"I've been obsessed with this damn ship for most of my life at this point, and I don't know why."

If you do anything for long enough in a session, it becomes performance art. I'm not one of America's preeminent performance art understanders, but as the 20somethings say, this feels right, feels organic. I'd like to tell you that your correspondent, who is 40, is grateful for the bits of incredibly common slang he can still pick up from what's left of Twitter, but I was like this when I was 25 too. Never been slangy. All attempts at folksiness are learned by rote. "Likes" mean I'm studying you through a telescope. Retweets mean I'm studying you under a microscope.

There are dozens of episodes of the podcast Well There's Your Problem that aren't performance art, even though Well There's Your Problem is the kind of podcast – long-winded, bit-driven – that's definitely art of some kind. Its creators describe it as "a podcast about engineering disasters and systemic failures, from a leftist perspective, with jokes." There's a sublime bit somewhere, I think it's in the Tenerife episode, where they lay out the kinds of listeners they have. Plane people care a lot about how much the hosts know ("and we know nothing"). Ship people care very little about how much the hosts know ("and we know very little"). Train people don't give a shit about how much the hosts know ("and we know everything"). As a lifelong ship person, the language I speak is barely mutually intelligible with that of train people, but I keep an open mind, which means, yes, I'm read, I'm seen, etc.

The thing about the engineering disaster obsession, which I also share, is that it appeals to a very particular kind of person: someone prone to special interests, as well as anxiety and/or depression. Someone who is actively calmed by terrible facts, because they reflect the world as we see it. It also means being prone to a very black kind of humor. This humor is built on a wince of sympathy – it doesn't victim-blame, and it's only a little callous. It's the antacid that makes it possible to choke those facts down. If you can learn to laugh at nightmares, the applications for modern life are obvious. For me, learning to laugh at nightmares is the only lasting solution, though my cocktail of one big, one medium, and one small pill is what makes it possible to get there.

Well There's Your Problem is hosted by two Philly dirtbags (the slightly raspier Justin "Roz" Roczniak, in the Captain Kirk role, and the slightly less raspy Liam Anderson, in the Dr. McCoy role), as well as their Spock, Alice Caldwell-Kelly, who had to become a podcaster because "wit" isn't a real profession. Alice also speaks with one of those critically depressed British private ("public") school affects, so her interactions with Liam and Roz have a very utopian, hands-across-the-Atlantic feel: in every country, there are certain special people who are unwell.

The episode I'm thinking of is about the Titanic. Titanic people are a whole separate breed of transportation disaster person. I was one in a big way in my teens, and while I've since moved on to nastier shit (i.e. I'm now a Franklin Expedition guy), this stuff never really leaves you. Titanic people blend all the standard engineering disaster person tropes with an obsession with the Edwardians (nostalgic or horrified as the fancy takes you), and a particular hangup on how people act in slow disasters, which is why I'm sure the Titanic-guy-to-Franklin-Expedition-guy pipeline is short and broad as the road to hell. Titanic took hours. The Franklin Expedition took years! There are slower disasters, but not that many where the crisis portion of things took that long. Incidentally, one of the strengths of Well There's Your Problem is, as "leftist perspective" suggests, it's really good on the ways engineering failures are generally human, regulatory, and political failures first; they might not take years, but they're years in the making.

This Titanic episode is a two-parter, about five and a half hours total. During these five and a half hours, Liam goes to sleep, Alice gets audibly drunk, and there are no breaks whatsoever; if someone goes to pee, the others rampage on. When it becomes clear that guest Kyle Hudak really has prepared almost six hours of material, there's no question of making significant cuts, recording in two sessions, starting over with a different outline, etc. No, to hell with all that. I don't even think Hudak knew this would happen. As the run of the show goes on, he seems increasingly alarmed by what he's done. Towards the end, he tells the surviving hosts with audible disgust, "I've been obsessed with this damn ship for most of my life at this point, and I don't know why." To be ashamed and confused by how much we know about the Titanic: that, to me, is the human condition, emphasis on condition.

When I say "performance art," I'm talking about self-harm. Charlotte Moorman, playing a cello made out of a bomb. Marina Abramovic, starving herself in an apartment which features a ladder made of blade-up knives, an oak plank for a bed, a rose quartz pillow. Talking for six hours about the Titanic won't cut you or kill you or risk your arrest (also a specialty for Moorman, who liked to play topless or sopping wet), but it's the same nervy vibe, exploring your own discomfort in public. Of course, on Well There's Your Problem, the whole thing is a joke, but it's also true that anything that goes on for long enough is a joke. There isn't a bright line between a joke and performance art. Both are all about distress, and both depend somewhat on a live audience. "Titanic Part I"/"Titanic Part II" aren't the best introduction to Well There's Your Problem, but they epitomize its ethos of exploring what's grim until it gets funny, and what's funny until it gets grim. They are for, and about, those of us who experience these two extremes as a circle.