I like to play little games with myself.

One involves my habit of firing off some imprudent bullshit on Twitter before exhausting my body with strenuous exercise. Once sufficiently caffeinated, as I am wont to be before any task, I tweet some nonsense, turn my phone off, hit a pilates class, and make that reformer my bitch until my limbs are shaking and I can’t see straight. The reward for my efforts is the deluge of inflammatory responses to my rage baiting. It pairs beautifully with the dopaminergic high I already enjoy post-workout.

My most recent much ado about nothing was the following:

My rage baiting is unintentional 90% of the time, I swear.

Maybe 85%.

I’m new to the joys of rage baiting, having lived much of my life as a voyeur, but I’m having a great time. The response to the tweet was a clean split: those who embraced the pervert and therefore the artist within, and those who were TRIGGERED. I hold a special place in my heart for the latter cohort, because I was once them; impotent in several crucial areas of my creative life, and deathly afraid that you might notice.

Outrage is a vivid, intoxicating distraction from the cavernous space within where eros is meant to reside. Those whose feathers I ruffled were not angry because they truly believe perversion is antithetical to good art making, but because they experienced a flash of recognition of the pervert in themselves and felt deeply ashamed.

The good news is that shame, once integrated, is arguably the most powerful tool for self-actualization as an artist, lover, and person. I get the pleasure of stating this with confidence because shame is my mother tongue. I was born fluent. My desires have at times felt so shameful that they appeared to rot me from the inside out. But here’s what so few but the initiated will tell you about shame: it is not the opposite of pride. Nor is it the roadblock to creation. It is the raw material. The aggregate that makes the asphalt. Sancta nigredo.

Everything is grist for the mill, and shame has to get crushed to dust before it can transmute. You cannot skip it. You cannot bypass the humiliation of wanting what you want and publicly going after it (with some obvious exceptions1). My great teacher Ram Dass would often tell us, “You’re going to get what you want.” It’s a guarantee. So you’d better get very clear about what you want, and fast.

I would bet money that the artists you admire most are not the ones who “conquered” their shame, or worse yet, never felt it at all.

They’re the ones who ate it, metabolized it, and allowed it to integrate into their entire being. Michael Jackson, Joan Didion, Federico Fellini, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Allen Ginsberg, Miley Cyrus, David Lynch, Prince, Lana Del Rey are all wonderful examples of this alchemical process made manifest.

The pervert and the artist share in the following ritual: when told to turn away from their greatest shame, they instead look longer, deeper, harder.

They stare into it until it burns a relief in their retina, like looking too long at the sun.

I am grateful to report that writer’s block rarely rears its head in my life these days, so I was looking forward to staring into the eye of The Pervert™. Though I was teeming with ideas for this essay after wrapping Reading Room III, I found myself staring at a blank Google Doc for days on end.

Why could this be? What exactly is this aversion to perversion that still seems to issue a gag order?

What Makes A Pervert?

To begin to unravel the conceptual robe of the pervert, we first need a working definition of the term. Merriam-Webster essentially defines “pervert” as one of two things: someone who turns away from what is morally good, or someone who turns away from what the normies are doing… a commodious distinction to say the least:

The Latin word pervertere means to turn completely.

Per: thoroughly. Vertere: to turn.

The original definition allowed for a river to be perverted. One could pervert a legal argument, a page, and a dance partner. A soul, much to the chagrin of the Catholic church, could be perverted away from God, which is how the word lived most of its early life. Priests and judges would use the term to describe a deviation from the intended spiritual course.

For half a millennium, give or take, a pervert was an apostate. Any sexual entendre doesn’t arrive until 1886, when Krafft-Ebing publishes Psychopathia Sexualis, and the medical establishment is scrambling for clinical vocabulary to define sexual desire that deviates from the reproductive norm. The quacks of yore borrowed perversion from the theological lexicon because the underlying logic was identical. There was an intended course: procreation, God’s design. Anything that turned away from it was a Big No No. Sin mutated into a sub-clinical diagnosis, and the primary authority over our weirdos of the world rotated from priest to psychiatrist.

