In March, I was driving home. An approaching car honked at a chicken lying on the gravel road. The chicken didn’t move. The car went around it.

I drove around the chicken. I turned left, onto my property. I parked. I walked to the chicken in the road. It was standing now, unstably, on the grass by the road.

I picked him up and was surprised how skinny he felt. It’s hard to visually detect emaciation in a chicken, due to the feathers. He seemed to have no muscles left.

I carried him into my yard and put him on the grass. He couldn’t walk or stand well. One of his eyes was swollen.

I fed him various food—ground beef, noodles. When he tried to peck at the food, he missed ~85 percent of the time.

I made a shelter using a table I built years earlier, a plastic thing that got sent to my house by accident years earlier, and a Chris Ware comic (blue thing on top):

But it seemed better for him to be near me, on the front patio where I work, so I put a wooden board on the ground and he spent his time there:

He stayed in the same place most of the day and night. I fed him coconut—I drank the water, axed the coconuts in half revealing the meat, and placed them by him.

I gave him a constant stream of food, including papaya. He pooped maybe thirty times a day, which seems normal for chickens. I sprayed the poop onto the grass with the garden hose. I used to hose to clean his rear end:

At night, I placed him in a cardboard box. In the morning, he was in the same place with a pile of poop under him.

He got better slightly. I saw him cleaning himself. I noted, “I’m glad to have the rooster to care for. He seems very calm and nice.”

One morning he was gone. That day, I found his remains in my yard. I’m 99 percent sure the neighbor’s dog ate him. There were feathers, a leg and foot. The grass was matted down.

A few days later, my mom emailed me saying my dad had asked about the chicken. I emailed them an email titled “Rooster Update”:

The rooster was eaten by the neighbor’s dog. I saw all the feathers in an area one morning, and part of the rooster’s leg. It had a good last 10 days with me though, eating a lot every day.

My mom replied, “You gave that rooster a good 10 days’ care and love before he goes, he will always remember you and your good deed.”

My dad replied, “ok yiu have done good job to her.”

In ~20 percent of near-death experiences (NDEs), people report undergoing “life reviews.” In a life review, a person re-experiences some or all of their life.

In many life reviews, people experience what they made others feel too. People have reported experiencing what they made animals feel.

Dannion Brinkley, a former U.S. Marine, wrote that he felt the “joy” of a goat he freed from a fence, and the “sorrow and pain” of a dog he hit with a belt, during his NDE.

I look forward to experiencing what I made this chicken feel.

Note: This is a different chicken than the one I wrote about in April 2025. That chicken disappeared in November 2025.

This essay first appeared in Granta in spring 2025.

Gian

You were born in West Virginia in 1974. I was born in Virginia in 1983. You went to college in New Orleans, earning a degree in philosophy. I grew up in Central Florida. We both moved to New York City in 2001.

In 2005, I saw an ad in The Paris Review for a new magazine called New York Tyrant. The ad said “submit” in large lowercase font; in place of the letter “i” was a drawing of the backside of a naked obese man wielding a sword. I sent a story to submissions@nytyrant.com.

Seven months later, I got an email thanking me. “After due consideration, however, we have come to the unfortunate conclusion that your story is not a good fit for our publication. Rejection is never a happy occasion, but rest assured that the anger and disappointment now stirring deep within your heart will only lead to greater things.”

“I hate you,” I replied. “No, just kidding. Thanks for the note.” I submitted another story and withdrew it when it was accepted elsewhere. “Damn,” someone replied. “This is a good fucking story. Have anything else?” I submitted another, withdrew it a month later, and got this response: “Damn it, man. Give us a fucking chance.”

“Dear Tao,” you emailed two weeks later. “Was at KGB the other night but had to leave before you read.” You asked me to send something for your magazine’s second issue. “Your first two submissions got yanked so fast, we couldn’t do anything for you. But we love your shit, so please resubmit. yours, GianCarlo.”

I submitted a story and withdrew it a week later. I sent a fifth story, which elicited no response, and six months later I sent another, which you rejected eight months later in 2007: “Hello. We’re gonna pass on this one, though. Thanks though.” You signed the email “Giancarlo”—lowercase c—and didn’t ask me to submit again.

In 2009, you founded Tyrant Books to publish a novella by Brian Evenson, who’d sent it to you after getting two emails in a row from people surnamed Brown—one being your assistant—while working at Brown University. “I act on things like that,” said Evenson in an interview.

Like Evenson, you paid attention to what you called “things that appear in strange ways.” The name New York Tyrant came to you in a dream. Later, you noticed “the letters TRN found in the word TyRaNt can also be found in that order in my last name diTRapaNo,” as you explained in an interview.

Evenson’s novella was published in November. In December, you emailed to say you’d started writing for Vice and to ask for a review copy of my recently published novella. The email was signed “Gian.”

“Happy Birthday, Tao,” you emailed in July 2010. “I won’t say to have a great day, because that’s so hard sometimes. So have a good day.”

I thanked you, and you asked if I knew a doctor who’d prescribe Adderall, which you’d noticed me mentioning online. I gave you my phone number. We began texting.

We met in person a month later, outside NYU’s Bobst Library, where I worked on my writing each day. I traded you Adderall for Percocet.

“How many of these should I take?” you texted when I was back in the library, seated at a computer.

“I’m good with half of one but I weigh 125 so maybe just one whole one. Open it and pour the little balls into your mouth.”

“Ooh fun. Thanks, Tao.”

The next night, we met at a reading in a room above a bar. I sat in the back, across from you. You slid your phone across the table.

“hi tao,” it said. I typed a reply and slid it back. “sip,” you saw. I’d mistyped “sup,” or it had been autocorrected.

The next day, you texted, “It was great hanging out with you last night. Still can’t believe I lost those fucking pills.”

“I had fun. We should do it again some time.”

“sip,” you replied.

“Heh.”

You emailed me instructions on how to get painkillers from Dr. Zhao: “Go in and be like, ‘I got in a car crash when I was 13 and I have back pains. I need a prescription of: if you ask for oxys, It’s what I take and I’ve just moved to town.’” Ten sentences later: “Anyway, good luck. This is like Lord of the Rings. I’m like a troll leading you to the gold. (Oh yeah, this troll charges a finders fee of five pills from your first prescription.)”

I went to Chinatown, learned Dr. Zhao wasn’t accepting new patients, bought three coconuts, drank the water, and returned to the library.

In August, we met at a bar in the East Village. You gave me five oxycodone tablets, and I gave you a hundred dollars.

Walking back to the library, I felt a pang of disappointment. “Hey,” I texted you. “4 of these are blue with cursive Vs on them.”

You replied, “I know. They look different but they are all oxy 30s. Trust.” And I trusted you again.

A week later, I texted asking how you were doing.

“Good, I guess. I’m always bored. Even with drugs.”

“Damn. Do you have an LSD contact? That might help (also if you do I’m ‘in the market’ for some, hehe).”

“No, but I can ask around. I love it if it’s pure LSD-25. Might know someone with mushrooms.”

In September, Vice published your review of my second novel. “I never fucking liked Tao Lin,” it began. “I’d probably have liked his books more, given them their fighting chance, if he and his books hadn’t been constantly shoved down my throat every day of the week for the past few years.” The anti-me rant continued at length, then: “But something must have happened to me, or to Tao Lin, or to the both of us, because I’ve been swayed. I kind of fucking love this guy now.”

We were texting regularly by then, mostly about drugs. I’d started using recreational pharmaceutical drugs the previous year. They allowed me to become a dramatically different person—calm, unworried, uninhibited, social—for hours at a time.

I don’t know when your drug use began. Your cluster headaches, which started at sixteen, seem to have been a factor. “In efforts to deal with this pain, I’ve orally ingested, injected, snorted and/or smoked oxycodone, hydrocodone, fentanyl, demerol, dilaudid, cocaine, heroin, codeine, morphine, and more,” you’d write in a 2016 article.

You introduced me to your dealer. I emailed and texted you questions like, “Any parties or want to sell oxys to me?” and “Any chance of me getting more MDMA tonight?” You asked me questions like “Where can I charge my iPhone in soho?” and “Know of any parties tonight?”

We saw each other at literary events and small gatherings. You looked deeply stoned, with a dispassionate gaze. Sometimes you smiled and grinned a lot; other times you seemed somewhat depressed. Like me, you were shyer in person than online.

You texted, “I love you. Happy Valentine’s Day to you and Megan!” Then: “Don’t know why I said I love you. I do, but like I’m kind of fucked up.” Two weeks later, I texted, “Felt an urge to txt you ‘I love you’ & on only little Xanax and Vyvanse.” You replied, “I love you same.”

We had many ideas. Drug corporations, we thought, should sponsor the literary world—PEN/Oxy Award, National Xanax Book Prize. You said Vice TV should send us to South America to drink ayahuasca. You emailed:

I was scrolling through the last year of our drug-addled text messages. Some funny stuff in there. Could be an “epic” Vice post someday.

I said our texts were positive and considerate. You said we were “really polite and nice.” I said someone could “build a sitcom” out of our messages. You said, “The dialogue is perfect because it’s actually real.” You typed our messages into a document, and I created a collage of us looking at our phones.

