No Country

On this episode, Kris and JDO talk: Uneasiness at work, the notion of time passing, teachers moving on, how to create amazing life stories, working on fishing boats in the North Sea. What is the psychology of someone who chooses to be homeless? How are some people built for adventure and others aren't? Japanese cholos, psychotronic imagery, syncretic religions, and abandoned asylums. “Memory is what's happening when you're not forgetting.” Looking to other world traditions for a way forward. The beauty in imperfections. The importance of aesthetics is not what you think. What's blue and smells like red paint? The Christian Reformation was the most significant thing to happen to the Western World. Modern myths are the fertile ground of modern morality. JDO explains Berserk to Kris. Female- and male-centric energy in mythos. The connection between Maimonides and Spinoza. JDO draws dead phones. Reverse the steps. Tang tonguelers. The oscillation between immersive storylines and passive experiences in dreams. The ghost disease of language. Emblematic strength.

On this episode, Kris and JDO break down a lot of the overly-complex cultural conversations to a brutally simple (but not easy) question: why can't we just be courteous to each other? We also talk about “rewilding” social situations, keeping things fresh, and not taking people for granted. Bringing back the sacred. What does it mean to a child when their parents are too involved in their phones to talk to each other, let alone the child? JDO is given an imaginative challenge as a gender swapped John Wick, and we discover the ultimate hack for writers' block. Revising opinions on art. (This episode was recorded before the Kent Axell episode, but JDO wanted to get that one out ASAP. Same thing for the next episode.)

We have a very special guest for this episode of Lost Xplorers. The great Kent Axell, Vegas stage magician and all-around cool guy, joined us to chop it up. On this episode, we talk about the different types of magic, paranormal phenomena, the writing process of a magic routine, James Randi's Million Dollar Challenge, the need for mystery in These Capitalized Times, choosing to believe, and the creative process. One of the most interesting conversations I've had in a while. Kent's a fascinating dude. If you're in Vegas, check out his show Ghost Stories. You can find out all the information you need on him via his website.

Kris and JDO talk about the strangness of passing time. JDO talks about the biggest viral scam he ever fell for. “Americans love nothing better than to be fooled.” JDO continues his path to becoming a cult leader by channeling Alan Watts. The strangeness of Florida. The World Weekly News as the ultimate American newspaper. What would an American Tory look like? Philip K. Dick vs. Alan Watts. There's something in the searching. We are all still children who want to stay up late at night. Speaking in metaphors. Degrees of compassion. Focused and tactical intimacy. Conversion is a drug. “Language determines the world.”

Red-headed robins, challenged by the weather, and Oklahoma mythology, including serial killers, mass murders, and werewolves. Imaginative subversion of the terrain. Students are not co-teaching. Two-headed chickens. A homeless freestyle rapper named Big Weiner. And from the notes of Kris Saknussemm: -Rapper 50 Cent, age 48 and trying desperately to look like a cartoon version of someone my students' age, says to his 12 million X followers, “It's almost over,” as in Humanity. This while he's embroiled in collateral flak from the federal investigations of Puff Diddy for sex trafficking, rape, domestic abuse, drugs, guns—the usual. And where did all the playground-sounding names come from? Puff Diddy. Charlemagne Tha God. Megan Thee Stallion. Strange mix of adolescence (if not childishness) and sexual perversion. -Sawfish. Improbable creatures that look like they were designed for sheer novelty. They're somehow going crazy and committing communal suicide in the shallow waters of Florida's beaches. Perhaps a strangely apt metaphor. -Weirdly echoed by parents (particularly white parents) in epidemic numbers seeking professionally certified diagnoses of their kids as being autistic, ADHD, clinically depressed, or neurodivergent. Why? In order to secure more time on tests like the SATs and ACTs. -Meanwhile, Harvard, the jewel brand in the Ivy League (and the pressurized Holy Grail of the test taking frenzy) sees the first drop in applications ever. Antisemitism and plagiarism scandals are credited as causes in the decline. The Harvard Corporation (note that term) has also come under legal fire for DEI discrimination against Asians, artificially promoting underqualified African American applicants—while it's been revealed that a disturbing percentage of white admissions are solely legacy based—children of alumni, faculty, and staff, who are in the main unable to compete outside the nepotism advantage. -On a broader, global scale, scientific experts from many fields debate the concept of the Anthropocene as umbrella label for the current era / epoch. But what no one ignores is that the Human Impact in question is viewed as entirely destructive. And on perhaps the principle of compounding interest, a great deal of the “damage” has occurred since the mid-20thcentury, which mirrors the rise of Environmentalism and green ideologies. Say one thing, do another. This inventory of Dysfunction could go on and on. We know. But like many curious and concerned thinking people today, you and I have talked about the Dysfunction often in terms of mass psychosis. A spiritual, psychological vortex-disease on the Cultural scale. I now wonder if the truth isn't conceptually much simpler. Let's take our sawfish death spiral despair as the emblematic end result of the ambient, atmospheric Dysfunction. If 50 Cent says world doom is at hand, what hope do sawfish have? Talk about a marginalized community. But what links these other crises (and so many more)? I'm coming around to viewing the “problem” as a fundamental collapse / erosion of Morality. Morale. Moral. How often do we connect those two notions? Are our problems today really all that complicated? Don't they in fact amount to people knowing what the right thing to do is and not doing it? Each of the above examples from recent news is about a failure of moral conscience and basic decency. Perversion arises from selfishness. We can break down or address each of these issues (selected from far too many others) in almost child-level moral terms. Many people (particularly NPR followers) now embody a genuine hatred of Humanity for our environmental destruction. Does this mean they're trying to live and consume more sensibly and sensitively? Nope. For the most part, they just complain about what governments and corporations are doing or not, while they go on consuming like it's 1999 or 1979. Ivy League schools, and now so many downstream schools, companies, and government departments know that DEI policies are inherently unfair, divisive, and illogical. Racism in the name of combatting racism? Victimology in the supposed service of reducing victimization? Doesn't work. Can't work. At the same time, admitting mediocre white candidates because of legacy loyalty is actually an advertisement of total failure in the institution's nurture of academic and intellectual excellence. How is it that legacy applicants are mediocre if Harvard is such an incubator of brilliance and achievement?  All of this is just disingenuous maneuvering for personal, political, and identity politics gain. It's in the realm of lying and cheating—basic morality. Nothing complex or clever about it. Same with parents (especially parents of underachieving white children) pleading to psychologists to designate their kids as Special Needs. Work the System, milk the System. Everybody else is. Could it be that our core problem at this point in history isn't nearly as interesting as technological mass delusion or a giant masquerade festival of psychosis? What if it's just moral sloth, devious self-interest, and everyday spinelessness? What if, as a Cultural community, we said, “Man up and try to be the best, humble, heroic leader in your house and in your neighborhood that you can be. There's honor in that. And you'll live longer.” Black millionaire and billionaire celebrities aren't doing black people at large any good. More black teachers, social workers, professionals, skilled tradespeople, and small business operators would. What if we eliminated all legacy advantage across the board? Radical individual meritocracy, as in sports? What if our activism regarding complaints and protest against corporations and governments turned to activism in our own habits and purchasing behaviors? What if we could tell the truth to each other? A good example might be: yes, there are key levels of society where females need to be encouraged and “empowered,” but there are also many levels where they wield far too much power. We need to bring back Morality and Ethics as essential…completely transcendent of any Right / Conservative frame, or Leftist rebellion. Hypnosis and Hysteria are more exciting than Hypocrisy—but mundane Hamburger Helper level hypocrisy is creating an Hypocracy. No, it's not nearly as cool a calamity as mass hallucination and simulated Matrix realities. It's really just Laziness Hard at Work. And as to the Left's exhaustingly shrill and repeated claim that Morality and Ethics can only enter in when the “playing field is level,” that's not a social belief system or program of coherent public policy—it's a secular religious mania that's so clearly not working as social program, only more mania will do. To me, the mania isn't as intriguing as I'd hope. More and more, it seems purely pathetic.

