How to Understand and/or Engage With the Dustin Mark Podcasts (And Books)
If what you feel you need is understanding and/or engagement
— — — A primer in three tiers — — —
I don’t want to get into why I make inaccessible things. Even if I could explain the…compulsion?…I don’t think this is the time. For now I just want to recognize the fact and briefly touch on the consequences.
(For those of you who don’t think this is my MO, you’re kind of not wrong, but when you consider The Dustin Mark Show and other YouTube stuff, My 100 greatest tweet list, my list of every shoe I’ve ever owned, etc. it’s hard to say you’re right. I appreciate it, though. I’d like to be better. And in my defense the YouTube stuff was part of a greater, albeit unjustifiable experiment.)
The main effect of being continually inaccessible, I guess, is that I’ve conditioned people to think that everything I put out will be just as inaccessible as whatever they last saw, which makes whatever is put out next even less accessible, given it now bears the burden of a prejudice.
And when I expand on a narrative that people have long given up caring about, or didn’t care about to begin with…
(I’m not trying to conflate inaccessibility with being any good. I’m not claiming that anything I’ve done is good or compelling, just that I’ve made it annoying for anyone to even see for themselves.)
The subject I’m here to try to demystify was always meant to be viewed after its completion — or so I imagined it initially. It was intended as a lot of mini projects ultimately constituting one bigger project. The bigger project was intended to hopefully make a lot more sense than the mini projects on their own — contextually, at least. Also not trying to conflate making sense with being good or compelling.
Since the project (this) has always been meant to be viewed as a whole, I did myself no favors by, I don’t know, doing it the way I did it. I understand that you may not wish to engage with this at all, regardless of what you know about it, but it would be a failure of mine if I didn’t at least offer some sort of entryway.
To be fair, I don’t need you to continue reading or listen to the podcasts or read the books. I’m not even trying to lead you to the water, I just want to explain what my water is, and if it sounds good to you at all I’ll show you where you can find it. Drink what you want, where you want, on your terms. You are the horse. Always have been.
And/but finally, since I really, really, can’t help myself, I appeal to the multitudes of you by offering this primer/entryway/water-explanation in varying degrees of detail (varying meaning three), for some of us want as little information as possible, some of us want a little bit more, and some of us — and god bless these of us — want a full, detailed explanation before ultimately deciding this is probably not for us.
So, a basic structuring which will apply to all three tiers.
There are six composite parts making up the whole project/this. The whole thing, I’ll note, I don’t know what to call. I considered calling it a paga, like a saga but with podcasts, but I’m not that exact kind of asshole, and I’ve considered calling it the Dustin Mark Project, but that’s not what I should call it for lots of reasons. So for now I’m just calling it this, until I can come up with something better, or at the very least something that makes sense that also doesn’t take too long to say. Anyway, the six parts are:
Dustin Mark: Massage Therapist (License Pending) **podcast**
Dustin Mark: Canceled Massage Therapist (Looking Out for Number 1) **podcast**
The Dustin Mark Poems: 1–100: 100 Poems That No Longer Need To Be Written **book**
Dustin Mark’s Everything Club (Everything Is Poetry) **podcast**
Dustin Mark Does Denmark **podcast**
The Dustin Mark Poems: 101 — Death: A Posthumous Collection of Things That Dustin Would Want Referred to as Poems **book**
See, six parts. Six projects. Six ~things~. For a general idea of what those ~things~ are, continue to Tier 1.
Tier 1
Dustin Mark: Massage Therapist (License Pending)
Made in earnest by a massage therapy student, this podcast explores the secrets and benefits of massage. Dustin is joined by a guest each episode. Series cut short. Listen here.
Dustin Mark: Canceled Massage Therapist (Looking Out for Number 1)
After having been outed as a sex pest by a classmate and kicked out of school, Dustin, now cynical and crude, takes the mic to review beer, objectify women, and share stories of his new life in Las Vegas. Listen here.
The Dustin Mark Poems: 1–100: 100 Poems That No Longer Need To Be Written
Imprisoned by his own uncle for stealing money, Dustin begins writing poetry to retain his sanity. This book is a collection of such poetry, as well as poetry written after his release. Purchase here (free via Kindle Unlimited).
