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.