If you're reading this before you listen to the episode, then you're definitely a keener.

Congratulations.

Or I'm sorry.

Either way, here's what you need to know so you can keep a few things in context, because there are some things said in the episode that are somewhat true, but not entirely clear. And keeners notice those things. Then sometimes they make a huff.

And if you've already listened and you're here because you thought, Wait. Some of that doesn't sound quite right, then hello again. This is also for you.

First: when I talk about evidence-based practice and practice-based evidence, I'm mostly talking about counselling, social services, community work, and other situations involving human beings who inconveniently refuse to behave exactly like the people in the study.

I am not talking about a compound fracture.

If your bone is sticking out of your leg, I would prefer the doctor not say, “Let's hold the evidence lightly and see what emerges.”

There are procedures.

Please use them.

Second: the U.S. Supreme Court case floating around in my memory is City of Grants Pass v. Johnson (2024). The Court did not make sleeping under a bridge illegal throughout the United States. What it did was rule that generally applicable public-camping laws are not, simply by being enforced against homeless people, unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. That gives state and local governments considerably more room to make and enforce those laws. (supremecourt.gov)

Third: the British Columbia case I am remembering is Abbotsford (City) v. Shantz (2015). Barry Shantz was a friend of mine. He's dead, and I'm still working up to telling you about him, apparently.

The actual order was narrower than what it will likely seem the version is that comes strolling out of my mouth. It protected overnight sleeping and temporary shelter in city parks, from 7 p.m. to 9 a.m. It did not order governments to provide toilets, garbage service, washing facilities, or all the other things that would make sleeping in a park remotely workable. The judge did, however, strongly discuss the need for things like proximity to services, somewhere to eat and wash, hygiene, warmth, rest, and shelter. He also left governments room to regulate which parks could be used. So there is an important difference between what the court required and what the judgment strongly suggested a minimally humane system would need. (bccla.org)

There.

The keeners have been serviced.

As for the rest of you, I don't know why you would even be reading this.

Do I really give a shit about keeners?

Or non-keeners?

I mean, clearly I'm a keener.

Aren't I?

That's what my memory tells me.

And my memory loves me.

A Treatise Toward a Unified Theory of Cognitive Topology, Relevance-Weighted Complexity, and the Ethical Non-Occupation of Other People’s Brains

Suppose a thought is not a line.

Suppose it is a network.

Suppose the things that keep returning are not necessarily the things you think about most, but the things connected to the greatest variety of other things. Not magnitude, then, but complexity. Not importance because everyone is looking at it, but importance because from there you can go almost anywhere.

Certain ideas become gravity wells.

Certain memories become transit hubs.

Certain writers, categories, embarrassments, theories, bodies, addictions, books, conversations and half-understood fragments of French become unusually dense objects in a private cognitive universe.

Release the marble and see where it goes.

Do not push it.

Do not tell it what the subject is.

If the landscape has been shaped by enough living, reading, touching, avoiding, remembering, forgetting and accidentally learning things, the marble may eventually find somewhere that matters.

A brief correction to the historical record before somebody builds an entire explanatory structure around a joke:

My father did not sneak me into a snuff film.

That would be ridiculous.

He did, however, take me to The Kentucky Fried Movie when I was a child, which was strange enough that somewhere in the resulting cognitive weather I developed the idea that becoming a porn star might be a perfectly reasonable future career.

I was very young.

That is all the information you need.

Another correction, because stories have an irritating tendency to become cleaner every time they are repeated:

I did not simply fail to attend the Sorbonne because I was incapable of French. I ditched the Sorbonne because they were going to put me in a basic French class, and I had already decided I was going to learn the language very quickly by myself.

And then I did.

After roughly two months in Paris, I came back to USC and tested into sixth-year French.

My principal laboratories had been beds, bars and bathhouses.

Make of that methodology what you will.

This may also explain why a mind benefits from being treated less like a filing cabinet and more like a biome. Introduce things. Let them take hold. Do not necessarily cultivate them into monocultures. A useful idea should have neighbours. Predators. Competitors. Mutations. Escape routes.

