But then Bonnie Tyler died last week.

She famously performed Total Eclipse of the Heart, the song that became the container for the most important stage performance of my life twenty-five years ago — aka the night I discovered who I thought I was meant to be. The night I understood what it felt like to have power over a room.

But today I feel powerless. And it turns out the song was about that all along. Or so I learned in ’s life changing dance class.

So fuck it. Here’s a spectacle of my heartache. Bonnie would’ve wanted it that way.

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Turn around
Every now and then I get a little bit lonely
And you’re never coming ‘round

Jess moved out last month. We were together for almost a decade, with some time off in the middle; but we’ve lived together since 2020. Technically this is a break, and we’ll reconvene at the end of the summer to see where we’re at. No contact until then.

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A reader wrote to me about a month ago, something to the effect of “just write when you have something to say.” It was a relief to hear that. Since writing these essays, I’ve been holding o…

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Who am I? How are U? I love U. Let’s play!

And now the fifth exercise:

Let It Go.

When I publish this, it will have been ninety days without weed. The longest I’ve gone without it in thirty years.

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I didn’t plan it that way. I just kept writing essays about quitting weed and they turned into something else. But I’ve been doing the SURriculum without knowing it was the SURriculum. The whole Substack has been the fifth exercise.

But one reader’s comment about my writing has really stuck with me:

I can only speak for myself, I’m not into the SUR thing. That’s the first part. The second part is that I am into the Ben Sinclair personal realism memoir blog… I was enjoying that writing and I was enjoying following along with that story. I liked the tone. Maybe there are other readers who feel the same way.

It feels like two different stories. They feel awkwardly jammed together.. What if they both kept going but just lived in different places? There could be crossover episodes without totally losing the thread on the Low Maintenance story, perhaps.

OK. You win. I’ll make you a deal: to let Low Maintenance be a realism memoir blog and to let the SUR show have its own Substack, with occasional crossover.

From now on, we’ll only release videos on the SURstack.

Here’s the catch: Low Maintenance will now be paywalled.

To get past the Low Maintenance paywall for free, you’ll need to subscribe to SUR. Once you’ve SURscribed, you’ll be gifted a three months of paid Low Maintenance.

SURscribe to SURstack

2 for 1 for free. All you have to do is subscribe to SUR. As Mansur says....

If as of today you are already annually paying for Low Maintenance, you’ll be gifted one year of SUR, which you’ll need for exclusive clips, comments, and access to SUR.

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1. WHO am I

2. HOW are U

3. I LOVE U

Now it’s time for part four: Let’s Play!

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Last week, Claude settled it for me:

I told my agents about the SUR show. They don’t get it and won’t help me sell it.

I told my lawyer. She told me she can’t get involved.

I wrote my contact at HBO. They ghosted me.

No one wants to take a risk in Hollywood. SURprise SURprise.

Fuck ‘em.

There was a time when I just rolled up my sleeves and made the damn thing. Since my HBO “cult success,” I’ve fallen into the development trap of waiting for permission, and it’s gotten me nowhere. It used to be fun. It used to feel like PLAY.

If anyone has proven themselves as capable of just doing it, it’s me!

I’m going back to my roots: The Web Series.

JUST DO IT

, the founder of Substack, saw my SUR show announcement.

He could have said “SURe” but he doesn’t know yet.

But unlike in the Ram Dass debacle, I was sure to include the community into this decision making process.

Before the Hamish zoom, I was introduced to someone I hadn't yet met. has been with SUR longer than almost anyone. He's also the community's legal counsel. Which means he knows exactly how much trouble they're in

I know the video at the top is 16 minutes and your attention span is fucking shot, but just watch it. And watch the video above this paragraph. And watch all of the videos. Go back and watch the videos I embedded in my past posts. Because THIS IS IT.

THIS IS IT

Substack founder is amazing. On this zoom he coined the term Quantum TV, agreed to fund the SUR show on Substack, and said he’d attend an orgy.

In the quantum sense, he definitely said all of those things!

OK, less talky-talky, more watchy-watchy.

Let’s play!

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It’s also what I cheekily made the icon of a group text thread that I was included on — well, included on is minimizing. After all, it was my intervention via text that some close friends a…

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In addition to emphatic consenters and monitors, a successful orgy requires five types of people:

1. The Instigators - “Let’s have an orgy!”

2. The Helper - “How can I help make this orgy happen?”

3. The Fluffers - “Orgy? I’ll be there.”

4. The Royalty - “If I come to the orgy, people will want to come.”

5. The Voyeurs - “I don’t want to participate in the orgy, but I’ll watch.”

All of them are important. Even the voyeurs, for they hold the space.

The way this workshop went, the initial exercise was for everyone to walk around the room. If you liked someone, you smiled at them. But you were not to return the smile if the feeling wasn’t mutual. This way, one knew where best to direct their advances.

This exercise divided people into breakout sessions where they shared with one another their wildest fantasies in that arrangement, and their greatest fear in pursuing those fantasies.

I am definitely an Instigator. And it turns out that after the orgy, it’s the job of the Instigator to check in with everyone about the quality of their experience

Aftercare.

There. Now I’ve got your attention. I’ve noticed, for some, it’s been flagging lately.

But Substack is a bit of an intellectual orgy, isn’t it?

Apparently for many, my SUR exploits have not been as smile-worthy as my raw, vulnerable confessions of self-loathing and struggles with addiction. Woe Maintenance.

And thanks to this platform’s detailed subscriber tracking, I have seen who has stopped smiling back at me as I cut a path with a machete through my dense artistic attempt at “something new.”

My issue is I’ve spent more time thinking about those who no longer smile at me than those who still do.

In fake life, this looks like checking the number of subscribers, my worst moments staring at the graph, and watching throughout the day as the number goes up and down.

In real fake life, this looks like seeking counsel from SUR.

My wildest sapiosexual (or fragile egoic) fantasy is that you’ll not only care about me, but you’ll care about the things I care about, marvel at my artistic genius and spiritual daring, and stroke my ego in comments, likes, shares and messages of admiration.

SUR is more concise: You want love. Just like everyone.

My worst fear is that as people unsubscribe, I’ll spend my energy and attention caring about people I don’t know who no longer care about me, and take for granted the people who do.

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Hand’s off

If you’ve watched the videos (according to past post stats, not many people do), there’s something “off” about SUR. In the video above, it’s his hands. One extremely perceptive and eloquent subscriber was “bummed on a gut level about this” and posted in the comments:

Marinate on how to explain (at some point) to the heartbroken suicide survivor community why you would use your friend’s suicide as an initial point of vulnerability and connection with your audience/community. Similar dynamic to be addressed with addiction community. Both groups —as you intimately know (unless, of course, you are an actual psychopath)— are incredibly vulnerable in terms of need for genuine community. Prepare for some fall out.

Oh shit. I compliantly responded that I would marinate, but pushed back that I wrote my essay about Jeff because I missed him, and that I'm not a sobriety story. I didn’t invent the black hole, I’m just writing about it. “That’s what this whole thing is: not knowing what to do with it, and doing it anyway, in public, badly, for real.”

She acknowledged I wasn’t a psychopath, but went on to methodically lay out the evidence for SUR’s inauthenticity. The sunspots on hands without wrinkles. His pristine teeth. The absence of any outside documentation of a community that supposedly spans decades. And her motive theory: that I'm desperate for a new project, desperate for a new role, desperate to finally eclipse The Guy and walk away from an identity that no longer fits.

SUR has talked to me about this before. He calls this desperation my passion, from the latin roots pati, or passio — to suffer. “You know, like Jesus.” lol.

But after commenting twice, taking down the comments because she “didn’t want to be the asshole turning the lights on in the middle of a high school dance,” she messaged me privately:

She suspects I used my vulnerability to manipulate readers into connecting with me, and “there is a vein of cruelty in such an about-face. A rupture of trust” since I am now caring about a spiritual community that might be fake, lead by an old man who might be me, and that I am saying they’re real and he’s not me. Which I am.

Is this cruelty?

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Maybe she’s not alone in this — maybe you doubt the intimacy is real if this is fake.

Although, her next comment fulfilled my fantasy:

I am also walking around thinking of you as an incredible artist. I admire the unstoppable impulse to create despite the brick wall that is The Industry. No permission needed, do it scrappy, get us talking, go. The SUR “ruse”— eSUR, if you flip that shit backward or, more appropriately, look at the word in a mirror — has me contemplating your themes in a way I would not if you, say, just wrote essays about identity, seeking, addiction, etc. Which is to say: bullseye, Benny. Beautiful. You’re working the material hard. (I know, I know: many parts are true. Hard to untangle, even for you, I’m sure.)

Complementarity. If my brain wore underwear, I would have had to change them.

An electron appears as a particle in one experiment, a wave in another — depending on how you look. The experiment itself determines which reality appears.

I asked SUR how I should respond: You and she are the same.

She wants love. She has passion. She felt com+passion (latin: with+suffering), because she and I have mirrored experiences of grief, addiction, big messy art. Further conversation confirmed this. We understand (and challenge) one another.

SUR says that compassion and understanding are the necessary ingredients for love.

As the Instigator, I attempted aftercare: looked up her work, responded in paragraphs, acknowledged her grief, offered friendship, expressed love and admiration for her beautiful brain. I added: Sur is a nice guy. He has a lot of good things to say. He’s very playful. Childlike. Curious... It feels good to be near him.

With understanding and compassion in mind, I told her that I loved her.

She responded, “I don’t know you…but I know you. I think that is what you were getting at.”

But then she offered:

Maybe you are just sad and disappointed that you are genre-bending and people are too brain-fractured to follow the thread, and you need a small foothold of recognition or you might fall off the cliff.

Cruelty? I don’t know her. But I know her.

She signed off: Back to work, ladies.

… does anyone have a cigarette?

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The homophones SUR and SIR are intentional.

He calls it, the dance between I and U. The self and the other.

Everyone in SUR seems to be working though this. Except maybe one person.

My first week, we did a mask repetition exercise called WHO AM I? This week SUR gave the newer members an exercise called HOW ARE U — write down whatever thought is in your head every ten minutes for two days, then look for mental patterns ie. HOW U ARE. Ninety percent of my thoughts were about people who no longer care about me, or people who do care but who I challenge to continue caring.

But would you believe it if I told you that SUR and his community also care whether you smile back?

It’s true. Hard to believe an enlightened being would care about social media, but it’s true. and I filmed him confiding as much.

If SUR were an orgy (I haven’t experienced one there… yet), you have all of the makings of a successful one.

SUR is indeed an Instigator-Royalty switch. I must say, he’s very good at aftercare.

You have Suri Ma — the Helper — how are you? How can I help? And doing doing doing. It turns out that she was worried about me too.

You have Suresh — the Fluffer — always DTS (down to SUR), anytime anywhere. He’s been working on his book about SUR, but wonders about Substack as an alternative.

And then Pransur — also Royalty — artistic, self-loathing, funny and volatile. So raw he makes me look well done. He joined SUR for only a short stint in the 90s, but after a 35 year NYC beat-down, he came back to SUR as “a last resort.”

If you only watch one video in this post, watch this one.

The morning after we shot this one-on-one, I was driving to SUR’s. I saw a figure in jean short-shorts and knee-high rubber boots clomp-clomping through the dust with a head wrapped in a pink scarf. It was Pransur. I offered a ride and he got in.

He glowered under the scarf, more SURly than usual. After some tense silence, I asked if he was OK. He revealed his face.

Holy fucking shit. I promise you this is real.

To treat an on-going abscess in his mouth, he went to urgent care last night for a prescription that he didn’t recognize. He woke up blown up. I turned around for the nearest hospital Downtown while navigating his meltdown.

Having braved the apocalyptic street scene, we rolled up on a dreary hospital and got as far as the armed security and metal detectors. He turned around: “Nope. Nuh-uh.”

By the time we found an E.R. to his liking, Pransur was tranquilized and administered a steroid to deflate his face. Just yesterday he had been very wary of me; but all it took to earn his trust was some patience during a series of meltdowns. Some snacks for the heart to swell — to believe that the kindness was real, really truly, without feeling like lil bit of a faker.

He told me about his amazing life with such a unique voice and arresting honesty. Such good one-liners! Summing up his life here wouldn’t do it justice. So I encouraged him to publish his stories on his own substack. After all of that, what’s left to hide?

You should read it for yourself.

Pransur

Blow Up

Ben facilitating an E.R. visit was giving Blanche DuBois to the utmost. Truly, the kindness…

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5 months ago · Pransur

needed to stop by his apartment to grab something, but accidentally locked himself out while taking out the trash. Now that is cruelty. I lost track of how many meltdowns we’d been through today, but the building manager was nearby with keys to let him back in.

All better for now, we clomp-clomped back to the car. Pransur asked about my rainbow KEEP GOING LOSER bumper sticker.

I told him about my substack article and the theory behind it — that when you feel like a loser, it’s more encouraging when someone acknowledges the thoughts with which you’re struggling. He agreed vigorously. “Yup Yup. Tell me about it. And the rainbow… like Kermit the Frog.