Vice published our texts from July 2010 to June 2011, which you titled “‘Andrew’: A Dialogue of Texts in the Year of Drugs and Kindness” after our dealer and the main topic and tone of our messages. After you died in 2021, I would learn that some-to-many of your friendships featured taunting and insults; we never had that.

I felt compelled to publish our unseemly, worrying texts, in which we discussed buying, selling, and using a variety of illegal drugs, because I had no family in the U.S. except my brother, with whom I wasn’t close; I also wasn’t close to my parents, who lived in Taiwan; and I delighted and specialized in creating art from life.

As an independent publisher, freelance journalist, and occasional memoirist, you also didn’t feel the need to censor yourself, and you seemed unconcerned with your family learning about your drug-heavy lifestyle. “I like my life to be an open book,” you said in an interview. Asked if you’d ever write a novel: “I feel like my life is my book.”

In 2012, you texted that your new dealer had asked you about books. I joked that he wanted to be in our next “year of texts,” and you replied, “Lol totally. He wants the fame.”

“We should start our own drug dealing thing next year,” I suggested.

“Publish books from profits, like lit gangsters.”

“Get writing residencies at Yaddo and use the time to figure out how to make our own MDMA.”

“Show up to Yaddo with a truckload of chemicals and hazmat suits. ‘We’ll need our food delivered once a day, and no interruptions please.’”

In March, you texted, “We need to hang more. I feel like you’re like my best friend but I never see you URL / irl / I never see you URL lol.”

“Lol’d and tasted metal in my mouth,” I replied. I’d been spending most of my time alone, working on my third novel, documenting my descent into my ongoing, increasingly troubling drug addiction.

In June, you emailed:

Supposed to fly to Italy tomorrow to see my dad because he’s sick but am in the middle of a cluster headache season so I could get into trouble over there without my neurologist. I ‘loaded up’ on $1,500.00 of Imitrex shots and Stadol (nasal spray morphine, will save some to ‘party’ with you) yesterday to try and deal with them myself over there.

Back in New York, you emailed that you’d gotten “nerve blockers” injected in your head and had been “headache free for like 20 hours.” I said time had started to move “way faster” for me in recent years and asked if you’d noticed something similar.

Yes, in my late twenties is when it really started flying. A year is like nothing now. It used to seem like a lifetime. Also, there was like a four-year period where I did nothing but party and I don’t remember anything from that time. Maybe a couple of monumental moments, but mostly a blur of watching the sunrise every morning. I don’t mind time flying though. I feel like I’ve done everything I want to do in life.

You hadn’t had alcohol in two months because it triggered headaches. You’d been taking Suboxone, a drug used for treating opiate addiction. “I can like get work done, feel good, sleep good, and I haven’t been depressed or anything,” you wrote.

Later in the same email, you wrote, “Oh yeah, I smoke weed all day, every day, but I have done that my entire life it seems,” which I hadn’t known. We’d never discussed cannabis, which I didn’t yet enjoy.

On my 29th birthday, you sent me a song you’d composed on piano. You had hundreds of them. “I have to record them to remember them,” you said. “Otherwise they disappear.” You sent another.

I said it sounded like the soundtrack to Gattaca, one of my favorite movies—about a sickly man who defies expectations—and you said, “I fucking love that movie.”

Vice published another year of our texts, including the text where you said you felt like I was your best friend. Soon after, at a bar, you introduced me to a man. I remember him and/or you seeming kind of sheepish as one of you said he was your best friend.

Discussing the texts by email, you wrote, “Would be sweet if one of us died and then the one remaining (hopefully you) would just do one of lonely unreplied-to texts to no one.”

I said the last text would be “are you there?” and that if we both died the post could have an epilogue of texts by two other people saying “did u hear gian and tao both died?” and “yeah lol.”

“‘yeah lol,’” you replied. “laughing.”

Besides texting each other around a thousand times in 2011, 2012, and 2013, we also emailed that many times during those years (when our communications plateaued), usually about literature—we wrote for the same magazines, both ran small presses, and published some of the same writers—but also about other things.

I sent you a mattress recommendation. You sent me a link to a head-enclosing pillow. I sent you comically bleak excerpts from a John Cheever biography. You sent me a video of a person smoking Salvia divinorum. I sent you a song titled “Kids of the K-Hole.” You sent me your song “ketamine concerto.” I sent you a video of me smoking cannabis out of an eggplant with your song as the soundtrack.

You invited me again to submit to New York Tyrant, which you were considering ending—it was a “moneysuck” that no longer “excited” you—to focus on books. You’d published four so far: the novella, a book of drawings, and two novels. I submitted an excerpt of my third novel and you published it in your magazine’s tenth and last issue.

You told me about your skin. “I suffered from horrible, grotesque, not-ever-wanting-to-leave-the-house-and-see-anyone acne all through high school and some of college and afterward.” You’d taken a “hardcore acne medicine that apparently causes suicides,” but you suspected the suicides were caused by the acne.

In October, I told you I was worried because I kept extending an in-progress drug binge, and you replied:

I get in that postponing the end of binges too. Man, I think I’m really fucked up maybe. Whenever I like don’t do painkillers for more than a week I have these vomiting attacks. And only eating painkillers helps me feel better. It’s like not even my mind but my body that keeps “forcing” me to do drugs. I think I’ve ruined my stomach with drugs. Oh well. I’m sure it’ll be fine.

Hurricane Sandy arrived a week later, resulting in blackouts, looting, and thousands of downed trees. Sandy and the 2012 doomsday meme that claimed the world would transform or end in December encouraged us and our friends to binge on drugs, including one night at your Hell’s Kitchen apartment on the West Side.

This was the only time I went in your home. Low-lit and cramped, it was filled with boxes of books and your piano. You had a small backyard with a firepit. Five or six of us sat around the fire talking.

Two weeks later, you came to my apartment to interview me. During our conversation, you said, “I feel like a lot of my attraction towards like fat guys or whatever comes from some kind of sympathy.” You elaborated:

I feel like there’s some kind of endearing quality in the fact that they’ve put up with a lot of shit for their entire lives and for some reason that makes me love them or something. I don’t know. It’s really weird that it manifests itself through sex.

In a 2010 essay about A Confederacy of Dunces, which your dad gave you when you were twenty-one, you wrote that you “fell hard” for the novel’s protagonist, Ignatius, a “waddling, unkempt mammoth toddler.”

Until then, I’d always thought of myself as straight. I walked straight and I talked straight. I dated girls, I slept with girls, when I jacked off, I jacked off to girls.

You quoted a scene in which Ignatius masturbates in his room, climaxing after his childhood dog appears unbidden in his mind, jumping over a fence. “This is the page where I went fag,” you wrote. “The solitude and isolation, the very sadness of it all, didn’t turn me off—on the contrary, it was the hook. Sex scenes had always been filled with gorgeous people. Ignatius wasn’t gorgeous. But he was sexual.”

Your mom didn’t believe you when you said you were gay. She “came around,” but at first “it blew her mind, and she was kind of not into it,” you said on a podcast. Your dad, who was “more worldly,” a fan of Oscar Wilde, was supportive from the start.

I sent you a link to my favorite song by the band Swearin’, titled “Fat Chance,” and said it made me feel “deep empathy,” and you replied, “What a great song. There should be like a fat music genre.”

You gifted me an action figure of a masked, big-bellied man in a yellow jumpsuit. This figure represented you, I’d realize two years after your death, seeing a drawing of it on your Instagram with the caption “Me irl.”

In August 2013, seated on my bed peaking on psilocybin at three a.m., I sobbed from gratitude that I finally felt empowered enough to end my addiction. I’d wanted to do this for more than two years.

Later in the trip, I texted you saying an alien was using my body to learn about “this thing we’ve got set up: family.” You replied, “You don’t think they have families?” I laughed and called you.

I rarely called anyone. Your voice seemed to come from inside my head. Later, you told me you could understand what I felt because you’d begun using psilocybin for your cluster headaches.

​​In your 2016 article, you wrote that nothing had provided “even a 100th of the relief that psychedelics have,” and that you’d been pain-free for three years because of them: “Unless you suffer yourself, you have no idea just how beautiful that actually is.”

Later in August, I praised your profile of Junot Díaz in Playboy. You said your dad had read it and emailed you, “I am so proud of you I am about to burst. I’m telling all of my friends about my brilliant son.” You wrote, “The email made me instantly cry.”

That fall and winter, I used cannabis to buffer the dysphoria and other withdrawal symptoms from ending four years of pharmaceutical drugs. I distanced myself from friends who remained mired in addiction, but we kept talking, in part because of our shared interest in psychedelics.

In 2014, you encouraged me to pitch a column on Terence McKenna, an optimistic psychonaut I’d gotten obsessed with, to our editor at Vice. I thanked you for your encouragement, and you said, “It was an encouragement of a selfish nature because I want to read that shit.”

One day I emailed you, “I can hear so much shit going on in apartments around mine when I’m very stoned. I hear someone talking to his dog and I’ve never heard anyone talking to their dog and I like never hear a dog. I hear like 5 dogs right now.”

