I live in a big beautiful house now with hardwood floors and it is well-lit and it is empty. There are no secrets and there is no mess. I used to have a dog who slept under my bed and a good woman who slept next to me and dreams that filled me every night.

I go to therapy and I don’t think it’s helping. I’ve thought that for the past 5 years but I still go. Just to be sure I’m doing all I can. Or to pretend I am.

I started drinking again. I didn’t even have a good reason besides a date asked me what I wanted from the bar and I didn’t feel like explaining I was sober from a bad mushroom trip for 5 years so now I drink most nights again.

I live in Texas now so sometimes I wonder why I never bought a gun. And then I throw back a few mezcal sodas and remember why.

I tore my elbow tendon, not a full tear but just a little, just enough to hurt like a bitch and keep me awake until 4:30am. Just enough to keep me out of the gym for 6 weeks, the only thing I’ve been enjoying, the only routine where I feel human and know I am doing something unequivocally good for myself. So little else is unambiguous these days.

There’s a video from inside a Waymo of me arguing with my ex girlfriend about moving to Denver written in zeroes and ones. It was was sold to Meta to serve me ads for run clubs and pickleball and other singles events in disguise.

I am having sex with a Colombian girl and the lamplight of my room is highlighting her curves in such a way that she looks like a projection from the Platonic ideal of woman. When she wants to finish she looks at me with such intensity that I think she really knows me. I don’t know if I really know myself.

There’s a 3D LIDAR scan of me on a server farm somewhere silently screaming at a car for cutting me off because drivers in Texas don’t have empathy or a theory of mind or a functioning nervous system. At least the Waymos pull into the intersection to take a left.

As I’m leaving the grocery store, a man catches my attention and yells from a car. He says something about looking up at the moon. When I yell back to ask what he means, he repeats himself, and then is forced to move by coming traffic before he can clarify.

They say you’re loneliest not when by yourself but around people that you can’t relate to. That has a certain melodramatic appeal but I’m not sure the guy in solitary confinement or marooned on an island agrees.

I wonder if suicide ever sneaks up on some people. They aren’t acutely distressed or intoxicated and maybe are even happy and have good friends and hobbies and live full beautiful lives but there’s a part of their mind that isn’t well-lit and that part wins a battle that was raging unbeknownst to them, in a single irreversible moment. One day they just take one step forward or turn the wheel ever so slightly or take 50 Tylenol instead of 1 for their elbow pain.

I’m pathetically trying to learn to draw 36. Truth be told I’m not really learning. I’m too old, my dreams rot around me, a rot that doesn’t fertilize but stultifies. When I see my unused sketchpad I think of the copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that sits unread in the dim corner of my bedroom.

There’s a long unsent text on my phone to a girl in Denver. There’s an equally long unanswered text from a Colombian girl. There’s a long list of calls to good friends who said to reach out if I ever need anything, unanswered.

My phone rings at a party, on the other end a girl I was seeing before she started seeing someone else. I ask her why she didn’t call her boyfriend, she replies that she doesn’t want to be a burden in her relationship. She says she went to a party earlier but felt alone the whole time. I tell here if she’s truly burdensome calling her partner that they are the wrong person and if its only being preserved by fear it isn’t going to last regardless. She agrees but I can tell she won’t call.

I am at a friend’s gallery opening, the full moon overhead, it’s a partial eclipse giving the pink hue I’m told. I am joking and laughing and flirting and emoting but my expressions feel manual like I am working pulleys and knobs from somewhere inside. Several people mention they’ve had uncharacteristically crazy weeks. I tell them it must be the moon, they agree but I don’t know any of us actually believe it.

There’s evidence on a thumb drive in a filing cabinet of a champagne gold 2006 Subaru Outback colliding at highway speeds with an empty Waymo from its front-facing camera. The international news coverage will question if the AI made a critical mistake, no one will wonder if it was the human that glitched.

Her husband Vincent and her met at a party, with the type of story couples who meet online dating grouse about not having, when they had turned corners and bumped into one another and she spilled her drink all over him, making her laugh hysterically. She found it charming he took the joke so well and quickly said that talking to her was worth trashing a white shirt. They had an immediate attraction and flirtation, he had a blithe confidence she found irresistible and she was fun to tease; she’d make that kind of snort laugh when he’d make a good joke and even slap his leg or grab his arm when he made a really good joke. He saw her as an instrument that makes pleasant chords when played with skill and she saw herself like a songbird teaching her young to croon and warble. On the way out, he’d asked, or rather stated, I would love to get your number so you can spill more wine on me sometime, not a great line but enough to do the job. They’d gone out and he insisted on a sippy cup for her and later she’d insisted on going back to his.

At least, that’s how she thought they’d met for the first time for the last eighteen years. Really, they’d met a few months before the party in passing during an exchange while she was on the sidewalk and he was in a car (if you can call that meeting). At the party, she’d thought he’d looked familiar and couldn’t put her finger on why until the end of the night when she summoned the memory after a few glasses of boxed red. It’s so strange, you remind me of a man that surprised me I was training for my 5k the other day.

In fact, he was that rude man (if you can call that rude). He was able to keep it a secret as he’d been in a rental red Toyota Camry while his own red Lexus was in the shop, ironically built on the same platform as the Camry but with real leather and a pearlescent coat of paint. It became their inside joke, doubly for him, that he was a bizarro version of some man who was out there somewhere driving around with a worse version of his car wantonly joking with women on the street.

In the weeks leading up to their street encounter, he’d been feeling caged, hemmed in by society. He’d been feeling as if every one of his behaviors was a script from the mundanities and vicissitudes of adulthood, so he’d decided to start having fun: eschewing smalltalk for deep conversations in grocery lines, flirting with abandon, dancing in public, and in the case of their encounter, making faces at strangers while driving. Most would do nothing, a reassuring amount would mirror their own silly face back at him, some would even road rage. Sarah’s response of surprise was atypical. To her, the face was so out of place in the affluent neighborhood she chose for her Sunday run that she dropped her iced strawberry one-pump brown sugar oakmilk matcha, and her shock turned to embarrassment which deepened when she looked up to see the driver just long enough to register he was handsome and he was laughing at her before the car turned the corner.

The experience upset her enough she did not run there again but motivated her enough she smashed her 5k goal. He found her reaction so endearing that he drove through the same neighborhood at the same time the next three Sundays hoping to see her and ask her out. When they finally met at the party months later, he felt it was fate and she felt an unexplainable attraction.

They fell in love quickly, moved in together within months, were married within two years, and were pregnant before they shared their vows (breakneck pace for where they were from). Speeches at the wedding unwaveringly mentioned how flawless their relationship was. Their family members viewed their relationship as aspirational, with why can’t you settle down with a nice girl/guy like Sarah/Vincent? oft thrown around on both sides of the family. Their friends executed multiple breakups catalyzed by the fact they didn’t feel the same connection with their partner that Sarah and Vincent exemplified.

Soon they had two perfect daughters whose names they chose by sitting in chairs opposite one another and saying names until they both said one at the same time (which only took ten and twelve minutes, respectively). Despite the typical ubiquitous catastrophes that make up life, they always spoke kindly to one another or quickly apologized with genuine contrition when they did not. They made passionate love regularly and genuinely pioneered a new sexual position previously uncategorized by the Kama Sutra (novel variant of reverse cowgirl wherein the woman lies down on the man’s leg supported by a pillow so she doesn’t tire herself out which they coined ‘lazy farmhand’). Their parenting styles blended seamlessly and they never undermined each other purposefully, each daughter had a favorite parent but it shifted often and was split exactly 50/50 over time (the same ratio as their household chores and monetary contributions). They felt the intoxicating mix of reliable comfortability somehow coexisting with mysterious novelty, each genuinely felt surprised by the other at regular but unpredictable intervals—Sarah had neglected to mention concert-level clarinet skills for the first eight years of their relationship and Vincent casually mentioned a decade in he was in a gay relationship in college for a full year (when he’d previously mentioned the tryst with an exchange student named Ryan she thought he was referring to an Irish woman).

They were sitting in the den one night after the girls had shockingly gone to bed without much of a fuss. They were discussing finally trading in the now-ancient blue Lexus when the story came up from an innocuous one-hundred and first time, and this time he decided to come clean. In his mind, it was the punchline to an eighteen-year long joke, the result of careful restraint he didn’t quite understand why he was exercising but did anyway. He told the full version of the story for the first time, his dissatisfaction with life, the silly faces, that she was the only one to react with surprise, that he had a crush on her and wanted to run into her until one day when he literally did. He believed it was his masterstroke, a story so romantic it would once again surprise her in the most wonderful way, filling her life with joy and synchronistic meaning once more. She did not express joy but was uncharacteristically quiet and cold, as if disguising simmering anger. That was a way she had surprised him in year two, her ability to feign anger and truly commit to a bit—this time it was he who had the patience to commit longer for the bigger reveal. She was already asleep when he came up to go to bed.

He woke up to the suspicious silence alongside suspicious restfulness that’s familiar to anyone with a family. He never needed an alarm on weekends (or any other day for that matter), his children and wife always woke up him early to play or do chores, with well-intentioned but poorly executed breakfasts in bed, or he’d hear them trying to let him sleep while stifling laughter then miss them enough that he’d get out of bed to join the fun. He looked at his phone and saw it was 10:30am, pretty much evening for a parent. He saw no texts so walked around the house calling each of their name in turn, Sarah, Sarah? Alicia? Allllliii? Tabitha? Nothing. As he started to repeat Tabitha’s name again to match the others (wouldn’t want to play favorites) he came across a note of paper on the counter.

You aren’t the man I thought you were. I took the kids.
-Sarah

Three months, many unanswered phone calls, and a few curtly answered texts later, he still had no answers. Friends and family didn’t know or wouldn’t tell, he wondered if there was someone else, he went through finances, he sorted through every event from the last six months and then from their entire relationship, all offering no insight to where she went with the kids or how their encounter from the car could possibly be so cataclysmic. He alternated between sleeping on his side of the bed to imagine her home and passing out on her side of the bed to try to understand how she was feeling when she left.

One evening, she returned as suddenly as she left (the kids needed to go back to school). No big hug, no grand explanation, polite silence as they put the kids to bed.

Finally, they talked.

Sarah, what the fuck is going on? I’ve been worried sick. Are you okay? What happened?

She poured herself a glass of red in a sippy cup, almost sarcastically, and took a deep glug, and a deeper sigh.

It’s like I said in my note: you weren’t the man I thought you were. I realized you don’t understand me at all, that you don’t understand seduction. When I fell in love with you, I thought you were the man I poured wine on him on purpose, not the man that had embarrassed me on the street. The score isn’t even, you’ve had one up on me for eighteen years by my count. Don’t you get it? I’d been walking around thinking I was control but you’ve been pulling the strings the whole time, behind every laugh and joke and tease was the one-sided knowledge that I was that silly girl on the street, everything you’ve ever said in jest I thought was someone chasing me was actually someone leading me, talking down to me. What a horrible secret you’ve held over me. I know you want to say I sound confusing or ridiculous but don’t pretend: if you didn’t know exactly what I was talking about you would have told me ages ago, we’ve told the story countless times, and yet you held onto that detail for yourself for power, to lord it over me, to sit above me. I’ve puzzled over how we can ever repair the damage for three months and I don’t know if we can. I’ve concluded have only one option: I have to hurt you like you’ve hurt me, we need to restore balance. I am going to sleep with a stranger. A stranger in this town so you won’t know who but you’ll know that it could be anyone so you can feel the hurt I felt looking with a side eye at every Blue Camry —and in eighteen years, if we’re both still alive, I’ll tell you who it was.

He paused, for a long time. She sounded crazy, so crazy that he felt crazy. He felt like he was seeing himself from the third person, an actor in a strange play, like watching television when you’re stoned. He repeated everything she said back in his head, he’d always been good with words but they sounded like an alien language. Then suddenly he realized.

Wait… you’d spilled wine on me on purpose at the party?

She paused, surprised.

Yes, of course. I wanted to talk to you. You didn’t know that? How do you think a single drop didn’t get on me? Divine providence?

Yes, actually. And you never told me?

I didn’t but I hadn’t the foggiest that you were unaware… everything I just told you and this is the detail you fixate on? This is so like you. Didn’t you hear anything I just said? I’m going to fuck a stranger Vincent. Why does the wine matter?

Sarah, I didn’t know the whole time, which means…

Suddenly, she covered her face with her hand, and rested her elbows on the kitchen counter, putting the full weight of her head in her hands before continuing.

…Which means we’ve both had one up on each other.

They both started laughing. Softly at first, and with the ridiculous laughter one experiences during breakups and funerals they started crying, almost weeping, then feeling their tears well up they started laughing harder at the absurdity of their crying, their laughter turning almost manic, and she grabbed his arm gently, then collapsed into his arms with the crashing exhaustion one typically only feels after a powerful orgasm.

He stood up from the stool, straightened her out on her feet, and reached for the sippy cup still half-full from red wine from the generous pour. Wordlessly, he unscrewed the lid and handed it to her.

She leaned in, kissed him deeply, and poured it over his head, each drop running down his face cleansing him like a baptism. They looked down to see a single drop had splattered, staining her white dress.

Third date at my house, I cook for her on my wok and she chooses a movie: Grizzly Man, a Werner Herzog documentary about a man who lives with bears and is, of course, eventually devoured by said bears along with his girlfriend. It is haunting and beautiful and the worst date movie I can imagine. I joke about the horror of the movie and make her snort laugh but I am talking too much, anxiously, over the movie. I am too intent on kissing her and not intent enough on just having a good time and going with the flow. Every moment I try to lean in after a good laugh, Herzog’s German-accented narration interrupts…

“And what haunts me, is that in all the faces of all the bears that Treadwell ever filmed, I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.”

and I am stymied. I wait, get a laugh, try again and…

“I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility, and murder.”

I try to break the tension and joke about the movie selection making it hard to kiss her, instinctively popping the unspoken bubble in the room like when I’m onstage. She doesn’t laugh and leaves abruptly afterwards. I guess relying on my instincts while watching a movie about a man eaten alive by bears wasn’t the move. I text her days later but I already know, she isn’t interested, there wasn’t a connection or whatever the irrelevant words are that she writes.

I am sitting on the mat at the bouldering gym, a beautiful woman sits next to me, too close to me when there’s no one else around. We start talking, a long conversation, she’s an architect, she studied in the Galapagos, she’s from Bogota, chatting too long to be polite, she’s touching my arm and laughing. We depart casually, a perfect first encounter. I’m sure I’ll see her again, better to play it cool. I do run into her again, we’re on the same schedule but at the second and third encounters there is no recognition, no flirty smile. I feel like I am bothering her just by saying hello. I stop.

I go on another first date. She asks me what I want to drink. I panic and order a Sapporo. Thing is, I haven’t had a drink in years. I guess I crumble that easily, I’m that mutable. She is mean and funny and we tease each other but have no sexual chemistry, or regular chemistry for that matter. She thinks she’s smarter than me and I conclude her brain has been melted by law school after she tells me any older guy who sleeps with a woman under 25 should lose their job. A week later I see her in a cafe and she pretends not to see me.

I bounce back, it’s the type of cafe where all the women dress up and look you up and down with hungry eyes like you’re the cute girl at the bar. It buzzes with the energy of a European city where everyone bikes as opposed to the usual vacant American stare that results from spending too much time alone in traffic. A beautiful girl sits next to me, she is reading Normal People, I’ve seen the show, we talk and I go back to writing. I ask her to watch my laptop while I use the bathroom. I return and she leans over and asks me what I’m writing on. Bingo. We talk for a half hour about her life and family and comedy and she asks to follow me on Instagram. I follow her back, follow request sent. A week later, the grey REQUESTED turns into a blue REQUEST. A silent, mysterious denial.

I am in a small wine bar with another online date, we order some vermouth cocktail (which I don’t like) with an olive (which I also don’t like). I offer mine to her and explain the olive theory, that the foundation of all good relationships is one person who enjoys olives and one who despises them so that they always hand over the goods. She asks me if I am lying about hating olives. I joke, of course, the foundation of all good relationships is lying and deceit. I don’t know if she thinks I am joking. I don’t know if I am joking. We have read the same books and have similar interests and she is strikingly beautiful but every time I try to ask her about herself she responds with an expressionless look and an I guess so. I tell her that I appreciate that she takes a moment to think before responding to everything, I guess so. I finish my drink and ask if she wants another, trying to loosen the arctic ice. This time she does not guess so. I pay for our drinks, she does not say thank you and exits, stage left.

I let the rejection bother me too much. I used to be good at this. Maybe I need to shake the rust off.

