Danger, Vicious Dog

E10: Crash the Met Gala; S6: Lesion Leash (finale)

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. --- 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?”

E9: I've Been Waiting; S6: Godot Has AIDS (Shocking Truth Revealed)

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.”

E8: My Pet Monkey, S6: Counter‑leash‑ference

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; S6: Self-Retracting Leash (Ethical Jello Wrestling with Muddy John Waters)

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.

E6: The Other Side; S6: Fleshy Leash-y (Bonus) Or we could just call it Melissa Etheridge

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?