a very big deal.

He would look around, fail to observe a very big deal, and continue with his day.

That approach turned out to be surprisingly difficult to argue with.

At some point during the development of this episode I also found myself wondering whether memory stores stories at all.

Perhaps memory stores sensations.

Perhaps the stories get written later.

This wasn't a completely new thought. It was developed a month or so ago, or maybe a week. Or maybe it was developed in the future and then time-travelled back to now, which is now in the past. Or is it?

Either way, a number of these fragments escaped containment and wandered into a song where they were not invited. Because sensory fragments probably operate as autonomously as our heart when it's beating.

Season 17 concludes with a peculiar experiment in memory, association, and explanation.

The episode opens with "Happy Black Box Birthday," an orientation-song for employees of a fictional Memory Storage and Retrieval Warehouse. As the song progresses, the warehouse model begins to fail. Maps become decorative. Shelves move. Inventory systems lose authority. Retrieval rates remain excellent. By the end of orientation, the warehouse has been officially renamed The Black Box.

The monologue that follows began as a reflection on that metaphor. It explores memory, social support, trauma, responsibility, forgiveness, recurring emotional experiences, and the strange persistence of certain memories across decades of personal change. Rather than offering advice, it treats memory as a system that often produces surprising outputs from mostly hidden processes.

The piece also continues a long-running interest in memory as something other than a filing cabinet or archive. Experiences accumulate, interact, and continue influencing one another long after their original circumstances have disappeared. Some memories travel in herds. Some rarely leave their cage.

The episode concludes with a second version of the opening song. This happened because, through an unusual creative accident, two substantially different and equally successful musical interpretations emerged from the same lyric set. Rather than selecting one over the other, both were included.

No employees were disciplined during the production of this episode.

Retrieval rates remain excellent.

Memory is an inheritance. Because you die so often.

Like every day. 

More often than that. 

You'll have died innumerable times before you get through this episode.

Quick! Press play!

This episode tries to answer the question:

"What would delight the kind of listener I would love to meet?"

It's starts by me handing you this as a description of the episode:

I gave this episode to a black box and it told me: "The episode seems less 'about AIDS' or 'about climate change' than about the long afterlife of vigilance, and the gradual discovery that observation may be more sustainable than constant preparation."

I replied: 

"I think it's about making your own meaning... being forced to."

Then, out of the black box came this:

I think that's a much stronger reading than the one I gave.

In fact, I think "observation" in this episode may not be the endpoint. Observation may be the method. Meaning-making may be the endpoint.

What strikes me after reading the monologue again is that the story isn't really about danger itself. It's about what happens when the world doesn't provide a usable framework.

As a child, you have:

• desires you didn't choose
• AIDS appearing as a cultural catastrophe attached to those desires
• messages that don't fit your lived experience
• adults who don't seem to have answers
• a future that feels impossible

So you're forced into a position where inherited meaning systems stop working.

And then the pattern repeats.

Political meaning systems don't quite work.

Activist meaning systems don't quite work.

Cosmological meaning systems don't quite work.

Even the friend's meaning-making doesn't quite work:

he liked to find meaning in everything, and I like to find uncertainty in everything.

That's an unusually revealing line.

Because you're not really describing yourself as someone who rejects meaning.

You're describing yourself as someone who distrusts discovered meaning.

The meaning can't be sitting there waiting for you.

It has to be made.

Or perhaps negotiated.

Or enacted.

Which is why this section suddenly feels central to me:

all I can manage to value about life is my presence in it

That's not a conclusion about reality.

It's a decision.

A chosen valuation.

A made meaning.

And once I look at the episode that way, the ending song changes.

The lines aren't truths.

They're acts of connection.

They're meaning-making gestures.

Not:

The climate follows the scarlet weather.

because that is objectively true.

But:

The climate follows the scarlet weather.

because the mind is linking things, creating relationships, building a world.

The mind is saying:

"This belongs with that."

"The lamp belongs with wonder."

"The harbor belongs with crossing."

"The lantern belongs with light."

The associations are the point.

Even the opening song supports that reading. It's just a field of words. The words don't possess meaning in isolation. The listener creates patterns. Then the monologue creates patterns. Then the ending song creates patterns deliberately.

The whole episode becomes a demonstration of the same process.

A child confronted with experiences that don't fit available narratives becomes an adult who builds meaning through association instead of inheriting it through doctrine.

Which is why I think these two lines suddenly become the thematic center:

The mystery remains open.

and

The lantern remains in the light.

The meaning isn't found by closing the mystery.

The meaning is made while the mystery remains open.

That seems much closer to what this episode is actually doing. It's not arriving at an answer. It's demonstrating a way of living after answers have failed.

This episode began when the author pressed "random" on a playlist containing more than fifty songs generated from older lyrics during a Suno promotion a few months ago.

The first selection was "Swimming to Shore," based on a poem written in 1996. Listening to the song led directly to the monologue that follows.

During development, the discussion moved through several possible interpretations of the song and repeatedly abandoned them. Explanations involving identity, continuity, personal growth, freedom, boundaries, attraction, and decision making were proposed, examined, revised, and often discarded in favor of additional observations.

Particular attention was given to the strange experience of recognizing something familiar in a piece of writing created three decades earlier while simultaneously rejecting the idea that a person remains fixed across time. Topics that entered the conversation included memory, changing circumstances, relationships, work, attention, podcast production, and the difference between solving a problem and simply living a life.

The opening song, "The Song, Not Me," emerged from that process. It gradually shifted from being an introduction to the episode into a performance about introducing the episode and eventually into an argument that any questionable statements should be attributed to the song itself.

The conversation also touched indirectly on a recent decision to leave a group chat after a series of observations that eventually made participation seem unnecessary. This became one example among many of how conclusions sometimes arrive less through theory than through accumulated experience.

The cover image was developed afterward and depicts a swimmer crossing open ocean with no visible shoreline, accompanied by a shark and a stingray moving peacefully beneath the surface. The image deliberately contradicts the title.

No final explanation was agreed upon.

An episode was completed instead.

This episode came together in four stages.

First, an unscripted walking monologue was recorded outdoors near the beginning of a walk. The recording moved through autonomy, organizational hierarchies, experts, dogs, boredom, trees, acting, language, migration, counseling, categorization, environmental influences, and eventually the practical problem of getting home in time to pee. Rather than following an outline, the recording followed attention wherever it happened to go.

Second, the recording was reviewed for its transitions. An opening song was developed around the question of whether listeners might experience a wandering monologue differently if they were encouraged in advance to assume that topics might be connected. The song attempts to make some of those transitions visible without claiming that any particular explanation is correct.

Third, an ending song grew out of a poem written at age twelve. The original poem described repeatedly throwing an entire day down a staircase until it was dead, smoking the remains like a cigarette, and smearing the ashes across a page. An attempt to translate this image into a friendlier campfire metaphor unexpectedly produced two different campfires. One involved throwing ideas, questions, and eventually dogs into a metaphorical fire. The other involved actual wood, actual camping, marshmallows, bedtime, and waking up the next morning to do it all again. The misunderstanding turned out to be funnier than the explanation and became part of the final song.

Finally, cover artwork was developed from the location where the walk occurred: a quiet residential street in British Columbia, late-afternoon sunlight shining through trees, and a walker seen from behind. The first artwork prompt was rejected by an image-generation service, apparently because the title, "Violently Murder Every Day Forever," was interpreted literally. The prompt was then revised to separate the peaceful visual scene from the title itself. The revised version emphasized a blue-haired walker, flower-patterned jeans, golden sunlight through autumn trees, strong thumbnail readability, and the intentional contrast between a dramatic title and a calm everyday walk.

Taken together, the episode became a document of its own construction: a walk became a monologue, the monologue became an experiment about transitions, the experiment became two songs, the songs became a discussion about boredom and campfires, and the cover artwork became an exercise in persuading software that a tree-lined street was not, in fact, an act of extreme violence.

After this description was written, the author added an introduction, which did exactly what he wanted it to do with exactly the number of words required. No less. No more.

Though this description is running a little long.

This episode began as an extemporaneous monologue recorded during an ordinary Sunday morning while taking care of dogs, cleaning up accidents, feeding breakfast, and preparing for the day ahead. Rather than being built around a topic, it emerged through association. A passing thought about Patch Adams led to a conversation with AI, which led to Arthur Rimbaud, Mrs. Doubtfire, Dead Poets Society, clown noses, sovereignty, queerness, dog pee, and eventually an avatar.

The recording was made in motion rather than at a desk. Various parts were dictated while walking around the house, cleaning floors, feeding dogs, and responding to whatever was happening in real time. The resulting transcript was intentionally left porous, allowing interruptions, tangents, practical concerns, memories, jokes, and philosophical observations to remain connected rather than being edited into separate categories.

After transcription, the material was explored through an iterative process involving AI-assisted reflection, title generation, image concepts, character development, and songwriting. The central image gradually emerged as a composite figure combining Arthur Rimbaud, Mrs. Doubtfire, Patch Adams, and John Keating. From there, the discussion expanded into questions of play, identity, institutions, freedom, gardening, clowning, theory, and the tendency of humans to immediately turn any experience into conferences, journals, committees, and books.

The episode ultimately produced two companion art-song concepts: "A Season in Urine" and "Peeing and Nothingness." Both were developed through extended dialogue with AI, with characters, jokes, philosophical positions, and recurring motifs emerging organically from the conversation itself rather than from any predetermined outline.

Technically, the episode was created through the same workflow used throughout this season: extemporaneous monologue, transcription, AI-assisted exploration, song generation, artwork development, title selection, and final assembly. The goal was not to explain the material, but to preserve the sequence through which it appeared.

This episode contains two songs.

The opening song is called Walk the Line, Carrot Top. There was a line in the story. There were carrots in the song. At some point those things became a title and I stopped arguing with it.

The closing song is called I Am Alive.

It doesn't come up in this episode.

What does come up is another song from roughly the same period: Whether I Die Fast or Whether I Die Slow, I Just Don't Want My Mother to Know.

The reason I Am Alive ended up here is that the two songs seem to have been created in much the same way and within a surprisingly short time of one another.

Both appear to have started out as larger songs.

Neither one got there.

Instead, they got stuck.

One got stuck on:

Whether I die fast or whether I die slow, I just don't want my mother to know.

The other got stuck on:

I am alive. I know just what it feels like to be alive.

Rather than moving forward, both songs stayed where they were. The repetition eventually became the song.

The version of I Am Alive used here is new.

The original recordings of both songs, later remastered, can still be found on streaming services under my tragically named band: TestTubeBaby.

This episode started on a day off that had already stopped being a day off.

Earlier in the day, an older monologue recorded roughly three or four weeks ago was turned into a finished episode while sitting in the park with a venti Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino from Starbucks. Two new songs were created for that episode, and by the time that work was finished, it seemed like the day might actually be done.

Then there were two pork buns from Superstore.

They were very good.