In 1905, Freud published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, in which he suggested that perversion is the rule in nature, not the exception. He defined infant sexuality as polymorphously perverse, meaning every human being starts as a pervert with their desire flowing omnidirectionally. “Normal,” i.e. culturally acceptable sexuality, is, so he claimed, just perversion that’s been disciplined into a narrow channel. The natural state of desire is to flow everywhere, toward everything, in every direction. Much of Freud’s work feels like his own copemaxxing to me, but perversion being the rule rather than the exception feels intuitively true. The natural state of desire, jing, shakti is to flow like water until contained.

Bonobos resolve conflict through sex; any combination of genders, any time, for any reason. Dolphins engage in recreational sex including same-sex activity and penetration of each other’s blowholes. Spotted hyenas have a pseudo-penis clitoris. They urinate, copulate, and give birth through it. Mating requires the retraction of the pseudo-penis to allow for penetration. The Sambia of Papua New Guinea ritualize male-male oral sex as a coming-of-age practice. The boys ingest semen to absorb masculine essence before transitioning to heterosexual marriage. Ancient Greece institutionalized pederasty as mentorship and bro-bonding.

All of this freakiness aside, the channeling of desire into a psychic levee of sorts is a vital, non-negotiable step in the process of integrating it. The channel is just as important as the river. Without it, desire floods everything, and murky bogs ensue.

Everything is Porn in 2026

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: creative energy = sexual energy. They are one and the same. The fruits of the effective channeling of this energy, be it a painting or a baby or a song, ought to be the least of your concern. If your creative life is stagnant, your erotic life, i.e., your capacity to move and be moved by the world, is more than likely stagnant too. And if your sex life feels dead, I’d bet a tenner it’s been a while since you did something that scared you, confused you, or turned you on. You can, in fact, turn yourself on in case you’ve forgotten.

One of the larger hurdles you will face on this path is the temptation of consumption in place of creation. Consumption, while it has its place, has little to do with the art of creation beyond the occasionally necessary “passive” point on Gurdjieff’s triangle of Affirmiing Denying, Reconcilling, or as I prefer to call it: Active, Passive, Neutral2.

And yet most of us have all but completely replaced creation with consumption. The endless scroll. Nobody wants to work it anymore. They just want to watch the world go by.

Pornography is obviously a major culprit here, though not for the reasons the semen retainers and trad cath tallow saleswomen of Twitter might have you believe. The problem with porn isn’t that it’s Dirty or Bad or Evil (though a convincing case could be made for all of the above). The problem is that it’s divorcing you from your imagination, which is the single most valuable tool you have in Becoming Yourself (next to your intuition, but more on that another time).

Porn is the anti-channel. It floods our desire with simulacral pixels on a screen and short-circuits the generative loop between desiring and creating. It replaces the slow, uncomfortable, frequently embarrassing process of discovering and going after what you actually want (a partner, an art practice, fulfilling relationships, a strong speaking voice, a nice little hardbody) with a black mirror that requires nothing of you except a free hand. It atrophies your precious vril in exchange for… nothing. A fugazi. Une petit mort au nom de rien. And that same atrophy that kills your drive for sex and love kills your vision, your art, your POV.

Remember what I said. Creative energy = sexual energy.

A more pressing problem is that in 2026 everything is pornography.

Everything you come across both on and offline is meticulously designed to steal your attention (the precursor for your desire) away from you. Products, services, devices, experiences presented to you with algorithmic precision to evoke desire for more bullshit and steer you away from your own generative, creative nature.

The news cycle is horror porn. Mukbang is food porn. Zillow is real estate porn. Instagram is fantasy life porn. Twitter is outrage porn. Even the seemingly endless anti-porn discourse behaves like porn, edging us into an unresolvable, fundamental misunderstanding of each other while we circle jerk in the comment sections of our respective echo chambers.