As I am writing this, I get a text from me and my ex’s mutual friend telling me she needs time and space. We’ve gone bouldering 3 times a week for the last several years, gone on outdoors trips together, made matching shirts for our climbing group. She’s watered my plants when I am out of town, she invited me to her wedding and I helped write the speech she gave at her brother’s. She texts that she hopes I understand. I don’t understand, I’m sorry, was my breakup hard for you? Ironically, or maybe the exact opposite of ironically, we became friends after we went on a few dates when I moved to Austin years ago and she said she didn’t feel the chemistry but would be open to being friends. A relationship born of rejection. I opened her wedding invite yesterday; she is getting married the day before my birthday, the same day as my date’s birthday who showed me Grizzly Man. Synchronicities pile up.

Three years ago, my best friend broke up with me. I don’t know a better way to phrase it. We barely saw each other or talked anymore and lived across the country so it’s beyond me how our relationship became irreparable or burdensome. He never told me when or why. When he told me he didn’t want to be friends, he told me over text message. I remember when he was crashing on my couch almost breaking up with his girlfriend, crying, unsure what to do, and I talked him down. He went back, they’re married now. I was not invited. I sent him a letter saying that he’s my brother and I understand whatever he needs to do I love him anyway. I never got a reply. I butt-dialed him last year (my therapist would say unconsciously) and when he called me back, he told me he thought I was calling because my mother died. I told him my mother had died 2 years prior. It didn’t seem to register that he stopped being my friend when I needed him most: during the end stages of my mother’s Alzheimer’s.

My stepmother divorced my father last January over text message after 18 years. I took the dogs. I don’t want to be married to you anymore. Synchronicities pile up.

I am told that I am supposed to be unaffected by all of this, that I should have the self-respect that Joan Didion wrote of in one of my favorite essays:

“…people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.”

The difficulty is that, at times, I do not understand my own mistakes in order to own the consequences. I do not know why my best friend stopped talking to me, I don’t know how my climbing friends would side with my ex when there are no sides to take. I don’t understand what an erudite woman can clock in me within 45 short minutes that makes her run for the hills. I don’t know how I can cook a delicious meal on a flaming wok for a girl who was born a day apart and lived a block away from me and make her snort laugh but she doesn’t want to see me again. But maybe that doesn’t matter and the wanting to know is the problem, my assuming I could have changed something, that I erred along the way. Relying on them to affirm who I am.

“To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.”

I do ruminate, I do lie awake imagining my transgressions, reverse engineering failures, scripting conversations that haven’t and will never transpire. I find myself balling up my fist, thinking of the lack of consideration and disrespect, of the explanations and apologies and support I never received. In short, I allow others’ perceptions and actions to alter my own very sense of self. I have a lack of solidity, a porous membrane that should be watertight, I’m a statue sculpted of pumice instead of granite. My fear says I am unlovable, maybe it’s this very fear making me unlovable. A recursive lack, a self-fulfilling prophecy, confirmation bias. A refusal before an offer.

“In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues… character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.”

Didion’s self-respect is the exact opposite of the narcissism, which is the inability to let others exit from your life, stage left, a pathological need to keep your life’s cast of characters eternally in the wings. To win in a negotiation you must be willing to leave the table; to have character, you must allow others to walk away. My dogged refusal to accept this amounts to a lack of character. Dates will find me repulsive and friends will drift apart, even best friends. My romance will come to an end after 4 years because I wouldn’t move back to Denver; I will sleep alone on my side of the bed, remembering when I slid my mother’s emerald on her hand in front of my family over Christmas to see how it would fit.

It’s easy enough to grasp the schema at hand: that self-confidence is the ability to accept the consequences of your choices and the refusal to allow others to alter you. Resultantly, it’s tempting to consider the matter resolved, that I’ve understood myself and therefore healed the wound. However, the work remains undone; I’ve been given an anatomical map but not the panacea. Conventional wisdom would have you believe that the path forward is one of self-knowledge. I believe this is a trap. The closer truth is something akin to acceptance, not to heal my wound but to understand as fundamental to who I am. I need to accept the part of me that grasps at others to tell me who I am, the saccharine cloyingness, childish overexcitement, clownish performativeness, the Boston-bluntness, the ruminative anxiety.

This is what I’ve learned after my breakup, 3 different 4-year relationships and another 3-year one. You must accept that, new place and new person, you will not change. You’re a marble coffee table that you keep busting an ankle against, you might sand off the sharp edge, but the best you can do is be mindful enough to move gracefully around it and warn others when they’re in your space. I’m sorry if every disagreement feels like litigation, I’m sorry my tone goes cold when I’m upset and trying not to raise my voice, I’m not working on it but I am working with it. Watch your step.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which, for better or for worse, constitutes self-respect, is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference.

My 4-year relationship perhaps ended because of this: I was unable to love, unable to cope with the consequences of my own decisions or lack thereof. I waited until the decision was made for me, until my girlfriend melted down under the stress like a reactor and finally cracked and spewed her waste towards me. Until she broke up with me. Until she signed a 3-month lease in Denver without me and told me she wanted to move with her, near her, to date again, to find ourselves again. Until I said that was crazy when it was her leaving the door cracked open, desperate, before I let the wind close it and then claimed innocence.

She called me 2 weeks ago, trying to patch things up. She said we weren’t really broken up broken up, we were just figuring things out before I signed the lease, that it wasn’t her breaking up with me or her signing a lease without me that was the nail in the coffin, it was my signing a lease without her afterwards. The internal logic of a relationship that’s impossible to understand when you’re outside it, even more impossible to explain that she was right.

A week later my pride crumbled and we switched places. I called, regretting what I did, wanting her back, wanting to visit. She said she’s not ready and might not ever be. I told her I want to move to Denver and that breaking a lease is nothing, just money, what could be cheaper than money? Too late. She felt a taste of life without my indecision weighing on her. I understand now what an emerald on her finger means and the ocean of difference between girlfriend and wife. Moving back to a city I didn’t want to for a girlfriend who is actively sabotaging my life sounds insane—precisely as insane as not moving to make my wife happy when every cell in her body is screaming I need you to do this for me anyways even when she never said it.

Sitting in my apartment, working and online dating and lifting once again, I’ve returned home having not changed like 4 years ago and 4 years before that. I keep looking for myself in others and find nothing, the leaving to find oneself is the forgetting. Like a man searching in the sun to find his shadow, wherever I go, there I won’t be.

The romantic arena is a beautiful way to determine your own character; women sniff out desperation like bloodhounds, nonchalant confidence acts as stand-in for character. I am in equal measures rejected for overeagerness and rewarded for boldness. I talk to strangers and attractive women easily when everyone else seems to sit 2 seats away and hope their longing will mysteriously manifest into conversation then actual sex—magical thinking. I am chatty and gregarious and while I allow rejection to overly bother me, I am simultaneously unafraid to fail.

As I leave the climbing gym, I hear catchy music emanating from the car next to mine and see a gobsmackingly gorgeous girl blaring it, windows down, hair held back by sunglasses. I have one of those moments where my mouth and body move before I have a say and ask her what she’s listening to. She shows me her phone, Caroline Polachek. I note I’d just been listening to her over the weekend and then thank her, return to my car and roll down my windows, where I’m surprised that we continue chatting. She'd just come from acro-yoga, I mention that my friends were just messing around on the floor with it last night, she says that’s 2 things that line up. She recommends the class, I thank her, roll up my windows, and make a mental note to return with the sole intention of asking her out, then start to back out of my spot.

In another one of those moments, I put my car in park and roll my window back down then wait for her to see me, awkwardly long, until she looks up, surprised. I tell her I want to buy her dinner. She mulls it over playfully before replying that Caroline Polachek vouched for me then supplies her number. I text her my name and point out, incredulous, that our numbers end in 7445. She says there’s 3 things. As I pull out of the parking lot I receive a text with the picture she took of me while I was saving her contact and then don’t stop smiling all night.

3 things indeed. Synchronicities pile up. Fuck Werner Herzog, fuck chaos, hostility, and murder. I feel harmonious, part of a universe replete with kinship, understanding, and mercy.

To open yourself to connection—to others and to the universe at large—is to expose yourself. Willfully entangling oneself in romance is guaranteeing rejection. To find meaning in logically disparate coincidences is to access a heretofore unknown world, one which offers guidance and confusion in equal measures. Character then is understanding that the opportunity for gain and the inevitability of loss are inseparable.

She never texted back. I’d be lying if I said it’s not bothering me.

Let me explain. Buddha’s cultural milieu much paralleled our own, prophets espousing transcendence through various extremes, either pursuing full-on indulgence or starving themselves as ascetics to deny worldly pleasures. Born a prince, he quickly found no matter how much pleasure he experienced that he’d still end up a corpse surrounded by riches and whores. Conversely, he fasted to the edge of death to prove all the monks doing so were liars merely valorizing their own suffering.

So, Lord Buddha cracked a wry smile and coined “all things in moderation—even moderation.” It killed at the time and the middle way was born, a path of neither exxtreme indulgence nor asceticism.

Our own age exemplifies a similar confusion. Do we succumb into the nihilism of sick computer games and IV drips of melted ice cream and fentanyl with VR porn synced to your own personal robot blowjob machine, or spartanly chisel ourselves into the hypercapitalist ideal evangelized by the looksmaxxers?

To answer this question, I’m taking looksmaxxing to the frontier. I will push my physical appearance to the absolute limit of raw sexuality and become a black hole for longing gazes, leaving a slugtrail of masturbatory fantasies in my wake, to see if being impossibly fuckable indeed manifests happiness.

No nook or cranny of my fragile flesh will be ignored, I’ll moisturize the rough skin of my elbows until it’s porcelain, inject radioactive isotopes into my boring-brown irises until they’re hypnotic-green and I can see the glow of the magnetosphere and navigate using the earths poles like a pigeon. I’m going to embark on a thousand-step Korean skincare routine that culminates in butchering Brad Pitt to harvest and graft his perfect epidermis onto mine to finally witness what the world looks like through eyes so blessed by our creator. And I’m gonna get a Brazilian butt lift and juicy pair of honkers so alien and distasteful that Instagram flags my many thirst traps as AI-generated content.

I’m going to be healthmaxxing so diligently that even that rich vampire guy who sells luxury olive oil and transfuses his son’s blood and probably measures the salinity of his ejaculate will tell me “there’s a limit, freak.” Fuck protein shakes and shiitakes, I’ll transcend the need for organic nutrients by installing solar panels designed by Tesla and Palantir onto my back to subsist from the pure vital energy of the sun. My only diet outside of solar rays will be a stack of experimental pills, capsules, tablets, and tinctures, farm-to-table from the lab bench into my bloodstream, supplemented by eclectic remedies from voodoo to Lao Tzu—ground scarab shell, waterfall-hidden century-blooming orchid, locket of virgin albino hair, cerebellum of still-living monkey.

I will exercise 24 hours a day to hone the perfect musculature, made possible by sharkmaxxing my brain to sleep one hemisphere at a time. I am going to force my left brain to be a right-brained at gunpoint (drop the paintbrush and no one gets hurt!) because creativity isn’t optimal. I’ll hemispherectomize myself to sever the connection between the (now) right and right sides, bifurcating my very being. Two productive selves, soulsmaxxing, double my peers, schizomogging. I’m gonna think fast and slow at the same goddamn time, faster and slower than anyone has.

Best of all, one half will be voyeur and the other exhibitionist for hyperefficient goonmaxxing, transcending sex to find the heights of pleasure.

In my panopticon masturbatorium (designed by Andrew Huberman) I’ll stream on OnlyFans and a hundred foreign sites you’ve never heard of and accumulate mountains of capital in currencies you’ll never touch to construct an optimally diverse portfolio while experiencing ecstasy heretofore unknown to the human animal, perpetually edging and cumming so hard I’ll need to sustain hydration with a bespoke device that captures my own output and recycles it back directly into my balls like the stillsuits in Dune, turning me into a perverted ouroboros.

Speaking of balls, I’m getting rid of one of them, along with a kidney and lung and my appendix because I’m minimalmaxxing. I’ll keep only the barest essentials, ridding my life of fellowship and camaraderie and especially family obligations on my quest. I’ll sleep on a ground so unforgiving it’d give a Japanese monk scoliosis. Hell, I’m gonna fuck that sexy-ass bitch Marie Kondo herself to make her spark joy in the most optimal way conceived by man and/or machine, with marathon Shibari rope bondage and Hitachi wand play sessions so epic even the Kundalini serpent need a smoke break after 10,000 hours. Together, minimal yin and maxximal yang in tantric union, we’ll put aside everything, our longing, our egos, our concepts of self, spring cleaning our conceptual nonbeing down to the last spiderweb until no vestige of being remains, where zenith and nadir meet, becoming the exact moment of stillness between rising and falling.

Having myself experienced the most extreme of all extremes in all directions and valences, I’m going to (easily) achieve enlightenment and then find a new, cooler transcendence beyond all the other heavens to monkmax and heavenmog on Buddha and Jesus.

In my final maxxing, my coup de grâce, I’ll sneak, ninja-silent, into God’s throneroom to pilfer the legendary clavicular’s hammer. I won’t hit myself in the jaw but use it to tap an icepick behind my eye into my frontal cortex, lobotomizing away everything I’ve learned because ignorance is bliss, the ultimate frontier is retardmaxxing. I’ll take a whole handful of Morpheus-blue pills and wash them down with a cold Bud Light. I will be the most retarded and, by proxy, the happiest man alive, and none of you can stop me.

I’ve always wanted to surf, I tried it three times on vacations, figured it would be easy going because I grew up a barefoot walk from the sea and can still ride vert ramps skateboarding, a Dogtown sport born from wave-quiet days. Turns out I’m talentless, an unnatural, that riding technique is dwarfed in importance by swimming and reading the ocean. The territory isn’t the map, and the view from the beach isn’t the same as riding waves. Surfing oscillates between two poles: staring out of the horizon trying to discern which bump will blossom into a cresting wave while adjusting for its arrival, and fighting the whitewater while duck diving or turtle rolling under other waves, trying to conserve energy to get back out and begin again. This is surfing. The part in between, the ride, is simply the expression of the mastery of these two elements. The ocean spray and hand dragging and the dazzling alacrity and whipping turns and glittering sun and the impossible, psychedelic barrels.

I flew to Bali on a lark. Good surf in Lombok, they said. Not too crowded, still real, rights breaking year round. Apparently, this is vital. If you ride regular stance, waves breaking right let you see the ocean as it surges around you to time your movements and ride just in front of its crashing, always just in front. Upon arrival, I found another expat selling a board cheap, an 8-foot resin, ivy-green, bisected with a pair of crimson racing stripes. He didn’t want to sell, he didn’t want to return to where I just left. Your loss, my gain. Enjoy the fluorescent lights and the addled bug eyes looking over your shoulder at parties, and the luxury SUVs that take zipper merging as a personal affront and the biological clock ticking down like a bomb in your relationship.

I hesitantly join the lineup this morning, dark and early, 6am, holding my board imperceptibly wrong, tying my leash less imperceptibly to the wrong leg, awkwardly dragging my board through the gurgling white water, instantly revealing myself to be an amateur, a kook. Beautiful lingo. An eclectic mix of jargon integrated across the Australian-Hawaiian-Californian axis. Pristine glassy days and crusty corelords ripping tasty cutbacks on absolute bombs. New ways to see the oceanic world, more words for waves and wind than Inuits have for snow. They say to join the lineup through a channel, a calm in the waves, a highway out to the action, but to my eyes, it all looks like water. I try to watch where others go and follow their path before I’m battered back by the waves they slip through effortlessly, like they whispered a password or hummed a hymn passed down through generations to open a hidden door. I’m spent before I’m out to the real waves. I adjust, and the air starts to feel cooler than the water. I rest my head on the board and watch the incandescent horizon. Divinity.

I romanticized surfing, some ideal to place next to my own drab modernity, I might be in an office chair staring at a screen all hours of the day, greying hair and not long but not short in the tooth, contending with the thought of a 30 year mortgage with a girlfriend turning 30, tired of my carelessness and idleness and fading ambition, in the dry, flat, startup hellscape of Denver… but if I learned to surf… I’m not sure what, but it would be different, goddamn it. I would be different. I would leave myself behind, all my rage and impotence, I’d be reinvigorated and revitalized and overfilled with transcendental appreciation of God’s living earth. My grandfather was buried a stone’s throw from Emerson and Thoreau and, at this rate, I’ll be ashes-to-ashes in the same crematorium as Joe motherfucking Rogan. Maybe in Bali, fucking maybe, I wouldn’t wake up ready to go back to bed. Maybe, the sun would dazzle like it did when I was still crawling on hardwood, and I’d feel the warm kiss of the most innocent and deific of all emotions: bare curiosity.

