This Is Your Afterlife

Death workers have been rare guests on This Is Your Afterlife. Listeners know my interest in death is about how it helps us make meaning in our lives more than the death industry. On the flip side, reckoning with your own death and your grief over the deaths of others is a process for the living. Enter Colleen, a death doula who practices under the name Death Doula Does and the first TIYA guest to identify primarily as a death doula. They offer one-on-one sessions, notary services, craft-based grief care, and other end-of-life planning, and they connect their work...

This is a preview of this week's bonus episode. Subscribe to TIYA After Dark on Patreon to support This Is Your Afterlife & get all bonus episodes for $5 a month: patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife.

Friend, TIYA listener, and comedian Bryan Duff creates short-form videos that are funnier & more informative than I've come to expect from social media. They're packed with so much information that I wanted to give him a chance to stretch out in a friendly environment where he can talk about whatever he wants. Turns out that's horses. Thus, we have Bryan Duff's first appearance on TIYA...

I can't say for sure what I expected to find at diabeticguy.org when I saw Pauly V's sticker outside a concert venue in Cleveland. I just knew it was a funny URL, and I was curious. What I found was best-case scenario: an artist with type 1 diabetes making zines and prints protesting the evils of capitalism and the U.S.A.'s corporate healthcare system. Basically, a fellow type 1 diabetic making DIY art with disability justice in mind. The moral of the story is visit URLs you see on stickers! And enjoy this conversation in which I intentionally...

Podcasting in Time is brought to you by the Afterheads and Producers on Patreon in collaboration with my unemployment. If you enjoy it, SUBSCRIBE to get episodes early and enable me to do more things like this. You'll also get all the other bonus episodes of TIYA After Dark:

https://www.patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife

Welcome back to Podcasting in Time, a This Is Your Afterlife bonus miniseries exploring the filmography of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky.

This episoden focuses on 1983's Voyage in Time, which is unique in several respects. Most notably, it's a...

"Music Sounds Better with You" by Stardust is Ned Milligan's favorite French house song, and by the end of this conversation, we realize the title is basically Ned's ethos as a musician and the founder of Florabelle Records. He makes space for listeners to make meaning with him. That generosity extends to our conversation, and I think I tell him several times how nice it is to finally talk. We've been in touch as fans of each other's work for a few years now, and his new album, Real Fun, lives up to the title of "domestic music" he...

Podcasting in Time is brought to you by the Afterheads and Producers on Patreon in collaboration with my unemployment. If you enjoy it, SUBSCRIBE to get episodes early and enable me to do more things like this. You'll also get all the other bonus episodes of TIYA After Dark:

https://www.patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife

Welcome back to Podcasting in Time, a This Is Your Afterlife bonus miniseries exploring the filmography of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky.

This episode, we're covering 1983's Nostalghia, a film that presents some people's favorite final image in a Tarkovsky...

This is a preview of this week's bonus episode. Subscribe to TIYA After Dark on Patreon to support This Is Your Afterlife & get all bonus episodes for $5 a month: patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife.

Longtime listeners know my musical explorations have led me to black metal in recent years, but this is the first bonus episode I've dedicated to the fascinating extreme metal subgenre. My guest is Ian Ostaszewski aka Jetski. I've been following Ian's own black metal deep dive on the Jetski Twitter, where he has been posting a new black metal album he loves seemingly every other...

This is an all-time great episode of This Is Your Afterlife, the entry point I'll give to TIYA newcomers going forward. Poet, essayist, cultural critic, Ohioan, and MacArthur “Genius” grant recipient Hanif Abdurraqib explores death, loss, grief, awe, and even heaven so deeply in his work that I had to rephrase the show's tentpole questions for this conversation. The result is a dream episode with a new metaphor for the afterlife I can't stop thinking about. Hanif has a way with images that keep you thinking.

We talk about: birds, aboutness as myth, talking to Martin Scorsese abou...

This is a preview of this week's bonus episode. Subscribe to TIYA After Dark on Patreon to support This Is Your Afterlife & get all bonus episodes for $5 a month: patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife.

I turned 42 last week, which is honestly the closest to middle age I've ever been. I decided to have fun with it and do some CONTENT CREATION by making a tier list with my buddy, TIYA After Dark regular Drennen Quinn. I created tiers based on the Afterlife Power Rankings, and we slotted in as many standard mid-life crises as we could, plus a few...

"There is nothing theorizable or interesting about death," Tom Krell says 30 minutes into his appearance on my podcast about death. He's speaking precisely. By "death," he means what he's learned of it from watching those close to him die. The annihilation of self. The finality of it. What he's not doing is dismissing the topic. Tom earned his PhD in philosophy, metaphysics specifically, so it makes sense he's intentional and unsparing with his words. But he also makes this beautiful music.

