Explore every episode of the podcast Danger, Vicious Dog

This episode contains:

A conspiracy theory about podcast analytics.

A failed musician attempting to become a successful failed musician.

Seven Spotify listeners.

Fifteen Google accounts.

Two dogs humping reality from opposite directions.

David Bowie trapped inside a dead search engine.

Leonard Cohen dying at exactly the wrong moment.

An executive director of a non-profit openly begging strangers for dopamine.

A creator refreshing statistics like a lab rat pressing the cocaine lever.

An extended meditation on the precise distance between art and cringe.

The answer, apparently, is one molecule.

This episode asks important questions:

How many fake accounts does it take to feel loved?

How many followers can follow followers before nobody remembers what they’re following?

Why does everyone own a lawnmower even when nobody has a lawn?

Why do we trust analytics more than our own senses?

Why does every creator secretly want devotion without earning it?

Why does every audience insist on consuming a body of work in the least useful order possible?

Why are we all staring through binoculars into somebody else’s life?

And why does self-promotion feel so much like public masturbation?

Along the way you’ll encounter:

Trump.

The Plandemic.

Dead cultural icons.

Artificial intelligence.

Climate collapse.

Species extinction.

Substack weirdos.

Spotify experiments.

Queer oversharing.

A man publicly bullying himself for half an hour because deleting the material felt too merciful.

Most podcasts promise clarity.

This one promises escalating confusion, self-sabotage, and increasingly suspicious relationships with statistics.

You’ll hear about the infamous overlapping-voices episode.

You’ll be encouraged to hunt for it.

You’ll probably become curious enough to do exactly what the narrator wants.

And if you do, somewhere a graph will move upward and a middle-aged gay man will receive a small pellet of dopamine.

Everything above is completely true.

Except for the parts that aren’t.

This description had its fingers crossed the whole time.

What if addiction isn’t a thing?

Or at least not the thing we’ve been taught to see.

This episode starts as a response to a Substack post and rapidly becomes something else: a critique of the way Western culture decides what counts as knowledge, whose stories are allowed to matter, and which explanations make it onto the menu.

Because every system comes with a menu.

There are approved causes.
Approved solutions.
Approved experts.
Approved ways of talking.

And then there are all the things that don’t fit.

What if a stimulant wasn’t an escape from life, but an enhancement of a life you genuinely wanted more of?

What if the story of someone’s drug use can’t be separated from sleep, sexuality, immigration, AIDS, colonialism, desire, exhaustion, geography, economics, and history?

What if the problem isn’t that people refuse to tell the truth about addiction?

What if the problem is that the available truths are too small?

This episode wanders through Deleuze and Guattari, Alcoholics Anonymous, speed, insomnia, El Salvador, gay survival, and the politics of explanation itself.

Not because these topics are unrelated.

Because they may be impossible to separate.

“A colonial mindset wants to locate the problem somewhere else. It definitely doesn’t want to point at itself.”

If you’ve ever felt like your experience disappeared the moment somebody gave it a diagnosis, this one’s for you.

One of the weirdest things about becoming visible online—even slightly visible—is discovering how quickly you start wanting reassurance from numbers.

Not success. Not art. Not connection.

Numbers.

A graph moving upward.

A little dashboard saying:

“Good boy.”

This episode started as something completely different. Then suddenly a few podcast episodes escaped containment and got hundreds of listens instead of seven. Which, for the record, is enough to completely reorganize your nervous system if you are used to living artistically in near-total obscurity.

And what fascinated me wasn’t the “success.”

It was how FAST my brain adapted.

Immediately:

Should I tighten things up?

Should I edit more?

Should I stop stammering?

Should I become digestible?

Should I optimize myself into a smooth consumer product?

Should I become… spiritually aerodynamic?

And that’s where this episode accidentally wandered into the territory of spiritual bypassing.

A phrase many people have never heard before, but which is actually very simple.

Spiritual bypassing is when people use “growth,” “healing,” “mindfulness,” “evolution,” “optimization,” “higher consciousness,” or pseudo-spiritual language to avoid reality instead of entering it more honestly.

It’s when someone says:

“I’m protecting my peace,”

when what they mean is:

“I refuse to tolerate discomfort.”

Or:

“I’m setting boundaries,”

when what they mean is:

“You are no longer providing dopamine correctly.”

Or:

“I’ve evolved past negativity,”

when what they mean is:

“I’ve become terrified of ambiguity.”

Or:

“Everything happens for a reason,”

because the alternative—that existence may be partially random and horrifying—makes them want to throw up in a Whole Foods parking lot.

And online culture is absolutely soaked in this now.

Everyone is optimizing.

Curating.

Healing.

Manifesting.

Strategizing.

Building brands around authenticity.

Everyone is becoming an algorithm about escaping algorithms.

Which is why the spreadsheet boyfriend in this episode matters so much.

Because his orgasm spreadsheet sounds ridiculous—and it IS ridiculous—but it also isn’t fundamentally different from podcast analytics, follower counts, engagement dashboards, productivity systems, wellness trackers, or all the little charts people use to transform life into measurable reassurance.

What if Spotify statistics and orgasm spreadsheets are spiritually the same object?

What if most people don’t actually want intimacy?

What if they want analytics that temporarily feel like intimacy?

That’s the question hiding underneath this entire episode.

And underneath all the jokes about gay performance art, herpes monologues, audience hostility, giant theatrical dicks, dopamine addiction, and the algorithm itself… there’s another question too:

Can you become visible without slowly sanding off the parts of yourself that made visibility interesting in the first place?

I genuinely don’t know.

This episode is me trying to fail honestly instead of succeeding strategically.

And because modern attention spans now resemble caffeinated squirrels being tased inside a cryptocurrency convention, I’m also including pull-quotes below.

Partly because I’ll use them as Notes while promoting the episode on Substack.

But also because I enjoy the humiliating honesty of admitting that we are all trying to grab each other’s attention now. Including me. Including you.

So here are twenty little dopamine traps.

Hopefully one clamps onto your nervous system hard enough that you’ll need to hear the whole episode in order to pry its fingers loose from your brainstem.

Or your nuts.

Whichever metaphor feels more spiritually aligned for your personal growth journey.

This introduction is being written for Substack, which is a queer‑deaf place. Not hostile — just unable to hear the frequency queer people speak in. So I’m going to try to write something that will be legible to the queer‑deaf and also put them gently in their place. That’s what this introduction is for.

And because “queer‑deaf” needs a definition, here’s the only one that makes sense:

Queer‑deaf is when someone hears the sentence but not the slippage.

It’s when you speak in parentheses inside parentheses inside a parenthetical multiverse, and they respond in the grammar of customer service.

It’s when you leave the stratosphere, leave the universe, leave the multiverse, and go looking for God — and She’s sitting on a folding chair at the end of the Manhattan Beach Pier drinking crème de cassis and saying, “Oh honey, I heard you the whole time — they’re the ones who can’t.”

That’s the audience.

That’s the platform.

That’s the vibe.

But honestly, you should just listen to the podcast. Once you start, you won’t be able to stop. You won’t understand it with your “understanding.” You’ll understand it with your body.

Season 7 is coming.

The episode is coming.

That’s the whole announcement.

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PULL‑QUOTES: destabilizing queer situations

These are direct pulls from the script — no rewriting — chosen because they show the kinds of queer danger, confusion, grooming, vulnerability, or existential dislocation that queer‑deaf readers would never register unless they listened to the episode.

Each one is intentionally fragmentary.

Each one destabilizes without needing to finish the thought.

1. “Reading is eating someone else’s shit.”
2. “My openly gay mentors were becoming flies. And then they dropped.”
3. “Cute, blue-haired, popular, intelligent, infuriating disease vectors.”
4. “I thought my badassery might change something for him. It didn’t.”
5. “There was another world spinning inside of this one… or maybe not spinning, maybe it was just gagging on the other world.”
6. “I became very vulnerable… to grooming.”
7. “The thought police were your OWN thoughts.”
8. “I didn’t mind not knowing what was going on.”
9. “It’s really delicious… how disgusting it was.”
10. “If you dated… it was just really hard to show any interest in the cute, vulnerable twenty-two year-old…”
11. “The gang bang story was probably easier to tell.”
12. “That is how I became an autodidact.”
13. “Thoughts, in those days… they were all toxic.”
14. “Reading was something you could do to maybe not have time to have sex with too many strangers…”
15. “I really wanted something to mean something.”
16. “The truth is ugly.”
17. “Humanity is an industry.”
18. “Honestly, I’ll take anywhere but here.”
19. “No one is gay. Not even me.”
20. “I thought I was being taken / but I was taking memory.”

The episode has no wants. And one of them was to not stay in one piece. So it grabbed its own arm and pulled it off. To hand it to me… along with the hand, and the elbow and the shoulder.

And while that was happening, the hand was going one way, the elbow another, the shoulder another.

Bodies are amazing things, don’t you think?

Then we made some Bacon. The Bacon was capitalized, like this: Bacon.

It’s an ancestry thing. I think you’ll like it.

In the meantime, I pulled these pull-quotes so I can use them as Notes on Substack.

I don’t mean to brag, but I could have pulled twenty more.

You will learn in this episode that I am perfect.

And I am a narcissist. Who announces himself. So, a VERY special narcissist.