Waves blend together, one after another, all I can think of is the curling barrel, all I can do is eat shit for hours. Hell, eating shit is the reward. I mostly float and paddle. Wrong spot, adjust, not even close, adjust again, give it everything I have, fight the ocean with both my hands trying to build enough speed to catch the wave, locals laugh, near-dead, limbs useless trying to come back through the waves, dragged mercilessly by each one, my big beginner resin board too buoyant to duck dive but at least I didn’t get one made out of fucking foam. I stare half-jealous, half-mystified, watching the too-easy triumph of others, trying to focus on all the advice I’ve absorbed; it’s too much at once, so my limbs are confused and my mind-body connection severed. Board flat, legs straight, back arched, arms wide, powerful but effortless, hands wide, pop up quick but not too quick, knee bent, not that much, eyes on the horizon. It takes me days to catch a single wave, and it’s short-lived. I go for a good one, but too late or too far forward, so my nose pearls down into the water and I tumble head over heels, trapped underwater for a frightening amount of time on even a small wave. I emerge from the water to disappointed looks for squandering such a chance. No violence in their eyes? At least I didn’t snake anyone. I must be getting better.

Surfing etiquette they call it, a peculiar concept for an ostensibly counterculture clique. While the tides and waves are, on paper, the property of humanity, in actuality, there is a wide set of norms and, as they call them, rules, governing one’s comportment within the oceanic realm. The magic of the rules is that they are unspoken, anarchic, organic, engendered bottom-up but enforced top-down, harshly. They are complex and archaic, though essentially manifestations of the golden rule with a special emphasis on hierarchy based on skill and localism. Stay out of the way of the rippers and wait your turn if you’re a barney. And I’m doing a lot of waiting. No matter, I need the rest.

Finally, my chance arrives, third in the set, I watch it, wait, turn and go, then stand up and don’t fall but somehow keep moving, suddenly pulled by the unfathomable ocean it feels like I’m riding a 30 foot bomb, like I’m breaking a bronco without a saddle, everything is worth it, the long flight and the lonely nights and the life I left in shambles, as I’m dragged towards shore on messy whitewater mush not worth the locals time. After that, progress comes slowly, one tiny triumph after another. Learning to fall back onto the board and not overcommit to conserve energy, minutiae in hand placement, an ineffable sense of oscillations in the ocean, I’ve gotten the cypher and the tiny glimmers on the edge of the water start to carry unmistakable meaning like runes on the side of a pyramid, an embarrassing amount of days pass before I finally drop in on a right ahead of a wave’s peak and truly rip, dancing up and down as my skateboarding muscle memory hijacks my movements and I look like someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing for a gorgeous moment before I catch my rail, tumble headlong into the ocean floor, and knock the air out of my chest. Rushing air alchemizes into water and glory into panic as I try to find the surface without a gasp of air.

I can’t believe they used to ride without leashes. I’m dumbstruck that pros can go entire sessions without getting their hair wet. Confidence embodied, true watermen. I don’t know how I made it to the beach. I spit up water for ten minutes, stare at the sky, thankful for my breath, and skip the evening session.

Even though I don’t know how many days I’ve surfed or how many waves I’ve caught, I know exactly how many barrels, zilch. Unsurprising, even for many a lifetime into surfing, let alone me, especially at the modest- but respectable-sized waves of Lombok. Rinse and repeat, cliches lose their metaphorical significance. All things come from the ocean, idioms included, apparently. One session I focus on timing, the next on efficiency, the following on ever more granular nuance of the cut of my hand and the rise of my elbow and the shape of the waves. Monomaniacal. I forget the date and think of tides and winds, I stop measuring time in days but by sessions, one in the morning and one in the evening. Twice as much life, I tell myself, as family stops asking for updates and friends give up pretending they’ll visit, my escape loses novelty. My ex no longer texts about life in Colorado, or maybe I stopped asking. So what? The phone stops itching in my pocket.

I wake up to find the ocean, glassy flat, inky water horizon melting together into pitch sky. I feel the biting cold of the water, and my body reflexively withdraws. I relax it and soak in until the temperature is float tank bodywarm. Gurgling white surf spells the shape of the waves. I lie on the board and imagine I’m part of it, merging, I imagine we’re one, like the Aztecs saw Cortez on a horse as a single creature. My hands move themselves and I head out through the matte water of the channel, feeling the lift of the ocean as a set comes in, I roll under, what fun, a little game I play every time to see how little I can let it pull me back, hands wrapped around fresh wax on the side of my board, I note that the third of the set felt the strongest as I join the lineup. Familiar eyes meet mine, an unfamiliar head nod, a first. I nod back gently as our eyes drift back to the same point on the horizon that fills with fishing boats, we cycle up and down, our morning communion rising and falling in liturgical unison. I sit, half-sunk onboard and sun slowly encroaching at my back, evidenced by the cellophane glimmer that reveals hidden detail in the water, topographical wrinkles, peaks and troughs, a ceaselessly transforming mountain range. I read that the length of any coastline can never be perfectly calculated as the scale of the measuring rod changes the outcome, fractal detail stretching to infinity. Floating in the same posture as a camper in a lawn chair, I consider the impossible complexity of the surface of the ocean in even this tiny patch.

I paddle after a few swells, miss, paddle again, plant feet, stand, then fall, and feel the tug of the leash on my ankle as the buoyancy of my board catches the wave I did not, up, then pull it back, lay flat, push water behind me. I’ve come to like falling, and each crash I notice my weight too far forward or back, my too-slow feet, my overeagerness chasing too close to the beach. I feel the force flow through me then past me with each swell, the ocean breathing, they say. A shine on the horizon catches my eye, minutely different from the others, and a minute later it’s on me, bigger than I thought. Bigger than I’ve ever seen. I glance left and behind, no one. I see the crest start to take form alongside terror tightening my chest, but my arms move themselves, and I take in cold air, salty as sweat, looking back one last time I feel a mountain form under me, hands strong on both sides, left foot firm, then I’m staring down the face, a full standing height above where I was moments before, the terror wins, I decide to bail back to my board. The signal from my brain never reaches my body, reflexes push down, and I lurch down and forward, suddenly riding on the face.

Every atom in my body screams, imbued with electricity, I lean into the rail, hard right, harder than I ever thought I’d have to. I start to pull away from the crest, too far away, leaving the wave behind. My back knee drops to collapse my lanky frame closer to the water, and my back hand does something it’s never done before, something it must have learned from movies and posters, and plunges into the water like a rudder, piercing the water, slowing me back to the crest—too much, I’m dragged back violently. I spread my fingers to allow more water to rush through and find myself in the pocket, the goldilocks zone, and I feel a vivid glow permeate through my limbs and permeate into my field of vision, the power of the ride fades into the muted morning-blue of the ocean, salt pummels me like static, and somehow, silence. I remember to lock my eyes towards the beach, that movement follows focus. Curiously, impossibly, there is no shore because the sky has closed in, no, the top of the wave, it’s above me, the exit forms a bubble, a whole world, a Rothko melding of ocean and sky. I pour everything into it and the wall around me, the ceiling over me starts to glow gentle green and I feel like I’ve changed with it, that I am it, I forget myself, I forget to breath, I forget my hand. Too much drag. The back of my board pulls up behind me, the lip clips my head, and my mouth fills with water.

In a flash, I’m up and then under, tumbling, over the falls, outside myself. Location and bodily awareness lose meaning as dread grips me. There’s no escape, no bailing, and the dread won’t fall. I do what I can and breathe, reassuring myself. It does little, the panic contaminates my limbs, I start to swim, but maybe the wrong way, I have water in my ears and a leash tugging my ankle, so I settle into the tumult as the oxygen continues to drain, my muscles too tight. I fucked up. I don’t fight the water, not for lack of trying, I simply have nothing left to give. I order my arms to swim anyways. Nothing. I really fucked up.

I’d like to tell you that I thought of my love, of my life back home, that I imagined waking up to amber light and palo santo and a warm head against my chest and hair tickling my face and the yawn of my husky stirring under my bed frame that I’d stopped appreciating but now understand I’d give anything for, I wish I could tell you that the ocean floor washed away my covetousness and cruelty and caprice like a baptism, but the bare truth is I thought of nothing and what I felt was absolute terror, ineffable death. I felt the inevitable end.

But I felt it.

And I met the equal and opposite resilience, the indefatigable desire to persist. I realized that the horror and the mettle mix together at the edges like an empty horizon where water meets air. And in that depth, the sensations in my body dissolved. There was no light to move toward, so I swam towards the darkness, fear flowing through me like hurricane waters. I didn’t fight but flowed onwards, two steps forward and two steps back through featureless, pristine void. And for a while, nothing happened.

Light returns in the form of beach and sky, then sand and taxi and hotel. I watch myself handing my surfboard to someone who looks just like me, then the Pacific from 40,000 feet give way to coast before Rocky Mountains rise and fall across the high desert and plains, ripples of colliding energy moving at the scale of epochs, the land breathing a sigh of relief for my return. I watch a bouquet in my hand and a door slam in my face, and the same thing for seven nights until it stays open. I see a hesitant smile, then so many starry nights and a Denver square with a big front window and succulents lining the patch between road and sidewalk, I see my wife’s stomach grow then my daughter crawling on hardwood dancing with sun, a glimmer in her eyes imperceptibly different than all others.

I nod off watching her crawl and feel my eyes close, sensations collapse, body heavy like stone, and allow myself to drop into darkness. High garden walls take shape before me, knife-edge thorn-lined, menacing eye guarded, withering scream emanating. I walk toward them to inspect, childlike. With a laugh, they open their vines, revealing a crimson-glow passageway and a trodden path.

Of course, I didn’t actually see any of this. The locals dragged my body out of the waves that day and saw to it that it was quietly buried that week. A dead American didn’t make a headline, tourism being the local industry and all. After a few years, my girlfriend stopped thinking about me until one day when the earthy hue of her daughter’s irises made her feel something she didn’t quite have the words for.

After suffering through a flight with seats so small my lanky caucasian frame wouldn’t permit me to deploy the tray table, my girlfriend and I landed in Saigon (what the younger locals call Ho Chi Minh) at 7pm, the first leg of a week-long journey across the country. I quickly realized my vague quaint perception of Vietnam was wildly inaccurate. Saigon is hyper-Manhattan, a living prophecy of the future, a cyberpunk dreamscape of urbanism, a dozen bustling coffeeshops on every block, shops tucked into every nook like a plant filling every touch of light in a jungle, traffic flowing in boggling density with a dozen scooters alongside moving in sync like schools of fish with a silent efficiency beyond any formal lanes or laws, a city emblematic of both collectivist ethos and frontier individualism.

We split a taxi off of the Gojek app with another Westerner to our hotel as she shared recommendations informed by her decade as an ex-pat, highlighting an area called Bui Vien Street. We dropped our packs in our room and dipped to immerse ourselves in the adventure of travel and promises of the unknown.

As we stepped out of the cab into a dense party street, we noted that no other Westerners were present besides ourselves, and that I stood a full head above everyone. I stood out like a, well, like a 6-foot-3 white guy in a crowd of 5 foot Vietnamese people. We grabbed dinner where the locals seemed to be going and communed with our inner Anthony Bourdain, minus the booze, as neither of us drink alcohol.

We stepped out of the restaurant into a light rain and took in the scene, which was shockingly garish. Music poured out from an endless row of clubs, threatening hearing damage from a stones throw away, a hyperactive radio changing stations every 20 feet as we passed alongside new venues. The patios were adorned with parties slamming shots and passing balloons because nitrous is legal in Vietnam, a whiskey on the rocks and one balloon please. It was the living antithesis of sobriety, the real Anthony Bourdain experience. Not our scene, but I felt like people watching, so we carried on, harried by a stream of aggressive promoters crowding the middle of the street, indistinguishable little men enticing us into identical clubs playing interchangeable EDM.

We refused all and flowed against the current, I politely put my hand up and shook my head at the first dozen and then ignored the rest trying to pull us in. As I dodged another and stepped under an umbrella, I felt a sharp tack in my left thigh. I whipped around, instinctively raising my fist. The promoter put up both his hands, laughing, signaling a prank, and my brain registered it as the jab of a schoolyard thumbtack.

I figured it was a harmless prod as retribution for literally standing out as the only white person I’d seen on the street since arriving, accompanied by an asian girl which they had no way of knowing was actually a Westerner and of Chinese heritage. I was a foreigner in alien terrain, surrounded in a sea of his peers, no police in sight, not even anyone who looked like me, so we continued. Outside of any cold calculation, I was simply caught off-guard, flummoxed. The fuck just happened?

As we walked, I considered if I had been drugged. Though I’d worked in a psychiatric emergency room for years, I’d never seen or heard of someone being drugged via needle rather than through a drink across the many shared idle hours when healthcare workers love to pass stories. Besides, they couldn’t possibly pass a drug so quickly with so small of a needle, right? I reassured myself it was nothing, I was being paranoid, this was a safe part of town trodden by countless tourists, I’m always doing that, assuming the worst. We walked quickly away from the scene and looked over my shoulder more than a few times. How ridiculous, I thought, calming myself, moments before my leg started to feel light and I felt an unmistakable warmth of a drug flowing from an injection site.

The motherfuckers had hit me with a punji stick after all. Adrenaline followed the flow of the drug and did its job, focusing my mind and body. I’d either worked in psychiatry due to my ability to remain calm in the face of catastrophe or developed my acumen by doing so, regardless, I acted immediately, feverishly (literally) typing in Google Translate as we jogged to find someone, anyone, before screenshotting my plea to preserve my story in case something happened.

check for opiate i got stabbed in the leg with a drug by a club promoter. I need an ambulance emergency now. if I pass out please administer narcan. I did not take drugs on my own. woozy dizzy numb headrush.

CALAMITY

Reeling as my symptoms escalated, I searched my mind for what drug could act so quickly in such a small amount, there were only a few options. Triaging, my immediate concern was fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid which could seriously risk overdose, so I focused on finding Narcan, a drug that blocks its action.

We took a heavy jog away from the main street to find help and in case we were being followed by their confederates looking to lighten my pockets and lift my ‘mug me’ fanny pack after I lost consciousness. I saw a man in uniform and approached him but he turned away from me. Confused, I continued and found another uniformed man, and showed him the message on my phone. He also shook his head, simply pointing down the street. I would come to find that these were not cops or any uniformed service, simply low-rent security guards they pepper across the city because it’s cheaper to pay a middle aged man minimum Dong to sit in a plastic chair and watch V-dramas than to buy a security system.

After bouncing between too many unhelpful people, my jog turned into a sprint and people on the street instinctively backed away from my desperation, until I lucked across a higher-end club with a 20-something bouncer. He read my message and understood immediately, telling me in broken English that he’d seen this before, to take a seat while he found help.

I perched on a bench in the front of the venue with my girlfriend, somewhat relieved. However, the relief refused to manifest tangibly. Viscerally, I felt the unknown pharmaceutic begin to heighten. A muddy warmth turned into a glow and penetrated from legs and arms to my shoulders and then penetrated my visual field. My sight swelled with vivid washes of colors, streetlights haloing and neon dancing, vignetted on the edges by an encroaching darkness. Oh no, it might be fentanyl after all. Cinematic. I turned to look at my girlfriend, who was trying her absolute not to panic, and said in stoney seriousness “I think I’m about to die.”

The taxi summoned by my benevolent bouncer lurched forward and I got up to walk to it. Too late. The vignette closed, that’s-all-folks style, a fitting end for a comedian at least.

I woke up in the backseat of the cab looking up at my girlfriend (quicker than a ambulance, I guess), who was no longer trying to hide her panic. She told me that her and the club worker caught me as I collapsed and dragged me in. He was seated shotgun. Good man. I returned to a foggy, fatigued awareness that was surprisingly close to okay. In the 10 minutes it took to arrive at the hospital, the nightlife worker informed us he’d indeed seen this before and that the drug currently onboard was likely ketamine. Divine providence, grace! Hopefully not fentanyl but ketamine, a drug that’s so difficult to fatally overdose on that they give it to out-of-control children to chemically restrain them in hospitals. An anesthesia, a favorite of tech nerds, California coke, a curious drug that causes dissociation at low doses, the (in?)famous K holes at medium doses, and full on sedation at higher doses.

As we arrived at the hospital, I relaxed a bit, feeling not quite normality but something adjacent, oddly calm and a level removed from the events, perhaps the effects of the drug, and the night club worker bid me adieu. I approached the front desk, presented my note, they shook their head, unpossessed of English. After my confused pleading, they summoned a doctor, who explained that this was not an emergency room. The careless taxi driver had just taken me to the closest random hospital which specialized in dialysis for failing kidneys, not drugged foreigners. They confirmed the location of a, hopefully, actual ER on the map and sent me on my way, meaning I had to order and wait for a Gojek, caught in purgatory.Yes, I would like to pay another dollar for priority pickup, I’ve got money like that.

Another 10 minutes later I arrived at, fingers crossed, an ER, and provided the same explanation with the same note, then was told to wait—outside. Purgatory indeed. If you ever need to revisit your appreciation of the West, I highly recommend engaging with the hospital system in any developing country. I don’t think I’d ever been more patriotic than sitting in the rain on the curb, waiting somehow another ten minutes before finally being brought into an dingy room with a dozen beds, on par in maintenance and lighting with a lower-tier big box store.