Under the name How to Dress Well, his art-damaged R&B soundtracked my bike rides the...

Podcasting in Time is brought to you by the Afterheads and Producers on Patreon in collaboration with my unemployment. If you enjoy it, SUBSCRIBE to get episodes early and enable me to do more things like this. You'll also get all the other bonus episodes of TIYA After Dark:

https://www.patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife

Welcome back to Podcasting in Time, a This Is Your Afterlife bonus miniseries exploring the filmography of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky.

Stalker is the only movie I'd seen before embarking on this project, and it's in the conversation for...

This is a preview of this week's bonus episode. Subscribe to TIYA After Dark on Patreon to support This Is Your Afterlife & get all bonus episodes for $5 a month: patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife.

Here's another solo episode of TIYA After Dark where I give myself a starting point and an endpoint and improvise the in-between. This one is brought to you by moving to Ohio and driving to restaurants in the suburbs as well as my conversation with NEXT WEEK'S This Is Your Afterlife guest. Listen to find out who it is!

I'm having fun with...

I razz him for using "brutally honest" in descriptions of two separate projects, but I love Brandon Ogborn. I know the comedian, playwright, podcaster, and reluctant "content creator" from our days on the same improv team at iO Chicago, Sports Team. Reminiscing about that time is the closest I get to nostalgia, and even then, Bubba had stories that made all our eyes pop out of our skulls. He's continued to amass stories as a parent of two young kids he makes fun of on Instagram, and now he's turned his parenting and growing up stories into a one-man...

Podcasting in Time is brought to you by the Afterheads and Producers on Patreon in collaboration with my unemployment. If you enjoy it, SUBSCRIBE to get episodes early and enable me to do more things like this. You'll also get all the other bonus episodes of TIYA After Dark:

https://www.patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife

Welcome back to Podcasting in Time, a This Is Your Afterlife bonus miniseries exploring the filmography of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky.

We've reached Mirror, the 4th of the man's 7 fiction features but not quite the midpoint of our series...

This is a preview of this week's bonus episode. Subscribe to TIYA After Dark on Patreon to support This Is Your Afterlife & get all bonus episodes for $5 a month: patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife.

These bonus episodes are nothing if not experimental. Even more than This Is Your Afterlife, TIYA After Dark is a place to test how close I can come to replicating the experience of doing a live show in podcast form. Which is to say I am so curious what you think of this week's episode, in which my fellow comedians and longtime buddies Drennen Quinn...

"Ants experience humans as shadows and wind." And with that statement, four-time (!) TIYA guest Oui Ennui blew my mind. There are forces bigger than we can imagine, and how can we be sure of what we know??!!! My conversations with Jonn (Oui) get heady, so I wasn't surprised to be talking about the nature of time, but that ants line was poetry. It's a moment of resonance in a conversation about resonance, artistically and in relationships. The episode starts and ends with the concept of no-contact, but it's the result of the exact opposite between Oui and me.

Podcasting in Time is brought to you by the Afterheads and Producers on Patreon in collaboration with my unemployment. If you enjoy it, SUBSCRIBE to get episodes early and enable me to do more things like this. You'll also get all the other bonus episodes of TIYA After Dark:

https://www.patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife

Welcome back to Podcasting in Time, a This Is Your Afterlife bonus miniseries exploring the filmography of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky.

With this Solaris episode, we're deep into this filmography. My head is full of flowing waters, plants swaying...

This is a preview of this week's bonus episode. Subscribe to TIYA After Dark on Patreon to support This Is Your Afterlife & get all bonus episodes for $5 a month: patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife.

It's another episode of Bracketology, the comedy argument game show created by me and some of my longest friends in comedy. This time, it's Bill Stern, Claire Favret, Meaghan Strickland, and me arguing Ways to Live!

How it works: pick a topic, fill a bracket with examples of that topic, and argue the matchups in the bracket until we crown a winner. The...

I don't remember when I started responding "THANK YOU" to guests saying, "Good question," but E Conner said it so often I felt obliged to explain the bit. I was slightly humbled by their admission it's an organizing trick for when you don't have an answer and not the turbo validation I interpret it to be. Fortunately, I don't need permission to self-aggrandize, and I have no plans to retire the bit any time soon. It's a silly moment in the midst of a really pleasant and sometimes intense conversation about E's punk rock radicalization, surprising (to me) orientation...

Podcasting in Time is brought to you by the Afterheads and Producers on Patreon in collaboration with my unemployment. If you enjoy it, SUBSCRIBE to get episodes early and enable me to do more things like this. You'll also get all the other bonus episodes of TIYA After Dark:

https://www.patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife

Welcome back to Podcasting in Time, a This Is Your Afterlife bonus miniseries exploring the filmography of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. This is it, y'all: the Andrei Rublev episode. I write this blurb from a future where I've now seen 5 of...