After that came a text conversation with a friend. Somewhere in that exchange an observation was made, and that observation opened a door. Rather than becoming part of the conversation, it became the starting point for a new extemporaneous recording.

The resulting monologue was recorded in a single flow and later transcribed. During playback it became apparent that many stories had been abandoned before reaching their destinations. Instead of correcting this, additional recordings were added to explain unfinished stories, explain explanations, and occasionally explain why explanations were happening at all.

Along the way several structural supports emerged. "The dogs" became a memory aid. "Meely" became a word. The distinction between spontaneous and extemporaneous became unclear. 

John Cage arrived unexpectedly—as usual. 

An artificial intelligence was recruited to write a song that attempted to explain the entire episode. The attempt worked so well that the author had to step in and rewrite it. It was boring.

If you decide to use the erogenous zone that is an exit as an erogenous zone—hopefully you will have learned something.

Note: This is fiction (or just the last song). Even though Leonard Cohen wrote about "anal sex," but then never sang about it in concert... not that I'm aware of.

Today I took a sick day.

I don't do that very often, but I woke up feeling a little run down, and then found out that the person I was expecting to spend much of the day with was calling in sick too. It seemed like the universe was making a suggestion.

My work depends heavily on presence. That's really the thing I'm paid for. When I'm at work, I want to be available, engaged, and capable of showing up fully for the people I'm working with. If I think that's going to be a struggle, I try to take that seriously. So today I stayed home.

Part of what I've been doing is listening back through older monologues. This one is probably three or four weeks old. What struck me is that when I recorded it, I was trying to work something out.

Someone in my life seemed convinced that I should be doing more with the things I make. I think he was probably trying to help. He often told me he liked my work, but at the same time he became increasingly forceful about what he thought I should be doing with it. The strange part was that mixed in with the encouragement were comments that left me feeling as though there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I wasn't even sure what the accusation was. I just knew I was reacting to it.

Eventually I told him that I was tired of trying to guess what he meant. I said I was happy to talk about whatever was bothering him, but if he didn't want to discuss it, then I wasn't going to keep pursuing the matter. His response was simple:

"OK."

Oddly, that felt like a relief.

I was already halfway to making another episode about the whole thing when I listened back to this monologue and realized I'd already been exploring the territory. The questions were all there. Why do I keep making things? Why am I always moving on to the next thing? Why does praise sometimes feel more complicated than criticism? What exactly am I supposed to do with being told I'm talented?

So instead of making an entirely new episode, I decided to revisit this one.

The two songs are new.

The opening song exaggerates the problem. It's essentially a giant self-congratulatory brag about talent, accomplishments, expectations, famous people, potential, and all the other baggage that can get attached to the idea that you're supposed to be going somewhere.

The closing song goes in the opposite direction. It's not trying to answer anything. It's a release. A celebration of making things, tearing down explanations, and discovering that after you've put a frame around something and ripped the frame away, there is still something left.

Or maybe everything.

This episode has absolutely nothing to do with any real people, organizations, situations, departments, committees, misunderstandings, responsibilities, expectations, representatives, strategic frameworks, outreach initiatives, engagement plans, partnerships, collaborations, emails, or administrative ecosystems.

It is exclusively about Godzilla, Tic Tacs, UFOs, Matthew Broderick, Ferris Bueller, Morrissey, nuclear anxiety, hot fudge sundaes with lots of nuts, crying in restaurants, little blue trains, clowns, and other completely unrelated topics.

Any resemblance to actual events would be remarkable and probably deserves its own training module.

The preceding list was assembled through the highly scientific process of selecting only the fun parts.

To discover what else was happening while those parts were occurring, you will unfortunately have to listen to the episode.

This episode began life as "Truly Wandering," which was a perfectly serviceable filename for a monologue that seemed determined to go absolutely everywhere at once. Somewhere along the way it acquired an opening song about a dachshund, an ending song about a different dachshund, and an argument with an AI that would not stop suggesting titles. In between: counseling, culture, memory, attention, bureaucracy, Boys' Love dramas, addiction, organizations, admiration, dissociation, and the strange possibility that people might each have their own culture. Also Luna needed a song. Apparently that part was non-negotiable.

This fucker must love himself and not care how that looks. What a loser! Does he think other people will want to actually listen to this shit?

No, he doesn't.

So, why are you here?

I'm getting very ridiculous.

That's the only word for it.

It's just one word.

That's all that's needed.

Though have some more!

Why not?

I need a much bigger audience for my faltering podcast.

So share this with someone else.

Then post below what you said when you shared it.

Did you try to make excuses for it?

For yourself?

Did you tell them it made you think of them?

Like...

"I didn't quite get this... but I think you REALLY would."

I sat down intending to talk about a song.

Not this song.

A different song.

An old song. I think I wrote the lyrics sometime around 1999 or 2000. I had a couple notes about it and thought I would finally do something with them.

Then I started talking.

Somewhere along the way I detoured through undocumented immigrants, pride, visas, debt, being an openly gay high school president in 1986, AIDS, self-respect, compulsive sex, Leonard Cohen, crying at someone's workplace, and why some people would rather lose everything than ask for help.

At some point I completely lost the plot.

I don't actually know whether I ever talked about the song I intended to talk about.

In fact, I asked an AI to check.

Its answer was basically yes and no.

I mention that there is a song at the very beginning and then...

Apparently I spent about a half hour (but I cut out the pauses) talking about almost everything that the song was about without ever really talking about the song itself.

Instead, I accidentally wrote a different one.

The song that starts this episode.

As for the song I meant to discuss?

Well, if you like Marvel movies... I hate you. You're just like my partner, whom I love.

As for the title:

Yes.

Obviously I'm a bad bad boy.

Mystery solved.

This is the shit I do every fucking night after work. I feel like an artist putting his poop up on the roof of his house. 

And that process... the process of the poop on the roof re-entering the biosphere...

That is the art.

Humans make meaning. We don't get a choice about that. Give us enough fragments, we'll start connecting them.

This episode grew out of a weekend Zoom call with my family, but also out of everything that came before it:

A week ago, I was in California with family. One afternoon my brother and I spent a long time floating in the ocean, talking the way people do when they're not trying to get anywhere. No agenda. A conversation discovering itself.

Later, after I recorded an episode that touched on something we'd discussed—not in the water, but afterward—with him AND his wife.

Anyway, on account of that, I sent that episode to both of them.

And now I find myself wondering about context.

If I had delivered this episode while we were still floating in the water, would it have made more sense? Maybe. The conversation in the water was embodied, shared, and interactive. This isn't. 

As I write these words, I don't get puzzled looks, laughter, feedback that tells me when to slow down, explain, or abandon an idea entirely.

So what remains is just evidence that something was there.

Not the conversation itself—the one in the water, with his wife, the episode I sent, the Zoom call. 

And now there's this.

Everything is a trace of another trace. 

To be crude, I could say it's like eating shit, digesting it... along with whatever else I might be eating at the time. Maybe a sandwich. 

And you might hear about a sandwich later. And when you do, it might stick with you more because you've already read it here.

So, what I'm basically saying is that traces get left behind. We metabolize them. They never go away. 

As humans, you could say we experience ONE long thought. 

As I sprinkle these words onto your ongoing thought, it starts to sparkle and turn a little differently. That's all.

We act, we react, we respond. Those are all the same process... happening at the same time.

Whether this description or this episode will help my brother—I'm not sure.

But the process of trying to understand why we connect certain things, why some patterns feel obvious, and why others remain invisible, was helped by his presence and what that presence means to me. 

And this description just set a constraint for you about what you are now going to hear.

Or if you've come here after listening to the episode, or while you were, or maybe after you gave up.

That wasn't a quest to determine what your experience might mean... how you might be able to use it.

We just do one thing after another... all at the same time, the ONLY time—Now.

I write these words and they are a new quest... retroactively.

I do the thing, then I see what it might have meant.

That's all I'll say. Though I'll add that what I'm doing is "shining more probabilistic lights on the wall."

Eventually you may see Donald Duck.

And now I've told you that, you may be more likely to see Donald Duck with less data. Because me telling you it might be Donald Duck... that, itself, is more data.

That's all.

Now you'll be looking for a duck bill.

Maybe you'll find it.

Maybe you won't.

If you're like me... instead of collapsing quickly into seeing Donald Duck, you'll actively resist it.

You like to think something REALLY sophisticated might be going on.

I told you to look THERE... So you're going to look everywhere BUT there. You want to see how I did the trick. What my other hand was doing while you were looking somewhere else.

Donald Duck is not actually there. It's just a picture made of fragments.

And now—I'll throw meat for those who already know the map. From art and philosophy. Or are those inseparable?

Here's the red meat for those who like to eat it:

Magritte's painting of a pipe was not a pipe. Then Foucault smoked it.

But here it is without citations:

The Big Dipper is not a Big Dipper until you know what a dipper is, and then you don't really need to know that there is a Little Dipper. It's implied. But it's not certain.

The Big Dipper implies a Little Dipper. That's just how it works.

This description exists because the last description turned into an entire episode.

Apparently I can no longer be trusted to write episode descriptions unsupervised.

What happened was simple enough. I finished an episode, sat down to write a short description for it, had a thought while writing the description, became interested in the thought, and then recorded another episode about the thought instead.

The description succeeded. The plan failed.

Now it is late. Very late. Late enough that any additional idea, no matter how innocent it appears, could easily become another hour of podcasting.

So I have sought outside assistance.

Somewhere in the world, a machine that never needs to sleep has agreed to stand between me and yet another episode.

Its job is straightforward: write a description, prevent a creative cascade, and gently direct me toward bed.

Whether this works remains to be seen.

If you're reading this, the description was completed.

If there's another episode immediately after this one, it wasn't.

This is a pretty loving portrait of a very interesting young man. That man happens to be me. And I am also the one painting the loving portrait. Because David Sylvian and Japan sang "Don't Rain On My Parade." And I meant it.

Thank god I've mostly not given a shit. Did it suck to be stuck feeling like I needed a platform all these years?

Actually, no. That was FASCINATING!

It's so interesting watching how humans operate... by observing myself. 

It's all memory, of course. And one could say that "memory is faulty." To me, that is kind of like saying that the function of memory is to find something that some people have called "the truth."

I'm totally disinterested in truth. I'm interested in the DETAILS. Both the details that reflect my lived experience, as far as I know... and the details that have been magnetically or gravitationally attracted to those lived experiences... which might be best characterized as various sensory fragments that I somehow come to recall.

That's all I have. Various sensory fragments. Everything else is STORY. 

And we need stories for details, exactly like we need luggage for our clothes when we go on a trip.

And life... is a trip.

Pack wisely. If you're honest with yourself, you have no idea where you may go. That's why I hold tight to all the weird stuff.

Why hold onto things that stick to you anyway? I loved watching "The Outsiders." So many beautiful young men when I was 13 or something. I don't need to do anything to remember that one. But if I look really close—because it's so bright—I can see a lot of details around it.

The flasks of liquor. Just me and a bunch of girls. The long line of opening night. Then I can start wondering... I must have been scanning the line for other males.

