Why I Don't Use Psychedelics

I'm a supporter, and I've been there, but now I find psychedelics to be...less interesting. There are many ways to sweet cosmicity⁠—and for me, nature is the first and ultimate inspiration.

I always thought of myself as a fan of altered states, but even as a lifelong drinker and early adopter of just about everything I could get my hands on, I noticed long ago that if the conversation turns to getting high, I lose interest after about twelve seconds. I think now that this is one of the first ways that my intuition tried to speak up about my own addictive and maladaptive habits—I liked drinking and doing drugs, but I didn’t like talking about drinking and doing drugs. Eventually, I found my way to changing and healing my relationship with alcohol, one of the main reasons being that I was so terminally bored with its effects. In fact, I’d say that now I find most mind-altering substances to be pretty boring too. Overall, I’m much more interested in my own—and your—real life experiences.

Especially with interest in the psychedelic experience higher than ever, and because it’s come to mind several times lately for me, I feel that it could be timely to share some of my own history, and a bit of a counterpoint to the flood of emergent—and mostly quite justified—enthusiasm about the mind-expanding possibilities of psychedelia. Everyone’s spiritual prescription is different, and although they were part of my path over the years, there’s no single answer for anyone.

At this point it’s inescapably clear that psychedelics can offer the potential to access states of consciousness that few of us have the opportunity to experience in any other way, and that these experiences can be legitimately mind expanding and even, for some, deeply healing. All sorts of psychedelics are beginning to be used in therapeutic settings, reviving efforts that began decades ago to bring these plants and compounds into the formulary of modern wellness and medicine.

It’s worth noting at this point that the word “psychedelic” is getting a bit worn. All of what tends to get lumped together under that umbrella encompasses a very wide range of substances, effects and experiences, ranging from generally very pleasant and just-more-then-slightly-trippy love drugs to “heroic” doses of very powerfully mind-altering hallucinogens—and many things in between and otherwise. Also, while the word “psychedelic” is still most often associated with certain substances that can often have unusual perceptual and visual effects, it is more properly understood in line with the meaning of the original coinage—something like ’mind expanding’—and not necessarily hallucinatory per se. Overall, it’s definitely time to move past the emphasis on the drugs and shift our focus to the experiences. Because of these past associations, the alternative term “entheogen” is now becoming used more often, in part because it includes reference to the intention of a spiritual purpose. To sum that up, a more up-to-date understanding of the ’psychedelic experience’ would be much less about the technicolor enhancement of the Lazerium production of Dark Side of the Moon that I experienced so many times as a young person and much more about opening a channel to the subconscious that might otherwise be totally unavailable—and doing so with great care.

All of that said, I think it’s fantastic that psychedelics—or entheogens—are gradually being decriminalized, legalized and normalized. I think it’s amazing that we now have access to ketamine therapy for depression, that you can do MDMA with your therapist to process trauma, and that we can buy chocolates infused with perfectly-measured dosages of psilocybe cubensis by mail. I love that my Venice barbershop guy wants to turn me on to 5-MeO-DMT so that I can experience death without actually dying, even though, I have to say, even just getting a haircut on Lincoln Avenue there on the west side of LA will pretty much turn you on to what it feels like to die, whether or not you choose to do the toad work while you’re in the neighborhood.

I’m a supporter. I really am. I think we should all be glad that psychedelics are coming out of the closet. There are a lot of folks out there who would gain a lot from a properly designed and well-intentioned psychedelic experience of one sort or another. And yet… I’m here to suggest that you might not want to join the rush to try to expand your mind in this particular way. Not that you shouldn’t consider it—just that, if you’re considering doing something, that it makes sense to also fully consider the possibility of not opening this channel, and that there are other modes of growth and self-expansion that can yield similarly dramatic results.

My own experience with psychedelics began—as with my experience with alcohol—at the age of ten or eleven. Too early. Way too damn early—in both cases—but it does mean that I have a long history to draw upon. As did most of my peers of that era, I did magic mushrooms and LSD many times in my teenage years, and then far less often once I was out of high school. I always had a great time on mushrooms, but LSD was definitely more of a mixed bag, and frankly, it was often just too strong. Too strong of a dose, too strong of a drug—I don’t know, but man, really, my experience was that acid is strong stuff, no way around it. I had a small number of pleasant recreational experiences with MDMA over the intervening years, one serious LSD trip in my thirties, and then, much more recently, one positive and yet only very moderately enlightening ayahuasca ceremony, and a few west-coast journey-parties with the old ’hippie flip’ double of Ecstacy and psilocybin, which were all good, really, aside from the last, which I describe in more detail below. Clearly, there are lots of people with lots more experience than I have, and I’m not claiming any sort of hugely deep expertise here, but I have been down for a more than few dives in the Yellow Submarine.

