This Is Your Afterlife

Michael Penn II, aka CRASHprez, makes two rapper episodes in a row! Not since Mike Watt has there been a This Is Your Afterlife guest slinging this much of their own lingo (what is it about Mikes?), and I do my best not to pretend too hard like I understand it all. Fortunately, we take a detour into the topic of slang ("getting kirk" is simply unbelievable) on the way to Michael revealing one of h...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. On the heels of last week's 200th episode, I talk about why it made me more emotional than I expected, and I offer a guide to the back catalog in the form of 5 episodes that changed my thinking, 4 about death and 1...

Sometimes a guest breaks my brain, like when Open Mike Eagle asks the titular question of this episode. I'm still parsing the way the question reorients consciousness in the body rather than as an entity separate from it. Maybe it's a basic thought, but it hit me fresh this time. But let me back up. OPEN MIKE EAGLE IS ON EPISODE 200 OF THIS IS YOUR AFTERLIFE. The rapper, podcaster, streamer, TV wr...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. I use my coma as the central metaphor of This Is Your Afterlife to discover the moments that transformed my guests' lives, but is there a more transformative life experience than a coma? What's the MOST transformati...

KR Riiber wrote one of the best plays I've ever seen, Tangles & Plaques, a show about dementia and memory care borne from their time as an ensemble member of the Neo-Futurists, the Chicago theater group with core tenets like honesty, brevity, risk & chance, and transformation. Hmmmm, sound like any other show/podcast you know??? Jk, this is not exactly a "brevity" podcast. Truly though, th...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. I got to talk about my favorite movie with the hosts of my favorite podcast! My guests this week, Pod Casty for Me's Jake Serwin and Ian Rhine, have not appeared on the main feed. YET! But I couldn't resist easing t...

I encountered the live feed puppetry of Theatre Nobody's "rustbelt." when I shared a venue with the show at Cleveland's BorderLight Festival 2025. That's how I met Kevin Michael Wesson, a Chicago puppeteer and theatre artist committed to the DIY ethos that so inspires me. This episode is full of gems like Kevin calling his childhood puppeteering "playing critters" or dropping the knowledge that do...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. I love year-end list season! Whether you're as gung ho as I am or view these lists with skepticism (or both), I've decided to share my enthusiasm by reading a bunch and then very UNSCIENTIFICALLY telling you which a...

Keir Neuringer is my kind of artist. The saxophonist, improviser, writer, and composer of Irreversible Entanglements and DROMEDARIES faces down the horrors of our world and plays AT them. He's not making easy-to-compartmentalize "political art." He's grappling with how to be an artist, father, bandmate, and human being during collapse. Like we all are. We talk about: being radicalized during the I...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. Matt Sage, aka M. Sage and 1/4 of TIYA fave Fuubutsushi, is here to talk about a shared passion of ours: compact discs, aka CDs!!! Matt and I have become friends since his first appearance on the podcast, and it was...

Eden Robins wrote a novel comprised of obituaries, Remember You Will Die, and even more importantly, she wrote an essay about becoming a school crossing guard that inspired me to do the same. We start our talk there. We talk about: death as subject matter, best practices for talking and writing about suicide, weirdo heroes, obituary writing, the curse of ANY success, making narratives amidst uncer...

This is a preview of a premium episode from the Patreon feed, TIYA After Dark! Head to patreon.com/thisisyourafterlife to hear this full episode and all the others for just $5 a month. For the first episode of this new premium feed, TIYA After Dark, I talk to my close friends and previous TIYA guests Daniel Strauss and Drennen Quinn about holidays. I went into this episode with a plan to rank holi...

After a year away, This Is Your Afterlife is back! One of the highlights of my year, creatively and culturally, was dipping my toe into black metal. The extreme music genre inspired my performance art installation, Black Metal Rooftop, which I expanded into a talk show called Black Metal Patio. My house band and musical guest for BMP was Genital Shame, a trans black metal artist from Pittsburgh wh...