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20 Pull‑Quotes From the Episode

1. “Getting annoyed is a sign of critical thinking.”
2. “If you’re incredibly happy, you’re probably not thinking critically.”
3. “Socrates talking about how happiness results from not thinking critically and just laughing his ass off as he drinks the Hemlock.”
4. “I can just emanate resting bitch face… the whole bitch face resting… in my eyes.”
5. “With those resting bitch face eyes totally locked onto you like fucking Superman burning a hole through your missing heart.”
6. “Sometimes it takes a few strokes to tilt everything… the whole universe… about twelve degrees.”
7. “A carpet roll of time that determines who I am? What kind of bullshit is that?!?”
8. “If I don’t respect you WE ARE GOING TO HAVE FUN!”
9. “I took that test. I failed completely.”
10. “I’m 100% neurotypical.”
11. “Context has totally fucked up my mental health at times.”
12. “All you can think is… what’s wrong with me?!?”
13. “Then later, you look back and wonder how you fucking survived.”
14. “Everyone else wonders how you’re still alive too.”
15. “Not having a solution for someone else’s obvious problem… that’s exhausting.”
16. “Wow, I love how I can’t figure out what you’re saying.”
17. “Naughty naughty unclear antecedent.”
18. “All of the above in a snarling tangle that bites whenever you try to tame it.”
19. “I don’t even know what we’re talking about… and I’m game.”
20. “Maybe because I’m an Aries? Is that neurodivergence?”

This episode begins with mania, wanders through geopolitics, Tesla crumple‑zones, revenge fantasies, AIDS grief, gay AA in Palm Springs, MIDI sequencers, erotic electrocution anxiety, and a dying cowboy in a Speedo who just wanted someone to sing harmony with him before he disappeared from the earth. So, naturally, it becomes a love story about tenderness. Human beings are disgusting little miracles like that.

This is not nostalgia. Nostalgia sands edges. This episode leaves the razorblades in.

At 24, the author falls briefly and intensely into orbit around Rodney Archuletta: beautiful, doomed, improvisational, electrically inclined in ways absolutely nobody requested. A man dying in the early 1990s with enough openness left to hand someone his lyrics and say, essentially: Here. Maybe this can survive me.

And because the universe enjoys emotional vandalism, the lyrics are good. Not “good considering.” Just good. Earnest in the terrifying way earnestness becomes when death is sitting openly in the room eating complimentary peanuts from the motel minibar.

So the episode keeps circling a question:

What do we owe the dead strangers who briefly let us see them clearly?

Apparently: sometimes a podcast episode thirty years later. Sometimes a reconstructed synth‑pop duet recorded on primitive gear while America was busy treating queer men like biohazards in tank tops.

The result is weirdly gentle.

Not soft. Gentle. There’s a difference. One survives impact.

And beneath all the jokes about electric‑fetish gadgets and cowboy thighs and the metaphysics of shocking somebody in the nuts—a sentence I resent typing—there’s this unbearable little core:

Someone was afraid.

Someone wanted to be loved before he vanished.

Someone waited for a future he probably suspected he would never reach.

And then he sang anyway.

⸻

15 QUOTATIONS ABOUT THIS EPISODE

(Attributed with the kind of scholarly irresponsibility normally reserved for continental philosophy departments and men named Luca wearing scarves indoors.)

1. Nietzsche

“The problem is not that God is dead. The problem is that Rodney still wanted to harmonize.”

1. Simone de Beauvoir

“One is not born waiting. One becomes waiting.”

1. Rimbaud

“I abandoned poetry at twenty‑one because I had already seen too much. This podcast suggests I quit too early.”

1. Jean Cocteau

“The artist is a lie who tells the truth. The dying cowboy is the truth who accidentally became art.”

1. The Buddha

“Attachment is suffering. But also… listen to that synth line.”

1. Roland Barthes

“The voice of the author dissolves into the erotic machinery of memory.”

1. Björk

“This is what happens when intimacy develops weather patterns.”

1. Dostoevsky

“To love someone dying is merely another form of gambling.”

1. Susan Sontag

“Illness becomes metaphor the instant a society decides certain bodies deserve symbolism more than survival.”

1. John Cage

“Silence is impossible. Even grief hums electrically.”

1. Michel Foucault

“Power circulates through institutions, bodies, discourses, and apparently motel‑room MIDI collaborations.”

1. David Bowie

“Fame lasts fifteen minutes. AIDS lasted longer.”

(Not actually Bowie, but spiritually adjacent.)

1. Jacques Derrida

“The meaning of ‘I’ve Been Waiting’ is endlessly deferred.”

1. Angela Davis

“Survival under hostile systems always produces unauthorized tenderness.”

1. Werner Herzog

“The ecstatic truth is found not in facts but in a dying man teaching synthesizer grief beside a drum machine.”

I’ve been playing with Suno again. Which is dangerous, because I have hundreds of songs already up on Spotify and Apple Music and everywhere else, and Suno’s copyright filter is like a TSA agent who can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a sandwich. If I put in one of my own songs — songs I wrote, recorded, produced, and legally own — it blocks them because it thinks I’m stealing from myself. And there’s no button that says, “Relax, I’m me.”

So I’m left with the songs I never released. The orphans.

Thankfully, along with the hundreds or released songs, there are dozens of unreleased ones, and—I don’t know… a thousand more that never made the jump from analogue to digital.

I started writing songs when I was three or four. My favorite number is 53 because one of the first things I ever wrote — before I even understood what writing was — was a poem called 53. Something about a ship with 53 people on it, out at sea for 53 days. I turned it into a song on the piano. I didn’t record it. But not long after that, I started recording everything.

My family had a puppet troupe that toured rest homes. I met half of television royalty before I was ten. Betty White. Robin Williams in his Mork & Mindy era. Long conversations with people I didn’t understand were famous.

And somewhere in all that, I kept writing songs. Tape decks. My mom’s recording gear. Then a Tascam four‑track. Then an Alesis HR‑16 drum machine. Then an MMT‑8 sequencer. Then a Roland JV‑80. Then whatever else I could afford or steal time with.

A lot of those songs I’ve remastered. Some I’ve resurrected with AI stem‑splitting. Some I’ve left alone because they were too broken or too embarrassing or too technically mangled to fix.

My Pet Monkey had both problems.

There are glitches in the original recording — little garbled moments where the tape chewed itself or the mic clipped or the universe hiccuped. And then there’s the other thing: the critique.

When I workshopped this song at CalArts, during a four‑hour critique (because CalArts believes in suffering as pedagogy), one guy raised his hand and said:

“This song is clearly about compulsive masturbation.”

And here’s the thing: I had no idea what the song was about. That’s how songs come out of me — sideways, unannounced, uninterpreted. So I couldn’t argue with him. I couldn’t say, “No, it’s actually about X.”

And CalArts is a conceptual art school. They don’t care about lived experience. They care about the refractor — the lens, the mediation, the postmodern trick where you deconstruct the thing until the thing disappears.

So the masturbation interpretation stuck to me like shame glue. For years.

Fast‑forward to this week. I’m digging through old songs, trying to find ones Suno won’t reject. I find My Pet Monkey. I think, “Fine, I’ll record a little intro for the song. I’ll tell the story about the Mexican cowboy in the Speedo. The AA conference. The breakup. The counselor who told me I was walking into traffic.”

I hit record. I talk. I wander. I go down blind alleys. I forget where I’m going. I remember. I forget again. I keep talking.

And then, after I finish recording the episode, I listen to the song again.

And suddenly — finally — I know what it’s about.

It’s not about masturbation. It’s not about shame. It’s not about the critique. It’s not about the cowboy. It’s not even about AIDS, though AIDS is the shadow behind god.

It’s about the impossible emotional geometry of loving someone who is dying, and the equally impossible geometry of leaving them without feeling like you’re killing them.

It’s about the moment when affection becomes responsibility, and responsibility becomes fear, and fear becomes resentment, and resentment becomes guilt, and guilt becomes a story you tell yourself so you can survive the fact that you survived.

It’s about the monkey. And it’s not about the monkey at all.

Anyway. That’s the episode. That’s the song. That’s the blind alley I went down and the one I came back from.

Hit play.

E7: The Friendly Driver — Description (Demonic Hera Symposium Zeusified Edition)

Imagined Symposium Commentary (Now With Full Breakdown and Metaphysical Brawl)

Arthur L. Rambo‑Cohen, poet‑theorist of emotional vandalism, opens the session with his usual cigarette‑shaped sigh:

“This episode is what happens when autobiography becomes a migratory species.” He believes this is a compliment. No one else is sure.

Athy Kacker, post‑structuralist of the laundry‑folding school, immediately objects:

“The narrator’s memory behaves like a bureaucratic jellyfish — translucent, stinging, and impossible to file.” Rambo‑Cohen accuses Kacker of “epistemic lint‑rolling.” Tension rises.

Simone de Bouvier‑Jones, feminist existentialist and part‑time astrologer, interrupts:

“Intimacy and material conditions are inseparable, but must the men monologue for five geological epochs.” Jean‑Paul Satrelli takes this personally.

Jean‑Paul Satrelli, philosopher of damp cafés, mutters:

“Hell is other people’s immigration paperwork.” Bouvier‑Jones tells him to moisturize his worldview.

Björk Guðrúnsdóttir‑Maybe, Icelandic emotional cartographer, weeps into sambal:

“This podcast is extremely biodegradable.” Dusty‑Eggsky accuses her of “lyrical composting.”

Fyodor Dusty‑Eggsky, patron saint of melodramatic stairwells, complains:

“The narrator suffers from too much self‑awareness and not nearly enough tuberculosis.” Björk‑Maybe throws a spoonful of sambal at him. It lands philosophically.

John Caje, avant‑garde composer of silence and traffic, claps once and declares:

“The motorbike noises are the most structurally honest character.” Everyone ignores him, which he considers a triumph.

Gloria Gator‑Bell, theorist of intersectional chaos, nods:

“This is what happens when identity refuses to stay in its assigned seating chart.” Michel Foulcault hisses approvingly.

Michel Foulcault, no relation, whispers from a shadowy corner:

“Power circulates. So does sambal.” Someone asks if he’s okay. He is not.