What’s prompted me to write about this now have been my most recent experiences, which I suppose you could say have been particularly enlightening—just perhaps not in the way that you would expect.

The first of these was an evening where I joined a group for the aforementioned heart & soul combo, usually a fairly reliable recipe for an enjoyable and perhaps somehow enlightening evening journey. This last time though, what I got was mostly a headache. It wasn’t the fault of the gear—it was me. I didn’t exactly have a bad time, and…nothing dramatic, but the fact is that I just didn’t really have much of any particular time aside from feeling sort of trippy for several hours, and all the while my body was telling me clearly enough that perhaps I’d had enough, at least right then and there.

The second instance that comes to mind was a New Years Day not long ago. I was out at one of those incredible beaches here on the northern California coast where the view stretches north and south for miles along deserted sand to windswept bluffs and sparkling cerulean sea. As I reached the end of the three-mile walk to the point with my loving partner of the time, I remembered that I’d tucked a little bit of mushroom-enhanced chocolate away in my backpack, and the high school kid in me kicked in, big time. I had the drugs! Drugs are cool, girls like cool, drugs make you cool—and I have the drugs, so, let’s do the drugs! I’m 52 and part of me still wants to be the cool kid with the drugs, y’know, and that same kid also has a very strong impulse to do the drugs. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, right?

We sat there in the dunes, basking in the pristine sunshine of a bluebird day at Drakes Bay, watching the outgoing tide form swirls and whirlpools in the current and the seabirds wheel and caw, and we sliced off and ate just the tiniest little piece of that special chocolate. Really, all we did was a microdose—and I mean really, a very micro dose, just a sliver, like around a fifth of a gram, maybe less, and pretty much right away, it was kinda weird.

I just felt off. I felt anxious and uncomfortable. My outer jaw muscles were tighter than normal. I felt a little furry around the eyes. The sky seemed too bright, a knot began to form in my stomach, and I felt a faint but persistent headache. Some people do experience some nausea with some psychedelic substances, but I never had before. In fact, I’d always enjoyed the taste of psilocybin mushrooms and how they felt in my stomach—and yet there I was at the beach on a dose that was so tiny as to be barely perceptible…aside from the quite noticeably unpleasant physical sensations. I couldn’t wait for it to be over—and thankfully, because we had eaten so very little, in about 45 minutes the headache and feeling of sickness had subsided. We got back in the car, went to buy some oysters, and carried on with the first day of the year.

I’m no newbie to all of this, and I had used that same particular formulation several times in the past, both at higher doses and in micro- and what I call ’museum’ doses, all with predictable and positive effects. Of course, there are other variables that come into play—it might have had something to do with something I’d eaten earlier, or—more likely—the turmoil that was lurking beneath the surface of the relationship that I was in at the time. Either way, I couldn’t ignore what was a very clear message from my body. It wasn’t nearly as bad as what resulted from that plastic bag of fried rice I’d bought on a slow night train going north from Yangon, the whole thing rocking, rocking, rocking as the cars lurched their way towards Mandalay until I finally got sick enough to puke up my dinner—but still, definitely a gut feeling.

The last of these experiences was just recently. I was at a weekend workshop up in Montana (you heard it here first, Whitefish is the new Ojai)—a gathering where we’d all come to learn more about, you know, creative writing, human sexuality, and Brazilian jiujitsu—and, no surprise, when Saturday night rolled around, several little tins and bits of gold-foil-wrapped special chocolate appeared. There, with the offer on the table, I asked myself whether I needed or wanted to run this particular experiment on myself once again—and once again, my body provided the answer. Without any further thought, I found myself back outside by the fire, where I sat and watched a fat September full moon rise glacial through the trees until an eighty-car Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight rolled through, and sent me happy, to my rack.

These three experiences have made it pretty obvious to me that while I’ve had a number of very positive psychedelic experiences in the past, the reality is that in the present I don’t feel compelled to seek out more. In all three cases, my body spoke up clearly, both in terms of the literal sensations inside my body—known as interoception—and also in terms of how I felt to move away from the psychedelic experience—a clear expression of intuition manifesting as physical action.

So, obviously, I wasn’t feeling it—and I’ve learned that that’s very much reason enough, and to respect my intuition when it speaks up so clearly—but let’s dive a bit deeper into some of the reasons why.