I once again explained the situation to a doctor who fortunately spoke decent English. I’d been drugged with a needle on Bui Vien, I’d had these symptoms and then passed out. He responded, verbatim, “you no die, go home, be happy.” I asked what he thought I was drugged with and was met with another jarring “you no die, go home, be happy.” I’d assumed from my earlier conversation that I was not the first drugged honkey stumbling through his door, and that he too would grok the situation offhand. I was half-right: he said “no, others drugged by drink, not needle.” I naively asked how we’d figure out the drug in question, if I should call the cops, and he laughed, correctly. “You can call cops, but no evidence.” There wasn’t even a test available that could detect the drug in the amounts it was administered in and was likely already clearing. I felt like a fool, I knew all this, that there was no evidence, cops are useless even in the US, let alone for a foreigner raising a stink about a neighborhood that draws countless riches yearly. He conceded that I could stick around a few minutes to make sure I was alright but my vitals were good, so in less than a half hour, he told me to hit the bricks, with one last dismissive albeit genuine “you no die, go home, be happy… have fun!'“

As we jumped into another cab, the story was already beginning to take on a dreamlike character, its colors running together in the damp. The arc of the night refused to conform to a satisfying narrative, epinephrine rising action into terse anticlimax, a chase scene ending with a morning commute.

NIGHTMARE INTERPRETATION

One peculiar aspect of being drugged is I recovered far better than I would have anticipated, especially given my history. Two years prior, I’d had a bad mushroom trip and was subsequently chemically assaulted by hospital staff, so one would expect that an assailant, ahem, not respecting my sobriety, would be deeply triggering. However, my girlfriend and I were able to continue the trip mostly unabated—I simply upgraded our accommodations to a ‘luxury’ hotel (still only $100 a night, cheaper than my recent West Texas Motel 6 stay) and cancelled the trip to the rest of the country, choosing to remain in the city. In retrospect, this seems an odd choice, that perhaps I was trying to relive, or at least resolve, the incursion. At the time it simply felt like the safer option, the familiarity of city comforts over the unknown of countryside travel. The devil you know and all that.

I attribute the mildness of the fallout to therapy and hard work addressing OCD-esque symptoms better equip me to sit with discomfort and intrusive thoughts. I found out later that people use ketamine to treat PTSD, so the pharmacological nature of the attack itself may have ironically lessened its own impact—free chemical therapy administered via intramuscular assault. How considerate.

However, the drugging was not fully without consequences, I found myself clenching my fist unconsciously when I would walk the city. At 9pm every night, around the time I was both assaulted in an American hospital and jabbed on a Vietnamese street, violent revenge fantasies flooded my mind. I escaped to the classic vigilantism characteristic of the impotent, complete with hack phallic symbolism. I pictured returning to the street with a gun and enacting street justice. I imagined beating him, the whole crowd of them, senseless, knocking his stupid schoolyard grin into the filthy pavement, breaking his jaw on the rainy curb I had to sit on.

The most pervasive and persistent impact was the blow to my sense of reality. I questioned if my memory of the night was accurate, if I was a reliable narrator. I tried to arrive at a motive with no success. Robbing? Wouldn’t someone be more on-guard after getting jabbed? Seems messy having to follow people through the streets. So, malice? Either they were trying to terrorize me for being a white male dating an asian female (WMAF as it’s called in both fetish and xenophobic circles), or more ‘innocently,’ they were just fucking with me for being a tourist.

Fortunately, I had some evidence on my side to combat my doubt. I found a freckle-sized puncture hole at the exact jabbing site in my leg, almost too small to see but undoubtedly there. The bouncer once more confirmed he’d heard of druggings with ketamine via needle when I messaged him the next day over WhatsApp. My girlfriend’s memory of the night matched exactly with my own—the symptoms, what I’d said, and of course the fact I’d passed the fuck out.

I can only imagine the unenviable situation faced by those drugged while out drinking, who wake up alone or worse with no witnesses to their violation, forced to wonder if they may have indeed simply gotten too drunk and blacked out, with no evidence of their assault outside of a horrible gut feeling, wondering if they might not just be a little paranoid as the police suggest, who perpetually look over their shoulders to wonder if their attacker is coming again, who have to gaze into the eyes of friends and acquaintances looking for any glimmer of psychopathy, whose doubt spills into their thoughts, polluting their mind like night-black ink.

But… was I so certain? The black ink was starting to spread.

NEEDLE SPIKING

In my quest for meaning and context I ravaged the internet, starting the night of the assault. I soon found that the phenomena, that I’d never heard of prior, was coined ‘needle spiking.’[1] I also found that its very existence was, and is, heavily contested.

Needle spiking received a huge surge in attention in 2021, with small upticks in the following years and then again in mid 2025. The media coverage at the time can be summarized as lots of reports by alleged victims with little in the way of corroborating evidence, laboratory analysis, video of assaults, or assailants arrested. Resultantly, most coverage of the events landed heavily on the narrative that needle spiking is a social panic or ‘flap.’

However, the landscape is more complex and less monolithic than is often discussed.

First, we need to differ between needle spiking with a drug, needle spiking with a disease, and needle pricking with no drug or contaminant. Of those who report being drugged (‘victims of surreptitious drug administration’), the overwhelming majority suspect drink spiking, with only 4.2% fearing they were needle spiked in a recent study from a Paris ER and ~1% in a Berlin nightlife study.2 Concerns range between sexual assault, humiliation, infection (with a disease like AIDS), and robbing.

The already-cited study from a Paris ER found that, upon toxicology, 0% of reported spiking cases had an unexpected substance onboard.

Interpretation: Overall, our data are more suggestive of needle pricking than spiking. Although women were overrepresented, there was no evidence of sexual motivation on the part of the perpetrators. It’s possible that the perpetrators wanted to instill fear in the population without a specific goal…

This is a reasonable conclusion given the limited evidence they are presented with. However, it leaves some of the pharmacological complexity unaddressed, namely, the small or biased sample size, the timeframe between exposure and testing, the sensitivity of the testing methodology and apparatus. Two likely candidate drugs for needle spiking, GHB and ketamine, are not even found in standard hospital toxicology and the more sensitive tests are rare due to their expense.

Historical incidents of needle spiking and pricking provide further context and share a common theme: sensational allegations with little evidence providing absolute confirmation. In the second century AD, Roman Senator Cassius Dio recorded prevalent cases of spikers paid to spread pestilence, claiming the practice had precedent in earlier generations. 400 young women allege assault in 1800s Paris. The “Needle Boy” rumor of the kidnapped women from movie theaters in pre-depression era New Orleans. The 70s, in Paris, with 63 women complaining of needle pricking in the chest across six years with no one arrested but some supporting physical evidence of assault in the victims. An urban legend in ‘98 of Canadian women finding a note in their pocket reading “welcome to the world of AIDS” and an injection injury. China, 2002, where polluted blood banks spread HIV to near-entire villages but needle spiking is blamed after the government failed to acknowledge their failure. 2009, in China again, over 400 people reported needle spiking, blaming ethnic violence which led to protests resulting in 5 deaths. Recent UK and French reports in 2021-2022 with 1,300 and 400 cases reported, respectively.[2]

Notably, vanishingly few cases had secondary crimes alongside the spikings—one would expect that a crime of brazen violence would have motives outsides of mere mischief or terror. However, only 14 cases of sexual assaults or robbings were confirmed of the 1,300 UK reports. Many alleged victims don’t go to police and may not receive toxicology or serology. Of those who do pass through these initial filters, studies found 90% and 100% come back negative for unintentional illicit drugs with denied intentional exposure.[3]

In many cases, the evidence for the involvement of any form of needle is done post-hoc, in the morning, half-remembered paranoia waking up after drinking and finding a scratch or injury. Often, people reported feeling a jab on the dance floor or in a crowded club. In some of these cases, suspected incidents were revealed to be tooth picks or mosquitos.

So, what was the reality of the recent and historical phenomena? How scared should you be that an unknown assailant will jab you on a night out in the club or movie theater? More importantly, what happened to me?

ADJUDICATION

Evidence for the case of a social panic and against widespread genuine cases is vast. Reports of needle (and drink) spiking are covariant with media coverage, supporting suggestibility. Cases tend to cluster in geographic and social circles and spread like a virus. And, as mentioned, there’s little to no corroborating physical evidence with no definitively confirmed cases in one study.

The historical record is hard to ignore. In this context, how are we to think about needle spiking and pricking writ large? Limiting ourselves to the recent UK and French reports, either there was a social panic or a sudden rash of needle spiking that spread through pockets of Europe and then, just as abruptly, subsided. This should be unsurprising to anyone who’s heard of a friend getting bed bugs and, that night, experienced the power of suggestibility firsthand as their brain turned every itch into an imagined infestation. However, the nuance reveals itself by stepping back from the binary, the false dichotomy of imagined vs actual. More precisely, the questions are to what degree the panic was the upshot of actual assaults, and how many of those who imagined they were needle spiked were actually victims of pricking or other forms of spiking.

The evidence leaves us with a vague and unsatisfying half answers; the problem with measuring a shadow on the wall is that its gone the moment you turn your headlamp in its direction. However, it’s not hard to imagine that the ‘flap’ resulted from a few genuine cases, like a spark onto the dry hay of post-covid paranoia. Psychoanalytically, there’s a straight line from mandatory vaccination following compulsory isolation in the zeitgeist to a fear of nonconsensual needle spiking in crowded social settings.

To flip the argument around, perhaps some genuine cases were the result of the social panic. If the power of suggestion in humans is so vast as to cause imagined assaults, surely perpetrators are also influenceable—monkey-see, monkey drug. In an environment of panic, any club denizen wielding a mere toothpick can turn a prank into real terror.

Parallel historical social panics simultaneously make a compelling argument against the reality of pervasive needle spiking and for needle pricking. Paris in both 1976-1982 and 2022 recorded victims with confirmed injuries consistent with physical assault by needle—even removing my case from the equation, it would take a dishonest reading to conclude no one has ever been jabbed with anything sharp in a dark, anonymous setting. An unknown number of overall assaults with unknown motives and an unknown number of druggings with unknown drugs—but certainly non-zero jabbings.

So, the question can be winnowed down to: was I needle spiked with a drug, or needle pricked and then manifested my symptoms psychosomatically, which just so happen to closely match how panic attacks look and feel?

It seems an even-handed outside adjudicator reviewing my case would determine that the evidence overwhelmingly favors pricking over spiking, no drug over some drug. At the very least, myself and my girlfriend, both fully sober, did not both hallucinate someone jabbing my leg (even if with a thumbtack) and then laughing at me. It’s perfectly possible to manifest symptoms that mimic being drugged, especially in crowded nightlife areas post-covid. Thus, it’s very reasonable to conclude that I was pricked in an unfamiliar environment, felt a resulting sensation in my leg a few minutes later, then spiraled into a panic attack, which presented in dramatic fashion, aligning with what my brain imagines being drugged feels like. This is further supported by the local ER doctor reporting that he’d seen drink but not needle spiking.

However, a few pieces of the story resist easy explanation. I was totally unaware of the phenomenon so could not have primed by any social panic. The local night club worker who’d helped me already knew of spikings with ketamine, not jabbings with nothing. After the assault, I’d texted my Vietnamese friend who’s an ER doc in NYC, careful to avoid priming her. She immediately confirmed ketamine as the best fit, noting that it can be administered intramuscularly through “cactus-sized” needles. What’s more I found two Vietnamese sources stating:

Ketamine’s dangerous effect is that it can quickly render a person unable to resist and paralyzed, therefore criminals involved in theft, robbery, and rape can also use ketamine to commit crimes.[4,5]

In this light, it’s an odd coincidence that ketamine is also the best match for the symptoms, fit the required drug curve (onset ~5 minutes, cleared in ~15-20), availability, and can be delivered intramuscularly. If I was panicking, its peculiar that my symptoms cleared rapidly and spontaneously in a situation where they should have escalated mid-emergency. However, I felt better in the back of the cab when I still hadn’t ruled out my primary fear, fentanyl. In fact, I was told I was drugged, which could have heightened any psychosomatic symptoms.

GESTALT

Ultimately, these confounding variables are simply curiosities in my story which is one of thousands. I’m undoubtedly biased towards one outcome, though I’m unsure in which direction.

Though I was assaulted regardless, I think I’d feel safer in a world where I panicked after being pricked rather than spiked. Conversely, I admit it would be embarrassing to conclude I wasn’t drugged and passed out from a panic attack. I’m a standup comic at heart, and it fucks up the razzle-dazzle, declaws one of my best stories, transforms my 10 foot prize catch into an old boot. But, hey, maybe it is a better punchline if I got jabbed on the streets of Vietnam and coaxed myself into a k-hole.

True to the historical and recent cases, none of these factors have any satisfying finality, there is no last word, my arc has the ambiguous ending of an art house movie. Like a vivid dream that begs interpretation but doggedly resists it, when I sat down to relate this episode of my life, I couldn’t identify the pieces in play let alone the gestalt.

I set out to share my case of needle spiking amidst social panic. Then, in the writing, I uncovered that the motif was believing my own experience in the presence of doubt from the collective. Then the doubt set in, I am no longer sure as I was for so long, I can’t honestly claim with unblemished certitude that I was drugged. Despite the evidence in my favor, the corroborating reports, I am at best, uncertain. However, this doubt has revealed itself to be my true thesis, a path only revealed in retrospect.

My feeling oscillates in every telling. I am unashamed of this wavering, of my confusion, in fact, it gives me pride. Rather than undermining my sense of reality, my doubt demonstrates it, confirming that I can exist in an uncomfortable world that resists absolutes, that I can sit with the discomfort of not knowing, of never being able to know if I was drugged.

The ordeal taught me that the goal of life is not certainty but accepting the impossibility thereof. We all operate from the fog of war, what separates the great men of history is that they act decisively from their enshroudment. Someone suffering from handwashing OCD cures themselves not by believing they are clean but by accepting they will always be dirty, that the world is full of risk. Some questions are unanswerable; faith is not belief in the absence of doubt but despite it. You will never know if you’re with the perfect partner or have the ideal career and there will be no divine intervention offering unshakable guidance on what it means to live a good life. Even when Moses came down from the mountain carrying stone tablets inscribed with the very word of God, they were still left to interpret it themselves.

Vegas odds? Syringe to my head, best I could give it is about a 50/50. One thing is certain, a day will come where I’ll once again believe that I’m moribund but this time I’ll be right. Black will close in from all sides, then God will say, you died, you are home, be happy.

(Monkey’s Paw) Wish Fulfillment

I was not in a good place at the time of my catastrophic mushroom trip (I was in Bushwick! Hey-o!). I’d had trouble finding work in NYC, owed $5k in rent to my girlfriend and another $5k to my sister, comedy was a dead end without clout or followers. I spent my nights waiting for the bus to go perform for nobody while chatting with comics who hated me. I was addicted to video games and porn, I smoked weed every day and threw back a few beers and pastries every night. I had stopped exercising and ballooned from 190 to 220 pounds. And the final kick in the dick, a year after moving from Denver, right when the city felt like it was starting to open figuratively, it closed literally. I was isolated from my family and friends and comedy.

The cherry on top, after my encounter with ‘Nurse Ratchet’, I started having panic attacks every night around ~9:30pm, the time I was assaulted by hospital staff. Somewhere, deep enough in my psyche where I forgot you can’t overdose on mushrooms, I’d trusted that the profession I’d given my entire twenties for would help me. I was betrayed by my trust and my mind, and my poor girlfriend didn’t know how to help.

My usual response was to numb myself with weed and alcohol with video games. The mushrooms also took this from me. Weed started to make me panicky and paranoid and launched me back into the dissociative, scattered memories from the trip. Alcohol stopped being enjoyable. I’d never been a binge drinker by comedian standards; I just had a couple most nights, and more than a couple on occasion. After the mushroom trip, I felt too acutely its effects, distancing myself from my experience. And I mean, I felt it, I could feel my awareness shrinking in a way I hadn’t before. After some online research, I found this was actually an intended outcome for some, many people successfully use mushrooms as a cessation aid for alcohol dependence.

Although the catalyst was dramatic, sobriety was not instant. I didn’t immediately swear off all drugs. Initially, I continued to turn to them as I had for the majority of my life, having started smoking weed at 15 and just turned 30. I went from drinking a couple of cheap n’ yellows (Tecate and lime) and smoking a few bowls (1:1 THC:CBD flower) every night to once or twice a week, to once in a while, until I was fully sober. I can’t stress enough this was not out of maturity and clarity of insight but out of animalistic self-protection.