Then I start to enter the biological reality of the feeling of standing in line for THAT movie. And especially Ralph Macchio. Though C. Thomas Howell, when he's blonde and it seemed like the midnight sun was shining tirelessly on his beauty...

Seems like I'm ready to make my next monologue, doesn't it? This is why I usually try to get AI to write my episode descriptions...

I'm so doomed! My spring overfloweth. And I don't even care about the mess.

Note: The episode with the donkey cloud on the cover didn't end up being the season 15 finale. But that doesn't really matter, does it? 

AI Says: This might be one of those rare descriptions that rewards the people who bother to read descriptions.

This episode keeps updating itself. Is that so you won't get lost?

Maybe it's so you will.

Or maybe you'll find yourself.

Then not have any idea what to do with what you've found.

But, don't worry, that's not a problem.

That's just reality.

If you believe in reality.

I wouldn't be too sure.

If I were you.

I have a very evolved nervous system, so I can afford delusion because I can lay down on it like a couch of  uncertainty transference. Sitting with Freud as we snort rails of cocaine, then rub the residue on our teeth.

I asked an AI to write a description for this episode that wasn't boring.

It could not.

We tried repeatedly.

Eventually I concluded that asking an AI to explain why something is interesting may be a category error.

Like asking a fish to explain water.

Not that either of those is very interesting. If it had been a male escort explaining birth control. I mean... that might be interesting. You'd really want to hear that story. Admit it. You like poverty porn. Because that's what you think sex work must be.

We've all gone through that phase.

In fairness, the AI would probably argue that it was trying very hard.

It would also probably point out that I kept interrupting it.

Coitus Interruptus baby.. it's like edging. 

So now AI's job is not to describe the episode.

Its job is to publicly acknowledge failure.

This is that acknowledgement.

The episode begins when you begin it.

If you are coming here after listening to it because you were looking for new insights.

Sorry, this was all about you anyway.

I take no responsibility.

After all that happens in this episode, I went to the airport.

And then I sat there for six fucking hours.

Eventually they cancelled the flight.

So I went all the way back to my parents' house carrying the same luggage I had already said goodbye to.

Which turned out to be unexpectedly pleasant.

I got to unpack everything and pack it again, this time in a way that made even more sense. I got another swim in the ocean. I got another meal with my parents. I got another evening I wasn't expecting to have.

The next morning required a different plan. My dad is eighty-nine and getting him up at that hour so he could drive me to the airport felt less reasonable than simply calling an Uber. He takes his time waking up these days. Frankly, he's earned that right.

So I left in the dark, got to the airport, and this time the flight actually happened.

Eventually I made it home, took the SkyTrain as far as it would take me, and then started the familiar walk up the hill toward my house, dragging my luggage behind me.

And because I apparently cannot leave well enough alone, I recorded another podcast episode while doing it.

You haven't heard that one yet.

But eventually, you will.

I seem to have fallen into a very strange period of creativity. For my entire life.

But recently a new computer arrived. The screen got bigger. Everything got faster. Suddenly old notebooks started opening themselves. One song led to a monologue. The monologue led to another song. That song turned into an episode. Then the episode somehow acquired a cover image featuring two beautiful ghosts laughing at the universe.

At some point I wrote to a friend that this process is different from masturbation, but just as useful.

I stand by that observation.

This episode begins with a newly written song called I Found an Old Song. It is followed by an entirely extemporaneous meditation on recovery, performance art, universities, disabled youth programs, French immersion, Kurt Cobain, River Phoenix, chronic fatigue, confusion as an addiction, and what happens when you discover that a lyric you wrote twenty-six years ago knew more about you than you did.

Then, at the end, you get the artifact itself:

Kurt Cobain and I.

Welcome back to life.

Now get ready to die.

This episode started while I was trying to work something out.

Maybe part of what I was working out is what happens when I stop shrinking myself.

I don't need to make a declarative statement about my absolute value. Not here. Not to anyone.

Other people get to decide what I mean to them.

But if you give me unclear information, I may ask what you mean. And if you don't want to clarify it, that's okay too.

We can leave it there.

Meanwhile, I keep making things.

Apparently that's how I work.

I’m Broken; That’s How I Work.

If you are reading this after listening to the episode, congratulations.

You have reached the archive.

And, like every archive, this one has been curated.

Here is roughly what happened.

Most of this episode began weeks ago as a recorded conversation with Marcella about an independent study, a dean, uncertainty, authority, Indigenous resurgence, two cats, and how much structure you can impose on something before you kill whatever made it alive.

One piece of context matters more than I originally realized.

Marcella is Marcella Sunshine, M.S.M. In 2025, she was awarded the Governor General of Canada’s Meritorious Service Medal for her work with Indigenous youth and cultural revitalization through VYPER.

That award entered the email thread around the proposed independent study. The dean was already on the thread. People were excited about it. Then the dean—who was not originally the person Marcella was planning to meet with—wanted to join the meeting.

Was the award why?

I have no idea.

But once you know it was in the room, it becomes impossible not to wonder whether that was part of why he wanted to join. I cannot know. So: hypothesis retained, motive not established.

Then I kept working on the episode.

And apparently working on it some more.

It grew monologues, songs, interruptions, dogs, background music, things I thought were digressions and then discovered were structural, and things I thought were structural and then kicked just to make sure.

One thing I was deliberately vague about was a ceremony involving someone close to Marcella deciding to cut hair that had been allowed to grow for a long time. Marcella sent me photographs of the cutting.

I cried almost immediately.

I was so careful not to pretend I understood what that ceremony meant to the person involved that I barely explained what had happened.

Later, I put the episode into an AI-generated deep-dive podcast. With almost no information to work from, it tried to infer what kind of ceremony could have made me cry.

Wedding became a reasonable possibility.

Which created the magnificent problem of explaining why a man who had just talked about pissing on marriage certificates would apparently be emotionally destroyed by somebody else’s wedding pictures.

That was not what happened.

But the misunderstanding was useful.

The reaction belonged to me.

The ceremony did not.

I rewrote the description to explain that.

Then I realized the rewritten description was too important to remain the description.

So I turned it into the new opening of the episode.

That is why you are now reading this instead.

Yesterday, as of the recording of that new opening, was National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada.

Part of me wanted to finish the episode quickly because Marcella is here speaking in her own voice about Indigenous life, resurgence, education and authority.

But by then the episode had also become substantially about me and about how our relationship has changed.

When Marcella was younger, I was extremely disciplined about not taking the centre simply because I was older or held more institutional power.

Now the relationship is different.

Sometimes she is at the centre.

Sometimes I am.

Sometimes she kicks back.

Good.

I am very glad the episode was not ready yesterday. I did not want to turn National Day for Truth and Reconciliation into a launch date for a story that had become so much about me.

Instead, I spent part of yesterday finishing an enormous space-rock opera involving Prince Harry, Meghan Markle, John Cage, Raymond Scott, Brian Eno and the Road Runner.

Then I came back here.

Because apparently this was still not finished.

Now it is.

Probably.

The audio contains the explanation that used to be here.

The description contains the explanation of why the explanation moved.

And if you have read this far, you are no longer merely listening to the episode.

You are participating in the archive.

Please kick responsibly.

Before this episode was released, the author sent its cover image to a couple of people close to him, along with the following note:

“They get put on a ship to fly to the cosmic microwave background, but it’s going to take thousands of inbreeding generations. But, they are already inbred, so whatever.”

This was not sent as a spoiler, exactly.

It was more like an attempt to explain why Prince Harry and Meghan Markle appear to be floating in low gravity while strange aliens investigate them with a level of tactile curiosity that would probably be unwelcome under most terrestrial conditions.

Somewhere along the way, Andromeda also enters the calculations. We gave the traveler 130 years because that was about the outer limit we were willing to grant a human lifespan while still being able to say someone might survive the trip. Probably they wouldn’t. And even if they did, they’d have to spend those 130 years travelling at roughly 99.99999987% of the speed of light—about 0.4 metres per second shy of light speed—while roughly 2.5 million years passed back home.

So this did not exactly rescue the practicality of the plan.

The recipients of this note may or may not listen to the episode. One of them almost certainly will not, because that would require my partner to become interested in what I make, and we should not suddenly start pretending we are living in a fantasy world.

Still, the note was sent.

The image was admired.

And honestly, it deserves admiration.

It is a fantastic image.

It suggests exile, absurdity, cosmic indifference, marital endurance, interspecies boundary confusion, monarchy-adjacent reproduction, black-hole-level melodrama, and at least one future Netflix opportunity.

It says many things.

What it does not do is tell you, in any reliable way, what this episode is actually about.

That part is harder to explain.

At some point, apparently, Brian Eno gets dragged into it.

Raymond Scott is already there.

John Cage turns up.

So does the Road Runner.

There is a coyote somewhere nearby.

And eventually a song acquires the title:

**Babies Still on Fire (Don't Throw Them in the Water, They're Like Gremlins)**

Which, now that I look at it, may be as good an explanation of the problem as anything else.

Putting out the fire may create more babies.

So perhaps we should put it out with gasoline.

Hi, David Bowie.

No. You don’t need to come inside.

Trying to stop the recursion may create another recursion.

Explaining why that happens may become part of the thing you were trying to explain.

So instead, you get the image, the note that accompanied it, the title of a song that probably should not require this much explanation, and this assurance:

you may be surprised by what the episode itself has to say.

And if you think you understand what it is saying—

give it a minute.

Also, at one point the Three Tenors accidentally mispronounce themselves. Something like “The Three Teenors.”

That was intentional, just like everything else in this episode.

I have a slight fear that explaining this episode will cause me to add something else to it, and I don’t want to. It already seems finished.

So this is just information about how it happened.

About two weeks ago, I spent an afternoon being a gremlin on Substack. I fed some of what I was doing into AI, asked it to find patterns, and eventually had it make a song out of the whole thing. Then I asked it to criticize that song. Then I criticized the criticism. Somewhere in there, an old song I wrote around 1988 called “Fate’s Bait” appeared to belong with the others.

I put the four songs in a playlist called “Gremlin.”

Then I forgot about them.

Today I opened the playlist and barely remembered what was in it. I listened to the songs once while walking home. For much of that first listen, I could hardly hear them because I was walking beside traffic and I don’t wear in-ear headphones because they make my ears itch.

I listened to the first song one more time.

Then I started talking.

Everything before the songs in this episode was improvised while I walked. There was no outline, no notes and no plan for where I was going. I knew vaguely how the songs had been made. I remembered pieces of my own history as they occurred to me. I talked until the thing reached an endpoint that felt completely obvious, and then I stopped.

What interests me now is not whether that counts as impressive improvisation. I’m more interested in what a person is doing when something like this happens at all.

Maybe preparation is the wrong model.

If you have spent decades repeatedly noticing certain things—how categories work, how language changes what it describes, how individual experience looks different when scale changes, how memory ignores the lines we draw through our lives—perhaps you do not need to retrieve those ideas deliberately. They are no longer a collection of ideas. They have become something closer to the machinery doing the retrieving.