This is a preview of this week's bonus episode. Subscribe to TIYA After Dark on Patreon to support This Is Your Afterlife & get all bonus episodes for $5 a month: patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife.

I watched Louis CK's new Netflix special, Ridiculous, as well as the Vulture podcast about it, so you don't have to.

I talk about: preserving the status quo, high school essays and college bulletin boards, toothless criticism, cancel culture, evolution, you simply DO NOT have to hand it to him, and we all deserve better.

Follow TIYA, share your thoughts:

Gabriel Jermaine Vanlandingham-Dunn has lost enough people in his life to form a "Grief Voltron" (his words), and he didn't hold back in this wide-ranging talk that's been a long time coming. I hope you appreciate this conversation with a man who spends so much time appreciating the music of others through his writing, thinking, DJing, and, yes, curating.

We talk about: deliberately cultivating your life, the Bomb Squad, "boundaries" & "healing" as buzzwords, lifelong what if-ism, grieving the recent passing of his mother, losing family members to gun violence and HIV/AIDS, invisible disability, recategorizing friendships, traveling...

Podcasting in Time is brought to you by the Afterheads and Producers on Patreon in collaboration with my unemployment. If you enjoy it, SUBSCRIBE to get episodes early and enable me to do more things like this. You'll also get all the other bonus episodes of TIYA After Dark:

https://www.patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife

Welcome to Podcasting in Time, a This Is Your Afterlife bonus miniseries exploring the filmography of Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky. In this very first episode, I welcome film writer Peter Raleigh to talk about Tarkovsky's 1962 debut feature, Ivan's Childhood. After brief...

This is a preview of this week's bonus episode. Subscribe to TIYA After Dark on Patreon to support This Is Your Afterlife & get all bonus episodes for $5 a month: patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife.

I asked, and you delivered: the very first This Is Your Afterlife Mailbag episode. I really loved doing this, and I hope you like it too! Topic include death (naturally), seeking out new media, internalizing criticism of others' art, reality shows, poker chips, fantasy baseball, and fruit.

Follow/contact This Is Your Afterlife:

https://thisisyourafterlife.com/

https://www.instagram...

Just what the title says. For next week's bonus episode, I am going to do a listener mailbag, and it will be very awkward with no input from you, a listener! So send your questions to my or the podcast's DMs on Instagram (@thisisdavemaher/@thisisyourafterlife) or my email: [email protected]. Voice notes welcome! (I assume by sending you're giving me permission to include them in the episode.)

I'll answer questions about me or the show, requests for unqualified advice, or whatever else you can think of, probably. Just send it now!

This Is Your...

I met rapper, writer, visual artist, and technical octuple threat Rhys Langston when he opened for This Is Your Afterlife's 200th guest, Open Mike Eagle, at a show in Cleveland. As I say to him in this episode, there were telltale signs he was my type of guy. I think he'll be your type of guy too. We recorded near the end of the NBA playoffs, as my partner and I were deepening our Cavs and general basketball fandom, and it just so happens Rhys has an entire former life as a basketball player. And that's not even his...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

This solo episode was an experiment. Of the things that have occupied my thoughts recently, I picked two, made one a starting point and the other an endpoint, and improvised my way from A to B. I'm pretty happy with it! As always, I'd love to know what you think.

I talk about: no one actually understands AI, harm reduction, bubbles bursting...

Cultural critic & friend of the show Madeline Lane-McKinley joins my conversation with Sean O'Brien about their book The Return of the 90s: A Cultural History of the Present for the end of another two-episode week! Or am I joining their conversation? Doesn't matter! It's a great one because not only do we get to explore in greater depth the project of the book, in the back half of the episode it gets personal, as we explore how the project of periodization has affected them as people. Plus, we all share our "most 90s" memories.

Support the show...

I don't tend to use the word "periodizing" for the project of This Is Your Afterlife, but when I ask my guests, "What's your coma?," I'm absolutely "categorizing the past into discrete, quantified, and named blocks of time for the purpose of study or analysis" (thanks, Wikipedia). Periodization is the explicit project of The Return of the 90s: A Cultural History of the Present, a new book edited by Sean O'Brien and TIYA friend Madeline Lane-McKinley. In another two-episode week, I'm talking to them about this cultural criticism project and personalizing it. What world did the 90s leave us...

This is a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear all the other After Dark episodes for just $5 a month.