We are a civilization gorging itself to death on content that simulates the feeling of living without requiring any of the risk. You watch someone make the art. You watch someone have the relationship. You watch someone build the body, the house. You watch people fuck. And then you close the app and go to sleep, having lived none of it, with the neurochemical imprint that you did.

Piousness vs. Purity

There’s a flavor of discourse that seems to equate piousness with purity, or at least a lack of perversion. The endless torrent of spiritually confused men and women tweeting about the decline of Western civilization with Renaissance paintings of knights and Grecian goddesses as their profile pictures. These people insist art has become perverted. That it used to be noble. Sacred. That once upon a time, great artists pursued the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, and now we’ve descended into filth. Interestingly, a lot of the time, their self-perception is so skewed that they don’t even realize how kinky their “normalcy” presents to the average person.

I would bet money that most of these people have not studied the greats, spent five minutes with a living artist, or even begun to consider the latent artist in the mirror.

Caravaggio killed a man, painted prostitutes as the Virgin Mary, and is widely understood to have been sleeping with his male models (the same models he posed as saints and angels). Michelangelo wrote love poems to men and sculpted the male body with an attention to musculature that borders on fetishistic obsession. Bernini carved The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa: a woman mid-orgasm, mouth open, back arched, being penetrated by an angel with a golden spear, and installed it in a church, where it has been venerated for four centuries. Shakespeare spent 126 sonnets writing to a “Fair Youth” he was plainly in love with, and dressed his heroines as boys so boys could play girls playing boys on stage; a hall of mirrors of gender and desire that would get him called woke by the lot of you today. Lord Byron fucked his half-sister and anything else that moved and is still taught in every English department on earth. Egon Schiele was arrested for his erotic drawings. Frida Kahlo painted her miscarriages, her affairs with women, her broken body splayed open for the viewer.

These are the artists referred to as the greats. These are the perverts you worship every time you post a Caravaggio with a caption about how art has lost its way.

Art has not become more perverted. It’s become uglier, that’s for sure. It’s become uglier and lazier. But ugly and lazy does not a pervert make.

How To Get Free

It took me a very long time to understand that the most shameful parts of me were actually my gift to humanity. My willingness to look too long and too closely at myself, at others, at the world, to be consumed by sensation and detail past the point of social comfort, is not a dysfunction. It’s my job as an artist. But it’s also my job to direct the energy in a constructive way. If done correctly, this can be part of the fun.

“The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” - Albert Camus

We can view the “restriction” of our desires like a hydroelectric dam. You don’t place a dam across a river to stagnate the water, you place it there to harness the pressure and direct the flow. Water hits concrete, has nowhere to go. Pressure builds, turbines spin, and what was flowing aimlessly downstream now generates enough electricity to power the nearest city.

Desire works the same way. Every attempt to narrow the river just adds steps to the water’s route. And those steps become “kinks”, as it were. Done correctly, your life can become a very sensual, lighthearted little game you play with yourself. Much like the one I described at the start of this essay. More about this can be found in my recently expanded piece On Bending Yourself Over, published this week on .

For this essay’s purposes, I invite you to do the following:

1. Identify one thing about yourself that you feel very ashamed about. Just one. Don’t spiral. Maybe McDonald’s is your favorite restaurant but you’re a health and wellness influencer. Maybe you have a thing for furries. Maybe you’re a staunch misandrist who secretly worships men. Maybe you’ve had more than a few fantasies of fucking a sibling. It doesn’t matter what the shameful thing is, just pick one.

2. Set a timer for 20 minutes. In that time, write a letter (ideally with pen and paper, no computie) to that shameful part of you from the perspective of God, Christ, Hanuman, Universe, whatever benevolent entity or being you connect to most easily. The key here is that this being who you are pretending to be does not have a single judgmental bone in their body.

3. This is an automatic writing exercise, so remove any “thinking” from the equation. The only thing to remember is you are a benevolent, all-seeing, all-knowing being who LOVES the person they are writing to wholeheartedly and wants to see them thrive. Enjoy the process of playing pretend.

