Danger, Vicious Dog

Somewhere in this episode, I say that you don’t need professional boundaries if you have good personal boundaries. I stand by it as a deliberately clickbait-y tool for making people think. Less provocatively: Professional rules cannot substitute for personal boundaries. Strong personal boundaries allow professional relationships to remain flexible and human without becoming exploitative or chaotic. The rest also prompted an AI-generated deep-dive podcast I used to stress-test the episode before release. This episode does not move like a carefully ordered argument. It moves like a fast current. Death, the AIDS crisis, counselling, responsibility, suicide, sexual confusion, race, consent, compulsory reporting, refractory suffering, vocation, Marketplace buyers, a hungry dog, and the making of the podcast all rush through together. The listener cannot stop the water to examine every object. The experience is being carried along: trying not to hit your head, trying to notice what matters, and perhaps enjoying the velocity. At the centre is “low-entropy presence,” a way of receiving another person’s chaos without flinching, erasing it, or allowing one’s own reaction to occupy all the space. Calm is not passivity. It is the internal organization required to notice what is arriving, place it accurately, and act when action is possible. Some things can be changed. Others—death, permanent loss, refractory symptoms—must be given somewhere to exist. For the deep dive, analyze this episode as a high-density delivery system rather than merely summarizing it. How efficiently does it bring intellectual, emotional, ethical, autobiographical, and sensory material into the foreground? Define efficiency not as brevity or orderly explanation, but as complexity delivered per unit of attention—and the force with which it enters the listener’s memory and body. Examine how repetition, qualification, associative movement, tonal shifts, profanity, humour, vulnerability, interruption, and self-correction create the sensation of being caught in a stream. Does that velocity produce conventional understanding, or something more visceral: recognition, tension, memorable fragments, or a felt model of how the speaker’s mind works? What becomes clearer this way, and what risks being missed? Consider whether the form enacts its theory. Is the podcast itself “getting everything safely into the building”—receiving AIDS grief, ethical responsibility, disturbing disclosures, sexual ambiguity, domestic interruption, and the need for meaning without erasing their contradictions? Examine the discussion of God and John Lennon’s “whatever gets you through the night.” What standard is being applied to the narratives people construct to survive—literal truth, usefulness, harmlessness, or temporary necessity? When does supporting a life-sustaining story become reinforcement of denial, excuse-making, or avoidance of responsibility? Pay attention to the Marketplace buyers and hungry dog. Are they distractions, failures, comic relief, evidence that life and art cannot be separated, or demonstrations of flexibility? Then examine how “Safely Into the Building” turns the unruly monologue into an educational song. Does it clarify the episode, oversimplify it, or provide the mnemonic structure the monologue withholds? Finally, consider what a listener will remember ten minutes, one day, and one week later. Is forgetting much of the episode ineffective communication, or is selective memory part of its function? Does the episode succeed by teaching a counselling modality, immersing the listener in the life that produced it, or both? Content note: Explicit language and discussion of death, suicide, the AIDS crisis, crystal meth use, strangulation, incest fantasies, sexual arousal during unwanted experiences, possible sexual coercion or assault, racism, homelessness, illness, religion, and child-protection responsibilities.

Content note: Explicit language and discussion of incest fantasies, masturbation, childhood sexual fantasy, suicide, possible sexual abuse, illness, and death. The title of this episode is uncomfortable. The artwork may be worse: three tissue boxes labeled “Masturbation,” “Learning,” and “AI Slop,” with a hand trying to decide which one to reach for beneath the question, “What do you do with a confession of something like incest?” The implication that someone might masturbate to such a confession is disgusting—and yet, in earlier episodes I have talked about childhood fantasies of my own that were equally uncomfortable, if not more so. Some ended with me being shot in the head. The point is not to make this confession erotic. It is to put you in the position I found myself in when a young person I mentored came to me after an unidentified friend disclosed fantasies about having sex with a parent. She would not tell me who the person was or provide any identifying information. She was not asking me to intervene directly; she was trying to understand how she herself could respond to what she had been told. I continued following up with her and helping her think through that question. What do you say in a situation like that? Was the disclosure a bid for attention? A genuine fantasy? An attempt to make something unsafe feel chosen or controllable? Could it have been an indirect way of talking about abuse without making an accusation? Or was it something else entirely? You do not know—and the point is not to diagnose an unseen person from a secondhand account. But you also cannot simply say nothing. You have to find a response without allowing your own shock to become the centre of the situation. When I talk about “taking myself out of the equation,” I do not mean removing responsibility, judgment, or possible intervention. I mean keeping my reaction from taking over so that I can think clearly about what support—and what action—the situation actually allows or requires. A direct disclosure, identifiable danger, or reason to believe that a young person needed protection would have presented a different situation. Around that question, I also talk about learning, masturbation, compulsive AI-assisted music-making, ecological guilt, and the overwhelming number of songs I have suddenly created from old lyrics. The accompanying song, “One Thing and Then Another,” returns to the practice of receiving someone else’s chaos without panicking: turning reaction into response while continuing through the strange accumulation of illness, death, graduation, work, family, and art. Some parts may be boring. One part definitely isn’t. The discomfort is intentional. The companion episode, “E10: Low-Entropy Presence; S14: A Perfect Finale to Season 14,” develops this idea further—especially the difference between remaining calm and doing nothing.