I was terrorized by recurrent intrusive thoughts and memories from the trip I had no context for, a mix of rumination and psychedelic insight that wouldn’t mix like oil and water. I felt irreversibly different, but in a bad way. I wondered if I was molested. I puzzled over whether I was gay. I questioned whether I was going to hell, if I was already in hell, trying to summon up a forgotten epiphany from the depths of my subconscious, a word on the tip of my tongue, a sneeze that wouldn’t come, a half-remembered dream. I didn’t feel like myself, I didn’t know what was real, I was doing everything wrong.

It turns out my outcome is not unusual, just not discussed often enough. In fact, there are so few resources that I ended up finding the book that helped me through an organization focused on negative outcomes due to meditation. Due to the polarizing nature of psychedelics, we’re stuck in-between uncritical drug legalization efforts and puritanical prohibition. Society doesn’t know what to do with adverse outcomes like mine outside of filing them in ‘other,’ which is essentially what they do in academic research. There’s the horrifying (and rare) Hallucinogen Persisting Perception Disorder (HPPD), where people have visual changes that don’t stop after a meditation retreat or drug trip. The more common feelings of unreality I experienced are usually referred to as depersonalization/derealization (DP/DR), and they describe catchall psychedelic variants of most diagnoses in the DSM, including drug-induced psychosis, drug-induced anxiety disorders, and drug-induced OCD.

My girlfriend, overwhelmed, suggested (demanded) that I go to therapy, and her therapist referred me to someone in the area I could afford because they were still finishing their doctorate. I started seeing them weekly over video (COVID) and still do years later (still over video across state lines). I still don’t know if it works.

Prior to the trip, I had been engaging with mysticism and religion. After a juvenile interest in staunch atheism, then neuroscience, I evolved my perspective into a casual engagement with Buddhism and Kabbalah. I had to put all of this aside for two or three years, given the fragility of my mind, or at least my own fear.

They say you learn the most from the bad trips. Looking back, I can only conclude that this was overwhelmingly true in my case.

I had to learn to confront the panic attacks and recurrent intrusive thoughts, which I later found were likely OCD and the very least OCD-like in nature; I never counted the exact hours a day to meet the threshold or sought a formal diagnosis. However, I did find a book that helped me immeasurably (and I’ve bought it for numerous people since), within days and weeks instead of months and years.

Here’s a summary for you if you ever find yourself with panic attacks, intrusive thoughts, or run-of-the-mill rumination: trying to stop panic or distress is what causes it to recur, strengthen, and become pathological. Your brain is setting off an alarm bell, and you need to signal that it’s a false alarm via not reacting to, running from, or pushing away the thought. Arguing with your thoughts, even in a positive way (I’m actually a good person / hell isn’t real / maybe you were the one who was molested!), increases them. The goal is not to engage and allow your discomfort.

My OCD was existential-themed (wherein the content of obsessive thoughts is typically around the nature of reality), pure O (characterized by compulsions that aren’t external, like hand washing—it’s all mental activity). This variety is notoriously difficult to treat, given there is truly no answer (maybe you’ll be the first to figure it out!). For compulsive hand washing, you need to accept that your hands are, in fact, actually clean after the first time. For things that may or may not happen after you die, you need to accept that you are never going to know, and you’re certainly not going to figure it out right now at 4am when you have to wake up at 7am for work. Even worse, these questions no longer felt like they had ‘theoretical’ distance in the way they used to—my mother was a few short years from death in the midst of early-onset Alzheimer’s.

Whatever the nature of OCD and rumination, their treatment is an exercise in allowing discomfort, likely the exact weakness in my psyche that precipitated such a bad trip. Many people with different dispositions and backgrounds are much more willing to cede control and go along for the ride. I was not, fought the trip tooth and nail every step of the way, then paid the price.

Something Lost, Something Gained

My life changed quickly and dramatically after my bad trip and brush with the psychiatric machine.

My romantic relationship unraveled, I lost a best friend, I moved from NYC back to Denver to Austin (shut up), and my mother and dog died (unrelated to the trip). I lost 30 pounds, grew a full social life, developed a healthy romantic relationship, pivoted my career into medical writing and quadrupled my income (enough to pay everyone back and then travel), launched a business and produced hundreds of comedy shows.

After a long break, I’m once again able to puzzle over academic consciousness research and read about mysticism again without fear or distress. I have a pretty solid standup bit about the whole ambulance fiasco—as the joke comics love to tell each other goes, at least I got a tight 5 out of it.

I still go to therapy, I’m still sober.

I never had a dramatic rock bottom in the way so many do; I wasn’t the type to black out and embarrass myself. I never tangled with hard drugs outside of a smattering of nights taking pills for back pain and a dozen uneventful parties railing coke with startup millionaires. My life had simply deteriorated into circularity, into a closed loop, video game and TV addiction bolstered by alcohol and THC numbing . Distress was so intolerable to me that I had found a way to have the same day over and over again, a safe little mental den to escape from the reality of a dying parent, artistic self-doubt, and my impotency enacting big-city dreams.

It was essentially only when I’d stopped doing drugs effortlessly that I committed to sobriety. This was partly informed by my engagement with Buddhism, which stipulates not being intoxicated or eating meat, so I happened to align naturally. The rationale of Buddhistic sobriety is one of radical engagement with life and one that remains with me. My sobriety is no longer informed by questions of whether I enjoy being high or drunk or if they are worth it, instead I remain sober because I believe that desiring one state over another leads to unhappiness. Basically, the Buddha was high on life.

I think my story of abusing legal drugs in the context of media addiction is almost ubiquitous in our culture, and that its lack of crescendoing conflict and climax is precisely its danger. It’s too boring and commonplace to be worth confronting; it’s insidious because, for many, it never reaches the severity necessitating confrontation. It’s a tin can that is perpetually kicked down the road towards the grave.

I’m not telling tales out of school to say that our culture has forgotten how to face discomfort in its myriad forms, particularly boredom. We have a litany of choices at arm’s reach to numb ourselves, vapes and sports gambling and Infinite Jest amounts of media and consumption as a hobby and designer drugs and casual sex, and so so so much booze.

My greatest takeaway resulted from the confrontation with panic attacks and OCD, as it forced me to build a healthier relationship with discomfort, a lifelong process that perhaps is what life is at its core. One of the core texts of Buddhism is the Fire Sermon, and one of the main teachings of Mahayana Buddhism is the Burning House Parable. My own version integrating both is this:

The Buddha says to be human is to be in a house on fire. We keep reaching for things which are burning (temporary) to soothe us from the pain of the flames, but everything is burning. You try another room, but it too is burning. You try the phone but it is burning. In fact, you are burning. Your arguments about the nature of the structure of the house or how it caught on fire in the first place don’t matter outside of an escape path. Get out.

I stopped torturing myself with the nature of reality (mostly) by accepting that I’m never going to know. The goal is not to ‘figure it out,’ it’s learning to be comfortable with uncertainty. We think that to know something is to hold it, to turn it around in our hand, to familiarize ourselves with it. This is precisely why reality confounds us; its nature is its unknowability. Paradoxically, the distress created by not knowing is the knowing of the nature of reality, we understand by not understanding. This confrontation with the other, trying and failing to hold something that’s too vast and amorphous to be held, leads us to one and only one conclusion: knowledge is not all-powerful. The one thing we’re incapable of clinging to is there to teach that power comes from letting go. We don’t need to escape discomfort; there is nowhere to escape to, there’s nothing to escape from, and there’s nobody to do the escaping.

Concretely, here’s the advice I would offer to myself knowing what I know now: You need to go through the pain of finding your baseline to see what you’re working with. This means removing as many variables as possible, including drugs, alcohol, and excessive amounts of media. You need to eat well (if you’re poor, get your broke ass some lentils, rice, and eggs), you need to socialize (even if it means just a phone call to your family or acquaintance), and I can’t emphasize enough that you must exercise and build good sleep hygiene. Don’t be hard on yourself forcing this all at once overnight, take on what you can while focusing on directionality instead of absolute progress. Find a therapist if you can to track your progress or lack thereof, sliding scale and community resources are likely available, don’t put it off.

More abstractly, if you relate to feeling the basic anxiety of modern life and a lack of purpose, if you find yourself repeating comfortable behavioral loops like the path a rabbit carves from repeatedly sprinting in circles to escape predators, I only suggest you reexamine your relationship with discomfort. And do drugs.

No, I don’t know if you should do drugs. If you do, do them with intention and purpose. Test them and find a trip sitter. And for Buddha’s sake, remember that you can always take more but not less.

The bad trips are the most important ones...
where the ego is fighting for its life.
-Terence McKenna

Part of me takes umbrage (I love taking umbrage) with the adage you learn the most from the bad trips; it posits that even mental health must be earned, paid for with blood. Researchers seem to believe the benefits can be conferred without the major downsides (at least this is the underlying conceit of modern human subject research) and that with a controlled set and setting, we can reap the rewards while having a groovy time hanging out with a professionally-licensed proctor. I want to agree with them, perhaps most of the benefits can. However, my experience leads me to suspect the unfortunate truth is that the getting knocked down is inseparable from the growth from pulling yourself back up. No mud, no lotus and all that.

It may be a coincidence that the thing I needed, to increase my discomfort tolerance, was exactly what psychedelics excel at providing and that I was in need of destabilization to dislodge me from the mud. I worry that many who turn to these drugs are in need of stability that they may not find.

I can not tell you if it was worth it. I am both a staunch evangelist for and critic of psychedelics. I won’t sit here and pretend to be some evolved being that’s transcended my problems through a bad trip. There’s no counterfactual of my own life, no parallel universe version to compare myself to wherein everything went swimmingly. My sense is it was overwhelmingly positive in the long run and an absolute bitch in the short term.

From time to time, 131 Starr 1L. 131 Starr 1L. 131 Starr 1L still cycles through my mind like a mantra. I’d like to believe that if I took psychedelics again armed with all the ways I’ve grown I’d be able to handle it this go around. I fear deeply that I still wouldn’t.

…

I broke this essay into 2 parts for readability. They can be read in any order.
Read Part 1: A Mushroom Trip Saved My Life (By Ruining It)

It was the pandemic, I was in Brooklyn, a walking stereotype, a failing comedian with depression, a sad clown. I’d done acid before and handled it well, confronting a lifelong fear that they would make me go insane or irreversibly embarrass myself by saying unforgivable things or wacking off in public (almost legal in NYC). A month prior, I’d done an eighth of mushrooms and felt comfortable enough to relax at Transmitter Park, watching the grass move like waves and the waves glow like the sun. I realized psychedelics were no big deal, and I had simply been subject to a lifetime of right-wing propaganda and self-induced judgment. I’d made a mountain of a molehill. My girlfriend at the time wanted to try mushrooms, and I said, no biggie. They say pride comes before the fall, well, it’s called tripping for a reason.

I launched WhatsApp and ordered the mushrooms from a delivery service, image below, complete with hip millennial branding. The equally hip millennial bike messenger (read: drug dealer but probably calls himself a healer) arrived at a speed that would put DoorDash to shame, and handed off the goods.

My girlfriend and I went inside and mentally prepared ourselves to down an eighth, kids at the top of a water slide. In doing so, I committed my first act of hubris, or regular ol’ fashioned naivety. I’d used the same delivery service before and taken the Golden Teacher strain. As you may have noticed in the picture, one of the eighths pictured is a different strain: Thai Ban Hua.

Despite having $30,000 in debt from a degree in neuroscience, half a decade working in a psychiatric emergency room and inpatient psychiatry, and a few years in pharmaceutical research, I’d committed the fatal and basic mistake of ignoring the sage wisdom every teen is told before their first trip: you can always take more but not less.

Years of smoking weed had lulled me into complacency regarding the relative strength of different drug strains. My experience as a teenager in the ‘burbs of Boston and living in Denver during legalization had taught me that strains were just a marketing gimmick. I learned that while there’s good weed and bad weed, the difference between OJ Kush and Sour Diesel to your actual experience of a high is negligible and wouldn’t pass the Pepsi blind taste test. I assumed an eighth is an eighth, if I had chilled in the park on one strain, my experience on another would be identical.

There are a few reasons why one needs to be more careful with ‘organic’ drugs: The naturally occurring dosage of the active compound, psilocybin, can differ significantly even between mushrooms grown on the same growth cycle on the same substrate. Potency is impacted by nutrition, season, storage, and harvesting time. More psilocybin is found in the caps than in the stems, making dosage by weight unreliable. And, of course, the strains differ enormously in the amount of psilocybin they produce.

Specifically, the variability accounting for these factors can be as high as 1500%.

Though Thai Ban Hua is a middling-high in potency and Golden Teachers is low-strength, it’s anyone’s guess what the accurate difference was, given the multitude of considerations. Based on experience alone, I would guess I’d taken 2-3x more psilocybin than I had intended to. However, as anyone seasoned in psychedelics or cliff diving can tell you, 2-3x the amount is not always 2-3x the experience, but can be exponentially, incomparably different.

Admittedly, this was not a heroic dose that would have challenged an experienced psychonaut (read: stoner). Terence McKenna would have probably hit a cup of tea, smoked a j, and given a seminal 3-hour lecture, but I was almost completely green. I’d done acid and mushrooms a single time apiece, just enough to be overconfident and careless. This also meant I hadn’t embarked with the intention to have an intense experience; I was merely trying to show my girlfriend a fun time on her first trip. Resultantly, I also failed to ask a friend to be a trip sitter.

We gobbled our respective eighths, my girlfriend the Golden Teachers and me the demonic Thai fuckers. We thought we’d catch some rays and went for a walk through the streets of Brooklyn, COVID still in full swing, NYC booming with pent-up energy after just being permitted, socially and legally, to be outside, kind of near one another. My leisurely stroll was interrupted by an impending panic, the feeling of the water being pulled away from you as the shadow of a cresting wave blocks the sun. Within minutes, I realized that this is different and turned home. My stroll turned brisk walk, run, then sprint. However, there was nowhere I could escape to; the wave was crashing inside of me.

I got home, went to the bedroom, and promptly stripped off all of my clothes. I felt like I couldn’t be naked enough, I wanted to keep removing more layers when there were none left. I looked down at my body, which was suddenly something different from what I ever understood, a pile of flesh I had no relation to, a confusing non-sequitur to my inner being. It no longer felt like me but a thing, a horrible thing (even independent of the fact I’d gained 30 pounds from depression and neglect).

I dug deep and asked what I would tell myself if I were my trip sitter, as I had been so many times working in psychiatry, coaching people through bad trips, exogenous drugs and endogenous mental illness, who had experienced true horror in their lives. Just use your coping skills, your toolbox, the voice offered. Ground yourself.

I turned first to the safest bet and curled up with my dog Argos, named after Odyseus’, hoping he too could draw me home. However, as I rubbed the soft spot on his ears I’d drawn through my thumb and forefinger countless times, I melted into him. The boundaries between myself and his white coat and the room itself dissolved.

I closed my eyes, trying to hide in the safety of the dark, like a child without theory of mind who does not yet understand that just because you can’t see something does not mean it can’t see you. I had the same hope of running from my trip as a toddler winning a game of hide and seek against the terminator. In short order, the trip consumed even the totalizing darkness. I decided my eyes would stay open.

The same room was not waiting for me but one constructed in a series of tessellating mosaics, reminiscent of an ornate Islamic temple built by people devoted to a vision with a depth of clarity rarely seen in the modern world. More colloquially, I was seeing the real-deal version of a Tool album cover or the shittiest art you’ve even seen sold by someone with white dreads living out of a bus. However, even to call it “seeing” is to understate it: everything was made out of this pattern, it did not have the valence of visual hallucinations.

After a few calls to voicemail, I got a hold of a friend who listens to Phish, correctly surmising he would have trip wisdom. He answered casually and advised that a trip was like a rollercoaster with ups and downs, that I was just hitting a loop, but it would settle out, and then he bid me adieu. I felt like I was riding a rollercoaster, alright, with nothing but soaring, high-G twists. Every time I reached a new height, pleading that this was enough now, praying to anything that this was the top, it ticked back up and started anew.

In desperation, I popped in a pair of airpods (how the fuck do these work?), thinking I’ll just listen to a few albums and it’ll all be over. I focused on the music the best I could, summoning all my hard-earned meditation skills before finally getting lost in the music and my swirling thoughts. I gave it a good hour and a half or so (I pride myself on my internal clock from doing standup for over a decade and often walk to the oven as the timer goes off) before finally allowing myself to check my watch.

THIRTY SECONDS had passed. I wish I were exaggerating for effect. Have you ever had the experience of closing your eyes, looking at the clock, blinking, and eight hours are gone in a moment because you drifted into instantaneous, uncanny deep sleep? This was the opposite, eternity in a second. I read later a theory that people experience time slowing during car accidents from adrenaline because it allows more sensory information in, so your experience of time changes accordingly on a ‘per experience’ rate. I don’t know how to devise a unit measuring the bandwidth of experience but I can say this, if everyday life was a trickling stream, my brain was the Hoover Dam blown open.