First of all, psychedelics do feel like strong medicine, and I don’t want to be using any medicine—or anything else that alters my perception, my consciousness, or my self—on a frequent or ongoing basis. If you’re reading this, it’s likely enough that you’ve heard the old quote from Alan Watts—that is, “If you get the message, hang up the phone”—and that makes a lot of sense to me, even if the message that I got was more like what Flavor Flav said, which is that “I dialed 911 a long time ago.” I mean, I have had a lot of positive experiences with psychedelics…and I’ve also had some pretty negative ones. I had some bad trips, man—on strong doses of LSD in particular—and those tumultuous inner voyages felt enough like narrow escapes to make me still quite cautious about introducing such strong stuff into my system. Granted, I was dangerously young and incredibly naïve when I first used psychedelics, and that no doubt does have a lot to do with how those experiences impacted me, but even as an adult I was reminded of the simple truth that LSD just lasts too damn long. Time stretches out, and even a hour trapped within a further- inward-looping and highly accelerated spiral of altered introspection is just not something that I want to subject myself to anymore. I wanted off the ride well before it was over, just as I did when I was a kid in San Francisco on the bus across town, alone on a heavy dose of liquid acid, unable to even see where I was going.

It’s not just the bad trips, it’s the not-so-bad trips, and the lack of any sort of guarantee of a trip that’s more than just cool and colorful and totally-out-there—and, moreover, the question of why all those trips? As I’ve gotten older I’ve gotten, well, slower, but also more...sober, and although I hope that I’m not entirely “too old for drugs” like Louis CK, it’s true that my interest in mind-altering substances has continually decreased, to the point where my interest in not changing my natural state of mind is now as high as my interest in getting high once was. Back in high school, we used to laugh in between bong hits of Humbolt or Hawaiian about how impossible it would be to be “high on life,” in any way that could compare to how high we felt smoking that high-test weed. I never did become a frequent user of psychedelics or even of all that much cannabis in adult life, but I did persist in drinking more and more alcohol, starting from the age of ten or so until the point when I was nearly forty-eight when I realized that, for the most part, I’d outgrown the actual feeling of intoxication, not to mention the feeling that comes afterwards. I still don’t really say that I’m “sober” in the way that most mean straight-edge, not a drop, never ever, and I still do enjoy some edible THC now and then. All of the recent psychedelic experiences that I’m referring to here came in the years after I stopped drinking, but the fact is that I find that now, I am actually high enough on life at this point that I don’t feel the need to put much in the way of psychoactive additives into my body. I mean, really—these days, I don’t even drink coffee.

Needless to say, psychedelics are not physically addictive in the same way that alcohol, caffeine, nicotine and many other substances are, but anything that can produce such a strong effect on the psyche can be distracting from the realities of one’s life, and that distraction can itself be habit-forming. More importantly, psychedelics can have a uniquely disorganizing effect on the psyche that should give caution to anyone—like myself—who knows the feeling of having their books not all quite lined up on the shelf, or whose thoughts have had a tendency to rattle and hum and jabber and go off in a lot of directions at once, or who—again, like myself—is, or has been, depressed or is what I’ve come to understand as depressively organized⁠. Tim Ferriss, for one, who has been and remains an outspoken advocate of psychedelics in general, cautions that psychedelics are “contraindicated in many circumstances. …People who take them lightly generally get punished, and you can have long-term consequences that are very difficult to resolve.”⁠

Of course, part of the power of psychedelics lie in the fact that what can be disorganizing can also be re-organizing, and I have experienced both first-hand. Psychedelics are showing great promise in helping people who experience depression, and many other things, and I believe that there’s a lot of great work happening in therapeutic settings. However, as someone who has spent many years of my own life getting myself to a place where I can say that I’m not depressed or disorganized on a regular basis, I am particularly attentive to caring for my own positive stability of mind, and some of my own unsupervised and decidedly non-therapeutic experiences with LSD in particular have left me with some real scars, and with a very real respect for the destabilizing power of stronger psychedelics.

Just to be doubly clear, it’s not just that I’m afraid of going there, or of doing deep work, or of exploring within. I’ve done a lot of personal work, including, I don’t know, at least fifteen years of talk therapy and a lot of other explicit self-development work, as well as countless adventures and activities that have tested and expanded my limits and horizons. Not to mention all of this writing, which is my deepest and most personal effort to unpick the elemental weft of my psyche and lay it all out bare. I’m fond of saying that fear is just a message, and so, if anything, most of the time I make a practice of turning towards my fears.