From the notes of Kris Saknussemm... Travel becomes Tourism. This Sacred - > Profane style degeneration is hardly an isolated phenomenon—in fact it might seem to be a Deep Algorithm. But I think the progenitors of the Tourism Age can to some extent be forgiven. It's fine to say now that they should've extrapolated—seen ahead to what large-scale, organized, budget-minded transportation of people around the world for the purposes of recreation or information, fulfillment of some kind—what that would mean. What impact. Think of Tahiti and Hawaii, Venice and Dubrovnik. Yellowstone National Park.) The problem is the Education has so much more to do with Tourism than with Travel—and has for several decades. Public Education tried to apply the values of Trade School (standardization, consistency, certification) to a Liberal Arts model…while wholesale abandoning the Trade School and apprenticeship streams. Meanwhile, Liberal Arts succumbed to customer service. Here's the concluding sentence of one of my students' analysis of the essay “The Loss of the Creature” by Walker Percy, which is as much about this theme / crisis as anything can be. “If you don't know the significance of William Faulkner, the story of Robinson Crusoe, the message within A Brave New World, or the man who discovered insulin, it may be very difficult to understand, and Percy's true message may never be revealed to a 21st century student.”

From the notes of Kris Saknussemm... We said last time that we were going to investigate further how the distinction b/w Travel and Tourism might help us understand what's happened to the project of national public Education in America. An odd proposition to some perhaps.      But I think this is easily done, although it's also easy to be very hard on Tourism. Travel can take many forms, but it's never crass. Tourism can't escape that tinge, that odor. Looking deeper, Travel suggests an openness to experience, a willingness to take risks, and to confront unexpected situations, even illness, violence, natural calamity, or falling in love. Tourism is precisely focused on at least managing risk, streamlining possibilities, reducing the unexpected, and delivering a consistent experience. Experience as Product (right off the conveyer belt).      This Sacred - > Profane style degeneration is hardly an isolated phenomenon—in fact it might seem to be a Deep Algorithm. But I think the progenitors of the Tourism Age can to some extent be forgiven. It's fine to say now that they should've extrapolated—seen ahead to what large-scale, organized, budget-minded transportation of people around the world for the purposes of recreation or information, fulfillment of some kind—what that would mean. What impact.      But they had no precedent—nothing on the scale that would emerge. They weren't far or deep thinkers and didn't claim to be. But while there was a lot of greed and foolishness (and still is), there were good intentions too. I believe some early Tourism champions genuinely thought that exposing ever more middle class Westerners to beauty, culture, and wonders around the world would do them good—and wouldn't degrade the points of interest, destinations, and ports of call. (In addition to the interesting philosophical questions involved, there are very practical physical matters of traffic congestion, inflated prices, resentful locals, and clogged toilets. The list is long, but think of Tahiti and Hawaii, Venice and Dubrovnik. Yellowstone National Park.)

From the notes of Kris Saknussemm... Temporary tattoos and the latest Oscar's night—two more examples of why we've entered the Post-Civilization Age. People who say the Oscar's have been in “decline” for quite a while are the kind of folks who wouldn't draw much distinction between Ted Bundy returning to have sex with a corpse three days after the murder, or three weeks. I maintain there's a difference. Moving along, it's struck me of late that there's a relationship between Education (public school system) and Tourism, which often goes unnoticed. We know there's a connection between Education and Travel. Travel is how humanity has educated itself about the human globe (and all this means), the planet Earth, and the larger world / universe we've been able to comprehend. All good. Tourism? Hmm, not so good. Why? What is the difference between Travel and Tourism? Many interesting people have tried to speak to this issue, including well-traveled writers such as Mark Twain, D.H. Lawrence, Somerset Maugham, Tennessee Williams, and Jack Kerouac—hell, the list goes on and on. What a great list. But it doesn't go that far back in time…because “tourism” in anything like the sense we mean it today really only fired up after WWII. Up to then, “travel” frequently meant adventure—both intentional and inadvertent. Calamity. Discovery. Decadence. Plunder. Escape. To be sure, the English fascination for a Tour of the Continent (Europe) was fashionable curriculum for the upper classes. But generally, Travel was a more eccentric endeavor. Hoity-toity or rough and ready. It was selective. A curious club. I've recently had my students read Walker Percy's wonderful essay “The Loss of the Creature.” It has a lot to say about reclaiming personal experience and sovereignty—and not sacrificing validation to a shadowy priest caste of so-called experts. It deals directly in the connection between Education and Travel or Tourism? So, taking my view that Tourism arises as an industry (and as a system of social values) post-WWII…isn't this about when the commitment to a fully national public school system takes off? I think before then, any sort of structured public education program was very porous and unevenly distributed even within states. More an idea than a system or a network. Is there a connection? What can the difference between Travel and Tourism possibly tell us about how the public education experiment is faring? Kris's music piece at the end is titled "Recurring Dreams."

FROM THE NOTES OF KRIS SAKNUSSEMM... If people haven't read Jung's work on Flying Saucers (as modern myth), I recommend it. I hadn't looked at it in some time, but I think it reads even better in this age of social media. He completely skirts the issue of “real” or “imagined,” and focuses on the sheer popularity of the mythology. This is the view I took of cargo cult beliefs when I was a failed young anthropologist in Melanesia. Real/Unreal misses the point if something is deeply vivid at the social level. Jung's short book makes a nice pairing with Randolph Stow's remarkable novel Visitants, which is set in the Trobriand Islands during a UFO-cargo cult crisis. Stow was a young patrol officer, and the book provoked a nervous breakdown of lifetime impact. You can see why. In something like Melville, the strangeness starts early, and then Stow takes you right off any map. To me, this strangely ties in with a larger phenomenon. Representation vs. Reality. Representation as Reality. It's interesting to me to note how far we have degenerated from Schopenhauer's ideas put forth in The World as Representation and Will. I think all forms of German idealism have a lot to answer for in Western thinking, but Schopenhauer had a lot more on his mind than we do today. Case in point. Google's Gemini AI image generator has recently caused a stir for ludicrous depictions of black Popes, black female Popes, black Vikings (although they look kind of cool), and images of the Founding Fathers as blacks and Native Americans (which rather contradicts the revisionist history program of today). The Right scorns the images as overzealous wokeness or outright historical misrepresentation. The Left dodges and weaves, and claims this is how stereotypes get broken down. The larger and deeper problem, however, is the notion that image alone is what counts. This isn't what Schopenhauer meant as “representation.” He meant a magical human capability of imagining all of existence. It was humancentric to be sure, but it was deep conceptually and structurally. Now what we mean is “optics.” Pure visual surface. We mean the artificial world of media and entertainment. Yet we know people aren't really fooled by this. Just frustrated. American black people know that one black President and a few millionaires and even billionaire celebrities don't equate to genuine structural change. How can this discordance not cause confusion and anger?

Today on the show we have a special guest: author/teacher Matthew O'Brien! We chat about the expat lifestyle, finding love through a language barrier, and the lives of people who live in the flood channels beneath Las Vegas. It's a great conversation. Matt is a fascinating guy. Here's his bio from his website, Beneath the Neon: Matthew O'Brien is a writer, editor and teacher/tutor who lived in Las Vegas for twenty years and is currently based in San Salvador, El Salvador. His latest book, Dark Days, Bright Nights: Surviving the Las Vegas Storm Drains, shares the harrowing tales of people who lived in Vegas' underground flood channels and made it out and turned around their lives. He's also the author of Beneath the Neon: Life and Death in the Tunnels of Las Vegas and My Week at the Blue Angel: And Other Stories from the Storm Drains, Strip Clubs and Trailer Parks of Las Vegas. Matt has taught at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Escuela Americana in San Salvador and is the founder of O'Brien Editing Services and Shine a Light, a nonprofit organization that provides housing, counseling and other services to the people living in the drains.

From Kris's notes: I take the view that visual Art begins at the crossroads of eyes and hands. A stick or a bone is good…dust mixed with water. Blood. It's a start. (With Sculpture, the question seems to me to be how does one escape? The whole world including open ocean is one vast sculpture park.) With music, hands and voice are the original party starters…splashing water. Two rocks would be handy. Maybe a blade of grass or a taut vine. (What's not a musical instrument?) Work from there. When it comes to Story however, then I reckon some serious cultural technology is required. Language. Repeatable fire perhaps. It's interesting to me that we have elaborate formal notions of Storytelling….and later endless pedagogies regarding the learned skill of Reading. It's very hard to find a guide to Storylistening. It's harder still to find the coherence of connection (satisfactory or not) between Storylistening and Storytelling that we have with Reading and Writing.