Dustin Mark’s Everything Club (Everything Is Poetry)
Now with a new appreciation for life and language, Dustin examines the poetry in the world around him — and his several guests — while also trying to hawk his new book. Listen here.
Dustin Mark Does Denmark
Having grown disenchanted with his country and mother tongue, Dustin leaves everything behind and moves to Denmark, where he attempts to start fresh with a new life and new language. In the end he dies. Listen here.
The Dustin Mark Poems: 101 — Death: A Posthumous Collection of Things That Dustin Would Want Referred to as Poems
This book, compiled jointly by his sister and his best Danish friend, showcases some of the unpublished notes Dustin left behind, both to honor his memory and raise funds for his grieving family. Purchase here (free via Kindle Unlimited).
For slightly more thorough summaries, see Tier 2.
Tier 2
Dustin Mark: Massage Therapist (License Pending)
Dustin describes himself in the introduction as a young man who has lived many places and followed various pursuits. His latest passion, massage therapy, led him to enroll as a student at Swedish Institute College of Health Sciences — this podcast is his way of sharing his love of the craft and reinforcing the lessons he’s learning in school.
Due to personal drama that befalls Dustin, this series has only a few episodes — one introductory episode and two full ones, followed by a lengthy absence — all of which are narrated by Dustin’s trying-very-hard-to-be-comforting voice and including audio of massages he gives to his guests.
In the final episode, released twelve months after the one before it, Dustin vaguely explains he has been accused of sexual misconduct, kicked out of school, and now lives in Las Vegas. He introduces his new series, where he promises to pull no punches.
(It should be noted that the remainder of this first series does exist, mostly but not completely produced and edited, including a would-be final episode wherein Dustin interviews and massages his classmate Claudia, with whom he is in love, and makes her very uncomfortable — a step that would ultimately lead to more of his classmates coming forward with allegations, his expulsion, and the world as he knows it falling apart. These episodes are offered via Patreon in the following series but were never purchased or released.)
Dustin Mark: Canceled Massage Therapist (Looking Out for Number 1)
This series picks up with a freshly “canceled” Dustin, the 180-degree turn of his virtues and worldview on full display as he makes clear this series is solely for and about him. The woke mob has ostracized him and as a result he has espoused some indelicate habits and behaviors.
Whereas the previous series was done the sake of sharing what he believed to be valuable lessons about the human body, this series is explicitly made for profit. Dustin wants revenge and whines about how unfair the world has been to him, and incessantly solicits subscription payments and donations. His Patreon page allows listeners to buy him booze, drugs, lap dances, etc..
Dustin fills air time reviewing different beers, rating women, bemoaning the raw deal he’s been given, and sharing stories of degenerate Las Vegas living.
His lifestyle proves, go figure, unsustainable, and we see Dustin progressively unravel. His disregard for others and lack of discretion results in him stealing an undisclosed amount of money from his uncle — a bookie for whom he works. In what is called an “emergency” episode, Dustin pleads to his listeners to send help, as he has been detained in his uncle’s basement with just enough to survive, and since he is without his phone or a power source for his laptop, he will soon lose connection to the outside world and live as a prisoner until his ransom is paid.
The Dustin Mark Poems: 1–100: 100 Poems That No Longer Need To Be Written
Dustin made it out of captivity and has a book to show for it. As he explains in the preface, he almost (he did) lose his mind in solitary confinement, but he realized he could channel his feelings into poetry, which he wrote in pen and marker on whatever surfaces would absorb the ink.
After his sudden and mysterious release, Dustin reemerges into the world as a poet. Before too long he compiles his writings from the basement along with poems he’s written as a free man into a book, which he self-published and sells out of his car.
Dustin Mark’s Everything Club (Everything Is Poetry)
Dustin sheds his me-first attitude and creates a podcast he feels will be beneficial and enlightening. Now “enlightened” himself, he preaches the marriage of language and appreciation of the world around us, attempting to extol all that is beautiful and poetic.
Dustin’s outlook has changed since the last series; abandoning the cynicism that he’d lived by, Dustin now appears to care about the opinions of others. Having taken residence in a hostel, he seeks out different perspectives, regularly bringing on guests — including his mother, a police officer investigating Dustin’s uncle, and a peculiar foreign man who left an Amazon review for the book of poetry — to try to identify the poetry within them.