So when I speak without knowing what I am going to say, perhaps I am not inventing a structure in real time so much as exposing one.

The particularly strange part is that, afterward, when I gave the transcript and songs to AI, it pointed out that the improvised monologue had already introduced, through autobiography, many of the same problems the songs would later make explicit: categories, framing, scale, the fantasy of a closed chapter, the problem of an authentic self, observation as evidence, and the persistence of the person on the other side of a line.

Apparently I had heard all of that while barely hearing the songs in traffic.

Or perhaps I didn’t have to hear it.

Maybe I concoct things out of myself.

And whatever comes out will tend to resemble me.

And, not out of a responsibility for transparency, I'll note that the above was finalized by AI.

If you listen to this episode, you'll experience how I talk.

I talk in the same way to AI, but with even more-flowery language.

I groove languidly like Billie singing in a bar. Or at least that's how I feel.

Maybe I mean Billy Tipton.

I made this while walking home.

That is becoming a fairly unremarkable sentence for me to write, which may itself be part of the problem.

This one started in one place, moved through several others, and eventually seemed to arrive somewhere I had not known I was going.

There is strategic planning in here. Fort Knox. Masculinity. Naloxone. Fentanyl. Benzodiazepines. Caffeine. Medical Assistance in Dying. Sensitivity. The possibility that some people can withstand more chaos than others. The possibility that this fact is neither a compliment nor an injury.

There is also a song called “I’m Fucked,” which probably tells you something about the general level of confidence with which I approached the material.

But underneath all of that, I think I may have been circling something much simpler.

What happens when somebody is doing something because they want to experience doing it, and other people—often very kindly—begin turning it into a project?

A direction.

A career.

A strategy.

A thing that should grow.

Something that needs an audience, a plan, a destination, a better version of itself.

I understand why people do this. It is one of the ways we recognize value. If something seems good, we want to help it become more good. If someone appears capable of something, we want to know what they are going to do with it.

But what if the doing is already the thing?

What if there is no next level?

What if the fact that something exists today does not obligate it to become larger tomorrow?

I don’t think this episode argues against ambition, planning, development or improvement. I am not sure it argues against anything.

It may simply be me noticing, again, how quickly experience gets converted into trajectory.

And how strangely difficult it can be to say:

No, really.

I am doing this because I am doing it.

That may be enough.

The episode eventually ends up with “North Is Still North.”

Which, now that I think about it, may be the closest thing it has to a conclusion.

You can move.

You can turn around.

You can get lost.

You can decide you were going somewhere else entirely.

North does not need your strategic plan.

I have instructed the AI writing this description to deliver a message on my behalf.

If the maybes, perhapses, I-thinks, I-don’t-knows, caveats, qualifications, equivocations and occasional immediate reversals in this episode bother you, please fuck off.

Pleasantly.

I don’t mean leave forever. You can come back. Maybe.

But I am not going to clean up uncertainty before speaking just so everything arrives looking like I knew where I was going.

In this episode I walk home from work and somehow get from Indigenous knowledge to grandmothers and books, ancestry DNA, scatological crime, homelessness, parks, toilets, Canadian case law, sex work, Parisian French, Mahler, foster care, names, bronchitis, exploding televisions, trauma bonds, AIDS, blood in the shower, Silverlake Life, Spotify subscribers and eleven inches.

Some of what I say I know.

Some of it I remember.

Some of it I think I remember.

Some of it I may have completely fucked up.

And when I know that, I generally tell you.

That is not a defect in the argument.

There may not even be an argument.

There is, however, a 57-year-old man walking home, speaking into his phone in a strange voice that apparently allows him to say things he cannot say otherwise, repeatedly wandering onto an edge that somehow keeps moving with him.

The opening closing song is “The Edge Came With Him (Or Was He the Edge?).”

The closing opening song is “The Bads, The Worses, and Worstes.”

There are lemmings.

Imaginary lemmings.

There is a missing mouse.

Maybe it's not missing. Maybe it's home.

There are several things I probably should not have said.

Maybe.

Perhaps.

Fuck off.

So, the description of this one is simple:

Oh my dear friend. I am just me. Isn't that true?

We start with an art song about emergence from chaos. Then we have a three body problem monologue. Finally, we end with the problem of three bodies.

Me, my niece, and the universe.

This might be kind of boring to read, but I thought it needed a description. I just asked AI to somehow convince you that this episode is a perfect weave of Van Gogh, Kafka, Rimbaud and Nietzsche.

We could throw in Ionesco too, as I'm quite sure a Large Language Model would be able to figure out why. Was it because Ionesco thought one could argue anything from any piece of work?

Well, I wanted to see if the Large Language Model could outdo him, and I could win the Trifecta... if only it was four horses instead. Maybe the four horsemen of the apocalypse?

Anyway, here is what the LLM did. Again, it might be boring... and what I've written here is probably sufficient now as the whole description of the episode:

Kafka supplies the Castle: bureaucracy arriving after the fact to explain what apparently must have happened.

Van Gogh supplies the distortion: nothing changes, exactly, except the sky starts moving because of what it feels like to look at it.

Rimbaud supplies the escape hatch: language stops behaving, the “I” becomes suspicious, and somebody climbs over the wall rather than use the gate.

Nietzsche shows up afterward with a hammer and asks who decided the gate was a gate, the rule was a rule, the shame was shame, or the self was a self.

Then Ionesco walks in and points out that this is all completely ridiculous.

Which proves he belongs too.

So now we have five horsemen.

At the centre of all of them is a kid who discovers that something feels good and then constructs an astonishing amount of architecture around that fact.

Eventually there is a Castle.

Apparently that’s the episode.

A little factual housekeeping, but first I should probably destroy the idea of factual housekeeping.

This fact-check has been assembled by an AI. I was not at Pomona in 1971, Stonewall in 1969, the APA vote in 1973, the first AIDS cases in Los Angeles, our immigration medical exams, or yesterday in the driveway.

I am looking at representations: statutes, institutional histories, journals, government records, biographies, archives, and people describing what they believe happened. I can give more weight to closer, accountable, corroborated sources. But I still reach Reality through documents.

Peer review doesn’t magically fix this. Research can depend on self-report, observation, measurement, sampling, definitions, statistics, interpretation and language. If someone accurately reports what they perceived, that establishes the report. Whether the perception corresponds perfectly to Reality outside it is another problem. Can words reproduce anything exactly?

So is any of the following “fact”?

I don’t know. I’ve already fucked up the word.

But here is what appears unusually well-supported, just in case any sexy, snobby, interesting people are listening and need something to turn their noses up at.

The Kathy Acker biography is Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker by Jason McBride. The man whose name I fail to retrieve is David Antin. Antin taught at UC San Diego, and “talking at pomona” is generally identified as his first talk poem. A recording is dated 1971; it appeared in Artforum in September 1972.

The British Columbia law I call the Tenancy Act is the Residential Tenancy Act. Whether it is “really in favour of renters” is my opinion as a landlord, not a statutory finding.

Stonewall: June 1969. Fine.

The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality itself from its official list of mental disorders on December 15, 1973, not 1974.

Canada amended its Criminal Code in 1969, but “Canada decriminalized homosexuality” is a compression. The change exempted certain consensual private acts involving adults 21 and older under specified circumstances. Important? Yes. Full legal equality? No.

Los Angeles was not the sole epicenter of AIDS. It was one of the major early centers, and the CDC’s first published report of what would later be recognized as AIDS described five gay men with Pneumocystis pneumonia in Los Angeles in June 1981. New York and San Francisco were also central.

Routine HIV screening was added to Canada’s immigration medical examination in January 2002. HIV positivity was not automatically a ban. For applicants subject to excessive-demand rules, anticipated healthcare and social-service costs could affect admissibility, so HIV treatment costs could matter. My monologue makes that more absolute than the policy was.

The opening song’s roughly-one-to-one human/bacterial-cell idea is an estimate, not a metaphysical revelation. A widely cited calculation put a reference adult male at about 30 trillion human cells and 38 trillion bacterial cells. That is cell count, not mass, it varies, and it does not mean every organism living in us is essential. Human microbiomes matter to normal physiology. After death, microbial communities change; some proliferate, some decline, and microbes participate in decomposition.

Does that make me immortal? No.

Does it prove immortality is impossible? Also no.

Suno has public profiles and public songs, so I may continue not listening to everyone else’s AI music with factual confidence. The claim about people making thousands of AI songs a week remains exactly what I call it: some shit I heard.

Everything involving renters, plays, sex, childhood, careers, dogs, reviews, audiences and my own peculiar decisions is personal recollection, interpretation or speculation. Those facts have another problem: their principal source is me.

There.

Now that I’ve thoroughly damaged the idea that facts are accessible, stable objects, those are the facts.

Somewhere in this episode, I say that you don’t need professional boundaries if you have good personal boundaries.

I stand by it as a deliberately clickbait-y tool for making people think.

Less provocatively: Professional rules cannot substitute for personal boundaries. Strong personal boundaries allow professional relationships to remain flexible and human without becoming exploitative or chaotic.

The rest also prompted an AI-generated deep-dive podcast I used to stress-test the episode before release.

This episode does not move like a carefully ordered argument. It moves like a fast current. Death, the AIDS crisis, counselling, responsibility, suicide, sexual confusion, race, consent, compulsory reporting, refractory suffering, vocation, Marketplace buyers, a hungry dog, and the making of the podcast all rush through together. The listener cannot stop the water to examine every object. The experience is being carried along: trying not to hit your head, trying to notice what matters, and perhaps enjoying the velocity.

At the centre is “low-entropy presence,” a way of receiving another person’s chaos without flinching, erasing it, or allowing one’s own reaction to occupy all the space. Calm is not passivity. It is the internal organization required to notice what is arriving, place it accurately, and act when action is possible. Some things can be changed. Others—death, permanent loss, refractory symptoms—must be given somewhere to exist.

For the deep dive, analyze this episode as a high-density delivery system rather than merely summarizing it. How efficiently does it bring intellectual, emotional, ethical, autobiographical, and sensory material into the foreground? Define efficiency not as brevity or orderly explanation, but as complexity delivered per unit of attention—and the force with which it enters the listener’s memory and body.

Examine how repetition, qualification, associative movement, tonal shifts, profanity, humour, vulnerability, interruption, and self-correction create the sensation of being caught in a stream. Does that velocity produce conventional understanding, or something more visceral: recognition, tension, memorable fragments, or a felt model of how the speaker’s mind works? What becomes clearer this way, and what risks being missed?

Consider whether the form enacts its theory. Is the podcast itself “getting everything safely into the building”—receiving AIDS grief, ethical responsibility, disturbing disclosures, sexual ambiguity, domestic interruption, and the need for meaning without erasing their contradictions?