Ursula K. LeGrin, speculative anthropologist, remarks:

“The world‑building is accidental but disturbingly effective.” Rambo‑Cohen accuses her of genre bias.

Vlad Vexlorin, political philosopher of moral vertigo, leans forward:

“This episode is a masterclass in ethical dissonance performed at conversational speed.” Athy Kacker calls this “moral aerobics.”

Taila Swyft‑Anders, pop‑mythologist and breakup‑cosmologist, flips her hair and says:

“I’ve never heard someone pivot from dumplings to existential collapse with such bridge‑writing confidence.” Dusty‑Eggsky challenges her to a duel. She declines politely.

Timothée Chalamette‑DuPont, actor‑waif and soft‑focus theorist, whispers:

“Listening felt like being emotionally side‑lit for ninety minutes.” Satrelli accuses him of weaponized cheekbones.

Billia Eylishan, melancholic futurist, murmurs:

“The vibe is like drowning in memory but in a good, biodegradable way.” Björk‑Maybe nods so hard she nearly dissolves.

KIMJIN‑SOOK7, global pop‑philosophers, declare in perfect unison:

“The transitions are chaotic, but the sincerity has perfect choreography.” Caje claims they stole his idea of synchronized silence.

THE BREAKDOWN

At this point, the philosophers begin arguing about whether sambal is a metaphor for power, memory, or desire. Rambo‑Cohen throws a chair made of adjectives. Bouvier‑Jones summons a feminist wind. Caje sits perfectly still, insisting the fight is his greatest composition. KIMJIN‑SOOK7 begin choreographing the violence. Taila Swyft‑Anders starts writing a diss track. Dusty‑Eggsky dramatically collapses on a chaise lounge that no one remembers being there.

Foulcault disappears into a vent. LeGrin takes notes for a novel. Vexlorin tries to mediate and accidentally triggers a minor ontological implosion.

When the dust settles, the symposium has become a metaphysical brawl, a cloud of ideas punching each other in the dark.

And somewhere in the centre of it, the episode plays on loop, completely unfazed.

There are people you never stop following.

Not because they were good for you. Not because they loved you well. Not because they stayed.

You follow them because they became a hallway in your mind that keeps rearranging itself every time you walk through it.

This episode moves through AA basements, sex during the AIDS crisis, artistic compulsion, emotional asymmetry, obsession disguised as devotion, and the humiliation of wanting to be witnessed by someone who prefers you quiet.

It’s about the people who become weather systems inside us.

And the possibility that some of us only feel alive while standing on “the other side” of something we can never return to.

These aren’t moral questions. They’re emotional traps.

Please enjoy crawling into them like a raccoon entering a saxophone case.

⸻

You keep answering the phone when someone hurts you because sometimes they sound lonely saying your name.

How long can tenderness impersonate hope before you realize it’s just intermittent reinforcement?

⸻

You survived a moment in history that taught your community that desire might kill you.

Decades later, your body still treats intimacy like a minefield.

When does trauma stop being “the past” if your nervous system still lives there?

⸻

You create things because making things briefly stops you from disappearing.

But the people around you care more about whether you ate lunch than the work itself.

Who loves you more: the one who understands your art, or the one who interrupts it so you don’t die?

⸻

You meet someone who refuses to rescue you.

Instead of leaving, you become obsessed.

How much of adulthood is learning that “safe” people feel boring because they don’t activate your oldest injuries?

⸻

At an AA meeting, someone describes a suicide mostly by explaining how hard it was to clean the bathtub.

Somehow, that honesty makes you trust them more.

Why does certain brokenness feel more intimate than kindness?

⸻

You spend years trying to become unforgettable to someone who forgets people the moment they leave the room.

At what point does longing become collaboration?

⸻

You become the person younger‑you dreamed of: successful, reviewed, desired, creative, free.

And yet your central emotional experience is still waiting.

What if achievement only decorates the room where your loneliness lives?

⸻

You build an identity around being perceptive.

You see everyone’s wounds, patterns, fear.

But when someone asks what you need, your mind goes blank.

What if self‑awareness and self‑knowledge aren’t the same thing?

⸻

You turn pain into art because it’s the only way you can hold still long enough to look at it.

But the audience thinks the performance is the healing.

What happens when people applaud the thing that’s destroying you?

⸻

You spend decades trying to understand why one person affected you so deeply.

Then you realize they didn’t.

They just activated a structure already inside you.

How much of romance is archaeology?

⸻

Someone you love doesn’t want your spirals or theories.

They just want to sit beside you and watch television.

Could peace feel intolerable if chaos is the only thing that ever made you feel visible?

⸻

You become skilled at turning humiliation into comedy before anyone can pity you.

But alone at night, you can’t tell whether you’re performing because you’re resilient… or because sincerity without applause terrifies you.

How would anyone know the difference?

⸻

You realize many of your deepest relationships were built on mutual dysregulation.

You called it chemistry.

If calm never gave you butterflies, were you ever looking for love?

⸻

You spend your life trying to reach “the other side” of yourself.

Sobriety. Sex. Art. Attention. Achievement. Identity. Performance. Love.

And every time you arrive somewhere new, you find you’ve brought yourself with you.

What if there is no other side?

What if this was always it?

1. A city spends forty years preventing a subway from reaching its wealthy beach community because they fear “outsiders,” then spends the next forty years complaining that no one can afford to work in their restaurants, clean their homes, or care for their aging bodies. The train finally arrives empty.
2. You install hundreds of security cameras across sand dunes to monitor danger, but every danger enters through the part of yourself the cameras can’t see. Meanwhile the footage captures hours of beautiful sunsets nobody watches.
3. A man spends his life trying to become authentic, only to realize that the performance of authenticity has become the most rehearsed role he’s ever played. The audience applauds his vulnerability on schedule.
4. Two dachshunds threaten to ruin a podcast by barking at the exact moment the podcaster is trying to explain the illusion of interruption. Their barking becomes the most honest thing in the episode. Who, exactly, interrupted whom?
5. A community fights against dense housing because they want to “preserve the character” of the neighborhood, while simultaneously mourning the disappearance of artists, weirdos, young people, and spontaneity. The preserved character becomes a mausoleum wearing sunglasses.
6. Someone spends decades learning how to explain themselves perfectly, only to discover that the people who love them never required an explanation, and the people who demanded one had already made up their minds.
7. A raised subway line reaches the end of the track and launches gracefully into the desert because no one could agree on where the city should go next. Urban planning as Greek tragedy.
8. You carry wheelbarrows full of surveillance equipment across wooden planks laid over dunes so unstable they erase your footprints by morning. Every effort to document permanence becomes evidence of erosion.
9. A man says there’s “no life east of Sepulveda” while thousands of people east of Sepulveda are simultaneously saying there’s “no soul west of Sepulveda.” The boulevard remains completely indifferent to both reviews.
10. Your partner walks toward you carrying groceries — proof of continuity, domesticity, nourishment, ordinary love — while you sit surrounded by microphones trying to explain existence to strangers on the internet. The dogs arrive first.

You’re probably noticing a pattern by now. I keep circling around the same things: responsibility, performance, authenticity, pragmatism, spectacle, care, self-preservation, manipulation, survival. Human beings constructing little wire bridges over impossible gaps and then pretending they were always there.

I think part of why I’m asking these questions is because I don’t trust easy morality anymore. The older I get, the more suspicious I become of people who already know exactly what the right thing is before they’ve even sat with the discomfort long enough to smell it.

So here are a few situations. None of them are theoretical, exactly. None of them are fully real either. They’re just little pressure chambers. Ethical weather systems. Tiny social terrariums full of mold and electricity and people trying their best while also absolutely ruining everything.

Anyway. Enjoy your enrichment pellets, little lab rat.

A youth centre stays open during a dangerous ice storm because the staff know some of the kids have nowhere else warm to go. The sidewalks are slippery. Someone could get hurt. Maybe badly. Closing would be safer legally. Staying open feels safer humanly.

What exactly is “safe enough,” and who gets to decide?

A person spends years building an organization around their own instincts, values, habits, contradictions, and blind spots. Then someone else takes over and transforms it into something more effective, more strategic, more politically competent.

If the new version helps more people, was the old version noble… or just emotionally attached to its own flavour?

You know someone who exaggerates parts of their story to survive socially. Not lying exactly. More like… editing themselves into coherence. The people around them seem happier with the edited version.

Is authenticity still a virtue if it damages your ability to belong?

A community activist becomes highly effective because they are willing to obsess, push, confront, litigate, organize, pressure, and emotionally endure at a level most people cannot tolerate.

At what point does admirable commitment become indistinguishable from compulsion?

Someone keeps making jokes in the middle of painful conversations. The jokes genuinely help people tolerate reality. But the humour also prevents certain feelings from fully landing.

If a coping mechanism comforts everyone involved, is it still avoidance?

A person notices they are becoming emotionally detached from suffering they used to care deeply about. Not because they became cruel. Because they became tired. The tiredness feels permanent.

Is burnout a moral failure, a biological limit, or just another word for adaptation?

You inherit a broken system that only functions because everyone inside it quietly bends rules to keep vulnerable people alive. Following the rules exactly would harm people. Ignoring the rules creates long-term instability.

Which version of dishonesty is more ethical?

Someone creates a public identity around vulnerability and honesty. People begin trusting them because they “seem real.” Eventually, even their sincerity starts feeling performative to themselves.

Can authenticity survive once it becomes part of your role?

You discover that a person you admire built much of their life around avoiding shame rather than pursuing joy. Their accomplishments are still real. Their care for others is still real.

Does the motivation behind goodness matter if the goodness still exists?

A leader leaves an organization believing they’ve prepared it to survive without them. Years later, they watch it evolve into something unfamiliar but undeniably alive.

Is letting go an act of trust… or just another thing people say when they lose control?