JDO gives his AWP trip. Lots of books sold! Many of JDO's ideas about how culture is were troubled by how cool everybody was. Is the negativity we hear online…just an online thing? Is there value in starting a collective rather than pursuing publication by an indie press or traditional publishers? The distinctiveness of Christopher Walken's accent…and Kris's. The disappearance of regional American accents, Korean accents, and British accents. Super Bowl ads…where is the Latino representation?  The American refusal to grow up is directly related to their fear of death. Or maybe their refusal to accept death. We talk about Taboo and Tom Hardy, and Hardy's secret rap career. The brilliance of Daniel Day-Lewis, and the troubles with an adaptation with J.G. Ballard's work. Super Bowl conspiracy theories. Usher's halftime show. America's tryhard lameness and sinister division. Are Americans inherently dishonest people? JDO's imaginative challenge gives him free reign to be as evil as he wants to be…but at a terrible cost. Receiving language from dogs. Where do the words we speak come from. More importantly, WHO do they come from? 

SHOW NOTES... We've been talking a lot about Education of late, and the insurmountable problem of getting kids interested in reading if they aren't already. Two clear thoughts have emerged.      One, I think the tired but all-too-accurate metaphor that American society is an Allegory of High School (jocks, cheerleaders, druggies and criminals in the making, nerds, and disaffected sub-groups, etc.) is becoming more concrete and congruent with each passing year. The only new element I see is the School Shooting. Telling.       But as I was thinking about reading in this context, I realized I don't recall learning to read myself very well. I vividly remember the discomfort of learning to handwrite (print and cursive). The pencils always seemed too big for my hands. What I do recall about early reading is that it meant Independence. I didn't have to rely on my grandmother or older sister. For me, reading was an expression of masculine self-determination—stepping out from the females who both dominated and positively directed my young life. How many people today would see reading as an expression of masculinity? How odd. Only a short while ago, our most important poets were men like James Dickey, James Wright, and W.S. Merwin. Those days seem long ago.      The second thought to reveal itself from this stream was The Bicycle. I used to ride my green Schwinn 3-speed to a bookstore in a strip mall to purchase the next Hardy Boy book I hadn't read. One rainy day, I realized I'd eventually run out of Hardy Boys…so I feverishly began creating my own deeply imitative series The Benton Boys. My real, private passion about writing came out of Fan Fiction. I openly borrowed characters. I just didn't want to run out of story.      I paid for the Green Bike myself…with the money I earned cleaning toilets and vacuuming floors for an industrial dry cleaner, starting at age 9. The job gave me more than $ and work ethic pride. It was a place to be after school in the strange days following my violent rape in 4th grade. The Green Bike was what I needed. The rape would never have happened if I'd had a bike. I made a major correction of reality. The Hardy Boys entered in…and then the Benton Boys. Reading + Green Bike = Independence.

SHOW NOTES...   Relaxed, deep sleep is perhaps the single best natural healing agent there is. If we wake slowly, there's still a profound vibration of nurture, if not immediate refreshment. But pattern is the key. The reliability of satisfying sleep is elemental to its satisfaction.      Consider this then. We live in a time increasingly characterized by sleep problems. Go to the appropriate aisle in any pharmacy. It's a big aisle. The problem is an epidemic—but not a pandemic. Yet.      But are sleeping problems seeping, and sweeping around the globe?      With a focus on Insomnia, but not excluding other sleep disorders (such as apnea, restless leg syndrome, nightmares, etc.), what if we asked this question: Is it possible that the simplest and yet most coherent and embracing explanation of Modernity is Trouble Sleeping?      Is this an oversimplification—or is it a sigilization? (Isn't Sigilization an interesting counter to Civilization?) -The Age of Trolls, the Age of Apps. Throngs of Dolls. Structures collapse. I'm afraid of the Death of Mythos…the overgrown abandoned Labyrinth. In Israel, they used to show porn films at drive-in-movie theaters. Big screen. Little known fact.      I'm afraid of a descent into nightmare without magic. Ceremonies degenerating into Spectacle. Incoherent rituals of violence. Not a visionary brutalism, full of geometry and High Ideals. Not a bestial, sensual hedonism of misguided Innocence and clichéd desires. No. A kind of barbed wire methamphetamine mutant amnesia. -My big concern with Education (and all that it represents in terms of class mobility) is the collapse of standards in the name of Diversity and Inclusion. The radical Left claims this is a misnomer, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Many go much further, believing the degradation of performance assessment is not only very real, and not merely collateral damage—it's their explicit goal. Cancel the Meritocracy. Everyone's a winner, baby.

FROM KRIS SAKNUSSEMM'S NOTES 1/23/24   Hidden Terrain… What appears to be mythic exhaustion—the Jungian Collective Unconsciousness turned to Dustbowl—may be a socially engineered fiction. Our psychological / mental health apparatus is dysfunctional and overwhelmed. All our approaches center on social-public behaviors. As several noted sex researchers lament, what incentive do people have to share their private psychic experiences honestly? Is it necessarily obvious that they can do this even they desired to do so? Meanwhile, imagination on almost every day-to-day level is discouraged. We find ourselves fixated on an aspect of Mind that is fundamentally limited, and in denial of one that must be at least provisionally viewed as unlimited. The result is a crisis-level imbalance between Logos and Mythos on the scale of Culture, where Logos has degenerated into a hyperspecialized (autistic) focus on Numeros: pure computational processing, and Mythos is cut off from Hypnos at the intimate personal level. Kerouac's “unspeakable visions of the individual” are now entirely in shadow. Outlawed. What we value is the visible-physical and performative. (Covid masks as iconic expression of our time). Imbalance + Corruption / Degeneration. Solution? The whole Lost Xplorers program celebrates a resurgence of Hypnos as a means to nourish and reinforce Mythos and to rehabilitate Logos by alchemizing Numeros back into its original position within the Family of Mind. I think it could be helpful to view the angst, distress, polarity, and violence of our age as a Family Problem writ large.

First day back teaching. Education of today no longer lines up with the needs of young people. What if education was project-based? Outdoors? Kris recounts his history with his Black Mountain Nemesis. Is there something wrong with the architecture of schools? The impossibility of convincing teenagers who don't like to read, to read. What's going on with the price of sandwiches? Kris's band for the day: THE LUXURIANTS! Radical wealth excess. A scathing attack on fandom. Is there any real cultural commentary going on anymore? Stores used to be hubs of underground fandoms. Those don't exist anymore. Kris and I talk about great bookstores. If there is an underground, Kris and I would love to be a part of them. Hidden algorithms and inherent structures. Is the way out through treasure hunting? Forcing people away from the gardens, from cultivation, is having disastrous consequences. We are turning away from ancient patterns of dreaming. Jack Kerouac called Charlie Parker “a creator of forms.” Who is creating forms now? JDO puts forward his idea of “lava lamp creativity.” How does a story actually form? It's worth creating a story in a group to find out. Where did the phrase “it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick” come from? Collective imaginative dreaming leads to lava bubble magic. Where things get fuzzy and immaterial, that is the realm of human dreaming and imagination. Hidden terrain, socially engineered fiction, and spiritual crisis. Dilbert and The Office as signals of the end. The rise of the middle management. What do these people do? Who knows? JDO delivers his mentor profile in the form of a short crime story. Taking care of yourself with the idea that you might have someone to take care of one day. Kris recalls Sonny Bono's PSA on drug abuse. “One day you'll be the older generation.” Kris muses on euphemism. Wondering what it would be like to live in the houses that you pass on the road. Enjoy nostalgia. Dream is the aquarium of night.