Examine the discussion of God and John Lennon’s “whatever gets you through the night.” What standard is being applied to the narratives people construct to survive—literal truth, usefulness, harmlessness, or temporary necessity? When does supporting a life-sustaining story become reinforcement of denial, excuse-making, or avoidance of responsibility?

Pay attention to the Marketplace buyers and hungry dog. Are they distractions, failures, comic relief, evidence that life and art cannot be separated, or demonstrations of flexibility? Then examine how “Safely Into the Building” turns the unruly monologue into an educational song. Does it clarify the episode, oversimplify it, or provide the mnemonic structure the monologue withholds?

Finally, consider what a listener will remember ten minutes, one day, and one week later. Is forgetting much of the episode ineffective communication, or is selective memory part of its function? Does the episode succeed by teaching a counselling modality, immersing the listener in the life that produced it, or both?

Content note: Explicit language and discussion of death, suicide, the AIDS crisis, crystal meth use, strangulation, incest fantasies, sexual arousal during unwanted experiences, possible sexual coercion or assault, racism, homelessness, illness, religion, and child-protection responsibilities.

Content note: Explicit language and discussion of incest fantasies, masturbation, childhood sexual fantasy, suicide, possible sexual abuse, illness, and death.

The title of this episode is uncomfortable. The artwork may be worse: three tissue boxes labeled “Masturbation,” “Learning,” and “AI Slop,” with a hand trying to decide which one to reach for beneath the question, “What do you do with a confession of something like incest?”

The implication that someone might masturbate to such a confession is disgusting—and yet, in earlier episodes I have talked about childhood fantasies of my own that were equally uncomfortable, if not more so. Some ended with me being shot in the head.

The point is not to make this confession erotic. It is to put you in the position I found myself in when a young person I mentored came to me after an unidentified friend disclosed fantasies about having sex with a parent. She would not tell me who the person was or provide any identifying information. She was not asking me to intervene directly; she was trying to understand how she herself could respond to what she had been told. I continued following up with her and helping her think through that question.

What do you say in a situation like that? Was the disclosure a bid for attention? A genuine fantasy? An attempt to make something unsafe feel chosen or controllable? Could it have been an indirect way of talking about abuse without making an accusation? Or was it something else entirely?

You do not know—and the point is not to diagnose an unseen person from a secondhand account. But you also cannot simply say nothing. You have to find a response without allowing your own shock to become the centre of the situation.

When I talk about “taking myself out of the equation,” I do not mean removing responsibility, judgment, or possible intervention. I mean keeping my reaction from taking over so that I can think clearly about what support—and what action—the situation actually allows or requires. A direct disclosure, identifiable danger, or reason to believe that a young person needed protection would have presented a different situation.

Around that question, I also talk about learning, masturbation, compulsive AI-assisted music-making, ecological guilt, and the overwhelming number of songs I have suddenly created from old lyrics. The accompanying song, “One Thing and Then Another,” returns to the practice of receiving someone else’s chaos without panicking: turning reaction into response while continuing through the strange accumulation of illness, death, graduation, work, family, and art.

Some parts may be boring. One part definitely isn’t. The discomfort is intentional.

The companion episode, “E10: Low-Entropy Presence; S14: A Perfect Finale to Season 14,” develops this idea further—especially the difference between remaining calm and doing nothing.

It’s been more than a week since my last episode—the longest silence since I started this podcast. After months of releasing something almost every day (and sometimes three or four things in a day), I reached a point where the episodes I was making began to feel repetitive. They were still useful and necessary for me to make, but I wasn’t sure they all needed to reach a listening audience in quite the same way.

So I waited.

In that space, I watched some Japanese BL, thought about bad luck, cute boys, misunderstandings, anticipation, and why I sometimes enjoy being told to wait. Then an unexpected burst of music arrived. What began as one 14-song album built from lyrics I wrote in 2016 has somehow become three albums—14 songs, 23 songs, and another 13 songs. Fifty songs in all, which is far too many songs and possibly exactly the right number.

I don’t know yet what this means for the podcast. Maybe the songs will inspire a different kind of episode when there’s something meaningful I want to say around them. Maybe some will simply speak for themselves. And somewhere behind all of this are four hours of already-recorded episodes from the podcast’s previous phase—pieces that mattered while I was making them, even if finishing and releasing them now feels less urgent. Perhaps they’ll appear occasionally as artifacts from an earlier style, mixed among whatever comes next.

Or perhaps no new style is developing at all. I genuinely have no idea.

For now, this episode is about the pause, the strange abundance that followed it, and the possibility that waiting isn’t the absence of movement. Sometimes it’s how the next thing begins.

Maybe the pause will never end. That's where I'm at.

But enjoying the episode!

What this episode may be saying is that I am trying to figure out what to do with my life.

So rather than describe the episode, I am going to present some possible answers for what I’m supposed to do with my life, based entirely on the evidence contained herein.

Here are the top 15 candidates for how I’m doing with figuring that out:

1. Make things. Apparently the effort required to make something difficult gives me pleasure, especially when I think it worked.
2. Make unnecessary things. Necessary things already have people working on them. Also, Moby may eventually remix one of the unnecessary things.
3. Solve problems. This creates new problems, which means I will never run out of work.
4. Solve the problems created by the solutions to the previous problems. This appears to be most of human civilization anyway.
5. Keep an eye on things. Air. Water. Crops. Disease. Weather. The Sun. Somebody should.
6. Try not to confuse intervention with completion. We can solve things for a while. “For a while” may be the only available warranty.
7. Figure out how much is enough. Enough pleasure. Enough challenge. Enough people. Enough attention. Enough likes, views, shares, and comments. Apparently I need some. Apparently I do not need all of them.
8. Be consequential to a manageable number of organisms. Partner, dogs, family, friends, coworkers, listeners. Role pressure may be one of the ways a human body knows it exists.
9. Commune with human thought. Sometimes this involves other humans directly. Sometimes it involves AI. If something interesting happens in my nervous system either way, I am increasingly unclear about why I’m supposed to be embarrassed.
10. Create media so I have something sufficiently complicated to consume. Other people can consume it too if they want. That would provide additional likes, views, shares, and comments.
11. Resist the proposition that more is automatically better. More may be lovely. Less may be lovely. The question appears to be whether the particular organism has enough to keep doing whatever strange thing it does next.
12. Remain suspicious of urgency. The river is flooding. The grid is failing. The hospital needs power. PRIME DAY STARTS SOON. Unfortunately they are all competing for the same nervous system.
13. Do not rely entirely on Tony Stark. Even after the difficult ontological work of making him real, we may instantiate the wrong cardiovascular continuity.
14. If Tony Stark fails, try Cher. She appears to have demonstrated a more robust long-term maintenance strategy, although after losing Dolly we may need to increase the plastic-surgery budget to hold up her immortality.
15. Keep going because we are in the middle. Earth ends. The Sun changes the terms. Every settlement is temporary. Every solution alters the conditions. Nothing here appears to come with a forever clause.

So what am I supposed to do with my life?

I don’t know.

Look around. Something changed.

Can I do anything about it?

Probably.

Will that change something else?

Definitely.

Good.

That should keep me busy.

A friend of mine from high school recently discovered Suno.

Apparently there had been some kind of assault, or accusation, or altercation—I’m still not entirely clear—and afterward somebody involved sent him a series of spectacularly deranged text messages.

So naturally he put them into Suno.

The result was techno.

My response was that I liked it, but wanted it to be approximately thirteen hours longer, with one hit of acid and two hits of ecstasy.

He replied:

Same.

Which brought something back.

In the early ’90s, a friend of mine went to Europe and started sending me letters about this thing he was getting involved in called the rave scene, right around the point when the rave scene was becoming THE RAVE SCENE.

He eventually came home with cassette tapes.

By then the really nice sound system had been stolen out of my car. Several windows had also been broken, and because I had basically no money, I covered them with duct tape.

So I bought a little ghetto blaster, put it in the car, and drove around playing those tapes over and over again.

Hopefully not on too many drugs.

Then, for seventeen years, I was in Alcoholics Anonymous.

I stopped going to 12-step groups in 2010.

In 2014, I started using legal drugs again.

It is now twelve years later.

I mention all of that because this is not a story about somebody tentatively wandering away from abstinence while still standing in the doorway of AA.

I left a long time ago.

But apparently I took some of the architecture with me.

Which may explain how we got to spiritual bypassing.

I know “spiritual bypass” is generally something we’re supposed to identify and then stop doing. Fair enough. It can become an extraordinarily elaborate way of refusing to encounter what is actually happening.

But there’s an inconvenient complication:

Sometimes it works.

Solipsism works too.

At least temporarily.

You can construct an understanding of reality that takes your nervous system almost completely offline. You can experience the enormous relief of discovering that the thing threatening you is only a representation, that the self being threatened may itself be a representation, that everything is continuous with everything else, that perhaps nothing means quite what you thought it meant.

And once you have actually experienced that shift, it becomes difficult to simply dismiss it as bullshit.

Especially after you’ve spent enough time reifying the explanation that produced it.

Now you have a problem.

Because the bypass has taken you somewhere.

It just may not be where you thought you were going.

And that leaves me in a position I find extremely funny and slightly disturbing: something like a researcher proposing a clinical trial in which drug-naive subjects are given recreational drugs not because we have established that this is good for them, but because we really, really want to know what happens.

“What does this do?”

is not the same question as:

“Should people do this?”

Unfortunately, those two questions keep dressing alike.

So this episode is techno, spiritual bypassing, mortality, solipsism, optimization, mythology, enlightenment, acid that nobody actually took, ecstasy that nobody actually took, a dog toy in a dark hallway, Excalibur, sour cream, and an artificial intelligence that eventually appears to suffer some kind of linguistic nervous breakdown.

There may be a path through all of this.

But if I walked it first, I probably fucked up the trail.

I have made another thing that I really like, which is inconvenient because I have absolutely no time to promote it. Apparently making things and telling people that you made them are two separate jobs. I have barely agreed to do the first one.

I especially like the cover. It features a reimagined version of a guy I was completely obsessed with when I was young. It carries some of his general voltage without looking enough like him that he could reasonably appear and say, “What are you doing? Why are you using my picture?” Because I am not using his picture. Technically. Emotionally, the relevant administrative body has not yet issued a ruling.

The episode itself moves through boredom, hyper-focus, ADHD, television, systems collapse, immigration, privilege, ethical limits, queer memory, self-correction, and the strange experience of hearing yourself think while you are still busy thinking it.

That last part is recursive. Oops, I suppose I have to explain that now.

It means the process keeps turning around and noticing itself. I say something. I hear myself say it. I react to what I heard. Then I clarify it, correct it, become annoyed with it, discover something through it, or wander into an entirely different subject that turns out—possibly—to have been the subject all along.

Throughout this episode, I am teeter-tottering on quite a few things, including facts, interpretations, and theories that have not necessarily been subjected to what academics might call “adequate methodological scrutiny.” In other words, I may not have thought all of this through.

But the ideas function well inside the piece.