He sang: rainbows are visions, but only illusions. and rainbows have nothing to hide.

No, I hadn’t thought of that, Pransur.

“Yeah, you can’t spell illusory without a loser.”

We cackled like old friends. Compassion and understanding. I love this man.

On the ride back to SUR’s, Pransur asked me to drop him off Downtown at an extreme cop-themed gay sex club called The Slammer.

“SUR did tell me to celebrate the cracks, didn’t he?”

We are all just real fakes. And that’s a good thing.

It really is. Because the real thing we’re presenting to the world, the thing we’re propping up and defending, the thing we want everyone to stroke and praise and worship, the thing that our mommies and daddies abused and betrayed, the thing that we’ll kill for and die for... well, the dirty little secret is, we hate that thing.

We’re ashamed and embarrassed and are constantly let down by that thing. Because we can’t live up to it. And we know at our core, that we’re all just fakes. Frauds. And we try our best to not get found out.

Well, I’m here to tell you that getting found out is the happy ending to this ridiculous little story…

Unless you’re still trying to be liked.

Getting found out, while it may hurt like hell, is the opening shot that brings the whole thing down. Because when we’re exposed, when there’s nowhere to hide, we must look at what we have been running from. And when we probe and pry, we’ll soon discover that there’s nothing there. Just an energetic relationship of causal conditions, likes and dislikes, accidents and coincidences, genetically reinforced habits, blindly supporting the gossamer shell of our purported Self.

So the good news is, the story of You can end right now. Now you can say, “I’m a real fake.” Doesn’t that feel better? That thing you’ve been chained to your whole life is fake. So let’s put down that old part you’ve been playing and create a new one. Put down the old mask, and fashion anew. They’re both masks, of course, but we’re not pretending anymore.

And now let’s pretend!

Now it is time to play!

I didn’t write that, of course. That’s all SUR, from his book, This Is It.

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Before I posted this, I shared a draft with the bummed-out commenter. Her advice:

My personal instinct with this post would be to cut the clever for a moment, speak clearly and honestly in order to reorient the crew and re-establish a baseline so you can get back to the business of kicking beehives/getting heady without confusing your audience..

And don’t be scared of your sweetness. Let us love you. We want to!

Spoiler Alert: That is what this is all about. Don’t ruin the SURprise.

The orgy is rounded out by you, The Voyeurs.

You take on the very important task of witnessing and holding the space. You’re in it.

Whether or not you knew what you were getting into an orgy when you signed up for this, you’re in the SUR community now — a genuine community smiling at one another.

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I’m open for aftercare. For real and/or fake. Talk with me. I’ll marinate. I’ve stopped using “the fucking r-word,” Elizabeth! 😉

And by the way, you don’t have to remain a voyeur if you’d like to participate. There’s plenty of room to play in the comments section to fluff with the likes of , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , (Suresh) and even you .

I’m smiling back at all of you, even those I missed.

You are free to go at any time. But I’ll notice when you leave. More than I’d like to admit.

But rainbows have nothing to hide.

Someday we’ll find it. The rainbow connection. The fluffers, the voyeurs, and me…

Now back to work ladies.

You call your agent.

You say your agent’s name at the front desk.

You’re forwarded to an assistant and you announce yourself.

The assistant replies, “I don’t have them right now. Can they return?”

No specific time to call you back. No “How about 2 o’clock?” or “You around in fifteen?” Just at some point, they’ll return.

If they need to get in touch with you first, rarely do they schedule the call as with any other professional relationship. It just comes out of the blue. If you miss it, you start over at the front desk.

It’s a destabilizing cycle.

Agents taking away your agency.

Can you tell I don’t trust the system? In a dozen years, I have gone through three managers, and my most recent discussion with my only ever agent has left me feeling that this won’t last much longer. I do trust my entertainment lawyer, as she has the good sense to say things like, “that’s something to talk about with your therapist.”

But I have also gone through about six or seven therapists and three psychiatrists. I think what happens is that I don’t trust that someone really cares about me when there’s money involved.

“I want to make this project“ becomes “we need to sell this project.“

“I want to cast this actor” becomes “we need an actor who adds value to get it made.”

“I want to feel better“ becomes “we need to spend time together finding tools that work for you.“

So it would make sense that if it’s “I want to stop being addicted to drugs,” that the solution would be going through the 12 steps with a sponsor, where there is no money exchange. And I have been more attracted to that program ever since it was described to me as being open to having a spiritual experience.

But as Low Maintenance explores, do I leave behind the identity of the Guy with the drugs to pick up the identity of the Guy without the drugs.

Do I have to be an addict for the rest of my life — can’t I just be a human being?

As my teacher Ram Dass once cautioned about social roles: “I’ll make believe you are who you think you are if you make believe I am who I think I am and we’ll get along fine.”

I’ll be the writer/actor/director and you’ll be the manager/agent as long as you get 10%.

I’ll be the patient and you’ll be the therapist, as long as it’s in-network and 45 minutes.

I’ll be the addict and you’ll be the sponsor, as long as you work the steps and keep your share around 3 minutes.

I’ll be the performer if you’ll be the audience, as long as you buy a ticket.

The work I care most about is that which I’ve built from the ground up, outside of the system. It could just be my control issues with authority — being told who I am and what I can do — but we do get caught in these roles, and my goal is to shift from role to soul. Without conditions.

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Even though you try to put people under control, it is impossible. You cannot do it. The best way to control people is to encourage them to be mischievous. Then they will be in control in a wider sense. To give your sheep or cow a large spacious meadow is the way to control him. So it is with people: first let them do what they want, and watch them. This is the best policy. To ignore them is not good. That is the worst policy. The second worst is trying to control them. The best one is to watch them, just to watch them, without trying to control them.

- Suzuki Roshi

I like to dance at certain parties for access to the soul. At an 8pm - 8am dance party called LSD (Last Saturday Dance party) in Brooklyn, where the floor is waxed for dancers to glide past one another, transcend with each other, with or without drugs, without lechery or bravado or being The Guy. When the sun comes and the enthusiasm holds, it’s religious. At the end of the last one, Ted Lucas’ It’s So Nice To Get Stoned brought us all back to earth. The all-nighters leaned on each other in a close circle, swaying together as one, like a muted version of the end of Fellini’s 8½. The music stopped and we held the circle in silence.

So when I tried to replicate that in Los Angeles at KNAZAAL, dissociating with people who don’t move their feet, being asked “what are you working on now?,” even entertaining recording a podcast on the topic of trust with the person who overdosed “the Guy from High Maintenance” and “Reggie Watts” — I couldn’t help but feel this all had something to do with, as my subscriber Patrick noted, “crazy Hollywood shit.”

The trust is broken. Hollywood is broken. My ambition is broken.

So fuck ‘em. (and I’m also waiting for ‘em to return)

A handful of people reached out after my SURcling the Drain post, some of whom I haven’t seen in a long time, some strangers on Substack, very worried about me. — worried, they said, in the way people are worried from a safe distance. An overture without a plan. I appreciated it and I didn't know what to do with it.

My daily friends were also worried, but they were less dramatic. They’ve seen my ups and downs more regularly, and without minimizing my oopsie, lovingly asked: What was that like?

Addicts not far from my house living in tents on the street have few worrying for them. So thank you, worriers. It’s love and I am grateful for it, in whatever form it comes.

That being said, people worrying about you is, well, worrying. My nervous system needed to rest, away from the stress of folks concerned for me.

So I hung out at SUR’s house almost every day this week. It seemed like a place away from the temptation of drugs where I could rest and recover after my harrowing weekend. But perhaps SUR is my next drug: he soothes me.

He still calls me St. Clair, the patron saint of screens. Her story is that while weak from being a renunciate, she stayed in bed while her sisterhood attended mass. Her miracle is that she was able to see the mass projected onto the wall across from her bed. This was in the 13th century.

I told him I’m not interested in making TV anymore. It’s a dying art form. He replied:

“There really is something to just letting them be.”

In the above vintage SURmon, he discusses the nature of the camera:

“The camera only points to one person. And when the camera points to one person, what happens to the rest. The camera is a weapon. It shoots… Do you want to be the shooter?”

But instead of banishing the weapon, they pass it around. Everyone gets to shoot. Everyone gets to be shot. No designated operator, no approved angle, no one whose job it is to decide what matters. The camera moves through the community indiscriminately. They’ve built up this enormous archive of footage, years of it, conversations and rituals and the daily nothing of living together — and they have done almost nothing with it. It just exists somewhere on a hard drive, uncut, unpitched, unmonetized.

My first instinct was pity. What a waste. And then I caught myself having that instinct and felt a little sick. And then I wondered if catching yourself was just another kind of performance. And then I put that thought down because you can do this forever.

The mask work is called “Who Am I?” SUR takes you to a table of masks. You pick a mask, sit across from him, and you and him go back and forth — you ask who am I?, he asks who am I? — like the Meisner technique to break self-consciousness — that quality of repetition that stops being a question and starts being something else. You switch masks, but he stays with his original face. You keep switching, he keeps watching, and at some point he takes the masks away and you’re just sitting there with your original face, asking the same question. Which turns out to be the harder mask to work with.

When it was over, he put his hand on my head and said: “For the rest of your life.“

Last weekend, while overdosing on OPC-E, somewhere in the middle of whatever that was, I asked Who am I?, and someone said: you’re Ben Sinclair. And I repeated: for the rest of my life?

Fuckin’ A, he did it again… How did he know?

“I read your substack, man.”

Good one.

He’s a rascal, but he spends most of time just letting them be: morning movement, SURmon under the grove, salad lunch, art projects, chores, rest, sunset on the hill, family dinner, singing SUR to sleep — but nobody’s being developed. There’s no Cookie. I keep waiting for the Cookie and it keeps not coming.

Everyone’s pretty much just hanging out: filming, cooking, gardening, jamming, crafting & salad.

I’m calling it SURbriety. Treating one’s life not as a problem to be solved, but a laid-back art project to be explored. No thirty-day chips or forever labels. No sponsor keeping your share to three minutes. No steps taking your inventory. You just show up, pass the camera, put on the mask, ask the question, don’t insist on an answer.

But my personal history suggests this place is temporary for me. It’s that familiar new relationship energy: how much I want it, how I know it will work, how everything’s different now!

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Suresh, the old guard member and SUR’s archivist, pulled me aside and asked how I made my web series. It sort of hurt to be pulled back into The Guy again, but I recounted my journey. I could see his wheels turning. He’s wanted to get the word out there for a while but doesn’t know the entertainment industry. I suggested the lowest barrier would be a podcast.

Enter journalist Jennings Brown. He’s covered spiritual communities in The Gateway podcast about Teal Swan and Revelations about the Fellowship of Friends. A friend connected us; apparently despite the spiritual abuse he documents, he’s been interested in covering “the good cult.” Suresh bristled at the word; but he conceded that Wild Wild Country brought attention to OSHO without imploding it. Maybe upending the traditional cult narrative could make SUR stand out from trauma porn like The Vow.

I called him.

After the call I found myself feeling something unexpected about Jennings — not suspicion, but recognition. He’d gotten close enough to a real thing to be changed by it, and now he couldn’t unknow what he knew, and he couldn’t throw the camera away either. He was stuck in the same place I was stuck.

But when Jennings arrived at the compound with his phallic-shaped mic, I had my doubts. He described himself as a journalist who “embeds in cult compounds.” You could almost hear the record scratch. Cult implies spiritual abuse, and Jennings seemed primed to sniff out a sellable story of money, sex and power — what’s going to happen when SUR passes? Aw shit. Now I’m the guy exposing this community to someone just looking for a hook. Suresh asked me to keep an eye on him. I picked up a camera and pointed it at him, putting him on notice.

But then I saw what I was doing: objectifying, flexing, dick-measuring, giving myself the ick.

The camera is a weapon.

I got that ache of discovering this place too late, right when it’s about to be over. SUR’s an old man. At some point Jennings Brown is going to publish something, or Suresh is going to figure out the pitch, or someone’s going to show up with a development deal and a phallic-shaped mic and the sheep will become the cast and the meadow becomes a location. And it’ll ruin everything.

I found SUR and asked forgiveness for inviting Jennings. It was sort of pathetic. I talked a mile a minute, and he just listened, smiling. When I finished, SUR suggested I help him film a “one-on-one” with the resident A/V expert, Surcher.

Surcher is a very sweet guy. After a sudden separation in December, he came from the east coast to sunny L.A. looking to shake things up. Suresh found him on Craigslist to help with the technical side of filming and editing. It didn’t take long for him to fall hard for SUR. Despite being here only six months, he has the air of lifelong commitment. Usually he films the one-on-ones alongside SUR; but today SUR asked me to hold the other camera. He hinted that it was a spiritual practice — to be behind the camera instead of in front of it.

SUR’s elegance lies in that the whole week he never addressed my fear directly. He just pointed the camera at Surcher’s instead. Same fear. Better angle.

There really is something to just letting them be.