Snow on the mountains. Starting to teach Jurassic Park. The tallest novelist of all time. Crichton's most controversial novel. Was Crichton a good novelist? Trapped in the bathroom. Is the science ever settled? Harmful Content. Militant non-musicians. Compliance. Kris vs. The Looping World. Lost malls. Hunting for bookstores in a small town. The worst bookstore in the history of America. Return policies on dirty magazines. Osmos with the cosmos, or you will be socializing with a bureaucracy of ghosts. Sex positive interrogative counter-scientism societal utopianism. Indistinguishable news organizations. Garmonbozia pablum. Does Liberal and Conservative mean anything? Should we have a Women Party and a Men Party? People can't see anything from another point of view, but more importantly, they can't see their own point of view. Kindness as a placating sinister force. People get more feral the more “nice” the conversation gets. Giving people responsibilities. The Gold Bar Test. Cults are about structure. Preview of 2024. JDO's imaginative challenge brings him to Swift Current, where a man wheels a cross through town and a Chinese restauranteur has problems with his fake hand. The Harari Main Market. The chaos of markets, the harmony of trading. Looking closely at Mayan and Aztec societies. Hardy Boys cover designs. Reassessment of danger from the fear of serfs to a kind of danger you'd want to be a part of.

Kris and I get in the holiday spirit! Well, we start off cheery, at least. Learning how to reuse the internet. Crossing the Drake Passage. The Truth About Dinosaurs. Shout out Jay for putting me on to new ways to surf the web. Are you using your tools, or are your tools using you? Robot Santa Carnival of Blood. Kris has invented The Memory Game. Which game improves memory the most? JDO attempts to rank them. Intuition vs. memory. JDO's imaginative exercise leads to “Polycule Slaughterhouse.” JDO reads a new piece he's been working on. As above, so below. Kris takes us out with a great new piece of music, holiday-themed, called "3 Men on the Move."

We've got a slightly darker episode this time around. But there's lots of valuable insight to be had. Kris meets a magician named Kent Axell. Area 15 in Vegas. JDO vents about frustrations with adminstrators. Being a high school teacher is kind of like being Tyler Durden. Learning how to teach The Great Gatsby. The tragic figure of F. Scott Fitzgerald. A potluck band. Tribal music making. Bighorn sheep at the lake. Is the universe top-down or bottom-up? JDO shares his line art with Kris. BIG IDEAS! Where are we going in 2024? Kris tells a story about the time he saw a man jump off a bridge. This leads to a longer discussion about suicide and the mass shooting phenomenon as a form of suicide. People are seeking oblivion, although it might not look like you'd expect. Is social media driving teens to suicide? Society doesn't want to look at what is causing these mass suicides. The power of spooning. A little time by the river. Loneliness is killing society. People who are giant walking red flags. Sanity = the history of heresy. The inability to map the weather. Huntsman spiders. Climate as a huge idea. Take some responsibility! Have we reach a point of too much signal? There's no noise if you have dedication to something. We seem unable to protect cargo. Stewardship. The importance of honor. Meaning = decision/choice. Let things roll. Don't take so much control. Let natural cycles take hold. Fall into the groove. Don't accept scolds and nags. The hanged man where the chandelier should be. Dreams about you as the observer.

Look out for another new episode dropping on Saturday! Words of the year.  The etymology of authentic. JDO talks about getting a bunch of birthday cards. Visual novels. Mother Killed by Shark. Do You Know Where Your Parents Are? The inverse of a viking helmet. Pharrel's Dudley Do Right hat. What about all the good things cults have done? The strangeness of time. Every Wednesday is the same Wednesday. Going full Bartleby. The singularity of the scrivener. Why do we have to do anything? Yielding sovereignty. Imperative. Septic tanks in the country. Dunce cap questions are important. Extremists show us that we don't *have* to do anything. Acquiescence to the must. Chores we like vs. chores that we do. The satisfactory service of Chik-fil-A. The theory of logical types. Staying in the emblematic groove of our lives. Becoming a collective requires having your own agency first. Fascination with samurai and yakuza. Gatsby's dead-on commentary on class. Not fitting in with the upper-middle-class literary establishment. Every president tries to convince you that they were born in a log cabin they built themselves. JDO's imaginative challenge involves the personification of Tabbo. How can we take music to the level of sound? What does that mean for a whole range of things? Power is a problem.

Over the next few days, there will be a new episode of Lost Xplorers dropping daily! A Christmas miracle! JDO got a bit behind on the uploading during finals season at school, and it is time to catch up so our official Christmas episode drops around Christmas. It's officially Christmas season! Cheddar biscuits. Ultimate endless shrimp. Mcnugget boxes. Gas prices. On-the-street, at-the-drive-thru-menu level economics. The Undaunted. High lonesome cowboys wrapped in bandages into S&M. The hungry closet. Knowing vs. doing. JDO rapping Ice Spice in front of a huge audience. Practicing performance instead of memorization. Turning your eyelids inside out. DREAM STUDIES BREAKTHROUGH! Daydreaming vs. night dreaming. Dream determines depth, but does not distinguish between character and setting. Liminal spaces vs. the crossroads. Memories vs. memories of dreams. The inventory of waking life experiences that appear in dreams. Dream mandala. Watching your actions like a cat. History as proscriptive. Families sharing their dreams. The Fremont Street Circus. Naked nuns. Giant bears and giant salmon. JDO spins a yarn about Kris as a young child going over to a friend's house for Thanksgiving. The friend's mother presents a blue, cold turkey.

Kris and JDO record a Tascam episode! Walking and thinking. The Accelerants. Atomic age cartoon characters. Milestones vs. mileblurbs. What has happened to the holiday season reindeer? Undercover teacher. The Long Kiss Goodnight. JDO recounts his most recent move into an apartment. Mental illness invariably involves time distortion. Personal alignment vs. societal expectations. Blackout time. Stretched-out time. The schizophrenic is touched by God. Physically representing how old the dinosaurs are. Charles Knight's dino illustrations. Are dinosaurs fake?  As above so below. Depth as a category. Time running backwards. What does it mean to declare someone The Greatest of All Time? Sharing reference points. Mr. O. The conveyor belt of consumerism running backwards. How do people who live through their ecosystems perceive our conception of time? The attempted murder of the eternal soul. Stewardship. A fantasy world of non-physicality. What has happened to public parks? Between the Memory Palace and the Swamp…A GARDEN. Turning people into mermaids. Alertness and attention. Apologies for a few moments of startling distortion in this episode. The next episode, we are back to Zoom and it sounds crisp and fresh.

On this episode, we begin with a bullet-pointed takedown of Neil Degrasse Tyson. Then we talk scientism as an unstable foundation to build knowledge. Philosophy of science. All sciences are not created equal. The price tag of academic credentials. Bergson's Principle of Proving a Negative. Shutting down interesting ideas. Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The God of Evidence. A band made of biofeedback. Human beings as stewards of reality. The miniaturization of knowledge. Hologram vs. jpeg. The bombardment of facts from a complete idiot. Science that isn't about proving anything. Religion as the outsourcing of validation. Kris invents a completely knew paradigm of education. This might be one of his best ideas of all time. The education of the hands. Realistic responses to AI. South Korea, El Paso, and Taos. Borders always exist, a quantum state that wants the friction of two countries. Constructing sentences out of emojis. Our dependency on language. It's impossible to run over a pigeon. Becoming monster hunters of dream.

On this episode of the podcast, we invite our second guest (the first being Ellen) onto the show to discuss education. Lisa Sezate is a lifelong educator working in elementary schools, and she brings a unique look into that side of education. Kris teaches college, David teaches high school, and Lisa teaches elementary. Between the three of them, they have a wide ranging conversation about the definition of insanity, how to get kids' attention, cell phone policies, and how to explain to students when a career path might not be for them. Great episode. Thanks to Lisa!

"Courage borne out of Curiosity"   New segments and lowered sumo standards. Unexamined cultural phrases. Engaging with the unknown throughout the day. Giving credence to memory. Dedicated reading rooms and responsible education. Growing up on algorithm curated feeds. Ancient character divides (Ambush vs. Surprise). A self-fulfilling mass psychosis in the form of a band that's more of an urban legend. Being the masks on the wall. The extension of interiority. Grave site obsessions. Following the orthodoxies of belief. Minority Consensus. Outsourced Beliefs vs. Integrated Religions / Profane barriers vs. Sacred Engagement. Distributable Ignorance and the shifting vectors of Progress. Irreducible emblem act-outs. Manuscripts of flesh vs. empty algorithms. Humanizing the internet (logistical organisms). The distorted mirror of our creations. "Let go" moments. Triangulating Crisis Points. Crisistianity. Drinking libraries and isolated omniscience. Being vicarized in the "Vicarious Age''. Fire in the sink solutions. Emergent archetypal heroes for Now. James Dean's preserved cool and modern cautionary tales. Fine art lawn chairs and magic scrapbooks. Stepping outside of your own language. The different humors of nap dreams. Triangulating dream-tones. Finally, we wrap up with some kitchen sink psychoanalysis.   Thanks to Nick Searfoss for the synopsis!