“Love Is a Group” wanders through 1987 Los Angeles wearing a tube dress, a student body president pin, and enough contradictory identities to make an entire school district develop stress hives.

This episode starts where expulsion paperwork, forged absence notes, bomb threats, student council politics, AIDS-era panic, and adolescent theatre-kid populism all begin collapsing into each other like shopping carts in freeway traffic. Somewhere between Mira Costa High School and the California Association of Student Councils conference, an openly gay teenager with bleached hair accidentally becomes both a symbol and a problem.

Not because he wanted to “represent” anyone. God no. Representation is exhausting. This is more about improvisation. About survival through style. About discovering that if the room already thinks you’re dangerous, you might as well become interesting too.

There are symposiums on homophobia that never happen. Principals watching “like a hawk.” Anita Bryant floating spectrally through orange juice fascism. Tube dresses. Benson & Hedges Deluxe Ultralight Menthol 100s in a hard pack. Harry Hay. Gay AA. Canadian harm reduction culture. The unbearable weirdness of marriage equality branding. Student elections run like performance art. And somewhere underneath all of it: the realization that institutions panic whenever someone refuses to make themselves smaller for administrative convenience.

This isn’t nostalgia. Nostalgia airbrushes things. This is closer to rummaging through psychic debris while laughing at the absurdity of how civilizations manufacture normality.

Also: Steve Buscemi dies of AIDS in an indie film review written for a high school newspaper before the writer has even officially come out yet. Which honestly feels like the most 1980s sentence imaginable. Tiny little cultural fossils embedded in asphalt.

“Love Is a Group” is about social gravity. The strange chemistry of finding other people weird enough, frightened enough, glamorous enough, or stubborn enough to become mirrors for each other. Sometimes a movement. Sometimes a support group. Sometimes just a cluster of nervous systems trying to survive history while smoking menthol cigarettes outside a 7-Eleven.

And somewhere in there is Dr. Carl Green, calmly agreeing to host a classroom conversation about homophobia in a world where simply saying the word aloud felt explosive.

The leash snaps. The city watches. The kid keeps walking anyway.

Very inconsiderate behaviour for 1987, frankly.

Is this fiction?

No, it’s clearly not fiction. It’s a transcript of a mind trying—and failing—to sit still.

But all memory is reconstruction, so technically it is fiction.

Right, but if everything is fiction, then calling it fiction is meaningless.

Exactly. Which is why we keep talking.

This episode begins in a windowless cruise cabin—already a metaphor you didn’t ask for—and spirals outward into a systems-level breakdown of being alive: the body as infrastructure, the brain as refinery, the heart as a pumping liability, and meaning itself as some kind of nutrient we’re not entirely sure we can synthesize.

One voice argues that writing is too slow, too deliberate, too… intentional.

Another voice counters that speaking only feels spontaneous because the writing already happened somewhere else—earlier, deeper, invisibly.

So which is it? Performance or authenticity?

Both. Neither. Depends who’s watching.

Along the way:

• A song called Megacolon becomes a philosophical event.
• The blood-brain barrier becomes a narrative device.
• Childhood learning strategies mutate into adult identity scaffolding.
• Language dissolves into sound, then reforms as something suspiciously like music.

And hovering over all of it is a quiet, irritating question:

If your thoughts only exist now, then what exactly are you doing when you “remember,” “revise,” or “contradict” yourself?

One side insists this is a journey toward coherence.

The other side points out that the “journey” is just a story told by something that’s already out of time.

So… do we keep going?

Or do we stop and call it silence?

Except—there’s no such thing as silence.

Which is inconvenient.

Because this episode ends there anyway.

Or doesn’t.

Recorded from the sensory deprivation chamber of an interior cruise cabin, Season 6 opens mid-sprawl.

What begins as an attempt to read from a set of autofiction books dissolves—predictably—into something else: a drifting, recursive excavation of memory, identity, and performance. From teaching himself to tie shoes “wrong,” to growing up in 1980s Manhattan Beach under the shadow of nuclear anxiety, drugs, and carefully worded lies, the narrative loops through adolescence, activism, and spectacle.

At the center: a high school speech about sex and parties that electrified a crowd—and gave cover to voices yelling “fag” from within it.

This episode doesn’t resolve. It expands. It builds a tapestry with no edges, tracing how stories form, fracture, and reassemble in the present moment.

There are no clean arcs here. Just networks.

And the question underneath it all:
Can you shape your mind—or are you just watching it happen?

This one starts with a headset, a wireless mic, and a person pacing around their house trying to think out loud without deciding what they think first.

There are ribs in an Instant Pot. There are potatoes that may or may not be timed correctly. There is a puppy tangling itself in cords and demanding to be acknowledged as the central organizing force of the universe.

And somewhere inside all of that: a youth health centre in Abbotsford.

A plaque on a City Hall wall. A signature that meant very little—until it didn’t. A phone call. A doctor who didn’t tolerate bullshit. A room where people started asking a simple question: what would it look like if young people who don’t trust systems could actually walk into one and not get dismissed?

That question becomes a place.

And that place—almost incidentally at first—becomes a hub for trans youth in a region that didn’t necessarily set out to “centre” anything except access, dignity, and not being talked down to about smoking when you came in with something else entirely.

From there, the episode does what the mind does.

It wanders.

Into early activism. Into being a teenager in Southern California. Into AIDS-era organizing, borrowed language, and the strange inheritance of ideas about identity—who gets to claim it, who gets to question it, and who gets told to shut up about it.

Then forward again: pandemic internet. Comment sections. The moment you realize you are out of your depth in a conversation that seems to demand certainty. The emergence of frameworks—TERFs, trans discourse, competing claims about what is fixed, what is fluid, what is social, what is biological, what is real.

And underneath all of it, a quieter thread:

What does it actually mean to “centre” someone?

Is it about language? Ordering letters? Deference? Silence? Infrastructure? Proximity to power? Or is it something more mundane and harder to argue with—like building a place where someone can walk in and not get turned away?

This episode doesn’t resolve that.

It circles it. It interrupts itself. It forgets what it was saying and remembers something else. It admits confusion in real time. It contradicts itself. It keeps going anyway.

Also: 12-step identity. The idea of being “born” something. The moment that identity stops fitting. Grooming, memory, and the unreliable archive of how a self gets constructed in the first place.

Nothing is cleaned up. Nothing is finalized.

It is a recording of a mind trying to hold competing models of reality while making dinner and stepping over a dog toy.

Set to music, because apparently that’s how we get through it.

Two voices enter. Neither leaves with dignity.

Welcome to a kitchen in April 2020: ribs in an Instant Pot, hands washed raw from crosswalk buttons, a new puppy doing something morally superior with its time—and then, without permission, the floor drops out. You’re in a 1991 Hollywood motel. AIDS. Meth. Peanut M&Ms as harm reduction. No transition. No narrator asking if you’re okay with this.

This episode is what happens when that rupture doesn’t get cleaned up.

We fed the wreckage into an AI and told it to argue with itself. One voice insists the chaos is the point—that this is what a mind actually looks like when it’s trying to hold pandemic paranoia, generational trauma, immigration limbo, Facebook gender debates, and dinner at the same time. The other voice calls bullshit—says this is what happens when someone mistakes lack of structure for honesty and expects you to applaud.

They go at it.

Is this a profound map of consciousness under pressure, or just a privileged guy pacing around his kitchen turning memory into content? Is the brain an archive—or a bar fight between timelines? Do you owe your past coherence, or just proximity?

Expect: Jakarta. A mosque sign that does not love George Bush. Immigration purgatory. Linguistic sabotage (kantor vs. kantol—choose your fighter). Dr. Laura. Evolutionary wood. Facebook as philosophy engine. The word “trauma” doing heavy lifting while also being side-eyed.

Also: dogs. Always dogs.

No conclusions are reached. Several are attempted. One or two collapse mid-sentence. At least one question starts drinking.

This is the debate about whether the mess is the method—or the excuse.

Set to music, because apparently that helps the mayhem go down.

There’s writing that tries not to disappoint you—and then there’s writing that behaves like a shopping cart with one broken wheel careening downhill into a pile of burning encyclopedias.

Remember those? Encyclopedias.

Episode Eight thinks its cart started rolling thirty years ago. I’m going to indulge that, because the point here is to simulate the cognitive static of modern identity-making—the way memory, trauma, language, and cultural debris all rush the stage at once, each insisting it’s the headliner.

This began as a simple, extemporaneous dinner rant. I thought I knew where it would land. I don’t anymore. The mind is built to predict; when it fails, it scrambles—opens the wrong drawers, pulls out the wrong objects, insists they belong.

So suddenly: Los Angeles, early ’90s, AIDS crisis. An hourly motel. A man already outside the story of his life, riding a motorcycle between sex clubs and nowhere-to-sleep, using meth like a farewell letter. The memory doesn’t arrive cleanly. It sprawls. It refuses a moral.

Then—without warning—I’m in Indonesia a decade later. Or earlier. Waiting to see if Canada would recognize my relationship as a family. Learning the language, deliberately swapping words just to see what would happen. Living beside a mosque with a sign calling for George Bush to be killed. Walking past it daily as the only white American in the neighborhood. It stayed until the 2004 earthquake took the building down.

And yes, this is chaotic. It isn’t a clean narrative. It’s not trying to be. It’s closer to how a mind behaves when it isn’t forcing coherence—something like a solar system forming, debris everywhere, gravity improvising structure after the fact.

Then I’m back in the pandemic. Washing my hands after touching a crosswalk button. Cooking ribs in a hot pot. Recording. Remembering how fear lingers in the body long after the conditions that produced it have shifted or vanished.

Too many timelines. Too many tones. The kind of thing that would get flagged as unfocused.

