E9: I've Been Waiting; S6: Godot Has AIDS (Shocking Truth Revealed)

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 reach.And then he sang anyway.⸻15 QUOTATIONS ABOUT THIS EPISODE(Attributed with the kind of scholarly irresponsibility normally reserved for continental philosophy departments and men named Luca wearing scarves indoors.)Nietzsche“The problem is not that God is dead. The problem is that Rodney still wanted to harmonize.”Simone de Beauvoir“One is not born waiting. One becomes waiting.”Rimbaud“I abandoned poetry at twenty‑one because I had already seen too much. This podcast suggests I quit too early.”Jean Cocteau“The artist is a lie who tells the truth. The dying cowboy is the truth who accidentally became art.”The Buddha“Attachment is suffering. But also… listen to that synth line.”Roland Barthes“The voice of the author dissolves into the erotic machinery of memory.”Björk“This is what happens when intimacy develops weather patterns.”Dostoevsky“To love someone dying is merely another form of gambling.”Susan Sontag“Illness becomes metaphor the instant a society decides certain bodies deserve symbolism more than survival.”John Cage“Silence is impossible. Even grief hums electrically.”Michel Foucault“Power circulates through institutions, bodies, discourses, and apparently motel‑room MIDI collaborations.”David Bowie“Fame lasts fifteen minutes. AIDS lasted longer.”(Not actually Bowie, but spiritually adjacent.)Jacques Derrida“The meaning of ‘I’ve Been Waiting’ is endlessly deferred.”Angela Davis“Survival under hostile systems always produces unauthorized tenderness.”Werner Herzog“The ecstatic truth is found not in facts but in a dying man teaching synthesizer grief beside a drum machine.”