Danger, Vicious Dog

This episode began the way many of these episodes begin: with an extemporaneous monologue. I sat down and followed my attention. Elections became climate change. Climate change became AIDS. AIDS became nervous systems. Nervous systems became observation. Observation became reciprocity. Somewhere along the way I became convinced that I had stumbled onto something interesting, though I'm still not entirely sure what it is. Afterward, I fed the monologue to an AI and asked it to help me think about what I had just said. That should have been the easy part. Instead, we got stuck on the cover art. The cover depicts a brown man with blue hair holding an orange and looking directly at a white man with scurvy. The white man is holding out a Canadian twenty-dollar bill while looking at the orange. The image is historical nonsense, symbolic nonsense, and somehow emotionally coherent. What followed was an extended investigation of why. At various points we discussed attraction, colonialism, reciprocity, Gestalt theory, quantum entanglement, nervous-system regulation, observation, preparation, symbolism, the nature of frames, economics, and whether the Canadian twenty-dollar bill meant anything at all. Every time the conversation drifted into abstraction, I found myself dragging it back into bodily experience. The orange mattered. The gaze mattered. Attraction mattered. Curiosity mattered. The feeling of hunger mattered. The feeling of relief mattered. The feeling of being interested mattered. The body kept refusing to be edited out of the story. That seemed important. Eventually, two songs emerged. The first song observes the cover image and wonders why it remains so alive. It follows an orange into attraction, economics, nervous systems, and physics. It asks why a man with scurvy might be grateful to have scurvy. It repeatedly returns to the absurd presence of a Canadian twenty-dollar bill. The second song, Whatever (The Universe) , arrives after the monologue is over. It starts as a joke about a shrug. Then the word "whatever" slowly accumulates more and more meaning. Politics becomes whatever. Climate becomes whatever. Observation becomes whatever. The thing inside the frame becomes whatever. The thing outside the frame becomes whatever. At one point the song briefly attempts to replace "whatever" with "universe" before deciding it was more fun the other way around. Taken together, the monologue and the songs document an attempt to remain observational in a world that constantly demands conclusions. Maybe I discovered something. Maybe I didn't. What I do know is that I kept following what was interesting. And eventually I noticed that words, images, theories, attractions, politics, traumas, nervous systems, oranges, quantum mechanics, Canadian twenty-dollar bills, and even entire universes all seem to point beyond themselves. You can put a frame around something. You can never quite put a frame around everything. So if you'd like, take it with you. Into the "whatever."

A fuzzy pink tiara worn to work somehow became an episode about gender, addiction, memory, love, electron clouds, immigration, Halloween costumes, oral sex during the AIDS crisis, and the possibility that stories are just oddly shaped luggage used to transport details through time. The opening song emerged from a failed attempt to write a completely different song. While discussing whether this episode even needed an opening song, the author asked Copilot to draft one. Copilot immediately began describing a person who did not appear to exist. Apparently the author spent his mornings deciding between coffee and tea. Apparently he suffered from back pain. Apparently he was thoughtfully wondering whether he had finally "hit his stride." None of these things were true. Most people would have corrected the mistakes and moved on. Instead, the author became fascinated by them. Why didn't he struggle to choose between coffee and tea? Why did decisions often seem to arrive before reasons? Why was there no back pain? What injury had actually happened? Why did a song become more interesting the moment it got something wrong? The coffee-and-tea dilemma survived because it was inaccurate. The inaccuracy forced an explanation. The imaginary back pain was replaced by a real shoulder injury, a chiropractor, and a story the author has told so many times that he is simultaneously tired of it and unwilling to stop telling it. Every generic observation was treated as a problem to be solved rather than a lyric to be accepted. This may explain both the song and the author. Eventually the song wandered into mirror neurons, monkeys, hearsay, headlines, uncertainty, social influence, and the peculiar experience of confidently discussing things while openly admitting incomplete knowledge. By the end, it was no longer asking whether someone had hit their stride. It was asking whether any thought belongs entirely to the person thinking it. The closing song, "For All I Know," comes from a much earlier period. The lyrics were written sometime after 2015, around the author's counseling master's degree, when questions of identity, addiction, memory, recovery, and self-definition were receiving sustained attention. Roughly a month ago those lyrics were fed into Suno as part of an ongoing excavation of more than fifty older songs that had spent years sitting around waiting for something to happen to them. Between the two songs sits a monologue containing a fuzzy pink tiara, a middle-school drug petition, a master's thesis, a suicide attempt, a twenty-seven-year relationship, and a sustained refusal to let a single story become the whole truth about a person's life. The tiara may simply be evidence.