And yet, again, I will say, I’m kindof afraid of that shit. I like being sane, and stable, and not feeling like my screws are loose. It’s one thing to go off on an adventure in search of something, with no idea what that something might be, and quite another to go actively looking for more contact with something specific that we’ve had a glimpse of. Both can be valid—and, it’s also quite reasonable to take the relative risks into account. With a specific purpose and intention—in general, I’m all for it. Going out hunting all wild and blind, on the other hand, guns loaded but for who-know-what, a cry-and-grope with twenty warm-hearted strangers, ten kajillion machine elves and maybe a near-death-experience to boot? Not for me, not right now.

I think the drugs do have a lot to say—and what they’ve been telling me lately is: stop looking here.

Speaking of adventure, aside from a lot of old-school talk therapy, it’s mainly adventure that got me through and past and beyond my orientation towards depression, and it’s also adventure, I would say, that has provided to me many of not just the moments of enlightenment that are often attributed to psychedelic experiences, but also the long term, lasting personal growth that led me to what feels like a more integrated and more interesting way of being myself—and also much more of my self.

In fact, what got me there wasn’t only “adventure,” that is, going purposefully into the unknown—although that is a very powerful paradigm to become familiar with—but also, more simply, sport. I say singular “sport,” and not “sports” because for me the plural form immediately conjures up balls and brightly colored outfits and whistles and, basically, the mechanics of it all, whereas “sport,” refers not only to all of the individual sports that are out there but to the entire cultural arena of intentional and yet ‘purposeless’ pursuits of physical exertion and skill. Interesting that we don’t even really ever say sport here in America—it’s more of a Britishism at this point. As is so often the case, language tells the tale, and this shows precisely how we’ve just about entirely lost track of the spiritual nature of sports and athleticism, which is a great shame, and part of what has left us looking for that fulfillment elsewhere.

I’ve written about how kitesurfing saved my life, and it’s true that all of these physical games that I’ve played along the way, from skateboarding to sailing and from paragliding to trail running, have all together formed one of the primary channels of my consciousness, and one very much as powerful, deep, valid, and transcendental as any of the others—which include, just off the top of my head, waking, sleep, dreaming, sex, intoxication, love, music, psychedelics, sport, adventure, meditation, connection, creativity, and, although I’m not there quite yet, quite certainly, death. All of these states of mind are very normal, and all of them are also extraordinary and transportive and enlightening and generative—and, an intrinsic part being human. In short, a perfect afternoon nap, some concentrated breath work or a long hike in the high Sierra could do you just as much good in terms of opening your mind and healing your trauma as any Saturday with a Santa Monica shaman named Scott. Here’s a little secret—all of these frequencies are the same. They’re all part of the same fabric of consciousness, all woven together, intersecting and available from many angles.

There’s no need for me to duplicate what’s been written about “flow⁠,” and I’m sure I’m not the first to say that the current focus on psychedelics as a powerful jolt to the psyche can seem like a bit of a shortcut. As much as psychedelics could be part of an alternative to Western approaches to wellness, the usage of psychedelics as “drugs“ and “medicine,” something that we “take” to achieve a particular effect without much effort on our own part, and that returns us to our prior state of ‘normal’ unharmed also seems like a very Western approach after all, and it’s not surprising that it appeals to the twenty-first century remote knowledge worker more readily than a longer journey of preparation, fitness, exertion, actually getting up and going somewhere and doing something, and then having to sort out and put away all of that expensive equipment afterwards.

Flow doesn’t just have real benefits—it’s actually the state of mind and being that we used to be in all the freaking time. Not just during exercise and hunting, but just about every waking moment of every day—and, for that matter, while asleep at night too. For us tail-less humans today, getting into flow requires real challenge, and although what we get from ingesting psychedelic substances can feel like flow, it’s more of a image of flow, a simulation, a show. We get to see what it feels like, but then we’re out of it again, back to the grind. It’s a different thing. It’s a shortcut—and it can be a useful shortcut, but it doesn’t have the same intrinsic benefits as a long-term practice that leads to flow becoming part of one’s life on a regular basis.

