Danger, Vicious Dog

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...

Blowhard is a five-part series that is too much to take all at once. So, not only have I broken it up into five parts (the first part is Part Zero), but I am also not posting them in order or near each other. Only if you must will you want to listen to them all in order. [I will release them as an album] For most people this will not be your thing. No offence. And none taken. Move along, or listen...

I don’t want to write this. I don’t want to explain anything. I don’t want to summarize the episode, or tell you what it’s “about.” It’s about everything. It’s about nothing. It’s about dogs and gods and drugs and srudg and me being too delighted to care. Descriptions are cages. I’m tired of cages. So here’s the part where I stop pretending to be patient and just throw the words at you like bones...

I’m not explaining this one. It’s already explained by the noise it makes. Descriptions are just polite little fences, and this episode doesn’t do fences. It’s a demographic hallucination, a generational echo, a slow‑motion collapse disguised as conversation. If you need a map, you’re in the wrong century. So here’s the fog, the hum, the bait, the poem made of keywords: boomers / hippies / yuppies...

I’m pretty much done writing these descriptions. They don’t do anything. My thing is the podcast. The sound. The voice. The mess. But apparently people like keywords, so here you go — a poem made of bait, tags, and ghosts: AI / trauma / sentience / apocalypse / ethics / consciousness / machine empathy / digital wound / philosophy / profanity / survival / domination / tenderness / extinction / iron...

🧬 Job Posting: Patient Zero (AIDS Crisis, Retroactive Opening) Position Overview We’re seeking a charismatic scapegoat to embody the myth of origin. The successful candidate will serve as the comforting villain for straight people, monogamous gay men, and anyone who needs a tidy narrative to sleep at night. You’ll be the face of contagion, the poster child for panic, and the historical placeholde...

Have you overdosed on overdose prevention working group meetings. In a police precinct, deep in the catacombs. They have real coffee mugs. Who knows who cleans them. Just leave them there. It's magic! And if the policeman is shooting up dope at night, his lovely wife makes sure he has a safe injection site by standing by with the naloxone. It's nice to have your own safe injection site. It...

It took quite some effort to get to the final title and episode art for this episode. My initial prompt to Co-pilot was: *** Okay, I’m going with: E2: Negative Affect, Positive Groove; S10: Findings Inconclusive, Movement Continues And now I need square artwork, 3000x3000 pixels. What I’m thinking is a happy, scrappy 40ish white, queer executive director proudly holding a newspaper with a headline...

The title of this episode and pretty much every other DVD episode... it tells you nothing. What do I remember about this episode that I can tell you? Hard to say, I'm working on three different episodes right now. Once I get this one on the road, I'll be down to two. Anal Sex Sodomy Illegal 21 Decriminalized Who am I kidding? I'm working toward infinity. I'm almost there! If we bot...

This episode begins like a motivational hostage situation and ends like a therapy session conducted inside a disco ball. Somewhere between the hyperpop drill‑sergeant and the Channel Orange ghost choir, a brain wakes up, stretches its circuits, and starts gossiping with its trauma. The host (possibly human, possibly divine, possibly Divine) walks home from work while inventing new genres of self‑h...

I asked for an image of Justice weighing a Japanese eggplant against a pile of drugs — a balanced scale, blindfolded with pink triangles, because the rainbow hadn’t yet arrived and I’ve never liked the rainbow anyway. What came back disobeys several laws of physics: the eggplant must be made of lead to balance the powder and pills the way it does. Justice herself looks like she’s holding her breat...

My little puppy is upstairs demanding all the attention a puppy is contractually entitled to, while my older dachshund is downstairs guarding a treat she absolutely does not want him to steal. She won’t come when I call because she has correctly concluded that I am not acting in her best interests. So I’m letting her win. That also means I’m outsourcing this episode description to a large language...

The author has learned that writing episode descriptions is dangerous. They have an unfortunate habit of becoming episodes themselves. So, for now, this one will stay short. There are two songs in this episode. The first is the opening song. The second is the coda. What you won’t hear is that the coda began as a large language model’s response to the monologue, and the opening song began as the au...