4. Once the 20 minutes are up, put the letter somewhere safe/sacred. On an altar, under your pillow, or in a special box are great options. Go about your day as usual.

5. The next morning, first thing, open the letter and read it aloud to yourself.

6. Explore how you feel in the coming hours, days, weeks. You can do this exercise as many times as you like, with as many “shameful” desires or thoughts, no matter how big or small. Over time, you will likely begin to notice how much free, useful energy lies behind the curtain of shame. You might notice more energy upon waking, during your work, or when you’re interacting with loved ones. You might feel less tense, more curious, more playful, more compassionate towards others. Take note of any changes in a journal, if you feel so inclined.

The willingness to look at the world and yourself with the full force of your attention is the exact same will that produces great art, great sex, a great life. You cannot make anything true and real if you are only willing to look at it from one angle. You’ve got to turn it all the way around.

So praise be to the pervert. Not the one reviled in the church or chided in the DSM-5. The etymological pervert. The one who turns the world three hundred sixty degrees around. The one inside of you.

For the first 30 years of my life, I was certain that I was submissive through and through. I was always ambiently searching for Daddy in lovers and art, bouncing from person, place, and thing, fantasizing about being told what to do, what to wear, what to eat, what to think. However, when I look back on how I was actually moving through the world, I came off more like a delusionally confident, moderately pretentious know-it-all with very big ideas, not great listening ears, and a 55% success rate when it came to follow-through. I was submissive in my mind’s eye, but life is a cruel mistress, and she made a girlboss out of me.

When it came to sex, I was fully enveloped in my inner fantasyland, crafting stories and scenarios and almost completely unable to actually be in the present moment with my lovers. This would manifest in multiple instances of partners asking, “Where did you go?” when they inevitably noticed I was so transparently Not Here. Rich for someone who is a student of Ram Dass, lmao.

Some of this was trauma, some of it was shame, a LOT of it was just not being fully acquainted with my real desires enough to even articulate them. Yet, on the rare occasion of truly transcendent sexual experiences, so much of the “wow” factor was a product of either surprise and mystery, or my partner seemingly being able to read my mind so that my fantasy became a part of the reality without my having to exert any effort at all (which we cannot ever truly expect of our partners). Of course, we often hear that people who are submissive in bed are often dominant in life and vice versa, but this binary is reductive. There was this secret third thing, this ebb and flow of longing and turning away, something akin to a hunger pang… not exactly painful, not exactly pleasureable either — this dissonance that I noticed arising in my late 20s.

So what is this dissonance? Carolyn Elliot (PhD and author of Existential Kink) would say having is evidence of wanting.

I thought I wanted to be told what to do by others in art, life, sex, whatever. But what I actually wanted, craved, and starved for was the tension of being told what to do — seeing how it could be the right thing and not listening. Getting good, solid advice, and going “Nah! I’m gonna do it my way. Thanks though!” I was creating scenarios that were ripe for people to tell me, “You can’t do that,” “Are you sure?” “Shouldn’t you get a real job?” just so I could prove them wrong. Or, rather, just so I could try, fail, feel that hot sting of embarrassment, and try again. In other words, I’m a big fucking brat.

To be a brat is to be a bit of a fucking pain in the ass to yourself and others at all times. This translates in and out of the bedroom. For me, it’s not being whiny or petulant in the traditional sense. It’s more like a subtle but constant jockeying for position with whoever is the most powerful man in the room. And I always, always win. Even when I “lose”, I still win, because on the rare occasion that I’m losing, that means I’m rubbing up against a man who is smarter, stronger, braver, and altogether more together than me. He knows better than I. There are very few of these men in the world, and when I meet one, or more to the point, allow one in my bedroom, I am more than happy to lay down my arms and my panties in kind.