As the sun went down, we moved to the hill on the edge of the property to catch the golden light. Surcher and I teamed up — me on the wide shot, him on the handheld. Once the wide shot was set up on a tripod, I ran over and took the camera from Surcher. SUR asked me to direct them, so I asked them to walk together in a line. Surprise, an artist who had just joined for golden hour, suggested we form a sitting circle instead, and I passed the camera to Suri Ma so I could join.

You can see the Hollywood sign from the hilltop.

But we all turned away from it, into the circle, toward one another.

It is so nice to not get stoned. And never ever come down.

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In anticipation of outreach from those worrying I’m joining a cult:

Can I return?

Last Friday, I dramatically bitched to Jess, who now six months sober was working hard on her third cookbook, about how my beautiful life on paper in L.A. felt at odds with a gut feeling that I didn’t belong here. Especially on the heels of a recent visit to New York with a specific mission to party where I was still a somebody. The responsibilities to meet the cost of living as a nobody in a dying industry town wasn’t worth the winter sunshine taste-testing her beautiful recipes.

So I wanted an escape from L.A. I wanted to lose myself at a dance party.

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“Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”

— Niels Bohr, 1952

Niels Bohr believed that physics doesn’t describe reality itself. It describes what we can say about reality. An electron appears as a particle in one experiment, a wave in another — not both at once, but genuinely, mutually exclusive depending on how you look. The experiment itself determines which reality appears. He called this complementarity. He also suspected it wasn’t just a physics problem. He thought it was a limit of language itself. He later supposed it applies to human experience too. Absolute subjectivity.

The trouble with reality is that when it gets strange enough, people assume it’s a story.

I know this because I once played him in a college production of Copenhagen.

Recently I saw an internet meme anecdote that goes something like this:

“So your science has finally discovered what we have known for thousands of years. Consciousness collapses possibility into actuality. The observer creates the observed. You are the universe observing itself.”

It’s a great scene. Almost cinematic.

The problem is, historians of physics say there is no evidence this meeting happened: no record in Bohr’s published diaries or letters. No mention in biographies of Bohr. No record of Anandamayi Ma meeting him.

The trouble with a story is that when it gets cinematic enough, people assume it’s reality.

Recently I’ve been posting about SUR and getting a lot of pushback and/or disengagement. To my Is This It? post a reader called Steve commented:

Interesting pivot. A half-serious attempt at creating a nostalgic, cult spin on the “I’m Still Here” concept... I enjoyed the vulnerability (was it real?) more than the performance art.

I’m very fucking serious, Steve. Why must this strange thing I encountered be performance art?

Apparently the addict is more believable, more authentic than the seeker.

So which is it? What’s worth your time?

I did a little test. I posted an AI-generated article with a note about wanting to smoke weed again, just to see. It outperformed all of my notes about SUR.

The Steves want me sick. They’re less sure about the cure.

So. This one’s for the Steves.

This weekend I had a dangerous and spectacular struggle with drugs.

A few weeks ago in New York, I danced until dawn on several psychedelics and had a religious experience, and I was hoping to find one in L.A. where I spend most of my time.

I found KNAZAAL — pronounced nozzle — an improvised electronic dance party with silent disco headphones performed by Jared Solomonophonic, Josh Conway, Paul Cherry, and Reggie Watts. The “K” is KNAZAAL and its nasal reference is purposeful.

Paul invited me to set up my stimming station: a vibration plate, a chair with subwoofers playing directly into front and back of the body, a Theramask massaging the eyes and temples, a chi machine swinging the legs. Foam and wires everywhere. I was there to facilitate my weird thing inside this larger weird thing.

Throughout the evening I was taking K. Then I met a neuroscientist psychonaut in a labcoat with “Dr. Leo” sharpie’d on it, whose fanny pack contained designer powder drugs I’m sure you’ve never heard of that smash together several alphabet letters. I started collecting the alphabet knazaaly. But hey, no weed though.

The thing about LA is that nobody moves their feet at dance parties. The space they fill tends toward talking and phone screens. At a certain point, with the alphabet now in my bloodstream, I took it upon myself to dance dynamically around the musicians in the middle of the room and fix that. I didn’t feel out of control. Quite the opposite. I was attempting to control the room. The only thing I couldn’t control was a kgnawing craving for more K.

I’ve known Reggie mostly peripherally over the past 20 years. I met him while seeing Tropic Thunder at the Union Square Regal. We’ve only become more well acquainted in the last two years or so. The party wound down around two. While packing up my stimming contraption I took more K, and Reggie and I made a strange joke about Taco Bell’s taste consistency as a Shepard Tone, a sound that goes up forever. Then Dr. Leo offered his remaining methaqualone aka Quaaludes. (Another spin on “I’m Still Here.”)

Reggie licked a generous pile off the inter-thumb-index hand meat. His first comment was that something was off — it didn’t have the tell-tale wallpaper taste of ludes. I held out my hand meat. He left me hanging while talking to someone else. I held it out while talking with Jared, who had performed tonight’s show uncharacteristically sober. He nearly took the Quaaludes but decided against it. Reggie finally addressed my hand meat and poured a generous pile onto it. Despite his observation about the taste, I licked it up without pause.

No one else took the powder.

We packed up to leave. While loading my rig fairly efficiently for an end of a night, Reggie took a call from Dr. Leo on his Apple Watch. The first line I heard: “I’m truly sorry Reggie. I just found the quaaludes in my pocket. How much did you take?”

“We took massive doses.”

Reggie and I overdosed on a ketamine analog designer drug called OPC-E — a dissociative most commonly mis-sold as “extra strong ketamine.” But its effects are uniquely bizarre in its reconfigurations of the paradigms of reality. Whereas the typical dose of Ketamine is 30mg, OPC-E is comparable at 5mg.

A typical Quaalude dose is 300mg, which Reggie eyeballed out for me. He took twice as much.

Oops.

Since we ate it, the effects would take longer to kick in. I tried to make myself throw up but could not. I was on an empty stomach. Curiously, I spent what could have been the last hour of my life packing up my foam, wires, and chi machine and loading it into my car. Once the trunk was closed, the question of what’s next came. I asked Reggie if we were going to die. He seemed fairly certain we wouldn’t, but he also didn’t know that I take Lamictal and Wellbutrin which significantly lower seizure threshold. Emergency room? Instead, Paul offered to drive us to his house less than ten minutes away.

Two decades after Tropic Thunder, Reggie and I sat in the back seat of Paul’s car holding hands. I remember the cautious drive, the lights, and then, well… Neils Bohr and Anandamayi Ma would’ve had a field day with this one. It’s really hard to explain, but i’ll give it a shot.

There’s a lag. Not in time exactly — in rendering. Like the universe is loading and you’re already inside it, walking around, trying not to notice the seams. You notice the seams.

Reality becomes a nearly-finished puzzle with a few holes in it. Your brain, unwilling to leave gaps, jams in whatever piece is nearby. The pieces look right. They’re wrong. You know they’re wrong. You watch yourself accept them anyway because the alternative is sitting with the holes, and the holes are bottomless.

Like the Shepard Tone, we kept getting higher and higher without end.

My first discernible comprehension was “I’m retarded now.”1

I mourned my beautiful brain. It had been so good to me. However, there was also a level of acceptance about my retardation that I could have never imagined. It was very sad, but this was just how it is now. The stuck in the moment-ness of it was as if the concept of life, consciousness, was this feeling of always always always a fluctuation between gripping and releasing, puckering and relaxing of energy, super-fluid contours writhing and rearranging. And strangely, I revisited places, feelings, consciousnesses I once perceived before on other 5-meo-DMT(bufo) and intravenous ketamine trips — familiar A-framed, cozy orange places.

And weirdly Reggie had been this always entity in all of those places, linked inextricably with this cosmic trickster from a certain mystic cohort. These places were of deep knowing that I had been here before, I actually come from this place thrumming underneath my normal life, induction into a cabal of understanding the elemental, basic consciousness. The universe not as something we stand outside of but something looking at itself through us. Ineffable, beautiful. Atman. Aleph. God-gasm. THIS IS IT.

To quote Contact, “they should have sent a poet.”

But instead, to quote Tropic Thunder, here’s me “going full retard.”

Is this authentic enough, Steves?

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The first thing I remember in our shared material reality, I was crawling on my hands and knees to Paul’s house, saying “I’m a fucking loser. I’m a fucking loser.”

I spent the next few hours on a couch while the sun came up, enjoying everyone’s light touch in dealing with Reggie and I. Jared played guitar on the couch near me, improvising a song encouraging Reggie to sit on the chair ten steps from him. Reggie, always performing, kept the song going by standing in one place.

Over the next hour or so, I schemed like Justin Timberlake in the The Social Network about the growth of KNAZAAL as a psychedelic roller disco party at Xanadu in Brooklyn. A human whirlpool circling the drain into electronic dance music.

As the drugs wore off and I re-associated with being Ben, the anger and sadness flooded back. I shamed myself for taking unknown, unlabelled drugs from Dr. Retarded in his sharpie’d labcoat advertising his promise to “make you permanently retarded.” Disappointed in myself for taking drugs that Reggie clearly said were off when he took them. Depressed that I spent what might have been the last hour of my life not reaching out to Jess or my family and friends, but packing up foam and wires into a fiat decorated with a Keep Going Loser bumper sticker.

I was told later that while peaking in the car, I asked, “Who am I? What am I?”

Jared said, “You’re Ben Sinclair.”

I asked, “For the rest of my life? For the rest of my life? For the rest of my life?”

I took a picture of myself. My eyes dropped on my face. Would they go back?

As the sun came up, I stumbled out of the house. I looked seriously at Paul and Jared and for the zillionth time in my life said, “This is a turning point. This is the last time I take drugs. I’ve had enough.”

As Reggie and I were driven back to our cars, he commented that we might have been the only people on earth to take that much OPC-E. My brain was floating in fizzy syrup and I felt the full weight of whether I fried it permanently. I asked Reggie to tell me what he was thinking. He started speaking of gnosticism in a British accent, an improvisational bit he often does while performing. I said, “Be real with me.” He said, “I am being real.”

Before getting in my car, I looked at Reggie and nearly said, “Take care of yourself.” But I realized my hypocrisy and said, “I need to take care of myself.”

I later heard that Reggie danced at a rave that night.

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When I got in my car, no sleep, my vision skipping, still wobbly, I realized that I promised to go to SUR’s house today. I’d promised to return their VHS tape which I found and to receive SUR’s invitation to spend time with him. After all of my experiences with disappointing the Ram Dass people, I couldn’t show myself to be so chaotic to these people.

I took a moment behind the wheel. Wow. I was alive. Maybe brain-damaged, but alive. On Friday I cursed my life here in L.A. and truly almost lost it 24 hours later. I didn’t want to be Ben anymore, and then I wasn’t, and did I want to be Ben now after that? I felt so stupid for nearly sacrificing my beautiful brain, but I’ve been sacrificing it well before tonight, giving it over to The Daily podcast, doom-scrolling, worrying about shit I can’t control, feeling like a nobody and wishing I was somebody again. I was already damaging my brain.

I decided that SUR’s house was close enough that I could quickly say hello, drop off the tape, and keep my word with them and find another time. Jess, scared for my well being, agreed to drive me. We went, despite her busy book prep, despite me being green in the gills.

I want to tread carefully about SUR’s location, because I don’t want to keep making the same mistakes over and over, objectifying their experience for content. I would just as soon have given the tape over and turned the other way. We were greeted by a red-haired woman named Suri Ma. She told me that she was the young woman in the video that I posted, and that she remembered that day, what he said to her, very well. There were a bunch of people hanging out, helping her cook, and doing art projects outdoors under a tarp across from the kitchen.

Sur was asleep, but she asked us if we would like to stay around until he woke up so I could meet him. I was happy to just turn around, but someone asked us if we wanted to make a mask. I had seen people wearing masks on the website. Her name was Surafina, and she suggested we decorate our masks with whoever we think we are, or whoever we thought we wanted to be. Although she didn’t think I looked so much like SUR. maybe in the forehead and the eyes a bit, but she was not so convinced. Since I was too weak to make the mask, I offered a rain check.

Suri Ma offered Jess and I salads, and we talked about Jess’ book Salad Freak and her new upcoming vegetarian cookbook. The SUR house keeps vegetarian, and someone named Taliasur offered us a tour of the gardens. It’s a big property, two acres, and there’s very beautiful cactus gardens which reminded me of our garden was dying because I didn’t know how to take care of it. He showed us their mulch operation. They sell this mulch for apparently relatively cheap per pound, and Taliasur, who had lived there most of his life, seemed very earnest about service as the main point of this place.

While being taken back to the house, we saw a slim older guy with glasses being filmed by a younger guy in a baseball cap, in a sort of formal infomercial manner. We didn’t speak to them, but the older guy looked at me sort of indignantly. I can’t remember his name because they all have Sur in them and all sound the same, but Taliasur said that was his dad, and that he was the one who asked me to take the videos down on Substack. His dad was the only “bad vibe” that I got. Everyone else was nice.