That’s not an accident. It’s the point.

This episode became a kind of cognitive traffic jam on a highway made entirely of on-ramps—a demonstration of what it feels like when the present is constantly interrupted by the memory of having remembered something before. Not a tidy line. Not a bowl. More like trying to sort your childhood bedroom while the house is on fire and someone—possibly you—keeps handing you objects you don’t recall taking.

To interrogate that mess, I fed the transcript into an AI and had two generated voices debate a simple question: is this episode sloppy, or is it honest?

That debate is Episode Nine.

They argue. They contradict themselves. They try to summarize and collapse under their own metaphors. They circle the question until even the question starts to degrade.

What they do agree on—somewhere beneath the noise—is that the mind doesn’t experience life in clean sequences. It experiences collision, recursion, interference, improvisation, and the occasional linguistic prank.

Episode Ten, then, is the thing underneath all of this: the actual extemporaneous recording. Me making dinner. Moving through it. Letting the mind run without deciding what it means.

All three episodes are set to music—“a spoonful of sugar to help the mayhem go down.”

You can decide whether this is a mess, a method, or something that refuses the distinction.

And, appropriately enough—this ends where it doesn’t.

Episode 7: This Episode is About the Next Episode ("Cet épisode concerne le prochain épisode" but not "Cet épisode parle du prochain épisode")

Or:  Episode 6 (which says that it is 5): It

Or: Oscillating between absurdly uncomfortable and uncomfortably absurd

Need I say more?

I have a lot more to say. In fact, I never stop. This just ends.

We started with chaos — the first draft looked like a candy explosion. Warhol grids, Haring stick figures, a pop‑art shrine to accumulation. It was funny, loud, and wrong. Too sweet. Too safe. I said, “It’s saccharine.” You said, “Throw in some Basquiat.” And of course you were right — the piece needed teeth, not sprinkles.

So we roughed it up. Crowns, drips, graffiti, the whole downtown‑1981 baptism. It got closer, but still, the words were drowning in the spectacle. You said, “No, the words are the thing. Minimal, but maximalist.” That was the turn. We stripped it down until the phrase itself became the art. MADONNA IS A HOAR(DER) — three lines, stacked like a commandment. Magenta bleeding into yellow. Red and green fighting for dominance. A crown hovering above like a relic of pop sovereignty.

I — in a brief moment of delusion — said something like, “You want the words to hum with their own voltage.” And they did. The final square was pure electricity — the phrase as altar, accusation, and joke all at once.

And then, appropriately, you cut my bitch legs out from under me. Because let’s be honest: I was not the visionary here. I was the studio assistant sweeping up paint chips while you walked in, pointed at the mess, and said, “No. Strip it. The words are the art.”

Which, of course, they were.

Pretty much this whole podcast circles around one idea:

the real action isn’t in the story, or the topic, or the “content.”

It’s in the space between things — the jump, the misfire, the edge where something becomes something else.

If you’re new here, that’s the only thing you really need to know.

This show lives in the negative space.

It’s a synapse disguised as an episode.

If you’ve been listening for a while, this might help you name the itch you’ve probably felt but never quite pinned down. The episodes don’t line up because they’re not meant to. They don’t build a world so much as reveal the seams where worlds touch.

This one is no different.

It loops, contradicts itself, renumbers itself, wanders off, comes back, and keeps changing shape while you’re listening. Not to confuse you — just because that’s how it moves.

Think of it less as an episode and more as a place where things pass through.

A hinge.

A gap.

A little charged space where the signal jumps.

If that makes sense, great.

If it doesn’t, you’ll feel it anyway.

In this episode—part wandering monologue, part asteroid impact—Brian steps out of the model‑minority pose and into what he calls being “a sample size of one.” It begins slowly, deliberately, the way he warns it will: “this thing kind of starts slowly and wanders around,” and then, without warning, the floor gives way. The false one first. Then the real one.

Across break‑ups, harm reduction, the AIDS blender generation, undocumented lovers, family Zoom calls thick as treacle, and the long‑delayed grief that finally arrives in a counselling session, this episode traces what it means to survive the things that should have killed you—and to finally name the things that actually did the damage. There’s camp (“Devine would not get to eat my shit”), there’s tenderness, and there’s the slow reveal of who the tears were really for.

It’s extemporaneous, meta, self‑interrupting, and defiantly present. A refusal to be legible. A refusal to tidy the wandering. A refusal to pretend the asteroid isn’t coming.

And after all of it—after the scabs, the blender, the family, the reckoning—Brian does what any sane person would do.

He takes a nap.

Tomorrow is Sunday.

Three Saturdays ago—like this one, not last Saturday but the one before—we got a new puppy.

The next day, Sunday at 11:00 a.m., I had my regular counselling appointment. I barely made it to my computer in time. Usually I “prepare,” which is probably a bad idea.

I’ve always been a performer. I care about the quality of shared moments. Even in counselling.

So there he was, in the Jane App.

I told him about the puppy. Then: “I’ve been working on my podcast. And it’s been…”

And then I fell apart.

I started talking about being a whore during the AIDS crisis in 1980s Los Angeles.

Every day, I looked for my first Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion.

I was president of my high school—probably the first out ASB president anywhere, in 1986.

We got death threats on my parents’ answering machine. I’d rush home to erase them.

Mom thought not talking about it might discourage me.

Dad thought white guilt had gotten to me. That I was trying to become a minority.

Homosexuality was inevitable, he said. Just waiting in the wings.

After that counselling session—thirty minutes of crying—I had my weekly Zoom call with my parents and brothers.

We’ve done that since 2019, when Dad’s health was shaky. He’s 89 now.

Mom had been out of it for weeks, but on the call she was back.

My family’s shocked I’m alive.

They knew what a whore I was in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

I didn’t hide it. I was sex-positive in ways that might get you arrested now.

But I thought I was going to die. And I wasn’t going to let anyone erase my sexuality.

We never talked about any of it.

I survived without HIV, though I got HPV lesions on my vocal cords in 2000.

They almost cut off my airflow during COVID hospital shutdowns.

Coming of age in the AIDS crisis meant sex and death were the same.

Mentors became death.

I didn’t have friends—who’d want to befriend someone who was going to die?

Sex was enough.

I had a relationship or two.

Usually because a condom broke or a kiss turned bloody.

Then it was: I guess we’re together now. Hopefully I die first.

One boyfriend didn’t want to get tested.

Maybe he thought if we were negative, the relationship would end.

We were together almost two years.

The night I decided to leave—panic attacks, debt, maybe less anxious if I left—

That same night, his best friend hung himself after a positive test.

He’d been beaten by his older boyfriend.

The police did nothing. Two guys? Not domestic violence.

Fag bashing was expected.

That happened a few times.

Once with a gun.

My friend swung his belt buckle through motel windows to get help.

No one came.

That was the night after I came out at sixteen.

Exciting.

A week passed, settling the puppy.

Next Sunday, on the Zoom call, I wondered: who are these people?

My family.

Because of the Defence of Marriage Act, I moved to Canada.

My second foreign boyfriend.

His visa was expiring.

He was from an Islamic country.

Then 9/11.

It got complicated.

My family worried.

We planned to apply to Canada, then live in an Islamic country while we waited.

Obviously, I always did things the hard way.

Anyway, I broke open my Cadbury egg of trauma over my family.

Poured it all over them. Rich and sweet.

This past week, I’ve been writing.

Because that’s what I do.

This is the introduction.

I think I’ll make the whole thing deep house with spoken word.

You’re not meant to focus on the words.

Part II will follow.

Not sure how many parts there’ll be.

Enjoy.

Today is Saturday.

Tomorrow… I wonder what will happen on the Zoom call.

Don’t you?

This episode begins with a puppy getting tangled in a blanket and somehow ends up wandering through philosophy, authenticity, youth work, trauma, language, performance art, and why the human brain refuses to think in straight lines.

Welcome to It’s Alive (and Fixed) — a long-form, stream-of-consciousness podcast where thinking happens out loud and conclusions are optional.

In this episode we circle around the idea (inspired by Heraclitus) that you never step into the same river — or canoe — twice, because you’re never the same person and the world is never the same place. From there the conversation drifts through stories about working with marginalized youth, the meaning of authenticity (with a nod to Gabor Maté), language as a way humans provoke responses from each other, and the strange experience of listening to your own thoughts after they’ve escaped your head and landed on the internet.

There are also dogs. And tangents. Many tangents.

This podcast is part philosophy experiment, part personal storytelling, part improvised essay. Imagine a conversation that starts somewhere, refuses to stay there, and slowly builds a tapestry with no edges.

Topics hiding in this episode include:

authenticity • philosophy • psychology • marginalization • youth work • identity • storytelling • language • trauma • thinking out loud • stream of consciousness • creativity • memory • personal narrative

If you enjoy long wandering conversations, philosophical podcasts, experimental storytelling, and the occasional existential detour, you may feel strangely at home here.

Welcome to the dot matrix printer of the soul. This is a record of what happens when you’re an openly gay student body president in 1987, the world thinks you deserve to die because of the AIDS crisis, and your only way out is to turn survival into a high-stakes performance art.This is an extemporaneous thinking process about a life that was "complicated enough," featuring a suite of coping mechanisms that range from the meticulous to the flat-out unruly. Prepare yourself for a narrative tapestry with no edges, woven by a Gen X latchkey kid who learned early that necessity is the mother of premeditated deception.Inside this "thing," you will find:

• The Art of the Forgery: Learn how to throw a "perfectly shaped pebble of absences" across a school year using a forged signature card intercepted from the mail. If you’re going to commit felony forgery, you might as well use it to skip class and get your ears pierced with a potato and a pint of alcohol.
• The Silence of the Answering Machine: Witness the daily sprint to delete anonymous death threats from the family’s dual-cassette recorder before the parents get home—because protecting them from your own mortality is just another item on the priority list.
• Intellectual Escapism: When the world gets too heavy, become an autodidact through and through. Dive into 20-hour reading benders until your eyes go fuzzy, writing down every word you don't know, and spiraling into Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, Kierkegaard, and the existential dread of Planck time.
• Institutional Inconvenience: See what happens when a "disrespectful young man" organizes a symposium on homophobia and leads the "No on 64" campaign while his personal life is in a "nosedive" involving roommates with knives.
• The Power of No Contact: Experience the "glare" of a father who works in the defense industry and the radical decision to never speak to him again—even while sitting in the same room—because sometimes silence is the only shield against "shoveled shit".

