The Awful Shadow: Unblocking the Self / Unboxing Big-Box Academia

Chapter 23 - The Eyes

A haunted walk through the origins of “The Eyes of Texas”—told as a fantasy with musical set pieces. John Henry, Alice, and Old Man Joshua pull the veil off a campus anthem; a paper tyrant named Jaihartd tries to sell “comfort” over truth. Content note Discussion of blackface/minstrelsy, racist caricature, and institutional whitewashing.

Chapter 22 - BRAC-Listed!

In this searing and darkly satirical chapter, Jack peels back the layers of secrecy surrounding a big-box university's Behavioral Risk Assessment Committee (BRAC)—an obscure, almost mythological campus entity with no visible public charter and yet, somehow, the power to investigate faculty and staff without their knowledge or consent. What begins as a Kafkaesque tangle of open records requests turns into something even more disturbing: a bureaucratic specter capable of branding a man a threat based on bolded email hearsay, surreal musical titles, and cartoonishly bad assumptions. This episode dives deep into: * 🕵️‍♂️ Hidden administrative surveillance * 🎵 The criminalization of instrumental music * 📜 Open records requests as weapons of clarity * 🧠 Mental health, family loss, and the long shadow of post-lawsuit grief * 🍫 A PayDay bar, a piñata, and a lanyard collection all make cameos Plus: A faculty member accuses Jack of “stalking by SoundCloud,” a dean drops a pizza-parlor-pedophile punchline, and the university Police confuse him with his own father. It’s absurd, it’s infuriating—and it’s all true. With help from fellow whistleblower and historian Alberto Martinez, this episode isn’t just a personal reckoning; it’s a surgical dissection of a shadow system that treats reputation as risk and satire as threat. 🟧 Trigger warning: gaslighting, defamation, uninvestigated accusations, and the misuse of mental health frameworks as instruments of silencing. 🟦 Content warning: brief discussion of depression, injury, and grief.

CHAPTER 20: ACADEMIA CULPA: SYLLABUS AND COURSE OVERVIEW

Season 2 opens with a fictional university course called Academia Culpa: The Fundamentals of Big-Box University Autocracy. Delivered like a deadpan syllabus reading, the episode slowly reveals itself as a satire of institutional power and academic gaslighting. Policy language becomes a weapon, and phrases like “collegiality” and “autonomy” start to glitch and unravel. Picking up where Season 1 left off—after grief, dismissal, and spiritual rupture—this episode shifts focus from personal fallout to the cold machinery that caused it.

Benediction 1: Sugarbean

More on the dream I had on the beach in Florida.

Bonus: Footnote- Podcasting is a Fad

On how technological shifts—often dismissed as fads—illuminate deeper processes of cultural transformation and human connection.