This episode generated an unusual amount of debris. Some of it ended up in the songs. Most of it didn't. Among the fragments left on the cutting-room floor were a number of competing explanations for what happened after I moved from Southern California to Canada. Maybe it mattered that I was no longer spending so much time in environments where HIV, recovery, and crisis were the organizing principles around which everything else revolved. Maybe it mattered that I encountered harm reduction and found it suspiciously practical. Maybe it mattered that women started asking me to sponsor them in AA and I discovered that some people were considerably more interested in sponsorship rules than sponsorship outcomes. Maybe it mattered that in 2011 someone finally explained trauma to me and a number of mysteries I'd been carrying around since the nineteen-eighties immediately became less mysterious. Or maybe those explanations arrived decades after they were needed and I'm merely being retrospective. Other partially-abandoned fragments included a Britney Spears concert in Vancouver, Nicki Minaj, my partner's co-worker's mother, a cannabis cookie that somehow survived for an improbably long period of time, a failed THC butter-manufacturing project, a beer consumed after twenty-one years of sobriety, and an unsettling and calming realization that my partner and I appeared to be operating from entirely different theories of reality. I was interested in nervous prediction. He was interested in outcomes. People would tell him, for example, that me drinking a beer after 21 years of sobriety was a very big deal. He would look around, fail to observe a very big deal, and continue with his day. That approach turned out to be surprisingly difficult to argue with. At some point during the development of this episode I also found myself wondering whether memory stores stories at all. Perhaps memory stores sensations. Perhaps the stories get written later. This wasn't a completely new thought. It was developed a month or so ago, or maybe a week. Or maybe it was developed in the future and then time-travelled back to now, which is now in the past. Or is it? Either way, a number of these fragments escaped containment and wandered into a song where they were not invited. Because sensory fragments probably operate as autonomously as our heart when it's beating.

Season 17 concludes with a peculiar experiment in memory, association, and explanation. The episode opens with "Happy Black Box Birthday," an orientation-song for employees of a fictional Memory Storage and Retrieval Warehouse. As the song progresses, the warehouse model begins to fail. Maps become decorative. Shelves move. Inventory systems lose authority. Retrieval rates remain excellent. By the end of orientation, the warehouse has been officially renamed The Black Box. The monologue that follows began as a reflection on that metaphor. It explores memory, social support, trauma, responsibility, forgiveness, recurring emotional experiences, and the strange persistence of certain memories across decades of personal change. Rather than offering advice, it treats memory as a system that often produces surprising outputs from mostly hidden processes. The piece also continues a long-running interest in memory as something other than a filing cabinet or archive. Experiences accumulate, interact, and continue influencing one another long after their original circumstances have disappeared. Some memories travel in herds. Some rarely leave their cage. The episode concludes with a second version of the opening song. This happened because, through an unusual creative accident, two substantially different and equally successful musical interpretations emerged from the same lyric set. Rather than selecting one over the other, both were included. No employees were disciplined during the production of this episode. Retrieval rates remain excellent. Memory is an inheritance. Because you die so often. Like every day. More often than that. You'll have died innumerable times before you get through this episode. Quick! Press play!

