Danger, Vicious Dog

Is this fiction?No, it’s clearly not fiction. It’s a transcript of a mind trying—and failing—to sit still.But all memory is reconstruction, so technically it is fiction.Right, but if everything is fiction, then calling it fiction is meaningless.Exactly. Which is why we keep talking.This episode begins in a windowless cruise cabin—already a metaphor you didn’t ask for—and spirals outward into a systems-level breakdown of being alive: the body as infrastructure, the brain as refinery, the heart as a pumping liability, and meaning itself as some kind of nutrient we’re not entirely sure we can synthesize.One voice argues that writing is too slow, too deliberate, too… intentional.Another voice counters that speaking only feels spontaneous because the writing already happened somewhere else—earlier, deeper, invisibly.So which is it? Performance or authenticity?Both. Neither. Depends who’s watching.Along the way:A song called Megacolon becomes a philosophical event.The blood-brain barrier becomes a narrative device.Childhood learning strategies mutate into adult identity scaffolding.Language dissolves into sound, then reforms as something suspiciously like music.And hovering over all of it is a quiet, irritating question:If your thoughts only exist now, then what exactly are you doing when you “remember,” “revise,” or “contradict” yourself?One side insists this is a journey toward coherence.The other side points out that the “journey” is just a story told by something that’s already out of time.So… do we keep going?Or do we stop and call it silence?Except—there’s no such thing as silence.Which is inconvenient.Because this episode ends there anyway.Or doesn’t.

This one starts with a headset, a wireless mic, and a person pacing around their house trying to think out loud without deciding what they think first.There are ribs in an Instant Pot. There are potatoes that may or may not be timed correctly. There is a puppy tangling itself in cords and demanding to be acknowledged as the central organizing force of the universe.And somewhere inside all of that: a youth health centre in Abbotsford.A plaque on a City Hall wall. A signature that meant very little—until it didn’t. A phone call. A doctor who didn’t tolerate bullshit. A room where people started asking a simple question: what would it look like if young people who don’t trust systems could actually walk into one and not get dismissed?That question becomes a place.And that place—almost incidentally at first—becomes a hub for trans youth in a region that didn’t necessarily set out to “centre” anything except access, dignity, and not being talked down to about smoking when you came in with something else entirely.From there, the episode does what the mind does.It wanders.Into early activism. Into being a teenager in Southern California. Into AIDS-era organizing, borrowed language, and the strange inheritance of ideas about identity—who gets to claim it, who gets to question it, and who gets told to shut up about it.Then forward again: pandemic internet. Comment sections. The moment you realize you are out of your depth in a conversation that seems to demand certainty. The emergence of frameworks—TERFs, trans discourse, competing claims about what is fixed, what is fluid, what is social, what is biological, what is real.And underneath all of it, a quieter thread:What does it actually mean to “centre” someone?Is it about language? Ordering letters? Deference? Silence? Infrastructure? Proximity to power? Or is it something more mundane and harder to argue with—like building a place where someone can walk in and not get turned away?This episode doesn’t resolve that.It circles it. It interrupts itself. It forgets what it was saying and remembers something else. It admits confusion in real time. It contradicts itself. It keeps going anyway.Also: 12-step identity. The idea of being “born” something. The moment that identity stops fitting. Grooming, memory, and the unreliable archive of how a self gets constructed in the first place.Nothing is cleaned up. Nothing is finalized.It is a recording of a mind trying to hold competing models of reality while making dinner and stepping over a dog toy.Set to music, because apparently that’s how we get through it.

There’s writing that tries not to disappoint you—and then there’s writing that behaves like a shopping cart with one broken wheel careening downhill into a pile of burning encyclopedias.Remember those? Encyclopedias.Episode Eight thinks its cart started rolling thirty years ago. I’m going to indulge that, because the point here is to simulate the cognitive static of modern identity-making—the way memory, trauma, language, and cultural debris all rush the stage at once, each insisting it’s the headliner.This began as a simple, extemporaneous dinner rant. I thought I knew where it would land. I don’t anymore. The mind is built to predict; when it fails, it scrambles—opens the wrong drawers, pulls out the wrong objects, insists they belong.So suddenly: Los Angeles, early ’90s, AIDS crisis. An hourly motel. A man already outside the story of his life, riding a motorcycle between sex clubs and nowhere-to-sleep, using meth like a farewell letter. The memory doesn’t arrive cleanly. It sprawls. It refuses a moral.Then—without warning—I’m in Indonesia a decade later. Or earlier. Waiting to see if Canada would recognize my relationship as a family. Learning the language, deliberately swapping words just to see what would happen. Living beside a mosque with a sign calling for George Bush to be killed. Walking past it daily as the only white American in the neighborhood. It stayed until the 2004 earthquake took the building down.And yes, this is chaotic. It isn’t a clean narrative. It’s not trying to be. It’s closer to how a mind behaves when it isn’t forcing coherence—something like a solar system forming, debris everywhere, gravity improvising structure after the fact.Then I’m back in the pandemic. Washing my hands after touching a crosswalk button. Cooking ribs in a hot pot. Recording. Remembering how fear lingers in the body long after the conditions that produced it have shifted or vanished.Too many timelines. Too many tones. The kind of thing that would get flagged as unfocused.That’s not an accident. It’s the point.This episode became a kind of cognitive traffic jam on a highway made entirely of on-ramps—a demonstration of what it feels like when the present is constantly interrupted by the memory of having remembered something before. Not a tidy line. Not a bowl. More like trying to sort your childhood bedroom while the house is on fire and someone—possibly you—keeps handing you objects you don’t recall taking.To interrogate that mess, I fed the transcript into an AI and had two generated voices debate a simple question: is this episode sloppy, or is it honest?That debate is Episode Nine.They argue. They contradict themselves. They try to summarize and collapse under their own metaphors. They circle the question until even the question starts to degrade.What they do agree on—somewhere beneath the noise—is that the mind doesn’t experience life in clean sequences. It experiences collision, recursion, interference, improvisation, and the occasional linguistic prank.Episode Ten, then, is the thing underneath all of this: the actual extemporaneous recording. Me making dinner. Moving through it. Letting the mind run without deciding what it means.All three episodes are set to music—“a spoonful of sugar to help the mayhem go down.”You can decide whether this is a mess, a method, or something that refuses the distinction.And, appropriately enough—this ends where it doesn’t.

This episode has already begun. Hasn’t it? Maybe before you even pressed play.That wasn’t an intro. Even if it was.Originally positioned as Episode Two of the whole podcast, this one went too deep, too fast.So it waited… until now… to be an Episode Six of Season Two. (There are others. A small pack of them. Don’t worry, they mostly don’t bite.)In this one:A scab becomes a plate.A plate becomes a meal.A walrus becomes a man again (or was it the other way around?).You’ll hear about the male–female “couple” who accidentally auditioned for friendship at the beach.The trauma of “Birthday parties” (not the events — the phrase).The smell of burning hair.A vet’s warning no one wants but everyone remembers.And “Guess what? Monkey’s butt.”You may be edging. Or being edged.By literature.And language.And your own sense of what should come next — and what doesn’t.Also featuring:Safer sex with an illegal manager,Opiate epiphanies with blurry picture-books,and a long-lost MDMA solo trip dedicated entirely to the art of touch deprivation.And if all that sounds overwhelming, it’s okay — just do the dishes.Or scrub a pot.Or set your oven on fire.This is Diverginity.This is Art: So Reassuring.This is Danger, Vicious Dog.Season One: Failure of LanguageSeason Two: Not Sacrè Bleu