You said you could hear someone above your apartment who played your songs on his piano. “Like he heard me and then learned them and played them and I could hear it. Sometimes we would play at the same time and kind of play to each other I felt.”

We emailed about our identities. “I wish Asians did more for me, they don’t do shit for me,” I wrote wryly. “Totally,” you replied.

I wish gays did more for me. I feel like I don’t reap enough minority benefits from being gay. Maybe if I added it to my twitter bio. But I guess if anyone ever attacks me (in writing or irl) I can always say that they are a homophobe or scream ‘I’m being hatecrimed!!’ Really need to exploit this minority position in society. Gays just don’t like me, I think. I only have one gay friend (Mark Doten) and the gay community has always treated me weirdly. Like just because I have none of the stereotypes, they don’t feel like I am truly ‘one of them’ but I guess they are right. I don’t feel like one of them.

I replied, “Felt strong connection with you on this, replacing gay with Asian.” Other East Asian-Americans seemed to readily form friend groups; I tended to drift toward alienated individuals.

“I’m extremely stoned,” I emailed you one night. “I just started daydreaming and thinking of how productive we’re being during these past few years and how it’ll be interesting to look back on things in like 10 years, in terms of literature. Made it feel fun to keep going and see what happens,” and you replied, “Totally totally totally, all counts.”

“I did some h last night and I fell asleep standing up in my bathroom for 4 hours,” you emailed one afternoon. You seemed to have snorted or ingested heroin irregularly; once, when I said I was buying it, you said you hadn’t done it in years. “I slept, standing straight up, for four fucking hours. I woke up mid fall face first into shower curtain and bathtub. Wish I could have that on video somehow.”

In 2015, you emailed that you’d been eating “a large nibble” of psilocybin mushroom every four days. When you felt headaches coming on, you ate a larger dose, successfully preventing them. “It’s so amazing. It’s like the only thing in life that I feel like being political or an activist for. Gonna freakin’ march on Washington or some shit lol.”

You sent me a link to the post of our second year of texts and said, “Rereading this, dying laughing. Feel like it didn’t get the accolades it deserved.” I liked that you revisited our projects, folding time over itself, stretching it, slowing it. I did this too.

While visiting my parents in Taipei, I emailed you, “Been alternating days of weed capsules and days of LSD while in Taiwan.”

You said you were “inundated with powders” in the city. “There is always some kind of powder around to sniff.”

You’d gone to Italy recently. “I think I fell in love. I mean, I did fall in love, but I can’t tell if it was just for four days or if it is still happening to me.”

Your grandfather emigrated to the U.S. in the early 1900s. My parents arrived in the 1970s. You were the youngest of five. I was the youngest of two. As children, we regularly visited our ancestral homelands.

“Falling in love, that seems good. There are pros and cons. I would say more pros. Who is the person?”

“This guy I met in a train station in Campoleone, IT. Soon as we met he took me to have dinner at his mom’s lol.” You added, “I feel like I’m halfway creating all this in my head. Oh well.”

A month later, in 2016, you emailed, “Went back to Italy and I am in love. Breaking up with Chris and moving to Italy in April to live with this guy. Crazy.” In an interview later that year, you said you “used to do a ton of drugs” and that you felt healthier, happier, and “more at home” in Italy.

I also wanted to leave New York City, but I stayed to draft a book on psychedelics—an expansion of my McKenna column—and because I also fell in love.

In 2018, you emailed, “Remember the doctor I went to and tried to get him to see you?” with a link to an article titled “Doctor made $1M selling Xanax before bust: cops.”

You invited me to Italy. You and your new husband lived in Rome. You’d started a writers’ workshop called Mors Tua Vita Mea (“Your Death, My Life”) at a family villa.

That August, you moved to the countryside, and I finally left the city, living upstate and in rural New Jersey. My girlfriend visited from Manhattan on weekends.

In late 2019, I visited my parents in Taipei for six weeks, then went to Honolulu to house-sit for my mom’s friend.

In 2020, when lockdowns began in the U.S., Italy, and elsewhere, I was still in Hawaii. I’d decided to stay. Alone in an Airbnb one night, I messaged you on Twitter (I’d replaced my smartphone with a flip phone and stopped texting) a link to a book titled SIP and said, “it’s our book.”

“lmao NICE,” you replied. It was March 29 in Hawaii, but in New York the date was March 30, exactly one year before your death. You wrote:

Chapter One. The event was crowded, but at least he had drugs. ‘I’ll never find a place to sit to listen to this boring shit,’ Tao thought just as he saw someone stand from their seat and walk towards the bar. He scurried over to the bench and sat down, filled with the small joy of not having to stand for an hour. Tao was blankly staring at the glass table at his knees when a cell phone appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, on the table before him. The screen was illuminated and open to the Notes app. One word, three letters: sip. What could it mean?

In my memory of that night in 2010, it was me who typed “sip,” but now, after reading your message, I wasn’t sure. I replied:

Gian made his way to the back of the reading, choosing a seat at a table where he couldn’t see the readers and wasn’t facing the stage. He noticed a small Asian person sit down across from him. It was that annoying Chinese-looking kid who was always promoting his books online.

You replied:

Tao looked up from the phone and across the table. Smiling, and obviously on opiates by the look of his eyelids, sat this guy named Gian who had just written a Vice piece about me. It was called ‘I like Tao Lin Now.’ This confuses Tao. Why didn’t Gian like him before? What has he done to him? But Gian had confessed his new feelings in the article and the love in the article dominated anything between them in the past.

By April, you’d “gotten used to” the lockdown. “it’s kinda how i lived before anyway. i’ve always worked from home.”

In July, you messaged, “man it was 3 months here in the country, only leaving for the grocery store. now it’s all back to normal.” You’d been swimming 50 laps a day in a pool. “i love it,” you wrote.

I said I’d been swimming in the ocean, and that my girlfriend was joining me in Hawaii soon. Many people were leaving NYC, abandoning city life after months of closed businesses and social unrest.

In 2021, my girlfriend and I moved from Oahu to the Big Island. While listening to a new interview with you, I messaged you, “liking your talk with sean a lot. making me miss you and also want to write.”

We discussed an idea you had for an anthology of one story edited by many editors. You said I should publish it. I said you should. We discussed other things, then you wrote:

dude / i tripped my balls off last night / such a long story / but i thought i was god’s angel here to do his work / and had all the power in the world / so wild / i called my brother and sister and freaked them out / i was just medicating for my clusters and went too far lol / but so beautiful

Two days later, seemingly out of nowhere, you messaged, “wild to think where we were 8 years ago.”

“yes,” I replied. “2013. damn.” The year we were closest to each other, when psychedelics helped end my addiction and your headaches.

“lmao. i was a freakin mess / ‘gian r u there’ ‘the aliens’ ‘they’re interested in this thing we have’ ‘family’ / i owe you for getting me to this place where i finally feel happy and enjoy life.”

“lol, forgot the aliens texts, and calling you,” I replied. “your voice was coming out of my head / nice, glad you feel that way. i owe you for getting me into and out of whatever happened i think.”

“we owe each other. nice.” You asked if I had WhatsApp. “wanna tell you about something like just in texts or whatever but i don’t think i have your number or even if you use a phone anymore.”

I gave you my Google Voice number, which accepted texts. I don’t know what you wanted to tell me—you never texted—but maybe it was about your new press.

Ten days later, on February 1, you tweeted, “I’m launching another press soon. Please stand by…” with two images of the logo for the press, called DiTrapano.

“sweet logo and name,” I messaged. The logo was a drawing of a car whose top half was on fire.

“thanks man. it’s gonna be huge launch. honor sean molly brodak gabriel.”

“excited.”

“me too like tons. dreamt you said it wasn’t good.”

“damn.” That was our last communication.

On March 31, while visiting the West Side of the Big Island, I learned from our friend Jordan that you’d been found dead in a hotel in Manhattan, where you’d returned for meetings about your new press.

A bad batch of heroin was going around, and multiple people had died, according to Jordan. A different mutual friend, who seemed to have knowledge of the toxicology report, blamed cocaine and ketamine.

One of the last people you spoke to was a mutual chemist friend. On his podcast, he said you’d visited his apartment and had briefly left to buy heroin, and that you’d told him your dealer said the heroin had been triple-tested for fentanyl. He’d told you not to believe your dealer.

Later, this friend told me he’d analyzed the heroin and found no synthetic opioids besides heroin, and that he’d heard the autopsy showed only cocaine and ketamine.

Your family didn’t release the cause of your death. However you died, it seems to have been an accident.

You were forty-seven. I tweeted a screenshot of your message from January, where you said you “finally feel happy.” Your obituary in the New York Times called you “a defiantly independent publisher.”

I imagined you passing through the internet on your way elsewhere. As you left, people talked and wrote about you, slowing time by immersing themselves in the book of your life.

Six weeks after you died, I published a collection of remembrances by me and thirty-three others in my online magazine.

Eleven months later, I dreamed I was behind you in a crowd, looking at your backside as we walked in the same direction.

Seventeen months after that, I dreamed we were walking toward each other. You were smiling. We greeted each other briefly—as if we knew we’d meet again soon—and continued in opposite directions.