It’s been more than a week since my last episode—the longest silence since I started this podcast. After months of releasing something almost every day (and sometimes three or four things in a day), I reached a point where the episodes I was making began to feel repetitive. They were still useful and necessary for me to make, but I wasn’t sure they all needed to reach a listening audience in quite the same way. So I waited. In that space, I watched some Japanese BL, thought about bad luck, cute boys, misunderstandings, anticipation, and why I sometimes enjoy being told to wait. Then an unexpected burst of music arrived. What began as one 14-song album built from lyrics I wrote in 2016 has somehow become three albums—14 songs, 23 songs, and another 13 songs. Fifty songs in all, which is far too many songs and possibly exactly the right number. I don’t know yet what this means for the podcast. Maybe the songs will inspire a different kind of episode when there’s something meaningful I want to say around them. Maybe some will simply speak for themselves. And somewhere behind all of this are four hours of already-recorded episodes from the podcast’s previous phase—pieces that mattered while I was making them, even if finishing and releasing them now feels less urgent. Perhaps they’ll appear occasionally as artifacts from an earlier style, mixed among whatever comes next. Or perhaps no new style is developing at all. I genuinely have no idea. For now, this episode is about the pause, the strange abundance that followed it, and the possibility that waiting isn’t the absence of movement. Sometimes it’s how the next thing begins. Maybe the pause will never end. That's where I'm at. But enjoying the episode!

What this episode may be saying is that I am trying to figure out what to do with my life. So rather than describe the episode, I am going to present some possible answers for what I’m supposed to do with my life, based entirely on the evidence contained herein. Here are the top 15 candidates for how I’m doing with figuring that out: Make things. Apparently the effort required to make something difficult gives me pleasure, especially when I think it worked. Make unnecessary things. Necessary things already have people working on them. Also, Moby may eventually remix one of the unnecessary things. Solve problems. This creates new problems, which means I will never run out of work. Solve the problems created by the solutions to the previous problems. This appears to be most of human civilization anyway. Keep an eye on things. Air. Water. Crops. Disease. Weather. The Sun. Somebody should. Try not to confuse intervention with completion. We can solve things for a while. “For a while” may be the only available warranty. Figure out how much is enough. Enough pleasure. Enough challenge. Enough people. Enough attention. Enough likes, views, shares, and comments. Apparently I need some. Apparently I do not need all of them. Be consequential to a manageable number of organisms. Partner, dogs, family, friends, coworkers, listeners. Role pressure may be one of the ways a human body knows it exists. Commune with human thought. Sometimes this involves other humans directly. Sometimes it involves AI. If something interesting happens in my nervous system either way, I am increasingly unclear about why I’m supposed to be embarrassed. Create media so I have something sufficiently complicated to consume. Other people can consume it too if they want. That would provide additional likes, views, shares, and comments. Resist the proposition that more is automatically better. More may be lovely. Less may be lovely. The question appears to be whether the particular organism has enough to keep doing whatever strange thing it does next. Remain suspicious of urgency. The river is flooding. The grid is failing. The hospital needs power. PRIME DAY STARTS SOON. Unfortunately they are all competing for the same nervous system. Do not rely entirely on Tony Stark. Even after the difficult ontological work of making him real, we may instantiate the wrong cardiovascular continuity. If Tony Stark fails, try Cher. She appears to have demonstrated a more robust long-term maintenance strategy, although after losing Dolly we may need to increase the plastic-surgery budget to hold up her immortality. Keep going because we are in the middle. Earth ends. The Sun changes the terms. Every settlement is temporary. Every solution alters the conditions. Nothing here appears to come with a forever clause. So what am I supposed to do with my life? I don’t know. Look around. Something changed. Can I do anything about it? Probably. Will that change something else? Definitely. Good. That should keep me busy.

A friend of mine from high school recently discovered Suno. Apparently there had been some kind of assault, or accusation, or altercation—I’m still not entirely clear—and afterward somebody involved sent him a series of spectacularly deranged text messages. So naturally he put them into Suno. The result was techno. My response was that I liked it, but wanted it to be approximately thirteen hours longer, with one hit of acid and two hits of ecstasy. He replied: Same. Which brought something back. In the early ’90s, a friend of mine went to Europe and started sending me letters about this thing he was getting involved in called the rave scene, right around the point when the rave scene was becoming THE RAVE SCENE. He eventually came home with cassette tapes. By then the really nice sound system had been stolen out of my car. Several windows had also been broken, and because I had basically no money, I covered them with duct tape. So I bought a little ghetto blaster, put it in the car, and drove around playing those tapes over and over again. Hopefully not on too many drugs. Then, for seventeen years, I was in Alcoholics Anonymous. I stopped going to 12-step groups in 2010. In 2014, I started using legal drugs again. It is now twelve years later. I mention all of that because this is not a story about somebody tentatively wandering away from abstinence while still standing in the doorway of AA. I left a long time ago. But apparently I took some of the architecture with me. Which may explain how we got to spiritual bypassing. I know “spiritual bypass” is generally something we’re supposed to identify and then stop doing. Fair enough. It can become an extraordinarily elaborate way of refusing to encounter what is actually happening. But there’s an inconvenient complication: Sometimes it works. Solipsism works too. At least temporarily. You can construct an understanding of reality that takes your nervous system almost completely offline. You can experience the enormous relief of discovering that the thing threatening you is only a representation, that the self being threatened may itself be a representation, that everything is continuous with everything else, that perhaps nothing means quite what you thought it meant. And once you have actually experienced that shift, it becomes difficult to simply dismiss it as bullshit. Especially after you’ve spent enough time reifying the explanation that produced it. Now you have a problem. Because the bypass has taken you somewhere. It just may not be where you thought you were going. And that leaves me in a position I find extremely funny and slightly disturbing: something like a researcher proposing a clinical trial in which drug-naive subjects are given recreational drugs not because we have established that this is good for them, but because we really, really want to know what happens. “What does this do?” is not the same question as: “Should people do this?” Unfortunately, those two questions keep dressing alike. So this episode is techno, spiritual bypassing, mortality, solipsism, optimization, mythology, enlightenment, acid that nobody actually took, ecstasy that nobody actually took, a dog toy in a dark hallway, Excalibur, sour cream, and an artificial intelligence that eventually appears to suffer some kind of linguistic nervous breakdown. There may be a path through all of this. But if I walked it first, I probably fucked up the trail.