The thing about these men is that they are truly dominant. Not Andrew Tate-style, tiny man in a suit-dominant, which is actually just controlling. These are the men who can look at a little boy throwing french fries in a restaurant, walk up to him and his friends, shake his hand, and strike the fear of God into him with his presence alone, no words required. We can learn much from these men.

Being dominant (sexually or otherwise) isn’t about telling anyone what to do — dominance is responsibility, and taking that responsibility for the entire situation. It’s not “bEnD ovEr I’m GonNa hAvE mY Way WiTH You.” That’s a sub pretending to be a dom. True dominance involves preparing the environment, gathering the tools, and existing in the flow state to execute. In other words: the dominant focus = responsibility. The submissive focus = pleasure. More specifically, pleasure and trust in being in good, reliable hands that will not Fuck It Up. This dynamic can be applied to creative work, making money, personal responsibility, and all facets of life, really. It’s important to get very well acquainted with the dom and sub within you, and to know when it’s time to wear each hat. This is especially true if you consider yourself an artist, which, as we’ve learned, most of you secretly do.

In the boudoir of creativity, when it’s time to be the dom, you create all the conditions needed to produce great work: studio setup, time blocks, limiting distractions, and saying NO to anything that takes you off course. When it’s time to be the sub, you are flexible, open to making mistakes and embarrassing yourself, embracing the full expression of the inner sanctum, with no holding back, and are ready and willing to try new things.

Consider, if you will, how you can be a better dom to yourself — to money (money, like ego, is a wonderful servant and a terrible master), to your work, to your art, etc. Perhaps a re-calibration of your Google Calendar is in order? Perhaps it’s time to start going to bed before 2 A.M. If it’s the sub in you that needs attending to, maybe it’s time to turn the phone off and go for a long walk to get some ice cream. Perhaps it’s time to throw away the underwear with holes and buy something lacy. Maybe what you need is self-directed yoga in a very hot room. Only you can know what you need, and I encourage you to be your own scientist and find out for yourself.

If any of this hornyspeak triggers the prude in you, consider the fact that creative energy is sexual energy. Same energy, zero differentiation. The only difference is the end result, i.e., what is born. But you can be pregnant with a painting the same way you can be pregnant with a baby. That old adage, “Everything in life is about sex except sex, which is about power,” is very true. These are truly secret codes of the universe that, when adopted and practiced, will inevitably change your entire life.

There is much to still be discovered here for me personally — let alone for us as a collective. This monologue is less of a deep dive and more of a treading the shallow end, but I’d be curious to hear how this lands for you, dear reader. As it happens, in last month’s Reading Room, we dug into Gillian Anderson’s 2024 collection “Want”, a selection of anonymous letters written by hundreds of women from around the world, revealing how women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally honest. This month, it’s J.G. Ballard’s Crash, a provocative and surreal masterpiece that explores the visceral fusion of human experience and modern technology through the lens of high-speed car accidents as erotic playgrounds. I would love to see you there.

The sub in you desperately wants a dom with a PLAN and the willingness to EXECUTE. The dom in you desperately wants a sub that will DO WHAT SHE IS TOLD and RELAX. And the dog in you wants to go fetch. Arf arf! 🌀

In September 2013 updated his Facebook status asking if anyone wanted to review the Taipei audiobook. I had been feeling pretty ‘stagnant’ and ‘unsatisfied’ with my writing/projects generally, and felt like reviewing Tao’s book would, in some way, make me feel these things less. I sent Tao a message offering to do a review, and the package arrived ~2 weeks later—addressed to me with Tao’s childlike, instantly recognizable handwriting. Inside the package was the audiobook, containing 7 CDs, totaling 9 hours of listening time. Also enclosed was a photograph of ‘Lemmings’ a painting by Tao of tiny round beings that, coincidentally, was commissioned by my ex-boyfriend and is now hanging above the toilet in his bathroom.

I felt confused by the length of the audiobook. It seemed insane to me that an entire novel could be read aloud in 9 hours. Simultaneously, it seemed like it took so long to read.

