Episode
E9: I've Been Waiting; S6: Godot Has AIDS (Shocking Truth Revealed)
- Podcast
- Danger, Vicious Dog
- Published
- May 20, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 1172
- Processing state
not_requested
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Summary
This episode begins with mania, wanders through geopolitics, Tesla crumple‑zones, revenge fantasies, AIDS grief, gay AA in Palm Springs, MIDI sequencers, erotic electrocution anxiety, and a dying cowboy in a Speedo who just wanted someone to sing harmony with him before he disappeared from the earth. So, naturally, it becomes a love story about tenderness. Human beings are disgusting little miracles like that. This is not nostalgia. Nostalgia sands edges. This episode leaves the razorblades in. At 24, the author falls briefly and intensely into orbit around Rodney Archuletta: beautiful, doomed, improvisational, electrically inclined in ways absolutely nobody requested. A man dying in the early 1990s with enough openness left to hand someone his lyrics and say, essentially: Here. Maybe this can survive me. And because the universe enjoys emotional vandalism, the lyrics are good. Not “good considering.” Just good. Earnest in the terrifying way earnestness becomes when death is sitting openly in the room eating complimentary peanuts from the motel minibar. So the episode keeps circling a question: What do we owe the dead strangers who briefly let us see them clearly? Apparently: sometimes a podcast episode thirty years later. Sometimes a reconstructed synth‑pop duet recorded on primitive gear while America was busy treating queer men like biohazards in tank tops. The result is weirdly gentle. Not soft. Gentle. There’s a difference. One survives impact. And beneath all the jokes about electric‑fetish gadgets and cowboy thighs and the metaphysics of shocking somebody in the nuts—a sentence I resent typing—there’s this unbearable little core: Someone was afraid. Someone wanted to be loved before he vanished. Someone waited for a future he probably suspected he would never re…