I have made another thing that I really like, which is inconvenient because I have absolutely no time to promote it. Apparently making things and telling people that you made them are two separate jobs. I have barely agreed to do the first one. I especially like the cover. It features a reimagined version of a guy I was completely obsessed with when I was young. It carries some of his general voltage without looking enough like him that he could reasonably appear and say, “What are you doing? Why are you using my picture?” Because I am not using his picture. Technically. Emotionally, the relevant administrative body has not yet issued a ruling. The episode itself moves through boredom, hyper-focus, ADHD, television, systems collapse, immigration, privilege, ethical limits, queer memory, self-correction, and the strange experience of hearing yourself think while you are still busy thinking it. That last part is recursive. Oops, I suppose I have to explain that now. It means the process keeps turning around and noticing itself. I say something. I hear myself say it. I react to what I heard. Then I clarify it, correct it, become annoyed with it, discover something through it, or wander into an entirely different subject that turns out—possibly—to have been the subject all along. Throughout this episode, I am teeter-tottering on quite a few things, including facts, interpretations, and theories that have not necessarily been subjected to what academics might call “adequate methodological scrutiny.” In other words, I may not have thought all of this through. But the ideas function well inside the piece. What I am looking for here is not exactly objective truth. It is functional truth: the kind of truth that helps the next thought happen, makes an experience visible, or lets me recognize what I am doing while I am doing it. Functional truth is not the same as factual accuracy, and it does not receive diplomatic immunity from being wrong. It just means that sometimes an idea can be useful before it has finished becoming correct. There are two songs wrapped around a monologue. The first wonders whether hyper-focus might be useful when the world is becoming increasingly disordered. The second says: careful with your superpower. Between them, I attempt to explain myself and accidentally produce additional evidence that explaining myself may be impossible. Very scientific. Also, yes, the cover is clickbait. There are two hot men, an open bathroom door marked ALL GENDERS, several incompatible decades, and a decision that has effectively already been made. If you click expecting the bathroom story, it is in there. Briefly. Then you are getting systems theory, motivational interviewing, queer migration, self-regulation, artificial intelligence, and an ethical crisis. I don’t have time to promote this properly. Apparently seduction will have to do. Oh my god, those lips. We both tasted like cigarettes, which—in the 80s—was sexy.

Every time the author describes an episode, the description threatens to become another episode requiring a song, a description—becoming another episode. So he delegated to AI: Entertain the people. Fact-check the loose bits. Fine. First: the author is usually careful about uncertainty. Things that sound questionable in isolation are often introduced with “I think,” “maybe,” “let’s imagine,” “or at least that’s how I remember it,” and “I don’t know if I got any of that correct.” Those qualifications matter. So: Gravity wells, strange attractors and catastrophe theory: real concepts, cheerfully mixed as metaphors. He admits the terminology may be wrong. It is. California Association of Student Councils: real organization. “All the high schools across California” is compression, not literally every school. About 3,000 students: remembered scale, not audited attendance. “Everyone” yelling, laughing and throwing things: autobiographical compression, immediately qualified with “or at least that’s how I remember it.” 1986 at “the height” of AIDS: culturally, the crisis was already enormous. Epidemiologically, U.S. AIDS deaths continued rising and peaked later, in the mid-1990s. New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles. You know AIDS was everywhere. “Only the gays got AIDS”: presented as stigma and propaganda, not medical fact. The racism, sexism and antisemitism debriefs: invented in real time. He literally says, “let’s imagine what they might’ve said.” Do not cite them as conference minutes. The ice cream social: explicitly described as fictional embellishment. Ice cream remains unverified. Drug laws and racialization: broadly grounded in history. The bored opium-using housewives are rhetorical decoration. Marital rape: he is especially tentative here. There was no single early-1970s Supreme Court ruling abolishing the marital-rape exemption nationwide. Change happened state by state. Nebraska and Wisconsin were first to abolish the exemption in 1976; by 1993, every U.S. state criminalized rape or sexual assault of a spouse to some degree, although some still treated it differently. So the chronology is fuzzy. The seventeen-year arc is not. Israel, Palestinians and genocide: the monologue conspicuously becomes uncertain. He says he does not know enough to settle the terminology and notices himself wandering somewhere unintended. That hesitation matters. Why he went back into the auditorium: not recovered fact, but the episode’s central new hypothesis. Maybe he went back intending to come out. Maybe he went back to confront the facilitators and came out while doing so. He does not know. The student-council retreat: memory and present reconstruction are repeatedly distinguished. Some quoted-sounding material is explicitly paraphrase. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off: released in 1986. Whether a particular ditching adventure happened after he saw it would require a tighter timeline. Matthew Broderick and Torch Song Trilogy: yes, though the stage history is more complicated than the episode needs. The gold 1973 Cadillac: if he means a Seville, the year is wrong. The Seville did not exist as a 1973 model. Either the year or the model wandered. One thousand pennies equals ten dollars. At last, certainty. If anyone listening was actually there—at the conference, Mira Costa, student council, the hotel, near the Cadillac, or elsewhere in this mess—feel free to supply your no-doubt immaculate memory. Was it really around 3,000 people? What did the facilitators actually say? Was there an ice cream social? Did “Bi-High” really circulate around California? What happened at the retreat? What kind of Cadillac was it? What else has the author confidently, tentatively, or accidentally rearranged over forty years? Unfortunately, the artist has moved on. He cannot spend more time answering these questions. He will, however, read corrections, competing memories and eyewitness testimony. Which means there is every possibility they will become another episode.