As time passes he becomes increasingly bothered by the soullessness of his surroundings and disenchanted with the English language. An impromptu road trip across the country with a girl he’d met at his hostel leaves him convinced he does not belong in America, at least not if he wants to maximize his abilities as a poet.
Dustin Mark Does Denmark
An all-night, booze-fueled encounter with two Danish siblings leads to an invitation Dustin cannot refuse. He sells his belongings and moves to Aarhus, Denmark, where he lives and works with a bookstore manager named Erik, whom he’d met in Las Vegas.
Dustin uses this series as a way to share stories of his travels as well as as a motivator to learn Danish, which he poorly showcases at all opportunities. His goal is to “unlearn” English and become a poet in the purest sense of the word, transcending his mother tongue and feeling the poetry deeper than how he’s been able to up to now.
He’s enjoying his time in Denmark, thanks in part to a budding romance with Erik’s sister Alberte. There are fleeting references to the fling between the two, which appears to be sexual in a manner beyond what Dustin is used to and perhaps ready for. A life-threatening, sex-induced injury emboldens his feelings for Alberte and the new experiences she’s introducing him to.
Weeks later, Erik announces Dustin has died suddenly, and weeks after that, in the final episode, Dustin’s sister announces a book being published in Dustin’s memory — his final poems from the waning days of his life.
The Dustin Mark Poems: 101 — Death: A Posthumous Collection of Things That Dustin Would Want Referred to as Poems
Forwards from Erik and Dustin’s sister Frankie introduce a compilation of poems taken directly from Dustin’s personal notes. Proceeds will go to Dustin’s family and the book is first put on sale at the bookstore he’d recently called home.
Roughly one third of the book is in Danish.
This is the last we have to hear from Dustin.
For added context and commentary based on what I remember about the making of these things and how the process influenced the product, Tier 3 lies below.
Tier 3
Dustin Mark: Massage Therapist (License Pending)
Look, it’s a not good health and wellness podcast.
If I’m not mistaken, at some point in the fall of 2020 I got the words “unregistered nurse” stuck in my head. That led to a nurse with a license pending. Then to the idea of any professional with a license pending. I don’t care that much about nurses or the nursing world so I went with massage therapist because “licensed massage therapist” is a thing that I knew existed.
I’d been interested in doing a fictional but hopefully real-passing podcast, and I liked the idea of a massage therapy student giving straightforward information and talking to an audience that he doesn’t necessarily know is listening.
It was always going to be four parts. Why four? I don’t know, that’s just how it presented itself to me. In my head it would start as a guy’s passion project, then some controversy would befall the character and he’d turn on the idea of the person he was. Then the idea was he’d be forced to leave the country due to the controversy, or something like that, and would start a travel show or become a foreign tour guide or something. I didn’t know for sure.
Ultimately I didn’t care about knowing where it would all end up, I just knew where I was going to start. I also knew that I had a terrible history of actually finishing things. I made a point to tell myself I would do this whole project, no matter how long it took. It would only be what I wanted it to be once completed, and since the pieces would be released publicly before ultimate completion they would forever make no sense if not completed.
I bought a microphone and pulled the sliding closet doors in my room off the tracks to create a bizarre, dirty, ineffective studio. I did lots of research on massage and the people who make their living from it.
I also realized a friend of mine sold adderall, which I’d never taken, and my brain was hardly working so I bought a handful and wrote out nine episodes. These episodes were….not very good, I think not very good would be the best way to put it. The Dustin Mark character was unctuous and cloying and it was all very forced. But fuck it, I started recording anyway.
Each episode, once Dustin finished his tips and histories and that, would feature a guest. Dustin would talk to the guest about their life and their body and would then give the guest a massage, mic on. When he finished they’d talk about how the massage felt, any takeaways, etc..
The characters were all hardly realized and lame and the interviews were not just poorly written but, as I began producing them, poorly edited. I also, immediately into the process, was reminded that I do not like the way I sound — less so the general sound of my voice and more that I am not, nor do I want to be, an actor, and everything I was reading sounded like I was reading it. Not an actor. As Cicero once said, “I cannot make believe, I can only be.”