A week after that dream, Jordan invited me to read at an event in Manhattan for a foundation that had been created in your name.

Two weeks later, I was back in the city for the first time in four years. It was November 2023.

The bar hosting the event was near Hell’s Kitchen, I realized while walking there on the night of the reading.

“We’re near where Gian lived,” I said.

“Really?” said Jordan.

“Yeah,” I said, waving my arm across the dimly familiar buildings to the west. “Somewhere over there.”

This essay first appeared in The Paris Review in Spring 2026.

GemStone

1

In 1995, when I was in seventh grade, I became addicted to a multiplayer online role-playing game with no graphics or sound, just words. It was set on a two-mooned planet called Elanthia, in the continent of Elanith. There, I was Esperath Wraithling, a dark elf wizard with black eyes and black hair.

I’d chosen everything about my character, including his statistics. Character creation involved “rolling.” Each roll produced ten numbers. People rolled for hours or days to get the highest numbers to apply to ten attributes—discipline, strength, etc. Player-written guides helped me decide what to do. Dartaghan’s wizard’s guide began:

The following is for you wizards out there that want to create and develop a wizard that will come into their power fully as they approach maturity around level 30 or so. Following this path will not be easy.

2

A virtual world is a persistent, shared reality in which player-controlled characters enact real-time changes governed by automated rules. GemStone, one of the longest-running virtual worlds, was created in 1987. It became GemStone II in 1988, GemStone III in 1990, and GemStone IV in 2003. Each iteration expanded and complexified the game.

Everything that happens in GemStone appears on the screen as lines of text that scroll up, like in a chat room. In middle school, I saved some of the text logs on 3.5 inch floppy disks, but I no longer have those. So in 2024, to help me remember the game, I created a wizard named NiniLali in GemStone IV.

He spawned in the town of Wehnimer’s Landing, as Esperath had twenty-nine years earlier. After a description of his surroundings (“Silver-veined grey marble comprises a short wall that lines the entire expanse of the courtyard…”), there was a line break, then: “Obvious paths: out”—the underline meant the word was interactable.

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As the curator at 1969 Gallery, I’m putting together this show, “Parallax: Traversing Image and Text,” which is a survey of forms and visual languages on canvases.

He was nice, praising my writing and art. He wanted to show two or three of my mandalas.

The gallery would take 50 percent, as usual. This seemed fair to me—with books, I get ~10 percent—but I was used to getting 100 percent.

In the previous two years, I’d sold seven mandalas myself, mainly on Instagram stories, for $1200, $1000, $790, $1200, $1200, $1200, $1200.

So I chose two mandalas from my binder of unfinished/abandoned mandalas.

One I started on July 20, 2023, after switching from tobacco to cannabis, smoking cannabis for the first time in eight months:

The other, which I started drawing in 2021 or 2022, had viewing instructions, allowing people to look at the mandala by following numbers—1, 2, 3, etc.

I leisurely worked on them for 3 to 6 more hours each, completing them on July 8 and July 10.

Hengzhi suggested pricing them at $1500 to $2000. I wanted to increase their chances of selling, so I suggested $1000, which I later raised to $1100.

Both sold soon after the show opened on July 25. Hengzhi had good communication, keeping me updated.

In August and September, someone named Ethan emailed to update the artists on when we’d be paid, and to arrange for artists to pick up their unsold art.

On September 26, Ethan wrote, “Please confirm your shipping address, and find the outline of your sales report below. Once confirmed, we will mail your commission check promptly.”

My payment would be $1,045. One mandala had sold at a 10 percent discount.

On October 21, I emailed Ethan, “I haven’t gotten my check yet.”

No response.

On November 6, I emailed Ethan, “Checking in on this.”

On November 7, I got an email from Quang Bao, who’d been CC’d on emails but hadn’t said anything yet. I assumed he was a 1969 employee dealing with payments. He wrote that he’d pay me “via Zelle.” He wrote, “Sorry for inconvenience.”

I gave him my Zelle address and wrote, “Thank you! And no worries at all. Mail sometimes doesn’t get here for some reason.”

No response.

On November 21, I emailed him, “Checking in on this.”

He replied that day, “This is getting absurd as we maxed out on our monthly limit for online payments a week ago.” He said he could PayPal me “now instead of waiting until Dec 2…my apologies and pls lmknow”.

I gave him my PayPal address.

No response.

On December 8, I emailed him, “Checking in on this.”

No response.

On December 13, I got a $550 transfer from Zelle labeled “1 of 2 payments artist share.”

On January 11, 2026, I forwarded Quang the Zelle email and wrote, “Thank you for this. I’m checking in on the ETA of the second payment.”

He replied 2.5 hours later, “Sorry to turn you into a collections agent.” He wrote that it had been “a miserable year - capped by the news that our gallery space was going to be put on the market for sale.” He wrote other things, including: “Since Zelle has no fees, when I have even the smallest amount, I will send it.” He set “lunar new year (2/17) as an outer deadline date -- so that we might begin talking about another subject.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t fully read his email until writing this post. I just wanted to be paid. I was busy working on two books.

On February 20, I emailed him, “Hi Quang. Just checking in on this.”

No response.

On March 12, I emailed him, “Checking in on this payment again.”

No response.

On March 24, I emailed him, “Would appreciate an update on this or instructions on who to contact about it. Will try phoning the gallery next.”

Being low on money had accelerated my prodding—checking in after 40 days, then 20, and now 12. I was calling in all my debts, selling my stuff online.

He replied on March 26, “Very tough transition out of gallery space and into quarter 1” and “your final payment in full will be made no later than Monday, April 6.”

I replied, “This is good news—thank you, I appreciate the time-frame update.”

On April 7, I emailed him, “Hey Quang, just checking in on this.”

He replied, “It’s coming - I keep relying on money coming in on time and then adding 5 days on to expected arrival but alas it’s another week or so … and if this isn’t paid to you in April I’m going to print money.” In another email, he wrote, “And also, I do apologize for this dragging on. I realized we are nearing a year from the group exhibition last summer,” and: “Thanks also for keeping the communication friendly and kind. Q.”

I hadn’t realized so much time had passed. I was in a good mood, so I replied,

I’m surprised it’s been almost a year! Doesn’t feel that long. If I was better off, I would just let it go, but this happens to be a month where I’ve run out of money and this would be helpful until my agent can try to sell my next two books in a month or so. [Spirituality and Reasons to Live—my agent Julie is sending these to editors soon.] So I’ll check in again later this month. I do appreciate the updates on when I might expect it.

Later, I felt kind of annoyed that I’d been put into a meek, submissive position, saying things like “I’m surprised it’s been almost a year!” and “I do appreciate the updates on when I might expect it” to maintain friendly relations in service of getting paid.

Five days later, on April 12, I emailed him,

Due to the amount of time this has been going on, I want to request that you, or whomever is in charge of the gallery, pay me this month. Then you or whomever can wait for the money to come in, instead of me waiting. This seems reasonable to me after so much time.

Two hours later, I finally looked up who he was, then emailed him,

I just realized you’re the owner and founder. Somehow I hadn’t expected to be communicating with the head person there. I would really appreciate payment on this instead of further waiting.

He replied,

Yes, of course.

We zero out in April.

Will let you know exactly when in 48 hours, Q

By then, I’d begun to talk to a friend about the situation—Brad Phillips, a veteran artist, with decades of experience in the art world. He said this type of thing was common in the art world. He said I could threaten to post about it on Instagram. He said this worked, in his experience.

On April 13, I emailed Quang:

My friend at Vice wants to interview me about my difficulties getting paid, and will pay me for the interview. I want to move forward with it if I’m not paid by Friday. I run a business too, and if this was me, I would have paid one of my authors upfront using my own money, as a matter of course.

I felt amused by my threat. It was a lie. I could maybe have successfully pitched such an interview—an editor at Vice had recently wanted to interview me about my dad and advance-fee scams (I’d declined)—but I hadn’t pitched it and didn’t want to.

Quang didn’t respond. I told Brad I kind of regretted the threat. Quang had seemed like he was going to pay soon, and I’d felt good about staying friendly for so long. Making the threat right after he said the “48 hours” thing seemed like an obvious tactical error.

I told Brad, “Wonder if taking back the threat would help.” I told Brad, “It’s annoying that he and I have had to send like 20 emails over like 8 months.” I told Brad, “Shouldn’t he be able to pay me out of his personal money, if he’s the founder/owner?”

Brad said galleries hoped artists would forget or not complain, and that most artists did forget and not complain: “Because they’re scared they will not be given art shows. That they will be seen as difficult. So they’re easy to steal from.”

Brad searched the gallery and saw they were closed. I hadn’t realized this, because I hadn’t read the emails from Quang closely. I didn’t know what this meant. Brad said it meant “they ran out of money” and probably owed “all the artists they work with.”

On April 16, I emailed Quang:

I just realized your gallery closed (permanently?), so you probably aren’t affected much by the potential loss of reputation the interview would entail. I’m not really interested in doing the interview—I’d rather focus on my work. I just would like to get paid. Can we pretend I never sent that previous email? Apologies for any ill will it might have caused.