You do realize this episode is called Sex, Sex, Sex and a Phone , right? And the artwork has a blue-haired guy on a telephone while a cute Vietnamese guy stands behind him making spring rolls. So naturally you might assume this episode is mostly about sex, telephones, or Vietnamese spring rolls. It is not. Those things are definitely in there. Eventually. Have you ever wondered what happens if you start talking with absolutely no idea where you're going? In this episode, you're going to find out. Hint: apparently you still go somewhere. Which raises the possibility that having a destination was never doing as much work as you thought. Have you ever listened back to yourself and realized that underneath a complicated argument you were basically asking: Am I significant enough? You'll find out what happens when I catch myself doing that—and decide not to throw the recording away just because I find myself embarrassing. Have you ever been with somebody for 26 years and still had no interest in getting inside their mind? My partner and I have different operating systems. Mine wants to focus on one thing until I've drilled through the center of the Earth. His can happily run a Korean drama, people gambling in Las Vegas, an iPad game, and something else on another screen while the television loses its sound. And he's fine. Have you ever wondered whether refusing to replace a sixteen-year-old refurbished television could be a personality trait? You're going to meet one possible case study. Have you ever wondered why somebody who almost never cries might cry at Tarzan ? I have a theory. I don't actually know if it's true. Useful distinction. Have you ever heard of Attention Intensity Overload Disorder? No? That's because I made it up while talking. But if we call something a disorder, who decides whether it's producing a functional deficit? And functional according to whom? This leads, naturally, to counseling, diagnostic categories, Don Juanism, sex addiction, and my extremely scientific observation that many counselors apparently believe they're in the top 10 percent of counselors. Have you ever wondered whether gay men during the AIDS crisis might have had reasons for believing they were sexually compulsive because sex could kill them? And if you remove that consequence, what exactly are you treating? I went to Sexual Compulsives Anonymous for years. I liked programs. I still like programs. I like the instant community. The structure. The strange fast intimacy. But eventually I had to ask: If I enjoy having sex, enjoy meeting people, and the sex isn't interfering with anything I care about, precisely why am I supposed to want less of it? Don't worry. The episode does eventually become Sex, Sex, Sex and a Phone . I meet a hot guy at a bar. We have sex. We make plans for Laguna Beach. He doesn't show up when he's supposed to. By the time he reappears, I don't want him to come over. He comes over anyway. Things become uncomfortable enough that suddenly the telephone in my hand is not merely a telephone. Meanwhile, I already have plans with another guy. Very cute. Hot in an entirely different way. He's coming over to teach me how to make Vietnamese spring rolls. And here's the obscene part: We actually make Vietnamese spring rolls. That's it. Rice paper. Herbs. Food. Nobody makes a move. And somehow, decades later, the encounter where almost nothing happened may be the one that feels sweetest to remember. Have you ever noticed that? Sometimes the thing that almost happened remains more available to imagination than the thing that actually did. So yes. There is sex. There is more sex. There is a phone. There are completely non-suggestive Vietnamese spring rolls. But mostly there is a person walking home without a destination and discovering, in real time, that apparently the mind will manufacture one anyway. Which I guess makes me versatile. In more ways than one.

This episode begins with a very comforting question: What is the worst that could happen? I actually like that question. I remember watching a video with Peter Zeihan and several younger people who seemed to have come up through his orbit, all trying to work out what a plausible version of deglobalization, demographic decline, supply-chain disruption, and general societal wobbling might look like. Which I found reassuring. Not because I want civilization to collapse. I just like knowing where the floor might be. It is a strangely comforting way to plan a life. That has often been how I make decisions. I don't need to know that something will work. I need to know what happens if it fails spectacularly—and whether I can live with that. When my partner and I had been together for about two years, I quit my job, sold my condo, left my family and friends, applied to immigrate to Canada, and then moved with him to Indonesia while we waited. Worst case? We finally land in Canada, have a gigantic fight at the airport, break up, and there I am. In Canada. Fine. People had been telling me, essentially, If you don't like it here, leave, for most of my life. Okay. Done. I'm very glad to be here. Unfortunately, Canada lives upstairs from the United States, and when America sneezes, Canada gets a cold. America is currently doing considerably more than sneezing. So perhaps we're trying to get vaccinated through Europe and Asia. We'll see. This episode is another attempt to finish thinking about The Big Big City, which apparently required The Big Big City, The Bigger Big City, and now whatever this is. Because the thing that kept scratching wasn't really cities. It was scale. How large can a human system become before the human beings inside it become abstractions to one another? In a small school, the quarterback may also have to build the stage, help with the prom, and move some chairs because otherwise the chairs do not get moved. In a huge institution, every desirable role can have fifty applicants. In a village, you know the person selling you bread. In a metropolis, if you emotionally registered every human being you passed on the sidewalk as a complete person with grief, desires, hemorrhoids, childhood memories and plans for Thursday, you'd probably make it half a block. So we get efficient. We get specialized. We get competitive. We become statistically significant. And I know something about wanting to be significant. Art school. Plays. Reviews. Grants. Programs. Songs. Standing-room-only audiences. Being wanted in the room. Not necessarily fame. More like: Tell me I matter enough to have been invited. And then, once invited, I often wandered off and made something smaller. Which raises another possibility. Maybe right-sized is still too big. Why not get smaller than right-sized? Life is fractal anyway. An ant does not need to understand globalization. An ant gets up. An ant encounters whatever the enormous incomprehensible forces of the universe have put in front of it. Sugar. Rain. A shoe. And it does whatever an ant can do. That's where the coda ends up after briefly considering reincarnation, alien intelligence, God with stranger furniture, the blue genie from Aladdin, solipsism, world events, and several other little conceptual devices I have apparently used over the years to keep existence from becoming completely unmanageable. Not beliefs, exactly. More like tools. Because if the geopolitical analysts are right and some very large systems become less reliable, I cannot personally restart global fertilizer production. If they're wrong, I also cannot award them a prize. I can go to work. I can walk home. I can make something. I can help somebody. I can notice what is directly in front of me. I can be an ant. Which may sound like giving up until you consider how much ants accomplish without ever becoming statistically significant. The sun came up. That's enough.