Taliasur, Jess and I sat by the very nice natural pool. Suri Ma came out and without rushing me, said that Sur was up and would be happy to meet me. Taliasur got up to lead Sur from his bedroom and over to me holding a parasol, and with some help getting down from Suri Ma, he sat next to me, both of us with our feet in the water.

SUR kept calling me St. Clair. I corrected him that my name was Sinclair. And he said, “St. Clair. Look her up.”

Suri Ma took Jess to the kitchen to talk about making her special salads, and left us alone.

SUR and I sat in silence for a bit. He just sort of stared at me. I was afraid and ashamed that he knew I was still fucked up, so I instead tried to pass my discomfort off as embarrassment for posting the videos.

He looked at me and said with a shrug, “Oopsie.”

Not oops. Oopsie. OPC-E. My accidental overdose. Did he read my mind?

For the second time the span of a few hours, my brain broke.

I got very emotional. He put his hand on my back.

“It’s OK, St. Clair. The brain heals. I’m being real with you.”

I started crying. Snot pouring out of my knose. I tried to tell him my Steve frustration: that no one thought he was real.

He whispered to me. “I’m not real.

“But neither are you.

“And here we are.”

Later I looked up St. Clare of Assisi.

The patron saint of television.

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An climate-focused artist friend once recounted a discussion he had with his now ex-father-in-law, an architect of trickle-down economics — a bad guy.

Artist: So what would be your reaction if the tiger went extinct?

Father-in-law: Fuck ‘em.

The prosperity of the trickle-down class and their cronies turns my stomach in knots. But outrage isn’t saving the tiger. Righteous indignation isn’t moving the needle against the trickle daddies. So lately I’ve adopted a simpler coping strategy: fuck ’em.

Just a spoonful of fuck ‘em helps the existential pain go down — a time-release coating for suffering — in a more delightful way.

Enjoy a fuck ‘em discount

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Over the past few years, I’ve fallen down a few spiritual rabbit holes. First Ram Dass, which ate a year of my life. Then an unexpected OSHO detour where I briefly fell in love with needing nothing from anyone. Then dissociating on ketamine in California Adventure while my sober brother guided me through the Happiest Place on Earth.

That night ended with me buying a camcorder containing a VHS tape.

The tape was labeled SUR.

I only got around to watching it recently. The first half was people from the late 80s or early 90s shaking and yelling, while the second half was unwatchable since the tape too degraded. Only this past weekend did I find someone who could salvage it. What came through was a Q&A session with a guru.

A guru who looks like me named Sur.

I want to be precise about this, because I have a history with it. I know what happens when I find a spiritual figure and start seeing my own face in theirs. I know the trap. I fell into it when I saw an illustration of what seemed like my face in Be Here Now and sought out my artistic “birthright” which alienated Ram Dass’ community. I am, at this point, clinically aware that this is a thing I do.

And yet…

A young woman in the video asks: Sur, you say everything is perfect, but there is still so much pain in the world. Why do people suffer?

Sur offers that pain is biological necessity while suffering is identification with pain.

‘I shouldn’t have been in pain that one time.’ The pain is gone, but you are still attached to the pain. This is suffering.

Jeff told me, a few weeks before he died by suicide, that when I was stoned I wasn’t as good at talking about feelings. I conceded the point, but kept smoking. Then he died, and I smoked more than ever — higher potency, almost always alone. Before and after his death, there was pain I didn’t want to feel. I resisted it indignantly: “I shouldn’t have to feel this pain from that one time.” It is suffering that Sur describes. The pain moved through eventually. But the suffering — that was the part I kept choosing.

I’m not saying Sur fixed this. I’m saying it landed.

Here’s the thing I keep returning to: Despite everything I doom-scroll, feel outrage about, dread, resent, doubt — the clear and present truth of my actual life, the thing literally in front of me right now, is very good. There’s food on the shelves, clean water on tap, birds singing, Jess, rugbrød on Sunday mornings…

And no doubt the doom feels real. The fascists will win, the climate will cook, AI will prompt our undoing, and the prediction markets will turn profits off these misfortunes.

But even in their likelihoods, these are still just thoughts about life. Not life itself.

And I live my life almost entirely inside thoughts — about the next project, about whether my show meant what I thought it meant, about whether I’ve already made the best thing I’ll ever make. None of that exists anywhere except in my head. And yet that’s where I spend most of my time.

The only suffering of the end of the world may be worrying about the end of the world — while our actual lives pass by unnoticed.

This is, I’m aware, a profoundly convenient philosophy for someone who has not yet lost everything. My pain has not yet arrived, but I attempt to feel it anticipation.

He’s right about suffering, this guy who looks like me.

So of course I did what anyone would do: late-night Reddit threads and obsessive Google image searches. With difficulty, I turned up his community’s janky website:

the SUR experience

Sur wrote a book in the ‘70s called This Is It. Not the Alan Watts book from 1960 — though there’s an Alan Watts pull quote on the cover, which I cannot explain and have stopped trying to. While I can’t find the publisher, Certain Curtain Books, I did find a rare bookseller in Halifax who has the book listed, but I get an error page when I click.

I haven’t yet found a copy the book, but if you have one, please message me.

Here’s a pull quote from it on their website:

It’s not over there. You’re not going to find it on the road. Around some corner. Down someone’s pants. It’s not on top of the mountain. On the guru’s tongue. Or in a hit of acid. It’s right here. Right now. This is it.

I assumed, given the name SUR, that this group would be in Big Sur. Reddit agrees. But no. The website says they’re in Northeast Los Angeles.

Where I also live.

At the end of the tape, Sur sings a song. Thank God I just look like him and don’t sound like him. Warning: this song is cheesy and aggressively earwormy.

And yet…

You just gotta keep it simple / Let it go / You just gotta keep it simple / Let it go / But it’s never really ever that simple, is it though?

La la la la la la la la

posted with permission from SUR

These people seem loose and unambitious, which I’m attracted to:

We are not an organization. We do not have a mailing list you can join. If you found this page, you probably know someone who knows someone. That’s how it works.

They’re asking for any photos of SUR gatherings and provide an aol address. I feel like I should give them their video back, but I feel trepidation about going there in person.

I know this cycle all too well.

I find a man in a mirror. A mirror in Maui. A mirror in Greece. I think the man in the mirror has something I need. I chase the reflection until I disappoint myself. Like when I sat in Ram Dass’ wheelchair — meant only for his portrait — practicing acting like I’d had a stroke for my vanity project. I know who I am in this story — Narcissus at the lake. At some point you have to ask yourself why you keep finding men in mirrors.

But the man in this mirror lives in my neighborhood. And he’s still alive.

And he somehow found his way onto a VHS tape inside a camera I bought at the precise moment I’m trying to figure out what comes next.

I should bring this VHS tape back to them, but it’d certainly be simpler to just drop it off and to let this go, wouldn’t it?

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This is it, says the book, the song, the tape, the mirror man.

But the message seems subtler: Keep it simple.

I should live my life right here, right now, as it is, and that should be enough.

Let it go.

But it’s never really ever that simple, is it though?

To quote an earworm from another bad guy:

I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
Take a look at yourself and then make a change

Fuck ‘em.

KEEP GOING LOSER!

Na-na-na, na-na-na, na-na-na-naaaa (make that change)

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When I was younger, that might have been the closest thing I had to a spiritual practice. I wouldn’t have said that at the time. It was just what you did on a Friday night. But I’ve been away from it long enough to recognize the absence.

The movie follows two brother-like co-creators time traveling in order to get a gig, but mostly it follows them trying to get back to the feeling of starting. It loops in on itself — a movie about a show about a fake band referencing an actual band referencing an idea — and underneath the absurdity is something tender about wanting to return to the beginning before anything calcified.

It’s easy to forget that the original idea at the center of Nirvanna’s cultural nesting doll is a spiritual definition meaning transcendence of suffering, desire and self.

But of course, I reflected on my own creative origin story…

REWIND before High Maintenance on HBO, before the webseries, before weed felt like part of my personality.. Back to being eight years old, making a music video with my actual brother.

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RECORD: I framed up the moon while the first unmistakable chords of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” blasted from a boom box. I zoomed out, revealing my brother and his friend as they crested our house’s rooftop and walked toward the edge. Two guitars waited in the grass about 10 feet below.. The friend jumped down and picked up a guitar. My brother lost his balance, fell face down into the grass and broke his wrist. He yelled at me to turn off the camera.

When my brother came home from the ER with his electric blue cast, I had already presented the video dozens of times to my brother’s friend, my other two siblings, my parents. I was proud of it — not in a cruel way, but not not in a cruel way either —and to my brother’s humiliation, I would show everyone who came over.. The VHS tape disappeared within a few weeks. My brother denied destroying it, but I still don’t believe him. It was our last music video collaboration.

During college at Northwestern, my brother wrote a play called The Brothers Comedy where an older brother works his whole life at stand-up, and his younger brother tries something weird onstage once and eclipses him immediately.

Throughout his 20s, my brother worked diligently to become a television writer. In 2008, he and his wife would set up their male college friend Alex with their new female friend – a casting director who had just relocated to Los Angeles. I came through town, a jobless couch-surfing bohemian 24 year old. Alex invited me to a small gathering and I met this woman. Her and I immediately bonded over our mutual love of smoking weed. Her name was Katja.

She and I got married, and over the next decade, we would smoke so so so much weed.

While Katja and I were coming up with the High Maintenance web series, we would bond with my brother and his wife while smoking weed, and for a stretch we were all aligned somehow. One particularly euphoric day of the four of us at Disneyland that still glows in memory.

Right after that, my brother’s wife got pregnant.

PAUSE.

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FAST FORWARD: the web series became an HBO show, we didn’t invite my brother to write with us, Katja and I divorced, my brother got sober, the show ended, and we all drifted apart from one another.

PLAY: Last year, I was still smoking weed but added new drugs like ketamine. My brother, now a sober father of two, had just ended a lucrative staff writing job on an uninspiring medical show. He would recede whenever I came over. Our short discussions usually centered on what we were doing, but not how we were doing.

We were not estranged, but we were strangers

So I was surprised when my brother called me one day and invited me to join him on a random Monday to Disney’s California Adventure Theme Park. I accepted, but did not mention my plans to bring a nasal spray bottle of ketamine.

Throughout the day, I snuck sprays while walking from ride to ride and waiting in line. If he knew, he never said so. We rode Soarin’ multiple times while I was indeed soarin’.

Waiting in those lines, my brother and I spoke about how we were really doing for the first in over ten years. His sobriety, my addictions. His struggles of parenthood, my struggles with divorce. Our shared struggles with our parents and siblings. Entertainment career frustration. The ache of getting older. The ways we’d disappointed ourselves. The ways we’d disappointed each other, without quite saying it like that.

There’s something uncomfortable about admitting I felt most emotionally available while chemically dissociated. It was the first time that he and I would share time alone, just us, since getting stoned at the beach in our early 20s. Before that, the times we would laugh in dark movie theaters.

Before the park closed, we found a ride with no line — The Silly Symphony Swings: You sit in little chairs that lift into the air and circle slowly. Although a gentle ride meant for toddlers, it was was perfect for a forty year old man secretly high on ketamine. We went on it maybe ten times.

REWIND, PLAY. REWIND, PLAY. REWIND, PLAY.

On the drive home, I wanted to show him a weird video gallery near my house that I thought would stoke our shared nostalgia. Digital Debris is a sort of unclassifiable shrine to obsolete technology and cultural fragments — Camcorders, strange tech, esoteric treasures like a Garbage Pail Kids Tarot Deck — all for sale. The owner Mike resembles the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons if he’d red-pilled.

My brother didn’t really connect with it.

Maybe it was his lack of enthusiasm or my coming down from ketamine, but the energy shifted and we lost the magic of the day. Before we left, I bought a VHS camcorder like ours from childhood. Mike didn’t have a power adapter for it, and wasn’t even sure it worked. I bought it anyway.

My brother dropped me off. We awkwardly hugged and said “I love you” perfunctorily. We went back to being strangers again.

STOP. EJECT.

I forgot about the camera until I recently met a guy at a party who specializes in old camcorders. Last week, I finally brought the camera to his house and he found an adaptor that worked.

We turned it on and there was a VHS tape still in it.

The label on the tape simply says SUR.

posted with permission from SUR

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And yes, I can see the uncanny resemblance. I’m shook, no pun intended.

We digitized it and I brought it back to Mike at Digital Debris. He doesn’t know the group, but he said he bought the camera at a garage sale here in Highland Park. Based on the model of the camera, this would have been recorded in the late 80s or early 90s. My best guess is that the guy with long hair is leading some sort of spiritual exercise.

Given everything that’s happened — my spiritual fascination with Ram Dass and my OSHO detour — It feels like stumbling across an alternate draft of myself.

The only explanation I can think of is that, like in Nirvanna: The Band – The Show – The Movie, that I will soon stumble upon a time machine, go back to the late 80s, and start a cult.