I just wanted to get paid. He didn’t respond.

I’m smiling as I type this. I don’t feel ill will toward Quang. He seemed like he was going to pay until the threat. He seemed to use the threat as a reason to ghost me.

I made this post not to “call out” 1969 Gallery and Quang but because it seems like a good, amusing, informative story to share.

Also: I wanted to write a different kind of this type of post, where I accept not getting paid and feel calm and happy about it.

Still, though: I didn’t want to go out of my way to hide Quang and the gallery’s identity. I stated the facts. Seems fair.

In the future, I want to stay true to what I feel is my deepest self and refrain from making a made-up threat, if I ever get in a situation like this again.

Situations like this can teach patience, calmness, and acceptance—sub-lessons in happiness and being able to control one’s emotions and not worry.

This was a learning experience in which I got a little better at relinquishing control and focusing my attention on acceptance instead of frustration or anger.

It helped that I’ve been busy writing two books. Getting randomly upset about the $455, fuming over it, would have been detrimental to my work.

Instead of thinking, “It’s not fair,” I’m thinking, “I made $550 off mandalas I probably wouldn’t have finished otherwise, and I got this fun post out of it and learned.”

However, $455 is not unwelcome. If Quang pays me, I’ll add a note at the top of this post saying he paid me. I’m not going to pursue this anymore, though.

People can buy prints of my mandalas here. Publishers can message me to offer to publish a book of 70 to 100 of my mandalas.

My other gallery experiences have been smooth, with one exception: in 2024 I agreed to show my mandalas at Basel Social Club but I changed my mind after the curator became belligerent, telling me not to sell too many mandalas on social media.

I’ve had enjoyable experiences with LVL 3 in Chicago, Zodiac Pictures in Santa Monica, and Project Gallery (an online gallery that took only 20 percent).

My favorite was when Nick Irvin showed prints of my mandalas in 2022 at a kava bar under plexiglass at the tables/bar and sold 34 prints.

UPDATE

After posting this, I got many messages from artists who also didn’t get paid by Quang. One artist told me:

I got this message too and joined this Instagram thread:

From the thread, I found the Kenny Schachter article. It says:

He talked to them while feeding them, calling them “stingy” and “greedy” (the bigger pigs push the smaller ones away while eating). He set down four trays so that all the pigs could get food. He seemed concerned about every pig getting food.

While my parents were here, the pigs got more food than ever before. They ate various types of noodles, a lot of oats, some miso (that I didn’t want), popcorn, and organic cocoa cereal, among other foods. After eating human food, they like to eat grass, probably to balance the dry cooked food with raw, hydrating, enzyme-rich material.

Here my mom is feeding them bucatini with miso:

Soon after my parents left, I stopped seeing the pigs. People in my neighborhood probably trapped and ate them. I don’t feel bad about people trapping and eating pigs. I believe in reincarnation, I believe animals have souls, and I believe souls can leave the body in near-death situations, minimizing pain. I believe these things from reading ~50 books on the soul and the spirit world (most of the 2025/2026 ones here).

Many people here—and elsewhere—seem to fear feral pigs, thinking they’ll eat their pets or attack or eat them. If you die and a pig finds your body, it will probably eat you, but I haven’t encountered pigs that have tried to eat me.

Once I brought home a dead baby pig (that I found on the street) and the pigs on my yard ignored it until I slit the piglet’s skin, then one especially famished sow—with many babies—ate the piglet. I approve of this. Pigs are good at eating dead things.

In my experience, feral pigs are gentle and respectful. They seem to never even look at my cats, much less try to touch them. Here’s Nini hissing and pawing at a feral pig (he did this often):

Nini is normally meek and shy, but with feral pigs he becomes bold and leader-like.

Nini imitating a piglet:

I like how long the pigs look when they lie down:

I like when a horde of them come onto the front patio:

Eating oats:

Feeding pasta:

Helping me work:

In February, after my parents left, I saw a solitary piglet under my house. It noticed me and panicked and tried to get out by bashing into the wooden slats (see right side of photo above). Once it got out, through an opening, it was calm. I saw it calmly eating coconut meat. It was probably one that got away, didn’t get captured.

In March, I saw a solitary shy boar, in the distance.

I haven’t seen any other pigs on my property since then.

I’m currently in Taiwan where in high-rises like where my parents live, people bring trash to the basement to be taken away. There’s a bin for “kitchen waste” that traditionally has been given to feed pigs.

Previous feral pig posts: Feral Pig Update (December 2025), My Feral Pig Friends (January 2025).

Read the full essay here behind a paywall.

She is maybe half the size of the main feral pig in my previous post—a large sow, the largest that visits me, that was bony and famished but now looks like this:

When the sows have babies, they get bony due to giving the babies milk, it seems. The sow with the hole in the ear had babies when I first saw her. She has remained bony. When the big sow was bony, early in the year, she was so hungry that when I brought food outside she would shove me, overeagerly wanting food. Once, she bit my arm (lightly) when I was chewing salami and she smelled it.

I wrote about her in an essay titled “Hawaiian Fauna” that is going to be in my next book, a memoir titled Reasons to Live.

The new sow doesn’t shove or bite me even though she is very hungry and has kids to feed. Here are the two together (I’ve been thinking of them as “the two musketeers” sometimes—often when I go outside, they trot or run up to me to see if I have food for them; I have food for them only 5 to 10 percent of the time):

Recently, I saw a new sow with new babies. A tan sow. She had like six piglets. When I approached her, she ran away. Her piglets were so young that some of them didn’t run away; they just lay there. I brought one inside for around one minute, then put it back outside. Sows don’t seem to try to defend their kids.

Here’s the mother, being observed by Nini:

This rooster that I wrote about here disappeared in November:

Feral pigs rise up:

I’m not sure which feral pig this one is but I like this photo:

Here’s Nini with the pigs. Nini almost never backs away from the pigs. When the pigs near him, he hisses at them viciously. The pigs have never touched Nini. They always ignore him. They only pay attention to me. In this video, the one with the giant bump/cyst on her back is the largest sow, mentioned earlier. The cyst popped on its own. It was her body excreting a store of toxins, in my opinion:

A herd of feral piglets:

Some more observations:

-There are less ants since the pigs arrived. The pigs eat dead rodents and rotting fruit and other things, leaving less food for the “little red fire ants” that people here hate and seem to unsuccessfully try to eradicate with pesticides.

-They ate all the giant snails. People here are afraid of these snails because they fear “rat lungworm.”

-With the pigs around, my property is more lush, since they pee and poop in it. I move the poop to under trees occasionally.

-Often when I call my cats, the two musketeers come trotting up. I don’t care for the name “two musketeers” but it came to me unconsciously.

-The male feral pigs stay in the distance, shy and incurious. Out of some thirty feral pigs (most are piglets), only the two sows come up to me.

Reincarnation is believed by 40 to 50 percent, I estimate*, of humans. It’s believed in some form by adherents of Hinduism, Buddhism, Chinese folk religions, Daoism, Shinto, Sikhism, Jainism, certain Sufi orders, Alevism, Alawism, Kabbalistic Judaism, esoteric Christianity, Spiritism, Santería, Theosophy, and the Druze faith, plus many non-religious people and most Indigenous groups, from the Inuit, Hopi, and Quechua to the Sámi, Hmong, Igbo, Zulu, and Australian Aboriginals.

The further back one goes, the more widespread the belief. It was shared by the ancient Egyptians and Chaldeans; the Manichaeans; the Maya, Aztecs, and other Mesoamericans; the Inca and other Andeans; Greeks across 1,100 years, including Pythagoras, Plato, Plutarch, and the Neoplatonists; some Romans (Ovid, Virgil); the Essenes and Hermeticists; and Christian sects such as the Gnostics, Marcionites, and Cathars. It was also accepted by the pre-Christian Celts, Slavs, and Germanic tribes, and presumably the vast majority of Indigenous groups.

Today, reincarnation is denied almost only by materialism and the orthodox Abrahamic religions. But a surprisingly large number of people apparently disregard official doctrine on it—28 percent of Christians, 25 percent of Muslims, and 25 percent of Jews in the U.S. believe “people will be reborn again and again,” according to a 2023-24 Pew survey. Overall, 31 percent of adult Americans believe.

*The Pew survey found that a median of 33 percent of adults across 35 countries believe in reincarnation. But the regions with the most belief in reincarnation—Africa and East Asia—were under-represented compared to Europe and North America, and the survey did not include Indigenous groups.

Some books I referenced:

Reliving Past Lives (1978) by Helen Wambach (PDF)

Life Before Life (1979) by Helen Wambach (PDF)

Children Who Remember Previous Lives (1987) by Ian Stevenson

Children’s Past Lives (1997) by Carol Bowman

I wrote this when I was 25. It was published when I was 26. I still like it. It’s out-of-print, but I own the rights. My agent Julie Flanagan is going to work on getting a new publisher for it next year. I’m currently working on two books, Reasons to Live: A Fractal Memoir (~95% done) and a book version of “My Spiritual Evolution.”