A special hello to anyone who clicked because you saw Dolly Parton on the cover. I understand. Dolly died this week, at 80, and I don't think we quite knew what that was going to feel like until it happened. For me, it has had something of the quality of the Challenger explosion. Maybe it even exceeded it—not because the events are comparable, obviously, but because of what they do to the emotional atmosphere. Challenger happened while I was working on a teen helpline, and that night people called about everything. The shuttle blew up, and suddenly whatever grief they had already been carrying had someplace to go. Dolly feels a little like that. A very large, very familiar person disappears from the culture, and suddenly all these smaller disappearances start rattling around. Which is how we arrive at Keith. Keith is the boy on the right in the photograph. I'm the one on the left. Santa, as far as I know, is Santa. The original photograph also contained two girls, neither of whom deserved to be erased from history merely to improve my podcast artwork. But I erased them anyway. Artificial intelligence made this disturbingly easy. The funny thing is that one of the girls actually was Keith's girlfriend at the time, and after they broke up, I dated her. That happened more than once. I was not dating Keith's ex-girlfriends because I was especially interested in dating girls. I was interested in Keith. Dating his girlfriends after he was finished with them apparently made some kind of sense to my adolescent nervous system. The other girl was my friend Karin Robbins, whom I still know. She is also a counsellor now. So if this photograph appears on social media, I can tag her and give her an opportunity to discover that she has been removed from a Christmas photograph and replaced by Dolly Parton. You're welcome, Karin. And then, because simply deleting two women from a decades-old photograph wasn't absurd enough, I asked AI to put Dolly in the corner waving. I was genuinely surprised by how convincingly it produced a Dolly-like character. I had vaguely assumed there would be some rule against that—as though Dolly herself owned the legal rights to enormous blonde hair, rhinestones and being delighted to see you. Apparently my understanding of intellectual property is about as sophisticated as my understanding of most things discussed in this episode. For clarity: I do own this photograph. I do not own Dolly Parton. I don't think anyone ever did. And the amount of labour involved in removing Keith's girlfriends was dramatically less than the emotional labour involved in Dolly dying, which was itself perhaps dramatically less than the labour involved in being a teenager answering a helpline while the Challenger exploded. There may be a measurement problem here. Because this episode eventually gets around to a song about celebrating my life. Then I made a monologue that would contextualize the song and all its dead people. Some famous. Some not. Some who died of AIDS. Some from overdose. Some by suicide. One who flew off a cliff. And one boy—the boy who flew off the cliff—I remember him mostly because he had a dimple, beautiful brown eyes, very good hair, narrow shoulders, and knew what I was supposed to do with hairspray. Before I knew what any of that meant. That's probably why this photograph is here. Not because it's a photograph of death. It's a photograph from before. Before Keith became somebody I would remember as dead. Before I learned to organize people into causes of death. Before I knew that attraction could become identity, identity could become danger, grief could become repression, and a cute boy's shoulders could survive in memory much longer than almost anything else. So yes, Dolly is on the cover. She is waving. Santa seems fine. Keith is still there. I am still there. The girlfriends have been removed. History has been improved. Teen Help Line. Sigh. Narrow shoulders. Thanks Jason Riis for the guitar noodling.