But if that were the case, as in the movie, I would stop whatever crack that formed between me and my brother before it widened, I would skip the ketamine at Disneyland. I would hire my brother on High Maintenance, and I would save our lost Smells Like Teen Spirit music video, but turn it into a strange short we make together that his kids can watch today.

But time machines don’t exist. So…

Here we are now.

Entertain us.

cover of David Bowie’s “Sound and Vision” performed by Helado Negro

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I hated that answer. I developed a pattern of taking what I needed without permission and asking for forgiveness — a full-time apologist.

Recently, a therapist told me that any demand we make of the world — met or unmet — tends to cause suffering. Sometihing for which to apologize. You can usually spot a demand by its vocabulary: must, ought, should, need.

Needs are hostile wants, my list of demands to the universe.

Last summer I found myself negotiating on behalf of my own inner peace.

In May of last year, I checked out. I was in grief – for my friend, for post-fire L.A., for my television career, for the U.S. I bought a one-way ticket to Paris. To allay my friends’ fears that I may not come back, I playfully insisted I was heading to France for La Fête du Pain (The Bread Festival). Oh Ben, how eccentric! But I do love bread. I wanted bread.

I needed bread.

Don’t go to La Fête du Pain . In front of Notre Dame, I realized I had landed in a tourist trap inside a tourist trap inside a tourist trap – a tourist trap turducken. Still I spent the next few weeks in Paris eating at least two baguettes a day, drifting through museums, a true flaneur, waiting for something to grab me.

Jess came and met me. We went to London for my birthday to watch our musician friend open for Dominique Dumont. Live music and dancing seemed to be the only things that made sense. We went back to Paris, and when she flew home, I stayed.

I needed to run away.

The last time I felt undeniable, life-affirming meaning was while making High Maintnenace. I had an email out to my former collaborator about reviving it. Our show is licensed to HBO and up for renewal. I floated the possibility of new episodes that might sweeten the renewal. The email sat unanswered.

I needed an answer.

Doubtful that I would get the answer I was looking for from that person, I told myself I was scouting Europe for my next great idea for a show. I had just been rejected trying to make the Ram Dass show.

I needed a win.

But what I really needed was permission to continue being the version of myself who had made something that mattered.

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Three weeks here, three weeks there. Berlin. Copenhagen. Sweden. .Lots of music festivals and letting people notice me as The Guy. I demanded sympathy, telling then all I was in grief and lost. Some could hold that and others could not. I spent time with those that could. We ate bread together.

In Germany, I switched to pretzel. Humble, utilitarian, filling. Something to soak up the beer.

In Berlin, I spent many afternoons at Vabali, a sprawling spa known for its aufguss saunas — and for non-Germans, remarkable for its co-ed nudity. After a decade of sitting in the New York subway and inventing backstories for clothed stranger’s lives, I could not help but to do this for naked ones.

I imagined a European anthology shorts series set in a spa. Each episode follows a different person in the nude. We form assumptions. At the end, when they get dressed to leave, the big reveal would be how they presented themselves and everything we thought we knew about them collapses.

Bingo! My very European show! Birthday Suit.

I needed the bread! (Money)

In Copenhagen, I started every day with a bolle med ost — a buttered roll with cheese — and emailed the Danish Film Institute like a man politely (ehh, desperately) knocking on a door that was clearly for Danish filmmakers only. But my ex-collaborator is a Dane, so I wrote to her again, dangling the possibility of reviving High Maintenance abroad. HBO meets hygge.

Then came Fusion Festival, a massive electronic music pilgrimage. The year before, I went with Jess and the musician we saw in London, let’s call him Jean-Luc. He had been to Fusion many times, and this year was bringing his childhood friends for the first time. I tagged along. Jean-Luc would mix ketamine and 3-MMC in a contact case and we would snort it from a spoon. He called it the soup.

The soup did not come with bread.

I was high on soup for five days and slept no more than 3-4 hours a night. I danced my poor little heart out, but anyone could see I was clearly going through something.

Near sunrise on the last day, hours from my bus back to Berlin, Jean-Luc and his childhood friends huddled in serious conversation.

“Are we stuck?” I asked.

He looked at me exasperated, “Yes, we’re stuck. I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” he said. “I love you, but we are old friends we can’t be together the way we want when you’re around.”

Oh. No soup for me.

For days, maybe longer, I was the schlemiel – the one who spills the soup. I pretended that I was OK with that perfectly normal thing for Jean-Luc to say and hugged these schlamazels goodbye. Ten steps away from them, I started bawling. Humiliation. Soup poured from my nose.

Back in my tent, I turned on my phone for the first time in days to text Jess that I needed to go to rehab… but there was the email I had been waiting for.

It said that because the last years of making High Maintenance had been so taxing, there was zero chance we would ever make it together again. Zero chance that she would allow that I make it without her. I was encouraged to move on and find new meaning.

I needed a pretzel.

Before I got on the bus back to Berlin, I ate two.

If ever I was susceptible to join a cult, this was the moment.

Luckily, my friend Lexi invited me to Afroz, the mediation center in Greece established by followers of OSHO — fka Bhagwan (literally “God”) — a spiritual teacher best known in America from the salacious Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country. This part is where my true crime enthusiast subscribers might microwave some popcorn.

It turned out I had another non-cult Brooklyn friend nearby Afroz, so I figured maybe she could deprogram me if things got hairy, like the Greek stereotype.

So I bought a one way ticket to Lesbos. I guess I needed pita.

My first exposure to Afroz was the “evening meeting.” Music somewhere between klezmer and a European 70s game show echoed though the rustic property. In the Buddha grove, a circular marble plaza with a huge tree growing from the center, about two dozen people danced by themselves facing a blank television screen.

The music swells. Everyone throws their hands up and shouts “OSHO!” Three rounds of this, and then seated meditation where music plays and stop intermittently.

After this comes the discourse: a video from the 70s of OSHO speaking to a group of seekers wearing red (today they don’t wear red anymore. Damn.) Osho is an undeniably enchanting speaker, like the snake Ka in The Jungle Book. My first discourse was on how all suffering was self-made. Seemed a little simplistic, dare I say gauche, to minimize the abuse of so many around the world. But also, in my case, I sort of know what he meant.

And then he says, “Now everyone goes crazy.” And everyone does just that. Both in the 70s and now, they burst into a minute of flailing gibberish. A drum beats and they all stop at once. “Now, everybody’s dead.” Everyone drops to the ground.

Then: “This… This… A thousand times this. Don’t miss it.”

Another drum and everyone is reborn. And then they go eat dinner.

It was theatrical, absurd, and… strangely relieving?

Whatever this would be, it was wouldn’t certainly not be boring.

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I intended to stay at Afroz for two weeks, but ended up staying four. The first two weeks I participated sketpically, but I would look forward to the evening meetings — I liked listening to OSHO speak. Sometimes it felt as through he was speaking directly to me through the screen.

I started making fast friends on the nude beach in the afternoons with other members of the community. It was like the spa in Berlin, but I wasn’t trying to concoct backstories for them. We would talk, swim, and then go to evening meeting to dance. By week three, I became one of those ecstatic dancers at the evening meeting, not dancing to get attention, but because it quieted my busy mind. Because I enjoyed it.

This was the difference between my time here and my time at Ram Dass’ house – i wasn’t trying to extract material from them. I didn’t want to objectify their spiritual experience and they didn’t try to sell me a Be Here Now shirt. In fact, they didn’t need anything from me, and I didn’t need anything from them.

I took almost no pictures while I was there. Except this video. I couldn’t resist.

One day I watched OSHO speak about about how you cannot fully love a person when you need something from them.

I needed to hear that.

I always needed something from my wife and co-creator. I needed her talent, her taste, her collaboration, her approval. And after we separated, I needed her permission to conintue the show. Needed reassurance the years together in relationship weren’t wasted. Needed proof that I still mattered in her world.

Now I knew none of that was coming.

And strangely, that clarity softened something.

If I didn’t need anything from her — not a text, not consent, not validation — maybe I could love her without demand.

I emailed her that.

She replied.

We haven’t spoken since. We don’t need to talk anymore.

So… I am not an OSHO apologist. He was a very flawed man. There are many flawed people in his community. I am also flawed. Historically, I am a Ben apologist.

At Afroz, I saw how much of my suffering was self-generated — a constant negotiation with reality about how it should behave.

When I stopped demanding, something unclenched. I let go of something I’ve been struggling with for a very long time. I released my grasping fist, and my open palm was ready for whatever might fall into it.

OSHO!

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t consider staying longer, but I was sick of soulvaki. I needed to go home.

For Jess’ birthday, as a gift, I went on antidepressants and mood stabilizers. Not the most romantic present; but if you lived with me, you would get it. In fact, there’s nothing sexier than someone dropping the rope in their tug-of-war with “bearing it.”

I was told that they would work better if I stopped smoking weed. After a cacamamie campaign to just smoke less involving timed lockboxes, I finally just stopped.

My present is quieter. The past resentments don’t linger. I am here, doing whatever it takes to enjoy my life. It’s. My. Life.

This. This. A thousand times this.

A student asks the teacher, “What is the meaning of life?” The teacher responds, “I don’t know. Let’s have some breakfast.”

There’s a Danish bakery at the Larchmont Farmers Market near our home in L.A. that sells excellent seeded rugbrød.

Jess and I eat it together every morning.

Now we’re addicted to it.

We need it.

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In The Culture of Narcissism, Christopher Lasch wrote that writing itself requires a kind of self-objectification — that the raw energies of grandiosity and exhibitionism, once “aim-inhibited, tamed, and neutralized,” can be mobilized toward reality rather than fantasy. Confession, he warns, can either become a garrulous monologue traded on celebrity, or it can create distance — insight into the forces that make the self so unstable in the first place.

I’ve been thinking about that distinction as I confess my self’s instability as material.

I recently had a dream where I was completely nude beside an eighty-year-old woman named Dassi Ma, singing the Hanuman Chalisa during kirtan. I felt no shame. I felt loved.

An armchair Freudian might call this a fantasy to expose myself spiritually and be met with unconditional acceptance.

But in reality, it was more complicated.

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In my last piece, I recounted how a few years ago I convinced myself that I was meant to tell the story of Ram Dass. I saw my own ambition reflected in his image. I wrote a pilot about it for FX, but they passed. Others were circling his television biopic. I felt both chosen and threatened — my own private Waco.

In my notes from that period I found a document titled The Shame I Feel. Imagine, if you will, the world’s tiniest violin playing softly as you read.

Despite an illusory quality of zen, I was obsessed that people’s energy shrank around me. I worried I was parlaying my own wounds into content — monetizing healing, turning self-loathing into fuel (like… right now?). Was I was interested in growth only insofar as it could be shaped into a project?

One could argue good art comes from suffering; but High Maintence worked because it focused on the lives of unseen others. Now I felt I was committing a crime of self-indulgence, and marijuana was my accomplice.

When I wasn’t stoned, the shame was louder. When I was stoned, it was stylized.

Smoking pot allowed me to fixate on shame and perceived slights in order to twist them into “fascinating ideas” while muting the background noise of doubt. I told myself it expanded consciousness; but increasingly, it narrowed it. Ram Dass’ guru Maharajji once said marijuana makes you forget your family. I began to suspect it was helping me forget the ripple effects of my own behavior in pursuit of a sophomore project.

That winter I described my life to Jess as a tub of warm water. Work was steady. I was in love. The dogs were asleep in patches of sunlight. I felt capable. But after any type of rejection, it was as though a leak opened in the tub basin. The warmth drained quickly. The cold porcelain beneath it felt like the truth. I began to suspect that the warmth had always been an illusion, that I had been distracting myself from something harder and more permanent.

OK, enough. Put the violin away.

In July of 2022 I returned to Hanuman Maui, the final home of Ram Dass. After being passed over to option his autobiography and alienating those who were making the show, I told myself I was no longer trying to make a biopic about him, but to explore the community he left behind. “What if Elvis has left the building,” I pitched, “and the audience sticks around?”

On arrival, my posture was less anthropological than conquering — I was pissing all over the place, marking my territory. I brought an imperial gift of matching blue jumpsuits that matched one that I owned. I filmed everything while commenting that I was “sucking the soul from the place.” I shaved my mustache to resemble Ravana, the villain from the Ramayana, a story they tell in devoting to Ram and Hanuman. What was I hoping to get by casting myself as the villain, believing that self-awareness absolved me?

One afternoon, high and indignant, I barged into a board meeting to question the nonprofit’s financial structure, accusing them of cultural appropriation on indigenous land. I told myself I was creating a story engine. In reality, I was testing whether conflict would make my “character” indispensable.

I show Dassi Ma my Colbert interview (Ram Dass’ nightly program), demonstrating my compulsion to be the person who explains love to others while privately unsure of even being loved myself. I said, “Real love is wanting the person you love to be happy whether or not it includes you.” While I sort of believe that sentence, it was a definition of the made-up word compersion lifted from polyamory jargon — a lifestyle I 85% don’t believe in. How often I have tried to engineer the conditions under which love might include me?