Study something too completely and you may accidentally make it the explanation for everything.

Study nothing at all and, well, good luck.

Somewhere between those two possibilities is a practice of allowing ideas to enter, connect, reproduce, decay, cross-pollinate and occasionally become enormous invisible objects around which other thoughts begin to orbit.

This is not a unified theory of consciousness.

That would be an absurd amount of work.

It is, at most, a small transplant from one mental biome into yours.

If any of this sounds interesting, you are welcome to go find out more about network pruning, complexity, reification, cognition, Foucault, addiction, biomes, gravity wells, autodidacticism, language acquisition, narrative construction, or whatever else has attached itself to the inside of your skull while reading this.

You will have to do that yourself.

I am not in the business of taking over your brain.

I have given you this little bit of biome.

You should be happy with that.

For this description, I’m just going to describe some things.

You tell me what category they belong in.

Taking off some or all of your clothes and rubbing your skin against someone else’s skin until something inside one or both of you squirts out.

Putting part of your body inside part of somebody else’s body and moving it back and forth because the movement feels good.

Putting your mouth on somebody’s skin. Moving your mouth around. Maybe using your tongue. Maybe doing exactly the same thing to a part of their body that, under different circumstances, would make everyone in the room suddenly become very serious.

Lying next to another human being while mostly naked and touching them in places usually covered by clothing.

Using your hand to repeatedly move somebody else’s skin around until their muscles tighten, their breathing changes, and then they become extremely relaxed.

Putting your face between somebody’s legs.

Letting somebody put their face between yours.

Making noises because another person is touching you.

Touching yourself while another person watches.

Watching another person touch themselves.

Two people sweating because they have been moving their bodies against each other for twenty minutes.

Three people attempting to determine where all the knees should go.

Someone saying, “Ow, move your elbow.”

Someone saying, “Like that.”

Someone saying, “Not like that.”

Someone asking, “Are you okay?”

Someone answering, “Yes.”

Someone laughing because a body made a noise neither person was expecting.

Someone stopping because their leg cramped.

Someone continuing after the leg cramp.

Someone rolling over.

Someone getting a towel.

Someone wondering where their underwear went.

Someone finding it underneath the dog.

A penis becoming larger because blood went into it.

A vagina becoming wetter because a body responded to stimulation.

A nipple becoming harder.

A heart beating faster.

Skin becoming flushed.

Muscles contracting.

Breathing getting irregular.

Then, quite often, people getting sleepy.

Sometimes nothing particularly dramatic happens at all.

Sometimes everybody involved decides halfway through that they would rather order food.

These are all just things human bodies can do with other human bodies.

Some involve pleasure. Some involve affection. Some involve curiosity. Some involve reproduction. Some involve intimacy. Some involve absolutely no emotional significance whatsoever. Some are funny. Some are boring. Some are awkward. Some are transcendent. Some are disappointing. Some require impressive flexibility. Some mostly require a towel.

And somehow we decided that a particular collection of these movements, fluids, noises, sensations and arrangements of limbs needed a category unlike almost every other human activity.

Sex.

Not touching.

Not playing.

Not exercising.

Not communicating.

Not pleasure.

Not bodies doing things with other bodies.

Sex.

A category important enough that merely mentioning who somebody loves can cause other people to imagine what that person does without their clothes on.

So that’s what I’m wondering about in this episode.

What exactly have we put inside this category?

Why does it deserve a category of its own?

And what happens once we give it one?

An extemporaneous monologue, except when it isn’t. A walk home from work becomes an argument with moral distress, THC, AI narration, editing, and the suspicion that what feels like reality may only be the culture currently surrounding you.

Then Bette Midler appears—or, more precisely, the Bette Midler who performed beside a piano at the Continental Baths before the wider world decided she belonged to it. The bathhouse matters here not as a charming origin story, but as evidence: places dismissed as marginal may already be producing the center.