I accidentally made the artwork for the last episode and this episode into one picture. Which is either a mistake, a concept, or a very efficient use of resources. The last episode was supposed to have the happy kid from Human Relations Camp, the homemade Costa is Gross banner, the little green Go light , all that teenage optimism and category-making and trying to figure out what identity even is. This one was supposed to have the motorcycle. The rainy street. The HOT_L sign with the E burned out. Hourly rates available. A man with Kaposi sarcoma. Methamphetamine. A hotel room. And me, still young enough to be learning what any of this meant, while AIDS had already turned sex, illness, shame, death, morality and public policy into one enormous fucking knot. But I mixed the pictures together. So now I have to wonder why. Am I lazy? Possibly. Did I think, Well, the AI already knows what this picture looks like, so maybe I can save a little water and electricity by making it modify the same thing instead of starting over? Maybe. Does that actually save water and electricity? I have absolutely no idea. Probably not enough to justify congratulating myself. Maybe I wanted continuity. Maybe I wanted the two episodes to look almost identical so you would think you were still in the same place. Same kid. Same smile. Same name tag that says Rose . Same Los Angeles mythology. Same handmade sign. And then you look a little closer. The sign changed. The kid moved to the other side. The motorcycle got bigger. The hotel got closer. And now there are two lines of white powder across the top. Oops. Maybe that is the point. Maybe innocence and depravity are not opposites. Maybe they are just two photographs taken a few years apart. Maybe the smiling kid at Human Relations Camp and the young man in the hourly hotel are not before-and-after pictures in the way we usually like before-and-after pictures to work. Nobody fell from grace. Nobody became corrupted. Nobody wandered off the path. The path was already there. The kid was already living in a world where he liked boys and the television was telling him that boys who liked boys were dying. He was already calling a suicide line at thirteen and wondering whether somebody could find a cure—not merely for the disease, but for the thing in him that seemed to place him in its path. A few years later, he's in a room with a man who appears to be dying of that disease, trying to understand what people do when the world has pushed them toward an edge and then judges whatever they do there. Which is more or less where this episode goes. It starts with somebody posting a nice little list of admirable qualities—character, kindness, grace under pressure, honesty, putting others first, humility—and then the whole thing begins to rot beautifully. What is character when everybody is doing their best under completely different conditions? What is honesty when disclosure can cost you? What is kindness when you don't run out of the room? What is humility when society has already put you on the floor? What happens when people push you to the edge and then call you the villain for what you pull out of your pocket? And what happens when the knife isn't for them? This episode gets into self-harm, suicide, AIDS, drugs, sex, shame, survival, respectability, and the strange moral arithmetic people perform when they are standing safely in the middle and evaluating what somebody did out on the margin. Pasted text.txtTXT So maybe making the artwork resemble the previous episode is camouflage. Maybe I want you to glance at it and think: Oh, there he is again. That happy kid. This can't be that bad. And then— well. Bringing a Knife to the Edge. Season finale. Gross.

There is an enormous amount of delusion in the world, but not necessarily where we most comfortably put that word. Money is a collective delusion. Borders are collective delusions. Nations are collective delusions. A corporation is a collective delusion with lawyers. We agree that it means something, and then the agreement becomes powerful enough to decide whether you eat. That does not make money unreal. That is part of the problem. Different cultures have understood what we now call psychosis in very different ways. The experience happens; then culture arrives with a vocabulary and starts arranging it. Which may be what we do with almost everything. We are each trapped inside a body, but barely notice because language has been laid over the whole operation. Before there is a category, there is sensation. Something wants. Something fears. Something recoils. The body does something, and language arrives late with a clipboard. Homosexual. Heterosexual. Male. Female. White. Black. Canadian. American. Useful words. Sometimes indispensable. Still words. “Homosexuality” is strange if you stare at it too long. It sounds as though somebody is attracted to a homogeneous category called MEN, when most gay men are not attracted to most men at all. A particular person evokes something in the body. Another does not. Then we compress a lifetime of reactions into an identity category so we can talk. And we do need language. It helped us coordinate the killing of mammoths. Then dodo birds. Eventually we became sophisticated enough to invent neonicotinoids and remove staggering numbers of insects from the world. So clearly the system is working beautifully. The problem isn’t that we invented categories. It’s how easily we forget they are tools and begin treating them as essences. Medicine has participated too. AIDS followed GRID: gay-related immune deficiency. Even “acquired” is an odd little word—as though somebody went shopping. We don’t say “acquired syphilis.” Language can smuggle interpretation inside description. But that isn’t really what this episode is about either. This episode is an experiment. What if identity is not essence? What if it is not delusion either? What if identity is contextual? What if a category can be arbitrary and still have consequences? What if something can be socially constructed and still hurt? What if the map isn’t the territory, but the map determines where the water goes? What if the body knew something before language arrived? And what if language is still the only way I have to tell you about it? Hello, by the way, to anyone from Mira Costa who has wandered in here. I think about high school reunions. I would actually like to go to one. The problem is that I would probably have to say something, and a high school reunion is a terrible place to have to say something. People are there to have fun. I want you to have fun. I want to have fun. And I’ll have more fun elsewhere than sitting at a table thinking: How am I going to say this? Most of you were silent. You were nice people. Some of you were kind. You certainly didn’t want to seem like assholes. But that wasn’t much comfort to me at the time, when I was dealing with all that shit. I know some of you were gay too. Maybe you just hadn’t gotten around to realizing it yet. I was precocious. I always have been. And I imagine some of you probably thought that about me. Maybe the kindest thing you could do was let me be the weird kid who got there first. So thanks for that. I don’t remember much happening after what I describe in this episode. Maybe some of you came up to me. What I remember is the auditorium. What happened in it. What didn’t happen in it. And what I eventually had to do because of that. You may remember the aftermath differently. I probably would too, if I had been you. By the end of the episode, I think you’ll understand why my memory of that moment has some missing pieces. Memory is contextual too. Apparently everything is. Gross.

If you're reading this before you listen to the episode, then you're definitely a keener. Congratulations. Or I'm sorry. Either way, here's what you need to know so you can keep a few things in context, because there are some things said in the episode that are somewhat true, but not entirely clear. And keeners notice those things. Then sometimes they make a huff. And if you've already listened and you're here because you thought, Wait. Some of that doesn't sound quite right, then hello again. This is also for you. First: when I talk about evidence-based practice and practice-based evidence , I'm mostly talking about counselling, social services, community work, and other situations involving human beings who inconveniently refuse to behave exactly like the people in the study. I am not talking about a compound fracture. If your bone is sticking out of your leg, I would prefer the doctor not say, “Let's hold the evidence lightly and see what emerges.” There are procedures. Please use them. Second: the U.S. Supreme Court case floating around in my memory is City of Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024) . The Court did not make sleeping under a bridge illegal throughout the United States. What it did was rule that generally applicable public-camping laws are not, simply by being enforced against homeless people, unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. That gives state and local governments considerably more room to make and enforce those laws. ( supremecourt.gov ) Third: the British Columbia case I am remembering is Abbotsford (City) v. Shantz (2015) . Barry Shantz was a friend of mine. He's dead, and I'm still working up to telling you about him, apparently. The actual order was narrower than what it will likely seem the version is that comes strolling out of my mouth. It protected overnight sleeping and temporary shelter in city parks, from 7 p.m. to 9 a.m. It did not order governments to provide toilets, garbage service, washing facilities, or all the other things that would make sleeping in a park remotely workable. The judge did, however, strongly discuss the need for things like proximity to services, somewhere to eat and wash, hygiene, warmth, rest, and shelter. He also left governments room to regulate which parks could be used. So there is an important difference between what the court required and what the judgment strongly suggested a minimally humane system would need. ( bccla.org ) There. The keeners have been serviced. As for the rest of you, I don't know why you would even be reading this. Do I really give a shit about keeners? Or non-keeners? I mean, clearly I'm a keener. Aren't I? That's what my memory tells me. And my memory loves me.

