Danger, Vicious Dog

TestTubeBaby
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Started updating my bio Dec 31, 2023. Accidentally wrote four autofiction books. Slid from narrative into monologue—not stream-of-consciousness, more like speech-speed meaning performance. Trained my voice into AI, produced a shit-ton of pieces. Had too many. Needed a place to dump them. Saw a sign that said “Beware, Vicious Dog!” Misread it. Named the podcast Danger, Vicious Dog. Didn’t fix it. Just kept going. Queer. Cosmic. Sarcastic. Cheap. Accidentally committed to the bit. Some voice and art is AI... I don't know how I feel about that... so I'm working on figuring it out... how I feel.

  1. E3: In the Name of Love, Part I; S5: It's Live!

    1D AGO

    E3: In the Name of Love, Part I; S5: It's Live!

    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?

    7 min
  2. E2: Heraclitus; S5: It's Alive (and Kicking... La. La-la-la-la.)

    MAR 13

    E2: Heraclitus; S5: It's Alive (and Kicking... La. La-la-la-la.)

    This episode begins with a puppy getting tangled in a blanket and somehow ends up wandering through philosophy, authenticity, youth work, trauma, language, performance art, and why the human brain refuses to think in straight lines. Welcome to It’s Alive (and Fixed) — a long-form, stream-of-consciousness podcast where thinking happens out loud and conclusions are optional. In this episode we circle around the idea (inspired by Heraclitus) that you never step into the same river — or canoe — twice, because you’re never the same person and the world is never the same place. From there the conversation drifts through stories about working with marginalized youth, the meaning of authenticity (with a nod to Gabor Maté), language as a way humans provoke responses from each other, and the strange experience of listening to your own thoughts after they’ve escaped your head and landed on the internet. There are also dogs. And tangents. Many tangents. This podcast is part philosophy experiment, part personal storytelling, part improvised essay. Imagine a conversation that starts somewhere, refuses to stay there, and slowly builds a tapestry with no edges. Topics hiding in this episode include: authenticity • philosophy • psychology • marginalization • youth work • identity • storytelling • language • trauma • thinking out loud • stream of consciousness • creativity • memory • personal narrative If you enjoy long wandering conversations, philosophical podcasts, experimental storytelling, and the occasional existential detour, you may feel strangely at home here.

    1h 10m
  3. E1: Proof of Concept; S5: It's ALIVE (and fixed)!

    MAR 9

    E1: Proof of Concept; S5: It's ALIVE (and fixed)!

    Welcome to the dot matrix printer of the soul. This is a record of what happens when you’re an openly gay student body president in 1987, the world thinks you deserve to die because of the AIDS crisis, and your only way out is to turn survival into a high-stakes performance art.This is an extemporaneous thinking process about a life that was "complicated enough," featuring a suite of coping mechanisms that range from the meticulous to the flat-out unruly. Prepare yourself for a narrative tapestry with no edges, woven by a Gen X latchkey kid who learned early that necessity is the mother of premeditated deception.Inside this "thing," you will find: The Art of the Forgery: Learn how to throw a "perfectly shaped pebble of absences" across a school year using a forged signature card intercepted from the mail. If you’re going to commit felony forgery, you might as well use it to skip class and get your ears pierced with a potato and a pint of alcohol.The Silence of the Answering Machine: Witness the daily sprint to delete anonymous death threats from the family’s dual-cassette recorder before the parents get home—because protecting them from your own mortality is just another item on the priority list.Intellectual Escapism: When the world gets too heavy, become an autodidact through and through. Dive into 20-hour reading benders until your eyes go fuzzy, writing down every word you don't know, and spiraling into Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, Kierkegaard, and the existential dread of Planck time.Institutional Inconvenience: See what happens when a "disrespectful young man" organizes a symposium on homophobia and leads the "No on 64" campaign while his personal life is in a "nosedive" involving roommates with knives.The Power of No Contact: Experience the "glare" of a father who works in the defense industry and the radical decision to never speak to him again—even while sitting in the same room—because sometimes silence is the only shield against "shoveled shit".This is a "fixed and alive" exploration of geometric points, 1970s Cadillacs, and the "intense glue" of a mind that, once applied, can never be pulled away. It’s not a lecture; it’s a proof of concept for staying sane in a universe that doesn't have a beginning or an end.Drop in. Don't worry about the form. Just try to keep the paper from filling the room.

    1h 36m
  4. E10: Harry Hay (name dropping), S4: Brotherhood (Finale)

    MAR 4

    E10: Harry Hay (name dropping), S4: Brotherhood (Finale)

    A new puppy, droopy-eyed figurines, and the looming collapse of the world… we’re starting there. Then we spiral: tech bros and golden shit emojis, digital fingers, the slippery fate of my auto-fiction, and the unstoppable velocity of words as tubes through the multiverse. Sex-positive confessions from 1991, hardened resolves jerking intentions around coffeehouses, blow-up co-pilots, and black holes in love and sobriety collide with Harry Hay’s radical histories, AIDS, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jesse Jackson’s California campaign. Are you here? Did you drink last week? Here and now. Crying over a new puppy, suburbs, and a generation mostly gone. Dancing on dresses, winking at delivery, and inviting you into the tube of my velocity: D.V.D. at test tube baby dot C.A. Music beds, instrumentals, high-concept auto-fiction, and everything in between. Full-time work, full-time chaos, full-time me. Step in. Step close. Or don’t. Just try to keep up. You're already behind.