On top of that, I needed people to play these guests for me, which would lead to shame about the writing and about my performance and about how ok I was with the guest also potentially doing a mediocre job. I recorded with three people for three different episodes and each was demoralizing in its own way, but the one constant was my embarrassment and understanding that I’d not been working very hard. Despite not knowing an optimal way to record and edit this way, I decided to voice any further guests myself. If I was going to be ashamed of the product I would at least leave others out of it.
I went on Fiverr and contacted a few graphic designers and landed on a nice young woman in Africa who agreed to make the cover art for…I think it was $20. I’d tried doing it myself and came up with something in the style of a diploma but it was bad and I happened to have $20. I gave her my thoughts and told her I’d be happy with whatever she provided, and within less than 24 hours she sent me a simple image that I didn’t love of a cartoon man massaging a microphone — come to think of it, I think that’s what I asked her to do — and the series title, and the man was bald and cartoonishly plain and I thought I could put my face over his and I did and it made me giggle. We’d somehow collaborated and I tipped her handsomely and she hopefully then forgot about me.
Having now found an online host for the podcast (s/o Anchor) I uploaded all the series information and an introductory episode and went live on February 14, 2021. I don’t know why I did it on Valentine’s Day, I don’t think that was a conscious decision. I was working on the rest of the series — I had one episode ready to go and about seven needing more recording or editing or both.
Let me briefly touch on the main character’s name. The whole series is centered around a guy named Dustin Mark. My name is Dustin Mark but I’m not that guy. I did create all of the stuff, but the Dustin Mark in the show is not me, despite several similarities.
People often ask (mostly my mother) why I didn’t name him something else — anything else — and honestly that was never an option. I can’t think of anything worse than having a fake little name for a character that doesn’t even deserve one. Dustin Mark as Jeremy Noname, a not-interesting guy who now exists in Dustin’s media. At least by using my own name I can save myself that indignity and keep all the traffic coming straight at me.
PLUS, I mean, I love that confusion. It had to be my name. It had to be. It doesn’t matter. I can be a lot of people. It doesn’t matter and I don’t care.
Ok, so I gradually released two more episodes and had fun tracking the listenership stats, which were better than I’d anticipated. In one episode Dustin massages his building’s super, a grunty foreign man, and in the other he massages some random stoner he finds online. My roommate Andrew was nice enough to play the stoner but nobody would be burdened with the foreign man besides me.
Despite the contrived nature of everything, Dustin is beginning to get into his stride. He explores massage theory, answers listeners’ questions, explores different muscle groups, and shares lessons from school.
Then things in my personal life started getting (they somewhat already were) not great and I stopped working on the series and stopped releasing it. For everyone’s best interest.
Dustin Mark: Canceled Massage Therapist (Looking Out for Number 1)
Fast forward almost a year and I’m no longer in my bedroom/studio in Los Angeles but living with my parents in Englewood, Colorado, and I’ve been inching my way back to feeling ready and able to work on this whole thing again.
On a harddrive I have the remaining episodes of series one. It feels, though, like that ship has passed, and though the timing doesn’t exactly line up, the release hiatus can still work towards the narrative.
Dustin is also living in a new place, having moved into his Uncle Julian’s basement in Las Vegas. It’s briefly touched on in the final episode of the previous series, which leads you to the new series, but Dustin got snitched on for being inappropriate with a fellow student or two and was expelled from the program. Since massage therapy was his whole identity he then faced the burden of finding a new identity.
The guy Dustin would become always seemed like a real person to me, but to be honest I’m not actually sure if it is one. He was to be an untrusting, woman-hating, binge-drinking, drug-doing asshole with a gambling problem and an insistence that his voice needed to be heard. I felt like there had to be dozens, if not hundreds, of podcasts made by insecure men who wanted to share their tips for picking up women and skeezy shit like that, but I did no research into that. A podcast seems like the most self-indulgent thing a person can make — especially one featuring only the host. I just know what it is that Dustin turned into, and it made perfect sense for this that he would start a podcast to share his thoughts and opinions on whatever crosses his mind.
As I said, I was living with my folks now and being a pretty good boy — trying to make their lives easier and create healthier habits for myself. I also had the awareness to know that I am not by any means a good actor and probably couldn’t pull off acting like a drunk asshole. Luckily, I have a little bit of drunk asshole actually in me, so once I’d written a handful of episodes and outlines I’d go down to the basement once or twice a week, once my parents had gone to sleep, and chug a few beers and start recording. Special thanks to my mom for letting me use her little office space which is covered wall to wall with bookshelves full of Jewish children’s books.