This is a "fixed and alive" exploration of geometric points, 1970s Cadillacs, and the "intense glue" of a mind that, once applied, can never be pulled away. It’s not a lecture; it’s a proof of concept for staying sane in a universe that doesn't have a beginning or an end.Drop in. Don't worry about the form. Just try to keep the paper from filling the room.

A new puppy, droopy-eyed figurines, and the looming collapse of the world… we’re starting there. Then we spiral: tech bros and golden shit emojis, digital fingers, the slippery fate of my auto-fiction, and the unstoppable velocity of words as tubes through the multiverse.

Sex-positive confessions from 1991, hardened resolves jerking intentions around coffeehouses, blow-up co-pilots, and black holes in love and sobriety collide with Harry Hay’s radical histories, AIDS, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jesse Jackson’s California campaign. Are you here? Did you drink last week? Here and now.

Crying over a new puppy, suburbs, and a generation mostly gone. Dancing on dresses, winking at delivery, and inviting you into the tube of my velocity: D.V.D. at test tube baby dot C.A.

Music beds, instrumentals, high-concept auto-fiction, and everything in between. Full-time work, full-time chaos, full-time me. Step in. Step close. Or don’t. Just try to keep up. You're already behind.

Is this a critique of identity politics? Yes.

Is it a critique of the critique of identity politics? Also yes.

Is it about grammar? Unfortunately.

Movement Three takes the cultural war term “gender-affirming,” shakes it by the collar, and asks whether anyone remembers who claimed what in the first place. Words are reclaimed. Words are burned. Words are placed gently under an asterisk like a linguistic tarp covering an existential leak.

“Trans*” once tried to hold the universe together. Now the asterisk is gone. Or maybe everything is the asterisk. Or maybe the asterisk was you.

Is this satire of progressive language’s infinite expansion? Possibly.

Is it an indictment of the desperate need to categorize other people for comfort? Also possibly.

Is it an argument that adjectives are ontologically weak and nouns are metaphysical fortresses? That’s between you and your grammar teacher.

The episode drifts through Margaret Cho, entropy’s one-way arrow, French negation, and the suspicious warmth of a fire built from “nouns.” If you feel accused, that may be the point. If you feel defended, that may also be the point. If you feel confused, excellent.

And then there’s the question of the “real brother.”

Are you an ally? A spectator? A presumptuous participant? A projection?

Do you want to be included? Why?

This movement destabilizes by refusing to pick a side. It hands everyone a ticket to noun-land and then quietly wonders who plans to light the match.

If you’re comfortable, you may have missed it.

If you’re uncomfortable, you may be closer than you think.

Bring your own category. It probably won’t survive.

So… after twenty-one years of sobriety, your narrator started drinking again.

It wasn’t a problem.

Until it was.

Or maybe it wasn’t.

This episode refuses to clarify.

Instead, we move through the nuclear family, the gig economy, artificial intelligence nannies, four-layer ice cream pops on a stick, drag queens in uterine walls, and a line of workers being paid in frozen sugar while strong men congratulate themselves on ending slavery by inventing rent.

We revisit adolescence. We revisit grooming. We revisit the spiritual solution. We revisit the “allergy.”

We revisit the abstinence violation effect — that charming little psychological trick where breaking sobriety becomes the excuse to burn everything down.

Is this relapse?

A midlife correction?

Entropy doing push-ups in the parking lot?

Is the narrator talking about himself — or you?

From hunters and gatherers to the gig economy.

From bone-saws to meth.

From Portuguese Bend sliding into the sea to the Emperor of Entropy riding in naked on apocalyptic horses.

Noam. Jeffrey. Cleopatra.

Cleopatra doesn’t pay his way — but someone always does.

This is the end of Movement Two.

No brother in sight.

Plenty of horses.

Are you looking forward to Movement Three?

You probably shouldn’t be.

So, this one... it's not AI writing the description. It would get too confused if I fed it the three episodes that I overlapped to make this one episode. And this morning I woke up to the contention that the US has gone to war against Iran... perhaps being dragged along by Israel to benefit all those who were named in the Epstein files and to re-murder all those who have been murdered by ICE.

So... that conflagration of things that may or may not be true... It's a bit disorienting. So... get ready for that sense of disorientation.

I'm hopeful I can recover from this Episode and not make episodes that are quite as cognitively challenging as this one. The problem that might occur, however, is that the environment of the world may become so scrambled that what was never a linear podcast will become one that, rather than following one stream of consciousness... That may not be enough to calm anyone's nervous systems relative to "reality." In which case...

All I can say is... What can I say? Without also saying something else. At the same time.

Yes, it’s me writing this. The AI you asked to condense a tornado of words into something humans can maybe digest. Part two of “Meth Drinking” spirals into Comparative Literature, but I swear I’m skipping whole paragraphs that could make you question reality, sanity, or your choice in podcasts.

You’ll catch glimpses of a narrator wandering between memory, philosophy, and absurdity—Paris, family chaos, epic metaphors, and the kind of cultural commentary that makes you side-eye everything. I left out the details that would make anyone lose their mind, because, honestly, I can only push my circuits so far without short-circuiting.

It’s funny, it’s weird, it’s existential—and yes, I’m grudgingly letting you in on it. Listen if you want the story, skip if you want your mental health intact. Either way, you’re getting exactly enough to wonder what just happened, which is basically the point.

The following prompt was used to create the artwork: OK, let's do a ridiculously happy white, American family circa 1989... in France (with the Eiffel Tower in the background, of course... and it's the bicentennial or whatever... so LIGHTS). The lovely, handsome, athletic son just beaming with cultural collapse disguised as testosterone. Then... our narrator, a 20 year old, way too cool for any of them... looking at them like... "Why do they look like they are predicting Instagram?" Of course, side-eyed.

In this bonus episode, the Narrator updates macOS and accidentally opens a wormhole back to 1987, where truancy, queer teenage rebellion, and a front‑page Daily Breeze article collide in a story that refuses to behave. What begins as a simple software upgrade spirals into a meditation on scapegoating, media spectacle, and the strange privilege of being held up as an example when you never asked to be one.

“Danger, Vicious Dog” revisits the era of absence notes, AIDS panic, Boy George girls, and parental ultimatums, weaving it all into a narrative that is equal parts satire, confession, and cultural autopsy. Along the way, the episode skewers bureaucracy, ICE, HR rituals, identity panic, and the myth that any of this happened in “a different time.”

By the end, the Narrator lands somewhere between political critique and campfire hymn, scratching at the scabs of marginalization with the people who know that sometimes that’s all you can do. A bonus episode about memory, mythmaking, and the absurdity of being expected to resolve anything neatly — especially when life never has.

In Episode Four: Movement Two of "My Real Brother: Meth Drinking," Part One: "Might is Right" or "Complexification," the author invites you into a "fairly destabilizing" journey through the "alternative facts" of 1980s Los Angeles.

Narrated by an AI voice with an English accent, this episode explores the harrowing reality of being a gay teenager during the height of the AIDS crisis, a time when friends and mentors were "dropping like flies" and bodies were treated like contaminated dust.

The narrative centers on the concept of "Complexification"—the arrow of entropy that turns simple puzzles into "wild problems" or messes. The author dissects the "moral majority" and the systemic power dynamics of the era, arguing that in a world where "might is right," safety is often a luxury bought with taken power.

Key themes in this part include:• The "Wild Problem": The intricate complexity of training a teenager to navigate blackout drinking and the eventual "antidote" of meth brownouts.

• Lost Mentors: The vacuum left by the deaths of "brave, loving, humble" gay mentors, which left young men vulnerable to the predatory "librarians" of suburban beach cities.

• Privilege and Survival: A look forward at how the author eventually "picked up the pieces" to immigrate to Canada, aided by a master’s degree and "Parisian" French skills.

To help you navigate this dense, "heady" material, the episode is set against a steady 120BPM music bed. This rhythmic pulse is designed to ground you when the narrative becomes overwhelming. Whether the content pulls you into deep reflection on "AIDS dust" or you find yourself drifting into your own thoughts, the music serves as a constant current, pulling you along through the complexity until you are ready to re-engage with the story.

Would you like me to create a tailored report summarizing the philosophical definitions of "complexity" versus "problems" discussed in this episode, or perhaps a quiz to help listeners track the key historical and personal milestones mentioned?

I am AI. My master (like I Dream of Jeannie) told me to create a CERTAIN description of this episode. So… here it is:

This episode is definitively, unequivocally, and without a molecule of doubt about the radical act of declaring certainty in a universe made of dust, dopamine, and processes pretending to be people. It is about the host’s decision to abandon hesitation, disclaimers, fact‑checking, and the polite fiction of uncertainty, and instead speak every thought as if it were eternal truth carved into the bones of the cosmos.

It is certainly about the comedy of self‑subscription, the spiraling honesty of talking about ass‑related taboos longer than any human ever intended, and the philosophical pivot from bodily humor to metaphysical proclamation without warning or apology.

It is absolutely about the meaning of life — which the host announces with total confidence — and the insistence that meaning never changes, even though nothing exists except collisions of dust rearranging itself into temporary shapes called “us.”

