Danger, Vicious Dog

TestTubeBaby
  • 5.0 (1)
  • Improv

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. 1h ago

    E4: Ned Rorem Black Hole Puckering During Pee-Wee’s Cosmic Activity; S13: Once You're Happy in Tennessee Williams, You'll Never Be Happy Again, Even In Perez Hilton Leaving Las Vegas

    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 f*****g 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.

    E4: Ned Rorem Black Hole Puckering During Pee-Wee’s Cosmic Activity; S13: Once You're Happy in Tennessee Williams, You'll Never Be Happy Again, Even In Perez Hilton Leaving Las Vegas

  2. 1d ago

    E3: Male Deadbeats Having Fun; S13: Is Gary a Drag Queen or a Trickster?

    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 t**s. 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.

    E3: Male Deadbeats Having Fun; S13: Is Gary a Drag Queen or a Trickster?

  3. 5d ago

    E2: Why Not Me? S13: Kidnapping, Let's Laugh. It's Chemical. Don't Feel Bad. Look at Your Phone.

    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.

    E2: Why Not Me? S13: Kidnapping, Let's Laugh. It's Chemical. Don't Feel Bad. Look at Your Phone.

  4. 6d ago

    E1: I'm a Teenage Boy and I Can't Stand Up at the Social Work Conference; S13: You Can't Go Home Again

    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.

    E1: I'm a Teenage Boy and I Can't Stand Up at the Social Work Conference; S13: You Can't Go Home Again

  5. 6d ago

    E10: Reincarnated Bananas; S12: New AI Voice (Boundaries: For the Algorithm, F**k You!)

    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.

    E10: Reincarnated Bananas; S12: New AI Voice (Boundaries: For the Algorithm, F**k You!)

  6. Aug 15

    E9: These Aren’t Even Apples; S12: Notes Toward an Increasingly Unmanageable Equity Lens, If You Enjoy This—Fuck You! Love, The Anthropologist

    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.

    E9: These Aren’t Even Apples; S12: Notes Toward an Increasingly Unmanageable Equity Lens, If You Enjoy This—Fuck You! Love, The Anthropologist

  7. Aug 15

    E8: Being Forced; S12: Being. Forced.

    What happens when memories formed before language are examined using categories learned much later? This episode approaches pleasure, shame, fantasy, intimacy, and childhood experience as charged material rather than settled evidence. It asks how words such as sexual, innocent, dangerous, wanted, and forced organize memories—and whether imagining force can sometimes provide distance from a desire that once felt impossible to claim. Recorded as an experiment in speaking without an audience, Being Forced is less a conclusion than an attempt to notice what moves when language is dropped into difficult internal terrain. Content note: Contains explicit discussion of sex, childhood bodily exploration, coercive and violent fantasy, shame, and childhood experiences involving adults.

    E8: Being Forced; S12: Being. Forced.

  8. Aug 15

    E7: Squirrel with a Flag and Ration; S12: A Helicopter Assist Would Be Really Helpful (Unless You're A Nurse)

    A walk through a park begins with an ethical problem: can you warn someone about an association without giving them the association in the process? From squirrels and rescue helicopters, the monologue wanders through healthcare, public anger, survival, drug use, professional authority, and the endless track humanity keeps building beneath itself. Along the way, an ordinary animal becomes a possible way of remaining aware of an overwhelming world without having to consume the news every day. This is an episode about attention, responsibility, associative thought, and how much reality one nervous system can reasonably be expected to carry. Content note: Contains frank discussion of climate disaster, suicide, HIV/AIDS, sex, incarceration, and drug use.

    E7: Squirrel with a Flag and Ration; S12: A Helicopter Assist Would Be Really Helpful (Unless You're A Nurse)
See All (124)

Ratings & Reviews

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
    2026
  • Episodes
    124
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © TestTubeBaby
  • Show Website
    Danger, Vicious Dog