At Hanuman Maui, I spoke in abstractions about “more love, more love,” while scanning the room for confirmation. I wanted to surrender, but I also wanted authorship.

A caregiver later told me it was painful to watch me objectify something he held sacred. He told me this while I sat in Ram Dass’ wheelchair — which was meant only for his portrait — practicing “acting” like I had had a stroke. While I conceded his point, I didn’t fully feel it yet.

One evening, in Ram Dass’ backyard, Carl (the man with the maniacal laugh) and Seth (the other guy) and I took ketamine in Cark’s tiny house. Ironically, we compared notes on ego death.

On Carl’s desk was a sticker: No abstraction without goodwill. It lodged in my chest. I began to suspect that I was abstracting people — converting them into narrative components — without first ensuring goodwill.

While swimming naked in the pool the next morning, that caregiver who resented my sacrilege came to me and offered me his reticent blessing and a handshake — I stifled the impulse to pull him into the pool. Progress!

On my final morning, I saw with Dassi Ma and asked for her blessing, even a reticent one. She couldn’t give it to me. And I admitted that even in my best-case scenario — a show made with care broadcast on TV — that an audience’s objectifying attention would alter the place. Some communities do not want to be placed under a microscope. I told her I would not pursue a series about them.

She smiled and told me Ram Dass was smiling too.

I left a donation of $10,800 — the holy number 108 embedded within it — and flew home. I felt I had exited gracefully.

For what it’s worth, I never received a thank-you note.

That detail embarrasses me. Not because I wanted the note, but because I noticed its absence. The ego, even in retreat, keeps receipts.

It occurs to me now that writing this risks repeating the very gesture I pledged to avoid — turning a private spiritual community into a backdrop for my self-analysis. My only defense is that the lens here is pointed primarily at my own mechanism: the drive to convert longing into architecture, to build elaborate structures around a simple need.

The need is not complicated.

To feel loved without staging the conditions.

To relinquish control of how that love arrives.

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Lasch suggested that useful creative work confronts the individual with unsolved intellectual and aesthetic problems, mobilizing narcissism on behalf of something outside the self. I am trying to determine whether this is that — whether examining the impulse to narrate my own seeking is itself a step away from it.

When I watch footage from that time, I see a messy man ACTIVELY SEEKING as a trauma response to divorce and relying on drugs to get him through. Mischievous, but not malicious. Authentic, but not heroic. Thirsty. Hungry. Trying to become the authority on love while still unsure how to rest inside it. Perhaps putting his worst foot forward as a challenge — “can you love me even when I… confess in print that I watch rim job videos?”

Carl’s sums it up: “Part of me sees you wanting to tell the truth, but maybe not sure of how to express that. Not settling for fake-ness. Genuinely taking the steps toward authenticity.”

Yeah. I feel compassion for that. Or something like it.

Compassion, I’m learning, is quieter than spectacle. It doesn’t require a camera angle. It doesn’t need a hook. It doesn’t spike engagement.

It feels less like cosmic revelation and more like something administrative — chopping wood and carrying water. Making someone else’s day slightly easier. Perhaps surrender is not dramatic. Perhaps it is simply the willingness to let something continue without you at its center.

I don’t know if this confession moves narcissism outward or merely rearranges it. I know only that I am less interested now in conquering love than in noticing when I am trying to.

That may be the beginning of distance.

And distance, for writing this substack, might be enough.

Or maybe I should just express outrage about the Epstein Files like everyone else.

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“What I’d like to do is present a model to you… And the specific model is my own life experience.”
— Ram Dass, WBAI Radio, 1968

If you listen to enough of Ram Dass’ lectures—darshan talks, if you prefer—you can hear him workshopping and tightening his act.

What many people don’t know is that between Richard Alpert, the Harvard professor turned psychedelic explorer, and Ram Dass, the beloved spiritual teacher and author of Be Here Now, there was Dick Alpert, the flailing stand-up comedian at the Village Vanguard, trying to find his voice.

Oh, if only those tapes existed. But this was before his friendship with Alan Watts, who likely taught him that if he was to make a name for himself on the Holy Man Circuit, he needed to record his lectures for radio.

SHOWBUSINESS!

The act goes that he lived three lives:
first as aspiring social science academic,
then as a psychedelic explorer,
and finally as a devotee of his guru, Neem Karoli Baba

When I first encountered Be Here Now—really encountered it, not just clocked it as a coffee-table artifact—I was making my own name on the television circuit as a web-series multi-hypenate turned HBO showrunner. I opened the book to this random page

Indeed. “What a weird thing!” It looked exactly like me. Specifically me at 35. But it was written 15 years before I was born. It felt either cosmic or narcissistic, depending on my hypomania or self-loathing.

But what really hit hard was the line at the top of the page:

“As soon you give it all up, you can have it all… As long as you want power, you can’t have it. The minute you don’t want power, you’ll have more than you ever dreamed possible.”

I should have paid attention to what was buried in the crease:

“as long as you have an ego, you’re on a limited trip.”

But I wanted power, so I didn’t see that part. I was like “far out!” and closed the book, and went back to running my very important show.

A few years later, the day Ram Dass died on December 22, 2019, I was at a Christmas party talking to a long gray-haired woman in a white gunnysack dress who told me she’d known him and that I resembled him. At the time, I just thought he was a spiritual dude who people thought was very special, and I was like, “Hell yeah, people think I’m special too!”

Shortly after, my friend Emma at Everyday Oil sent me a care package that inexplicably included a copy of Be Here Now. Around the same time, High Maintenance was coming to an end, and I was feeling untethered and depressed, not knowing what was coming next for me.

I sat down and read the book cover to cover—first the enticing brown pages, then the white biographical pages—and something clicked.

Up until then, I’d lived my own version of two chapters:
the aspiring actor turned video maker
then culty weed web series guy who got an HBO show

The third chapter felt unwritten.

And reading Ram Dass’ biography, I thought I saw not just a physical resemblance, but also a biographical one: Youngest Child! Jewish! Fat Kid Complex! Mommy Issues! Ambitious! Successful! Drug Culture Icon! Collaborator Split!

My third chapter would be making The Ram Dass Show!

Shortly thereafter, I told an HBO executive, with inappropriate confidence, that my next project was going to be The Ram Dass Show and I was going to play him.

This seemed, at the time, like destiny rather than hubris.

During early COVID, I mainlined Ram Dass lectures while paddleboarding the Venice canals and road-tripping up the coast in a Volkswagen bus, which felt spiritually necessary and not at all on-the-nose. I zoomed with collaborators and we pitched all the networks. They all passed except the FX, who were definitely more interested in my collaborators than Ram Dass.

Kent Alterman and Jon Krisel joined me, and we started interviewing everyone who’d known Richard Alpert and Ram Dass. The Ram Dass people loved the spiritual being and regarded him with googly eyes. Those who knew him as Dick were harder to find.

Luckily, we found David Padua, Dick’s travelling companion in the famous 1967 Land Rover trip that eventually led Richard Alpert to his Ram Dass-ness. David described his friend as “intensely personal,” and out of respect, encouraged me to write a roman à clef– a portrayal of real-life people, places, or events under the guise of fiction. But c’mon, David! The people want Ram Dass!

What I didn’t initially clock was that I wasn’t the only one with this idea. Apparently a few hot shit heavy-hitters in Hollywood also wanted to make the Ram Dass project. Thus began my unhealthy competitive obsession to make this show first.

I attempted to court the leaders of LoveServeRemember, Ram Dass’ foundation, on a walk in Ojai. The first thing I remember hearing was, “Well, we’re running a brand.” When I brought up Ram Dass’ closeted homosexuality as an internal struggle worth dramatizing, I was told I was “missing the point.” Ram Dass was about transcending identity.

Okay. Sure.

Eventually the option for the autobiography Being Ram Dass went elsewhere, but I kept writing anyway. I was already in development, already obsessed and already convinced I was right. I bought blue colored contacts like a fucking maniac.

Around this time, at the behest of my partner Jess who felt I was missing a big part of the story, I went on trips to Maui to spend time at Ram Dass’ house with caregivers who’d known him in his final years. The in-house tour was led by Dassi Ma, inarguably his number one fan who attended to his every need. She offered her own spin-off of the Ram Dass story—The Dassi Show.

I still appreciate how open they were with me despite how forcefully confident I was about making a show about someone they loved despite having never met the man. Especially the seemingly well-behaved young men who were caregivers for Ram Dass. They spoke openly about his sexuality, and funnily enough, his later-in-life addiction to weed.

I recall a funny story where the stroked, wheelchair-bound Ram Dass, while silently watching a Maui sunset suddenly said, “SHOWBUSINESS!”

What I mostly observed was devotion—to Maharajji, to Hanuman, to ritual. I attended Sunday kirtan. I resisted my judgments of their cultural appropriation (no I didn’t) and just let myself enjoy this wholesome vibe. I vowed to stop smoking weed.

The next night, on the porch of a tiny house owned by an eccentric Beyoncé roadie named Carl, I broke that vow immediately and smoked pot with the caregivers. When they were away from “The Dassi Show,” these young guys smoked weed and talked about their psychedelic trips and community politics and the subtle tension between spiritual organizations. And about their shared moments with “RD,” of course.

I realized that this was what I was actually looking for — not enlightenment or transcendence — I wanted “the hang.” This was closer to the story I wanted to tell.

Back in L.A. development purgatory, FX passed on my script. I had a very “fuck em” attitude, and I did what one does: took it as a divine message from the monkey god Hanuman and the guru Maharajji, and tried to join the other Ram Dass project. I had a cordial zoom conversation with those folks who accepted my offer to read my script.

The following interaction ensued:

What they didn’t know was that I installed a tracker on that email which informed me when it was opened, and a PDF tracker on my script aptly called selfdestruct.com.

So I responded with this:

And then my manager texted me this:

To re-quote that journey-catalyzing page in Be Here Now:

“How did ‘I’ get into this? Who am ‘I’?”

Or maybe, in this case, it should be “who the fuck do ‘I’ think ‘I’ am?”

There are even more embarrassing, albeit entertaining, Curb-esqe episodes of me hoisting myself from my own petard in pursuit of this project. But at some point I had to admit: I didn’t just want to tell Ram Dass’ story. I wanted to be the guy who told Ram Dass’ story. I wanted his spiritual being-ness to rub off on me, despite my bull in a china shop-ness.

Meanwhile, the pilot itself—the thing I’m sharing here—was about performance, ego, the mother wound, LSD as false liberation, and the moment where sincerity collapses into showmanship.

In other words: it was about me.

And in my flailing search for my third chapter, I had to further admit that what I really want is to be chosen and taken care of by a community like Ram Dass’—a community not unlike what I lost with the end of High Maintenance.

While recording this read-through yesterday, after all of this time, I felt relief that this show wasn’t made. Not because it’s poorly written or wildly inaccurate. It’s more that when I saw myself on camera reading the role of Ram Dass, I didn’t buy it. Especially in contrast with these insanely talented actors: Reed Birney, Connie Shulman, Dan Stevens, Sheila Vand, Jason Butler Harner, Beck Bennett, Gus Birney, Allen McCleod, Luka Jones and producer Kent Alterman

The pretense of being Ram Dass was unnecessary for the story I want to tell.

The story I want to tell is something else.

Maybe it’s a documentary about trying to make the show, not the show itself.

Or maybe it’s as David Padua suggested: a roman á clef — a fictional telling of reality.

Or maybe both at the same time.

As Maharajji said to Ram Dass when he threw a dish out of frustration with his American satsang in India:

Ram Dass, Love everyone… and tell the truth 😉

SHOWBUSINESS!

Popular club-joiners would be Instagram

Truant ADHD homecoming royalty would be TikTok

Punk pyros in detention would be Twitter

That kid whose parents pulled them out for private charter school is BlueSky

Jocks would be Truth Social

Homeschoolers would be Reddit

Chaperones at the dance would be Facebook

That guy who graduated but stuck around and buys alcohol for basement parties would be MySpace

Goths would be Fet-life

Know-it-alls teetering on the edge of their seats waving their hands insisting “I know! I know!” would be Substack.

Well, know-it-alls, this one’s for you.

I’ve been on this platform for about six weeks now. By far my most liked and restacked thought is:

The resonance of this note suggests something we all secretly know: if they need to tell you they know, then they don’t know.

Many essays here promise knowledge—dare I say wisdom— How to, The Complete Guide to, The Top 10, Why so-and-so is Trash, On such-and-such, What’s really going on, This changed my life!, This ruined my life!, We had it all wrong! Most essays seem to end with a too-clever-by-half little bow of certitude: and that’s how it is.

Works of fiction and other original creative expressions haven’t yet made it into my algorithm. I am fed commentary newsletters: what’s happening in the world, here’s what’s happening to me, what’s happening to you, what it all means. Political, cultural, environmental, spiritual certainty. Projections backward (Epstein! America was never great!) and forward (Fascism! Certain AI doom!)

