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Danger, Vicious Dog: Daily Summaries Delivered
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Started updating my bio Dec 31, 2023. Accidentally wrote four autofiction books. Slid from narrative into monologue—not stream-of-consciousness, more like speech-speed meaning performance. Trained my voice into AI, produced a shit-ton of pieces. Had too many. Needed a place to dump them. Saw a sign that said “Beware, Vicious Dog!” Misread it. Named the podcast Danger, Vicious Dog. Didn’t fix it. Just kept going. Queer. Cosmic. Sarcastic. Cheap. Accidentally committed to the bit. Some voice and art is AI... I don't know how I feel about that... so I'm working on figuring it out... how I feel.
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- Today44 min
E1: Unfiction; S15: Endless Orgasmic Arc Forever (Of course this is a season opener! Welcome to Season 15 of Danger, Vicious Dog)
A little factual housekeeping, but first I should probably destroy the idea of factual housekeeping.This fact-check has been assembled by an AI. I was not at Pomona in 1971, Stonewall in 1969, the APA vote in 1973, the first AIDS cases in Los Angeles, our immigration medical exams, or yesterday in the driveway.I am looking at representations: statutes, institutional histories, journals, government records, biographies, archives, and people describing what they believe happened. I can give more weight to closer, accountable, corroborated sources. But I still reach Reality through documents.Peer review doesn’t magically fix this. Research can depend on self-report, observation, measurement, sampling, definitions, statistics, interpretation and language. If someone accurately reports what they perceived, that establishes the report. Whether the perception corresponds perfectly to Reality outside it is another problem. Can words reproduce anything exactly?So is any of the following “fact”?I don’t know. I’ve already fucked up the word.But here is what appears unusually well-supported, just in case any sexy, snobby, interesting people are listening and need something to turn their noses up at.The Kathy Acker biography is Eat Your Mind: The Radical Life and Work of Kathy Acker by Jason McBride. The man whose name I fail to retrieve is David Antin. Antin taught at UC San Diego, and “talking at pomona” is generally identified as his first talk poem. A recording is dated 1971; it appeared in Artforum in September 1972.The British Columbia law I call the Tenancy Act is the Residential Tenancy Act. Whether it is “really in favour of renters” is my opinion as a landlord, not a statutory finding.Stonewall: June 1969. Fine.The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality itself from its official list of mental disorders on December 15, 1973, not 1974.Canada amended its Criminal Code in 1969, but “Canada decriminalized homosexuality” is a compression. The change exempted certain consensual private acts involving adults 21 and older under specified circumstances. Important? Yes. Full legal equality? No.Los Angeles was not the sole epicenter of AIDS. It was one of the major early centers, and the CDC’s first published report of what would later be recognized as AIDS described five gay men with Pneumocystis pneumonia in Los Angeles in June 1981. New York and San Francisco were also central.Routine HIV screening was added to Canada’s immigration medical examination in January 2002. HIV positivity was not automatically a ban. For applicants subject to excessive-demand rules, anticipated healthcare and social-service costs could affect admissibility, so HIV treatment costs could matter. My monologue makes that more absolute than the policy was.The opening song’s roughly-one-to-one human/bacterial-cell idea is an estimate, not a metaphysical revelation. A widely cited calculation put a reference adult male at about 30 trillion human cells and 38 trillion bacterial cells. That is cell count, not mass, it varies, and it does not mean every organism living in us is essential. Human microbiomes matter to normal physiology. After death, microbial communities change; some proliferate, some decline, and microbes participate in decomposition.Does that make me immortal? No.Does it prove immortality is impossible? Also no.Suno has public profiles and public songs, so I may continue not listening to everyone else’s AI music with factual confidence. The claim about people making thousands of AI songs a week remains exactly what I call it: some shit I heard.Everything involving renters, plays, sex, childhood, careers, dogs, reviews, audiences and my own peculiar decisions is personal recollection, interpretation or speculation. Those facts have another problem: their principal source is me.There.Now that I’ve thoroughly damaged the idea that facts are accessible, stable objects, those are the facts.
- Today34 min
E10: Low-Entropy Presence; S14: A Perfect Finale to Season 14
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.
- Yesterday16 min
E9: What Do You Do with a Confession of Something Like Incest? S14: AI Slopping While I Take My Self Out
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.
- Yesterday13 min
E8: Tell Me to Wait; S14: Cute Boy, Lucky Day
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!
- 1 weeks ago29 min
E7: Humanity is the Solution's Problem; S14: Or Tony Stark (or maybe Cher). Hello Dolly. Goodbye. In 5 Billion Years (or less)
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.
- 2 weeks ago17 min
E6: Oops, I Exceeded Reality Again; S14: Jury Duty Cancelled, so this is the result of being snarky on a spiritually bypassing algorithmic visit to Substack drinking mochas at a coffeeshop all morning
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.
- 2 weeks ago25 min
E5: Hyper-Focus Disorder Street Fighter; S14: Yet Another Layer of Self-Regulation When I'm Bored (Or Unambivalently Horny - Thanks Motivational Interviewing)
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.
- 2 weeks ago39 min
E4: This Is How I Spend My Evenings (Lucky Me!); S14: Close Out the Closer (Get Closer)
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.
About Danger, Vicious Dog
Started updating my bio Dec 31, 2023. Accidentally wrote four autofiction books. Slid from narrative into monologue—not stream-of-consciousness, more like speech-speed meaning performance. Trained my voice into AI, produced a shit-ton of pieces. Had too many. Needed a place to dump them. Saw a sign that said “Beware, Vicious Dog!” Misread it. Named the podcast Danger, Vicious Dog. Didn’t fix it. Just kept going. Queer. Cosmic. Sarcastic. Cheap. Accidentally committed to the bit. Some voice and art is AI... I don't know how I feel about that... so I'm working on figuring it out... how I feel.
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