Shoplifting from American Apparel

Sam woke around 3:30 p.m. and saw no emails from Sheila. He made a smoothie. He lay on his bed and stared at his computer screen. He showered and put on clothes and opened the Microsoft Word file of his poetry. He looked at his email. About an hour later it was dark outside. Sam ate cereal with soymilk. He put things on eBay then tried to guess the password to Sheila’s email account, not thinking he would be successful, and not being successful, and did fifty jumping jacks. “God I felt fucked lying on the bed,” he said to Luis a few hours later on Gmail chat. “I wanted to fall asleep immediately but that is impossible. I need to fall asleep. Any second now. Just fall down asleep.”

“I played video games, Perfect Dark,” said Luis. “I killed people for two hours then I got bored. I know what you mean by impossible.”

“This is fucked,” said Sam.

“You know those people that get up every day, and do things,” said Luis.

“I’m going to eat cereal even though I’m not hungry,” said Sam.

“And are real proactive,” said Luis. “And like are getting things done, and never quit their jobs. Those people suck.”

“We get shit done too,” said Sam. “Look at our books.”

“I know, but that brings in no money,” said Luis. “Are we, like, that word ‘bohemians.’ Or something. Our bios: ‘They lived in poverty writing their masterpieces.’”

“We are the fucked generation,” said Sam. “Someone release the press release announcing this. Look at that typo.”

The word “announcing” was almost twice as long as normal.

“I’m laughing,” said Luis. “That is a good typo.”

“How do we get out of this,” said Sam.

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The early days of Nini. He was probably eight or nine weeks old here.

Nini has bathed two or three times in his life, all in his first weeks of domestic life.

Nini rests with his sister Lali. The size discrepancy decreased a little over time, but Lali remains much taller than Nini today.

Nini with his brother Leo, an alpha male. Leo ran away in February 2023.

Rare photo of Nini on top of something taller than 1.5 feet. Nini prefers to stay close to the ground. He was lifted up here.

This photo was taken during Nini’s partial paralyzation. Read about it in the essay.

Nini has a wiry, short tail compared to his siblings.

Nini showing off his flexibility. He’s not as flexible as his siblings, but he’s still flexible.

A recent photo of Nini, taken a few days ago. He reminded me of Garfield here. I read a lot of Garfield, the comic, as a child.

Poem Drafted After Meditating for Ten Minutes

The next world has the answers to my questions.

Life is an interim period. I could heal an insane Dad

better than anyone. I used to be six years old.

I’ve been working on poetry about death and time.

Andrew Basiago says time-travel was “reduced

to practice" in 1970. I saw crystal domes on the moon

in a book. It’s June and I’m healing my myopia

with a technique called “print pushing.” Mom said

Dad might go insane. I’m crying. I’m turning 40 in July.

I’m glad I called Mom earlier tonight. Dad’s healing

journey might not begin until he dies. He’s 75.

15,000 years ago, sea levels were 300 feet lower.

My parents are going to the next world. I was once six.

I’ve been researching time, death, and the afterlife.

My cats don’t know I used to be as small as them.

Mom turned 70 in January. I’m turning over in bed.

My healing journey prevents me from going insane.

Dad used to say life begins at 70. He used to be six.

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My mom and I feeding a squirrel what seem to be Cheerios. I don’t remember this.

Me looking at a tiger. I don’t remember this.

Me looking at a camel. I don’t remember this. I was 2.66 years old.

My brother and I holding hamsters or gerbils—not sure which. I don’t remember this.

My brother and I with a rabbit. I don’t remember this rabbit.

Me with Binky.

Me with Binky again.

My dad and I with sheepsheads.

My dad and I with a redfish.

My mom and I with Dudu on a cow farm in Taiwan.

Me in Brooklyn somewhere with two ferrets, I think. Someone had pet ferrets(?).

Me on Oahu with a duck or goose.

Me with baby Nini.

Me with lizard. This lizard seemed to be Dudu visiting my parents and I.

Me with rooster and Nini.

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I submitted “Nini” to Harper’s as a ~13,000-word draft, and they asked me to shorten it to ~9,000 words. I highly enjoyed editing it down. I believe writing almost always benefits from being more concise. The version of “Nini” that will be in my essay collection Reasons to Live is currently ~11,400 words. It’s getting gradually shorter.

On Substack, I can post excerpts that are in the book version but not in the magazine version, like the following—a section titled “Indecision.”

INDECISION

When Nini lifts a paw—seemingly to walk ahead—he sometimes puts it down in the same place (once, he did this three times in a row), or swings it 30 to 120 degrees (changing course), or sets it down in front of him without advancing the rest of his body.

He is often motionless in ways that make him look like he’s in a paused video. In these moments, he teaches me patience. He seems to be zoned out, malfunctioning, or ignoring me, but he is actually considering his next move. If I quietly wait, instead of rushing him, I can discern his true nature.

Recently, I saw Nini at the bottom of the four steps leading up into the house, seeming to be on his way indoors. He turned away from the stairs, toward the way to go under the house, which is raised three feet off the ground by wood posts on concrete blocks. He paused for a long time. He turned halfway around, back toward the stairs. He paused again. He dawdled up the stairs into the house.

His full-body indecision reminded me of my decade of pharmaceutical drug addiction and heavy cannabis use, when I often stalled or reversed directions—sometimes repeatedly—in my room or in public, in New York City, unsure what I wanted to do. My uncertainty stemmed from drug-exacerbated neuroticism; Nini’s seems linked to his extra-cautious psychology, a mix of autism and feral instincts.

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In 2020, I began to try to contact extraterrestrials via Steven Greer’s CE5 protocol, which involves meditation and telepathy. In 2022, I stopped trying. I still wanted to contact aliens, but now it was a long-term project, which I would train for gradually—meditating, researching/practicing psychic abilities, deepening my spirituality.

In 2025, I’m still not ready to contact aliens. I’m busy (1) researching and writing about the soul and the spirit world, and (2) detoxing my liver. I’m not averse to alien contact, but I’m not actively seeking it. If/when it happens, I want to write about it in-depth. I’m excited to write about a potential future alien interaction.

I imagine contact will be partly ineffable (indescribable) because aliens advanced enough to reach Earth seem to be highly spiritual—communicating telepathically, understanding nonmaterial realities, etc.—and English is designed mostly for physical reality. This is partly why aliens and spirituality are connected in my view.

As I become more familiar with my soul, lucid dreaming, and other spiritual topics, my subconscious and conscious mind will become more open to nonphysical phenomena. This will naturally lead to more experiences involving them. Recently, I had two dream experiences relevant to the above topics.

ONE

On the night of March 25, near the beginning of sleep, I blearily woke to barking dogs. I hear dogs often, even at night, but this time I thought/sensed “aliens.”

I saw a large glowing blue light coming from the backyard. I leveraged my body up—I sleep on a tatami mat on the floor—with a feeling like “this is it, this is it,” regarding meeting extraterrestrials. The feeling was tinged with fear and apprehension.

Then I woke and realized it was a dream. But it was a weird dream. In the “dream,” everything—my body, my bed, the light—seemed like it did in real life. So maybe it wasn’t a dream. Maybe my fear kept the extraterrestrials away. Fear does this, I knew from my research. Encounters can seem like dreams, I also knew.

TWO

The night of May 11, I had another dream that felt strangely real—more real than 95 or more percent of my dreams. In the dream, I was on my front patio at night.

I don’t remember what happened first:

• I saw pigs but was confused because some had horns. They seemed to be rhinos. I saw two humanoids (long gray hair, black clothing) walking away with the animals, toward the forest that surrounds my yard.

• I noticed the full moon was around twenty times its normal size. This shocked me, which is strange because things in dreams normally don’t shock me—they just seem normal.

Then I saw a triangular black craft coming from the direction of the moon. The pilot had a white helmet. As the craft approached, I knew I would be entering it. I seemed to have no fear. My thoughts felt realer in this dream than in my “normal” dreams. They felt like thoughts I would have while awake.

The craft landed on my front patio, which was bigger in the dream than in life. When I went inside, the interior was a whole other world. Somehow I had a son—a little child—in here. He seemed vaguely like a humanoid version of my cat Nini.

I immediately realized I'd been here, in this world, before, and that I would be here a very long time, and that it would be hard to get out, and that I did want to get out.

It was an unpleasant place, seemingly managed by unseen entities. This place had punishments, it seemed, for people who questioned anything or wanted to get out.

At one point I was in a giant room, and they released alligators to attack us. Everyone ran away into another room—except for me and my son. We went up high, not by climbing but by floating or flying. We kicked the alligators as they jumped up at us.

They retreated and piled up on each other, melding into giant alligators that could reach us. There was no pain throughout the dream, just discomfort.

When I finally got out of the alligator room, I entered a weird tunnel. I wasn't afraid because I remembered being here before. If I kept going, I'd get out, I knew. I had no physical body in the tunnel. I was abstract.

I made it out into a pool-like place, with my son, who seemed seven or eight. At some point, seemingly out of desperation, I started provoking him, calling him fat. I would be punished for this, I realized.

Then I was in a freer area, where I didn’t feel uncomfortable. I remember thinking: In this world, if I look closely at anything, it will seem blurry, undefined, unlike the real world. That’s the last thing I remember from the dream.