There are offshoots involving Barry Manilow, The Rose, Leonard Cohen’s “Chelsea Hotel #2,” clickbait, the Stork, and the increasingly questionable meaning of “extemporaneous” once transcription, revision, and a synthetic voice become involved. The seams are left visible.

This may be about working shit out before THC. It may be about whether that distinction is even as clear as it sounds.

It may seem fairly strange that Pee-wee Herman is on the cover of this episode—especially after you listen and discover that the episode is not, in any meaningful sense, about Pee-wee Herman.

Pee-wee is there because much of the episode circles around a euphemism I invent for masturbation: cosmic activity. The association arrived because Pee-wee had his secret word, and I apparently needed a secret word of my own before I could begin talking about something we are all supposed to pretend is either medically embarrassing, morally significant, psychologically revealing, or simply not happening.

Even with the euphemism, I didn’t quite get where I wanted to go. I got near it. I could see it. Then I became afraid of going there and started moving sideways. In another episode, I do go there. So this episode is a bridge to that one.

It is a fairly long bridge.

It has many, many off-ramps.

Those off-ramps pass Ned Rorem, aging, art, plumbing, pleasure, shame, AIDS, AA, grooming, memory, Harry Hay, complicated elders, and the problem of telling the truth about people who offered something valuable while also being profoundly wrong. Ned Rorem functions less as the destination than as a nearby gravitational body, pulling everything slightly out of its expected course.

The opening song asks what it means to leave the bad part in: not to turn biography into a fan club, but also not to flatten a complicated person into a monster so we can stop thinking. The monologue then tests that principle by wandering through pleasure, fear, influence, survival, and the strange machinery by which a person attempts to say something while also avoiding saying it.

Some of the off-ramps may appear to go into a black hole.

If you believe that, then you know nothing about a black hole, because a black hole would fucking eat everything: the bridge, the off-ramps, Ned Rorem, Pee-wee Herman, the cosmic activity, the person describing it, and eventually you.

Content includes candid discussion of masturbation, grooming, adolescent sexuality, AIDS, addiction and recovery, self-harm, and Harry Hay’s support for NAMBLA.

There is not actually a drag queen in this episode. Or, more precisely, Gary—the man in the final song who takes the children out in his old van to find the tadpoles—was not originally described as a drag queen. I made him one for the artwork.

This probably needs to be said because I don’t want the picture to operate as bait. Also, she has very believable tits. Some people may therefore assume she is simply an eccentric woman, except that MALE DEADBEATS HAVING FUN is printed directly over her head.

And some of the people who might relate most strongly to this episode may see a drag queen and immediately decide that it is not for them. I know that. I put her there anyway.

The picture is not meant to suggest that the episode is about drag queens. Gary is not standing in for drag queens. Gary is a character in a song who owns an old van, provides sandwiches, knows where the tadpoles are, can repair a terrible mood, and has apparently been assigned to laughter, snacks, and keeping Grandpa company. Making him a drag queen just pushes the question a little harder: What makes somebody look useful? What makes somebody look responsible? Why do certain kinds of care become almost invisible when they are performed by someone who does not resemble a provider?

This episode started because I heard myself saying that men and women should get along better for the sake of children. It sounded reasonable. Then I noticed how much was hiding inside “reasonable”: the nuclear family, the provider, the deadbeat, the private household, and the assumption that every child’s needs must be contained inside one exhausted little economic unit.

So I tried to correct myself with a song. The song was too earnest. Then I tried again from the perspective of the male deadbeats, and Gary arrived with his van.

This is partly about families, partly about corporations, partly about colonial arrangements that have become ordinary enough to feel biological, and partly about whether a person can be useful without turning that usefulness into employment, ownership, productivity, or a five-year plan.

It may also be about a drag queen with excellent breasts showing some children where the tadpoles go.

That is not nothing.

When I was a gay teenager in the 1980s, people threatened to kill me. Sometimes the threats came through the telephone my mother handed me. Nearly ten years later, even while visiting San Francisco, holding hands with my boyfriend could make strangers yell at us and make the street feel unsafe. Other people saw it happening. They generally remained bystanders.