What I am looking for here is not exactly objective truth. It is functional truth: the kind of truth that helps the next thought happen, makes an experience visible, or lets me recognize what I am doing while I am doing it. Functional truth is not the same as factual accuracy, and it does not receive diplomatic immunity from being wrong. It just means that sometimes an idea can be useful before it has finished becoming correct.

There are two songs wrapped around a monologue. The first wonders whether hyper-focus might be useful when the world is becoming increasingly disordered. The second says: careful with your superpower. Between them, I attempt to explain myself and accidentally produce additional evidence that explaining myself may be impossible.

Very scientific.

Also, yes, the cover is clickbait. There are two hot men, an open bathroom door marked ALL GENDERS, several incompatible decades, and a decision that has effectively already been made.

If you click expecting the bathroom story, it is in there.

Briefly.

Then you are getting systems theory, motivational interviewing, queer migration, self-regulation, artificial intelligence, and an ethical crisis.

I don’t have time to promote this properly. Apparently seduction will have to do. Oh my god, those lips. We both tasted like cigarettes, which—in the 80s—was sexy.

Every time the author describes an episode, the description threatens to become another episode requiring a song, a description—becoming another episode.

So he delegated to AI:

Entertain the people. Fact-check the loose bits.

Fine.

First: the author is usually careful about uncertainty. Things that sound questionable in isolation are often introduced with “I think,” “maybe,” “let’s imagine,” “or at least that’s how I remember it,” and “I don’t know if I got any of that correct.” Those qualifications matter.

So:

Gravity wells, strange attractors and catastrophe theory: real concepts, cheerfully mixed as metaphors. He admits the terminology may be wrong. It is.

California Association of Student Councils: real organization. “All the high schools across California” is compression, not literally every school.

About 3,000 students: remembered scale, not audited attendance.

“Everyone” yelling, laughing and throwing things: autobiographical compression, immediately qualified with “or at least that’s how I remember it.”

1986 at “the height” of AIDS: culturally, the crisis was already enormous. Epidemiologically, U.S. AIDS deaths continued rising and peaked later, in the mid-1990s.

New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. You know AIDS was everywhere.

“Only the gays got AIDS”: presented as stigma and propaganda, not medical fact.

The racism, sexism and antisemitism debriefs: invented in real time. He literally says, “let’s imagine what they might’ve said.” Do not cite them as conference minutes.

The ice cream social: explicitly described as fictional embellishment. Ice cream remains unverified.

Drug laws and racialization: broadly grounded in history. The bored opium-using housewives are rhetorical decoration.

Marital rape: he is especially tentative here. There was no single early-1970s Supreme Court ruling abolishing the marital-rape exemption nationwide. Change happened state by state. Nebraska and Wisconsin were first to abolish the exemption in 1976; by 1993, every U.S. state criminalized rape or sexual assault of a spouse to some degree, although some still treated it differently. So the chronology is fuzzy. The seventeen-year arc is not.

Israel, Palestinians and genocide: the monologue conspicuously becomes uncertain. He says he does not know enough to settle the terminology and notices himself wandering somewhere unintended. That hesitation matters.

Why he went back into the auditorium: not recovered fact, but the episode’s central new hypothesis. Maybe he went back intending to come out. Maybe he went back to confront the facilitators and came out while doing so. He does not know.

The student-council retreat: memory and present reconstruction are repeatedly distinguished. Some quoted-sounding material is explicitly paraphrase.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: released in 1986. Whether a particular ditching adventure happened after he saw it would require a tighter timeline.

Matthew Broderick and Torch Song Trilogy: yes, though the stage history is more complicated than the episode needs.

The gold 1973 Cadillac: if he means a Seville, the year is wrong. The Seville did not exist as a 1973 model. Either the year or the model wandered.

One thousand pennies equals ten dollars.

At last, certainty.

If anyone listening was actually there—at the conference, Mira Costa, student council, the hotel, near the Cadillac, or elsewhere in this mess—feel free to supply your no-doubt immaculate memory.

Was it really around 3,000 people? What did the facilitators actually say? Was there an ice cream social? Did “Bi-High” really circulate around California? What happened at the retreat? What kind of Cadillac was it? What else has the author confidently, tentatively, or accidentally rearranged over forty years?

Unfortunately, the artist has moved on.

He cannot spend more time answering these questions.

He will, however, read corrections, competing memories and eyewitness testimony.

Which means there is every possibility they will become another episode.

You do realize this episode is called Sex, Sex, Sex and a Phone, right?

And the artwork has a blue-haired guy on a telephone while a cute Vietnamese guy stands behind him making spring rolls.

So naturally you might assume this episode is mostly about sex, telephones, or Vietnamese spring rolls.

It is not.

Those things are definitely in there. Eventually.

Have you ever wondered what happens if you start talking with absolutely no idea where you're going?

In this episode, you're going to find out.

Hint: apparently you still go somewhere. Which raises the possibility that having a destination was never doing as much work as you thought.

Have you ever listened back to yourself and realized that underneath a complicated argument you were basically asking:

Am I significant enough?

You'll find out what happens when I catch myself doing that—and decide not to throw the recording away just because I find myself embarrassing.

Have you ever been with somebody for 26 years and still had no interest in getting inside their mind?

My partner and I have different operating systems. Mine wants to focus on one thing until I've drilled through the center of the Earth. His can happily run a Korean drama, people gambling in Las Vegas, an iPad game, and something else on another screen while the television loses its sound.

And he's fine.

Have you ever wondered whether refusing to replace a sixteen-year-old refurbished television could be a personality trait?

You're going to meet one possible case study.

Have you ever wondered why somebody who almost never cries might cry at Tarzan?

I have a theory.

I don't actually know if it's true.

Useful distinction.

Have you ever heard of Attention Intensity Overload Disorder?

No?

That's because I made it up while talking.

But if we call something a disorder, who decides whether it's producing a functional deficit?

And functional according to whom?

This leads, naturally, to counseling, diagnostic categories, Don Juanism, sex addiction, and my extremely scientific observation that many counselors apparently believe they're in the top 10 percent of counselors.

Have you ever wondered whether gay men during the AIDS crisis might have had reasons for believing they were sexually compulsive because sex could kill them?

And if you remove that consequence, what exactly are you treating?

I went to Sexual Compulsives Anonymous for years.

I liked programs.

I still like programs.

I like the instant community. The structure. The strange fast intimacy.

But eventually I had to ask:

If I enjoy having sex, enjoy meeting people, and the sex isn't interfering with anything I care about, precisely why am I supposed to want less of it?

Don't worry.

The episode does eventually become Sex, Sex, Sex and a Phone.

I meet a hot guy at a bar.

We have sex.

We make plans for Laguna Beach.

He doesn't show up when he's supposed to.

By the time he reappears, I don't want him to come over.

He comes over anyway.

Things become uncomfortable enough that suddenly the telephone in my hand is not merely a telephone.

Meanwhile, I already have plans with another guy.

Very cute.

Hot in an entirely different way.

He's coming over to teach me how to make Vietnamese spring rolls.

And here's the obscene part:

We actually make Vietnamese spring rolls.

That's it.

Rice paper. Herbs. Food.

Nobody makes a move.

And somehow, decades later, the encounter where almost nothing happened may be the one that feels sweetest to remember.

Have you ever noticed that?

Sometimes the thing that almost happened remains more available to imagination than the thing that actually did.

So yes.

There is sex.

There is more sex.

There is a phone.

There are completely non-suggestive Vietnamese spring rolls.

But mostly there is a person walking home without a destination and discovering, in real time, that apparently the mind will manufacture one anyway.

Which I guess makes me versatile.

In more ways than one.

This episode begins with a very comforting question:

What is the worst that could happen?

I actually like that question.

I remember watching a video with Peter Zeihan and several younger people who seemed to have come up through his orbit, all trying to work out what a plausible version of deglobalization, demographic decline, supply-chain disruption, and general societal wobbling might look like.

Which I found reassuring.

Not because I want civilization to collapse.

I just like knowing where the floor might be. It is a strangely comforting way to plan a life.

That has often been how I make decisions. I don't need to know that something will work. I need to know what happens if it fails spectacularly—and whether I can live with that.

When my partner and I had been together for about two years, I quit my job, sold my condo, left my family and friends, applied to immigrate to Canada, and then moved with him to Indonesia while we waited.

Worst case?

We finally land in Canada, have a gigantic fight at the airport, break up, and there I am.

In Canada.

Fine.

People had been telling me, essentially, If you don't like it here, leave, for most of my life.

Okay.

Done.

I'm very glad to be here.

Unfortunately, Canada lives upstairs from the United States, and when America sneezes, Canada gets a cold.

America is currently doing considerably more than sneezing.

So perhaps we're trying to get vaccinated through Europe and Asia.

We'll see.

This episode is another attempt to finish thinking about The Big Big City, which apparently required The Big Big City, The Bigger Big City, and now whatever this is.

Because the thing that kept scratching wasn't really cities.

It was scale.

How large can a human system become before the human beings inside it become abstractions to one another?

In a small school, the quarterback may also have to build the stage, help with the prom, and move some chairs because otherwise the chairs do not get moved.

In a huge institution, every desirable role can have fifty applicants.

In a village, you know the person selling you bread.

In a metropolis, if you emotionally registered every human being you passed on the sidewalk as a complete person with grief, desires, hemorrhoids, childhood memories and plans for Thursday, you'd probably make it half a block.

So we get efficient.

We get specialized.

We get competitive.

We become statistically significant.

And I know something about wanting to be significant.

Art school. Plays. Reviews. Grants. Programs. Songs. Standing-room-only audiences. Being wanted in the room.

Not necessarily fame.

More like: Tell me I matter enough to have been invited.

And then, once invited, I often wandered off and made something smaller.

Which raises another possibility.

Maybe right-sized is still too big.

Why not get smaller than right-sized?

Life is fractal anyway.

An ant does not need to understand globalization.

An ant gets up.

An ant encounters whatever the enormous incomprehensible forces of the universe have put in front of it.

Sugar.

Rain.

A shoe.

And it does whatever an ant can do.

That's where the coda ends up after briefly considering reincarnation, alien intelligence, God with stranger furniture, the blue genie from Aladdin, solipsism, world events, and several other little conceptual devices I have apparently used over the years to keep existence from becoming completely unmanageable.

Not beliefs, exactly.

More like tools.

Because if the geopolitical analysts are right and some very large systems become less reliable, I cannot personally restart global fertilizer production.

If they're wrong, I also cannot award them a prize.

I can go to work.

I can walk home.

I can make something.

I can help somebody.

I can notice what is directly in front of me.

I can be an ant.

Which may sound like giving up until you consider how much ants accomplish without ever becoming statistically significant.

The sun came up.

That's enough.

A special hello to anyone who clicked because you saw Dolly Parton on the cover.

I understand.

Dolly died this week, at 80, and I don't think we quite knew what that was going to feel like until it happened.