That’s not to say that I haven’t experienced lasting benefits from psychedelics myself. I have. I’d say that, for one, I enjoy an expanded sense of openness, perception and beauty that does seem to me to be in large part an artifact of my psychedelic experiences. There’s also a lightness, a sense of humor, of laughing at the very-charming absurdity of everything, really, and it feels like I learned that in no small part from all of those Friday nights out tripping balls and laughing our heads off, sixty feet up in that secret treehouse in the Presidio as a teenager. I’d say too, that I’ve had some insights in psychedelic states that I think have helped to empathize and connect more deeply with other people. Most of all, psychedelics gave me a view behind the curtain, and showed me the expansiveness, connectedness and colorfulness of the world in way that makes both the infinite fractal multi-dimensionality and the beyond-galactic scale of everyday existence apparent—and that stayed with me. I know there’s a lot more to the world than we can normally see, and I’m very grateful for the psychedelic experiences that showed me how everything is “more than real.⁠”

Unlike all of those other states of being that I cited above, being radically altered by psychoactive compounds is not something that we can do or be on an ongoing, or even a very frequent basis, while we can meditate, be creative, do sport, have sex, sleep, dream, and be in connection with others…more or less constantly. Sport and adventure—physical movement in the outdoors, and the purposeful pursuit of the unknown—are part of my life deeply enough that they feel inseparable from my life. I suppose many psychonauts would say the same about their ongoing relationship with mind-altering substances, just as many indigenous people might say the same about their lifelong use of entheogens—but I didn’t grow up being turned on to ayahuasca as a child. Abraham Maslow said that when we “see the world in peak experience, in a more pure form, this can be remembered,”⁠ and that “people who do remember tend to be changed.” All sorts of peak experiences have changed me, including psychedelic experiences, but I have to say that those peak experiences that I find repeatedly returning to mind over the years are not ones that involve psychedelics.

Perhaps it just comes down to the fact that psychedelics aren’t part of my personal tradition in the same way as outdoor adventure, but it’s also important to remember that despite all the excitement around psychedelics right now, you can have a powerful, mystical, life-changing, and truly spiritual experience in and through any of these channels, and probably, in particular, in the outdoors. Read Emerson, Muir, Jung, Snyder, or, for that matter, Kim Stanley Robinson, whose name might ring a bell as the instantly-recognizable author of the Red Mars trilogy and the person who introduced the concept of terraforming to our popular consciousness, but who also happens to be a lifelong Sierra backpacker who has spent more time in the high mountains of California than I could ever hope to. His recent book, The High Sierra: A Love Story is indeed just that, and he does a positively beautiful job of illustrating just how face-meltingly mind-blowing time spent in the “God Zone” up there is—and how that feeling and the opening that it inspires stays with you—forever. There are no drugs to wear off or to integrate, just pure granite, once buried deep within the earth as plutonic batholith and now emerged as thousands of mountain cathedrals, complete with cascading symphonic springs, hanging chandeliers, metamorphic intrusions, and direct access to the farthest reaches of the entire galaxy, right there in front of your funny little ape face, every summer night.

These Western terms like “trip“ and “journey” also remind me of how Americans in particular tend towards granting the status of reality to entertainment and rides. My favorite example is that perennial family ’adventure’ activity: zip-lining. People—a zip line is a ride, not a sport, and certainly not in any way an adventure, despite what the website might say. It’s something that you stand in line for and get attached to, and by the time you whizz between whichever two large trees the wire has been strung across, your gap-toothed grin has been captured and processed and downloaded to your phone in ready-for-Insta sequences, and you are simply plopped back on the ground, still bloated, still tired, still yearning for escape.

Anything that you’re strapped to and tossed out of or towed up or around without any training required—like tandem skydiving, parasailing, bungee jumping, tubing, or the Tilt-O-Whirl—just to name a few—these are all rides, and I have to say that reading back that list of them brings to mind the sudden, dramatic, and in many ways artificial leap into another interesting, unusual and also often shocking world, but still just a ride—that is, in many ways, the psychedelic experience.

Another way in which passive extreme rides and psychedelics are similar is in that it’s just a bit too easy to say that something meaningful has happened, and too easy to claim credit for it oneself. Not to say that meaningful things don’t happen on the Puke-O-Tron at the county fair, but if I get off that ride or come back from that special weekend with the special feeling that everything has suddenly changed forever, just by way of downing that special dose, I just might be bypassing real growth, just as if I got dragged off to “go skydiving” and ended up strapped to some Joey with a pair of two-dollar plastic goggles and, having returned safely to Earth, declared that I’d seen God up there. Now, some do, some do see God up there!—and real growth does happen, even from tandem skydiving. I don’t mean to write off psychedelics as a means towards mind expansion, but when I honestly reflect on my own experiences, I’m conscious of wanting something to happen to me, to be released or delivered from whatever state of self I was in, without really having earned my way there. So many of us are looking for solutions to the problem of modern life, and psychedelics can seem like what might be a free ride right outta that plain grey hell. The thing is, although there is some magic in these substances, there is also something untrue, and very dangerous about wanting or expecting something to happen for free, especially when that something is operating directly upon the levers of your innermost psyche.