I woke and felt amazed—the dream felt so real—and started to mentally take notes on it. But apparently I was still asleep. Because then I woke again.

I recorded a Voice Memo describing the dream, then got my computer and typed about it, then went back to sleep. It was maybe only one a.m.

Another weird thing about the dream: It happened early in the night. Usually, a dream this complex wouldn’t occur until late in sleep, in the morning.

Dreams grow increasingly long throughout the night, dream researchers have found and I’ve noticed too. The weirdest and most narrative dreams normally happen at the end of sleep, after three or four prior periods of REM sleep, when vivid dreams occur.

SIX THEORIES ON MY MAY 11 DREAM

1—It was an actual trip that I interpreted as a dream. Maybe only my soul went somewhere. Maybe the “son” in the dream was my cat Nini’s soul.

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• Reviews of classic books I’ve read that I’ve mostly-to-entirely forgotten. I already wrote this but I’m not sure if I want to publish it.

• A post about being abducted by a UFO in a dream on night of May 11. I already wrote this too but I’m not sure if I want to publish it either.

• An essay titled “Before War.” Tank Magazine published my ~5,000-word essay “The Partnership Before War” in 2021. I’ve since expanded it to ~12,000 words and shortened its title to “Before War.” Since it seems unlikely that another magazine will want to publish such a long essay that’s already been published in shorter form, Substack seems like a good place for it. There’s an ~8,000-word version on my website but I’d like the ~12,000 version to be here I think.

• Excerpts of my essay “Nini.” Harper’s accepted my ~13,000-word version of this but asked me to edit it down to 9,000 words, which I did. I could post excerpts from it that were edited out. The version that will be in my book Reasons to Live, which I recently completed, is currently ~11,700 words.

• An interview with my mom about 12 books that she read while visiting me from January 20 to March 10—Return from Heaven, Soul Survivor, Reflections on Life After Life, Transformed by the Light, Pottenger’s Cats, Poisoning for Profits, Saved by the Light, The Education of Koko, Wizard of the Upper Amazon, Underestimated: An Autism Miracle, The Truth About Contagion, half of The Awakened Way, half of Children Who Remember Previous Lives. She read so much in part due to being stuck at the house. There’s nowhere to walk to here, and she couldn’t drive.

• A post on the term “conspiracy theory.” I recently did an interview where
  I was asked about this. I said, in part (and could expand into a full post):

The CIA popularized the term "conspiracy theory" to dismiss people who disagreed with the official narrative on the JFK assassination (read about this in this paper). The term, as the CIA wanted it used, has been adopted by mainstream media (not surprisingly, considering Operation Mockingbird) and most of society. I don't like the term. For most people, calling someone a "conspiracy theorist" is the same as calling them an "idiot" or "nut" or any other name-calling/insult-based term. It serves to demean and ostracize.

Fortunately, as an artist, I'm granted some leeway in exploring so-called conspiracy theories before I get dismissed, at least by some people. In my opinion, society would vastly benefit from more, not less, people examining what are called conspiracy theories. Most conspiracy theories seem to be at least partially true, and our world is ridden with "crimes committed by more than one person in secret"—the literal definition of "conspiracy theory."

• An update on my feral pig friends. Much has happened with them since my first post on them, which covered up to January 23, four months ago.

• Nini’s diarrhea. My cat Nini had diarrhea continuously for something like nine weeks. I stayed calm—due in part to my knowledge from Dr. Garrett Smith regarding bile—and let Nini’s liver detox via diarrhea,. He eventually stopped having diarrhea and now seems healthier—and less autistic—than ever. Normally, a vet would have wanted to stop the diarrhea with antibiotics, which would have impeded the detoxification process while destroying Nini’s microbiome, leading to worse outcomes later, instead of his now healthier-than-ever state.

• A post on reincarnation, which I’ve read seven books on since December. I’m now 98 to 99 percent convinced it’s real. Believing in reincarnation changes so many things. For example, reincarnation seems to be a third major factor in what makes us who we are—along with nature (genes) and nurture (environment). We carry over habits, likes, dislikes, fears, memories, and much more—even physical characteristics—over lifetimes, apparently, according to the evidence.

• A post of photos of me with various animals throughout my life.

• I wrote a piece on glyphosate for Amalia Ulman’s movie Magic Farm, for a booklet for it, that I could post here at some point.

• “Tour of My Computer Screen.” I could record my screen while talking about it. Would need to be in the right mood to do this.

• Shoplifting “Shoplifting from American Apparel” from Urban Outfitters. I wrote ~1,000 words of this proposed book a long time ago. I could post it here. It begins:

“Should I really write Shoplifting Shoplifting from American Apparel from Urban Outfitters,” said Sam, returning with Michelle to his apartment after buying pasta from a deli to eat during The Royal Tenenbaums, which they’d wanted to rewatch after rewatching Rushmore in Sunshine Cinema on methadone a few nights earlier, both liking it more than their previous, respective viewings, when (this was unsaid, but Sam felt they were both aware of its relevance) they hadn’t been on drugs.

• Notes from my diary/notes file from 10 years ago. I started taking near-daily notes in late 2013. They became daily in 2015 I think. I could post a month of my unedited notes from exactly ten years ago. I feel safe with the ten years distance—since whatever I said was said by me from ten years ago, not me now.

• A post listing and discussing the books for this:

Out of the stories in Bed, I had the most fun writing this one, I think. I wrote it in my junior year maybe. It’s 4729 words. I submitted it to many print journals. It was published in Other Voices and anthologized in New American Stories (2015).

Love is a Thing on Sale for More Money Than There Exists

This was the month that people began to suspect that terrorists had infiltrated Middle America, set up underground tunnels in the rural areas, like gophers. During any moment, it was feared, a terrorist might tunnel up into your house and replace your dog with something that resembled your dog but was actually a bomb. This was a new era in terrorism. The terrorists were now quicker, wittier, and more streetwise. They spoke the vernacular, and claimed to be philosophically sound. They would whisper into the wind something mordant and culturally damning about McDonald’s, Jesus, and America—and then, if they wanted to, if the situation eschatologically called for it, they would slice your face off with a KFC Spork.

People began to quit their jobs. They saw that their lives were small and threatened, and so they tried to cherish more, to calm down and appreciate things for once. But in the end, bored in their homes, they just became depressed and susceptible to head colds. They filled their apartments with pets, but then neglected to name them. They became nauseated and unbelieving. They did not believe that they themselves were nauseated, but that it was someone else who was nauseous—that it was all, somehow, a trick. A fun joke. “Ha,” they thought. Then they went and took a nap. Sometimes, late at night and in Tylenol-cold hazes, crouched and blanket-hooded on their beds, they dared to squint out into their lives, and what they saw was a grass of bad things, miasmic and low to the ground, depraved, scratching, and furry—and squinting back! It was all their pets, and they wanted names. They just wanted to be named!

Life, people learned, was not easy. Life was not cake. Life was not a carrot cake. It was something else. A get-together on Easter Island. You, the botched clone of you, the Miami Dolphins; Coco-Puffs, paper plates, a dwindling supply of clam juice. That was life.

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The rooster doesn’t seem to have left since arriving on March 18. He’s here all day and seemingly all night.

He was silent until March 27. At four p.m. that day, he crowed thirteen times. The 10th and 12th crows had a lower-pitched last note. After each crow, distant roosters crowed back. From then on, he crowed more than a hundred times per day. It was by far the loudest noise I heard each day, especially when he did it within five feet of me:

For two or three days, each crow broke my focus as I worked on finishing a draft of my essay collection Reasons to Live. I wondered how to get rid of the rooster. I imagined caging him, driving him away. I imagined “harvesting” him via bow-and-arrow, machete, and/or garden shears. (My cats and I eat an average of two chickens a week.)

But then I got used to it. The sound stopped bothering me. I was able to work through it. I felt good about this. I could apply this method—acclimating to bothersome phenomena instead of lamenting or bemoaning it—to other things too, I knew.

The rooster is a loner. He doesn’t pay attention to the cats or pigs, just me—the one with food. He doesn’t interact with other chickens in-person (in-chicken), but he has a limited kind of internet—covering a half-mile or so diameter circle—with three to ten other roosters. He and these roosters say “Hi” to each other a hundred-plus times per day. This sates his desire for social interaction, apparently. I can relate.

I saw him levitate in a dream on the night of March 29. While standing on one leg, he lifted it and didn’t fall, floating six or seven inches off the ground.

In early April, I began to notice the rooster looking at himself in the mirror. He did it multiple times per day, for minutes at a time. He liked being near the mirror.

He cleans himself as much as my cats do. Here’s Nini and the rooster cleaning themselves.

I’ve never seen him fly. Here he flaps his wings:

My mom wondered if the rooster was the reincarnation of Leo—my orange cat that ran away in February 2023. In August 2024 I heard a phantom meow that may have been Leo, saying “bye” to me after dying. (Cntrl+f “meow” here to read about this.) Like Leo, the rooster is loud, clingy, and a lover of food. Here’s a video of Nini watching Leo (after a time in 2022 when Leo was gone for 3.5 months):

I feed the rooster apple/pear peels/cores, beef, chicken, adzuki/pinto beans. It eats dried pig poop and other things from my yard, maybe tiny seeds or bugs.