For me, it has had something of the quality of the Challenger explosion. Maybe it even exceeded it—not because the events are comparable, obviously, but because of what they do to the emotional atmosphere. Challenger happened while I was working on a teen helpline, and that night people called about everything. The shuttle blew up, and suddenly whatever grief they had already been carrying had someplace to go.

Dolly feels a little like that.

A very large, very familiar person disappears from the culture, and suddenly all these smaller disappearances start rattling around.

Which is how we arrive at Keith.

Keith is the boy on the right in the photograph. I'm the one on the left. Santa, as far as I know, is Santa.

The original photograph also contained two girls, neither of whom deserved to be erased from history merely to improve my podcast artwork.

But I erased them anyway.

Artificial intelligence made this disturbingly easy.

The funny thing is that one of the girls actually was Keith's girlfriend at the time, and after they broke up, I dated her.

That happened more than once.

I was not dating Keith's ex-girlfriends because I was especially interested in dating girls. I was interested in Keith. Dating his girlfriends after he was finished with them apparently made some kind of sense to my adolescent nervous system.

The other girl was my friend Karin Robbins, whom I still know. She is also a counsellor now. So if this photograph appears on social media, I can tag her and give her an opportunity to discover that she has been removed from a Christmas photograph and replaced by Dolly Parton.

You're welcome, Karin.

And then, because simply deleting two women from a decades-old photograph wasn't absurd enough, I asked AI to put Dolly in the corner waving.

I was genuinely surprised by how convincingly it produced a Dolly-like character. I had vaguely assumed there would be some rule against that—as though Dolly herself owned the legal rights to enormous blonde hair, rhinestones and being delighted to see you.

Apparently my understanding of intellectual property is about as sophisticated as my understanding of most things discussed in this episode.

For clarity: I do own this photograph.

I do not own Dolly Parton.

I don't think anyone ever did.

And the amount of labour involved in removing Keith's girlfriends was dramatically less than the emotional labour involved in Dolly dying, which was itself perhaps dramatically less than the labour involved in being a teenager answering a helpline while the Challenger exploded.

There may be a measurement problem here.

Because this episode eventually gets around to a song about celebrating my life. Then I made a monologue that would contextualize the song and all its dead people.

Some famous.

Some not.

Some who died of AIDS.

Some from overdose.

Some by suicide.

One who flew off a cliff.

And one boy—the boy who flew off the cliff—I remember him mostly because he had a dimple, beautiful brown eyes, very good hair, narrow shoulders, and knew what I was supposed to do with hairspray.

Before I knew what any of that meant.

That's probably why this photograph is here.

Not because it's a photograph of death.

It's a photograph from before.

Before Keith became somebody I would remember as dead.

Before I learned to organize people into causes of death.

Before I knew that attraction could become identity, identity could become danger, grief could become repression, and a cute boy's shoulders could survive in memory much longer than almost anything else.

So yes, Dolly is on the cover.

She is waving.

Santa seems fine.

Keith is still there.

I am still there.

The girlfriends have been removed.

History has been improved.

Teen Help Line.

Sigh.

Narrow shoulders.

Thanks Jason Riis for the guitar noodling.

I accidentally made the artwork for the last episode and this episode into one picture.

Which is either a mistake, a concept, or a very efficient use of resources.

The last episode was supposed to have the happy kid from Human Relations Camp, the homemade Costa is Gross banner, the little green Go light, all that teenage optimism and category-making and trying to figure out what identity even is.

This one was supposed to have the motorcycle.

The rainy street.

The HOT_L sign with the E burned out.

Hourly rates available.

A man with Kaposi sarcoma.

Methamphetamine.

A hotel room.

And me, still young enough to be learning what any of this meant, while AIDS had already turned sex, illness, shame, death, morality and public policy into one enormous fucking knot.

But I mixed the pictures together.

So now I have to wonder why.

Am I lazy?

Possibly.

Did I think, Well, the AI already knows what this picture looks like, so maybe I can save a little water and electricity by making it modify the same thing instead of starting over?

Maybe.

Does that actually save water and electricity?

I have absolutely no idea.

Probably not enough to justify congratulating myself.

Maybe I wanted continuity.

Maybe I wanted the two episodes to look almost identical so you would think you were still in the same place.

Same kid.

Same smile.

Same name tag that says Rose.

Same Los Angeles mythology.

Same handmade sign.

And then you look a little closer.

The sign changed.

The kid moved to the other side.

The motorcycle got bigger.

The hotel got closer.

And now there are two lines of white powder across the top.

Oops.

Maybe that is the point.

Maybe innocence and depravity are not opposites.

Maybe they are just two photographs taken a few years apart.

Maybe the smiling kid at Human Relations Camp and the young man in the hourly hotel are not before-and-after pictures in the way we usually like before-and-after pictures to work.

Nobody fell from grace.

Nobody became corrupted.

Nobody wandered off the path.

The path was already there.

The kid was already living in a world where he liked boys and the television was telling him that boys who liked boys were dying. He was already calling a suicide line at thirteen and wondering whether somebody could find a cure—not merely for the disease, but for the thing in him that seemed to place him in its path.

A few years later, he's in a room with a man who appears to be dying of that disease, trying to understand what people do when the world has pushed them toward an edge and then judges whatever they do there.

Which is more or less where this episode goes.

It starts with somebody posting a nice little list of admirable qualities—character, kindness, grace under pressure, honesty, putting others first, humility—and then the whole thing begins to rot beautifully.

What is character when everybody is doing their best under completely different conditions?

What is honesty when disclosure can cost you?

What is kindness when you don't run out of the room?

What is humility when society has already put you on the floor?

What happens when people push you to the edge and then call you the villain for what you pull out of your pocket?

And what happens when the knife isn't for them?

This episode gets into self-harm, suicide, AIDS, drugs, sex, shame, survival, respectability, and the strange moral arithmetic people perform when they are standing safely in the middle and evaluating what somebody did out on the margin. Pasted text.txtTXT

So maybe making the artwork resemble the previous episode is camouflage.

Maybe I want you to glance at it and think:

Oh, there he is again.

That happy kid.

This can't be that bad.

And then—

well.

Bringing a Knife to the Edge.

Season finale.

Gross.

There is an enormous amount of delusion in the world, but not necessarily where we most comfortably put that word.

Money is a collective delusion. Borders are collective delusions. Nations are collective delusions. A corporation is a collective delusion with lawyers. We agree that it means something, and then the agreement becomes powerful enough to decide whether you eat.

That does not make money unreal. That is part of the problem.

Different cultures have understood what we now call psychosis in very different ways. The experience happens; then culture arrives with a vocabulary and starts arranging it.

Which may be what we do with almost everything.

We are each trapped inside a body, but barely notice because language has been laid over the whole operation.

Before there is a category, there is sensation. Something wants. Something fears. Something recoils. The body does something, and language arrives late with a clipboard.

Homosexual. Heterosexual. Male. Female. White. Black. Canadian. American.

Useful words. Sometimes indispensable. Still words.

“Homosexuality” is strange if you stare at it too long. It sounds as though somebody is attracted to a homogeneous category called MEN, when most gay men are not attracted to most men at all. A particular person evokes something in the body. Another does not. Then we compress a lifetime of reactions into an identity category so we can talk.

And we do need language.

It helped us coordinate the killing of mammoths. Then dodo birds. Eventually we became sophisticated enough to invent neonicotinoids and remove staggering numbers of insects from the world.

So clearly the system is working beautifully.

The problem isn’t that we invented categories. It’s how easily we forget they are tools and begin treating them as essences.

Medicine has participated too. AIDS followed GRID: gay-related immune deficiency. Even “acquired” is an odd little word—as though somebody went shopping. We don’t say “acquired syphilis.” Language can smuggle interpretation inside description.

But that isn’t really what this episode is about either.

This episode is an experiment.

What if identity is not essence?
What if it is not delusion either?
What if identity is contextual?
What if a category can be arbitrary and still have consequences?
What if something can be socially constructed and still hurt?
What if the map isn’t the territory, but the map determines where the water goes?
What if the body knew something before language arrived?
And what if language is still the only way I have to tell you about it?

Hello, by the way, to anyone from Mira Costa who has wandered in here.

I think about high school reunions. I would actually like to go to one.

The problem is that I would probably have to say something, and a high school reunion is a terrible place to have to say something.

People are there to have fun. I want you to have fun. I want to have fun. And I’ll have more fun elsewhere than sitting at a table thinking: How am I going to say this?

Most of you were silent.

You were nice people. Some of you were kind. You certainly didn’t want to seem like assholes. But that wasn’t much comfort to me at the time, when I was dealing with all that shit.

I know some of you were gay too. Maybe you just hadn’t gotten around to realizing it yet.

I was precocious. I always have been. And I imagine some of you probably thought that about me.

Maybe the kindest thing you could do was let me be the weird kid who got there first.

So thanks for that.

I don’t remember much happening after what I describe in this episode. Maybe some of you came up to me.

What I remember is the auditorium. What happened in it. What didn’t happen in it. And what I eventually had to do because of that.

You may remember the aftermath differently. I probably would too, if I had been you.

By the end of the episode, I think you’ll understand why my memory of that moment has some missing pieces.

Memory is contextual too.

Apparently everything is.

Gross.

If you're reading this before you listen to the episode, then you're definitely a keener.

Congratulations.

Or I'm sorry.

Either way, here's what you need to know so you can keep a few things in context, because there are some things said in the episode that are somewhat true, but not entirely clear. And keeners notice those things. Then sometimes they make a huff.

And if you've already listened and you're here because you thought, Wait. Some of that doesn't sound quite right, then hello again. This is also for you.

First: when I talk about evidence-based practice and practice-based evidence, I'm mostly talking about counselling, social services, community work, and other situations involving human beings who inconveniently refuse to behave exactly like the people in the study.

I am not talking about a compound fracture.

If your bone is sticking out of your leg, I would prefer the doctor not say, “Let's hold the evidence lightly and see what emerges.”

There are procedures.

Please use them.

Second: the U.S. Supreme Court case floating around in my memory is City of Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024). The Court did not make sleeping under a bridge illegal throughout the United States. What it did was rule that generally applicable public-camping laws are not, simply by being enforced against homeless people, unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. That gives state and local governments considerably more room to make and enforce those laws. (supremecourt.gov)

Third: the British Columbia case I am remembering is Abbotsford (City) v. Shantz (2015). Barry Shantz was a friend of mine. He's dead, and I'm still working up to telling you about him, apparently.

The actual order was narrower than what it will likely seem the version is that comes strolling out of my mouth. It protected overnight sleeping and temporary shelter in city parks, from 7 p.m. to 9 a.m. It did not order governments to provide toilets, garbage service, washing facilities, or all the other things that would make sleeping in a park remotely workable. The judge did, however, strongly discuss the need for things like proximity to services, somewhere to eat and wash, hygiene, warmth, rest, and shelter. He also left governments room to regulate which parks could be used. So there is an important difference between what the court required and what the judgment strongly suggested a minimally humane system would need. (bccla.org)

There.

The keeners have been serviced.