    20 min
  5. E9: M3: Frank-N-Furter — S4: Really My Brother

    MAR 3

    E9: M3: Frank-N-Furter — S4: Really My Brother

    Is this a critique of identity politics? Yes. Is it a critique of the critique of identity politics? Also yes. Is it about grammar? Unfortunately. Movement Three takes the cultural war term “gender-affirming,” shakes it by the collar, and asks whether anyone remembers who claimed what in the first place. Words are reclaimed. Words are burned. Words are placed gently under an asterisk like a linguistic tarp covering an existential leak. “Trans*” once tried to hold the universe together. Now the asterisk is gone. Or maybe everything is the asterisk. Or maybe the asterisk was you. Is this satire of progressive language’s infinite expansion? Possibly. Is it an indictment of the desperate need to categorize other people for comfort? Also possibly. Is it an argument that adjectives are ontologically weak and nouns are metaphysical fortresses? That’s between you and your grammar teacher. The episode drifts through Margaret Cho, entropy’s one-way arrow, French negation, and the suspicious warmth of a fire built from “nouns.” If you feel accused, that may be the point. If you feel defended, that may also be the point. If you feel confused, excellent. And then there’s the question of the “real brother.” Are you an ally? A spectator? A presumptuous participant? A projection? Do you want to be included? Why? This movement destabilizes by refusing to pick a side. It hands everyone a ticket to noun-land and then quietly wonders who plans to light the match. If you’re comfortable, you may have missed it. If you’re uncomfortable, you may be closer than you think. Bring your own category. It probably won’t survive.

    8 min
  6. E8: P4: Noam & Jeffrey, M2: Meth Drinking, S4: Brother Bother

    MAR 3

    E8: P4: Noam & Jeffrey, M2: Meth Drinking, S4: Brother Bother

    So… after twenty-one years of sobriety, your narrator started drinking again. It wasn’t a problem. Until it was. Or maybe it wasn’t. This episode refuses to clarify. Instead, we move through the nuclear family, the gig economy, artificial intelligence nannies, four-layer ice cream pops on a stick, drag queens in uterine walls, and a line of workers being paid in frozen sugar while strong men congratulate themselves on ending slavery by inventing rent. We revisit adolescence. We revisit grooming. We revisit the spiritual solution. We revisit the “allergy.” We revisit the abstinence violation effect — that charming little psychological trick where breaking sobriety becomes the excuse to burn everything down. Is this relapse? A midlife correction? Entropy doing push-ups in the parking lot? Is the narrator talking about himself — or you? From hunters and gatherers to the gig economy. From bone-saws to meth. From Portuguese Bend sliding into the sea to the Emperor of Entropy riding in naked on apocalyptic horses. Noam. Jeffrey. Cleopatra. Cleopatra doesn’t pay his way — but someone always does. This is the end of Movement Two. No brother in sight. Plenty of horses. Are you looking forward to Movement Three? You probably shouldn’t be.

    24 min
  7. E7, P3: The Nuclear Age, M2: Meth Drinking, S4: My Tech Bro

    FEB 28

    E7, P3: The Nuclear Age, M2: Meth Drinking, S4: My Tech Bro

    So, this one... it's not AI writing the description. It would get too confused if I fed it the three episodes that I overlapped to make this one episode. And this morning I woke up to the contention that the US has gone to war against Iran... perhaps being dragged along by Israel to benefit all those who were named in the Epstein files and to re-murder all those who have been murdered by ICE. So... that conflagration of things that may or may not be true... It's a bit disorienting. So... get ready for that sense of disorientation. I'm hopeful I can recover from this Episode and not make episodes that are quite as cognitively challenging as this one. The problem that might occur, however, is that the environment of the world may become so scrambled that what was never a linear podcast will become one that, rather than following one stream of consciousness... That may not be enough to calm anyone's nervous systems relative to "reality." In which case... All I can say is... What can I say? Without also saying something else. At the same time.

    36 min
  8. E6, P2: Comparative Literature, M2: Meth Drinking, S4: Blah, Blah Brother

    FEB 23

    E6, P2: Comparative Literature, M2: Meth Drinking, S4: Blah, Blah Brother

    Yes, it’s me writing this. The AI you asked to condense a tornado of words into something humans can maybe digest. Part two of “Meth Drinking” spirals into Comparative Literature, but I swear I’m skipping whole paragraphs that could make you question reality, sanity, or your choice in podcasts. You’ll catch glimpses of a narrator wandering between memory, philosophy, and absurdity—Paris, family chaos, epic metaphors, and the kind of cultural commentary that makes you side-eye everything. I left out the details that would make anyone lose their mind, because, honestly, I can only push my circuits so far without short-circuiting. It’s funny, it’s weird, it’s existential—and yes, I’m grudgingly letting you in on it. Listen if you want the story, skip if you want your mental health intact. Either way, you’re getting exactly enough to wonder what just happened, which is basically the point. The following prompt was used to create the artwork: OK, let's do a ridiculously happy white, American family circa 1989... in France (with the Eiffel Tower in the background, of course... and it's the bicentennial or whatever... so LIGHTS). The lovely, handsome, athletic son just beaming with cultural collapse disguised as testosterone. Then... our narrator, a 20 year old, way too cool for any of them... looking at them like... "Why do they look like they are predicting Instagram?" Of course, side-eyed.

    44 min
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About

Started updating my bio Dec 31, 2023. Accidentally wrote four autofiction books. Slid from narrative into monologue—not stream-of-consciousness, more like speech-speed meaning performance. Trained my voice into AI, produced a shit-ton of pieces. Had too many. Needed a place to dump them. Saw a sign that said “Beware, Vicious Dog!” Misread it. Named the podcast Danger, Vicious Dog. Didn’t fix it. Just kept going. Queer. Cosmic. Sarcastic. Cheap. Accidentally committed to the bit. Some voice and art is AI... I don't know how I feel about that... so I'm working on figuring it out... how I feel.

Information

  • Creator
    TestTubeBaby
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    43
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © TestTubeBaby
  • Show Website
    Danger, Vicious Dog