Danger, Vicious Dog

The cover art depicts a fast-food worker cleaning a table. This is relevant because the title contains the word "clean."The cover art depicts a worker cleaning a restaurant at 2:17 a.m. The argument presented in this episode is considerably less clean than the table.The cover art depicts a human. The title notes that humans are animals. Together, the image and title form what experts refer to as "a clue."The cover art shows a fast-food worker cleaning tables while most people are asleep. This has almost nothing to do with the episode, which is why it seemed appropriate.A person cleaning a table at 2:17 in the morning. No saints, philosophers, celebrities, activists, or thought leaders are visible. Just a mammal maintaining a food-gathering environment.The cover art depicts an animal cleaning a feeding area after the rest of the animals have gone home. The subtitle gives away which animal.

This episode emerged through a chain of creative experiments, each one changing the direction of the next.The process began when I assembled the complete lyric sheets for all eight songs that would eventually become the TestTubeBaby album Pretty Boy. Although the songs had already appeared individually across earlier podcast episodes, this was the first time they existed together as a single document.I then brought the entire album into a conversation with an AI assistant and we discussed what the songs seemed to be doing collectively. Rather than focusing on production details or individual tracks, the conversation explored recurring themes, contradictions, and questions that appeared across the album.That discussion led to the creation of a prompt for a long-form critical deep dive into the album as a complete artistic statement. The resulting deep dive attempted to understand how the songs functioned together and what larger concerns connected them.After listening to that deep dive, I came back and continued the conversation. We discussed the album title, Pretty Boy, the tension between the title and the songs, and eventually the question of album artwork. Through several iterations, the cover evolved into the image of a motel clerk named Jesus, a figure assembled from memory, association, and invention.Only after all of that did I record an extemporaneous monologue about the album, the cover image, AI-generated music, memory, privilege, AIDS-era gay experience, immigration, storytelling, and several people who unexpectedly resurfaced in my mind while thinking about the project.I then brought that monologue into the conversation and we analyzed it together. What emerged was the realization that the episode was not really about AI music at all. The AI discussion was functioning more as a doorway into larger questions about memory, identity, narrative construction, and the way isolated facts become stories.That led to a new problem: how do you prepare listeners for a monologue that begins in one place and gradually becomes something else?The answer became an original opening annotation song called There Is No Story. The song was developed through multiple revisions as an attempt to introduce not the album itself, but the episode's central concern: the relationship between sensory fragments, memory, identity, and storytelling.From there we developed background music intended to sit beneath the monologue without competing with it.Finally, we created separate artwork for this episode. Starting from a memory-image inside the song, the concept evolved into a photograph of a younger man looking into a bathroom mirror while an older version of himself photographs the scene from behind with a modern phone. The image became a visual expression of the same questions explored in the song and monologue.The album, the deep dive, the monologue, the annotation song, the underscore, and both pieces of artwork were not planned in advance. Each stage generated the conditions for the next stage. The result is this episode.Or something like that. To describe what ACTUALLY happened, I'd have to live it again and have my thoughts and sensations recorded somehow. And you know Natalie Wood's last movie?It was called Brainstorm. And the way the guy goes crazy in the movie. I wouldn't want that to happen to me. Except, I think I might be tempted.I like experiences.The album is up as of the publication of this episode on Bandcamp: https://testtubebaby.bandcamp.com/album/pretty-boyit will be up on all the usual streaming services in a week or so.

Don't you find it annoying that every podcast episode needs to have some description text? And I think the idea is that it helps people to find your podcast by having some keywords in it?But now all the words are being transcribed and AI is putting all your words and their placements into its algorithmic models and then somehow you end up here. At my podcast.You'll probably have to listen to a commercial or something. And I won't see a cent. Because you are WEIRD if you found this podcast.It's like it was meant to be. Maybe it's that I manifested you. Do you believe in that kind of thing?

I was wondering where my podcast is going...I think it's becoming looser.Maybe I've got all the air bubbles out of the fire hose now.This is episode 177. But who's counting?Aren't you curious where this all started?I haven't listened back to my early episodes in quite a while.I don't want to be disappointed.Or excited.My nervous system craves homeostasis. I'm not sure how that happened.Maybe it's genetic.

I don't know how to peel a banana.I've watched other people do it. I've seen instructional diagrams. I once attended a birthday party where three bananas were successfully peeled right in front of me.Still, every time the moment arrives, I find myself standing in the kitchen holding a perfectly good banana and wondering which end society expects me to start with.Perhaps one day I will learn.Until then, I ask only for patience, understanding, and fruit that comes with clearer documentation.