He has three main kinds of poop—solid coiled cylinders, mushy watery splats, creamy ice-cream-like piles. All seem odorless (from a distance). He often poops on the concrete patio where I work. I cover the poop with soil, then sweep it into the yard.

Once, I saw Nini sniffing the creamy poop, moving his head near it, seeming like he wanted to rub against it. Days later, I saw Nini licking the creamy poop. I’m 98 percent sure this behavior benefitted Nini—improving his microbiome, providing needed minerals or compounds, or doing something else helpful.

Nini loves watching the rooster, as he loved watching Leo. Nini is unusually verbal while watching the rooster, repeatedly making the “chatter” sound that seems to mean “bird” or “non-threatening animal.” (He does it to all birds and has done it to pigs.) From my notes on April 15:

Nini can’t stop watching the rooster, watching with his neck extended even though the rooster is ~40 feet away in the yard.

From my notes on April 27:

Nini was sleeping, eyes closed. The rooster, around five feet away, began crowing. Nini turned his head toward the rooster, eyes still closed, and chattered at him around five times. The rooster stopped crowing.

Maybe a female chicken will come and mate with him and create babies. A low-stress farm is developing in my yard/garden naturally—nineteen pigs and one chicken, so far. I feed them irregularly, and they fertilize my yard and stimulate me and my cats.

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Gian gave me this in 2012 (I found out after he died that this is how he viewed himself IRL, according to this Instagram post):

Here’s a collage I made in 2011 of me and Gian using our phones. I made it for our Vice post “Andrew”: A Dialogue of Texts in the Year of Drugs and Kindness—a year of our text messages—his idea—read about it in my essay.

Here’s the song “ketamine concerto” that I mention in the essay, played by Gian:

💜

I’ve been reclusive since May 2022, when my last relationship ended. I’ve enjoyed the solitude more over time. I love solitarily working on my writing, hanging out with my cats, researching things that interest me, and healing my mental and physical problems, in part because I view this as a temporary phase. I haven’t been in an in-person social situation—besides my parents visiting from January 20 to March 10—since last May, when I visited New York City. My routine—I live on the Big Island in Hawaii—has changed regularly these past three years. Lately, it has been this:

Morning (first ~90 minutes)

I wake between 6:30 and 9:30 a.m., do 30 to 60 minutes breath-work, tongue exercises, and humming, ending with 90-100 forceful exhalations (what Brooke McPoyle, my breathing instructor—I did one Zoom session with her—calls “detox breathing”) and a timed breath-hold (my record is 5 minutes 30 seconds).

Then I go to my doorway pull-up bar. I hang by my arms for ~30 seconds, then I hang upside-down for ~3 minutes (during which I turn my head side-to-side—a good-seeming exercise I invented—laughed while typing that—it seems good because while using my computer my head barely moves), then I do 12, 13, or 14 pull-ups.

Then I go outside to the front patio and sit on a tatami mat and meditate for 20 minutes to an alarm on my phone. Then I consume 1-4 ounces of beef and/or chicken, a tablespoon of Sunfiber (a bifidobacteria-feeding fiber), and a Keystone Minerals capsule (30mg zinc, 150mcg molybdenum, 150mcg selenium, 113mg niacin).

Then I feed my cats Nini and Lali—I've been hand-feeding them due to a somewhat complicated reason that I don’t need to get into here, but will share at some point.

Main Work Session

~1.5 hours after waking, I drink 120 to 140mg of caffeine powder in water, type brief notes in my document of daily notes, reply to emails (5 to 20 minutes), and begin work.

I've been working on my essay collection Reasons to Live. All the essays are 95 to 99.5 percent finished; I’m editing all of them in order, one by one, sometimes two at once, putting them into one file, searching certain words/phrases, making it a cohesive self-aware book. I’m going to be doing this until April 15.

I love tweaking my nearly-finished writing—tightening the prose, working on the language, choosing more accurate words, implementing more pleasing paragraph breaks, carefully inserting or removing phrases/sentences/ideas, etc.

Part of my work each day includes editing my writing with a pen away from the computer. I do this indoors or on a tatami mat in my yard in sunlight, sweating, shirtless. When I do this, my cats, the feral pigs, and lately a rooster often visit me.

On my first caffeine high, I work on my writing for ~120 minutes, then I drink 80 to 100mg of caffeine + one bag of green tea and work for ~90 more minutes.

Next I look at social media for 20 to 60 minutes. Usually during this time I post on X and Substack Notes, then refresh a few times to look at engagement and respond to comments. I've been locking myself out of social media—via the Freedom app—on both my phone and computer all day except these 20 to 60 minutes.

Then I drink more green tea and work for 30 to 60 more minutes, for a total morning/afternoon work time of around 4 hours, on average. I graze on fruit usually during this work session—apples, pears, rambutan, longan, lychee—and sometimes take breaks to garden or draw.

Gardening includes moving rocks around, building/arranging rock walls, picking up feral pig poop, moving feral pig poop to beneath trees and covering it with plant matter, planting things, moving plant matter to beneath trees to fertilize them, and lately creating a trail into an area of wild growth.

After Work

When I finish work, the time is 1:30 to 4:30 p.m., depending on when I woke up. (I allow myself a large range of waking times, giving my body as much sleep/rest as it wants, because I’m in a years-long process of detoxifying my liver and healing myself generally, which involves irregular ups/downs as my liver excretes toxic bile—varying amounts of which will leak into my blood—for me to excrete in my feces.)

After work, I do one or more of the following, depending on how I feel:

• Drive to town. I go to town an average of maybe twice per week to buy food, get mail, and bring garbage to the garbage dump. I live between two small towns.

• Bike. I bike for 15-20 minutes, often shirtless. People in Hawaii are often shirtless. I love getting sunlight all over me while biking. I bike without shoes.

• Read. I usually save reading for before bed, but sometimes I’ll read in the afternoon. My reading so far this year has been focused on reincarnation.

• Clean/organize. I like wiping my wooden floor with a hand-towel. It gets dusty because of the gravel roads, and Nini regularly “relieves himself” indoors.

• Draw. I draw sitting on a tatami mat at my low work table, or—mostly—lying stomach-down on a tatami mat in my room or outside. I listen to podcasts while drawing. The podcast I’ve listened to most in the past year is:

  • Nutrition Detective by Dr. Garrett Smith, who I found in April 2024, almost one year ago. I’ve listened to probably 300+ hours of his livestreams. He has revelatory information on detoxification, vitamin A, copper, and essential minerals. He’s the only doctor I’ve encountered who knows, I’m convinced, how to heal people in a true, long-term manner. I recommend him for anyone with any health problems—his toxic bile paradigm is relevant to every disease.

Night

I eat my one official meal between 5 and 8 p.m. Lately, it has been either (1) one cup of boiled adzuki beans with 14-24 ounces of raw beef + raw and/or cooked chicken plus salt, or (2) ~16 ounces of raw beef with hot chicken broth poured over it, cooking it a little, plus some chicken, and salt, or (3) steak tartare with little pieces of white onion, with chicken and chicken broth on the side. I watch YouTube videos—in a desultory manner, usually switching somewhat rapidly between videos—while eating.

I drink potassium citrate in water (reverse osmosis or mineral) with my meal.

Then sometimes I rest a little—lying supine on my bed (a tatami mat), thinking.

Then I drink half a cup of honey water and work on my writing for ~60 minutes.

Then I do the following, in an order that varies each night: Watch more videos, interact with Nini and Lali, meditate for 10 to 20 minutes, mentally review my day’s work and plan the next day’s work, use the pull-up bar, draw, read.

I’ve been going to bed between 10 p.m. and midnight. Before bed, I drink 1 to 1.33 tablespoons of activated charcoal (adsorbs bile), and rub magnesium oil or lotion on myself (I also do this sometimes during the day).

Also

Interspersed with all of the above are these: Talking to my parents on FaceTime once every two weeks for ~110 minutes, contributing to one group chat on Signal on phone, irregular text messages with one person, regular gchats with one person, audio or video interviews for my writing career, feeding the feral pigs, going through old papers/things, packing/mailing mandala prints, doing Muumuu House things, and random other tasks like taxes and vehicle upkeep and buying printer paper.

Last Night

I enjoyed pretending I was in a character-driven, minimally plotted, “literary” science-fiction released in the 1930s or 1950s.

Summary

Sleep (7.5-10.5 hours)
Write (~5 hours)
Draw (1 to 3 hours)
Read (5 to 120 minutes)
Eat (40 to 70 minutes)
Breath-work (30 to 60 minutes)
Time with just cats (30 to 60 minutes)
Meditate (30 to 40 minutes)
Bike and other exercise (20 to 60 minutes)
Clean/organize (20 to 60 minutes)
Social media (20 to 60 minutes)
Think (15 to 45 minutes)
Garden (5 to 45 minutes)
YouTube (5 to 45 minutes, not counting dinner)
Poop/pee (4 to 12 minutes)
Shower (0 to 5 minutes)

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