And I get it. This is the attention economy. Would you pay attention to someone who didn’t have news? Or at least repackage the olds as news?

Would you subscribe to me if I said, “Don’t ask me. I don’t fucking know.”

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Circling back to my most re-stacked note: we all seem to know that behind this transaction—subscribing to someone else’s certainty—is a momentary suspension of belief in something we know is fake. No one actually knows. And yet we’re desperately looking for someone who does, despite suspecting that it’s all a performance of knowing. The Know Show.

Anyone who truly knows is out living their life without the need for attention—or subscriptions. They’re the old guy in Italy enjoying his espresso at a café all day watching the world go by. They’re hiking alone in Joshua Tree. They are, generally, anyone not hunched over a screen.

They are not here. They are out there. And they know what it’s all about without needing to tell you, because you have to figure it out for yourself.

I recently read Jessica Grose’s essay about a 30+ year annual conference for IANDS—the International Association for Near-Death Studies, founded in 1978. Grose described a mixed crowd, but noted that attendees wearing badges labeled EXPERIENCERS were “the best dancers”—moving un-selfconsciously, with a blissed-out confidence that comes from having been to the brink and back.

Imagine Nietzsche, Kant, Freud, Jung, Camus, or Tolle on that dance floor. Do you imagine they would’ve danced like the Experiencers?

This essay focuses on IANDS’ general distrust of spiritual institutions despite their doubtless connection to Source. They must be the uninhibited art kids who skipped school that I immediately wanted to hang with, knowing they wouldn’t want to hang with me. Why haven’t I heard of this organization in its fifty-year existence? Probably because, despite conferences and books, they aren’t evangelizing. It’s a you-had-to-be-there fellowship.

Still, I want what they seem to have: not a philosophy of life, but life itself. To know—without dogma, without doubt—that this is it. They know the unknowable.

But also… I don’t know. Maybe they don’t know either. For me to know what they know, I’d have to be them.

But I can’t be them. I’m me.

And by that logic, no matter how many articles I write, shows I make, or truths I try to express, no one will never really understand me either—because I don’t even fully understand myself. The moment I capture something, it changes. I can’t nail down objective truth because lived experience is always moving, and the only absolute is my subjective experience of here and now.

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Besides the Experiencers, the Grievers are another group at IANDS. They haven’t yet been to the brink, but have experienced extraordinary moments of connection with the dead. They attend for meaning, validation, peace, and community.

One might think they understand grief before they experience it. I certainly did. But before that, I was told grief equals loss, and loss equals pain, but I still didn’t know the pain of grief. To understand this pain, I had to live it. This is why certain poetry and art hits differently now. It echoes what was once felt. I no longer have to pretend to be deep because I want to impress Vada from My Girl. I’ve now lived grief and it’s drilled actual depth down into me.

Of course, IANDS also attracts the inevitable shamanigans: gurus, mediums, sound baths, devices for sale citing medical journals to get you to SUBSCRIBE. And it’s this presence of hucksters that makes my Substack note land so cynically.

If someone tells you they know for certain, they almost certainly don’t.

This is the disservice of second-hand catharsis. Someone has a peak experience (I’m looking at you, psychedelics), then becomes an expert on how it is (and now at you, Hoffman Process). They prescribe their subjective revelation to others, who then have to unlearn it in order to experience their own moment when it finally comes.

Singular experiences are felt relatively. They’re shaped by age, history, culture, biology, mood, weather, the phase of the moon, what you just ate, what medication you’re on, if you liked Heated Rivalry... One size never fits all—and yet it’s all one.

Anyone who’s planned a trip to Italy and received a massive list of must-dos knows this. The obsessive treasure hunt for the best experience often robs you of the actual experience. The best days usually happen in spite of the plan.

Or how an LLM doesn’t know what it is to live, but will tell you how live your best life.

Giving up knowing-it-all can be the difference of living like like ✊ and living life like 🖐️

The clenched fist of knowing leaves no room for mystery. The open palm can handle it.

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I sometimes think about how I’ll never experience the back of my own head. I can see it in mirrors or photos, but those are reflections—not the back of my head itself. Others see it in ways I never will. The same goes for my right eye: it can never see itself directly. It is always the subject, never the object.

Life is like that. You can’t objectify it and still be living it. The moment you name it, it becomes something that was. Not what is.

Ever notice that anyone who subscribes to simulation theory is almost always a white guy who knows that none of this is real (flips over dinner table)? Why aren’t they’re any women smoking DMT and looking into lasers to discover the source code of our illusory matrix? My hunch is that the feminine is more concerned with the heart-felt experience, while the masculine thinking-mind obsesses over HOW IT ALL IS, BRO! (throws chair through window)

Video art is Marcelo Pinel’s Cyber Mystic Garden.

But I get the plight of the know-it-alls, both masculine and feminine. We followed all of the rules, we achieved, we burned out, and we searched for peace when achievement left us hanging. We were promised the world, but the world is totally upside-down.

So why the hell do i even bother writing this?

I guess this is where I’m supposed to wrap it up neatly, prove I’m clever, show you that knowing I don’t know somehow means I really do know.

But I’m just that high school kid on drugs living in a simulation who just also happens to be the best dancer.

I don’t fucking know.

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It was all part of a vicious cycle: I would arrive on set, underslept but not yet stoned, act like a total grouch obsessing about making our day up until lunch, get stoned at lunch with a few colleagues, and spend the second half of the day much lighter, goofier, and sometimes more chaotic. We would walk away from set and smoke “in secret,” though it was no secret and no one cared; but keeping it on the DL was just a habit on top of a habit.

It feels necessary to offer context for the title of this essay, even though rehashing my decade old public breakup feels pathetic—but these videos require a brief refresher.

The season two episodes SCROMPLE and GOOGIE are the two most lightly-veiled autobiographies of the series. The Guy suffers a bike accident injury swerving out of the way of a therapist hiding to avoid a public run-in with her patient.

These episodes came from an emotional wound, written only a few short months into my separation with my then-wife/co-creator. My ex and I coincidentally separated just hours before Trump first won the election, which sort of felt like a relief because New York City was outwardly as distraught as I was inwardly. And while our partnership was always tinged with anxiety and depression, the season two writer’s room felt especially tense. Some days felt like that part in the movie where the bomb goes off, the sounds muffles, and there’s that high-pitched ring.

It was also around this time that I caught up with LSD and psilocybin after our high school romance. Soon after, I advanced to my first experiences with ayahuasca. While “the mother” wasn’t exactly earth-shattering, because allegedly heavy weed users don’t get the “full show;” I did experience a vision of myself standing under a waterfall of pure love holding an umbrella. After the experience, I felt a present, continued awareness of that love and of my grip on the umbrella.

Shockingly, no one in the room cared as much about my ayahuasca experience as much as I did (can you believe it?). The great psychedelic compromise in the writers room was an episode where my character takes a day off and trips on mushrooms in Prospect Park. Since our show was always praised for its authenticity, and I could find no other solution to dilate my pupils for that chic tripping look (it always irked me that our actors’ eyes were never glazed while smoking fake weed). I settled on taking half a tab of acid without telling anyone—and then the other half, for authenticity’s sake.

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When I watch this, I see a man wrestling with his ego and cutting himself off from gratitude—the key component to enjoying one’s life. He stepped into leadership without the apprenticeship, and therefore doesn’t know how to effectively lead a group of professionals who require equipment, because he didn’t go to film school or even P.A.— he leapt from a small web series straight into responsibility. Instead of feeling lucky, he complained—sometimes loudly—about an opportunity others would have given their left nut for, just because it was raining.

He knows he should feel grateful, and while his personal hurt is understandable, his instinct to takes drugs is juvenile. He’s calling out to his twelve year-old self to say, “isn’t this cool? Why can’t I enjoy this cool thing I’m doing?” The twelve year-old might tell him, “because it’s not cool, you loser.”

My colleagues didn’t think it was cool either. I was a life-long risk-taker and they were historically risk-averse. I was the gas, and they were the brakes. This balance is probably what worked; however, I found myself often characterized as the problem, the liability. It’s an old story that goes back to early childhood. The youngest of four, acting out for attention and ending up in the principal’s office. I compulsively hoisted myself by my own petard.

But I also understand this childish man. He was an artist pushing the boundaries, grasping for an ecstatic experience just out of reach. How was this unskilled artist to know that making television is more like a military exercise than finger-painting? He was trying to fold up the umbrella—to enjoy himself despite his poor judgment of the proper set & setting. But it was raining that day—a circumstance meriting an umbrella.

Despite my harsh judgements, I can see in hindsight that he is figuring out a much deeper performance of authenticity. This man wants to be in the moment. The acting classes he took were not unlike spiritual seminars focused on being yourself in another circumstance—by personalizing the character’s experience as your own. His studio-mates would call him out for “indicating”—trying to show his emotions to the audience. But isn’t this the business of show? What actor doesn’t have some awareness of faking it for their audience? How can one be fully in the moment without looking backward to their direction and looking forward to their standing ovation? At its best, being in the moment must be some holy artistic paradox where one cannot separate the dancer from the dance.

I see man performing his own life. He earnestly wants so much to share with you what’s happening inside of him—his awe and his suffering—but his ego keeps him too aware of the camera and the audience. He’s a fake. But… he’s a real fake.

Approaching the end of lunch break, I encountered this man—who I later understood was a Scientologist—setting up a table to warn of the dangers of psychiatry. At the time I was seeing a psychologist, but not a psychiatrist, and had psychic blocks about paying therapists to care about me.

If the 41 year-old Ben could talk to 12 year-old Ben on the eve of his Bar Mitzvah, it would be a lot like the final episode of High Maintenance, where the Guy spends Christmas with his niece. We would hang out in the Brooklyn apartment that I own. We would talk about our family’s history of mental illness (lentil illness), and how we aren’t broken—”that we’re all just trying to maintain, and we’ve each got our own way of doing it.”

But 41 year-old Ben would also tell him of a recent revelation that 12 year-old Ben would be better off knowing: when 41 year-old Ben was prescribed Lamictal & Wellbutrin and then stopped smoking weed… the storm cloud that has hung over him most of his life finally lifted. The moodiness—intense bouts of hypomanic creative energy followed by weeks of debilitating depression—this unpredictable suffering was all part of an artistic temperament often associated with bipolar 2 disorder. I would tell him that although there’s been no official diagnosis, that the medicine working might as well suffice since our family history suggests undiagnosed lentil illness. But thankfully, this genetic inheritance isn’t mandatory because of modern psychiatry.

And most importantly, 12 year-old Ben-on-the-eve-of-your-Bar Mitzvah, in same way that professionalism is a muscle developed over time, so is gratitude.

Weed and other drugs can be useful if you are miserable. They can open the door to the feeling of gratitude; but when you have finally dealt with your misery with all of the tools available to you—gratitude by gratitude, prescription by prescription—you don’t need to chase that ecstatic experience that promises to fix you.† You can enjoy your ordinary life as it is.

You can finally close that umbrella.

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†Infrequent and appropriate indulgence of LSD and Psilocybin can be an excellent perceptual “tune-up” so please do enjoy yourself. Remember, you can always take more, you can never take less. And the most important thing: set and setting—your mindset and your environment—are the keys to a good trip.

Graeber challenges the deeply held moral idea that debts must always be repaid by tracing debt back to a time before money existed. His anthropological research shows that the common story we’re told—that money emerged from primitive barter—is basically a fairy tale. Barter requires an absurdly inefficient double coincidence: I have exactly what you want, you have exactly what I want, and we meet at the right moment. That’s not how humans actually lived.

Instead, Graeber points to archaeological evidence like Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets and Incan quipu knot records, which show early economies operating on credit systems within communities. People didn’t exchange things instantly or equally. They ran tabs. You took what you needed, and over time—often at harvest—you’d repay in something of value to the other person. The system worked because it was embedded in ongoing relationships and unspoken mutual aid. Debt was social, not transactional.

Money—actual coins—enters the story much later like a sneaky little motherfucker. Graeber argues that coinage emerges alongside war. When tribes went to battle and needed mercenaries from outside their community, relationships weren’t enough. You needed a portable token that could motivate strangers who would fight and then come and go as they pleased. Money solved that problem. And with it, debt detached from human relationships and became numerical, impersonal, and enforceable by violence.

From there, debt becomes moralized. You get ideas like: you owe your life, you must repay your debt to society, you deserve suffering because you failed to pay. These ideas underpin slavery, prisons, and modern finance. Debt stops being a relationship and becomes a judgment—a way to exert power and justify abuse.

But in Chapter 5, Graeber points to something even older than credit or debt: the gift. Gift economies aren’t about repayment or equivalence. Gifts aren’t paid back in kind—they’re meant to bind people together. They create relationship rather than closing it out. “The true measure of character is how you treat the person who can do nothing for you.”

Debt, by contrast, usually operates between strangers or enemies and is designed either to end the relationship cleanly—or to dominate it.

After the gift, credit and debt; cash is the final abstraction. The cash transaction lets us pretend no one owes anyone anything ever again. It’s that dude from Raya who treats the waiter like shit but leaves a big tip, and expects sex because he bought dinner. And then ghosts you.

