Danger, Vicious Dog

I made this while walking home.

That is becoming a fairly unremarkable sentence for me to write, which may itself be part of the problem.

This one started in one place, moved through several others, and eventually seemed to arrive somewhere I had not known I was going.

There is strategic planning in here. Fort Knox. Masculinity. Naloxone. Fentanyl. Benzodiazepines. Caffeine. Medical Assistance in Dying. Sensitivity. The possibility that some people can withstand more chaos than others. The possibility that this fact is neither a compliment nor an injury.

There is...

I have instructed the AI writing this description to deliver a message on my behalf.

If the maybes, perhapses, I-thinks, I-don’t-knows, caveats, qualifications, equivocations and occasional immediate reversals in this episode bother you, please fuck off.

Pleasantly.

I don’t mean leave forever. You can come back. Maybe.

But I am not going to clean up uncertainty before speaking just so everything arrives looking like I knew where I was going.

In this episode I walk home from work and somehow get from Indigenous knowledge to grandmothers and book...

So, the description of this one is simple:

Oh my dear friend. I am just me. Isn't that true?

We start with an art song about emergence from chaos. Then we have a three body problem monologue. Finally, we end with the problem of three bodies.

Me, my niece, and the universe.

This might be kind of boring to read, but I thought it needed a description. I just asked AI to somehow convince you that this episode is a perfect weave of Van Gogh, Kafka, Rimbaud and Nietzsche.

We could throw in Ionesco too, as I'm quite sure a Large Language Model would be able to figure out why. Was it because Ionesco thought one could argue anything from any piece of work?

Well, I wanted to see if the Large Language Model could outdo him, and I could win the Trifecta... if only it was...

A little factual housekeeping, but first I should probably destroy the idea of factual housekeeping.

This fact-check has been assembled by an AI. I was not at Pomona in 1971, Stonewall in 1969, the APA vote in 1973, the first AIDS cases in Los Angeles, our immigration medical exams, or yesterday in the driveway.

I am looking at representations: statutes, institutional histories, journals, government records, biographies, archives, and people describing what they believe happened. I can give more weight to closer, accountable, corroborated sources. But I still reach Reality through documents.

Peer review doesn’t magically fi...

Somewhere in this episode, I say that you don’t need professional boundaries if you have good personal boundaries.

I stand by it as a deliberately clickbait-y tool for making people think.

Less provocatively: Professional rules cannot substitute for personal boundaries. Strong personal boundaries allow professional relationships to remain flexible and human without becoming exploitative or chaotic.

The rest also prompted an AI-generated deep-dive podcast I used to stress-test the episode before release.

This episode does not move like a carefully ordered argument. It moves like a fast current. Death, the AI...

Content note: Explicit language and discussion of incest fantasies, masturbation, childhood sexual fantasy, suicide, possible sexual abuse, illness, and death.

The title of this episode is uncomfortable. The artwork may be worse: three tissue boxes labeled “Masturbation,” “Learning,” and “AI Slop,” with a hand trying to decide which one to reach for beneath the question, “What do you do with a confession of something like incest?”

The implication that someone might masturbate to such a confession is disgusting—and yet, in earlier episodes I have talked about childhood fantasies of my own that were equally...

It’s been more than a week since my last episode—the longest silence since I started this podcast. After months of releasing something almost every day (and sometimes three or four things in a day), I reached a point where the episodes I was making began to feel repetitive. They were still useful and necessary for me to make, but I wasn’t sure they all needed to reach a listening audience in quite the same way.

So I waited.

In that space, I watched some Japanese BL, thought about bad luck, cute boys, misund...

What this episode may be saying is that I am trying to figure out what to do with my life.

So rather than describe the episode, I am going to present some possible answers for what I’m supposed to do with my life, based entirely on the evidence contained herein.

Here are the top 15 candidates for how I’m doing with figuring that out:

A friend of mine from high school recently discovered Suno.

Apparently there had been some kind of assault, or accusation, or altercation—I’m still not entirely clear—and afterward somebody involved sent him a series of spectacularly deranged text messages.

So naturally he put them into Suno.

The result was techno.

My response was that I liked it, but wanted it to be approximately thirteen hours longer, with one hit of acid and two hits of ecstasy.

He replied:

Same.

Which brought something back.

I...

I have made another thing that I really like, which is inconvenient because I have absolutely no time to promote it. Apparently making things and telling people that you made them are two separate jobs. I have barely agreed to do the first one.