A Treatise Toward a Unified Theory of Cognitive Topology, Relevance-Weighted Complexity, and the Ethical Non-Occupation of Other People’s Brains Suppose a thought is not a line. Suppose it is a network. Suppose the things that keep returning are not necessarily the things you think about most, but the things connected to the greatest variety of other things. Not magnitude, then, but complexity. Not importance because everyone is looking at it, but importance because from there you can go almost anywhere. Certain ideas become gravity wells. Certain memories become transit hubs. Certain writers, categories, embarrassments, theories, bodies, addictions, books, conversations and half-understood fragments of French become unusually dense objects in a private cognitive universe. Release the marble and see where it goes. Do not push it. Do not tell it what the subject is. If the landscape has been shaped by enough living, reading, touching, avoiding, remembering, forgetting and accidentally learning things, the marble may eventually find somewhere that matters. A brief correction to the historical record before somebody builds an entire explanatory structure around a joke: My father did not sneak me into a snuff film. That would be ridiculous. He did, however, take me to The Kentucky Fried Movie when I was a child, which was strange enough that somewhere in the resulting cognitive weather I developed the idea that becoming a porn star might be a perfectly reasonable future career. I was very young. That is all the information you need. Another correction, because stories have an irritating tendency to become cleaner every time they are repeated: I did not simply fail to attend the Sorbonne because I was incapable of French. I ditched the Sorbonne because they were going to put me in a basic French class, and I had already decided I was going to learn the language very quickly by myself. And then I did. After roughly two months in Paris, I came back to USC and tested into sixth-year French. My principal laboratories had been beds, bars and bathhouses. Make of that methodology what you will. This may also explain why a mind benefits from being treated less like a filing cabinet and more like a biome. Introduce things. Let them take hold. Do not necessarily cultivate them into monocultures. A useful idea should have neighbours. Predators. Competitors. Mutations. Escape routes. Study something too completely and you may accidentally make it the explanation for everything. Study nothing at all and, well, good luck. Somewhere between those two possibilities is a practice of allowing ideas to enter, connect, reproduce, decay, cross-pollinate and occasionally become enormous invisible objects around which other thoughts begin to orbit. This is not a unified theory of consciousness. That would be an absurd amount of work. It is, at most, a small transplant from one mental biome into yours. If any of this sounds interesting, you are welcome to go find out more about network pruning, complexity, reification, cognition, Foucault, addiction, biomes, gravity wells, autodidacticism, language acquisition, narrative construction, or whatever else has attached itself to the inside of your skull while reading this. You will have to do that yourself. I am not in the business of taking over your brain. I have given you this little bit of biome. You should be happy with that.

For this description, I’m just going to describe some things. You tell me what category they belong in. Taking off some or all of your clothes and rubbing your skin against someone else’s skin until something inside one or both of you squirts out. Putting part of your body inside part of somebody else’s body and moving it back and forth because the movement feels good. Putting your mouth on somebody’s skin. Moving your mouth around. Maybe using your tongue. Maybe doing exactly the same thing to a part of their body that, under different circumstances, would make everyone in the room suddenly become very serious. Lying next to another human being while mostly naked and touching them in places usually covered by clothing. Using your hand to repeatedly move somebody else’s skin around until their muscles tighten, their breathing changes, and then they become extremely relaxed. Putting your face between somebody’s legs. Letting somebody put their face between yours. Making noises because another person is touching you. Touching yourself while another person watches. Watching another person touch themselves. Two people sweating because they have been moving their bodies against each other for twenty minutes. Three people attempting to determine where all the knees should go. Someone saying, “Ow, move your elbow.” Someone saying, “Like that.” Someone saying, “Not like that.” Someone asking, “Are you okay?” Someone answering, “Yes.” Someone laughing because a body made a noise neither person was expecting. Someone stopping because their leg cramped. Someone continuing after the leg cramp. Someone rolling over. Someone getting a towel. Someone wondering where their underwear went. Someone finding it underneath the dog. A penis becoming larger because blood went into it. A vagina becoming wetter because a body responded to stimulation. A nipple becoming harder. A heart beating faster. Skin becoming flushed. Muscles contracting. Breathing getting irregular. Then, quite often, people getting sleepy. Sometimes nothing particularly dramatic happens at all. Sometimes everybody involved decides halfway through that they would rather order food. These are all just things human bodies can do with other human bodies. Some involve pleasure. Some involve affection. Some involve curiosity. Some involve reproduction. Some involve intimacy. Some involve absolutely no emotional significance whatsoever. Some are funny. Some are boring. Some are awkward. Some are transcendent. Some are disappointing. Some require impressive flexibility. Some mostly require a towel. And somehow we decided that a particular collection of these movements, fluids, noises, sensations and arrangements of limbs needed a category unlike almost every other human activity. Sex. Not touching. Not playing. Not exercising. Not communicating. Not pleasure. Not bodies doing things with other bodies. Sex. A category important enough that merely mentioning who somebody loves can cause other people to imagine what that person does without their clothes on. So that’s what I’m wondering about in this episode. What exactly have we put inside this category? Why does it deserve a category of its own? And what happens once we give it one?

