Danger, Vicious Dog

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...

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....

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 cas...

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 insi...

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 unman...

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 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 possibl...

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 thr...

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 begin...

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....

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 t...

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 bon...

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 soc...

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...

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 disse...

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...

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 th...

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...

This episode didn’t begin the way it sounds. It started somewhere else—somewhere draftier—and then wandered into the shape you’re about to hear. I won’t explain the process, partly because the process doesn’t want to be explained, and partly because the episode already gives away its own secret without ever saying it out loud. You’ll hear a story that isn’t quite a story, a confession that isn’t q...

This is Part 2 of the five‑episode Blowhard series, even though in the internal chronology it behaves more like Part 3, and in the release schedule it’s the last one I’m putting up. The whole project has been out‑of‑order from the start: Part 0 came first, Part 1 came somewhere in the middle, Part 3 slipped out before Part 2, and now Part 2 arrives as the final installment. It’s a series, but a sc...

I thought I was making an episode about psychics. Then tarot showed up. Then Paul Tillich. Then existentialism, anxiety, compulsive behavior, counselling, sex, the AIDS era, relationships, death, survival, and the strange usefulness of being a socially marginalized person. So I kept talking. This episode starts with a question about whether I can “read” people. I can sometimes watch someone, notic...

The episodes aren’t in order. They aren’t even near each other. That’s intentional. They shouldn’t be listened to together. Unless you’re curious. Which means you will. So maybe the warning is the invitation. Maybe the whole thing is a dare. Maybe the dare is the structure. Life has rules. We pretend it doesn’t. That’s the game. Free will versus determinism? Too complicated. Or too simple. Either...

Serving Suggestions: One of the central paradoxes to explore is whether some realities may be psychologically difficult enough that they become almost impossible to communicate directly. Stating conclusions may allow dismissal, defensiveness, moralization, or intellectual agreement without emotional engagement. Examine whether the episode circumvents that problem. Examine whether humour functions...

A little behind the scenes, not of how I do everything… but what kinds of liberties I take as I do everything. It’s a mode, not a method. You could listen to this episode as a set of instructions for making AI slop music, though it never admits that’s what it’s doing. The prompt I fed into the machine was absurd — a pile of half‑thoughts, contradictions, and leftovers. But that’s the point. The AI...

Blowhard (An Introduction) opens with a creative stance that feels strangely familiar to anyone who’s ever fallen into the gravitational field of Arthur Rimbaud. Not because Brian imitates Rimbaud, and not because he’s trying to resurrect 19th‑century symbolism, but because both artists treat consciousness as raw material and refuse to separate the profound from the profane. The comparison isn’t s...