The thing that changed my life the first time1 I tripped didn’t actually happen during the trip. It was something said to me before, by one of the more psychedically experienced people I would be tripping with. He said that for advice, he was going to tell me what he had told his partner before her first time: if things get too much, remember — this is happening because you ate poison.
Irrefutable logic, really. And very good advice for the occasion; I was able to use it to reassure myself, for example, when I got spooked by how tiny my hands were, or grew concerned that my brief confusion over whether we were strolling towards my old high school a river and several miles away indicated that I had fundamentally broken my brain’s ability to accurately perceive linear time or perhaps that time itself had fragmented. I ate poison, I reminded myself, sternly, euphorically, repeatedly, with relief; this is to be expected. But I only came to fully appreciate its power later. In the weeks after, when I started drifting towards the familiar lanes of despondence and inwardly directed vitriol, I would find myself thinking: Wait a second. Could this, too, be happening because I ate poison? Poison, of course, here being broadly defined, encompassing but not exclusively: sleeping too little, scrolling too much, insufficient protein, dehydration, days plural without meaningful human contact outside the tracks of my apartment or my work life, days plural without some kind of physical exertion, &c. Was I really walking as if compelled down a road I knew too well to a place I thought I had left behind for good years ago, or was I experiencing a kind of physico-psychic immune response to stuffing my brain full of bad takes from strangers that I encountered because I went looking at the bad takes factory?
Spoiler alert: it’s usually poison. Sometimes it’s poison I don’t really have a choice about — external stress, hormonal peaks, unexpected setbacks or disappointments — but more often, like, almost always, really, it’s my own dumbass fault. (And, irritatingly, I have found it reliably true that the relationship between external and internal poison is not additive but exponential: life’s slings and arrows feel much less tolerable if I am sitting around chipping away at my emotional equilibrium.) This has been freeing to recognize. It’s not a novel idea, or even particularly new to me; in Drinking: A Love Story, a book I have been obsessed with since I was fifteen, Caroline Knapp talks about HALT, the acronym AA uses to warn members against getting too hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, the body-mind states most prone to warping our judgment towards precisely those habits we are trying to avoid. But something about the poison idea has helped it stick.
I think what I like about this framing, what makes it so radically useful for my particular spiritual ailments, is that it does not require me to affirmatively believe anything other than the toxic soup that boils over periodically in my mind. Over the years, I have come to recognize that I harbor a deep, stubborn attachment to my worst possible image of myself, such that conscious attempts to alter my views have only ever caused me to tighten the vise-like grip with which I cling to them. But the idea of poison doesn’t ask me to change my mind. It doesn’t ask me to consider evidence to the contrary or concede that I am being irrational. It simply reminds me that my data may be contaminated, or tainted by confounding variables. Sure, sure, the notion whispers, not in the voice of a therapist but in that perhaps of a mentor guiding me to be more rigorous in my thinking, maybe you just are the suckiest person alive and doomed to roam the earth for decades haunted by the knowledge that for you, because of your unique flaws which everyone thinks it’s very embarrassing for you to have, joy will only ever be at best a distant memory that haunts you with the humiliating foolishness of having once believed it to be yours. That’s possible. But we can’t confirm the hypothesis until we rule out the low blood sugar issue. It doesn’t try to shift anything; it just cautions me to avoid being too hasty in my conclusions. I am allowed to return to the question later and maintain my previous assessment of the situation, if that’s what the evidence continues to suggest, but of course — of course! — I must only do so with the highest quality available evidence.
Maybe that’s why it works for me: the thing I really want when I get like this is to prove myself right. Thinking about the poison allows me to move in the direction of what I need (water, steps, closing the tab on the internet drama that has long since ceased to be fun) without abandoning what I crave (to accumulate unassailable proof of my own misshapen monstrosity). I am allowed, above all, the freedom to make up my own mind, which enables me to explore the possibilities without the old kneejerk defensiveness, my superego and my id temporarily in cahoots, colluding even as all the while each is sure the other is soon to be outsmarted. It’s a neat trick: if I only remember certain baseline principles of experimental integrity, the paths into and out of the darkness merge into one.
When I was saying goodbye to Tinyletter, I said that I wasn’t going to do anything crazy like writing once a week, but then after blogging for the first time in years I was like, wow, I forgot how much I love blogging! I do love blogging, and blogs. I always have. In ninth grade I used to sit at the desktop computer in our chilly basement at scroll through the musings of distant and unspectacular strangers with hyphenated domain names and constantly renovated CSS-based layouts that changed the shape of your cursor when you hovered over a link: a frequently hungover fashion student in London, a depressed Michelle Branch fan, an Australian graphic designer who had married at seventeen and once posted something to the effect of “if you can’t fart in front of each other, it’s not going to last.” I was going to say I have loved blogs almost as long as I have loved Drinking: A Love Story, but then I remembered the whole reason I read it was that it was recommended by Sars at Tomato Nation. Some of the blogs I read back then may have been good writers, but most I suspect were not; that wasn’t the source of the appeal. I’m not sure I know what was, honestly, why I was so riveted by tales of fights with parents and weekend adventures an ocean away with friends I’d never meet and in all likelihood would not have enjoyed hanging out with if I did. But I know I felt like I had found fucking Narnia.