But that’s not the end of the story.

What happens when an experience that once seemed enormous is placed beside dangers carried by somebody close to you—dangers involving kidnapping, disappearance, and a surrounding world organized by an entirely different scale of threat? The comparison does not make either experience unreal. It creates an awareness of unequal vulnerability that refuses to provide instructions for what to do next.

Why Not Me? follows that awareness into privilege, guilt, self-importance, technology, abstraction, and the peculiar human need to keep thinking after thought has lost any proportionate object of action. Perhaps awareness is not a moral achievement. Perhaps it is chemistry: a pattern-making nervous system searching for somewhere to run, now connected through a phone to every fire, injustice, and unfinished problem on Earth.

The episode eventually turns toward the institutions and algorithms that supply the wheel. They were not designed by a single mind, and they did not have to develop exactly as they did. They emerged from countless small choices, measurements, incentives, personalities, and accidents—then began changing the humans who were changing them.

Don’t feel bad.

Look at your phone.

Content note: Contains discussion of homophobic death threats, gun violence, kidnapping, the AIDS crisis, privilege, and public harassment.

Thank god I no longer get lost every time I sit down to type. Almost everything I do now is dictated. Not everything, though. I wrote the lyrics for a song yesterday... or maybe it was earlier today.

I don't remember. Anything. This episode's monologue was recorded, I think a couple weeks ago. Probably the song was done a week after that. Then today I added the two little book ends.

In case you'd rather experience them in chronological order, you could listen to the monologue first, then the song, then the opening and then ending monologues.

I'm not going to give you timestamps. You're the one who wants to do that, not me. I don't care if you don't.

An AI-generated podcast about this episode offered a remarkably flattering interpretation. It suggested that the monologue develops a model of boundaries in which a boundary is not an instruction for somebody else—it is information that tells you what to do when somebody else keeps pushing.

The narrator’s response was more or less: yes, obviously. That idea is old enough to feel ordinary from inside the life that produced it. But perhaps this is one thing AI can do: receive an unstructured human ecology and return one of its recurring patterns as though it were a newly discovered theory.

A prompt might be understood as a human biome—not merely an instruction, but an environment made from memory, appetite, humour, shame, history, language, self-correction, unfinished arguments, and whatever wandered into consciousness that day. Feed that biome to an AI and it will decide which organisms appear central. Feed the response back into the biome and something else starts growing.

In this case, what grows begins with a banana, an appetite, and a condition that was stated but not respected. From there, the episode moves through expression, self-policing, recovery culture, bureaucracy, personal values, and the difference between understanding why somebody acted harmfully and pretending that the harm therefore requires an excuse.

It also introduces a new AI voice. The algorithm may use it briefly. The algorithm has been informed of its boundaries.

Content note: Contains explicit sexual metaphor, discussion of coercive pressure, condom negotiation, HIV/STI risk, emotional manipulation, threatened self-harm, addiction recovery, and the AIDS crisis. And this is the only time I will say this. I will never say it again. Every single episode of my podcast (except the ones that don't) needs this content note.

Wow, I'm almost a serious scholar with a very entertaining presentation style. And the tension between the two... that's what I'm teaching.

We need information to locate ourselves in the world, but information has to hold our attention long enough to reach us. Distress becomes narrative; analysis acquires rhythm; structural problems become compelling characters in an increasingly unmanageable story. Voluntarily exposing ourselves to what troubles us can then produce its own peculiar pleasure—not necessarily because we enjoy the suffering, but because attention, recognition, understanding, and entertainment have begun vibrating together.

This episode tries to interfere with that vibration without pretending it can escape it. If you find yourself enjoying the presentation, perhaps you can observe that enjoyment while it happens. Then you can become critical of it. Then, if things are working properly, you may notice the pleasure of being critical of your own pleasure—and become suspicious of that too.

Somewhere inside this recursion are questions about fairness, productivity, privilege, comparison, and what an equity lens reveals when it is turned toward the conditions that make one person appear more successful than another.

These aren’t even apples.