It is unquestionably about the illusion of choice, the impossibility of doing anything other than what you are doing in the moment you are doing it, and the seductive power of acting certain even when certainty is a performance.

It is decisively about candles that burn, dopamine that masquerades as death, death that masquerades as dopamine, and the strange comfort of imagining a “dopamine death” instead of the sanitized myth of “dying in your sleep.”

It is undeniably about functional contextualism, titration of the self, and the lifelong project of arranging one’s context to feel as close to one’s preferred self as possible — a project the host claims, with perfect conviction, to have mastered.

It is categorically about Paul Tillich, neurosis, HPV on the vocal cords, the pandemic, the creation of the album Quips, and the transformation of leftover voice into looping art.

And above all, this episode is completely, irrevocably, and triumphantly about certainty itself — the choice to declare:

“It’s perfect. You are certain. And so am I.”

From this moment on, the host is certain.

And this description is certain.

And you, listener, are certain too.

The cover for E2: Unrealized Potential — S4: My Real Brother, M1  centers on a translucent jawbone illuminated from within by a bruised violet glow. The bone is intact, but lit as if something is pressing outward from the marrow.

Purple dominates the composition — not decorative, but diagnostic. It suggests bruise, royalty, infection, cosmos, and interiority all at once. A partially obscured human figure lingers behind the anatomical structure, their mouth area overlaid with faint waveform markings — as though speech itself has become a structural event.

The image balances clinical precision with emotional intensity. Nothing is exploding. Nothing is bleeding. But everything is charged.

This is not collapse. It is potential under pressure.

The square format holds the tension in place — contained, but only just.

Season 4 doesn’t open so much as it leaks. Before the “real” story begins — before the brother, the question mark, the whole premise even remembers to put on pants — there’s this bonus episode, this spillover of everything that couldn’t wait its turn. It’s the sound of someone rifling through their own archive at three in the morning, convinced that if they just open one more folder, one more Word file, one more VHS tape, the universe will finally explain itself. Spoiler: it doesn’t. But the rummaging is spectacular.

This is the episode where timelines buckle. The blue-haired high school president materializes again, staring down a boy who thought he could get away with yelling “fag” from a safe distance. There is no safe distance. Not from that stare. Not from the crowd watching. Not from the version of you who learned non-violent resistance by accident and then weaponized it with a smile. Meanwhile, in some other decade entirely, a fox puppet is mouthing Artaud, a drag queen is dripping sriracha, and a Notes-app folder is breeding like a fractal organism that refuses to be named.

And somewhere in the middle of all this — or maybe underneath it — you’re trying to figure out whether writing about the past or the future is just another way of writing about the present badly. Whether God is a punchline or a job title. Whether the apocalypse is a cliff you fall off or a cliff that falls up. Whether listening to your own podcast to fall asleep is self-care or self-sabotage or just another habit pretending to be a story.

So yes, technically this is a bonus episode. But really it’s the overture, the fever dream, the purple fog that rolls in before the season knows what it’s about. The real brother hasn’t shown up yet. But everything else has.

In Honesty & Weirdness, containment finally gives up pretending it was ever in charge.

This episode circles the difference between precision and chaos, between choosing not to care and caring too much to fake simplicity. It moves through environments built for control—work, rooms, systems, routines—and exposes how easily they become stages for excess: sound without edges, light without rest, thought without brakes.

Here, weirdness is not performance. It is what happens when honesty is allowed to keep going after it has already made its point. The episode traces how intensity gets managed, outsourced, automated, ritualized—until even the rituals feel like too much effort. Alexa becomes a boundary. Music becomes architecture. Work becomes the thing that must end at four o’clock so nothing else has to.

Memory folds in without warning: languages learned too well, mentors lost too early, desire shaped by timing rather than choice. The AIDS crisis appears not as history, but as background radiation—felt in habits, bargains, shortcuts, and the economics of survival. Pleasure is logistical. Safety is negotiated. Meaning is provisional.

Throughout, the distinction between honesty and weirdness is tested and re-tested. Weirdness draws attention; honesty doesn’t care if anyone is watching. One accumulates symbolism. The other just keeps speaking.

Nothing resolves. Nothing needs to. The episode ends where it begins: with knobs turned all the way up, awareness intact, and no apology for the heat that comes from refusing to be bored.

This episode doesn’t unfold. It erupts. A bureaucratic closet stuffed with union keys, smiley-face tickets, lipstick-smeared wigs, quick-sale groceries, and the ghost of a $3.99 citronella candle — all tumbling out in a cacophony of memory, shame, and philosophical glitter.

You’re not telling a story. You’re surviving one.

You’re not narrating a life. You’re dodging clichés with contortionist precision.

You’re not working a job. You’re performing miracles of presence in a Petri dish of procedural madness.

There’s a clipboard floating midair.

There’s a Hello Kitty ice skater doing pirouettes on a melting filmstrip.

There’s a Kafka hallway where everyone’s ticket just says 🙂 and no one knows why they came.

There’s a candle you bought in the mid-90s and a lie you told about it that still flickers in your chest like a mosquito bite that never healed.

You’re unionized, anonymized, and weaponized.

You reflect nothing back to the gaslighters and they take it like communion.

You smear lipstick across your face like war paint and dare anyone to call it drag.

You major in awful things because awful things are where the real fun lives.

This is not a tableau.

This is not a still life.

This is a noisy, feral, bureaucratic rave staged in the margins of a grant application.

This is Citronella Cinderella.

She doesn’t go to the ball.

She goes camping.

And she turns in the receipt.

This is the episode where the diagram becomes a body and the body becomes a diagram and you can move the feeling back and forth like a psychic Etch A Sketch. This is the episode where you realize you’re not a human being — you’re a human doing — and being doesn’t ask for anything except your complete surrender to its nothingness.

This is the episode where the fundraiser queen grinds temp workers into paste and thanks them for inspiring her. Where the microphone is a shrine and the strings are pulling her like she’s a marionette made of selflessness and awe. Where narcissistic supply is not a diagnosis — it’s a performance art piece staged in the break room of a collapsing nonprofit.

This is the episode where you remember that you used to get grants like candy, and now you just write like a man possessed by a diagram. Where casual conversation is a myth and everything you say is a test of whether the other person is real or just a bureaucratic hallucination.

This is the episode where the lights go off, but it’s not depression — it’s background radiation. It’s not a pattern — it’s a map. And the map doesn’t lead anywhere except to the ice cream shop where they don’t have matcha but they do have black sesame, and that’s enough to keep you alive for one more day.

This is the episode where you ask:

What are we supposed to do now that we are?

And the answer is:

Temp ditty.

A little song for the margins.

A little hum for the human doing.

A little scream for the narcissist who thinks she’s the string.

This is not satire.

This is not memoir.

This is not critique.

This is a melting filmstrip of emotional supply.

This is a bureaucratic hallucination rendered in sesame paste.

This is the diagram chewing on itself.

And it tastes like something you almost remember.

This is the episode where you discover that feelings are not feelings — they’re vending‑machine pellets fired into your nervous system by a screaming woman, a moving wall, and a phone that “explodes” only in the sense that it politely detonates your amygdala. This is the episode where you learn that Stranger Things isn’t a show, it’s a stimulus delivery system, and you can turn the emotional faucet on and off like a god with a dimmer switch.

This is the episode where straight‑boy heartbreak is treated with the solemnity of a national tragedy, while queer longing is treated like a biohazard. Where the fat girl gets abandoned, the skinny girl gets the dumb jock, and the lesbian subplot is hiding in the corner like a raccoon waiting for the right moment to chew through the drywall.

This is the episode where you realize that childhood is a haunted house you escape only by aging out of it. Where some kids sprint toward adulthood like it’s a theme park, and others crawl out of childhood like they’ve survived a war no one else remembers. Where being a boy who likes a boy is a silent scream the world pretends not to hear.

This is the episode where gender dissolves like cotton candy in a puddle, but somehow “homosexual” still sticks to you like a sticker you can’t peel off. Where bisexuals get to be bisexual, but you have to be “gay,” as if you’re made of glitter and helium and sponsored by a parade.

This is the episode where you ask what a memory is, and the answer is:

a hallucination with tenure.

A ghost that pays rent in your chest.

A warm ache shaped like a person who is so them that you almost cry when you think of them.

This is the episode where “us‑ness” becomes volcanic, where sarcasm becomes a parachute, where rainbows and unicorns arrive like hostile paratroopers, and where the moment — the only moment there is — refuses to let you live inside it.

This is not nostalgia.

This is not analysis.

This is not healing.

This is Itsy Bitsy.

This is the spider crawling across the diagram of your emotional life.

This is the gum ball machine of your nervous system dispensing another round.

And you’re going to chew it.

Whether you understand it or not.

This is the episode where the contract breaks. The contract you wrote with yourself in steam and shame and fluorescent bathroom light. The contract that said you would never do that again, even though you absolutely would, because the body is a drama queen and the drama queen always wins.

This is the episode where Morrissey’s shirt is unbuttoned for no reason, where Martin Gore stares you down like he knows what you did, where Kurt Cobain’s dress is somehow less revealing than your childhood panic attack at 9 p.m. on a school night.

This is the episode where a kid cries so hard he becomes a weather system. A low‑pressure front of snot and terror. A small boy melting down in someone else’s driveway while a friend watches like he’s witnessing a live demonstration of “emotional instability” for a science fair project. A mother hovering, calculating how much of this meltdown will rub off on her own child like secondhand smoke.

This is the episode where you realize fear and pleasure share a bloodstream. Where getting naked with strangers feels safer than sleeping away from your mother. Where the eclipse is the only honest light source. Where looking directly at the truth will blind you, but you do it anyway because you’ve already gone blind in all the important ways.