The first episode or two or three I scripted in full, with the help of some remaining adderall. After those episodes, though I’d written plenty more, I scrapped anything I’d written other than general things to talk about because I was again reminded how bad I am at delivering lines. I’d also written the stuff sober so it was a little discordant. I’d still go downstairs and get drunk alone in a tiny room but this time I’d just wing it.
One of the first things I did for the series was record an intro theme song, a riff from The Dead Kennedys’ cover of “Viva Las Vegas” via my sloppily played guitar. With the first series I felt that lame and intricate editing was an overall asset (by intricate I mean any at all) and I still liked the idea of unnecessary production, ideally to add an air of legitimacy but really just to look like I’m not 100% phoning it in.
I tried making these edits a part of the new series, and did so a little bit in the first episode, but I also remembered I don’t like audio editing and am not very good at it, and I’m not patient enough to not just release whatever it is I recorded almost immediately.
So I stopped doing that. I’d run through whatever I was saying in one go. If there was an absolute need for a cut I’d give in, but otherwise I just wanted to run the intro I’d recorded, talk for a while, and play the outro. That’s what I did. Nice and sloppy.
This version of Dustin is obsessed with money. He makes it clear that while the published episodes may be available for free, any further features will not be. As stated in the series title, Dustin is looking out for himself and profit is his priority. He promotes his patreon page, which I made one day, and cites listeners and patrons throughout the series (listeners would sponsor beer that Dustin would then review on air). Having patrons would have been nice, but it was not the case. I had zero patrons. I mean of course I did, it would have been bananas for someone to pay this fictional character. But it would have been nice.
Anyway, this was the series I was most looking forward to making. I got to drink and complain and be mean and lazy. It was very easy. Dustin gets a little in over his head as time passes and gets a little crisis-y and emotional and that was fun to do too, but again I’m no actor.
When the time came to end the series, which wraps up with a panicked cry for help/call to action to his listeners, I was sad. I wanted to keep being this Dustin. He was a flawed, problematic person, but he was far more of a person than the Dustin from the prior series. He was broken and in pain and didn’t know how to handle it. I liked him, I miss him.
The Dustin Mark Poems: 1–100: 100 Poems That No Longer Need To Be Written
The plan was always for Dustin to write a book and wouldn’t you know it, he did. Last we heard from him he was assuring his listeners that he was safe while simultaneously pleading for help. He mishandled his uncle’s money (Dustin worked for him as a bookie in a fashion that I’m pretty sure is wholly unrealistic) and as punishment was locked in the basement until either the money was repaid or his uncle felt like releasing him. He was given enough food to survive…you know, some details don’t need to be explained. He was a prisoner with no access to the outside world.
I don’t know what it’s like to be kept in solitary confinement. I can’t imagine being locked up like this and not knowing when or if you’ll get out. But I’ll go ahead and say that yeah maybe if you start losing your mind and all you have is pens and paper you might just start writing like a nuts person, and for survival’s sake you might start to believe what you’re writing is really good and really important and it might just keep you going. Maybe.
That’s what happened to Dustin. To clarify, he lived in his uncle’s basement — it was his space — but he didn’t have his phone or computer chargers so once those ran out he was left with whatever was downstairs, which was little besides some notebooks and a little pot and some psychedelics.
I’ve been fascinated with poetry for a long time — to me it’s the art form that’s easiest to fake. It can be whatever you want it to be and I’ve always wanted to do something with “fake poetry,” which is of course, I am constantly reminded, real poetry.
Poetry seemed like an easy thing for Dustin to shit out and be convinced is high art. Writing a novel, for instance, would be very difficult and it would be easy for someone to say “this is a very bad novel,” but since poetry has more freedom of interpretation he’d be able to do whatever he wanted. I, then, was able to do whatever I wanted and ended up doing exactly that.
At first the book was going to be no more than 50 poems, though some of them would be epic in size, but the thought of publishing 100 poems made me laugh, so I went with that and never looked back. It was pretty enjoyable writing the majority of the poems; they’re all from Dustin’s head so all have a connection to his life and that was a fun exercise in worldbuilding/worldliving. Writing some of the poems made me sad and I don’t want to go any further into that.