Anyway. I’m not, in fact, deciding to make this a weekly endeavor, but I am considering that perhaps it would be both fun and healthy for me, a person extremely prone to all-or-nothing thinking, to choose, deliberately, that it does not have to be five thousand words on topics I have been pondering obsessively for three months or total radio silence. Perhaps I can have an outlet for when I want to do some writing, and also I can sometimes merely blog. One of the other guys I was with that day likened the attitude he recommends for embarking on such journeys to that you might adopt if you were going to a show with a friend by a band you’ve never listened to: you know you’re going to have a good time, but you don’t know what the music will sound like. I didn’t integrate that into my worldview the way I did with the poison thing, but it might not be a bad theme to consider as we settle into 2024. (This is also, for what it’s worth, a good way to go into Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), which I saw solely and a little apprehensively because a friend and I were having trouble making movie plans and he invited me to tag along on some pre-existing ones, and which I was pleasantly surprised to find myself swept away by, and at the end quite moved by as well.)
In that spirit, some supplemental materials regarding recent topics of interest:
I would be remiss not to mention that probably part of the reason I am so buzzed about making the internet blogs again is that Tess is blogging again, too.
Roger Ebert, Keva York, and Nathan Rabin on American Movie are all worth reading; Rabin is worth the click for the title of his piece alone.
Literally the day before I sent out an essay that more or less kicked off with how people underrate how funny Louise Glück is, I stumbled upon this New York Times review of her last book (which I totally missed the existence of, wow I feel like a poseur) which opens: “I once heard someone comment that no one ever talks about how funny Louise Glück is, which alarmed me so much that for some time afterward, I would randomly think quite loudly to myself, ‘That’s because she’s not.’” Which — okay, no offense to the failing New York Times, but quite honestly [Mike’s Mic talking about the Bratz movie voice] if you get it you get it if you don’t you don’t.
I also found this piece, written after her death by an admirer turned student turned friend, whose author felt compelled, as I did, to foreground the literal objective fact that sometimes — not always! no one said always! — she was funny. SO THERE.
I found both of those because I was trying to find proof of something I read maybe on her Wikipedia page, which was the claim that “October” was written as a response to 9/11. I couldn’t find this claim substantiated in any kind of explicit way, but the timing of its first appearance (a year after 9/11) is indeed suggestive, particularly combined with the fact that it was initially published as a standalone chapbook before being folded into her later collection Averno — and, of course, its actual content. Which… is it weird to say that kind of humanized her for me? She has been such an important part of my life for so long, and the nature of her actual work is that if you connect with it she does seem so strongly to speak with the voice of an oracle directly channeling some kind of atavistic human truth, that it did become a little easier to envision her as a flesh-and-blood person when I learned that (perhaps) she too was once, like so many, simply out there Making Choices in Bush’s America.
In the Mike’s Mic Bratz movie video, if I’m remembering right, he actually does not mention my favorite line in that very bad movie, which is when the girls are fighting and the poor daughter of the single mom says to the snotty rich girl, “At least we don’t buy friends with our daddy’s bank account!” and the snotty rich girl shoots back, “Only because you don’t HAVE a dad! OR a bank account!”
Like this was a movie for children, there was really no reason to go so hard…
My favorite Taylor Swift content of 2023 or indeed any other year comes from the unbelievably galaxy brained Succession tomgreg video girlies, whose output is truly… I don’t know. I don’t know what to call it. I don’t know that we as a species have words in any of our languages that do it justice. Unhinged? Sure. Art? Absolutely. Camp? Perhaps. The best thing that I watched on Al Gore’s internet all of last year is this painstakingly narrativized fanvid set to “Mastermind,” and it’s only partly amazing because of the unbelievably funny choice to cast Greg, who famously has rocks in his head, as the titular mastermind:
Today’s picture arrives by way of this delightful JSTOR Daily round-up of female mycologists and their illustrations.
Please do remember that if you ever like something that you watched or read because I told you to, you are legally obligated to let me know through whichever medium is most convenient for you (comments, replies to these emails, text messages if we are personal friends, uhh I guess Letterboxd replies at this same user name if you feel really enthused about that platform for some reason? I’m running out of options as a person who refuses to join the social media apps people actually use). Thank you for being here, and for following the law.
Of, like, two.
this was how i found out that tess is blogging again and i am DELIGHTED (and i also love your writing too)