E3 A Speed Freak’s Critique of Empire; S7: Owning the Libs

E3 A Speed Freak’s Critique of Empire; S7: Owning the Libs

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.

E2: Welcome to the Algorithm; S7: Non-Alcoholic Libations (maybe just a little)

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.

E1: Crème de cassis; S7: Liberated Panties

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. --- 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.”

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.”