Hello, all you textual deviants, and welcome to another season of Texting! Believe it or not, Tomek and I have been “texting”—that is, talking into microphones about deviant texts—since 2022. We thank you for your support over the past three years and are excited to bring you 20 new episodes of our textually deviant podcast in 2025.
To kick off season 4, we invited our friend Steve of Idiotville to join us in the Riverside studio for a chat about the deviant text known as the Enneagram—which the Idiot facetiously calls the “Woowoogram” but also sincerely considers his religion. Press play above to hear what transpired during this meeting of the three-personed hive mind. I personally would describe it as a rather disjointed introduction to the “9 flavors of the soul,” but you don’t want us to just regurgitate what you can read on Wikipedia, do you? Although we never do get around to describing what each of the 9 Enneagram types are, nor adequately explain (to my mind, at least) the concept of the “wing,” we do touch upon the 3 subtypes (sexual/social/self-preservation), the 3 centers (head/heart/gut), and the 3 core emotions (anger/fear/shame). We also share our Enneagram origin stories (the Myers-Briggs and OCEAN personality tests having basically served as gateway drugs to the Big E), pause briefly for some Adidas product placement, then speculate on which Enneagram types are manifested by famous people such as Caveh Zahedi (4 or 8?), Jeff Bezos (3?), Drake (3?), Kendrick Lamar (4 or 5?), and Jacob Collier (7?). Steve explains why you never see 8s—those brutal motherfuckers—in therapy, and he expresses the admirable hope that the “Woowoogram” will enable the devout querent to transcend “the bars of his ego cage” and to love his neighbor without becoming “a God-spouting twat.” Tomek, in the dual nay-saying roles of Phoenix Willowfern the New Age Wonderboy and Ennegram 0: The Hater, asserts that “to be nothing is the point,” then experiences a Tomekian (or Willowfernian) epiphany in real time, proclaiming: “I’m alive! That’s the miracle!” For my part, despite my technical difficulties with Riverside and/or internet connectivity, I manage to steer the conversation off-course with a digression on Osho before eventually finding solace in knowing that my tritype or trifix is 458: The Scholar—which Steve tells me is sometimes characterized as “Satanic” (Can I get a “Sssssss!”?):
What about you? Dost thou know thyself? Have you figured out what the language is using you for yet? Take the Riso-Hudson QUEST and let us know:
Show Notes
The contemplative piano music at the beginning of the pod is from Keith Jarrett’s G.I. Gurdjieff: Sacred Hymns:
Osho vs. the Oregonians:
“Anger is an energy”:
Secular Enneagrammarians of the world, unite!
Evangelical Enneagrammarians, rejoice!
Bergman’s pastor should have consulted the “Woowoogram”:
Coming soon (or late) to Books Are Burning!:
I’m pretty sure this is about the Enneagram, but I haven’t yet been able to determine the types of all the characters:
The Next Text
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