It took me a while to decide on the title but I knew that I was going to go with a too-long title because that’s who I am, and I went through a few cover ideas using the same shadowy/sketchy image of my face. All very silly. I picked a passage from Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” and thanked a bunch of poets and random people and pressed publish on that bitch. When I say I didn’t read through the book to edit, I mean it. (Amongst other things, I’d forgotten that I put a note in the table of contents saying “** denotes poem was written in captivity” but then forgot to actually add “**” to any of the titles. It happens.
I sold some copies! I think probably all to friends? I bought a bunch for myself and sent some out to people who asked. I even tweeted out an offer for a #freebook and got a real person to send me their address and now they have the book. The book will forever be on sale so get a copy, it’s very cheap. (Reminder to self, need to send twitter guy the second book, too.)
The moral of this story is that anyone can write and publish a book. And when you’re difficult and say things like, “I didn’t write it, Dustin wrote it,” people will roll their eyes and insist that you wrote a bunch of poetry, which you did, but not exactly.
Dustin Mark’s Everything Club (Everything Is Poetry)
The next logical step now that Dustin had become a free poet was for him to really dive into his love of poetry. I maybe could have thought of a different way of presenting this series because it reminded me so much of the first one, but I didn’t want to think about it too much. Yes, podcast serieses one and three are similar in that they’re both Dustin talking about the healing power of some little hobby they have. Whatever.
Similar to how I felt while making the previous series, I didn’t want to put too much technical work into this one. I’m pretty sure the jingle I just pulled from some website with free jingles, and I’m pretty sure I even forgot to include it for one episode. The words were supposed to be the focus this time, Dustin would say.
Dustin’s character doesn’t fully make sense in this series either, if you can believe it. He keeps all of his stuff (very limited) in his car and lives/sleeps in a hostel. He didn’t want to be tied down to an apartment or house but couldn’t sleep in his car, so that’s what I was left with. All of the sudden he’s super open-minded and curious so the hostel allows him to meet people and hear stories and schmooze. It makes sense in theory, but come on no one’s voluntarily living in a hostel.
Dustin tells us that he supports himself by playing poker and with book sales and other writing gigs. I intended for the freelance writing to be a bigger part of the story; since he’s now all about poetry he would write speeches and toasts and letters for people less gifted with words. I wanted to share more of him trying to access other people’s emotions for speeches, but I guess I forgot. As for the poker thing, I don’t know, I guess he’s good at poker.
In contrast to the first podcast series, this Dustin’s naivete now partners with a sort of absolute certainty. He truly believes poetry saved his life and appears fanatically pledged to it as an ideal. Since he’s pretty new to the world of poetry, he’s realizing in real time that he can find the essence of poetry everywhere, which results in a confidence and a drive to keep discovering more poetry.
I tried to have guests feature in this series because the idea was for Dustin to be analyzing the poetry in everything, and we’re all bored enough of hearing just me. This brought us Arnolds, voiced by my friend Andrew, who randomly found Dustin’s book on the Kindle marketplace and used it as a means to practice his English. Dustin tracked Arnolds down and had a dumb, goofy conversation with him about poetry and life. It was never determined where Arnolds was from, though people will refer to him to me as an Italian character. Arnolds got more love from the listenership than anything prior (i.e. I think one person told me they found him funny), really emphasizing the futility of episodes of my voice only. By this point I’m tired of it too, I just have to finish the project or I’ll be upset with myself :( .
There were more guests, including Dustin’s mother (also played by Andrew), a cop (played by a far-too-talented-to-be-involved-in-this Chris Gilman), a return of Arnolds because hey why not, but they were mostly distractions for Dustin, who began to feel, after a few months as a poet, that he’d maxed out the English language. He started disliking Las Vegas more and more, trying to see in it the beauty he looks for in everything but instead seeing only superficiality.
I got busy and didn’t record for a while so when I finally did again I chalked the absence up to a cross-country road trip Dustin had taken with a woman he’d met in his hostel. He tells the story of the trip — sex and freedom and sightseeing — but can’t shake the fact that now that he’s actually seen the country he can’t find anything redeemable about it. He feels he doesn’t belong here.