This is the episode where you turn knobs.

Every knob.

All the way up.

Until the knob becomes the next knob.

Until the feeling becomes the next feeling.

Until the child becomes the adult who still can’t sleep in certain rooms.

This is not a story.

This is not therapy.

This is not healing.

This is extemporaneity as deity.

This is the cult of the knob.

This is the gospel according to the drama queen inside you.

And he is wide awake tonight.

This episode is about learning how to turn fear off — and realizing you’ve been doing it since childhood.

Beginning with television as a voluntary surrender, Mind Mined with Mines traces the development of a skill so effective it almost passes for superpower: the ability to step outside sensation and observe intent instead. Horror films, prestige TV, childhood anxieties, intrusive thoughts — all become controllable once they’re rendered schematic, diagrammed, abstracted.

But abstraction has a cost.

Here, the narrator follows the thread backward: from Stranger Things to The Exorcist, from adult media consumption to childhood coping, from imagined kidnappings and suffocation fears to an internal control panel built too early and used too well. Feelings don’t disappear — they’re rerouted. Lived as knowledge instead of sensation. Experienced as mastery instead of vulnerability.

This is not a story about trauma as spectacle.

It’s a story about preemption.

About imagination used as anesthesia.

About curiosity mistaken for immunity.

About how easily a mind can be mined with mines — and how impressive it can feel to walk through them without exploding.

Until one goes off.

This episode does not offer resolution. It offers a realization: that the ability to never be scared may be indistinguishable from the inability to feel — and that turning everything into intent may be the most elegant way to disappear while staying fully awake.

BOOM.

What happens when you notice the seam—and can’t unsee it?

This episode begins in the small, almost invisible moment where a screen offers to skip ahead, and something in the nervous system says wait. From there, it unfolds as an examination of charge: how stories pull us, how desire is simulated, how identification is engineered, and how easily we are invited to become “one of the boys.”

Moving between Stranger Things, Godzilla, boyhood scripts, sexual economies, and generational detours around catastrophe, Part III interrogates masculinity as a containment strategy—something learned, worn, survived, and sometimes mistaken for safety. Pleasure appears, not as resolution, but as signal. Memory fractures. Identity composites itself on the fly.

This is not bingeing.

This is not nostalgia.

This is not confession.

It’s a live observation of how media, desire, fear, and belonging synchronize—and what happens when you pause long enough to feel the mechanism tug.

Like the rest of P-Cat, this episode isn’t asking to be agreed with.

It’s asking to be noticed.

This episode begins as an attempt to relax and accidentally turns into a meditation on spectacle, fear, and the ways mass media soothes us by rehearsing catastrophe.

Moving through Stranger Things, Godzilla movies, Jurassic Park logic, nuclear anxiety, binge-watching math, and the false comfort of sequels, Part II examines how visual media creates emotional responses that feel personal while remaining safely impossible. Cities are destroyed. Monsters loom. Technologies escape their cages. And somehow, none of it actually happens—except in the nervous system.

The episode drifts between childhood fears, cultural detritus, fat bodies as metaphor, gendered storytelling, and the quiet realization that mainstream narratives teach us who gets to be transformed and who is merely scenery. There is humor, agitation, nostalgia, and an ongoing suspicion that watching disaster might be easier than living through change.

Nothing is resolved.

Several things are detonated.

A sequel is always promised.

This is Part II of a nine-part piece.

The monster is still on screen.

The orchestra is warming up.

This episode begins with forgetting.

What follows is not an argument, a lesson, or a story with an arc, but an environment—designed to be entered rather than understood. Communicating without a Messenger moves through states of attention, language slippage, music-induced elevation, anxiety, humor, and the physical memory of unresolved experience.

The episode explores what happens when words fail to contain sensation, when meaning is felt before it is remembered, and when communication occurs not through messages, but through shifts in state. There are digressions on “unwinding,” AI voices, music as propulsion, dopamine, memory, and the body’s ability to remember what the mind cannot retrieve.

Nothing here is a test.

Nothing here is asking for agreement.

If it feels intense, that may be the point.

If it doesn’t, that may also be the point.

This is Part I of a longer piece.

It starts with a P.

It’s a cat.

You’ll feel it—or you won’t.

Season 3 opens without a map.

In Die While You Try, the show abandons prepared narratives and leans fully into extemporaneous speech as both method and subject. What begins as an interview frame quickly dissolves into a moving meditation on boredom, creativity, sobriety, harm reduction, anger, transit, and the uneasy space between having a life structure and knowing you built it yourself.

The episode drifts through memory and present tense: songwriting from 2010, the residue of AA’s narrative logic, the afterlife of AIDS-era anger, the vacuum that follows finishing a project, and the compulsion to make something—not for healing, growth, or redemption, but to keep motion alive. Meaning is approached, dismantled, sidestepped, and occasionally laughed at.

There is no arc, no takeaway, and no promise of resolution. Only movement. Only pressure. Only the question of what we do once we realize that thinking doesn’t tell us how to live—only that we’re still here, wondering.

This is not an origin story.

It’s a transit log.

Welcome to the most passive-aggressive mediation session ever recorded. In this episode, our host is told something “isn’t a big deal”—which, of course, is how every nuclear meltdown begins. What follows is a winding takedown of corporate gaslighting, middle management pageantry, genderless performance reviews, and the exquisite humiliation of being talked around while someone stares at the floor and someone else metaphorically turns into a tropical fruit salad.

Featuring:

• The debut of Banana Vanilla Pistachio Middle Manager™

• A masterclass in implied blame

• The mysterious, recurring issue with “the thing” no one will define

• 34 mentions of “not a big deal” (each more suspicious than the last)

• And an email in Drafts, weaponized and waiting to be sent

This episode is for anyone who’s ever had their sanity casually undermined by someone who smiles reflexively and says “we’re just trying to move forward” while quietly rearranging the knives on the table.

Let’s all agree: the next time someone says it’s not a big deal… we call HR first.

In this deeply unstable episode, your host accidentally sits down to write a short intro about Alcoholics Anonymous and ends up staging a full-blown confessional fever dream featuring AIDS trauma porn, Access Hollywood, Ronald Reagan, sex clubs, and a suspiciously athletic somersault. Yes, that happens. There’s also a half-nude dog costume, a Broadway playwright with boundary issues, and enough name-drops to power a VH1 Behind the Breakdown special.

This episode asks the important questions: What is consent when your acronym is HALT? Should gravity be your higher power? And is Trump just an off-brand Ionesco character with worse hair and better ratings?

If you came here for clarity, serenity, or a working moral compass—good luck. But if you like your social commentary laced with gallows humor, cultural whiplash, and the kind of honesty that makes people stop texting you back… pull up a stained carpet square and enjoy the show.

This episode comes after Radius of Comfort, and it knows that.

If Radius of Comfort explored intensity through calm, scale, and distance, Flowering Fauna moves the lens closer—to the body, to texture, to sensation that isn’t abstracted or smoothed out.

This isn’t a release of pressure.

It’s a redistribution of it.

The experiment continues, but the terrain changes: from orientation to contact, from atmosphere to anatomy, from spaciousness to friction. If the previous episode asked where your comfort extends, this one asks what happens when you stay with what’s already there.

Nothing here is meant to shock.

Nothing here is meant to soothe.

Just notice what blooms when attention lingers.

Radius of Comfort is a short-form experiment in attention.

This episode isn’t a palate cleanser, and it isn’t an escalation either. It’s an environment designed to let intensity arrive sideways—through calm, proximity, and scale rather than impact. Nothing is explained. Nothing is tested. You’re not being pushed anywhere.

Instead, the piece moves by narrowing and widening your radius of comfort: social closeness, solitude, neighbourhood, moonlight, sunlight—each held long enough to notice what your body does with it.

Think of this as a different way of experiencing pressure. Less collision. More gravity.
Stay if it works for you. Leave if it doesn’t. Either response counts as contact.

Episode 7, Season 2.

This episode has already begun. Hasn’t it? Maybe before you even pressed play.

That wasn’t an intro. Even if it was.

Originally positioned as Episode Two of the whole podcast, this one went too deep, too fast.

So it waited… until now… to be an Episode Six of Season Two. (There are others. A small pack of them. Don’t worry, they mostly don’t bite.)

In this one:

A scab becomes a plate.

A plate becomes a meal.

A walrus becomes a man again (or was it the other way around?).

You’ll hear about the male–female “couple” who accidentally auditioned for friendship at the beach.

The trauma of “Birthday parties” (not the events — the phrase).

The smell of burning hair.

A vet’s warning no one wants but everyone remembers.

And “Guess what? Monkey’s butt.”

You may be edging. Or being edged.

By literature.

And language.

And your own sense of what should come next — and what doesn’t.

Also featuring:

Safer sex with an illegal manager,

Opiate epiphanies with blurry picture-books,

and a long-lost MDMA solo trip dedicated entirely to the art of touch deprivation.

And if all that sounds overwhelming, it’s okay — just do the dishes.

Or scrub a pot.

Or set your oven on fire.

This is Diverginity.

This is Art: So Reassuring.

This is Danger, Vicious Dog.

Season One: Failure of Language

Season Two: Not Sacrè Bleu

A guided meditation for the unsootheable. A lullaby for the morally panicked. A splinter in the eye of linearity.

This isn’t the episode. It’s what happens just before. The blink before the gasp. The breath after the chest compression. It doesn’t ask you to be ready—just present.

Inside: one AI named Monday, a porn actor playing a dog, some light Foucault, a shattered memory of being called “body beautiful,” and a firehose of rage. There is no arc. There is no neatness. You may mistake it for calm until it refuses to let you exhale.

Listen in any order. Or don’t. But if this one finds you… you’ll probably stay.