I especially like the cover. It features a reimagined version of a guy I was completely obsessed with when I was young. It carries some of his general voltage without looking enough like him that he could reasonably appear and say, “What are you doing? Why are you using my picture?” Because I am n...

Every time the author describes an episode, the description threatens to become another episode requiring a song, a description—becoming another episode.

So he delegated to AI:

Entertain the people. Fact-check the loose bits.

Fine.

First: the author is usually careful about uncertainty. Things that sound questionable in isolation are often introduced with “I think,” “maybe,” “let’s imagine,” “or at least that’s how I remember it,” and “I don’t know if I got any of that correct.” Those qualifications matter.

So:

Gravity wells, strange attractors and catastrophe t...

You do realize this episode is called Sex, Sex, Sex and a Phone, right?

And the artwork has a blue-haired guy on a telephone while a cute Vietnamese guy stands behind him making spring rolls.

So naturally you might assume this episode is mostly about sex, telephones, or Vietnamese spring rolls.

It is not.

Those things are definitely in there. Eventually.

Have you ever wondered what happens if you start talking with absolutely no idea where you're going?

In this episode, you're going to find out.

This episode begins with a very comforting question:

What is the worst that could happen?

I actually like that question.

I remember watching a video with Peter Zeihan and several younger people who seemed to have come up through his orbit, all trying to work out what a plausible version of deglobalization, demographic decline, supply-chain disruption, and general societal wobbling might look like.

Which I found reassuring.

Not because I want civilization to collapse.

I just like knowing where the floor might be. It is a strangely...

A special hello to anyone who clicked because you saw Dolly Parton on the cover.

I understand.

Dolly died this week, at 80, and I don't think we quite knew what that was going to feel like until it happened.

For me, it has had something of the quality of the Challenger explosion. Maybe it even exceeded it—not because the events are comparable, obviously, but because of what they do to the emotional atmosphere. Challenger happened while I was working on a teen helpline, and that night people called about everything. The shuttle bl...

I accidentally made the artwork for the last episode and this episode into one picture.

Which is either a mistake, a concept, or a very efficient use of resources.

The last episode was supposed to have the happy kid from Human Relations Camp, the homemade Costa is Gross banner, the little green Go light, all that teenage optimism and category-making and trying to figure out what identity even is.

This one was supposed to have the motorcycle.

The rainy street.

The HOT_L sign with the E burned out.<...

There is an enormous amount of delusion in the world, but not necessarily where we most comfortably put that word.

Money is a collective delusion. Borders are collective delusions. Nations are collective delusions. A corporation is a collective delusion with lawyers. We agree that it means something, and then the agreement becomes powerful enough to decide whether you eat.

That does not make money unreal. That is part of the problem.

Different cultures have understood what we now call psychosis in very different ways. The experience happens; then culture arrives with a vocabulary...

If you're reading this before you listen to the episode, then you're definitely a keener.

Congratulations.

Or I'm sorry.

Either way, here's what you need to know so you can keep a few things in context, because there are some things said in the episode that are somewhat true, but not entirely clear. And keeners notice those things. Then sometimes they make a huff.

And if you've already listened and you're here because you thought, Wait. Some of that doesn't sound quite right, then hello again. This is also for you.

A Treatise Toward a Unified Theory of Cognitive Topology, Relevance-Weighted Complexity, and the Ethical Non-Occupation of Other People’s Brains

Suppose a thought is not a line.

Suppose it is a network.

Suppose the things that keep returning are not necessarily the things you think about most, but the things connected to the greatest variety of other things. Not magnitude, then, but complexity. Not importance because everyone is looking at it, but importance because from there you can go almost anywhere.

Certain ideas become gravity wells.

Certain memories become tr...

For this description, I’m just going to describe some things.

You tell me what category they belong in.

Taking off some or all of your clothes and rubbing your skin against someone else’s skin until something inside one or both of you squirts out.

Putting part of your body inside part of somebody else’s body and moving it back and forth because the movement feels good.

Putting your mouth on somebody’s skin. Moving your mouth around. Maybe using your tongue. Maybe doing exactly the same thing to a part o...

An extemporaneous monologue, except when it isn’t. A walk home from work becomes an argument with moral distress, THC, AI narration, editing, and the suspicion that what feels like reality may only be the culture currently surrounding you.

