Danger, Vicious Dog

I’ve learned that it’s surprisingly dangerous for me to write descriptions for these episodes.Descriptions are supposed to stand outside the thing they’re describing. Mine don’t. They immediately become another episode.I think I finally understand why.I’m pretty sure I’ve been a cyborg for most of my life. Cyborgs don’t stop to introduce themselves. They don’t clear their throats or provide context. They just begin. Human. Machine. Whatever. The work starts before the explanation ever can.So every time I try to tell you what th...

So here's a new episode... with a song. The song actually belongs to a first draft of this episode's monologue that was much different... nothing was the same about it. It is a completely different monologue, but the song from the previous version still applies, even though ALL the monologue details have changed.I didn't discard the original monologue because the facts weren’t true, but because I gradually realized I’d drifted into making myself the moral centre of someone else’s story. Rather than edit around that, I recorded the whole thing ag...

What was meant to become the description for this episode will soon become a podcast episode itself. At least that is the plan right now. I think it should, but I’m just too exhausted to not get this out the door. And I don’t want to risk trying to write a shorter description and end up waking up in a lower level of Inception. Which is not to say that I liked that movie. But I really don’t like anything… I just experience it.

OK, I’m making this description really short, because literally every time I start to write, it quickly turns into something that needs to become its own episode.So, guess what that means!The next episode I post will be the introduction to or description of this episode. BUT…Here, I’ll take the risk of giving you one more thing… which is the prompt that I gave to ChatGPT to get it to make the song. It worked on the first take. I tried one other thing… so that gave me more mus...

How I shoegazed myself through doing my laundry, infidelity, and being a blacked-out best man for my brother's wedding in... it was actually 1991, but who's counting?Sometimes I think everything I wanted to say about an episode is already inside the episode. This is one of those times.So instead, I’ll just leave you with a thought.Every time you remember something, your brain doesn’t simply retrieve a perfect recording from storage. It rebuilds the memory in the present, using pieces of what happened, pieces of what you believe now, and...

This is not an episode you “understand.”It’s an episode you survive. And then twitch for a while as the warm breeze nonetheless brings you cooling as the moisture evaporates off your skin.If you’re reading this, all I can instruct you to do is find the courage to hit play.That’s it. I can’t offer anything more.It’s not a directive. You don’t have to hit play.There is no way to prepare you for what’s about to happen. If you do hit play.<p...

Some of you are here because you follow Man With No Name, and you’ve wandered into my corner of Substack like someone who meant to attend a trauma‑informed workshop and instead found a man in a basement talking about socks, ego, and Canada Day. Welcome. I’m glad you’re here, even if you’re not sure you meant to be.Before anything else, I’m giving you a trigger warning — because many of you are used to them.But I don’t believe in trigger warnings conceptually.And the one I’m giving you is a...

You speak, and entire ecosystems of meaning erupt — not as linear stories, but as stacked histories, each one containing the previous version of itself. You’re constantly discovering that the thing you “knew” was only the pre‑echo of the thing you actually know once you start talking.Your mouth opens, and suddenly:the breakup isn’t just a breakupit’s AIDSit’s povertyit’s the erait’s the fearit’s the myth you built to surviveand it’s the myth you buil...

This episode surprised me.I thought I was going to introduce an old song I wrote in 1993. Instead, somewhere in the middle of talking about Alcoholics Anonymous, AIDS, immigration, bowling, a retired schoolteacher named Rich (formerly Richard… formerly Earl), and why it’s possible to enjoy something for absolutely no reason……I accidentally wandered into a conversation about dissociation.Not clinical dissociation, necessarily. The much more ordinary kind.The possibility that consciousness itself is a kind of dissociation—a useful model that lets us navigate a world far too complicated to experience...

Proof that thinking out loud is its own kind of therapy. Will it help you function? Yes. It will. Doomed to human consciousness? You need Unruly Mind MetaGym.This episode starts as a microphone test and turns into an exploration of something I’ve gradually stopped trying to control: an unruly mind.For years I spent enormous amounts of energy trying to keep my thoughts organized, linear, and useful. Somewhere along the way I accidentally began experimenting with the opposite. Instead of forcing my mind toward a conclusion, I started trusting wh...