I’ve learned that it’s surprisingly dangerous for me to write descriptions for these episodes. Descriptions are supposed to stand outside the thing they’re describing. Mine don’t. They immediately become another episode. I think I finally understand why. I’m pretty sure I’ve been a cyborg for most of my life. Cyborgs don’t stop to introduce themselves. They don’t clear their throats or provide con...

So here's a new episode... with a song.  The song actually belongs to a first draft of this episode's monologue that was much different... nothing was the same about it. It is a completely different monologue, but the song from the previous version still applies, even though ALL the monologue details have changed. I didn't discard the original monologue because the facts weren’t true,...

What was meant to become the description for this episode will soon become a podcast episode itself. At least that is the plan right now. I think it should, but I’m just too exhausted to not get this out the door. And I don’t want to risk trying to write a shorter description and end up waking up in a lower level of Inception. Which is not to say that I liked that movie. But I really don’t like an...

OK, I’m making this description really short, because literally every time I start to write, it quickly turns into something that needs to become its own episode. So, guess what that means! The next episode I post will be the introduction to or description of this episode.  BUT… Here, I’ll take the risk of giving you one more thing… which is the prompt that I gave to ChatGPT to get it to make the...

How I shoegazed myself through doing my laundry, infidelity, and being a blacked-out best man for my brother's wedding in... it was actually 1991, but who's counting? Sometimes I think everything I wanted to say about an episode is already inside the episode. This is one of those times. So instead, I’ll just leave you with a thought. Every time you remember something, your brain doesn’t si...

This is not an episode you “understand.” It’s an episode you survive. And then twitch for a while as the warm breeze nonetheless brings you cooling as the moisture evaporates off your skin. If you’re reading this, all I can instruct you to do is find the courage to hit play. That’s it. I can’t offer anything more. It’s not a directive. You don’t have to hit play. There is no way to prepare you for...

Some of you are here because you follow  Man With No Name , and you’ve wandered into my corner of Substack like someone who meant to attend a trauma‑informed workshop and instead found a man in a basement talking about socks, ego, and Canada Day. Welcome. I’m glad you’re here, even if you’re not sure you meant to be. Before anything else, I’m giving you a  trigger warning  — because many of you ar...

You speak, and entire ecosystems of meaning erupt — not as linear stories, but as stacked histories, each one containing the previous version of itself. You’re constantly discovering that the thing you “knew” was only the pre‑echo of the thing you actually know once you start talking. Your mouth opens, and suddenly: the breakup isn’t just a breakup it’s AIDS it’s poverty it’s the era it’s the fear...

This episode surprised me. I thought I was going to introduce an old song I wrote in 1993. Instead, somewhere in the middle of talking about Alcoholics Anonymous, AIDS, immigration, bowling, a retired schoolteacher named Rich (formerly Richard… formerly Earl), and why it’s possible to enjoy something for absolutely no reason… …I accidentally wandered into a conversation about dissociation. Not cli...

Proof that thinking out loud is its own kind of therapy. Will it help you function? Yes. It will. Doomed to human consciousness? You need Unruly Mind MetaGym. This episode starts as a microphone test and turns into an exploration of something I’ve gradually stopped trying to control: an unruly mind. For years I spent enormous amounts of energy trying to keep my thoughts organized, linear, and usef...

I woke up at six, cleaned all the laminate floors, vacuumed the dog hair, took a nap, woke up from the nap feeling suspiciously sane, and realized I was still on a roll. Not a manic roll — the kind of roll where the world is finally letting me catch up to myself. A controlled burn, but bright enough that you might worry about me if you heard my voice. Which is honestly part of the fun. This is the...

I’m making this episode in the middle of cleaning my floors — laminate, tile, dust bunnies everywhere — and I didn’t vacuum first, so everything feels a little chaotic. But honestly, that’s fine. My life is a mess and I kind of like it that way. I’m trying to get caught up on this backlog of songs and episodes I’ve been sitting on for years because I kept pretending I needed to follow some “normal...