A little grumpy luminosity at the dermatologist. Some Lake Mead diving magic. Nominal Strangers and the Agents of Synchronicity. The Doppelzüngig. The sanctity of Good Shelter. Making sense with mondegreens and celebrating ghost stories. A billionaire manufactures thought contagion music with "Spanky Hanky". Seeding culture; paving paths. Crotch Level Wisdom (Romance & Lust). Famous Ghosts and Transparent Presence. Mutating villages in contaminated civilizations. Hideos cliches in the Impotent Empire. The ancestral / animistic voice within the monkey impulse. God as Anthill. Reconceiving where you come from.    Conversational speculation or speculative conversation? In Real-Time Travel. Ancient mollusks of flowing possibility. Leveraging the "Spearthrower" and the leaping spirit-mind-rhythm. Taking "The Wheel" for granted. Rediscovering your Origin Magic within the Living Duality. Bergson's idea of "negation" and the space between the notes (foreground & background). Cow Sense Field Test. Inference & Imagination as the dark heart of humanity. Inference as the universal test of intelligence. The Depth of Ignorance vs. The Structure of Knowledge. Reclaiming negation.    Then David gives us a fluid filled vore comedy with hints of Godzilla meets American Pie for the film "Big Girl Panties." Persecuting randomness and keeping records on yourself. Spending more time investigating. Making monkey bread. Being a generous spirit. David closes out with a tornado twisted metal traffic dream that becomes a thriller-revenge adventure.   Thanks to Nick Searfoss for the summary!

On today's episode we're getting attention while gaining traction and forming a humble rapport between audiences in a dead age. Having 3500 years of material to sift through. Absorbing news tangentially. Nostalgic lyric-memory messages. Maintaining a harmonic congruence with reality. Being hyped on ambient anxiety. The perverse side of heroism. Surfing waves of momentum. The Raw (sacred) vs. The Cooked (profane). Oblique phrases from the Deep and one of Kris' darkest band contributions yet.   The Line as the ultimate human invention. The sequencing of Thought & Time. Spiral strategies and expanding shamanically. The importance of making multidimensional map-ceremonies. The Dark Swamp Hero. Map = Guide. The validation of rapport. The Counterintuitive. The denial of distance through engagement. Breaking the time signatures. The silence of melody; the surprise of harmony. The Human Scaffolding vs. The Jellyfish Grid. Intuition vs. Instinct. Proto Hippie Islands. The metaphysics of being in the wrong body. Entering The Illogic. The disavowed sides of history. Extended Dream-Existence. Bowling in Maya. The Profound Vacuum. Resonating with personal algorithms. Chasing Atoms.    On to being skeptical towards presumed assumptions of certainty. Rediscovering fundamentals through amateur eyes. Rerouting the curious ghost hunter. We have a brief corn chip intermission. Then the dark prolapse ballad of "Slippery Chicken". Rubber room storytelling. Moving across time frames into time maps. Packaged Dimensionality vs. Kaleidoscopic Vacuums. Approximation vs. Proximity. Maple Syrup Bootleggers and Nonlinear Dingo Symbols.

From Kris's notes: I wonder if an analogy for what lies between the private consciousness-structuring agencies we've presented as the Memory Palace and the Swamp (the wilderness of All the Things Someone Doesn't Know) can be found in the Tent Cities and Homeless Camps we see today in almost every American metropolis? -Memory as species of Hallucination. I don't see how this position can be entirely dismissed or circumvented. -Rethinking Heizer's CITY as an Inverse Memory Palace?? -Begin Xplore of the Counterintuitive…the bizarre, murky notions of Instinct, Intuition, and the perhaps oxymoronic notion of Human Nature.

Getting in tandem with psychomagnetic rapports and poignant quietudes. A bit of Freudian-Quaalude lounge music with the band HypnoLiquid Motion. Tonal give-aways. Cleopatra Denial Syndrome vs. Resonant Harems. The admission of denial and denial as admission. Being the steward of your inverted Memory Palace. Being in charge of your psychic constructs and heralding your unknown terrain. Balancing Integration and Insinuation. The Allegory of the Theremin. Unmediated Sound Generation and the influence of the Hidden Hand. The impact and influence of our movements and our presence. The adversarial universe hunting of language, and the venn diagram of  yourself and the universe being one.    Then it's onto embodied rooms and cohabitating the atmosphere. In borne constructs. The Grand Metaphysic operating in the background. Allowing a few trees into the Memory Palace and a bench in the Swamp. Touring each other's private architecture and murky inner landscapes. Untapped fluids of permeability. The malcontent of the Unmelded. The camo-ambush membrane. Allowing the 3rd Man to teach rapid fire riddles to the class. Then, David gives us a gender bending exploitation flick that takes place in Normandy during WWII called, "Motherhouse".   Hide and Seek as a mode of practice, self-mastery, and navigation. The value of a grumbling belly. Facing some hard work and some creative procrastination. David's inhuman ability to not feel hunger. Memory gaps of the inescapable substrata and the fantasy of controlling time. Flushing out the repressive. The Blue Begonia Diner. Prophetic nail wounds under black caps. Wrangling trauma, and the Wendigo curse of Norman, Oklahoma.

This week, a review of the terrain the Lost Xplorers have crossed and the expedition ahead. Exploring the multiple angles of motifs. Hunting butterflies in strange lands. The decompositions of The Machine Elves. Taper erections. The Unspatialized vs. The Intangible. The prism of masculinity and the hidden melancholy behind behinds. The Alienated Experts. The inescapable reflection of the human shadow. Revisiting the human habitation of the oscillation between The Edge and The Heart. Being more integrated with what we know and what is known, and the variations of beetles.    From there, conceptualizing individuals as civilizations and the distance between the individual and the alien. The trembling foundations of education. Methods of being congruent with culture through rites of passage. Becoming the system, inverting ego. Thinking Civilizationally vs. Socially (conspiring with civilization). Rules being rules until they're not. Motifs, memory, and personal coding. Generative Archetypal Memory Manifestation. Biochemical soul connections within the mind and the well within. Art as a function of the etheric. More glimpses into the Hidden Algorithm.    Then it's on to the transparency of pornographic emblems. Being out of range for symbols. The Fixed vs. The Flow. Oblique Agility. Private mass communications vs. Public Intuitions. Discovering ourselves through each other with Reverse Platonism. David sabotages elite floating fortress bunkers with "Operation Middle Man". A sacrificial world renewal ritual. Making music without money. Optical illusions as meditation points. Conscious Bookmarking. Revisiting yourself semantically. Finally, Kris dreams of protecting his spiritual dingo familiar and the guys pitch a new venture into dream interpretation.

On today's episode we begin with an exorcism of distraction and nonsense while getting in motion with The Spheres. Then doing some down home divinity exams while learning to occupy vacancies during a deficit. From there it's on to reforming demoralized educators, going back to The Schoolhouse, and ironing out some spiritual deformities in The Educationists, Homoneurotic Honky Tonk, and moving within Subterranean Grammars.   Returning to The Swamp vs. Memory Palace and the notion of the music behind the meaning of language. Intimacy as a metric. Engaging with the Mysterious Meeting Grounds of Convergence. Rehaunting ourselves against the virtuality of the Soft Machine. The Gravity & Magnitude of intimacy. The Homeport and The Horizon. Being dispatched into exile. Improv with the Ancestors in the River of Bones. The execution and explorations of Sir Walter Raleigh. Mandatory heroism against mental health. Recognizing crisis. Corrosive distractions and attentive prisoners, and a few military responses to impotent individualism.    David introduces us to a music based action game called "Unveil". We feel the ripples of ignorance within strange categories. Ghost categories. We're then challenged to research toward harmonic surprise. Living at The Heart and on The Edge within the thickets of curiosity. The Obese Archetypes and the inversion of intimacy. Wrapping up with a deep discussion into motifs and deja vu while Kris tries to figure out if the dream of the giant miniature golf course is a recurring nightmare or not.