On top of this realization he finds out that Claudia, the classmate he’d been obsessed with in massage therapy school (Claudia is voiced by my friend Erika in an unreleased DM:MT(LP) would-be finale and she did a great job), has an OnlyFans account with another classmate of theirs, which he immediately subscribes to and watches every video from. His brain is turning on him again. He wants to be happy but he doesn’t think that can be achieved where he is. He needs to run away and start fresh.
Dustin Mark Does Denmark
Bear with me on this one because it’s a dumb story.
Dustin had to leave the US and dive headfirst into another culture, the way he has with other practices and personalities. I knew he’d be moving and learning a new language, I just didn’t know where and which. It so happens that one thing I’d actually like to do in my real life is learn French, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to do so; however, on several occasions to date Dustin has claimed to know French, which I do not. He even included a French poem in his first book, which I don’t remember how I wrote and I couldn’t tell you what it says.
Despite the many plot holes and contradictions present in the project, I couldn’t get myself to choose French when the idea was for Dustin to truly know nothing about the place he’s ending up, even though, again, none of it matters and nobody was listening. (While the first series had a surprisingly healthy listenership for the few published episodes, the second had far fewer and the third hardly any. The fourth would also have hardly any.)
I had to pick a new place. I wanted somewhere small but not too small, obscure but not too obscure. The Netherlands crossed my mind but something about an American in Holland felt hokey, I don’t know why. I considered a few other options but eventually decided that Belgium would be the best option. If he were to move to Belgium I’d still get the Dutch culture I’d have gotten in Holland, including the language itself, but it would be better because I decided it would be.
I moved forward with the Belgium podcast — what I knew would be the final series. I’d banked some words by using a short title in the previous series so for this one I went with “Dustin Mark’s Belgian Avontuur: ‘Avontuur’ Means ‘Adventure’ in Dutch, and Other Lessen (‘Lessen’ Means ‘Lessons’)” which made me giggle the first time or two I said it and then got really really old.
I recorded and released the final Poetry Club episode, explaining Dustin would be heading to Belgium and learning a new language. I released the first episode of the new series. I made a jingle. I spent a couple weeks learning Dutch on duolingo.
Then, one night, unable to sleep, I realized that I kind of have the word “Denmark” in my name, and as I further played around with the sounds I realized my name kind of sounds like “Does Denmark”; and that was that.
I erased the episodes I’d published and scrubbed the internet of the Belgium podcast, the name of which I’d fortunately not have to say again. I changed my duolingo settings to Danish and restarted, releasing an almost identical finale to the Poetry Club, save for the names of people and places and the language, and I put out the first episode of Dustin Mark Does Denmark. I think it’s not only a good title, but a title that literally had to be used.
Over the following weeks I would aggressively learn and practice Danish (using only Duolingo, which isn’t the perfect teacher but it’s something) in a manner of commitment I’m not sure I’ve ever seen from myself. I watched videos about Danish life, read about Denmark’s history, and obsessively racked up duolingo points. As hard as that fucking language is to pronounce, I started getting not terrible at it.
And Dustin, it seemed, was happy with his new life in Aarhus. He worked with his new best friend at a bookstore, he got to see a brand new part of the world through a brand new lens, and he started a courtship with Alberte, his friend’s younger sister.
Though we never heard from Alberte, we heard Dustin talk about how smitten he was by her. He’d tell of her making fun of him for his lousy Danish and his weird self-importance and strange journey, and eventually he’d tell us that he let Alberte peg him.
Dustin continues writing poetry, this time in Danish, and tries to keep the podcast focused on Denmark, but after a little while he is hospitalized from a sex accident. I can so, so clearly see the accident in my head — the room, the people present, the breaking of one of the harness ropes, him swinging upside down across the room. I can see it and I can smell it. But it was hard for me to explain so we went with something vague like Dustin was being playfully abused by Alberte’s sex club and something went wrong and he broke his neck, a few ribs, suffered a concussion, and a few other things I’m sure are listed at some point in the series.
The drugs he is given in the hospital for the pain inspire him to write even more, which he cannot physically do so he dictates his poems to Alberte. As soon as he is fit enough to record an update for his listeners he takes the opportunity to let them know he is ok and will be fully fit before too long. His listeners reach out with concern for him and question whether Alberte is a good influence, as it sounds like he almost died because of her reckless deviance (note to self, “reckless deviance” could be the name of my perfume line).