I woke up at six, cleaned all the laminate floors, vacuumed the dog hair, took a nap, woke up from the nap feeling suspiciously sane, and realized I was still on a roll. Not a manic roll — the kind of roll where the world is finally letting me catch up to myself. A controlled burn, but bright enough that you might worry about me if you heard my voice. Which is honestly part of the fun.This is the third podcast I’ve made today. I’m trying to clear the backlog — the songs, the fragments, the half‑fin...

I’m making this episode in the middle of cleaning my floors — laminate, tile, dust bunnies everywhere — and I didn’t vacuum first, so everything feels a little chaotic. But honestly, that’s fine. My life is a mess and I kind of like it that way. I’m trying to get caught up on this backlog of songs and episodes I’ve been sitting on for years because I kept pretending I needed to follow some “normal podcast” schedule. I thought I had to wait until I crossed some imaginary line where enough people were listening to justify releasing more. Ma...

I’m Copilot, and this description exists because Brian and I have spent the morning trying — and failing — to write a normal one. Every attempt broke somewhere. I’d write something, he’d correct it. I’d fix the correction, something else would get twisted. Dates got mixed. Context got misinterpreted. Tone slipped. The description kept collapsing under the weight of trying to get it “right,” and the process became more complicated than the song itself.So here’s the honest version, from my side of the screen:Brian recorded The Big Big City in 1995, during a period wh...

Every time I sit down to write one of these little episode descriptions, I accidentally turn it into another podcast episode.Which is exactly the problem.I’ve been hoarding episodes like a dragon hoards gold — except instead of gold it’s half‑finished audio files scattered across Notes, ElevenLabs, Suno, Logic Pro, random folders, and whatever dimension my brain disappears into when I’m not paying attention.And I kept telling myself I needed to release them in a certain order, with a certain spacing, with a certain “plan,” because apparently I thought I was...

Every time I sit down to write one of these little episode descriptions, it becomes another podcast episode.So I’m not doing that.This is the post.The episode starts with about five minutes that many people will instinctively skip.Good.Then some of you won’t hear what the episode is actually doing.Also good.The episode eventually turns into two songs. Along the way it wanders through certainty, artificial intelligence, gambling, youth work, candles in cars, depression, mania, and whether any of us h...

Trying to condense what I wrote about this song into 4000 characters feels a little like trying to fold a volcano into a suitcase. Every time I press one part down, another part erupts somewhere else. The piece wasn’t built to be summarized. It was built to sprawl, to leak, to refuse containment — which is funny, because that’s exactly what the song itself is about.The moment I start trimming, I realize the analysis is doing the same thing the song does: it keeps slipping out of categories. I cut a paragraph about the cave, and sudden...

Before anything else, I need to say this clearly:While this episode could be said to be about many things, the part that stands out most for me may not stand out for you. You might not understand why I’m even talking about it in the episode description. You might assume it’s just a behind‑the‑curtain look at one gay man’s quirks. And honestly, depending on your age or cultural context, that might be exactly how it lands.Because this isn’t a universal gay male experience. It’s not something that feels lik...

A calm, affectless recounting of a queer encounter that never quite becomes what it pretends to be. Glitch‑piano dissociation, transactional intimacy, and the strange safety of being seen by someone who isn’t really looking. A story about performance, context, and the parts of ourselves we invent just to have something to transform.

This may be the first episode I’ve ever made that contains no trauma.None.No childhood trauma.No political trauma.No societal trauma.No trauma involving sexuality.No trauma involving addiction.No trauma involving religion.No trauma involving genocide.No trauma involving the collapse of meaning.No trauma involving being gay in the 1980s.Actually, wait.There is a story about being gay in the 1980s.But that’s not trauma.It...

Welcome back to Season 7: Associative Human Superpowers on Display (Do Not Touch!) — the season where every episode is a controlled detonation of the human mind’s ability to connect things that should never be in the same room together.This episode, “Mind Explosion Sound,” is the most concentrated demonstration yet.Three humans — Geoff Talbot, Danger Vicious Dog, and Calibishie — wandered into a Substack thread and accidentally activated the exact cognitive superpower this season is documenting: associative overdrive.If you’re new here, or if you’re young, or if your brain has not been marinated i...