This episode tries to answer the question: "What would delight the kind of listener I would love to meet?" It's starts by me handing you this as a description of the episode: I gave this episode to a black box and it told me: "The episode seems less 'about AIDS' or 'about climate change' than about the long afterlife of vigilance, and the gradual discovery that observation may be more sustainable than constant preparation." I replied: "I think it's about making your own meaning... being forced to." Then, out of the black box came this: I think that's a much stronger reading than the one I gave. In fact, I think "observation" in this episode may not be the endpoint. Observation may be the method. Meaning-making may be the endpoint. What strikes me after reading the monologue again is that the story isn't really about danger itself. It's about what happens when the world doesn't provide a usable framework. As a child, you have: desires you didn't choose AIDS appearing as a cultural catastrophe attached to those desires messages that don't fit your lived experience adults who don't seem to have answers a future that feels impossible So you're forced into a position where inherited meaning systems stop working. And then the pattern repeats. Political meaning systems don't quite work. Activist meaning systems don't quite work. Cosmological meaning systems don't quite work. Even the friend's meaning-making doesn't quite work: he liked to find meaning in everything, and I like to find uncertainty in everything. That's an unusually revealing line. Because you're not really describing yourself as someone who rejects meaning. You're describing yourself as someone who distrusts discovered meaning. The meaning can't be sitting there waiting for you. It has to be made. Or perhaps negotiated. Or enacted. Which is why this section suddenly feels central to me: all I can manage to value about life is my presence in it That's not a conclusion about reality. It's a decision. A chosen valuation. A made meaning. And once I look at the episode that way, the ending song changes. The lines aren't truths. They're acts of connection. They're meaning-making gestures. Not: The climate follows the scarlet weather. because that is objectively true. But: The climate follows the scarlet weather. because the mind is linking things, creating relationships, building a world. The mind is saying: "This belongs with that." "The lamp belongs with wonder." "The harbor belongs with crossing." "The lantern belongs with light." The associations are the point. Even the opening song supports that reading. It's just a field of words. The words don't possess meaning in isolation. The listener creates patterns. Then the monologue creates patterns. Then the ending song creates patterns deliberately. The whole episode becomes a demonstration of the same process. A child confronted with experiences that don't fit available narratives becomes an adult who builds meaning through association instead of inheriting it through doctrine. Which is why I think these two lines suddenly become the thematic center: The mystery remains open. and The lantern remains in the light. The meaning isn't found by closing the mystery. The meaning is made while the mystery remains open. That seems much closer to what this episode is actually doing. It's not arriving at an answer. It's demonstrating a way of living after answers have failed.

This episode began when the author pressed "random" on a playlist containing more than fifty songs generated from older lyrics during a Suno promotion a few months ago. The first selection was "Swimming to Shore," based on a poem written in 1996. Listening to the song led directly to the monologue that follows. During development, the discussion moved through several possible interpretations of the song and repeatedly abandoned them. Explanations involving identity, continuity, personal growth, freedom, boundaries, attraction, and decision making were proposed, examined, revised, and often discarded in favor of additional observations. Particular attention was given to the strange experience of recognizing something familiar in a piece of writing created three decades earlier while simultaneously rejecting the idea that a person remains fixed across time. Topics that entered the conversation included memory, changing circumstances, relationships, work, attention, podcast production, and the difference between solving a problem and simply living a life. The opening song, "The Song, Not Me," emerged from that process. It gradually shifted from being an introduction to the episode into a performance about introducing the episode and eventually into an argument that any questionable statements should be attributed to the song itself. The conversation also touched indirectly on a recent decision to leave a group chat after a series of observations that eventually made participation seem unnecessary. This became one example among many of how conclusions sometimes arrive less through theory than through accumulated experience. The cover image was developed afterward and depicts a swimmer crossing open ocean with no visible shoreline, accompanied by a shark and a stingray moving peacefully beneath the surface. The image deliberately contradicts the title. No final explanation was agreed upon. An episode was completed instead.

