Filed November 29, 2025
Why This Project Exists
…and why it just might matter to someone like you. And this, this is a true account.
It all started with, and still revolves around, a book.
A mostly true tale about a guy named Willie.
Willie Lyonsan was born and raised in a no-stoplight farming town in Mid-Michigan. Even as a kid, something about the universe he occupied felt off. Like he’d been dropped on the wrong map at the wrong moment in history. He didn’t rebel, he just roamed. Always moving. Always listening. Always searching for — and not quite finding — something he couldn’t name.
What followed was a life filled with some beautiful, and not so beautiful, miscalculations and accidental adventures, falling into strange situations most people only read about or hear third-hand from a friend of a friend. But for Willie, it wasn’t chaos. It was a collection. He gathered these moments like rare baseball cards: bent, tattered, but always earned.
Eventually, the road caught up to him.
Quietly, things began to collapse. Internally first. Then everywhere else. He told no one. Just kept driving forward with a slowly hollowing-out hope. Until he couldn’t anymore. On the thinnest of threads, that hope precariously dangled above an abyss.
The Turning Point
That’s when he began planning for what he called “the last pilgrimage.” Japan.
It was a last-ditch effort to… well, I don’t even think he knew. It wasn’t some cute midlife adventure or eat-pray-love soul search. It was life or death. He truly didn’t care if it drained the last of his finances, and it did. There was nothing beyond that trip in his mind anyway. No future to worry about, no plan. Just go. One last shot at feeling something before the whole thing collapsed for good.
Near the end of that month-long pilgrimage is when the universe, or fate, or pure dumb luck, stepped in.
Willie was drugged in a Tokyo bar. Roofied. Went dark. But somehow, impossibly, he was rescued and inexplicably ended up deep in the rural borderlands of Northeast Thailand, near where Cambodia and Laos blur like a watercolor left in the rain.
When he came to, there was no more running in him. The noise was gone. The restlessness, gone. The sense of being “misplaced” his whole life, gone.
It was as if God, Buddha, and every assigned angel who’d been watching him like a slow-motion car wreck all those years just plucked him from the timeline he was careening down and dropped him exactly where he was always meant to be.
He didn’t just land, either. All of a sudden, he belonged.
Enter the Book, and the Broadcast
That’s where the story really begins.
Oscar Slamp, lifelong friend, soul brother, old-school radio man, raconteur, and the self-assigned keeper of Willie’s tale, had been watching all this nonsense unfold for five decades. Taking notes. Listening carefully. When Willie’s latest chapter started playing out across the globe, Oscar mobilized and started shaping it into a manuscript. He had to.
The result?
The Mostly True Tale of Getting Roofied in Tokyo and Waking Up Married in Rural Thailand, a raw, strange, cinematic tale that’s funny, heartbreaking, adventurous, absurd, and more real than any memoir has a right to be.
But when the dust settled on the book, it didn’t feel like enough. Oscar wasn’t content with just a book. This was something tactile, audible, visible — a story that needed to be heard, seen, and felt.
So, he packed up his life and moved to Thailand too, right near where Willie now lives with his beloved Chitra, and started building something more immersive. A full-spectrum experience that pulls you into a world lived real-time, smack dab in the margins.
A Studio in the Jungle
Broadcasting from a proper studio on the patio of a stilt-house perched above a dusty rural village, Oscar created something rare: a living, breathing, open-air radio experience.
Forget acoustically sealed booths and sound directional foam. This studio invites the ambient sounds in. The monsoon thunder. The clack of bamboo poles. Children running down the road. Water buffalo hooves on pavement. Drunken karaoke from the neighbors. It all becomes part of the texture, part of the story.
As a former radio man, Oscar knows how to chase sonic perfection. But he also knows the real power is in truth. And truth out here sounds like the jungle fighting to come to terms with itself.
The radio show, Live From The Margins, blends chapter readings, memory, music, philosophy, and whatever else decides to drift through the mic that day.
Beyond the Book: What This Is Now
What started as one man’s spiraling story has become something bigger. A layered, from-the-heart project that includes:
- The Book, Willie’s odyssey told through Oscar’s voice.
- The Radio Show, part B-side mix, part field diary, part absurd real-time theater.
- The Blog, behind-the-scenes deep dives and dissections — reflections on what didn’t make the cut.
- The Films, short, unscripted, observational pieces that offer glimpses of the beauty and absurdity of life on the edge of reason.
And yes, a sequel is already in the works…with more plot twists than you can shake a bamboo cane at. Some of it’s too strange to be fiction. Some of it’s too perfect not to be.
The whole damn thing lives and breathes right here on this website.
It’s a handmade project. No sponsors. No algorithm. Just one guy with a mic, a camera, a pile of notes, a feral producer who says his name is “Danny” lit up on Lao Khao half the time, and a whole lot of story still to tell.
How to Keep the Signal Alive
If any of this resonates, would you consider keeping the signal alive? Here’s how:
Subscribe to the YouTube Channel >
- Like, follow, and share if something lands
- Sign up for updates so you know when new stories, shows, or videos drop
- And if you believe in the kind of storytelling that doesn’t play by the rules — maybe toss a coin in the tip jar, become a patron, or buy a book or a shirt. It keeps the lights on, the mics hot, and the dispatches flowing.
Because this whole strange experiment only works if the right people find it.
You did. So maybe that’s a sign.