The beginning of this year started with optimism, elation of my brain’s recovery from weed abuse and the positive attention gained from my essays about it. But towards the end of February, the pink cloud faded and my subscribership plateaued. I was back to feeling lost again, 3 years unemployed, listening to The Daily podcast when I woke up, brain-rotting until afternoon. This feeling compounded when I blew it yet again objectifying a spiritual community.
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.
“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?
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.
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.
I apologize to those offended by the use of the r-word. It is not my intention to offend anyone, but I chose to exercise poetic license to get my point across. I am aware that some of you will be turned off and unsubscribe, but it is the honest truth of how I was regarding myself in that moment. Perhaps its use will eclipse the underlying message of my essay, or perhaps you will be able to accept me, warts and all. I won’t attempt to defend my use of it in the comments I will surely get regarding this, but please consider sending a message instead if you feel I really need to edit my essay for the betterment of society, and we can discuss.