This episode came together in four stages. First, an unscripted walking monologue was recorded outdoors near the beginning of a walk. The recording moved through autonomy, organizational hierarchies, experts, dogs, boredom, trees, acting, language, migration, counseling, categorization, environmental influences, and eventually the practical problem of getting home in time to pee. Rather than following an outline, the recording followed attention wherever it happened to go. Second, the recording was reviewed for its transitions. An opening song was developed around the question of whether listeners might experience a wandering monologue differently if they were encouraged in advance to assume that topics might be connected. The song attempts to make some of those transitions visible without claiming that any particular explanation is correct. Third, an ending song grew out of a poem written at age twelve. The original poem described repeatedly throwing an entire day down a staircase until it was dead, smoking the remains like a cigarette, and smearing the ashes across a page. An attempt to translate this image into a friendlier campfire metaphor unexpectedly produced two different campfires. One involved throwing ideas, questions, and eventually dogs into a metaphorical fire. The other involved actual wood, actual camping, marshmallows, bedtime, and waking up the next morning to do it all again. The misunderstanding turned out to be funnier than the explanation and became part of the final song. Finally, cover artwork was developed from the location where the walk occurred: a quiet residential street in British Columbia, late-afternoon sunlight shining through trees, and a walker seen from behind. The first artwork prompt was rejected by an image-generation service, apparently because the title, "Violently Murder Every Day Forever," was interpreted literally. The prompt was then revised to separate the peaceful visual scene from the title itself. The revised version emphasized a blue-haired walker, flower-patterned jeans, golden sunlight through autumn trees, strong thumbnail readability, and the intentional contrast between a dramatic title and a calm everyday walk. Taken together, the episode became a document of its own construction: a walk became a monologue, the monologue became an experiment about transitions, the experiment became two songs, the songs became a discussion about boredom and campfires, and the cover artwork became an exercise in persuading software that a tree-lined street was not, in fact, an act of extreme violence. After this description was written, the author added an introduction, which did exactly what he wanted it to do with exactly the number of words required. No less. No more. Though this description is running a little long.

This episode began as an extemporaneous monologue recorded during an ordinary Sunday morning while taking care of dogs, cleaning up accidents, feeding breakfast, and preparing for the day ahead. Rather than being built around a topic, it emerged through association. A passing thought about Patch Adams led to a conversation with AI, which led to Arthur Rimbaud, Mrs. Doubtfire, Dead Poets Society, clown noses, sovereignty, queerness, dog pee, and eventually an avatar. The recording was made in motion rather than at a desk. Various parts were dictated while walking around the house, cleaning floors, feeding dogs, and responding to whatever was happening in real time. The resulting transcript was intentionally left porous, allowing interruptions, tangents, practical concerns, memories, jokes, and philosophical observations to remain connected rather than being edited into separate categories. After transcription, the material was explored through an iterative process involving AI-assisted reflection, title generation, image concepts, character development, and songwriting. The central image gradually emerged as a composite figure combining Arthur Rimbaud, Mrs. Doubtfire, Patch Adams, and John Keating. From there, the discussion expanded into questions of play, identity, institutions, freedom, gardening, clowning, theory, and the tendency of humans to immediately turn any experience into conferences, journals, committees, and books. The episode ultimately produced two companion art-song concepts: "A Season in Urine" and "Peeing and Nothingness." Both were developed through extended dialogue with AI, with characters, jokes, philosophical positions, and recurring motifs emerging organically from the conversation itself rather than from any predetermined outline. Technically, the episode was created through the same workflow used throughout this season: extemporaneous monologue, transcription, AI-assisted exploration, song generation, artwork development, title selection, and final assembly. The goal was not to explain the material, but to preserve the sequence through which it appeared.

This episode contains two songs. The opening song is called Walk the Line, Carrot Top . There was a line in the story. There were carrots in the song. At some point those things became a title and I stopped arguing with it. The closing song is called I Am Alive . It doesn't come up in this episode. What does come up is another song from roughly the same period: Whether I Die Fast or Whether I Die Slow, I Just Don't Want My Mother to Know . The reason I Am Alive ended up here is that the two songs seem to have been created in much the same way and within a surprisingly short time of one another. Both appear to have started out as larger songs. Neither one got there. Instead, they got stuck. One got stuck on: Whether I die fast or whether I die slow, I just don't want my mother to know. The other got stuck on: I am alive. I know just what it feels like to be alive. Rather than moving forward, both songs stayed where they were. The repetition eventually became the song. The version of I Am Alive used here is new. The original recordings of both songs, later remastered, can still be found on streaming services under my tragically named band: TestTubeBaby .