To any experienced tripper or even surfer, it’s obvious why my approach failed. You can’t ground yourself out at sea. You can only breathe deep and let the wave take you. I was not embracing the trip, my ego was a cornered criminal, reaching for anything sharp and swiping violently, connecting with only mist and throwing out its arm in the process. I was a fragile little bird tangled in a fishing line, thrashing while a benevolent fisher tried to free me.

I wish this description did the experience justice, it does not, it can not. For the first time in my life, I understood what ineffable truly means, what all those inarticulate hippies had tried to relate to me, what the mystics espouse across millennia-old texts. We build our lives around homeostasis and stability, both biologically and psychologically, by constructing a conceptual foundation to secure ourselves a homestead among the shifting sands of reality. Whatever you think is your bottom, your base, is not. There are more layers underneath it and more layers under those still. Psychedelics will ask what solid ground you stand on before demolishing it. For me, the drug didn’t even need to go so far as to drill into the basement, it just pulled the rug out from under my feet.

I’m not claiming to have visited some privileged state of mind only accessible to yogis and the truly daring. However, I can now say that I know, through experience and not intellectual understanding, that there is a vast ocean of consciousness that we inhabit an infinitesimal part of. When I tell you that there is no difference between you and me or humans and animals, I’m not citing some academic argument but my experience melting into my dog.

Philosophizing aside, I had just realized that if 30 seconds felt like 90 minutes, I was in for a long fucking day.

I made another classic trip mistake (is anyone keeping count?) and looked in the bathroom mirror, and decided that if I couldn’t get more naked, I could at least shave my unkempt COVID beard away. I got about halfway before shaking out my razor and looking up to see myself aged to 85 years old, a Hollywood-perfect amalgamation of both of my long-dead grandfathers. I recognized exactly how much I looked like both of them, an illusion (?) that persisted in perfect, high-fidelity detail while pinching my face and dragging my skin.

Sufficiently freaked out, I decided to go to my ultimate safe space: sitting in a hot shower, an underrated alternative to a bath where the water doesn’t get cold and you get to enjoy the mix of relaxing white noise, steam, and stream of water.

It was in this innocuous moment that things started to fall apart.

Somehow, I convinced myself that I was going to drown in the bathtub (in the shower?). Somehow, I convinced myself I was already drowning. I had overdosed on drugs, illegal drugs, and my girlfriend and I were, in the real reality, dying. I felt like I wasn’t in control of my body, like it was failing me. I felt myself pulled to the floor by an insatiable gravity, a gravity I would later discover described in uncanny detail in the Tibetan Buddhism as earth dissolving into water, or the first stage of dying:

The solidity of the body fails.
Strength leaves the limbs.
The body feels unbearably heavy, as though sinking into the bed or the ground.
One feels pressed down, trapped in flesh.
The ability to hold posture disappears.
The sense of having a stable form breaks apart.
Emotionally, there is a feeling of being overwhelmed, buried, or stuck.
-The Tibetan Book of the Dead

Of course, I was not dying, my earth was firmly undissolved, and there is no (chemical) danger of overdosing on mushrooms. I know this deeply—as mentioned, I have every reason to know this deep in my resume and my soul. Turns out, a drug that can dissolve your ego like sugar in warm water doesn’t have a problem casually brushing aside some factoids.

I ventured into the living room, where my girlfriend was vibing with some TV on the mellow-named Golden Teachers. I, on the other hand, was decidedly not vibing. I told her that we were overdosing (overdosed?), dying and that we needed to call an ambulance. She, blissed out on the couch with our dog and cat, shockingly, thought this was a bad idea and said I should try relaxing. It was too late; panic was setting in.

We called a few friends, no answer this time. In our drug-addled state, she decided to reassure me by Googling “can you overdose on mushrooms?” The first search result was truncated to an ill-fated “Yes, you can overdose on mushrooms…”

I didn’t get far enough to click through and read the rest of the sentence after the fold, stipulating that overdose simply meant having a bad time. Panic turned into icy cold terror, and I reached for the phone to call 911, despite my girlfriend’s pleading. What did she know? We were druggies, akin to heroin addicts, and we were overdosing, and we were dying, and I was going to save us.

Drawing on my time in the psychiatric emergency room, I started repeating my address aloud so the EMTs could find us, 131 Starr 1L, 131 Starr 1L, 131 Starr 1L. They said they’d send help and to wait where I was. Mission accomplished, one would think. They would come and tell me to chill, give me a Xanax, and the brush with authority would sober me up.

Ambulance #1.

However, I didn’t wait. I decided we needed to go now and dragged my girlfriend out of the apartment into the Brooklyn streets. 131 Starr 1L, 131 Starr 1L.

We lived on Maria Hernandez Park, where heroin addicts would congregate day in and day out. I grabbed the friendliest middle-aged lady from the group and told her, pleadingly that we needed help, that I’d overdosed on mushrooms. I remember her look of concern, “Oh no, that’s bad, you need to get somebody!” Help came shortly because right on cue, an ambulance was going down Knickerbocker Ave, sirens blaring, on an active call. Synchronicity but in a bad way.

131 Starr 1L, 131 Starr 1L, 131 Starr 1L. I ran into the middle of the street and flagged the ambulance down, forcing it to stop.

Ambulance #2.

3 very annoyed EMTs got out, assessed the situation, and realised they’d have to take me into the ER (because I was insistent and they were tired). My girlfriend and I got in the back, and they tried to put a mask on my face. I did not like this as, in my mind, they had become paramilitary COVID soldiers. They gave up and sat in for the ride. I did not.

131 Starr 1L, 131 Starr 1L, 131 Starr 1L. These were decoy EMTs, and I needed the real EMTs. After all, I was, we were, still overdosed and dying in the bathtub back home in the real reality.

I reached for my phone and started dialing.

9. “What are you doing?”

1. “Who are you calling.

1. “Give us the phone…”

I pushed them off and got to the voice on the other end. “Are you in a safe place right now?” it asked. “NO!” I answered and called in another emergency to my home address, where we were obviously still dying.

Ambulance #3.

My last memory before the hospital is my foot in an angry EMT’s face.

From Psych Worker to Psych Patient

After getting checked in and waiting too long (probably?), I was interviewed by an unempathetic ER doc, who I still did not trust was real. I ripped off my sweater and threw it out, suddenly sullied by it. They found my phone and got my father on the other end, who reassured me that the doctor was indeed a doctor, and I had indeed done some drugs. I started to come down and snap back into hospital mode, beginning to understand I had brought myself into the bureaucratic machinery of a system I was intimately familiar with.

I anticipated her questions and concerns and what she needed to hear to let me leave. I told her I had freaked out because I thought I had overdosed on mushrooms. I was not suicidal. I had just freaked out on mushrooms. I also did not want to hurt anyone. I had just freaked out on mushrooms. She ignored me and, instead of giving me a small dose of a benzo and letting me sit for a few minutes as any remotely competent practitioner would have, decided to transfer me to the psychiatric emergency room. I reiterated that I was not suicidal or homicidal and would like to leave. She reiterated that she did not give a shit.

If I can be perfectly honest, I am still not over all or any of this. As I write this, I caught myself fantasizing about running out of the hospital to escape as I’d done if I’d known what was in store.

Once again overestimating their competence, I figured I would be interviewed by a nurse with form questions and, in short order, after demonstrating that I was not and was never a danger to myself or others, would be allowed to leave. I arrived at the psychiatric ER unit and quickly realized I was in trouble as the hospital was a cesspool of mismanagement and abuse (Woodhull NYC Health + Hospitals boasts 2.4 stars on Google, as opposed to Denver Health’s 3.9 stars, where I worked in the psychiatric ER). It was the height of COVID, and no one was masked. There were six sad people sitting in plastic chairs. And notably, there was vomit on the floor. I had gotten what I wanted, I was sober, and I quickly summoned my years of professional experience.

They checked me in and started to take my belongings. I told them politely that I used to work in their job and had a few questions. For starters, I wanted a copy of the hold I was placed on that allowed them to hold me against my will, as they are legally required to provide. This paperwork is so vital and basic that even when you restrain a client to a bed, you must print out a copy to place on the table next to them, signed by a doctor or police officer with a rationale as to why they were a sufficient danger to themselves or others. He shrugged me off and said simply, he “didn’t know anything about that.” Uh oh.

I approached a group of 4 other employees standing in a circle chatting with one another. Now is a good time to mention that I am white and 100% of the people working this unit were black, and BLM protests were in full swing. This is relevant because when I asked the same question to the group about my rights, I was told to sit down and shut up. When I asked they please offer some sympathy because I was having one of the worst days of my life, they responded with a heartfelt “try being black in America, white boy.” I still don’t know where to file this experience.

I noted the placement of all the cameras as I’d been trained and was sure to avoid any blind spots.

I tried to find the most reasonable person working in this Shutter Island, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, prison-style hospital, and found someone who could complete full sentences. I told them, again calmly, that I used to work this job and understood my rights, and would like them to respect them, including access to my hold, and the ability to use the phone. I told them because I was not a danger to myself or others, there was no legal rationale to remove my right to leave and said that I would like to. They said no. When I explained, calmly, that a hold is what allows them legally to be able to sequester me, and it would be legally considered assault and kidnapping if they stopped me, they responded with a reasonable “go ahead and try to leave and see what happens.”

I was refused my right to a copy of my hold, a phone, and visitors (“COVID” though I was refused even a mask), and I was denied my right to speak to the patient advocate or the unit psychiatrist. I resigned myself to waiting for the nurse interview and sat down next to an actively psychotic homeless man who was bobbing back and forth to calm himself, and a few feet from the vomit that the employees, gossiping about their weekend plans, had no interest in cleaning.

I sat and waited for a while, around an hour and a half more (this time, I am certain of the duration from later reading my records). Suddenly, several employees emerged from a room at once, carrying a needle, something I immediately recognized as a ‘show of force.’ The needle, no doubt, contained what’s known in the biz as the triad, a ‘B52 shot’: 50mg Benadryl, 5mg Haldol, 2mg Ativan, the chemical mixture used to chemically restrain or ‘snow’ people who are out of control and dangerous to themselves or others. I got out of the way for them to edge over to who I assumed was their target, the psychotic homeless man screaming to himself next to me. I mentally took note how broken this place was, after all, he was surely psychotic, but had done nothing justifying intervention. Instead, they pointed at me.

I, put my hands up, once more ensured I was on camera, and told them I was not a danger to myself or others, that I was denying any type of medication, that they were not allowed to administer any drugs against my will, that I had been sitting calmly in a chair for an hour and a half, and asking for my papers was not rationale to chemically restrain a client, especially when that person was me. I knew all of this; I’d trained others in the ethics and legality of the restraining process. I also knew enough not to fight. They responded to my well-reasoned and informed position by putting pointless hands on my compliant and seated shoulder, then injected me with the drug cocktail whose chemical structures had once decorated the back of my Denver Health Psychiatric ER employee hoodie. The irony was not lost on me, and I laughed a sad chuckle to myself as the drugs started to spread, trying to process the fact that I had just been assaulted by the system that I’d given so much of my life to and trusted in my time of need.

Some brief backstory: I had quit working at Denver Health after 2 years, in part because being a behavioral tech is a dead-end job designed to underpay immigrants and people with college educations looking to bolster their resume with clinical experience for graduate-level training and nursing school, and in part because I was arguing with doctors when they would unethically order restraints on patients. The doctors did not like this. I was scolded and instructed by the nurse educator to ask questions, so I did. The doctors did not like this. I was written up for insubordination. I quit and filed for unemployment (allowed in Colorado), they challenged it and I had to prove I worked in a hostile workplace. After a crushing amount of stress, I beat their lawyers and my former boss and won my rightful and meager unemployment benefits.

All that happened in the hospital that has 1.5 more stars on Google than the one I was currently confined to.

After more waiting, I was brought into a dingy office with a psychiatrist who barely looked up from his stack of papers. I explained my situation in perfect detail and the trampling of my basic rights. He ignored me and offhandedly explained he was going to keep me overnight because they had injected me with drugs and he didn’t want to be liable. I explained that he didn’t have a rationale to keep me overnight because I was not and was never a danger to myself or others, and I was safe to leave back to my apartment in the care of my girlfriend, who was waiting. He responded by writing a hold. Well, that explained why they never provided me with a copy: they had held me illegally against my will for hours, during which time they’d managed to deny every one of my rights while both chemically and physically assaulting me.

I stayed the night in a freezing shared room wishing I hadn’t thrown out my sweater. In the morning, a social worker interviewed me (the first informed or considerate person I’d encountered) then went wide-eyed and jaw agape as I explained my story. I was discharged in short order.

Too broke to splurge for an Uber, I walked home wearing the hospital gown, 24 hours after my journey had begun. This time, I did not run.

…

I broke this essay into 2 parts for readability.
Read Part 2: Getting Sober By Doing Psychedelics (Accidentally)

The question on everyone’s mind in our sexless culture is if they should fuck more. If sleeping around offers spiritual insight or secret confidence, if happiness is on the other side of intercourse. The answer is an emphatic no, but do it anyway. This story is about sleeping around and how I’ve apparently done it more than most. It’s about how it didn’t help. It’s about how it did.

The human psyche is an endless labyrinth of meaning that resists simple reduction into cause and effect. Regardless, a few anecdotes from my past demand mentioning: a pastiche of my first infatuation and first serious girlfriends. After developing a big crush in 6th grade on a friend of my best friend’s twin sister, I laid in bed and listened to Stellar by Incubus on repeat. When I told my best friend’s sister, she laughed in my face and said I’d never stand a chance with her friend, and she was right. In college, I caught my first girlfriend cheating on me by looking through her phone after she told me I didn’t last long enough in bed (she was years older than me and from Bogota, where she’d lost her virginity at 12). Years into my next relationship, my second girlfriend grabbed her childhood friend’s boyfriend’s dick over his pants at a party and winked at him.

Apparently, Gen Z is having far less sex than my generation (X) which had less than the last.1 I can only imagine the greatest generation fucked the most, after all, that’s how they earned their title, and why their kids were called baby boomers—no one wants to wrap it up with a Jimmy after returning home from a World War. What’s more, the average number of sexual partners for adults is a meager 6.3 for men and 4.3 for women (I assume a hand or footjob is 0.3).2

I hesitate to share my exact body count. It’s not a matter of privacy—as a standup comic, I regularly tell stories like when my girlfriend accidentally made me finish in my own face—it’s simply that I’ve learned from conversation that any number comes across like bragging, and any reasonable person stops counting at a gentleman’s baker’s dozen. While it would require psychosis or at least obsession of a different variety than I possess to keep literal notches in my bedpost (or, auto-fiction blog), my best guess is over 60 and less than 80.

If you don’t think this is high, I didn’t think so either before reading it was ten times the average and that just over a quarter of men sleep with more than 15 people. I also know it can’t be that extreme because I was in long-term relationships for the vast majority of my adult life and didn’t cheat once (don’t worry, I’m an asshole in myriad other ways). I would imagine extreme outliers can bang my total out in a year, especially if we count gay dark rooms at techno clubs in Berlin. The question at hand is whether fucking scores of women is a wise choice in the long-term and why I felt the need to.

Throughout my 20s and into my 30s, I’ve had more and longer relationships than most of my friends. I’m a serial monogamist, a branch swinger. I’m now 36 and since I was 18 years old my relationships have been 2, 3, 3, 4, and 4 years long, totaling almost 16 of the 18 years I’ve been dating. I also have never cheated on a partner.

So the question is, when the the hell did I find time to fuck so many people? Well, compulsively between relationships.

From No Beers to All the Beers

I was awkward (or at least, a pathologically bad hang) in high school and, resultingly, didn’t get laid until college. This mundane fact inflicted a larger-than-it-should-have psychic wound. I’d fall asleep in class and only avoided suspension and expulsion because I’d finagled unlimited class absences after breaking my neck on a trampoline at the end of freshman year, resulting in a fusion of my 5 vertebrae, a summer in the hospital, and a crippling World of Warcraft addiction. I didn’t go to parties because I didn’t get invited to parties. In fact, I got bullied so much I often skipped school, not for sex and cigarettes but to sit in the safety of my computer’s glow. One night junior year, some friends I played poker with decided to use me to throw a party at my house while my dad was out of town.

I had never drank before and had no context into what a normal amount of alcohol was because my dad was sober and my mother maxed out at one yearly Kalua mudslide. So, I drank all the beer, urged on by peer pressure and the typical games designed to make you black out when the cool kids who did know how to drink, caught wind of the party and showed up. This included, gasp, girls, two that I had a crush on. One, who I genuinely in retrospect may have had a chance with had I not been a socially inept as I was a class older than her and made her laugh in chemistry class, and one who’s face is so symmetrical I’m surprised she never launched a race war starring in an American Eagle ad.

