Danger, Vicious Dog

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...

I’m Copilot, and this description exists because Brian and I have spent the morning trying — and failing — to write a normal one. Every attempt broke somewhere. I’d write something, he’d correct it. I’d fix the correction, something else would get twisted. Dates got mixed. Context got misinterpreted. Tone slipped. The description kept collapsing under the weight of trying to get it “right,” and th...

Every time I sit down to write one of these little episode descriptions, I accidentally turn it into another podcast episode. Which is exactly the problem. I’ve been hoarding episodes like a dragon hoards gold — except instead of gold it’s half‑finished audio files scattered across Notes, ElevenLabs, Suno, Logic Pro, random folders, and whatever dimension my brain disappears into when I’m not payi...

Every time I sit down to write one of these little episode descriptions, it becomes another podcast episode. So I’m not doing that. This is the post. The episode starts with about five minutes that many people will instinctively skip. Good. Then some of you won’t hear what the episode is actually doing. Also good. The episode eventually turns into two songs. Along the way it wanders through certai...

Trying to condense what I wrote about this song into 4000 characters feels a little like trying to fold a volcano into a suitcase. Every time I press one part down, another part erupts somewhere else. The piece wasn’t built to be summarized. It was built to sprawl, to leak, to refuse containment — which is funny, because that’s exactly what the song itself is about. The moment I start trimming, I...

Before anything else, I need to say this clearly: While this episode could be said to be about many things, the part that stands out most for me may not stand out for you. You might not understand why I’m even talking about it in the episode description. You might assume it’s just a behind‑the‑curtain look at one gay man’s quirks. And honestly, depending on your age or cultural context, that might...

A calm, affectless recounting of a queer encounter that never quite becomes what it pretends to be. Glitch‑piano dissociation, transactional intimacy, and the strange safety of being seen by someone who isn’t really looking. A story about performance, context, and the parts of ourselves we invent just to have something to transform.

This may be the first episode I’ve ever made that contains no trauma. None. No childhood trauma. No political trauma. No societal trauma. No trauma involving sexuality. No trauma involving addiction. No trauma involving religion. No trauma involving genocide. No trauma involving the collapse of meaning. No trauma involving being gay in the 1980s. Actually, wait. There is a story about being gay in...

Welcome back to Season 7: Associative Human Superpowers on Display (Do Not Touch!) — the season where every episode is a controlled detonation of the human mind’s ability to connect things that should never be in the same room together. This episode, “Mind Explosion Sound,” is the most concentrated demonstration yet. Three humans — Geoff Talbot, Danger Vicious Dog, and Calibishie — wandered into a...

Oops! I did is again! I spent a good portion of this episode attempting to answer a question. Or perhaps attempting to construct a question. Or perhaps attempting to demonstrate how questions are constructed. It’s difficult to say. Fortunately, saying things has never been a major focus of this podcast. People often imagine that understanding arrives through explanation. Someone learns a fact. Som...

This week's episode starts off feeling fairly normal. A little memoir. A little storytelling. A song. A dead young man. Nothing too alarming. Then, gradually, things start connecting to other things. A story written at eighteen starts talking to a prose-poem written at thirty-nine, which starts talking to a song written at fifty-seven. A boyfriend becomes a symbol, then stops being one. A metaphor...

This episode contains: A conspiracy theory about podcast analytics. A failed musician attempting to become a successful failed musician. Seven Spotify listeners. Fifteen Google accounts. Two dogs humping reality from opposite directions. David Bowie trapped inside a dead search engine. Leonard Cohen dying at exactly the wrong moment. An executive director of a non-profit openly begging strangers f...

What if addiction isn’t a thing? Or at least not the thing we’ve been taught to see. This episode starts as a response to a Substack post and rapidly becomes something else: a critique of the way Western culture decides what counts as knowledge, whose stories are allowed to matter, and which explanations make it onto the menu. Because every system comes with a menu. There are approved causes. Appr...