This episode started on a day off that had already stopped being a day off. Earlier in the day, an older monologue recorded roughly three or four weeks ago was turned into a finished episode while sitting in the park with a venti Pumpkin Spice Frappuccino from Starbucks. Two new songs were created for that episode, and by the time that work was finished, it seemed like the day might actually be done. Then there were two pork buns from Superstore. They were very good. After that came a text conversation with a friend. Somewhere in that exchange an observation was made, and that observation opened a door. Rather than becoming part of the conversation, it became the starting point for a new extemporaneous recording. The resulting monologue was recorded in a single flow and later transcribed. During playback it became apparent that many stories had been abandoned before reaching their destinations. Instead of correcting this, additional recordings were added to explain unfinished stories, explain explanations, and occasionally explain why explanations were happening at all. Along the way several structural supports emerged. "The dogs" became a memory aid. "Meely" became a word. The distinction between spontaneous and extemporaneous became unclear. John Cage arrived unexpectedly—as usual. An artificial intelligence was recruited to write a song that attempted to explain the entire episode. The attempt worked so well that the author had to step in and rewrite it. It was boring. If you decide to use the erogenous zone that is an exit as an erogenous zone—hopefully you will have learned something. Note: This is fiction (or just the last song). Even though Leonard Cohen wrote about "anal sex," but then never sang about it in concert... not that I'm aware of.

Today I took a sick day. I don't do that very often, but I woke up feeling a little run down, and then found out that the person I was expecting to spend much of the day with was calling in sick too. It seemed like the universe was making a suggestion. My work depends heavily on presence. That's really the thing I'm paid for. When I'm at work, I want to be available, engaged, and capable of showing up fully for the people I'm working with. If I think that's going to be a struggle, I try to take that seriously. So today I stayed home. Part of what I've been doing is listening back through older monologues. This one is probably three or four weeks old. What struck me is that when I recorded it, I was trying to work something out. Someone in my life seemed convinced that I should be doing more with the things I make. I think he was probably trying to help. He often told me he liked my work, but at the same time he became increasingly forceful about what he thought I should be doing with it. The strange part was that mixed in with the encouragement were comments that left me feeling as though there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I wasn't even sure what the accusation was. I just knew I was reacting to it. Eventually I told him that I was tired of trying to guess what he meant. I said I was happy to talk about whatever was bothering him, but if he didn't want to discuss it, then I wasn't going to keep pursuing the matter. His response was simple: "OK." Oddly, that felt like a relief. I was already halfway to making another episode about the whole thing when I listened back to this monologue and realized I'd already been exploring the territory. The questions were all there. Why do I keep making things? Why am I always moving on to the next thing? Why does praise sometimes feel more complicated than criticism? What exactly am I supposed to do with being told I'm talented? So instead of making an entirely new episode, I decided to revisit this one. The two songs are new. The opening song exaggerates the problem. It's essentially a giant self-congratulatory brag about talent, accomplishments, expectations, famous people, potential, and all the other baggage that can get attached to the idea that you're supposed to be going somewhere. The closing song goes in the opposite direction. It's not trying to answer anything. It's a release. A celebration of making things, tearing down explanations, and discovering that after you've put a frame around something and ripped the frame away, there is still something left. Or maybe everything.

This episode has absolutely nothing to do with any real people, organizations, situations, departments, committees, misunderstandings, responsibilities, expectations, representatives, strategic frameworks, outreach initiatives, engagement plans, partnerships, collaborations, emails, or administrative ecosystems. It is exclusively about Godzilla, Tic Tacs, UFOs, Matthew Broderick, Ferris Bueller, Morrissey, nuclear anxiety, hot fudge sundaes with lots of nuts, crying in restaurants, little blue trains, clowns, and other completely unrelated topics. Any resemblance to actual events would be remarkable and probably deserves its own training module. The preceding list was assembled through the highly scientific process of selecting only the fun parts. To discover what else was happening while those parts were occurring, you will unfortunately have to listen to the episode.