However you get there, real growth doesn’t come for free—and, just like Burning Man in fact, all of this modern psychedelic work has also gotten to be a bit spendy. I used to buy an gallon-sized ziplock bag of mushrooms for less than hundred bucks and carry it around in my high school backpack for weeks. Nowadays a groovy overnight psychedelic retreat will set you back a half a grand or so. I’m not saying that’s not a fair price for what’s being offered, which is not just a nice place for the party but also some well-intentioned (if not necessarily all that well trained) adults in the room who aren’t also ingesting—and you do get chicken soup and pancakes as part of the deal—but, that’s a lot of dough, any way you slice it, and it’s a one-shot deal. Put that cash towards a nice pair of boots and a lightweight backpack—or an airline ticket for that matter—and they’ll take you hundreds of miles and the experiences will be with you for years and years.

In case it’s not obvious by now, it’s fair to say that I am a bit of a contrarian. I enjoy being the guy who zags left when everyone else is zigging right—and, for that matter, the guy who stays in town or heads off on his own lonesome road when everyone else is caught up in a huge commuter clusterfuck on their way to the Black Rock Desert. It’s not that I have anything against psychedelics overall. Almost everyone that I know these days has benefited from their experiences with psychedelics, and I know some people that have turned their lives around in very significant ways in large part due to their work with psychedelic medicines. I’m a supporter of the explosion of awareness and use of psychedelics, both recreationally and therapeutically—and, I’m suspicious of crowds. I know from my experience navigating the world that my intuitive sense to avoid places that I’ve heard other people mention too often has served me incredibly well, and my sense now is that psychedelics are getting just a bit too popular. We’re very much at the top of the hype cycle right now, and some of the primary enthusiasts and researchers are walking back their early enthusiasm for psychedelics and taking great pains to re-emphasize that “the drugs themselves are not the key.⁠ Just as an aside, a dear friend of mine who trained as a naturopathic doctor pointed out that part of the green-washing around psychedelics has been to adopt the term “plant medicine,” as if to signify that all psychedelics are ‘just plants,’ and, also, “medicine.” This borrowing not only paints psychedelics into sort of a happy little Bob Ross scene, all sun-lit and serene, but also discounts the entire, much broader field of medicine using plants that aren’t so dramatically psychoactive. Not to mention: mushrooms aren’t even plants!

So I just want to say, before you buy that Golden Ticket, stop and ask yourself, what are you looking for, and how are you going to get there? FOMO is part of the human experience now more than ever because of our ability to see so incredibly many possibilities for ourselves, and you will always be missing out on most of what is flowing through nearly eight billion other consciousnesses, but what you miss out on is always less than your own glowing, sweet “cosmicity⁠,” as Kim-Stan puts it.

Consider going your own way, wherever that leads you. Consider finding your own colors. Your own God. You don't necessarily need to go searching in the psychedelic world, even if everyone else seems to be going there. If you do, know that it’s probably best as something that one learns to move with—and then moves through, and moves on from. Don’t be a follower. Find what moves you.

As for me, I’ve been there, I found what I needed, and at least right now, I’m not going back.

I’ve recorded voiceover for this piece using this new tool called Descript. I love doing audio, it’s great practice for the emerging performer in me (I’m still very much working on that!)—and, it takes a lot of time and effort. If you enjoy the audio and want to support me in doing more of that, please leave a comment at the bottom of the page, and, if you can, become a paying subscriber.

Further Reading

• Gavin McClurg and James “Kiwi” Oroc on the Cloudbase Mayhem podcast

• Kim Stanley Robinson, The High Sierra: A Love Story

• You might enjoy some of my other writing on the subjects of nature, sports, drugs, alcohol, addiction, and depression, as well as this interview:

I’d love to hear from you!

1. What’s your own experience with psychedelics? Good, bad, intentional, accidental, long ago, recent?

2. Are you an outdoors-person — and, if so, how does your time in nature compare to the psychedelic experience, both viscerally and in terms of long-term effects?

3. Are you a Kim-Stan fan? What’s your favorite sci-fi book?

4. Does your name happen to be Scott? If so, sorry, nothing person, but I have to say, Scott is just not a good name in my world.

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