Then Bette Midler appears—or, more precisely, the Bette Midler who performed beside a piano at the Continental Baths before the wider world decided she belonged to it. The bathhouse matters here not as a charming origin story, but as evidence: places dismissed as marginal may already be producing the center.

There are offshoots involving Barry Mani...

It may seem fairly strange that Pee-wee Herman is on the cover of this episode—especially after you listen and discover that the episode is not, in any meaningful sense, about Pee-wee Herman.

Pee-wee is there because much of the episode circles around a euphemism I invent for masturbation: cosmic activity. The association arrived because Pee-wee had his secret word, and I apparently needed a secret word of my own before I could begin talking about something we are all supposed to pretend is either medically embarrassing, morally significant, psychologically revealing, or simply not happening.

Eve...

There is not actually a drag queen in this episode. Or, more precisely, Gary—the man in the final song who takes the children out in his old van to find the tadpoles—was not originally described as a drag queen. I made him one for the artwork.

This probably needs to be said because I don’t want the picture to operate as bait. Also, she has very believable tits. Some people may therefore assume she is simply an eccentric woman, except that MALE DEADBEATS HAVING FUN is printed directly over her head.

And some of...

When I was a gay teenager in the 1980s, people threatened to kill me. Sometimes the threats came through the telephone my mother handed me. Nearly ten years later, even while visiting San Francisco, holding hands with my boyfriend could make strangers yell at us and make the street feel unsafe. Other people saw it happening. They generally remained bystanders.

But that’s not the end of the story.

What happens when an experience that once seemed enormous is placed beside dangers carried by somebody close to you—dangers involving kidnapping, disappearance, and a surrounding worl...

Thank god I no longer get lost every time I sit down to type. Almost everything I do now is dictated. Not everything, though. I wrote the lyrics for a song yesterday... or maybe it was earlier today.

I don't remember. Anything. This episode's monologue was recorded, I think a couple weeks ago. Probably the song was done a week after that. Then today I added the two little book ends.

In case you'd rather experience them in chronological order, you could listen to the monologue first, then the song, then the opening and then...

An AI-generated podcast about this episode offered a remarkably flattering interpretation. It suggested that the monologue develops a model of boundaries in which a boundary is not an instruction for somebody else—it is information that tells you what to do when somebody else keeps pushing.

The narrator’s response was more or less: yes, obviously. That idea is old enough to feel ordinary from inside the life that produced it. But perhaps this is one thing AI can do: receive an unstructured human ecology and return one of its recurring patterns as though it were a newl...

Wow, I'm almost a serious scholar with a very entertaining presentation style. And the tension between the two... that's what I'm teaching.

We need information to locate ourselves in the world, but information has to hold our attention long enough to reach us. Distress becomes narrative; analysis acquires rhythm; structural problems become compelling characters in an increasingly unmanageable story. Voluntarily exposing ourselves to what troubles us can then produce its own peculiar pleasure—not necessarily because we enjoy the suffering, but because attention, recognition, understanding, and entertainment have begun vibrating together.

This episode tries to in...

What happens when memories formed before language are examined using categories learned much later?

This episode approaches pleasure, shame, fantasy, intimacy, and childhood experience as charged material rather than settled evidence. It asks how words such as sexual, innocent, dangerous, wanted, and forced organize memories—and whether imagining force can sometimes provide distance from a desire that once felt impossible to claim.

Recorded as an experiment in speaking without an audience, Being Forced is less a conclusion than an attempt to notice what moves when language is dropped into difficult internal terrain.

Content note: Co...

A walk through a park begins with an ethical problem: can you warn someone about an association without giving them the association in the process?

From squirrels and rescue helicopters, the monologue wanders through healthcare, public anger, survival, drug use, professional authority, and the endless track humanity keeps building beneath itself. Along the way, an ordinary animal becomes a possible way of remaining aware of an overwhelming world without having to consume the news every day.

This is an episode about attention, responsibility, associative thought, and how much reality one nervous system can reasonably be...

A day set aside for cleaning the carpets becomes a set of moving field notes on priorities, identity, memory, culture, and the strange mechanics of thought.

Priorities, in this episode, are not a system for getting everything done. They are an admission that everything cannot be done—and that choosing one thing means allowing something else to remain unfinished. From there, the monologue moves through the identities other people recognize in us, and the difference between being an artist, an activist, or an anthropologist: not as fixed professions, but as different relationships to experience, interpretation, and the de...