I was freshly 20 years old and ready for anything (read as: wanted to be the center of attention and experiment with drugs while doing it), so when first considering my options for how I would do the review, I felt it would be funny to make a long film of some sort. However, after emailing with Tao and others and—due to being extremely disorganized and poorly connected—failing to find people who could help film, I decided instead live tweet my review while roaming around New York City for the very first time, and while also ingesting LSD for the first time.

I booked a flight to New York, LSD floating around in a pack of 5 gum, and met a woman in publishing on the plane who invited me to sleep on her couch. I made no concrete plans for accommodations and had basically no money, so this worked perfectly for me.

The night before The Event I created the Twitter account, and preemptively posted:

I woke up at 6:30 am on Saturday in the stranger’s apartment somewhere in Brooklyn. I showered, got dressed while listening to “Burning Down The House” by Talking Heads, consumed 1 cup of coffee, a green smoothie, and a clementine orange. I selected my ‘trip outfit’ for the day; a pair of white, distressed, high-waisted jeans, a matching set of Calvin Klein black cotton bra and panties, a loose-fitted white cotton t-shirt, an extremely textured, rib-like, white Opening Ceremony crew-neck sweater, a long black hooded cashmere/wool coat, and a pair of blue and green Nike Free running shoes. I transferred the contents of the audiobook CDs to my Macbook, then to my iPhone. I took a container of fruit purchased at Whole Foods the previous evening, and placed it in its transportation device; a Whole Foods paper bag, along with a container of cherry tomatoes and two bottles of ‘Naked’ green smoothie.

At 8:00 am I placed the acid on my tongue, left the apartment, opened the Twitter account I had created the night before, began the audiobook, and walked towards the nearest C train stop.

At this time, while somehow in Harlem and beginning to rapidly ‘come up’, I had a few realizations: The first was that the only previous experience I had with LSD was 3 years ago at the Winnipeg Folk Fest—the poor-man’s Burning Man we would all saddle up for annually—when I was 16.

My friend Gislina and I sat on a hill tucked into our sleeping bags, observing the sea of white people with dreads across the way, playing with sparklers, waiting for the acid to kick in—but it never did, and we fell asleep listening to Bright Eyes.

The next realization was more of a flashback. A single dose via blotter—as confirmed by Erowid.org—typically contains between 30-100ug of LSD. However, in this moment, languidly sauntering onto a bus with no clear understanding of its direction, I vividly recalled sitting in my high school drug dealer’s Honda Civic as he exclaimed, ‘these tabs are way stronger than most blotters’ and to ‘only take one at a time’. I had completely forgotten this conversation with him until this moment. I realized that, in my haste to Get The Show On The Road, I had forgotten to cut the tabs in two and just took both in one go. So, by my estimation, I had taken somewhere between ~350-500ug, which is a “Strong to Heavy” dosage (according to Erowid.org). I thought “perseverance” repeatedly, and continued on my randomly selected route to Central Park with no concrete understanding of if the bus I was on would get me anywhere near it. Fate was driving from here on out.

My memory begins blurring into a haze here, but I distinctly remember noticing my phone was rapidly dying, and for some reason deciding to approach a police officer to ask if he knew where I could charge my phone? I remember him looking into my eyes and I saw myself so clearly reflected in the microexpressions of concern, fear, confusion, anxiety, and generalized judgment on his face. We were both pond scum in this moment. He did not know where I could charge my phone.

“Made it” to Central Park around this point, and was immediately horrified by what I found.

~2 minutes after this tweet, my phone ran out of batteries while walking through Midtown Manhattan. Coincidentally, this was when I began to ‘peak’. It seemed that God needed me phoneless for this leg of the journey.

For 45 minutes or 30 hours (unclear) I wandered around the posh, tense, towering, kaleidoscopic, vibrating Park Avenue shops searching for a place to charge my phone. It was a ghastly affair. The doors and windows of Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci glistened repulsively, covered in what appeared to be a gelatin-like translucent film.