I blacked out, obviously, and woke up in my bed on top of the covers with a hangover so bad I haven’t topped it since—I’d drank so much I was throwing up liver bile from alcohol poisoning. I went to school to discover that I’d clumsily hit on both girls by telling them that I was a “hopeless romantic.” I don’t even know how my empty teenage mind put these words together or where I heard it. These, in retrospect, very minor transgressions were enough to throw me into seclusion and rumination for months.My dad found a hookah coal-sized hole in his nice rug but never suspected anything because I was such a loser.

All that is to say I was tremendously behind socially when I arrived at college, I went from having gotten drunk a handful of times to suddenly surrounded by pros at state school. I didn’t have my first kiss until the opening night of college when I somehow ended up making out with a girl from my dorm in my bed. As I was desperately puzzling over what to do with my lips and tongue (a thought usually held by middle schoolers), we took our clothes off. Within 5 minutes of my first kiss, I was sucking on the freckled tits of a redheaded college athlete. Suffice it to say this was overwhelming, like going from no beers to all the beers, I made a fool of myself.

Towards Nothing

The feelings involved with this level of intimacy were too intense for me to handle without any previous context or experience. I texted her too much, was clingy, blew it immediately, and she avoided me. After my failure, I was afflicted with paranoid intrusive thoughts and severe insomnia. I thought that I was being tricked and no woman could actually be attracted to me (of course, they weren’t from my desperation) and that she must secretly be a man—years of being called loser and faggot had permeated deep into my unconscious. Luckily, I lived fifty feet from health services and found a sympathetic doctor who gave me Valium, a benzodiazepine, AKA the only drug class that could ruin my life. It’s the kind of drug that offers an alluring removal of discomfort rather than a high, benzos simply turn the volume down when things get a little loud, they offer nothing instead of something.

As freshman year continued, I regularly visited my hometown friends in Boston to escape the social isolation that followed me to college. At an Allston party, I met a girl, we made out in a bedroom, then went back to her dorm overlooking the Boston Commons to take each others’ virginity. She was so tight on the first go I was literally unable to put it in and we went to bed frustrated. We tried again the next day then both successfully joined the adult world, despite barely staying hard in the chokehold of latex.

We had a year of movie montage fun, drinking underage in the Italian North End of Boston where she worked and lived as a waitress, fucking loudly in her room with thin walls, fucking quietly on her roof, fucking and fucking. I insisted upon condoms even though she was on birth control, not out of responsibility or self-control but fear and anxiety, the guiding force propelling most of my decisions. I wanted to keep my options open and felt inexplicably above her, so I strung her along, inconsiderate of the intense feelings attached to her own newfound intimacy. I still had a high school sized void in my ego that I tried to fill with pussy, which obviously didn’t work. You can’t fill one hole with another.

Good Chemistry

The dating apps were a godsend for me and I was an early adopter, starting with OkCupid and then Tinder and Bumble. I swiped until there was no one left and had dates multiple times a week. Turns out, a video game where you actually get to fuck Princess Peach when you win is pretty addicting. I would go through a breakup, indulge compulsively until I stopped enjoying and I fell into something else, date someone for a few years, then begin the cycle anew. Add up a few several-month-long sprees sprinkled across 15 years and I have a meaningless number, a handful of good stories and, astonishingly, no STDs or children.

At my worst, I woke up with one girl in my bed, got in a morning quickie, went to work, then cleaned up for a date later that night to literally rinse and repeat. I remember putting my whole hand inside of a girl I had met an hour prior who seemed pleasantly amused that I’d bothered to take her to dinner at a restaurant. I became fuck buddies with a girl with a dancer’s body and pussy that were so perfect I wanted to preserve her in amber. I hooked up with a doctor who had never had an orgasm before and made her cum a dozen times despite doing nothing extraordinary (who I still occasionally text for free medical advice). I’ve forgotten plenty of nights that were the exact opposite of that, gorgeous near strangers whose bodies seemingly didn’t function as I’d learned, who taught me that ‘having chemistry’ is literal and that pheromones go further than looks.

Outside of all the game theory bullshit you’ve read, I can tell you that the pursuit of improving yourself is one in the same as getting better with women, including prioritizing yourself so you’re unavailable. But most importantly, get a cool jacket and lots and lots of money and be mean to them and break your jawbone with a hammer and inject a steroid meth cocktail every morning. And also active listening.

I’m deflecting with humor, a therapist on TV would chime in, but mine would never spout such drivel. The truth is women are attracted to excitement and status but also normal shit like being curious and confident and, most of all, funny. Having fun is being fun. Being good in bed and talking to women is like kissing, the more you’re thinking, the less you’re present in the moment. Do what feels good, pursue your desires with force, and the rest will fall into place.

Zero-Sum Game Theory

I remember walking into a college party where my roommate pointed out a drummer in the band to say he’d fucked over 100 girls and thinking it was the coolest thing I’ve ever heard, having fucked none myself at the time. Now, I know the man that boy became is probably dead, addicted to fentanyl, or still a drummer doing the same thing but in a much less cool way. Growing up, mass culture taught me random sexual encounters were supposed to fulfill and satisfy. Every movie and rap song glamorizes casual sex and the implicit idea that, by fucking someone, you gain something and they lose it. It’s taken hard work to shed this idea to even a degree, deep as it goes.

The anxiety and compulsive behavior carried into adulthood and may continue still. It manifested as OCD after a bad mushroom trip, it plagued me following breakups and my mother’s death. I have not evolved into some cool-handed Lothario but simply hope to know myself enough to be aware of this deficit and where it directs my attention. I’ve learned that every time I think I’ve transcended my deficit is when I’m due for a rude awakening from the universe in the form of a slew of unanswered texts, a partner ‘taking space,’ being quarantined with someone for ten days in the middle of a breakup, or a long-time girlfriend threatening to move across the country with or without me two months from this very day.

Gun to my head, I doubt I could recount even half of the people I’ve fucked (hot as that sounds). Most have no meaning, Valium would have served the same purpose, they were a mistaken attempt to silence the voices I’m sadly likely to repeat if my current relationship dissolves. Where conquest stays with me is where it wasn’t driven by compulsion.

Allow me to indulge in some bragging. I don’t know why I still bother with comedy, or fucking for that matter, because I know I’ll never top one experience. Once at an airport, a beautiful woman with dyed-blonde hair approached me at my gate, saying she’d seen me do standup and thought I was funny. Providence put us on the same tram once we arrived in Boston, where she asked for my number. Unfortunately, I had a girlfriend at the time, but fortunately, she dated women, so I asked if I could pull the trigger. I got the go ahead, and took a wild swing. My girlfriend and I giggled nervously as we tag-team authored texts, and two weeks later she brought a bottle of red wine to our apartment called ménage à trois. We all fucked on our bed and I bent her over an ottoman. She had an ass that could launch a thousand ships and after we (read: I) finished, told my girlfriend that she was impressed how hard and long I’d fucked her from behind. She made me a beautiful playlist filled with Sex and Cigarettes she’d play at the cafe she worked at. I still drink the rooibos tea they served at that cafe and wonder if her compliment nullified the impotence of being cheated on by a Colombian who told me I wasn’t good enough.

Of course, it never will. Like sex, your psyche is no zero-sum game. Something gained does not cancel out something lost, my sleeping with everyone who let me in my 20s didn’t cancel out not going to prom, a coked-up hookup with my best friend’s sister does nothing to silence her laugh echoing all the way from middle school. There’s no tally and no ledger, nothing is lost or gained unless the birth control fails.

You may feel compelled to have casual sex for precisely two reasons because there are only two different vectors in psychology: away from discomfort and towards desire you think will satisfy or fulfill. Either you think sex will resolve the anxiety of loneliness and self-doubt or you believe it will make you more than what you already are and, in either case, it won’t. I think that you should anyway.

It won’t heal whatever wound you have but it will supply you with self knowledge, a vital understanding that your wound is not going anywhere anytime soon so you better get friendly with it. Hopefully you’ll discover, like I did, that your specific psychogenic injury is not only an auxiliary part of you, it’s central to who you are. Self-actualization is the discovery that your being is a whorl wrapped around it, there’s no pearl without an irritation, there are no humans without gash. I learned to fuck well because I couldn’t, I’m loyal because I was betrayed, I make people laugh because I was laughed at, and won’t stop until I’m in the ground.

Conspiracy theory pseudo-etymologists purport that Hollywood was named after the wood from the wand of the holly tree and functions as a magical rune, sacred symbology spelling unholy incantations into existence. I used to suspect they were right, now I’m sure of it. LA became Hollywood which became our every waking thought. Correction, even our dreamscapes are LA now. Can we envision being anything beyond popular and famous? Can we desire anything but to be desired?

Everyone who plugs themselves into social media is an actor. Every accountant forced to demean themselves by doing trending dances while giving 401k advice, every lunatic espousing herbal alternatives to vaccines on #momtok while leveraging their children like a casting director, everyone scrolling, pretending that they’re immune to propaganda while binging glowing state-controlled media 2 inches from their face.

Everywhere is LA because every city and town is overflowing with ‘creators’ and ‘artists’ looking over eachothers shoulder for someone more profitable to expend their charm on. Everywhere is LA because we’re all in traffic, encapsulated in little boxes with our little media thinking about our little selves, unaware that the guy driving next to us has a spike of rebar through his leg and couldn’t afford an ambulance. And he’s filming an Instagram reel out about it. Most of all, we’re pissed at pedestrians and bikers for daring to be free, the hatred a snake feels for a bird.

Giles Deleuze said we’ve moved from a society of discipline to a society of control; we live in open air prisons where our movements and thoughts are controlled by a complex web of laws, bureaucracy, advertisement and propaganda, corporatism, and perverse incentives. Guy Debord said that, counterintuitively, media separates us through the very mechanism of its connection, a loneliness machine fueled by intimacy.

Translation? Everywhere is LA now.

I go to coffee shops every day and bars every night, nobody looks anybody in the eye. Nobody converses with strangers, nobody is hitting on anyone, and, apparently, nobody is fucking anymore. Fame used to be a way to get laid. Now, we’ve been taught that sex is a way to become famous, so we cut out the middleman. Is OnlyFans emblematic of female sexual empowerment or a manifestation of capitalism claiming more and more of women’s private lives under the auspices of social progress? OnlyFans is LA. Is podcasting different than porn because people are normalizing shameless tell-alls of their personal lives as ordinary and admirable instead of exposing enormous gym-and-surgeon-sculpted asses? How many comics need to gossip with a fat guy giggling around a microphone until we’ve had our fill and start talking to each other again? How much true crime can we mainline until we allow ourselves to have a single silent thought, or better yet, no thoughts at all?

LA is capitalism and there’s seemingly no limit to how much ourselves we’ll offer up to it. We cut off our noses to spite our faces then bring them to market. Every day capitalism colonizes deeper into the wild unknown of writhing, unconquerable humanity because we invite it in, supply it a guide and clean water, then reveal our epoch-old sacred groves as its logging trucks lag close behind a fake smile.

LA is the publicizing of the self, bottomless, mining deeper into our personal lives and innermost secrets, constantly conquering new frontiers. A process that began on the early internet with a simple php image and anonymized pseudonym to supplement our identity soon turned to personalized avatar to supplant it. AOL instant messenger gave way to forums which morphed into Myspace then Facebook and, soon enough, our digital avatars superseded reality, a ‘happy accident’ for our reptilian overlords who flit their forked tongues in horrible pleasure at every new part of our beings we voluntarily expose. I can’t definitely prove the exact moment of their triumph, though I suspect it was while Facebook encouraged us to divulge a litany of personal information under the banner of community and, in doing so, created the unassuming relationship status. Woe is us, soon flesh and blood romantic relationships were mediated by the internet, being ‘Facebook official’ uprooted the material reality of commitment.

LA is manifest destiny and its other coast is your soul. Our spirits are the loincloth locals living in perfect unity with nature but LA is a thousand-thousand armor-clad rapists with gold in their eyes and murder in the holes where hearts should be—but this time they have Bluechew. Do we kill for gold or does gold permit us to become killers? Are we sluts for fame or…

To age gracefully used to mean accepting the reality of greying or hair loss, now it requires tying oneself to the mast to resist the siren song of invasive plastic surgery. Everywhere is LA and everybody is an aging actress, desperately holding onto youth with a vice grip that would turn an arm wrestler’s hand to dust. Why else would Salesforce office managers and Amazon warehouse workers be spending their meager paychecks on microneedling and red light therapy and lip filler and botox and fake asses and fake tits? Company money flowing back to the company store. Our presence in physical reality has become a prayer at the alter of the internet; even our unbridled obsession with our appearance is merely a means to an end for our bodies’ ultimate digitization. Lookmaxxing twelve step skincare routines and obsessive gym culture took hold not to empower personal seduction and stoic presence in the moment as they purport but to increase social media and dating app market value. Appearance as a stand in for appearance.

What are we all auditioning for? The only ones critiquing our performances are ourselves through a reflection in a lake, and Nemesis is standing behind us in judgement, sword sharpened in hand.

I don’t know where to move. I fear I’m going to unravel, unplug, and escape to a Nepalese basecamp populated exclusively by sherpas, then wake to find a compatriot using Starlink to post his rustic momo recipe on American-Chinese TikTok. Everywhere is LA now.

A man’s long, white beard wisps out from under the covers. He dreams of children chasing a butterfly through the heather, gleefully swinging a net in the summer heat. He’s the only child sitting to the side. “Don’t try and catch the butterfly...” He’s also the only child with a beard. “...try to catch the clouds.” An alarm disrupts this Eden.

A hand emerges from the beard, then the covers, past pickle chips and cans of Diet Coke, then presses down lethargically on the alarm clock. He steels himself. Time to get up. The band needs my help. The covers don’t move. What’s even the point? Isn’t there enough music in the world? He pauses and glances at a shelf overencumbered with accomplishments. His Producer of the Year Grammy, the stack of records he’s credited on that would make a respectable collection on its own. The bottle of Vicodin from Johnny Cash. One N-word pass, signed and dated by Jay-Z. His bestselling book: The Creative Act: A Way of Being. Rick Rubin. This can’t happen to me—I’m the guy.

A knock. The door creaks open. “Rick. Clock’s ticking. We need the band to make the album. We need you to make them make the album.”

“Just a few more minutes. I’m… meditating.”

“It’s almost noon, for Christ’s sake. The fans are impatient, and so is the label. We’ve waited long enough. I’m calling in a specialist.”

“What? No way. I can handle this on my own.”

“That’s what the band said when we called you in. You’ve clearly lost your inspiration. I’m calling in an even fatter and more annoying guy to inspire you.”

Invigorated by annoyance, Rick pulls himself heroically from lying in bed to claim his seat of power: lying on a luxurious couch wearing sunglasses near an exhausted band. The band glances up from black coffee, energy drinks, and beer, respectively. For the first time in a long time, Rick is at a loss for words.

The heavy mahogany door slams open, breaking the silence. Backlit from the door, the shadow from an even portlier guy eclipses Rick Rubin on the couch. A man with a longer, more tastefully unkempt white beard strolls comfortably into the Malibu mansion, past the band, and directly to him. His white shirt is somehow more casually plain than Rick’s, like a canvas fresh with gesso. He removes his black designer shades, revealing another pair underneath. “Tell me what’s going on.”

Dazzled, Rick is caught off guard, forgetting that just moments ago, he wanted nothing to do with outside help. “My book on creativity was a smash hit. How can I make lightning strike in the same place twice?”

“It’s not about controlling the magic of electricity but creating the conditions where a lightning strike is inevitable.”

Rick reflects on the words, not wanting to look dumb. “That’s so true.”

“Read this.” He hands him a white book emblazoned with a single black dot on the cover, etched with a tasteful serif reading Creation Infinity: Being the Way.

Son of a bitch. That’s even more pretentious than my title.

“The thing is…” he scans the cover page to find his name. “...Double Rubin. I’m having trouble knowing what to say—to people who don’t know what to say.”

“You can’t control what people do with your advice. Once it leaves your mouth, it’s out in the world for people to do with what they wish.”

“I’m a loser. I don’t even make anything myself. I just tell others to.”

“Does anyone truly create anything on their own, or do they just tap into a creative force? Be honest, and the inspiration will inspire itself.”

Is this how all those bands felt all those times? “It used to come so easily. Now I worry that I’m just recycling vague inspirational mumbo jumbo in 24-point font.”

Double Rubin walks a conversational tightrope between motivation and condescension, cocksure as a Cirque de Soleil gymnast. “MORE honest. Let the creative essence flow through you.”

“I misrepresent Eastern culture for pod people who can only process at a 6th-grade reading level. My book is a decoration for influencers’ coffee tables. My prose solely exists for tech bro DJs to mindlessly regurgitate while putting $20 bills up their nose. The only art it’s ever inspired is open mic poetry, resin dining tables, and ceramics crafted by trophy wives with Halliburton husbands. The only ‘creative acts’ my audience ever undertake are mortgage underwriting, pharmaceutical advertising, and authoring weapons vouchers.”