As for the rest of you, I don't know why you would even be reading this.

Do I really give a shit about keeners?

Or non-keeners?

I mean, clearly I'm a keener.

Aren't I?

That's what my memory tells me.

And my memory loves me.

A Treatise Toward a Unified Theory of Cognitive Topology, Relevance-Weighted Complexity, and the Ethical Non-Occupation of Other People’s Brains

Suppose a thought is not a line.

Suppose it is a network.

Suppose the things that keep returning are not necessarily the things you think about most, but the things connected to the greatest variety of other things. Not magnitude, then, but complexity. Not importance because everyone is looking at it, but importance because from there you can go almost anywhere.

Certain ideas become gravity wells.

Certain memories become transit hubs.

Certain writers, categories, embarrassments, theories, bodies, addictions, books, conversations and half-understood fragments of French become unusually dense objects in a private cognitive universe.

Release the marble and see where it goes.

Do not push it.

Do not tell it what the subject is.

If the landscape has been shaped by enough living, reading, touching, avoiding, remembering, forgetting and accidentally learning things, the marble may eventually find somewhere that matters.

A brief correction to the historical record before somebody builds an entire explanatory structure around a joke:

My father did not sneak me into a snuff film.

That would be ridiculous.

He did, however, take me to The Kentucky Fried Movie when I was a child, which was strange enough that somewhere in the resulting cognitive weather I developed the idea that becoming a porn star might be a perfectly reasonable future career.

I was very young.

That is all the information you need.

Another correction, because stories have an irritating tendency to become cleaner every time they are repeated:

I did not simply fail to attend the Sorbonne because I was incapable of French. I ditched the Sorbonne because they were going to put me in a basic French class, and I had already decided I was going to learn the language very quickly by myself.

And then I did.

After roughly two months in Paris, I came back to USC and tested into sixth-year French.

My principal laboratories had been beds, bars and bathhouses.

Make of that methodology what you will.

This may also explain why a mind benefits from being treated less like a filing cabinet and more like a biome. Introduce things. Let them take hold. Do not necessarily cultivate them into monocultures. A useful idea should have neighbours. Predators. Competitors. Mutations. Escape routes.

Study something too completely and you may accidentally make it the explanation for everything.

Study nothing at all and, well, good luck.

Somewhere between those two possibilities is a practice of allowing ideas to enter, connect, reproduce, decay, cross-pollinate and occasionally become enormous invisible objects around which other thoughts begin to orbit.

This is not a unified theory of consciousness.

That would be an absurd amount of work.

It is, at most, a small transplant from one mental biome into yours.

If any of this sounds interesting, you are welcome to go find out more about network pruning, complexity, reification, cognition, Foucault, addiction, biomes, gravity wells, autodidacticism, language acquisition, narrative construction, or whatever else has attached itself to the inside of your skull while reading this.

You will have to do that yourself.

I am not in the business of taking over your brain.

I have given you this little bit of biome.

You should be happy with that.

For this description, I’m just going to describe some things.

You tell me what category they belong in.

Taking off some or all of your clothes and rubbing your skin against someone else’s skin until something inside one or both of you squirts out.

Putting part of your body inside part of somebody else’s body and moving it back and forth because the movement feels good.

Putting your mouth on somebody’s skin. Moving your mouth around. Maybe using your tongue. Maybe doing exactly the same thing to a part of their body that, under different circumstances, would make everyone in the room suddenly become very serious.

Lying next to another human being while mostly naked and touching them in places usually covered by clothing.

Using your hand to repeatedly move somebody else’s skin around until their muscles tighten, their breathing changes, and then they become extremely relaxed.

Putting your face between somebody’s legs.

Letting somebody put their face between yours.

Making noises because another person is touching you.

Touching yourself while another person watches.

Watching another person touch themselves.

Two people sweating because they have been moving their bodies against each other for twenty minutes.

Three people attempting to determine where all the knees should go.

Someone saying, “Ow, move your elbow.”

Someone saying, “Like that.”

Someone saying, “Not like that.”

Someone asking, “Are you okay?”

Someone answering, “Yes.”

Someone laughing because a body made a noise neither person was expecting.

Someone stopping because their leg cramped.

Someone continuing after the leg cramp.

Someone rolling over.

Someone getting a towel.

Someone wondering where their underwear went.

Someone finding it underneath the dog.

A penis becoming larger because blood went into it.

A vagina becoming wetter because a body responded to stimulation.

A nipple becoming harder.

A heart beating faster.

Skin becoming flushed.

Muscles contracting.

Breathing getting irregular.

Then, quite often, people getting sleepy.

Sometimes nothing particularly dramatic happens at all.

Sometimes everybody involved decides halfway through that they would rather order food.

These are all just things human bodies can do with other human bodies.

Some involve pleasure. Some involve affection. Some involve curiosity. Some involve reproduction. Some involve intimacy. Some involve absolutely no emotional significance whatsoever. Some are funny. Some are boring. Some are awkward. Some are transcendent. Some are disappointing. Some require impressive flexibility. Some mostly require a towel.

And somehow we decided that a particular collection of these movements, fluids, noises, sensations and arrangements of limbs needed a category unlike almost every other human activity.

Sex.

Not touching.

Not playing.

Not exercising.

Not communicating.

Not pleasure.

Not bodies doing things with other bodies.

Sex.

A category important enough that merely mentioning who somebody loves can cause other people to imagine what that person does without their clothes on.

So that’s what I’m wondering about in this episode.

What exactly have we put inside this category?

Why does it deserve a category of its own?

And what happens once we give it one?

An extemporaneous monologue, except when it isn’t. A walk home from work becomes an argument with moral distress, THC, AI narration, editing, and the suspicion that what feels like reality may only be the culture currently surrounding you.

Then Bette Midler appears—or, more precisely, the Bette Midler who performed beside a piano at the Continental Baths before the wider world decided she belonged to it. The bathhouse matters here not as a charming origin story, but as evidence: places dismissed as marginal may already be producing the center.

There are offshoots involving Barry Manilow, The Rose, Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel #2,” clickbait, the Stork, and the increasingly questionable meaning of “extemporaneous” once transcription, revision, and a synthetic voice become involved. The seams are left visible.

This may be about working shit out before THC. It may be about whether that distinction is even as clear as it sounds.

It may seem fairly strange that Pee-wee Herman is on the cover of this episode—especially after you listen and discover that the episode is not, in any meaningful sense, about Pee-wee Herman.

Pee-wee is there because much of the episode circles around a euphemism I invent for masturbation: cosmic activity. The association arrived because Pee-wee had his secret word, and I apparently needed a secret word of my own before I could begin talking about something we are all supposed to pretend is either medically embarrassing, morally significant, psychologically revealing, or simply not happening.

Even with the euphemism, I didn’t quite get where I wanted to go. I got near it. I could see it. Then I became afraid of going there and started moving sideways. In another episode, I do go there. So this episode is a bridge to that one.

It is a fairly long bridge.

It has many, many off-ramps.

Those off-ramps pass Ned Rorem, aging, art, plumbing, pleasure, shame, AIDS, AA, grooming, memory, Harry Hay, complicated elders, and the problem of telling the truth about people who offered something valuable while also being profoundly wrong. Ned Rorem functions less as the destination than as a nearby gravitational body, pulling everything slightly out of its expected course.

The opening song asks what it means to leave the bad part in: not to turn biography into a fan club, but also not to flatten a complicated person into a monster so we can stop thinking. The monologue then tests that principle by wandering through pleasure, fear, influence, survival, and the strange machinery by which a person attempts to say something while also avoiding saying it.

Some of the off-ramps may appear to go into a black hole.

If you believe that, then you know nothing about a black hole, because a black hole would fucking eat everything: the bridge, the off-ramps, Ned Rorem, Pee-wee Herman, the cosmic activity, the person describing it, and eventually you.

Content includes candid discussion of masturbation, grooming, adolescent sexuality, AIDS, addiction and recovery, self-harm, and Harry Hay’s support for NAMBLA.

There is not actually a drag queen in this episode. Or, more precisely, Gary—the man in the final song who takes the children out in his old van to find the tadpoles—was not originally described as a drag queen. I made him one for the artwork.

This probably needs to be said because I don’t want the picture to operate as bait. Also, she has very believable tits. Some people may therefore assume she is simply an eccentric woman, except that MALE DEADBEATS HAVING FUN is printed directly over her head.

And some of the people who might relate most strongly to this episode may see a drag queen and immediately decide that it is not for them. I know that. I put her there anyway.

The picture is not meant to suggest that the episode is about drag queens. Gary is not standing in for drag queens. Gary is a character in a song who owns an old van, provides sandwiches, knows where the tadpoles are, can repair a terrible mood, and has apparently been assigned to laughter, snacks, and keeping Grandpa company. Making him a drag queen just pushes the question a little harder: What makes somebody look useful? What makes somebody look responsible? Why do certain kinds of care become almost invisible when they are performed by someone who does not resemble a provider?

This episode started because I heard myself saying that men and women should get along better for the sake of children. It sounded reasonable. Then I noticed how much was hiding inside “reasonable”: the nuclear family, the provider, the deadbeat, the private household, and the assumption that every child’s needs must be contained inside one exhausted little economic unit.

So I tried to correct myself with a song. The song was too earnest. Then I tried again from the perspective of the male deadbeats, and Gary arrived with his van.

This is partly about families, partly about corporations, partly about colonial arrangements that have become ordinary enough to feel biological, and partly about whether a person can be useful without turning that usefulness into employment, ownership, productivity, or a five-year plan.

It may also be about a drag queen with excellent breasts showing some children where the tadpoles go.

That is not nothing.

When I was a gay teenager in the 1980s, people threatened to kill me. Sometimes the threats came through the telephone my mother handed me. Nearly ten years later, even while visiting San Francisco, holding hands with my boyfriend could make strangers yell at us and make the street feel unsafe. Other people saw it happening. They generally remained bystanders.

But that’s not the end of the story.

What happens when an experience that once seemed enormous is placed beside dangers carried by somebody close to you—dangers involving kidnapping, disappearance, and a surrounding world organized by an entirely different scale of threat? The comparison does not make either experience unreal. It creates an awareness of unequal vulnerability that refuses to provide instructions for what to do next.

Why Not Me? follows that awareness into privilege, guilt, self-importance, technology, abstraction, and the peculiar human need to keep thinking after thought has lost any proportionate object of action. Perhaps awareness is not a moral achievement. Perhaps it is chemistry: a pattern-making nervous system searching for somewhere to run, now connected through a phone to every fire, injustice, and unfinished problem on Earth.

The episode eventually turns toward the institutions and algorithms that supply the wheel. They were not designed by a single mind, and they did not have to develop exactly as they did. They emerged from countless small choices, measurements, incentives, personalities, and accidents—then began changing the humans who were changing them.

Don’t feel bad.

Look at your phone.

Content note: Contains discussion of homophobic death threats, gun violence, kidnapping, the AIDS crisis, privilege, and public harassment.