An extemporaneous monologue, except when it isn’t. A walk home from work becomes an argument with moral distress, THC, AI narration, editing, and the suspicion that what feels like reality may only be the culture currently surrounding you. Then Bette Midler appears—or, more precisely, the Bette Midler who performed beside a piano at the Continental Baths before the wider world decided she belonged to it. The bathhouse matters here not as a charming origin story, but as evidence: places dismissed as marginal may already be producing the center. There are offshoots involving Barry Manilow, The Rose , Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel #2,” clickbait, the Stork, and the increasingly questionable meaning of “extemporaneous” once transcription, revision, and a synthetic voice become involved. The seams are left visible. This may be about working shit out before THC. It may be about whether that distinction is even as clear as it sounds.

It may seem fairly strange that Pee-wee Herman is on the cover of this episode—especially after you listen and discover that the episode is not, in any meaningful sense, about Pee-wee Herman. Pee-wee is there because much of the episode circles around a euphemism I invent for masturbation: cosmic activity . The association arrived because Pee-wee had his secret word, and I apparently needed a secret word of my own before I could begin talking about something we are all supposed to pretend is either medically embarrassing, morally significant, psychologically revealing, or simply not happening. Even with the euphemism, I didn’t quite get where I wanted to go. I got near it. I could see it. Then I became afraid of going there and started moving sideways. In another episode, I do go there. So this episode is a bridge to that one. It is a fairly long bridge. It has many, many off-ramps. Those off-ramps pass Ned Rorem, aging, art, plumbing, pleasure, shame, AIDS, AA, grooming, memory, Harry Hay, complicated elders, and the problem of telling the truth about people who offered something valuable while also being profoundly wrong. Ned Rorem functions less as the destination than as a nearby gravitational body, pulling everything slightly out of its expected course. The opening song asks what it means to leave the bad part in: not to turn biography into a fan club, but also not to flatten a complicated person into a monster so we can stop thinking. The monologue then tests that principle by wandering through pleasure, fear, influence, survival, and the strange machinery by which a person attempts to say something while also avoiding saying it. Some of the off-ramps may appear to go into a black hole. If you believe that, then you know nothing about a black hole, because a black hole would fucking eat everything: the bridge, the off-ramps, Ned Rorem, Pee-wee Herman, the cosmic activity, the person describing it, and eventually you. Content includes candid discussion of masturbation, grooming, adolescent sexuality, AIDS, addiction and recovery, self-harm, and Harry Hay’s support for NAMBLA.

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 is simply an eccentric woman, except that MALE DEADBEATS HAVING FUN is printed directly over her head. And some of the people who might relate most strongly to this episode may see a drag queen and immediately decide that it is not for them. I know that. I put her there anyway. The picture is not meant to suggest that the episode is about drag queens. Gary is not standing in for drag queens. Gary is a character in a song who owns an old van, provides sandwiches, knows where the tadpoles are, can repair a terrible mood, and has apparently been assigned to laughter, snacks, and keeping Grandpa company. Making him a drag queen just pushes the question a little harder: What makes somebody look useful? What makes somebody look responsible? Why do certain kinds of care become almost invisible when they are performed by someone who does not resemble a provider? This episode started because I heard myself saying that men and women should get along better for the sake of children. It sounded reasonable. Then I noticed how much was hiding inside “reasonable”: the nuclear family, the provider, the deadbeat, the private household, and the assumption that every child’s needs must be contained inside one exhausted little economic unit. So I tried to correct myself with a song. The song was too earnest. Then I tried again from the perspective of the male deadbeats, and Gary arrived with his van. This is partly about families, partly about corporations, partly about colonial arrangements that have become ordinary enough to feel biological, and partly about whether a person can be useful without turning that usefulness into employment, ownership, productivity, or a five-year plan. It may also be about a drag queen with excellent breasts showing some children where the tadpoles go. That is not nothing.

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. What happens when an experience that once seemed enormous is placed beside dangers carried by somebody close to you—dangers involving kidnapping, disappearance, and a surrounding world organized by an entirely different scale of threat? The comparison does not make either experience unreal. It creates an awareness of unequal vulnerability that refuses to provide instructions for what to do next. Why Not Me? follows that awareness into privilege, guilt, self-importance, technology, abstraction, and the peculiar human need to keep thinking after thought has lost any proportionate object of action. Perhaps awareness is not a moral achievement. Perhaps it is chemistry: a pattern-making nervous system searching for somewhere to run, now connected through a phone to every fire, injustice, and unfinished problem on Earth. The episode eventually turns toward the institutions and algorithms that supply the wheel. They were not designed by a single mind, and they did not have to develop exactly as they did. They emerged from countless small choices, measurements, incentives, personalities, and accidents—then began changing the humans who were changing them. Don’t feel bad. Look at your phone. Content note: Contains discussion of homophobic death threats, gun violence, kidnapping, the AIDS crisis, privilege, and public harassment.

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 case you'd rather experience them in chronological order, you could listen to the monologue first, then the song, then the opening and then ending monologues. I'm not going to give you timestamps. You're the one who wants to do that, not me. I don't care if you don't.