This episode began life as "Truly Wandering," which was a perfectly serviceable filename for a monologue that seemed determined to go absolutely everywhere at once. Somewhere along the way it acquired an opening song about a dachshund, an ending song about a different dachshund, and an argument with an AI that would not stop suggesting titles. In between: counseling, culture, memory, attention, bureaucracy, Boys' Love dramas, addiction, organizations, admiration, dissociation, and the strange possibility that people might each have their own culture. Also Luna needed a song. Apparently that part was non-negotiable.

This fucker must love himself and not care how that looks. What a loser! Does he think other people will want to actually listen to this shit? No, he doesn't. So, why are you here?

I'm getting very ridiculous. That's the only word for it. It's just one word. That's all that's needed. Though have some more! Why not? I need a much bigger audience for my faltering podcast. So share this with someone else. Then post below what you said when you shared it. Did you try to make excuses for it? For yourself? Did you tell them it made you think of them? Like... "I didn't quite get this... but I think you REALLY would."

I sat down intending to talk about a song. Not this song. A different song. An old song. I think I wrote the lyrics sometime around 1999 or 2000. I had a couple notes about it and thought I would finally do something with them. Then I started talking. Somewhere along the way I detoured through undocumented immigrants, pride, visas, debt, being an openly gay high school president in 1986, AIDS, self-respect, compulsive sex, Leonard Cohen, crying at someone's workplace, and why some people would rather lose everything than ask for help. At some point I completely lost the plot. I don't actually know whether I ever talked about the song I intended to talk about. In fact, I asked an AI to check. Its answer was basically yes and no. I mention that there is a song at the very beginning and then... Apparently I spent about a half hour (but I cut out the pauses) talking about almost everything that the song was about without ever really talking about the song itself. Instead, I accidentally wrote a different one. The song that starts this episode. As for the song I meant to discuss? Well, if you like Marvel movies... I hate you. You're just like my partner, whom I love. As for the title: Yes. Obviously I'm a bad bad boy. Mystery solved.

This is the shit I do every fucking night after work. I feel like an artist putting his poop up on the roof of his house. And that process... the process of the poop on the roof re-entering the biosphere... That is the art.

Humans make meaning. We don't get a choice about that. Give us enough fragments, we'll start connecting them. This episode grew out of a weekend Zoom call with my family, but also out of everything that came before it: A week ago, I was in California with family. One afternoon my brother and I spent a long time floating in the ocean, talking the way people do when they're not trying to get anywhere. No agenda. A conversation discovering itself. Later, after I recorded an episode that touched on something we'd discussed—not in the water, but afterward—with him AND his wife. Anyway, on account of that, I sent that episode to both of them. And now I find myself wondering about context. If I had delivered this episode while we were still floating in the water, would it have made more sense? Maybe. The conversation in the water was embodied, shared, and interactive. This isn't. As I write these words, I don't get puzzled looks, laughter, feedback that tells me when to slow down, explain, or abandon an idea entirely. So what remains is just evidence that something was there. Not the conversation itself—the one in the water, with his wife, the episode I sent, the Zoom call. And now there's this. Everything is a trace of another trace. To be crude, I could say it's like eating shit, digesting it... along with whatever else I might be eating at the time. Maybe a sandwich. And you might hear about a sandwich later. And when you do, it might stick with you more because you've already read it here. So, what I'm basically saying is that traces get left behind. We metabolize them. They never go away. As humans, you could say we experience ONE long thought. As I sprinkle these words onto your ongoing thought, it starts to sparkle and turn a little differently. That's all. We act, we react, we respond. Those are all the same process... happening at the same time. Whether this description or this episode will help my brother—I'm not sure. But the process of trying to understand why we connect certain things, why some patterns feel obvious, and why others remain invisible, was helped by his presence and what that presence means to me. And this description just set a constraint for you about what you are now going to hear. Or if you've come here after listening to the episode, or while you were, or maybe after you gave up. That wasn't a quest to determine what your experience might mean... how you might be able to use it. We just do one thing after another... all at the same time, the ONLY time—Now. I write these words and they are a new quest... retroactively. I do the thing, then I see what it might have meant. That's all I'll say. Though I'll add that what I'm doing is "shining more probabilistic lights on the wall." Eventually you may see Donald Duck. And now I've told you that, you may be more likely to see Donald Duck with less data. Because me telling you it might be Donald Duck... that, itself, is more data. That's all. Now you'll be looking for a duck bill. Maybe you'll find it. Maybe you won't. If you're like me... instead of collapsing quickly into seeing Donald Duck, you'll actively resist it. You like to think something REALLY sophisticated might be going on. I told you to look THERE... So you're going to look everywhere BUT there. You want to see how I did the trick. What my other hand was doing while you were looking somewhere else. Donald Duck is not actually there. It's just a picture made of fragments. And now—I'll throw meat for those who already know the map. From art and philosophy. Or are those inseparable? Here's the red meat for those who like to eat it: Magritte's painting of a pipe was not a pipe. Then Foucault smoked it. But here it is without citations: The Big Dipper is not a Big Dipper until you know what a dipper is, and then you don't really need to know that there is a Little Dipper. It's implied. But it's not certain. The Big Dipper implies a Little Dipper. That's just how it works.

