RERUN: The Rats are taking a much deserved recording break, please enjoy this episode from the back catalogue.

In this introductory episode, Samuel and Johanna explore their many indulgences toeing the line between self-care and self-harm, including (among other things) sex toys, weak white men, drinking as a national sport, smoking, full blown Burger King addiction and clinical inter-dependency.

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This week the rats acknowledge that they’ve had something of a hiatus, without offering apology. The world is coo coo crazy right now and if the most charismatic gutter-creatures in the southern hemisphere (ask anyone) feel like taking a break, then they’ll damn well do so, without seeking approval first. That’s how rats and narcoleptics roll. First up, the rats tackle the current feud between Sky Ferreira and Charli XCX, if only because talking about anything else at the moment (like the oil-slick creep of WW3, cabals of child-eating rapists, the unbearable bot-bullying of Chappel Roan) is just too much for the nervous system. Also, the rats discuss the difference between ‘organic community’ and ‘astro turf’, wondering aloud if they’ve missed their chance for belonging somewhere stable and good because of their priors (cough). And finally (while skipping a few erudite topics, for the sake of brevity) the rats grapple with the cosmically confounding, metabolically mysterious matter of Dog Shit, which (because dogs are so undignified that they eat literal shit) is like the shit of the very last human in the centipede, a substance so void of mineral and nutritional value that it sits somewhere between rocks and dust, but more putrid than both. That’s what you get when you’re a casual bottom feeder—clumps of anti-matter coming out of your rear end (and then, because you left your baggies at hime, its somebody’ else’s problem). It’s kind of a beautiful allegory for the current cultural ice age, really. Like whether it be movies or music or fashion or even literature, we seem to have lost any interest in chronicling ourselves with the adventure and majesty of previous eras. Either that or millennial eyes are just blind to an emerging art which only looks like a breaching turd in its early stages, and which will eventually be pushed out as a golden egg. Who can say.

Contemplate Charli XCX, Kabuki Theatre and K9 Excrement with us at patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

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The body keeps the score, and this week the rat-bodies are bedraggled, bewitched, bewigged, and decidedly simian. Which is to say, despite recent salmonella attacks (taking out both towers) the rats are present and ready to tour anyone who’ll listen through the jumble-bin of a week-in-review. Which includes; an objectively stellar idea for a dive bar named Throbs and Leaks which, having a backroom, does exactly what it says it does on the packet; the unbearable lightness of Intellectual Property; the necessity of strategic self starvation when bottoming frequently, and the dysmorphia-adjacent pitfalls of doing so; the necrotic pull of reality television as an Only Fans pipeline (becoming more and more attractive as our government reveals itself as increasingly hostile towards anyone with less than a billion in savings); the abusive relationship most of the country has with KFC (because the colonel is a cruel taskmaster with little regard for your colon, hates it in fact); the architectural grandeur of cum gutters; and, as always, the profundity of corporeal being with its fixed duration and the sometimes incomprehensible fact that death will eventually come for us all, even if we cannot envision it right now because life seems so deceptively stable day to day, despite the geopolitical nightmare we all currently reside in, and the looming impossibility of a gas crisis whose fetid edges we’re already experiencing, hurtling towards the storm’s leering eye of public transport and excessive cardio.

Yes, it’s an exciting but trying time to be alive and while everything we’ve ever known starts splitting down the middle you could argue there’s no better place to be than right here in the gutter, because at the very least, when the seas rise and fire starts falling from the sky and Jojo Siwa unleashes a plague of new singles (we hope not) we’ll be together.

Throb and leak in our backroom at patreon.com/RatsInTheGutter

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