DC WAS MAGA BURNING MAN
Damn, 2021 did not come to play.
I was going to spend today’s newsletter extolling the virtues of Dry January and being “social media sober,” but the MAGA gurls storming DC and temporarily turning it into their own Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone snapped my resolve to stay logged off.
So I spent all day yesterday glued to my screens, watching at least ten Twitch livestreams while deliriously thumbing through Twitter texting friends and lurking the discourse on Discord. Cataclysmic news events unfold like data tsunamis, with the real action happening in a memer-commentariat metaverse far far away from the Boomer traditional news chatter.
A couple hours into my marathon news binge—as my brain was besieged by images of pasty white dudes in animal horns and fur cloaks roaming the halls of the Capitol Building—it became evident that this idiotic mob’s antics were not made for TV, but for TikTok. All these Trumpers swagged out in headdresses like Buffalo Bill cosplay, all these anarcho-primitivist ass, caveman LARP looks? This is what thirst trapping for social media virality (and virility) looks like in the age of QAnon-—where these costumed cavemen plunder physical reality as endless material for photo-ops to be deployed in the real battleground of memetic warfare.
In fact, I am going to posit that what happened yesterday was not a coup but a carnival, in both the Burning Man and Bakhtin sense of the word. I’ve been writing a lot about the purpose of partying in political resistance—most recently in this sprawling essay I wrote for Document Journal—and the libidinous chaos scaling the walls of Capitol Hill yesterday had some serious Meth ParTy Energy. This is dark euphoria.
SHROOMS ARE THE NEW WEED
TBH I’ve been getting restless with weed. I moved to LA under the spell of a fantasy that I’d witness a stoner revolution, wondering naively what kind of collective awakening would happen once this drug went mainstream. This dream of THC-assisted transcendence never really materialized, but a mess of headache regulations, exorbitant taxes, and borderline snake oil products that reduced cannabis to its most inoffensive facets arrive in its wake (sorry, CBD is so over).
I watched cannabis go from counterculture to capitalist cash cow, morphing into a mundane industry dominated by stoner bros and IPOs.
So can you blame me for moseying over to the shroom scene, which is booming with the type of electric possibility that lured me towards cannabis in the first place? I can’t leave my house in LA these days without meeting someone working on some artisanal shroom brand, and I’ve become obsessed with documenting all the cute packaging and products flooding the market—microdose LSD kits, DMT vapes, and shroom chocolates seem to be especially chic right now.
RAVE TO THE GRAVE
I’m back in Brooklyn, bitches, and this time, I’m seeking rave redemption. After pit stops in Washington DC for an epic protest-party, and Minneapolis to visit the (extremely underreported) George Floyd memorial autonomous zone, the final stop of my 2020 protest tour brings me back to New York, the city that nearly suffocated me in its toxic fumes the last time I swooped in—yet I always come crawling back, because New York nightlife might be my most fatal addiction.
Raving in a pandemic is a thorny problematic fraught with both political and moralistic considerations. When large social gatherings become synonymous with public health disasters, the risks of raving can be difficult to justify—especially as masks come off and social distancing is thrown out the window as the night falls into boozy stupors. Parties have become hotbeds for the community spread of this disease, and recent indoor raves in Berlin have resulted in dozens of infections. At a time when personal risk is also community risk, one person’s party antics could end up jeopardizing many more people who did not consent to their act.