Danger, Vicious Dog

One of the weirdest things about becoming visible online—even slightly visible—is discovering how quickly you start wanting reassurance from numbers. Not success. Not art. Not connection. Numbers. A graph moving upward. A little dashboard saying: “Good boy.” This episode started as something completely different. Then suddenly a few podcast episodes escaped containment and got hundreds of listens...

This introduction is being written for Substack, which is a queer‑deaf place. Not hostile — just unable to hear the frequency queer people speak in. So I’m going to try to write something that will be legible to the queer‑deaf and also put them gently in their place. That’s what this introduction is for. And because “queer‑deaf” needs a definition, here’s the only one that makes sense: Queer‑deaf...

The episode has no wants. And one of them was to not stay in one piece. So it grabbed its own arm and pulled it off. To hand it to me… along with the hand, and the elbow and the shoulder. And while that was happening, the hand was going one way, the elbow another, the shoulder another. Bodies are amazing things, don’t you think? Then we made some Bacon. The Bacon was capitalized, like this: Bacon....

This episode begins with mania, wanders through geopolitics, Tesla crumple‑zones, revenge fantasies, AIDS grief, gay AA in Palm Springs, MIDI sequencers, erotic electrocution anxiety, and a dying cowboy in a Speedo who just wanted someone to sing harmony with him before he disappeared from the earth. So, naturally, it becomes a love story about tenderness. Human beings are disgusting little miracl...

I’ve been playing with Suno again. Which is dangerous, because I have  hundreds  of songs already up on Spotify and Apple Music and everywhere else, and Suno’s copyright filter is like a TSA agent who can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a sandwich. If I put in one of  my own  songs — songs I wrote, recorded, produced, and legally own — it blocks them because it thinks I’m stealing from my...

E7: The Friendly Driver — Description (Demonic Hera Symposium Zeusified Edition) Imagined Symposium Commentary (Now With Full Breakdown and Metaphysical Brawl) Arthur L. Rambo‑Cohen , poet‑theorist of emotional vandalism, opens the session with his usual cigarette‑shaped sigh: “This episode is what happens when autobiography becomes a migratory species.” He believes this is a compliment. No one el...

There are people you never stop following. Not because they were good for you. Not because they loved you well. Not because they stayed. You follow them because they became a hallway in your mind that keeps rearranging itself every time you walk through it. This episode moves through AA basements, sex during the AIDS crisis, artistic compulsion, emotional asymmetry, obsession disguised as devotion...

A city spends forty years preventing a subway from reaching its wealthy beach community because they fear “outsiders,” then spends the next forty years complaining that no one can afford to work in their restaurants, clean their homes, or care for their aging bodies. The train finally arrives empty. You install hundreds of security cameras across sand dunes to monitor danger, but every danger ente...

You’re probably noticing a pattern by now. I keep circling around the same things: responsibility, performance, authenticity, pragmatism, spectacle, care, self-preservation, manipulation, survival. Human beings constructing little wire bridges over impossible gaps and then pretending they were always there. I think part of why I’m asking these questions is because I don’t trust easy morality anymo...

“Love Is a Group” wanders through 1987 Los Angeles wearing a tube dress, a student body president pin, and enough contradictory identities to make an entire school district develop stress hives. This episode starts where expulsion paperwork, forged absence notes, bomb threats, student council politics, AIDS-era panic, and adolescent theatre-kid populism all begin collapsing into each other like sh...

Is this fiction? No, it’s clearly not fiction. It’s a transcript of a mind trying—and failing—to sit still. But all memory is reconstruction, so technically it  is  fiction. Right, but if everything is fiction, then calling it fiction is meaningless. Exactly. Which is why we keep talking. This episode begins in a windowless cruise cabin—already a metaphor you didn’t ask for—and spirals outward int...

Recorded from the sensory deprivation chamber of an interior cruise cabin, Season 6 opens mid-sprawl. What begins as an attempt to read from a set of autofiction books dissolves—predictably—into something else: a drifting, recursive excavation of memory, identity, and performance. From teaching himself to tie shoes “wrong,” to growing up in 1980s Manhattan Beach under the shadow of nuclear anxiety...

This one starts with a headset, a wireless mic, and a person pacing around their house trying to think out loud without deciding what they think first. There are ribs in an Instant Pot. There are potatoes that may or may not be timed correctly. There is a puppy tangling itself in cords and demanding to be acknowledged as the central organizing force of the universe. And somewhere inside all of tha...

