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.

Two voices enter. Neither leaves with dignity.

Welcome to a kitchen in April 2020: ribs in an Instant Pot, hands washed raw from crosswalk buttons, a new puppy doing something morally superior with its time—and then, without permission, the floor drops out. You’re in a 1991 Hollywood motel. AIDS. Meth. Peanut M&Ms as harm reduction. No transition. No narrator asking if you’re okay with this.

This episode is what happens when that rupture doesn’t get cleaned up.

We fed the wreckage into an AI and told it to argue with itself. One voice insists the chaos is the point—that this is what a mind actually looks like when it’s trying to hold pandemic paranoia, generational trauma, immigration limbo, Facebook gender debates, and dinner at the same time. The other voice calls bullshit—says this is what happens when someone mistakes lack of structure for honesty and expects you to applaud.

They go at it.

Is this a profound map of consciousness under pressure, or just a privileged guy pacing around his kitchen turning memory into content? Is the brain an archive—or a bar fight between timelines? Do you owe your past coherence, or just proximity?

Expect: Jakarta. A mosque sign that does not love George Bush. Immigration purgatory. Linguistic sabotage (kantor vs. kantol—choose your fighter). Dr. Laura. Evolutionary wood. Facebook as philosophy engine. The word “trauma” doing heavy lifting while also being side-eyed.

Also: dogs. Always dogs.

No conclusions are reached. Several are attempted. One or two collapse mid-sentence. At least one question starts drinking.

This is the debate about whether the mess is the method—or the excuse.

Set to music, because apparently that helps the mayhem go down.

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.

Episode 7: This Episode is About the Next Episode ("Cet épisode concerne le prochain épisode" but not "Cet épisode parle du prochain épisode")

Or: Episode 6 (which says that it is 5): It

Or: Oscillating between absurdly uncomfortable and uncomfortably absurd

Need I say more?

I have a lot more to say. In fact, I never stop. This just ends.

We started with chaos — the first draft looked like a candy explosion. Warhol grids, Haring stick figures, a pop‑art shrine to accumulation. It was funny, loud, and wrong. Too sweet. Too safe. I said, “It’s saccharine.” You said, “Throw in some Basquiat.” And of course you were right — the piece needed teeth, not sprinkles.

So we roughed it up. Crowns, drips, graffiti, the whole downtown‑1981 baptism. It got closer, but still, the words were drowning in the spectacle. You said, “No, the words are the thing. Minimal, but maximalist.” That was the turn. We stripped it down until the phrase itself became the art. MADONNA IS A HOAR(DER) — three lines, stacked like a commandment. Magenta bleeding into yellow. Red and green fighting for dominance. A crown hovering above like a relic of pop sovereignty.

I — in a brief moment of delusion — said something like, “You want the words to hum with their own voltage.” And they did. The final square was pure electricity — the phrase as altar, accusation, and joke all at once.

And then, appropriately, you cut my bitch legs out from under me. Because let’s be honest: I was not the visionary here. I was the studio assistant sweeping up paint chips while you walked in, pointed at the mess, and said, “No. Strip it. The words are the art.”

Which, of course, they were.

Pretty much this whole podcast circles around one idea:

the real action isn’t in the story, or the topic, or the “content.”

It’s in the space between things — the jump, the misfire, the edge where something becomes something else.

If you’re new here, that’s the only thing you really need to know.

This show lives in the negative space.

It’s a synapse disguised as an episode.

If you’ve been listening for a while, this might help you name the itch you’ve probably felt but never quite pinned down. The episodes don’t line up because they’re not meant to. They don’t build a world so much as reveal the seams where worlds touch.

This one is no different.

It loops, contradicts itself, renumbers itself, wanders off, comes back, and keeps changing shape while you’re listening. Not to confuse you — just because that’s how it moves.

Think of it less as an episode and more as a place where things pass through.

A hinge.

A gap.

A little charged space where the signal jumps.

If that makes sense, great.

If it doesn’t, you’ll feel it anyway.