Dustin, who we know to be proud, lashes out at his listeners, reminding them it is his own life he’s living and if something makes him happy then he’s going to do it. He’ll continue on with his new Danish crew, writing bad poetry and being used as a little Jewish fucktoy.
The next episode, a couple weeks later, opens with an unfamiliar voice: Erik announces that Dustin has died and more details will come. What the fuck! He died?! Shit.
The voice of Erik was selected from a slew of profiles on Fiverr. I sent him the lines and some brief tonal directions and he sent me back what you hear in the episode, which I think is completely terrible but I wasn’t going to ask him to do it again and I wasn’t going to pay a new person to do one (I had no money left) and after thinking about it some more I didn’t really care.
The final step would be to announce the final piece of this way-too-long-but-thankfully-almost-done project — a second book of poetry. For this I would need Dustin’s sister Frankie to record the announcement. I asked a very American-sounding friend of mine to record herself reading it and she agreed. Then I reminded her and heard nothing back. I bugged her again and again heard nothing. I’d waited enough and reached out to another friend of mine with a completely different ethnicity who was happy to comply and did a wonderful job reading the lines I gave her. Why is Dustin’s sister French? I mean, whatever. Nobody’s listening. People sound different. It doesn’t matter.
Point being, the podcast comes to a close with Dustin’s sister, inexplicably a non-native English speaker, telling us she’s worked with Erik to create a book of Dustin’s final poems, which is now available online and at the bookstore at which he’d worked, Resten af Bøgerne.
The Dustin Mark Poems: 101 — Death: A Posthumous Collection of Things That Dustin Would Want Referred to as Poems
God, by the time I got to working on this book I was so over the whole project, but I’d promised myself I’d finish it blah blah blah. Luckily I was happy with my commitment to learning Danish so I approached working on this book like I would more language study.
I’d already gotten the “fake poetry” out of my system with the first book; this time it felt even more disingenuous. I struggled to come up with nonsense that Dustin would have written. He did have a new muse, Alberte, so lots of the Danish poems are about her and her sexual magnetism and the power she holds over him. The rest of them are…dare I say filler.
Whereas the first book is a bunch of nonsense with a few random little poems that make me laugh or I think aren’t awful, the second book is almost exclusively a bunch of nonsense.
This book is longer than its predecessor. I think there are 181 poems but I’m scared to recount and I think there are 114 in English which would leave 67 in Danish, but again I don’t say this with certainty. And I think that 91 of the total poems — a pure coincidence that this is essentially half — are “untitled” having not been titled before Dustin’s death.
I’d entered the whole thing expecting to have a different cover altogether — since somebody besides Dustin would be designing it they might not be able or want to replicate the cover from the first book. Once I realized I was going with the 101-Death name I figured I’d just keep it as is. The only conscious adjustment I made is one that I regret: the en dash in the first book’s title is positioned correctly between 1 and 100 (no space), whereas the second book has 101, then space, then en dash, then Death. I thought to myself, maybe they have different rules in Europe and maybe Erik or Frankie wouldn’t know the proper formatting. In the end it just looks like a mistake/inconsistency and it bugs me.
Earlier in the process I’d designed and created a shirt that fictional Dustin would have worn to work at the fictional store Resten af Bøgerne. I spent too much money on it and I might have violated some copyright law by stealing a template but I needed a picture of me in it for a memorial picture. I also hoped that readers, listeners, friends or family would want to purchase the shirt, which I’d sell to them with no markup. Nobody wanted the shirt and on life went. But special thanks to Tattered Cover Bookstore in Denver for having weird energy while I snuck around trying not to be noticed while I had my girlfriend take a picture of me pretending to work.
Sales for the second book were lower than the first, which is saying something. Perhaps people are not interested in reading even more fake poetry, this time in a language they don’t understand. Either way, I wrote the book and published the book and it’s full of easter eggs and it’s really bizarre and I have forgotten almost every ounce of Danish that I learned for it. For the curious among you, the camera on the Google Translate app will instantly translate the Danish poems to English. I don’t know if they’re translated correctly but then I also don’t know if they were written correctly in the first place.
Amazon raised its printing costs so this book is a little more expensive than the first. Even so, it’s available if you want it.
Looking back….this project didn’t need to happen. Yet here it is, and here I am feeling like I have to explain myself. Good times.