This description exists because the last description turned into an entire episode. Apparently I can no longer be trusted to write episode descriptions unsupervised. What happened was simple enough. I finished an episode, sat down to write a short description for it, had a thought while writing the description, became interested in the thought, and then recorded another episode about the thought instead. The description succeeded. The plan failed. Now it is late. Very late. Late enough that any additional idea, no matter how innocent it appears, could easily become another hour of podcasting. So I have sought outside assistance. Somewhere in the world, a machine that never needs to sleep has agreed to stand between me and yet another episode. Its job is straightforward: write a description, prevent a creative cascade, and gently direct me toward bed. Whether this works remains to be seen. If you're reading this, the description was completed. If there's another episode immediately after this one, it wasn't.

This is a pretty loving portrait of a very interesting young man. That man happens to be me. And I am also the one painting the loving portrait. Because David Sylvian and Japan sang "Don't Rain On My Parade." And I meant it. Thank god I've mostly not given a shit. Did it suck to be stuck feeling like I needed a platform all these years? Actually, no. That was FASCINATING! It's so interesting watching how humans operate... by observing myself. It's all memory, of course. And one could say that "memory is faulty." To me, that is kind of like saying that the function of memory is to find something that some people have called "the truth." I'm totally disinterested in truth. I'm interested in the DETAILS. Both the details that reflect my lived experience, as far as I know... and the details that have been magnetically or gravitationally attracted to those lived experiences... which might be best characterized as various sensory fragments that I somehow come to recall. That's all I have. Various sensory fragments. Everything else is STORY. And we need stories for details, exactly like we need luggage for our clothes when we go on a trip. And life... is a trip. Pack wisely. If you're honest with yourself, you have no idea where you may go. That's why I hold tight to all the weird stuff. Why hold onto things that stick to you anyway? I loved watching "The Outsiders." So many beautiful young men when I was 13 or something. I don't need to do anything to remember that one. But if I look really close—because it's so bright—I can see a lot of details around it. The flasks of liquor. Just me and a bunch of girls. The long line of opening night. Then I can start wondering... I must have been scanning the line for other males. Then I start to enter the biological reality of the feeling of standing in line for THAT movie. And especially Ralph Macchio. Though C. Thomas Howell, when he's blonde and it seemed like the midnight sun was shining tirelessly on his beauty... Seems like I'm ready to make my next monologue, doesn't it? This is why I usually try to get AI to write my episode descriptions... I'm so doomed! My spring overfloweth. And I don't even care about the mess. Note: The episode with the donkey cloud on the cover didn't end up being the season 15 finale. But that doesn't really matter, does it? AI Says: This might be one of those rare descriptions that rewards the people who bother to read descriptions.