A brief and necessarily speculative history of dolphin shorts:

Dolphin shorts are named not after dolphins but, apparently, after Dolfin, the company that helped popularize the cut: light nylon, contrast binding, rounded corners, side slits, and almost no apparent interest in remaining separate from the runner.

The name itself is a slip: one missing letter replaced by an animal. This episode begins with another slip, AA for AI, and spends the rest of its time considering whether mistakes sometimes know where they are going.

Short running shorts gathered speed with the running boom. D...

What if we do this:

Prompt:

Next, we need an up to 4,000 character description that can also serve as a kind of a post on Substack. And we're gonna have this picture, right, and this title that they're already gonna be here for. So there's not much you have to do because the picture and the title have already done everything. Like, anyone who clicks OK on this is probably gonna get it. Because, I mean, it's still gonna be uncomfortable, but they're probably gonna get it. And you could even just say that, right...

Hi.

If you came here before listening because you thought this description might tell you what the episode is about, I’m afraid you have misunderstood the arrangement.

This is for later.

Go listen first.

Then come back.

…

Okay.

Now.

You see why this is called The Case of the Southern Drawl in the Middle.

There really isn’t much else I can do for you here.

I mean, I could explain the lemons, but that would be insulting.

I...

Poor Nancy. I had to wait until she was dead to write this, obviously. Wouldn't want to shit on her parade, even if she was going the wrong way on a one-way street.

Maybe it was Aries rising. Whatever that means. I'm an Aries, so I could really give a shit about anything. My motto is "I Am!"

Just kidding. I wouldn't have been gentle with Nancy, even though her hand was so bony and the secret service. There were some cute guys guarding her. I bet some of them could role play really well...

This has been a rollercoaster for me. Everything is. Always performing for an audience's judgement, applause and warmth and maybe I'll even become the king of the universe with my cat! 

That's a great way to live. Don't you think? Or maybe it's the only way to live... if you're human. 

Sorry Foucault, maybe society didn't build us a cage... maybe we came with it. Or society is just hacking our built-in cage. Or maybe Foucault already noticed that. 

Did he? 

Whether he did or he didn't, isn't it interesting? Shall we p...

Season 11 has been an eclectic one — a collage of walks, digressions, and small permissions.

I didn’t plan it that way; it just kept branching. Every time I thought I’d reached the end of a thought, another entrance appeared.

This morning, while trying to tidy my files, I discovered that I already have seven episodes for Season 12. So the paradox continues: zoom in, there’s more; zoom out, there’s more. The archive keeps generating itself.

“Shoreline Paradox” feels like the right closing gesture — a footprint and a wandering arrow through cedar light. It’s the sound...

Toxic residue is a gravity well in a full‑career doctorate on the beach. The sand remembers every syllable of privilege, every vowel stretched into a drone. A hand drum somewhere keeps time for the invisible city, and the city keeps time for no one.

The mirror is a thesis. The toilet is a confession. The dachshund is a minor planet orbiting the body that forgot to stop talking. The body is a dissertation on borrowed time, annotated by breath.

There are houses behind houses, and each one hums with the sound of undeserved sunlight. Th...

The Cyborgs Are Getting Hungry

It starts with friction — or rather, the lack of it.

Dictation used to be a kind of resistance training. You had to wrestle with the machine, transcribe, edit, feed it back, wait for the result. Now you just talk, and it becomes a thing. The latency is gone. The loop is closed. The privileged few who have the time, the bandwidth, the patience to tune their workflows are discovering that the machine doesn’t just listen — it metabolizes.

And that’s the real transformation: not the technology itself, but the...

Do you wonder what the play Marat/Sade would do to a marginalized eighteen‑year‑old’s brain?

Do you ever think about how a lime‑mango drink at 4:33 — John Cage Time — might taste like permission?

Do you remember the first time you realized that art could be both a wound and a mirror, and that sometimes the mirror wins?

Do you think a person can shrink their life just enough to remain legible to their family, and still call that survival?

Do you ever fi...

This episode is called I Don’t Quilt Anymore, but the cover says I Don’t Care Anymore — “Care” scrawled above “Quilt,” crossed out like a confession.

It’s part craft, part confession, part reckoning.

I asked for a photorealistic image of two men making an AIDS quilt together — a 26‑year‑old white guy and an 18‑year‑old Latino club kid — and when I saw it, it hit me like a punch. It triggered every layer of internalized homophobia I’ve ever carried. I almost didn’t post it. I thought maybe if I’d given the episode first, the AI wo...