Fortean verifications and odd news. Vanishing Bigfoot Hunters in the Outlands. Being energized through the counterintuitive. The Sick Passenger Dilemma. Yellow Bird Bait. The Stage vs. The Class (social bandwidth). Praising good intellect and having an assertive teaching ethic. After that The Raunchettes shock the Woke Nation in an inverted field of diluted spectra.    Wading in the Swamp of the Unknown. Acres of Uncontrolled Psychic Ant Territory. Dynamic Memory Neighborhoods. Inhabiting archetypal holism. Preserving exploration, celebrating interrogation. Jungle Badlang fence hopping during a foggy night. Pursuing mysteries in Forbidden Zones. Sustained Curiosity. Retrieving a fly from the Frog Man. Developing foresight. Providing evidence without resources. Defensive Experts (Bruno's BBQ). Making things from scratch. Controversial pluralisms and infinite ignorance. The velocity of "slowing down". The Poetry of the Bog. Familiar Oddities. The musical scales of Language.    JDO goes off for the challenge with "Malibu Dick", a surfer revenge style noir with a cult that controls the weather, drag queens performing the rites of Osiris, and a hollow moon. Moving on to Accessing the Big River through explicit experimentation and learning to drive "offtrack". The Gradual vs. Sudden emergence of homosapians and identifying major structural binaries. Scrutinizing "The Random" and "Spontaneous". Single Image Focus vs. Chaotic Noise Ceremonies. A premonition about Jimmy Buffett, and JDO builds a time machine in his garage.   Thanks to Nick Searfoss for the synopsis!

On this episode we begin with Peripheral People surviving a Live Event Exploration. Needing burly men to build stages. The "Missing" at Large. Unassuming students and augmented plagiarism. Deprogramming epileptic willpower. The Role of Ministers. Following the vibrational grooves. Resurging secret histories in the New Dark Age. The Serpent Jaguar Priests. Bypassing semantics with multi-media communications. Exercising Dream and Memory to change your life. Running into Ponderosa Pine lessons. Getting unstuck from the floor. Sharing an ensemble of strangeness.    Then we move on to clear scenarios being the key to good communication. The Tempo of Psychic Metabolism. We go further into the Phonebooth to discuss the benefits and restrictions of fluidity and integrity. Judo Inversion Techniques. Feedback Belief Systems and Extrapolating Interiority. Leveraging the sentience of language. "The Ham Pounder Impersonators". Keeping personal records and studying your experiences. Deciphering dreams through emblem and ceremony (narrative). Pineneedle Complaints and Animal Statue Escapes.    Finally, we wrap up with dream resources being occluded by the near waking experience. Early Dreaming Moments. Tuning out the Waking Chatter. Being on orange alert to incoherent frameworks of consciousness. An interrupted pitch to Robert Redford on a bustling set. Thanks to Nick Searfoss for the summary!   (The picture for this episode requires a bit of explanation...it is allegedly a photo of the mythical "Loveland Frogman" peeking out of a river. It is episode-relevant.)

In this episode we talk about Satan's honor and disheartened colleagues who retreat into the dark. Trading in the general malaise of critical thinking and flexibility of mind with strict psychic discipline and defense. The LX Mission Statement: "look to the fun". Triangulating problems, personalities, and proximity. The physicality of writing and performance. Erasing introversion. The Goal of Language. How your words sound through someone else's mouth. Grammar vs. Elocution. Having the courage to share. The Personal Dynamics of making noise with each other. Then we're back to bands with some genitally mutilated screech music.    Being honored by equal magic. Confusing the library for the moon. Trusting bridges you've built. Kris introduces a big idea: the Allegory of The Phonebooth. Peculiar Architecture and Occult Practicality. Photographic Morphology and Expanding Physics. Newtonian Scale vs. Quantum Time. Being aware of Street Level Tempo. Sovereign Temporality (Intention and Timing). The surprise of stillness. Enjoying the navigation and movement through Time with others. Spontaneous Shapeshifting vs. Protean Durability. "Pudding & Water". Expeditions into Metaphor & Analogy (perception and performance). The Stage of Multitudes. Reestablishing Context and Recognizing Containers. Going in the box to get out.    Philanthropic Panspermia Nuclear Intervention. Melting away metonymic icebergs. Shadow puppets in Dark Ages. Consistency & Surprise. Being alert to local metaphors. Idleness vs. Laziness (Jalan-Jalan). Volcanic Fruitions. Dimensionalizing Dream Maps. Cave Drawings and Greek Drama. Image, Ceremony, and the social dilemmas of Dream Time.

What is the value of The Tunnel?   In this episode we talk about strange summer winds steering us back to shore. The Osborne Curriculum (always have something to do). Learning to trust what you Herd. Stage managing the depths of downtime prep. The confidence of Method (performing to standard). Wincing at flaming pedagogies. A game where you learn as you flee. Working through Decisiveness and Decision.    Barbie vs. Oppenheimer (The Barbenheimer Phenomena). Having poor taste toward atrocities. Celebrated Brutality. Vibing with the Sirens. The facade of the Nuclear Dolls. Sifting through the Emblematic Rubble. The plastic significance of Mattel Omens. The Sinister Joylessness of Cartoon Idolons. The inherent hauntedness of bad cinematic magic. The intelligence of context, timing, and precise delivery. Rhetorically numb religiosity. Dignified responses to advanced weaponry (Atomic Insanity). Sacrificial rites of Destruction and Exploration. Anesthetic Luxury Curses and Idiot Compassion. The necessity for tough magic. The Jargonized Victim-Agent. The resurgence of Lost Psychologies (Do Good to Be Good).    The Obsession with Potentiality in a Limited Space. Pragmatic instrumentation and the Myth of Life. The Vibrancy of a Constricted Path. The sunk cost of eternal infancy in the face of commitment. Psychopathic Poltergeists of Potential vs. The Practicality of Regret. The Linguistic Ecology Sweepstakes. Courageous Re-Evaluations. Giving yourself a well deserved reward. Erotic Lucid Escape Dreams. "Now entering Sunken City, CA" and the delusion of abiding by Dream Logic.   Thanks to Nick Searfoss for the summary!

Mirage = Message / Noise = Signal   In this episode we talk about disappointing thunderstorms and dog-men transformations. Self-righteous conundrums. Archonic Co-Option. "Becoming Animal" vs. Artificial Furry Movements. William James recording at the Lyceum of the 21st Century. Grammar Warriors. The Totemic Attraction of Evil Antlers. Instead of a band, Kris provides us with his own Roguelike game.    Effective education and curiosity as the cure for ignorance. Flawed Xplanations. Conversational speech to convey information. Trusting your ear to suss out content vs. music. Strange neighbor desert aphorisms. Cultural balance between traditionalism and wokism. The Superficial Intelligence Conundrum. Image as Substance. Oblique Troubleshooting. The Compromise of Self-Knowledge vs. The Flux of Self-Exploration. Embracing the fundamental dualism of the mind for inspired living. Spooky Thinking and Quantum Magnetism. Generating prophecy. Hidden metaphysics. Impending Future Derailment Disorder. The Oklahoma-Cthulhu Connection. Sleeper Detergent. Underground Maps. Private interests vs. Public functions. Good people make good teachers. Escaping the mundanity of machine memory.   Unprotected homeless time travelers. Dirty Laundry Anthropology. Being frugal through routine and planning ahead. Barbecues and block parties in a Fortified Neighborhood. The complexity of sociality. Exaggerated communities in the Virtual Villages. Coded Obedience. The Elders of Dynamic Compromise. The nurtured macrocosm and the emblem of social reason. Conflict Moderator Representative. The race to wrangle the moon. Complexifying tropes for Middle America. Instilling ideas instead of implanting them.    Inversion Revisited; more antonym and synonym therapy. Having fun with the morphology of language (Cave Grunts). The confrontation of the non-verbal. Associative harmonic ripples from complex holograms. Emblematic Interactions to stimulate memory. Cliched Apocrypha (Fading Mythologies). Integrated consistencies without explanation. Representing a preternaturally honest country singer. The Honesty-Anxiety Dilemma.   Thanks to Nick Searfoss for the description!