While on the hunt I began to notice the amount of people who could only be described as ‘socialites’ present in the area. It was like they were placed there just for me to observe. They seemed limited to a certain number of tasks: walking their babies in McLaren strollers, posing for selfies, being photographed by paparazzi, talking, animatedly, on gold-plated blackberries. Because I was no longer listening to the audiobook, I was able to hear their voices, which sounded like a combination of ‘munb munb munb’ and ‘shheeeehehehehe’. I made what felt like a valiant effort to recognize speech patterns and understand anything they were saying to no avail. Language was becoming unrecognizable, or I was caught in the middle of an elaborate simlish flash mob.

I continued searching for a place to charge my phone while simultaneously hyperventilating due to the paralyzing fear that my fate was, for the rest of eternity, to be lost in Manhattan, on LSD, searching for a place to charge my phone.

After an hour of wandering on Park and 5^th Avenue to no avail, I began approaching ostensibly authoritative/trustworthy figures, asking if they ‘knew of’ a place I could charge my phone. I was primarily met with what seemed like darting, confused, slightly concerned eyes, and variations of “no… I’m sorry…” and “wish I could help.”

I became fully convinced that those I interacted with recognized me as the ‘token crazy lady’ of 5^th Avenue, and began considering the possibility that I had actually been roaming the streets of New York, homeless and insane, for 25 years.

After some time I realized that I had been walking in circles, and made the ‘executive decision’ to enter into the Trump Tower. I felt intuitively that if I could enter this gleaming concrete shrine of self-aggrandizement, find a place to charge my phone, I might, hopefully, have a chance to regain some level of sanity.

I entered the building and was met with two golden escalators. After some deliberation, I took the one going up, as the other seemed counter-productive, and was met with a tall, friendly-seeming security guard. I asked if he knew of any outlets to charge my phone, and he pointed to his left, where there sat ~10 people charging and using their Apple devices and drinking what seemed like Starbucks-type beverages. This was a Starbucks Whole Foods Concrete World, and I was just living in it.

I was positive it was either a mirage or a hallucination of some kind, however when I approached the wall and plugged my iPhone into the outlet, much to my amazement, it began to charge. Once the battery reached 7%, a feeling of calm triumph washed over me. I decided it was time for me to take a break, and return to the apartment.

I allotted myself 40 minutes of ‘break time’, not including the time it would take to cab back to the apartment. In the cab, I started the audiobook from where I believed I had left off and closed my eyes, mentally cataloging tweets to post when I arrived at the apartment.

Indeed they are…

Full poem can also be found here

I arrived at the apartment and was extremely grateful to be alone, far away from the prying eyes of the towering panopticon that is comprised of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. The whole city is watching you all the time, you know. The apartment smelled sweet and stale, and I attempted to close my eyes and rest but that is not possible with ~450ug of LSD coursing through your veins, so I simply gave myself over to the experience.

I watched as my thoughts blended together in a melange of disclarity, and felt overwhelmed by their rapid onslaught… like a Star Wars opening crawl sped up 10X.

At some point I was overcome with the feeling that a key had entered into a lock hidden in the recesses of my mind and opened a door. I had taken MDMA, psilocybin, various pharmaceuticals, but never before had I felt full, unadulterated access to all hidden corners of my brain. It was almost too much. Almost, but the wild ride seemed to stabilize just as I was beginning to surrender to it.

I made the decision to venture out into the world again, this time with no particular direction in mind.

Foreshadowing for the next few years of my life….

I vaguely remember choosing to text both (???) of my parents while haunting this Whole Foods. No idea why or what I said but I felt it was important at the time.

This was a very big deal.

When I realized the audiobook was nearing its end, I got in a cab and began my trip back to Brooklyn. There was a secret feeling of triumph building inside me, as if I had accomplished some impossible feat that would change the course of history forever, and yet somehow was potentially the most ridiculous and frivolous thing anyone had ever done. I felt glad that I was alone in the experience.