READ THIS! Life has made it hard to put out the podcast weekly, and I can't stop myself from apologizing for that. Just know this is a temporary situation. Diabetes trauma, depression, and full-time work have been hurdles, but I've nearly cleared the first two. I know better than to make promises about show frequency or format now, but I didn't when recording this episode. Rather than tack on an i...

THIS solo episode comes from my car during my lunch break. I talk about: Reading Black Metal Rainbows and the uncanny experience of enjoying reading about an art form more than the art form itself, though I'm still enjoying Dawn Treader's Bloom & Decay The images of Shaaban Ahmad via @letstalkpalestine  and so many other places: a 19-year-old software engineering student burning alive in...

The Neo-Futurists series continues with dyed-in-the-wool weirdo Emma Casey. We bond over our recovery from the hyperindividualism of mistranslating punk ideology, and she shares a walk through New York City that could only happen with the confidence of youth. She's very cool and thoughtful and lovable, and I hope you love her! Content warning: whiteness, pristine coffee shop hell, personality/worl...

Adam Gilbert (Just for Laughs) is a real sweetie, and he was in a punchy mood (or maybe that's just him?) when we recorded. And even though he compared me to Bill Maher, we had a lot of fun. This makes two weeks in a row of standups, and who knows, maybe this is the start of This Is Your Afterlife as traditional comedy podcast! (It's not.) Content warning: alcoholism, dead dad, escalators, spiders...

SNL writer, stand-up comedy comrade of mine, and O.G. observer of my coma, Steven Castillo joins me to brag about the memory of his second Saturday Night Live audition. Actually, this is a very sweet and warm chat between old friends, and I was so grateful to have it (on my 40th birthday! I don't mention this on the main feed, but it's in the full convo on the Patreon). Now it's yours. Content war...

"Why Cleveland?" is the question I get when I tell people I moved from Chicago to Cleveland, mostly from people IN Cleveland. This Very Special Episode of This Is Your Afterlife does not answer "why" and in fact cautions against reading too much into every little detail of such a huge life transformation. My lovely pal, very funny comedian, and big TIYA fan Claire Favret helps me tease it all out....

As a follow-up to last week's Will Oldham episode, I'm re-releasing my episode with the man Will called an "internet angel," saxophonist and Fuubutsushi member Patrick Shiroishi. This conversation has been on my mind because my move to Cleveland has come with consuming more Taco Bell than I have in the past decade, so take any shade I throw toward T. Bell with that grain of salt. In my mind, this...

Booking This Is Your Afterlife sometimes looks like me hand-writing a list of dream guests off the top of my head. Will Oldham appears on every one of those lists. I've been a fan since he released the first Superwolf album with Matt Sweeney in 2005, and their 2021 follow-up, Superwolves, joins it as one of my favorite albums ever. Few artists are better at combining mystery, sincerity, wisdom, an...

Playwright, actor, and well-balanced adult Steven Strafford is a breath of fresh air when it comes to putting creative pursuits in their proper place, i.e. as part of a life rather than a whole life. It was wonderful to talk to him about sobriety, meeting his husband, and moving from Chicago to Ohio as a grown man. Content warning: sobriety, family, having kids, people pleasing, ants and grasshopp...

I've wanted artist, writer, educator, and organizer Benji Hart on the show for a while, and today we finally make it happen. It's such a pleasure to speak with them about navigating abolition work while acknowledging the very human desire to see evil punished. It's something I think about a lot, and clearly Benji does too. Content warning: abolition, punishment, religion, not being able to relate...

My conversation with Lyn Rye was so intense and locked in that I gave up on taking notes (and doing bits). They're a bass player, songwriter, artist, gardener, "house dad" at Casa Al-Fatiha (an autonomous sanctuary house for LGBTQ+ asylum seekers), and abolitionist troublemaker. Yet our conversation stretched beyond even all that work! Content warning: domestic violence, carceral violence, assiste...

Daniel Wyche is a composer and improvising musician who uses guitar, pedals, and other electronics to make tracks full of ideas, noise, and even humor. I love his new tape with Lia Kohl, Movie Candy , so I talked to him in my living room about how to listen to experimental music (a Patreon-only part of our talk) and just how important other people are to his well-being. Content warning: hell is NO...