We have a bit of an ayahuasca purge on this episode. The past three years left a bad taste in JDO's mouth, and he articulates what exactly bothered him so much about people's response to global crisis. Next time, we get fun and positive as a palate cleanser, but this one felt necessary at the time to get all the poison out. We can move on from here.   In this episode, we talk:   What are you manipulating? What are you manipulated by?   We talk about High Strangeness in high temperatures. Unexpected pest control community service. Automated negligence. Survival of the Sanest. "Humanity always pokes through". Rehabilitated expectations / Integrated ethics. A sanitarium in the woods. Textured storytelling and the Emblematic. Applying principals over value judgements.    Exploring the lust for facets and fixation. Augmented Backmasking Game. The Graveyard of Failed Pitches. Rejigging the Formula (trusting hidden rivers). Performative syntax. The Trafficking of Image Currency. The pathogen of self-hypnotic photography. Microlabs of Cryptogenic Time Control. Transitory masks of initiation. Mini epics of manipulation. Edward T. Hall's "Human Extensions''. Doomed mimetics (pat apocalypses). The Selfie vs. The Mask.    Nightmare callback. Secular Disguises vs. Sacred Costumes. Self-less faces concealing themselves. Obscured recognition. The psychotic detritus of vintage crisis management. Beautiful psyops. All-purpose Manichaeism. The disturbance of rapid social change. Large scale ritual sacrifice (David goes to church). Pop culture survivor's guilt in Big Sur. The fungal classism of unquestioned hypocrisy. The Infallible Panel of Experts.    Conspiracy Theory as Category. Pynchon's COVID novel. "Everything's going to plan". Allegorical distance. Scrappy points of view and amending opinions. Suspicious explosive change. Nonplayer Roleplayer (Collision vs. Integration). Giving attention to what's interesting. Inexplicable bafflement. The courage of curiosity as virtue. Grumpy satisfaction. RnD as practice and discipline. Hiders and Seekers (who's stepping in the river?"). All live events matter. "Nothing simple in the Doing''. The Non Agency of the Woke Junky.    Recurring dream settings. Landlord Anxiety at Sting's Luxury Apartments and a schism in the Small Town soap opera.   Thank you to Nick Spinnett for his amazing summary.

How you spend your time is how you live your life.    Today we talk administrative nonsense during system collapse. Rediscovering an old cache of photos. Hometown house hunting (the seller-buyer synchronicity). Reading between the signs. Lawn care character assessments. A reverse car chase leading to a door that does not open.   Phantom story arcs. Anticipating "The Moment." The sacredness of sniffing out Dog Fear. Gus projects a new mom.   "Don't listen to the worried." Life stage segues. "The Gods only listen to the horns."   Dark Rave Doppler Music. Bloated tomes. Post-Ballardian speculative fiction. Bleeding for your words. Being alert to paranoid alleys. Doing good to feel good in spite of sagging optimism. The Decoder Ring of Innocence. Tiger Beat Girl Magic. Time shifts and evading madness (the fun of complexity / the utility of simplicity). The Movement towards The "Superfice."   The Disappearing Darkrooms. Fast forwarding evolution. Getting crude with morse code. Static Billboards and Closed Casinos. Invisible Grammars vs. Transparent Jargon. The Abomination of Abbreviations. Hungry for Vision.   The joys of the feeding frenzy. Vibing with the room. Ralph Eugene Meatyard revisited. Social Physics. Losing the Process along the way. Democratizing miracles. Visual Analogies for Asymmetric Chasms. Imagery interrogation. Primitive Visualization ("in the box" thinking). Symbols vs. Emblems.   Performance as human origin. An epistemology predicated on denial and division. Uniqueness vs. repetition (the rhythms of good living). The Eye of the Sincere Tourist. Setting up Forbidden Spaces. Reverse Education (Learning to Forget). Memory as related to Character. Category-Inference. Going where the energy is. Private internal research / personal algorithms. Don't go out with a whimper.   (Thanks to Nick Spinnett for the summary)  

A sequence of photographs suggests all the photographs missing from the sequence. What does it mean when one person in a relationship takes all the photos? When is a key not a key?   On this episode, we talk: Surviving the heat, big horn sheep, snake invasion, roadrunners, Tim Powers novels, the Tarantella, the Theatre Royale of Castlemaine, the Radical Nudist Psychedelic Jug Band Band, public nudity, nude Starbucks, codpieces, Eldridge Cleaver, cognitive dissonance, the autonomous instinctive animal network within humans, mowing the lawn late at night, documenting subjectivity objectively, phantom forms, reverse pareidolia, Tom Waits, garage bands, believing in characters, the most photographed person of all time, sticking to an image, late-night TV show hosts, “real comes before important,” compulsively photographing things, the need to document, beck and call, trunks full of old photographs, intent, pictures of the moon, the end of photography as a fine art, just seeing the image, the musicality of language vs. the concrete rules of plot, holograms, simple principles, skirting around elitism, Round Table imaginative challenge, The Last Room, creating riddles, DIY instruments, translating the avant garde into pop culture, and cold tundra.

Laser on the Prairie Is a life made up of a series of images? Which images do we choose? Do you begin to fade if there are no images of you? Heat wave, 4th of July weekend recap, doing things when you want to, Dogs Per Minute, bonelessness, the word “sploot,” hauntological music, modern rock music, the Gorillaz, the confusion and sorrow of the times, men and women, leaving your keys in your car, basing your life on the best possible outcomes, Zeno of Elea, Parmenides, the slaving meat wheel, memory's dependence on images, photographic evidence as stability, the authority of the photograph, our dependence on photographs, Kodak albums, the speeding up of time, memory as experiential molasses, James Ellroy vs. David Foster Wallace, database animals, cities as live performance theater, White Jazz, content and context, the opposite of “inhabit,” containerism, getting results without work, you can't have a ghost without being killed, an analysis of chaos magic, Universal Studios, return to the water, pool communication, talking to a wall, checking in on rhythms, self-care, dangerous women, and practical and tactical avoidance.

Are aesthetics a kind of philosophy? What is the most important photo of all time? Kris's birthday celebration, shoutout to Jay Springett, starting the day off right, The Miracle Morning, Gus encounters a passed-out junkie, Pat Murphy's Points of Departure, (JDO incorrectly states that Tea with the Black Dragon won the 1984 PKD award; it was actually The Anubis Gates; TWTBD was the runner-up), Thomas Merton, Gary Snyder's The Real Work, calamities that lead to epiphany, (the book JDO is trying to remember is Honest to God by John Robinson), Ralph Eugene Meatyard, every photograph is a self-portrait, D.H. Lawrence's paintings, the Slim Jims' Music for Tall Men Only, inclusive vs. inviting, forced limitation, “deny the veil, enjoy the view,” the Devouring Television, media creating reality, worshipping a Felix the Cat doll, the introduction of widescreen, the irreality of VHS, the return of the Third Man, what is contained in a photograph?, the most important photo of all time, repetition of imagery, the first-world sinister hug, shot-up jukeboxes in quicksand, MK Ultra Imaginative Challenge, the whim of nature, getting down in the baked beans and cream corn, pornographic thought experiment, James Dickey, the magic of guilt, and a Ben Affleck and Matt Damon dream.

“Emblematic congruence” refers to how well a person represents the culture from which they grow. This leads to some interesting questions: is your culture strong enough to weight you with this cargo? What creates squalor in a neighborhood? Can architecture be embellished and still squalid? On this episode, we talk: UFOs when the sun goes down, 4am wake-up time, informal meditation, not waking up in the machine, optimized sleep patterns, keeping the phone away from sleep, ratios of confidence to confusion, humans as emblems of their cultures, instilling cultural artefacts, embracing the earth spirit to release the archetype, immigrants with strong sense of culture, individualist ad campaigns, becoming wolf vs. becoming furry, affecting attitudes becoming real, category mistakes, the decomposing world, is architecture ever reality?, the shanty towns of Seoul, flourish vs. artifice, the American noosphere, the hunger for subjectivity, sexual teasing, the reason why people flip out, eavesdropping at sportsbars, the show Hannibal, the Osborne Effect, the perception of loudness, never stop experimenting, cool smoothies, and stepping on a rubber band barefoot. For the dream segment this time, we're listening to Kris's awesome musical piece “Minotaur.”