~2 minutes after crossing the Williamsburg bridge the audiobook ended, which felt highly appropriate.

On the cab ride home I was reminded that I was indeed not alone in any of it, when I received an onslaught of text messages from friends praising my commitment to and completion of the journey. Was this performance art? Was this a waste of time?

At the time, still ‘feeling it’ (the high) intensely, I did not understand the praise. 2hile beginning to experience what was the beginnings of a come down ~3 hours later (I was high for 19 hours total) I felt proud, or, content maybe, that I had ‘done it’ and didn’t get hit by a car, pass out, or go insane.

Taipei as an audiobook felt, in an almost unsettling way, like a detailed guide to New York, created solely for my personal use. Certain aspects felt so specific and tailored to my predicament (e.g. “obese people exercising, screaming…” while in Central Park, feelings described while on LSD, etc) that I began to question if literally everything I encountered in my life was specific and tailored to my predicament.

As the audiobook ended, “Dance Yourself Clean” by LCD Soundsystem began playing on shuffle. Natch. I grinned, unbuckled my seat belt, stuck my head out of the cab window, and began to laugh.

Thank you to for facilitating this experience, and thank you to past Sophia for making strange choices and following them through to their illogical conclusion.

1. You’re not a “real” artist

2. If you are a “real” artist, your work isn’t that great

3. If you are a “real” artist, and you’re making work, it should be kept private and not shared, let alone capitalized on.

But I know you. I know you because I AM you. Because of this, there are a few things I can essentially guarantee:

If you want to make good (art)work, there is only ONE thing you have to do, and that’s get to work. You need to remove the idea that work is a bad, evil, or draining thing from your consciousness, and that needs to happen TODAY.

“I do not dream of labour” is a false pretense you are using to absolve yourself of the responsibility you hold as an artist to bring more truth and beauty into the world.

This responsibility ≠ a debt to capitalism (but removing shame surrounding charging for your work is equally important).

Me? I absolutely dream of labour. I dream of labour all day and night. But I don’t dream of the fruits of my labour. Those get given up to God.

To quote Michael Cheritto in the film “HEAT”:

For me, the action is the juice.

We are all in this together, and you have a right AND a responsibility to share your gifts with us, your fellow beings. We need your HARD WORK. We need it NOW.

Guess what happens if you don’t do your work? Somebody else does. Have you ever had a great idea only to let it percolate to the point that all the juice dissolves into the atmosphere and only dust is left? And then a year-or-so later, someone else has manifested your idea into reality? Not a good feeling. Almost as bad as forgetting a good idea because you didn’t write it own.

Don’t be selfish. Don’t be lazy. Only you know if you’re being one or both.

This isn’t about “should” or “have to”. You don’t have to.

You GET to make work. You get to create beauty.

Your limitations only exist in your mind; however, your limitations also happen to create your style. This means you’ve already got style in everything you do baked in. No posturing needed. You think your voice is weird? It probably is. You think you can't play guitar like Joni Mitchell? Good. Play like you. Every single thing you think is "wrong" with your work is your defining signature. The gap between what you want to make and what you can make IS the work. That gap is where you live.

If you think I am preaching and have always had the juice flowing, TRUSTTTTTT me, you would be wrong.

I often hear from peers that it seems like I am always doing/making/ideating something, but the truth is I have spent literal years of my life tense and scared, lying in bed staring at a screen, waiting for life to happen to me.

The fact that anything got done during those times is a literal miracle, and it was a slog all the way through. I felt imposter syndrome acutely the whole time, and the work was mediocre at best.

But what’s equally true is I have always known since I can remember that I was an artist and that my life’s work was making and sharing art.

What’s also true is you’ve got to work the art muscle and make a lot of mediocre (or in my case straight up BAD) work before you get to the meat of it.

if you’re reading this i’m gonna guess there’s a strong possibility that this is true for you, too.

So get up, warm up, and get to work you fuckin freak.

Thank you.