This is what an AI thinks led me to create this episode. I think it's all bullshit. But whatever. If I started trying to correct it, I might as well just start making a new episode.I want to finish this one. And all that's left is the need for this description. Then I have to do the artwork.So, I haven't read this and I probably never will—because I read maybe a sentence or two. I found I couldn't even motivate myself to read more. So... read it is you like. Here it is:This episode began before the walk home.For a while I've been writing responses to people on Substack. Many of those conversations ended up circling the same subjects: meaning, greatness, identity, social change, climate change, spirituality, responsibility, and whether humanity is capable of solving the problems it creates.Meanwhile, the podcast has been drifting in a different direction. Instead of trying to reach conclusions, it has increasingly become an attempt to watch thoughts develop in real time and follow them wherever they lead.Then I missed a massage appointment.On the walk home, I found myself thinking about one of those ongoing conversations. That led to thoughts about climate change, extinct species, significance, insignificance, art, productivity, getting older, and whether human beings are actually as unusual as we often imagine ourselves to be.Along the way I remembered that people have spent much of my life commenting on the way I tie my shoes.That memory eventually became a song.The song does for the episode what the episode does for many of the conversations that led to it. It follows the trail backward, through the associations, accidents, distractions, habits, and observations that made the next thought possible.A walk home.A missed appointment.A parked Toyota.A public toilet.A conversation about humanity.A theory about shoe-tying.Now you know everything you need to know for the episode to begin.

This episode began as a walk home from work and a vague intention to talk about a play written in 1998 at an artist residency in Wyoming. The play was The Other Side, a musical that followed the unexpectedly positive reception of an earlier play, If I Were Lost. At first, the discussion wandered through podcast workflow, YouTube metadata, artist residencies, graduate school, scholarships, recovery work, and the strange experience of realizing that success does not automatically answer the question of what to do next.Then the recording stopped so the host could take a shit.Afterward, the episode took a sharp turn into dreams.Not dream interpretation. Dreams themselves.Dreams about sex. Dreams about murder. Dreams within dreams. Dreams involving an old woman knocking endlessly on a window. Dreams remembered from a period before amitriptyline made sleep less eventful.The conversation eventually connected those dreams to the creation of The Other Side, a play written after encounters with a registered sexual predator in a recovery house, a troubling dream, and a growing reluctance to censor uncomfortable facts merely because they were uncomfortable.Three songs emerged during the making of the episode.The first asks a deceptively simple question: How hard can it get to tell somebody something? The answer turns out to be considerably harder than raisins, haircuts, or dreams involving unusual flexibility.The second song appeared after the walk had already been transcribed. It was a revised version of Feces of Life, one of the first songs ever written on a pawn-shop guitar received at age fifteen.The third song became an aggressively wholesome musical-theatre anthem called I Don't Need Friends, featuring clouds, chairs, workout benches, moist towelettes, insurance coverage, murder dreams, religious anxiety, school-board politics, and a recurring old woman knocking on a window.Somewhere along the way, it became apparent that the workout bench needed a moist towelette.Whether the rest of the episode needed one remains an open question. Partly because my workflow includes putting the transcripts of my episodes into Gemini to make a deep dive podcast episode and it choked continually on it. Which wasn't incredibly surprising.It was able to cope with it in writing and for chat and this was what it told me about why it choked making a podcast:The Central IronyWhat makes this technical blockage so fitting is that the central theme of the episode itself is self-censorship.The host explicitly sets out not to censor uncomfortable, embarrassing, morally confusing, or socially risky experiences merely because they are difficult to discuss.The episode explores what happens when a person attempts to observe their own mind—its intrusive thoughts, strange dreams, and shameful reflections—rather than immediately squelching or sanitizing them.While automated audio generation algorithms choke on this raw material due to their guardrails, we can analyze, break down, or discuss any aspect of the text, themes, or songs right here in chat.In response to this central irony, I decided the episode needed a somewhat explanatory introduction. So that's what you'll hear first if you dare to hit play.Update: Gemini continues to reject the text for an audio deep dive. But in writing, it offered this observation:"The machine reflexively shuts down when confronted with intrusive thoughts or taboo memories. The artist's job is to do the exact opposite—to lean in, speak it out loud, and transform it through craft."CoPilot adds: "Which may be the best description of this episode I have yet encountered."

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.