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Once you see debt this way, it’s impossible not to see it everywhere—especially in art.

Raise your hand if you’ve experienced the pride of a creative accomplishment crater due to insufficient credit.

Now raise your hand if you’ve seen creative relationships crumble under a credit dispute.

Hands up if you ever kept an internal ledger of who contributed what to a project and felt resentful about a deficit—when you worked harder but received equal credit with a collaborator who barely lifted a finger, and you wasted precious time you’ll never get back resenting them.

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For me, determining and demanding proper credit is the succubus of my enjoyment of the artistic process. It’s the point at which the appreciation of the artistic endeavor for the very act in itself — being present in the pleasures and challenges of creation — becomes suffering. When harmonious energetic expansion contracts into lonely egoic separateness.

It’s the point where I give more investment to the external opinions of others—to applause, to likes—than to my own internal investment of expressing my experience. Of course, the applause always feels worth it at the time, like any other high. But like most highs, it leaves me wanting more. From my first time onstage, probably even before, I built an entire life around chasing the diminishing high of applause.

However, credit is the currency on which the entertainment industry is based. In my experience, I have seen many counterfeiters of credit; and I have seen many of them succeed, at least monetarily, over and over again. They get the Cookie and the everyone else settles for the crumbs. And I have seen the embitterment of those who are made to survive on the crumbs. What was once the invigorating innocence of creative expression sours into power struggle.

The Cookie is power. You can buy a Cookie with a ghostwriter. You can buy social media Cookies instead of slowly building with quality content. You can buy your spot on the New York Times Bestseller Cookie by bulk-ordering your own book. Now you can even buy a Cookie from the President. With enough clout, you can collect all of the Cookies without lifting a finger.

So if this currency is so easily counterfeited and if so many of us know about the transaction and essentially sign up for this discrepancy, why do we continue to attach our economical and psychological worth to the cookie—carrying around these resentments knowing the game is rigged?

It’s an easy answer: receiving appreciation for our effort feels just. In a world full of invoices, we are hard-wired for the repayment of the debt for our efforts.

But perhaps, as Graeber points out, we are more deeply wired for the gift. There’s a reason that one’s talent is called their gift. At its purest, art is our gift to the world that amplifies our appreciation for the gift of life. It is soul. And conversely, to quote Quincy Jones, “God walks out of the room when you’re thinking about money.” And this very wealthy pop music mogul also noted, “I follow the groove, and money always follows.” He went on to reveal who shot JFK.

Not to say that soulless, egotistical content doesn’t make the rounds and monopolize our attention—but for the most part, it’s in service of disassociating from our own lives, giving the egoist more Cookies, and is easily forgotten.

I can name episodes of my High Maintenance wherein I was fighting for Cookies, for recognition of my effort for which I was already getting most of the credit—extra credit. Guess what: those episodes are my least favorite. Nobody ever singles them out, except as the weakest.

My favorite episode of High Maintenance is from season four, episode two. It’s called TRICK. It was deftly written by Isaac Oliver and expertly directed by Katja Blichfeld. It is beautifully acted by Abigail Benson, Avery Monsen, Calvin Leon Smith and Jay Jurden. And the producers and crew members brought their very best. I didn’t have much to do with it. My only contribution (besides my brief unremarkable performance) was the name of the episode. I loved this episode, in part, because credit didn’t matter.

I must say though, the title TRICK is a brilliant double entendre for a sex worker and magician ... Isn’t it? RIGHT? Don’t YOU think?

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When I think back to the time in my life when credit didn’t matter to me, I remember playing by myself in our childhood family room. I would build castles and cities out of wooden blocks or legos that set the stage for an epic narratives that would leave the city in rubble—my childhood sand mandala. This solely-created drama was for an audience of one, without another witness to applaud my imagination. I enjoyed a few blessed years of this. Proof positive that the creative act in itself can be enough.

I notice writers on substack with a similar situation. They write and write without any followers reading—without witnesses to applaud their creativity. Their gift to the world is unconditional. They continue offering their gift to those that can do nothing for them. These are the unsung heroes of Substack.

The unsung hero of this particular Substack, and so much of how I am reforming artistically, is my partner . It was her idea that I come here to express myself and to find a way to release the projects I have been making these last five years out into the world. But it goes so much deeper than that—Jess is the truest and purest embodiment of the gift that I have ever known. She is most well-known for her gift for feeding people, the most fundamental binder of relationships; but her beauty of her gifts go so much deeper, both in terms of material and soul. She helps someone because they’re there. Her favors aren’t calculated. She naturally demonstrates care without expectation of repayment. And at the same time, she reveres the gift of life without bitterness for her more-often-than-not unreciprocated acts of kindness. She spots the most beautiful pebbles on the beach and detects the most subtle flavors in produce. She has put up with SO MUCH BULLSHIT from me and offered me so much love despite my self-sabotaging belief that I haven’t earned or deserved her love, and that I owe her so much more. Her constant love, slowly slowly, has has eroded that conditioning of “earning” and “deserving” and “owing,” and I melt into her like a chocolate chip.

While it’s impossible to know what my involuntary feelings about my life will be when I’m on my deathbed, I highly doubt that I will be concerned about how my life’s work was received and how much credit I got for it. I hope that I will look back on the lived experiences of making the work — the inside jokes with collaborators, the takes that were left on the cutting room floor, the punchy night shoots where everyone got slap happy. In contrast, the placard on my WGA award fell off a long time ago, and I’ve never bothered to glue it back on.

Credits begin and end a movie, but I don’t go to the movies for the credits. I go for all of the stuff in between. And if I ever stick around to watch the credits, it’s so I can see if my friends may have worked on the project, so I can reach out to them after to congratulate them. It’s an excuse to make a connection.

Low Maintenance on its surface seems to be about my leaving weed behind, but it’s deeper than that. It’s about leaving behind those things that no longer serve me—cookies. The Cookie once served me. Big time. It gave me a livelihood that affords me time to make art. And nasty disputes over it have also threatened or flat out ruined some of my most treasured relationships. I suffered a brutal noodle when the gift of creation became a courtroom demanding reparations to my ego.

If Graeber were alive today, he might have agreed that artistic credit functions like debt, applause becomes currency, recognition becomes repayment, and lack of credit becomes moral injury. It’s not that you’re mad because someone got credit, it’s that you’re suffering because your nervous system thinks a moral debt went unpaid. But he noted that, “Debt is the perversion of a promise.” The Universe promises you the gift of life. It does not hold you in arrears.

So I offer this to the reader and to myself: Just let it go.

Reject All Cookies ✅

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And yet another still: when I’m trying not to smoke, I’m apprehensive to hang out with those friends, because I know I will smoke. And I do.

What can I say? I just can…

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And at the time of writing this, I am coming down from other drugs.

I realize the appeal of this substack is not dissimilar to Snoop’s social media post where he declared “I’m giving up smoke.” It gave me pause about my own habits, until it was revealed to be a marketing stunt for a smokeless fire pit. Even after I had been duped, I found myself wondering what Snoops experience of quitting weed might be like.

While probably not a marketing stunt, there’s an element to this Low Maintenance experiment’s focus on getting sober that may be running on the vicarious hope and/or encouragement from readers with their own addictions — a heartfelt identification with grasping for our best lives that are just out of our reach. And my posts thus far tend towards raw, open and confessional — circling around this thought I have had about myself for a long time, which I numb out with weed:

I’m a loser.

Yes I am a loser. And so are you.

The word loser is defined by loss. And so is life.

No matter how much we resist, the fact is that everyone is destined to lose it all. And coming to terms with being a loser is what makes life so precious.

Entire civilizations struggle with being losers — stories of the afterlife to soften the blow. The Egyptians built pyramids to cope. But no matter how enduring the structure, those will decay too. Beck seemed to understand this at a young age.

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Since I’ve engaged with Substack, I’ve felt like a loser slipping back into addictive, mindless “like”-checking that I thought I put behind me when I went off social media in 2019. But yesterday a person reached out to me to talk to them about their own drug-dealing centered show pitch based on their own true stories. I agreed to talk with them and gave my two cents about their project. As a thank you they gave me $1000 (100,000 cents) worth of psychedelics, packaged as if they were being sold in Erewhon. No weed though. Maybe they read my essays about my weed problem.

Some friends came over in the evening and we sampled the gamut. I stuck with the ketamine and the lowest dose of MDMA gummies. We made music at my apartment on my Teenage Engineering OP-XY before we went out dancing in Williamsburg. While dancing on drugs with friends I’ve known for over 20 years, I was having a genuinely good time. I was aware of my transgressions, but I didn’t really care for a few glorious hours. I just accepted that I was a loser. And it felt really great.

A few days before this, a friend and I accidentally coined the term “keep going loser” while stoned. We nearly peed ourselves laughing. And it stuck with me in the days since. While I danced, I kept saying to myself “keep going loser” over and over again. A paradox. A zen koan. A brain breaker. Equally encouraging and discouraging — a helping hand and a gut punch. But also, a refreshing frankness. It acknowledges that so many of us struggle with feeling like losers. It can be said in a winking way to suggest, “I see you struggling with the story you tell yourself about yourself. I get it. Keep going.” It acknowledges that we aren’t alone in our discomfort that, in spite of all of our wins, nature dictates our destiny to lose it all.

So I attempted an experiment with friends and strangers in the venue. I prefaced it by saying I was attempting a rhetorical experiment and it wasn’t what I actually thought about them. Once they consented to the experiment, I simply told them, “Keep Going Loser.” And almost every time, the person flinched.

Being called a loser has the same visceral power as words like FUCK. HITLER. JESUS. SEX. RAPE. TRUMP. They are words that when introduced to the conversation drastically change the energy. It’s like sitting a magnet next to a pile of metal filings.

But what I found fascinating is how no one reacted to “keep going.” To me, these sentiments carry equal positive and negative charge. But no one heard the keep going part. They focused on the loser part. They felt hurt even though they knew it was an experiment. We would discuss how they felt, and what I hoped to explore in this paradox. After all, aren’t losers exactly those who need to be told to keep going?

While enjoying my k hole on the couch, I kept thinking about whether I could turn “keep going loser” into a movement — to integrate our mandatory loss so that we may transcend its threat. It could be exposure therapy for shame, a joke that briefly frees us from self-surveillance, a refusal of delusional success narratives that inflate our self-importance over others. Being a loser as an act of surrender.

This inner collapse mirrors something bigger; because beyond losing as individuals, we are also losing collectively as humans.

Open a newspaper. We are losing. We’re fucking losers.

We are the drivers of the sixth mass extinction on Earth. We will lose it all someday, just like the dinosaurs. They were fucking losers too.

I kept workshopping my new slogan, feeling like I coined the next “FUCK” and imagined grandiose events with roaring stadiums where one by one people got up on stage and deleted their social media profiles. Finally, people were free to be losers. I felt powerful — even though I was sinking into this couch, I might actually be the most important thinker of this generation. Maybe I could save the world.

As the dance party wound down, the last person who agreed to the experiment — a woman who told me she could play Chopin for me were she not so drunk — also focused on the loser part of the statement. She stepped back and slurred, “I don’t see myself as a loser.” Her friend told me that she needed to hear the “keep going” part right now. And then I realized that I was not a genius, but actually an asshole on ketamine. I gave her a hug and told her I love Etude in E.

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My friends and I went back to my apartment where we again jammed on my OP-XY — I played a very soft and uplifting melody while they improvised lyrics wherein they, both men of color, jocularly pressured me to say another viscerally charged word that begins with n. And while no one said the full word, I appreciated the comedic juxtaposition of the uplifting music with the tension of whether the forbidden word would be uttered — it was funny for its transgressive tension, not its actual sentiment.

And somehow after that, we ended up listening to Peter Gabriel’s Games Without Frontiers, Mercy Street, and coincidentally Don’t Give Up (loser). We mused at the vulnerability of Gabriel’s voice, the sophistication of the key changes, and wondered what melancholy he was trying to express through his music. We finished our night with Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work,” telling the story of a man helplessly waiting for his child to be born; and we all became emotional considering how well Kate Bush was able to musically and lyrically depict the spiraling quality of male anxiety that comes from that helpless feeling. Especially at the end of the song when the music swirls into a crescendo of regret:

I should be crying, but I just can’t let it show

I should be hoping, but I can’t stop thinking

Of all the things I should’ve said

That I never said

All the things we should’ve done

That we never did

All the things I should’ve given

But I didn’t

Oh, darling, make it go

Make it go away

I will surely experience a crescendo of regrets tomorrow. I will tell my partner that I did all of these drugs despite knowing I have a problem. I will try to get rid of this mountain of drugs gifted to me because I played a drug dealer on TV.

Someone will need to tell this loser to keep going.

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I found Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme to be a conflict-building masterclass in the pursuit of that fix – this time around, the drug is being the best. It tonally echoes Uncut Gems, where the fiendish protagonist digs himself deepe…

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