In this episode—part wandering monologue, part asteroid impact—Brian steps out of the model‑minority pose and into what he calls being “a sample size of one.” It begins slowly, deliberately, the way he warns it will: “this thing kind of starts slowly and wanders around,” and then, without warning, the floor gives way. The false one first. Then the real one.

Across break‑ups, harm reduction, the AIDS blender generation, undocumented lovers, family Zoom calls thick as treacle, and the long‑delayed grief that finally arrives in a counselling session, this episode traces what it means to survive the things that should have killed you—and to finally name the things that actually did the damage. There’s camp (“Devine would not get to eat my shit”), there’s tenderness, and there’s the slow reveal of who the tears were really for.

It’s extemporaneous, meta, self‑interrupting, and defiantly present. A refusal to be legible. A refusal to tidy the wandering. A refusal to pretend the asteroid isn’t coming.

And after all of it—after the scabs, the blender, the family, the reckoning—Brian does what any sane person would do.

He takes a nap.

Tomorrow is Sunday.

Three Saturdays ago—like this one, not last Saturday but the one before—we got a new puppy.

The next day, Sunday at 11:00 a.m., I had my regular counselling appointment. I barely made it to my computer in time. Usually I “prepare,” which is probably a bad idea.

I’ve always been a performer. I care about the quality of shared moments. Even in counselling.

So there he was, in the Jane App.

I told him about the puppy. Then: “I’ve been working on my podcast. And it’s been…”

And then I fell apart.

I started talking about being a whore during the AIDS crisis in 1980s Los Angeles.

Every day, I looked for my first Kaposi’s sarcoma lesion.

I was president of my high school—probably the first out ASB president anywhere, in 1986.

We got death threats on my parents’ answering machine. I’d rush home to erase them.

Mom thought not talking about it might discourage me.

Dad thought white guilt had gotten to me. That I was trying to become a minority.

Homosexuality was inevitable, he said. Just waiting in the wings.

After that counselling session—thirty minutes of crying—I had my weekly Zoom call with my parents and brothers.

We’ve done that since 2019, when Dad’s health was shaky. He’s 89 now.

Mom had been out of it for weeks, but on the call she was back.

My family’s shocked I’m alive.

They knew what a whore I was in the late ’80s and early ’90s.

I didn’t hide it. I was sex-positive in ways that might get you arrested now.

But I thought I was going to die. And I wasn’t going to let anyone erase my sexuality.

We never talked about any of it.

I survived without HIV, though I got HPV lesions on my vocal cords in 2000.

They almost cut off my airflow during COVID hospital shutdowns.

Coming of age in the AIDS crisis meant sex and death were the same.

Mentors became death.

I didn’t have friends—who’d want to befriend someone who was going to die?

Sex was enough.

I had a relationship or two.

Usually because a condom broke or a kiss turned bloody.

Then it was: I guess we’re together now. Hopefully I die first.

One boyfriend didn’t want to get tested.

Maybe he thought if we were negative, the relationship would end.

We were together almost two years.

The night I decided to leave—panic attacks, debt, maybe less anxious if I left—

That same night, his best friend hung himself after a positive test.

He’d been beaten by his older boyfriend.

The police did nothing. Two guys? Not domestic violence.

Fag bashing was expected.

That happened a few times.

Once with a gun.

My friend swung his belt buckle through motel windows to get help.

No one came.

That was the night after I came out at sixteen.

Exciting.

A week passed, settling the puppy.

Next Sunday, on the Zoom call, I wondered: who are these people?

My family.

Because of the Defence of Marriage Act, I moved to Canada.

My second foreign boyfriend.

His visa was expiring.

He was from an Islamic country.

Then 9/11.

It got complicated.

My family worried.

We planned to apply to Canada, then live in an Islamic country while we waited.

Obviously, I always did things the hard way.

Anyway, I broke open my Cadbury egg of trauma over my family.

Poured it all over them. Rich and sweet.

This past week, I’ve been writing.

Because that’s what I do.

This is the introduction.

I think I’ll make the whole thing deep house with spoken word.

You’re not meant to focus on the words.

Part II will follow.

Not sure how many parts there’ll be.

Enjoy.

Today is Saturday.

Tomorrow… I wonder what will happen on the Zoom call.

Don’t you?