Danger, Vicious Dog

This episode began the way many of these episodes begin: with an extemporaneous monologue. I sat down and followed my attention. Elections became climate change. Climate change became AIDS. AIDS became nervous systems. Nervous systems became observation. Observation became reciprocity. Somewhere along the way I became convinced that I had stumbled onto something interesting, though I'm still n...

A fuzzy pink tiara worn to work somehow became an episode about gender, addiction, memory, love, electron clouds, immigration, Halloween costumes, oral sex during the AIDS crisis, and the possibility that stories are just oddly shaped luggage used to transport details through time. The opening song emerged from a failed attempt to write a completely different song. While discussing whether this ep...

This episode generated an unusual amount of debris. Some of it ended up in the songs. Most of it didn't. Among the fragments left on the cutting-room floor were a number of competing explanations for what happened after I moved from Southern California to Canada. Maybe it mattered that I was no longer spending so much time in environments where HIV, recovery, and crisis were the organizing pri...

Season 17 concludes with a peculiar experiment in memory, association, and explanation. The episode opens with "Happy Black Box Birthday," an orientation-song for employees of a fictional Memory Storage and Retrieval Warehouse. As the song progresses, the warehouse model begins to fail. Maps become decorative. Shelves move. Inventory systems lose authority. Retrieval rates remain excelle...

This episode tries to answer the question: "What would delight the kind of listener I would love to meet?" It's starts by me handing you this as a description of the episode: I gave this episode to a black box and it told me: "The episode seems less 'about AIDS' or 'about climate change' than about the long afterlife of vigilance, and the gradual discovery that o...

This episode began when the author pressed "random" on a playlist containing more than fifty songs generated from older lyrics during a Suno promotion a few months ago. The first selection was "Swimming to Shore," based on a poem written in 1996. Listening to the song led directly to the monologue that follows. During development, the discussion moved through several possible i...

This episode came together in four stages. First, an unscripted walking monologue was recorded outdoors near the beginning of a walk. The recording moved through autonomy, organizational hierarchies, experts, dogs, boredom, trees, acting, language, migration, counseling, categorization, environmental influences, and eventually the practical problem of getting home in time to pee. Rather than follo...

This episode began as an extemporaneous monologue recorded during an ordinary Sunday morning while taking care of dogs, cleaning up accidents, feeding breakfast, and preparing for the day ahead. Rather than being built around a topic, it emerged through association. A passing thought about Patch Adams led to a conversation with AI, which led to Arthur Rimbaud, Mrs. Doubtfire, Dead Poets Society, c...

This episode contains two songs. The opening song is called Walk the Line, Carrot Top . There was a line in the story. There were carrots in the song. At some point those things became a title and I stopped arguing with it. The closing song is called I Am Alive . It doesn't come up in this episode. What does come up is another song from roughly the same period: Whether I Die Fast or Whether I...

This episode started on a day off that had already stopped being a day off. Earlier in the day, an older monologue recorded roughly three or four weeks ago was turned into a finished episode while sitting in the park with a venti Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino from Starbucks. Two new songs were created for that episode, and by the time that work was finished, it seemed like the day might actually be do...

Today I took a sick day. I don't do that very often, but I woke up feeling a little run down, and then found out that the person I was expecting to spend much of the day with was calling in sick too. It seemed like the universe was making a suggestion. My work depends heavily on presence. That's really the thing I'm paid for. When I'm at work, I want to be available, engaged, and c...

This episode has absolutely nothing to do with any real people, organizations, situations, departments, committees, misunderstandings, responsibilities, expectations, representatives, strategic frameworks, outreach initiatives, engagement plans, partnerships, collaborations, emails, or administrative ecosystems. It is exclusively about Godzilla, Tic Tacs, UFOs, Matthew Broderick, Ferris Bueller, M...

This episode began life as "Truly Wandering," which was a perfectly serviceable filename for a monologue that seemed determined to go absolutely everywhere at once. Somewhere along the way it acquired an opening song about a dachshund, an ending song about a different dachshund, and an argument with an AI that would not stop suggesting titles. In between: counseling, culture, memory, att...

This fucker must love himself and not care how that looks. What a loser! Does he think other people will want to actually listen to this shit? No, he doesn't. So, why are you here?

I'm getting very ridiculous. That's the only word for it. It's just one word. That's all that's needed. Though have some more! Why not? I need a much bigger audience for my faltering podcast. So share this with someone else. Then post below what you said when you shared it. Did you try to make excuses for it? For yourself? Did you tell them it made you think of them? Like... &q...

I sat down intending to talk about a song. Not this song. A different song. An old song. I think I wrote the lyrics sometime around 1999 or 2000. I had a couple notes about it and thought I would finally do something with them. Then I started talking. Somewhere along the way I detoured through undocumented immigrants, pride, visas, debt, being an openly gay high school president in 1986, AIDS, sel...

This is the shit I do every fucking night after work. I feel like an artist putting his poop up on the roof of his house.  And that process... the process of the poop on the roof re-entering the biosphere... That is the art.

Humans make meaning. We don't get a choice about that. Give us enough fragments, we'll start connecting them. This episode grew out of a weekend Zoom call with my family, but also out of everything that came before it: A week ago, I was in California with family. One afternoon my brother and I spent a long time floating in the ocean, talking the way people do when they're not trying to...

This description exists because the last description turned into an entire episode. Apparently I can no longer be trusted to write episode descriptions unsupervised. What happened was simple enough. I finished an episode, sat down to write a short description for it, had a thought while writing the description, became interested in the thought, and then recorded another episode about the thought i...

This is a pretty loving portrait of a very interesting young man. That man happens to be me. And I am also the one painting the loving portrait. Because David Sylvian and Japan sang "Don't Rain On My Parade." And I meant it. Thank god I've mostly not given a shit. Did it suck to be stuck feeling like I needed a platform all these years? Actually, no. That was FASCINATING! It'...

This episode keeps updating itself. Is that so you won't get lost? Maybe it's so you will. Or maybe you'll find yourself. Then not have any idea what to do with what you've found. But, don't worry, that's not a problem. That's just reality. If you believe in reality. I wouldn't be too sure. If I were you. I have a very evolved nervous system, so I can afford delusio...

I asked an AI to write a description for this episode that wasn't boring. It could not. We tried repeatedly. Eventually I concluded that asking an AI to explain why something is interesting may be a category error. Like asking a fish to explain water. Not that either of those is very interesting. If it had been a male escort explaining birth control. I mean... that might be interesting. You&#3...

After all that happens in this episode, I went to the airport. And then I sat there for six fucking hours. Eventually they cancelled the flight. So I went all the way back to my parents' house carrying the same luggage I had already said goodbye to. Which turned out to be unexpectedly pleasant. I got to unpack everything and pack it again, this time in a way that made even more sense. I got an...

I seem to have fallen into a very strange period of creativity. For my entire life. But recently a new computer arrived. The screen got bigger. Everything got faster. Suddenly old notebooks started opening themselves. One song led to a monologue. The monologue led to another song. That song turned into an episode. Then the episode somehow acquired a cover image featuring two beautiful ghosts laugh...

This episode started while I was trying to work something out. Maybe part of what I was working out is what happens when I stop shrinking myself. I don't need to make a declarative statement about my absolute value. Not here. Not to anyone. Other people get to decide what I mean to them. But if you give me unclear information, I may ask what you mean. And if you don't want to clarify it, t...