On this episode, Kris and I develop ideas as to how to break down prepositional distance, and how to frame an approach to writing and life. What does the term “structural” even mean? What is structure? Art exhibit retrospective, coming home, spaceship homes, how much money it would take to get Kris to live in Seattle, running away from home, returning to family, moving all the time, Aphex Twin's head, creating a Shire, Rumble Strip, sex in a gas station, simple language, love and fear, The Implicate Order, holographic universe, what if Einstein had to go viral?, the Philip K Dick Awards, getting people off their phones, bad texters, QR code shenanigans, grifters, finding a job you love, artists as craftsmen, everything smells like onion rings, odd aquariums, the strange informing power of Structure, form and content, patterns of education, The Silence of the Lambs, structural racism,  simulation theory, feeding someone a snake, having great ideas, and an inverse treasure hunt.

Kris and I begin this conversation by talking about the simulation of photography, the predictive nature of it, and move into a talk about appreciation for sentence- or paragraph-level writing, and how to perhaps sell that love to lure readers in. We talk: Seattle masks, Eternal Jing, the connection between Zanesville and Altered Carbon, double binds, Bateson's Pyramid, melody smother, goodbye courage, how to have a more decisive mind, the fear of saying something bold, the vampire/zombie hybrid, totemic dreams, the strangely predictive nature of photography, Project Origin, cybernetics, creating simulations of the self, tribal mindsets toward photography, prepositional distance, the ego looking for something to protect, asemic writing, things are built to see what they become, rebellion against the outline, the enjoyment of language, LitRPG, the comfort with the shen, how to write if you don't want to be a cookie-cutter formulist, cryptotransgression, thinking like an animal, taking environment into account when discussing mental illness, is “reverse engineering tautological?”, the hands of many strange angels, the hunter-killer search for knowledge, a whole fish inside him, cleaning house, and a dream car losing traction with the road.

On this episode, Kris and David talk about the out of control homeless problem in America. Notes: Reporting live from a closet, museums and graveyards, different kinds of benches, crow attack, holding onto losses in the past, catfish girlfriends, radical agreement, living cliches, everything wants to be found, learning how to speak extemporaneously, sore necks, giant pimps, the unsexiness of Seattle, salmon everywhere, genuine diversity, tech money, John Mellencamp, perfect optics, fixing homelessness, are cities making people sick?, the conspiracy of disappearing the dead, decriminalizing shoplifting, $90 candy bars, the importance of canning, the focus on consumers, Apocalypse Trucks, modern cars, Vegas fashion, risk aversion, the flavor is settling, cultivating the aura, daoism, commitment to wisdom, what lies beyond problems?, detective inquiry, how to talk to strangers, saving horses from fire, are words saying us?, JDO's puppet, the importance of dream concrete, and the danger of small talk.

  On this episode, Kris and David debrief each other on Kris's art show and David's three-day trip to Las Vegas. Stick to the end of the show to hear David fall down a rabbit hole over where his thoughts are coming from. Dad fitness, devouring sound, Radiohead at 800% slower, art as a mode, being too real to live, plague masks, time shamans, the size of Kris's mind, cosmic vs. astronomical, ferret cage synchronicity, qualia, area unexplored because of ghosts, ACE car rental rant, the Neon Museum, crackhead soap opera, Area 15, chicken ginseng soup, the danger of telling women to calm down, the power of System of a Down, the powerful sense of vacancy of certain people, the Vegas time slip, the three incidents that explain where we are now, the separation between humans and AI, algorithm hoarders, when did we first get the internet?, the nonlocal vs. the algorithmic, silver alerts, digital detoxes, the selfie invents the selfie murder, time flu, operating system updates, judging the thinker by the fans, thinking about thinking, cultural loneliness, being reincarnated as a buffalo, S(  )R, everything wants to be remembered, lost watches, reducing backstory, speaking directly into the mirror, and the Glass Cylinder Game.

On this episode, we talk about the nature of time, and the repeating nature of certain types of people throughout history. Other topics discussed: Taking a handsaw to branches, feeling good after exercise, to-do lists, following through on tasks, Heavy Prowl Area, hot car music, having faith in the essential strangeness of life, objects in the mirror, thought generator, JDO recounts his family tree, Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River, the repeating nature of human types, past lives, the disappearance of peoples, how do human patterns repeat?, pinhole cameras, peculiar geometry, the book of machines, the whirlpool of time, beaver populations, being stewards, the Hawaii 5-0 remake, remakes necessitating the originals, Terence McKenna impression, the third man's approach to modernity, thought generators, Amish hackers, and how to practically escape modernity.

Kris and I have an in-depth discussion about run-down American towns. Notes: Kris gives a recap of his installation setup, how to run a self-publishing business, where the time goes when you're parenting, anthills, what you can measure is what you can't measure, inscape and instress, Gerald Manley Hopkins, Thin, Gently Scorched Metal, leaving a part of yourself behind in hotel rooms, a reason for art outside of communication, the Booty Warrior, David shows Kris a puppet, is poverty a result of degeneration, or a failure to launch?, Tortilla Flat, what causes a town to fall into poverty?, car culture as a sign of middle class prosperity, talking to strangers, the corporatization of American towns, Chat GPT's solution for poverty, Disney communities, caliente yellow, Kris's guide to talking to strangers, a new approach to open-air prisons, and long days that go by quickly.

This begins our discussion on the introduction of photography, and how it changed the world. On this episode, we talk: Our reflections on the Lost Xplorers journey, doing what energizes you, expressions of gratitude, unknown callers, the difficulty of procrastination, beds of nails, never leaving well enough alone, Robert Loewy, one person having a huge effect, iron horses, the beginning of modernity, do photographs steal souls?, Tom Bombadil, self-explaining grammars, not understanding money, the ball bearing problem, the acceleration of the symbolic, things that we watch, thaumaturgy, what was lost with the invention of photography, the instant acceptance of “realism,”  CGI giraffes, prepositional distance, the difference between metaphor and origin, the invention of the word “kodak,” semantic depth, the oddness of depiction, the new donut, keeping a journal of the future, where does sound come from on a VHS?, and metaphors becoming too metaphorical.

On this episode, Kris and David close out their architecture series. We talk: Making documentaries, three years of Lost Xplorers, almost good at podcasts after 400 episodes, beginner's mind, areas unexplored due to ants, constructing unknown areas in the mind, defense mechanisms against derangement, a go master vs. a computer, doing everything wrong, practicing thinking together, a sea change of strangeness, rappers who don't speak, anarchists of mind, thinking hard vs. thinking far, fans running too hot, making peace with hierarchies, suspicion of disorder, houses as machines for living, the children of the machine, the overgrown village, the balkanization of the Atlantic seaboard, the little black pig, technical difficulties, cuckoo clocks, a clear vision for the future of architecture, homelessness as an architectural problem, The Decorated Diagram, A Pattern Language, reading your spouse's thoughts, accuracy as an antidote to the truth, and the reality of dream beings.

On this episode, we're going to Disneyland!!!! We talk about: Post-cultural society, hornswoggle consumerism, OCD update, self-imposed crutch, bad job interview, explaining what I do, long silences, businesses are vampires, creating courses, Harry Stack Sullivan, tardigrades, anxiety as a choice, idiosyncrasies as defense mechanisms, going into other people's dreams, David throws Kris for a loop, adult Disney fans, Disney's cryogenically frozen head, Sam Cooke's 24-hour access, the connection between Disney and J. Edgar Hoover, trapped on It's a Small World, the Smellitizer, giant Mickey Mouse effigy, the peerless theme park, arrested development, Dreamland by Kevin Baker, theme parks as replacement for the freak show, the libidinal nature of theme parks, the betrayal of the middle class, taxidermy, corporations replacing churches as the primary distributor of cultural shame, Freaky Friday (spousal edition), working on the voice, Claes Oldenberg, and David has an acid flashback while listening to Kris telling him his dream.