E8: My Pet Monkey, S6: Counter‑leash‑ference

I’ve been playing with Suno again. Which is dangerous, because I have hundreds of songs already up on Spotify and Apple Music and everywhere else, and Suno’s copyright filter is like a TSA agent who can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a sandwich. If I put in one of my own songs — songs I wrote, recorded, produced, and legally own — it blocks them because it thinks I’m stealing from myself. And there’s no button that says, “Relax, I’m me.”So I’m left with the songs I never released. The orphans. Thankfully, along with the hundreds or released songs, there are dozens of unreleased ones, and—I don’t know… a thousand more that never made the jump from analogue to digital.I started writing songs when I was three or four. My favorite number is 53 because one of the first things I ever wrote — before I even understood what writing was — was a poem called 53. Something about a ship with 53 people on it, out at sea for 53 days. I turned it into a song on the piano. I didn’t record it. But not long after that, I started recording everything.My family had a puppet troupe that toured rest homes. I met half of television royalty before I was ten. Betty White. Robin Williams in his Mork & Mindy era. Long conversations with people I didn’t understand were famous.And somewhere in all that, I kept writing songs. Tape decks. My mom’s recording gear. Then a Tascam four‑track. Then an Alesis HR‑16 drum machine. Then an MMT‑8 sequencer. Then a Roland JV‑80. Then whatever else I could afford or steal time with.A lot of those songs I’ve remastered. Some I’ve resurrected with AI stem‑splitting. Some I’ve left alone because they were too broken or too embarrassing or too technically mangled to fix.My Pet Monkey had both problems.There are glitches in the original recording — little garbled moments where the tape chewed itself or the mic clipped or the universe hiccuped. And then there’s the other thing: the critique.When I workshopped this song at CalArts, during a four‑hour critique (because CalArts believes in suffering as pedagogy), one guy raised his hand and said:“This song is clearly about compulsive masturbation.”And here’s the thing: I had no idea what the song was about. That’s how songs come out of me — sideways, unannounced, uninterpreted. So I couldn’t argue with him. I couldn’t say, “No, it’s actually about X.”And CalArts is a conceptual art school. They don’t care about lived experience. They care about the refractor — the lens, the mediation, the postmodern trick where you deconstruct the thing until the thing disappears.So the masturbation interpretation stuck to me like shame glue. For years.Fast‑forward to this week. I’m digging through old songs, trying to find ones Suno won’t reject. I find My Pet Monkey. I think, “Fine, I’ll record a little intro for the song. I’ll tell the story about the Mexican cowboy in the Speedo. The AA conference. The breakup. The counselor who told me I was walking into traffic.”I hit record. I talk. I wander. I go down blind alleys. I forget where I’m going. I remember. I forget again. I keep talking.And then, after I finish recording the episode, I listen to the song again.And suddenly — finally — I know what it’s about.It’s not about masturbation. It’s not about shame. It’s not about the critique. It’s not about the cowboy. It’s not even about AIDS, though AIDS is the shadow behind god.It’s about the impossible emotional geometry of loving someone who is dying, and the equally impossible geometry of leaving them without feeling like you’re killing them.It’s about the moment when affection becomes responsibility, and responsibility becomes fear, and fear becomes resentment, and resentment becomes guilt, and guilt becomes a story you tell yourself so you can survive the fact that you survived.It’s about the monkey. And it’s not about the monkey at all.Anyway. That’s the episode. That’s the song. That’s the blind alley I went down and the one I came back from.Hit play.