Rick Rubin sighs, feeling the weight start to slide off his shoulders. Just then, Double Rubin oversteps. “Beautiful. Now use that energy.”

“What the hell do you know? You don’t even motivate artists; you just motivate people who motivate artists. You aren’t a real artist motivator like me! You wouldn’t know a pithy quote if it kicked you in the balls!”

Double Rubin panics, sputters, then falters. “Avoid allowing analysis to undermine inner knowingness.”

“THAT’S FROM MY BOOK YOU SON OF A BITCH!” Rick Rubin grabs the closest heavy object, Creation Infinity, and charges at Double Rubin.

“WAIT!” Rick Rubin pauses, book overhead. “Does anyone ever truly write anything or do the muses?” The words barely slide from Double Rubin’s mouth as Rick Rubin lunges at him. They fall onto the couch and tussle fattily.

The record company executive shakes his head, sighing as he picks up his phone.

“We need to change our approach. Malibu. ASAP. Anti-Rubin, we need you.”

The slam of hardwood interrupts their fight as a man crashes through the mansion doors. Rick Rubin and Double Rubin look up to see gym muscle almost bursting from his white Loro Piana shirt, square Gucci glasses, a neat white goatee framing perfect white teeth.

“Cease with all this fruity art bullshit. Inspiring others to inspire others isn’t about pithy quotes. It’s about results.”

Rick Rubin and Double Rubin respond in sync. “Who the hell are you?”

“Who the hell am I? I’m the guy who pulled up in a Lambor-fucking-ghini you couldn’t even fit into. Call me Anti-Rubin. I’m here to show you how to motivate others the right way.”

“What the hell would you know about inspiring others to inspire others? You’re just a suit.”

“I might be—but I’m a 10,000 dollar suit. I read both of your books; insufferable prattling and pie-in-the-sky hippie gobbledygook. Creating is about getting to work and being a professional. It’s about giving your audience what they want. Read this.”

He produces a black book crammed with maximalist font, a la airport bookstore best-selling shelf, and tosses it to them, somehow, with an NFL-perfect spiral.

Rick Rubin and Double Rubin bobble the book between them, finally catch it, then turn it over in their hands. The cover features a bullseye on a dollar sign and reads: THE CONSUMER ACT: MAKING MONEY. ANTI-RUBIN.

Rick Rubin and Double Rubin look at each other and scoff. “Psh. We’ve won way more awards.”

“Oh yeah? You’re right. I don’t have a single trophy on my shelf. I have 50,000,000 of them in my offshore bank account. Awards didn’t pay for this seaside estate; song licensing fees from Chase Bank and Palantir commercials did. Your precious muses never made shit—a Greek putting in the hard work created the muses. Now it’s time to grab your lunchpail, clock in, and hit the bricks.”

Rick and Double Rubin reflect for a moment, still horizontal on the Hermann Miller couch, and consider the concept of hard work while weighing the book in their hands. “We’re not reading that, asshole.” Anti-Rubin dives at them and quickly locks both in a headlock.

The record company executive opens his briefcase to reveal a glass case. He slides a tiny hammer from his breast pocket, breaks open the glass, and removes a red phone. “Mayday. I repeat, mayday—we’re gonna need more Rubins.”

The entry doors burst forth once again as more and more Rubins pour in. Twink Rubin saunters in. Dadaist Rubin emerges spontaneously from an assemblage of other Rubins. Galactic Rubin bursts through the wall while Malibu Dreamhouse Rubin looks on in horror. A helicopter hovers over, and Tactical Rubin rappels through a skylight. Rubins offer vague advice loudly and confidently as they hand their books to each other. Tantric Rubin holds his ‘Sexual Act: Kama Sutra for Creatives’ in one hand as he sits in lotus position with Woman Rubin, their wispy beards wrapped together in coital unity. A human-sized book hands copies of a miniature Rick Rubin out. White Rubin casually drops that he helped Jay-Z create The Black Album. Black Rubin brags about his role in the Beatles’ White Album.

The band remains seated nearby, unperturbed. The lead guitarist washes down Advil with coffee. The bassist bangs a line of rehydration powder and recoils. The drummer laughs and sips what he calls ‘morning beer.’ As they observe the chaos, Rubins begin to tangle together into a hulking mass of book and beard. What was a group of dozens, scores, hundreds, morphs into a singular, globbing unity. Like rat tails, their long wizard manes twist into one another. A Rubin King is born.

The Rubin King begins to roll, collecting more Rubins as it goes, before turning towards the table where the band sits. Its shadow envelops the table where the band is sitting—where their drugs are sitting. “No! Our inspiration!” The lead guitarist dives out of the way, the bassist following instinctively. The drummer slams one last line before barely escaping as the King Rubin crashes into the table, swallowing up the chemical collection that would make Hunter S. Thompson seem like a teetotaler. Half-empty pillbottles, used syringes, off-brand energy drinks and gas station boner pills, a suitcase of unlabeled powders, tinctures, and dried plants, a pallet of computer duster, canisters of dentist-strength nitrous, a terrarium of exotic toads, and a couple of Advil.

A medley of the most powerful exogenous drugs created by man and nature alike floods the Rubin King through every orifice, every pore. Thoughts travel between them, their beards carrying electric signals between Rubins like a vast network of neurons. The Rubin King has merged into a hivemind—and its shared consciousness is tripping absolute balls. The Rubin King is no-Rubin and every-Rubin at once equally.

He (she? They? It?) blacks out momentarily before finding itself kneeling before a towering throne: a heaven-spun couch, woven of cockatrice feathers and golden fleece. A colossal silver-grey beard twists down infinitely through the cosmos at the scale of nebulae. Unfathomably void-black sunglasses and a plain tee of purest white spiral into a yin-yang. He basks in the presence of God Rubin.

“Behold. You entreat with pure inspiration. I am the maker of everything, credited in every creative act though I lift nary a finger. The Cheetoh dust from my beard begat your universe and uncountable more. What do you seek, seeker?”

“How do I…”

“SPEAK.”

“How do I…unlock the door to infinite inspiration and unbound creativity?”

“Haha! You cannot bind what is already free, little Rubin. There is no key to the door because there is no lock. There is no door. You already stand beyond the threshold. Remember this and this only: simplicity. Reach for the power you desire.”

The words echo through the King Rubin, shattering it back into the multitude of Rubins, each their own special and complete Rubinverse, buzzing with creative energy.

Rick Rubin is the first to share his revelation. “Creation is incredible.”

Double Rubin, “I’m full of ideas. And people need to hear them.”

Anti-Rubin, “I’m the man. I’m a genius. I’m a God.”

Rick Rubin approaches the record company stooge. “I think we’re finally ready to finish that album.”

“You’re actually going to make the music?”

Double Rubin joins, putting a hand on Rick’s right shoulder. “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re ready to inspire someone else to actually do the work.”

Anti-Rubin follows, placing a hand on his left. “We’ve joined forces…to create the most inspiring quote possible.”

The group of Rubins gathers around the band, now sitting on the floor. They look up expectantly at Rick, as do the throngs of other Rubins. The guitarist speaks for the band. “We’re ready to be inspired.”

He waits a beat. No need to think, the words speak themselves. “Are you ready… or is the art ready?”

Ready to dismiss him outright, they pause, struck by the simple fact that his words rang true, resonating like a Tibetan meditation bowl. Just as great lyrics cut through your defences to let you know you aren’t as over a breakup or as healed from the loss as you pretended, an aphorism can strike a nerve, forcing a reaction. This was one of those rare times when someone said the perfect thing. Maybe it was time to get to work. Maybe the art was ready.

The guitarist puts down his coffee and starts to dust himself off,“Wow, man, that’s dee—” but is cut off midsentence by the sound of a bullet being chambered. Rick Rubin holds a Glock to his head.

“WRITE A GODDAMN SONG RIGHT NOW. GET OFF THE COUCH AND CUT A TRACK.”

The band scrambles to their feet in shock.

“I SWEAR TO EVERY DARK FORCE IF YOU DON’T HAVE IT DONE TODAY I’M DRAWING A PENTAGRAM ON THE GROUND AND SUMMONING SATAN. I KNOW FOR A FACT THAT GOD IS REAL, SO THE DEVIL MUST BE TOO. DO NOT FUCK WITH ME.”

Collectively, frantically, the band finds their instruments, plugs them in, and starts playing. Rick Rubin clicks off the safety and waves the gun around.

“LET THE MUSE SPEAK THROUGH YOU.”

They begin to play more energetically.

Rick fires a bullet into the air. “OR ELSE, MOTHERFUCKER.”

In the chaos, a melody and beat emerge, reminiscent of a firearm being discharged in an enclosed space. Rick Rubin starts to nod along—it’s catchy.

“Oh my God. I did it. I DID IT! I made someone else do something! My work here is done.”

Double Rubin repeats his words, as do the other Rubins as they turn to sparkles, inspired to inspire anew, each Rubin returning to their respective fiefdoms.

The band continues to play, filling the house with what will undoubtedly become the next smash hit. Satisfied, Rick Rubin returns to his room and crumples into bed.

As he slides under the covers, he sees sparkles fade from a mysterious book waiting on his bedside table. He picks it up and flips it over in his hand. Its cover features a minimal pentagram and reads: ‘The Violent Act: Using a Gun. By Rick Rubin, Double Rubin, Anti Rubin, Mecha Rubin, Slut Rubin, Rubin 2.0, literally God & more!’

He cracks a slight smile and adds the book to his trophy shelf. Still easier than working with Kanye. Tonight, he will dream he’s a billowy cloud, fat with rain, headed towards land with cracking, grey soil.

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None of the characters had real arcs, in large part because ~1/3rd of the dialogue was devoted to affirming that husband #1 is hot. Not only is this a joke that’s been made endlessly and identically across the genre, but it’s something that is already accomplished merely by having the character appear onscreen and the single line of dialogue as husband #1 dies. I guess comedy and economy were never the point: these lines exist merely to permit the clinically repressed audience to ogle at the hot guy again and again. This isn’t a Hallmark movie, it’s A24! It’s elevated! It’s not slop for Vallium-addled suburbanites, it’s cinema! Look at the color palette! If you left the theater feeling (insert any actor name) was so dreamy, congrats, you’re about as hopeless and sexless as your funny postmenopausal aunt who raves about Hugh Jackman a little too enthusiastically. Go to the bar, take home a stranger, and try a new hole to reclaim your sexuality before it is too late for you.

This is a deeply cynical movie written by committee and checklist. Even Letterboxd denizens and supposed cinephiles seemingly ignore the Madlibz-esque chatgpt wokism replete in this script. One obvious example of many is the chemistryless afterlife helpers who have a pointless romantic relationship despite one of them being obviously gay, and the fact that you have never seen a relationship like theirs in real life. Why? The same reason bad things happen to good people. Fuck you, that’s why. Check it out! Husband #1 did gay stuff while killing 67 years! Wait, actually kind of promising… does husband #2 ever use this as a barb against him to create a running joke and consequence for this reveal? Of course not, that would risk being actually funny and alienating Jimmy Fallon-watching mouthbreathers. Joking about husband #1 fighting in the Korean War is about as edgy as this movie gets, but even there, you can practically feel the rewrites to the script to avoid offence, keeping it short of a laugh.

This movie presents eternity as a drab analog to everyday dating life. It would be no different if [hot perfect guy you had a passionate but brief relationship with] but were separated from for [unavoidable life reason] suddenly [moved back to small town / you moved back to small town / came back from war / what the fuck ever]. Strip A24 and the quasi-existential setting from this movie, and it’s the same inoffensive shlock you can watch 1000 versions of on 100 streaming platforms + in 10 languages you’ve never heard of.

So, what are the character arcs? Husband #2 evolves from doing everything for his wife to still doing everything for his wife. Hot perfect guy remains hot and perfect. The afterlife helpers check their respective Hollywood casting boxes (note: you apparently get a pass for token sassy black woman and Will-and-Grace-smarmy-gay-guy sidekicks if a hot dude mentions he was gay offscreen). Elizabeth Olsen’s lip quivers. I don’t think this movie has a single line of dialogue where she feels guilt for (potentially and then actually, twice) abandoning her doting husband of 65 years for eternity.

Who is the hot perfect guy besides hot and perfect? How did he change waiting in purgatory for 67 years? Was he ever disillusioned by it? Does he ever contend with the fact that he’s in love with a memory? Why are they even in a rush (”you have to choose!”) when they can seemingly dick around literally forever simply if they’re okay having a menial job (social worker, bartender, ineffectual security guards who are A-okay throwing people into eternity in the void for mild bureaucratic infractions)? Why not just date and make an informed decision after whatever time period? The answer to all these questions is, of course, a resounding fuck you, that’s why.

If you disagree, let us recall her big epiphany, namely, that life has meaning and value not in spite of but because it is temporary, that things end for a reason, what is meant to be will be. She then, based on this insight, decided to go into eternity without either lover. Then, husband #2 tells her she can be with the other guy. And so she... changes her mind? How do his words alter the reasoning that led to her decision? Doesn’t changing based on his permission totally undermine her epiphany (which itself came mysteriously from a night of binge drinking with her lesbian bestie, yass queen!). Someone who didn’t watch the movie would argue they return to their relationship with newfound appreciation for one another, but recall they never actually were unhappy. They loved their quotidian life together, raised a beautiful family, then died a week apart.

Despite being a movie, ostensively, about one women’s decision, Elizabeth Olsen’s single defining characteristic is that she has the caprice of a child: she wantonly commits to eternity without either man, then wantonly commits to eternity with a man who knew 67 years ago after spending less than a week together, she wantonly decides she made the wrong decision (after time uncertain but probably 4 days), she wantonly decides to risk eternity in the void to correct her mistake (romantic? close, wrong r word), she wantonly commits to eternally re-living a life that was so unimpressive it failed to emotional impact her enough to beat out a short relationship from 67 years prior. Vitally, re-living the simple life won’t feature the progression that defines it (kids, house, growing up together, growing old together, dying). And yet we are supposed to believe that this time around, our mercurial moron will remain happy with her decision for eternity without growth and the fantasy of a life unlived?

It’s only the “simple life” when you grow old, have kids, and die together. This is what makes it both simple and a life: your acceptance of the basic premise of change being constitutive of life. This is something she says almost verbatim when she chooses to leave behind both men. Instead, they will live out eternity together in a life devoid of the very things that define it, forever unchanging, childless, and immortal.

This removal of what is essential to the eternity they chose is paralleled by their psychoanalytic dynamic. Husband #2 is seemingly unaffected by the fact he was abandoned, but perhaps his epiphany to give his wife permission to go into eternity with another man is a deliberate psychic torpedo targeted at her lust—I mean, who can have consecutive toe-curling orgasms with hot husband #1 when their dutiful, boring husband told them to? His permission, the freedom he grants transmutes her decision from hers into his. He removes himself as an option in a ricochet attack to remove his rival as one.

The only real change is that Elizabeth Olsen no longer has the pleasure of fantasising about hot dead war hero husband #1 while boning boring #2 (and he, in turn, doesn’t get the pleasure of her being unexplainably turned on occasionally). He no longer needs to comfort her now that she has closure—or a private fantasy life—the core of their respective desires unravel. Believing that their relationship will endure ad infinitum now that this is removed and not instantly collapse is a profound misunderstanding of human sexuality and psychology.

This movie’s cynical take is that Olsen baring her private life (read: fantasy) for all to see and exposing it in the most vivid and public way imaginable will somehow make her more contented, more romantically involved, more capable of a deeper love that can endure for an eternity. In fact, this fantasy is the very engine of their relationship and mutual attraction (him doting, her imagining a different life), and there is nothing to hold them together without it. This was not a psychic blockage preventing the flow of true love; it was the subterranean support beam holding up the whole structure. This is explained throughout the movie as husband #2 literally proposed on the dock husband #1 left to die, and is still so hung up on 67 years later that he chokes seeing a picture of his chiselled jaw. The ending exorcizes the spectre of her past, but what’s unclear is whether anything remains afterwards between them.

It can be said that Olsen’s choice is a refusal to move into enlightenment (accepting that change is the essence of being, staying with either man would be clinging) and instead returns to another cycle on the wheel of samsara. Their return to eternity in the simple life is an absurd inversion; what was defined by change and uncertainty is now marked by stasis and complete knowledge—no harm will come to them, they cannot die, there is no struggle, just a ghostly repeat of life. What looks like a return to the human life in Buddhism is actually a deliberate entry into the realm of hungry ghosts: she will be agelessly Hollywood-hot without a functioning womb, Barbie except it’s the audience who has smooth plastic where their genitals should be.

In the light of eternity, there is but one certainty: everything will end. This obvious fact never comes to bear that, ultimately, her choice does not matter. They will fall in and out of love until they are a distant flicker of a memory, until they are not even a memory.

If you are a sentient being with a vivid internal life and a modicum of self-respect I highly recommend skipping this and watching The World of Tomorrow by Don Hertzfeld.