Two voices enter. Neither leaves with dignity. Welcome to a kitchen in April 2020: ribs in an Instant Pot, hands washed raw from crosswalk buttons, a new puppy doing something morally superior with its time—and then, without permission, the floor drops out. You’re in a 1991 Hollywood motel. AIDS. Meth. Peanut M&Ms as harm reduction. No transition. No narrator asking if you’re okay with this. T...

There’s writing that tries not to disappoint you—and then there’s writing that behaves like a shopping cart with one broken wheel careening downhill into a pile of burning encyclopedias. Remember those? Encyclopedias. Episode Eight thinks its cart started rolling thirty years ago. I’m going to indulge that, because the point here is to simulate the cognitive static of modern identity-making—the wa...

Episode 7: This Episode is About the Next Episode ("Cet épisode concerne le prochain épisode" but not "Cet épisode parle du prochain épisode") Or:  Episode 6 (which says that it is 5): It Or: Oscillating between absurdly uncomfortable and uncomfortably absurd Need I say more? I have a lot more to say. In fact, I never stop. This just ends.

We started with chaos — the first draft looked like a candy explosion. Warhol grids, Haring stick figures, a pop‑art shrine to accumulation. It was funny, loud, and wrong. Too sweet. Too safe. I said, “It’s saccharine.” You said, “Throw in some Basquiat.” And of course you were right — the piece needed teeth, not sprinkles. So we roughed it up. Crowns, drips, graffiti, the whole downtown‑1981 bapt...

Pretty much this whole podcast circles around one idea: the real action isn’t in the story, or the topic, or the “content.” It’s in the space between things — the jump, the misfire, the edge where something becomes something else. If you’re new here, that’s the only thing you really need to know. This show lives in the negative space. It’s a synapse disguised as an episode. If you’ve been listenin...

In this episode—part wandering monologue, part asteroid impact—Brian steps out of the model‑minority pose and into what he calls being “a sample size of one.” It begins slowly, deliberately, the way he warns it will: “this thing kind of starts slowly and wanders around,” and then, without warning, the floor gives way. The false one first. Then the real one. Across break‑ups, harm reduction, the AI...

Tomorrow is Sunday. Three Saturdays ago—like this one, not last Saturday but the one before—we got a new puppy. The next day, Sunday at 11:00 a.m., I had my regular counselling appointment. I barely made it to my computer in time. Usually I “prepare,” which is probably a bad idea. I’ve always been a performer. I care about the quality of shared moments. Even in counselling. So there he was, in the...

This episode begins with a puppy getting tangled in a blanket and somehow ends up wandering through philosophy, authenticity, youth work, trauma, language, performance art, and why the human brain refuses to think in straight lines. Welcome to  It’s Alive (and Fixed)  — a long-form, stream-of-consciousness podcast where thinking happens out loud and conclusions are optional. In this episode we cir...

Welcome to the dot matrix printer of the soul . This is a record of what happens when you’re an openly gay student body president in 1987 , the world thinks you deserve to die because of the AIDS crisis , and your only way out is to turn survival into a high-stakes performance art. This is an extemporaneous thinking process about a life that was "complicated enough," featuring a suite of...

A new puppy, droopy-eyed figurines, and the looming collapse of the world… we’re starting there. Then we spiral: tech bros and golden shit emojis, digital fingers, the slippery fate of my auto-fiction, and the unstoppable velocity of words as tubes through the multiverse. Sex-positive confessions from 1991, hardened resolves jerking intentions around coffeehouses, blow-up co-pilots, and black hole...

Is this a critique of identity politics? Yes. Is it a critique of the critique of identity politics? Also yes. Is it about grammar? Unfortunately. Movement Three takes the cultural war term “gender-affirming,” shakes it by the collar, and asks whether anyone remembers who claimed what in the first place. Words are reclaimed. Words are burned. Words are placed gently under an asterisk like a lingui...

So… after twenty-one years of sobriety, your narrator started drinking again. It wasn’t a problem. Until it was. Or maybe it wasn’t. This episode refuses to clarify. Instead, we move through the nuclear family, the gig economy, artificial intelligence nannies, four-layer ice cream pops on a stick, drag queens in uterine walls, and a line of workers being paid in frozen sugar while strong men congr...