I asked, subscribers voted, and we're doing it: watching all seven Andrei Tarkovsky feature films this summer! Here's an "episode zero" for this bonus miniseries, in which I explain the genesis of the idea, my approach, and my general insecurities for good measure. This thing is so new I didn't even have the name "Podcasting in Time" until writing this blurb after recording. Real-time creative process!

...

Is gossip the only thing people want from their media these days? Is your own taste to the contrary evidence of an audience for something different? What do you do when you want to create work that engages culture thoughtfully in a format longer than a single TikTok? The answer for Jeff Weiss is: double down on the publication you started as a rap blog in 2005, which has launched the careers of many excellent writers and influenced culture in mind-boggling ways, like helping to solve murders and free people from prison.

Upon launching a subscription model for...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

You can also purchase just this standalone episode for $3 here: patreon.com/posts/nasty-squeezes-158644003

Sarah Knittel is a clown, actor, producer, deviser, previous TIYA guest, my close friend, a comrade-in-arms when it comes to DIY solo performance, and one of the people I consult most often on creative process questions. Her show Nightmare Fuel, which she brought to the Edinburgh Fringe the...

Pod Casty for Me week on This Is Your Afterlife concludes with a silly, serious, thorough, and discursive episode with that podcast's other host, Jake Serwin. I'm pleased to say our internet interactions have blossomed into an actual friendship, and I'm not at all insecure about how much I text him after the bit about "Lisa Lampanelli" he does at the top of the episode. Nah nah nah, c'mon, Jake is quick, funny, perceptive, irreverent, and a great hang. Enjoy the second of these episodes with my favorite movie guys who are also political guys.

We talk...

Ian Rhine is "one of the guys" who host Pod Casty for Me, my current favorite podcast. He and Jake Serwin talk about film and politics, and their deep friendship is evident in every episode. I find it illuminating and comforting and fun, and, wouldn't you know it, that's also how I feel about this conversation with Ian. I split him from Jake for another two-episode week, so stay tuned for Jake on Part 2. Ian and Jake joined me on a bonus episode a few months back to talk about Exorcist III, so these appearances on TIYA proper are...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

People have mentioned many versions of the afterlife on TIYA, but which one is THE BEST? That's exactly why we're here today. Afterheads, I present to you the Afterlife Power Rankings. My long-time comedy collaborators Daniel Strauss and Drennen Quinn join TIYA After Dark to rank eight separate afterlives, but first, we discuss the Pixar movie Soul, since Lucia Whalen mentioned it on her...

Place-Goers Week continues on TIYA, an acronym my guest—comedian/actor/YouTuber Danny Catlow—attempts to pronounce in this episode and we agree doesn't quite roll off the tongue. WE COVER SO MUCH GROUND IN THIS EPISODE. It starts with talk of how we met each other when my improv group Computer stayed on his couch for a festival in Austin when he was 18 and I was in my mid-20s. Strange! And then it ramps up (or cooks down?) into an exploration of grief in its many forms as Danny attempts to break the podcast's record for number of "...

I've become a weekly watcher of Kate O'Connor's YouTube vlog, Place-Goers, which features her going places with her boyfriend, Danny Catlow. I know both comedians—and unapologetic YouTubers!—from doing comedy in Chicago, but since they live in L.A. now, that's the site of most of their place-going. Their dynamic is great together, but for their TIYA appearances, I wanted to talk to them separately. These are the first two-part episodes featuring collaborators in a long time, and it's the very first two-episode week for the podcast.

We talk about: relationship patterns, increasing bone density, Jungian ther...

All-new type of bonus episode this week! I decided to visit the cemetery across the street from me, make my way to the grave of Cleveland working class artist hero and underground comics pioneer Harvey Pekar, and bring you all on the trip. This was a blast to record, and it's one of my favorite episodes of TIYA After Dark and maybe even the entire project of This Is Your Afterlife. Some of the audio is rough around the edges, especially in the bookshop and coffee shop, but those segments are quite short, so stick through if you're having...

Chicago comedian and gem-of-a-person-to-talk-to Lucia Whalen returns to This Is Your Afterlife... for the first time? Lucia wanted a few things from episode 83 kept private, so I sent it to the great podcast beyond, and we took the opportunity to record a new conversation as episode 205. I honestly think we had even more fun than before! We're older, wiser, and Lucia is DEFINITELY prepared this time. Right, Lucia?

We talk about: having a one-page worldview, the 2020 Pixar movie Soul, disappearing into oneness vs. losing consciousness, being present for her dad's heart attack, the lonely life of a...

This is a preview of a bonus episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month.

Thanks to everyone who contributed voice messages to this first call-in episode of TIYA After Dark (at least of the new era)! It's an exorcism of all the casual cruelty we experience at work, from the mundane to the dramatic. I hope you dig it. It was very fun to do.

I talk about: work, bosses, how much I love work and...