High Life Supernova

[highlifesupernova]

The Beatles Were Right, I Am the Walrus

In July, I did a bunch of acid. My friends and I laid on the grass under the Space Needle at midnight and listened to Fleetwood Mac on surround sound and spent a suspiciously long time in an apartment building lobby because we were lost in a painting of a desert. I want to write about it.

Our summer was coming to an end, and we were all coming to terms with the transience of our mid-twenties. The three of us had spent the last few months traveling together, and now we were headed off separately different geographic directions. We wanted to take one last trip in Seattle while it was still our shared home city.

Something that's bound to come up in my writing at some point is that I am very depressed. I've been living with it for years, and it's mostly fine; I have a fantastic support system and take a big dose of Zoloft every day. That said, medically, my brain is a chemical battlefield, and I'm never quite sure how it's going to react to a new enemy combatant. LSD isn't a welcome visitor to a lot of depressed brains, so we started off with what the kids call "microdosing".

Microdosing was an alert, euphoric high, like flipping an on switch in my brain's dusty right hemisphere. My thinking became incredibly fluid, finding connections, surging from question to idea to realization. I became aware of how much energy I expend on keeping my mind focused on the obligatory trappings of being a person living in a society (job, paying bills, feeding myself) rather than letting it wander into the uncharted territory I'm naturally interested in. I wondered about everything. I felt like a child, questioning the order of the world while reveling in my surroundings. The rumors about our tech billionaires being avid microdosers, which I once spread with a veneer of joking sarcasm, are reasonable. If I did this often enough, I am pretty sure I would eventually invent the hyperloop.

Outside of my introspective side adventure, this part of the day was pretty fun. We laid on the grass by the sea, watching boats go by in our upside down world. We did makeup we aren't usually brave enough to wear outside of a dark club, and told each other how great we looked. We thought about finding a dark club since we already looked great, but got sidetracked by a pot of boiling Maggi. We checked in with each other, and we felt good. We were ready to do it for real.

Before the big day, I'm sure I got myself on a bunch of FBI lists with such Google searches as "what does acid trip feel like", "lsd reddit", "acid review not dare website", etc. Nothing I read online in my feeble attempt at diligent research quite captured my experience, so I'll try to faithfully record it here for the drug Googlers of posterity.

There was a lull while we waited for the rest of the tabs to snake through our bloodstreams, incrementally dosing up in an attempt to strike the perfect balance between "a bunch of acid" and "not so much acid that we experience ego death, meet god, go to the hospital and have to explain this to our moms". I was sitting on the floor of my friend's studio apartment wondering whether I was ever going to feel it when the microwave started to pulsate. My friends saw it too. Slowly, the kitchen came alive, expanding and contracting like the side of a great beast. The world around it bloomed into animation.

We spent the night wandering around an empty, sleeping Seattle that was somehow bustling just for us. The Space Needle seemed to whir and wave, the sky full of stars forged a web of interstellar connections, and every object I focused on danced under my gaze. My thoughts were cast outward, noticing and considering everything in my surroundings. I didn't think about how I looked or sounded, and I found myself completely uninterested in my phone. For a painfully stereotypical internet-age person, this was a revelation. Instead, I focused on the important things: being in fearful awe of gravity and overcoming that to climb up a children's play set. The victory I felt when I eventually made it down the slide was downright saccharine.

This story takes place in Seattle, so eventually, it started to rain. Back in the apartment, we let anything that interested us capture our full attention. I looked at every page of a photography book, watching my mind bring the pages into fluid motion. One friend rearranged her cabinets while the other played music, every song taking on a perfect richness. I couldn't get enough of art. I love it every day, but the acid gave it dimensions that my sober brain has never been able to perceive.

Eventually, my body tired out, and I curled up in my friend's bed while my two companions stayed up, listening to soft, familiar songs and talking about the future. The drugs wouldn't let me sleep for a while, but with my friends' words and the music they created beautiful abstractions in my mind. Fractal patterns and geometric images and alien landscapes danced in my head as the conversation dwindled into a collective peaceful slumber.

I came back to Earth with the sun. My friends still sleeping, I crept out on to the balcony and watched it illuminate the skyline. I wrapped myself in a blanket and listened to Japanese Breakfast and relished the stasis of the city and the vacant black abyss when I closed my eyes. This sweet hour of stillness and solitude was glorious.

The next day was a precarious venture back into the world bustling with actual, living people, learning to justify the way we had seen the world the night before with the reality of the daylight. We got coffees and pastries and listened to buskers at the market. I felt generous and grateful and glowing with love for my friends and home. Eventually we parted ways. I went straight into my own bed to sleep off the night, and woke up to my regular life.

As someone whose baseline, sober state is one of grey exhaustion, dropping acid was a beautiful reminder that my brain is capable of jubilation and creativity. Getting to feel curiosity and wonder and connectedness with my friends and the planet for a day did close a circuit in my brain that has held up in some ways. Since our trip, I'm more at peace alone with my wandering thoughts. I've spent more time on little things that bring me joy. It's small, but I feel emboldened to think and learn and live as I wish without regard for whether that fits into the expectations I impose upon myself. I don't know anything about psychology or neuroscience and obviously can't recommend a schedule I controlled substance as a wholesale cure for mental illness, but it helped me, and I think there's something to that. I'm still sad, but I'm sad with a bit more zest now.

I'd be remiss not to mention that I am a white woman of means living in a city with lax drug laws and policing. My work does not drug test. This whole endeavor was easily accessible to me, and at no point did I fear that I'd face anything other than potential bad trip consequences. Apart from the fluffy self care stuff, my biggest takeaway from the time I did a bunch of acid is that I wish that were true for everyone who such things could possibly help. Some states have legalized other hallucinogens -- particularly ketamine -- for therapeutic use (at great cost and with shiny millennial marketing aesthetics), but there's still a long way to go before the narrative around psychedelic drugs turns away from 1960s band groupies and prison. Demonizing substances without regard for their potential medical uses has not sat well with me for quite some time, and experiencing one of these substances has reaffirmed my stance.

As stress, anxiety, and mental illness run rampant through our chaotic world, I hope we can open our minds and empathize with the means of treatment and escape that people need. Anyone who wants to give being the walrus a go in a safe, controlled environment should be able to do so without fear.

[highlifesupernova]

Kanye West is My Problematic Fave

Can we separate our favorite works of art from the artists who created them?

I'll admit at the outset of this piece that I don't know the answer to this question. Over the last three years, one of my favorite musicians has put on that red hat, released a terrible record about a misogynistic religion, and stood between an unrepentant homophobe and accused domestic abuser on the porch of a replica of his mother's home at a third listening party for an album that seemed like it would never be released. What does that mean for our relationship with his work?

The common thread among my favorite musicians is theatrics - I love nothing more than discovering a universe of sound, concept, and drama in a piece of music. I loved the idea that Sufjan Stevens would release fifty state albums. One of my favorite records of all time is a concept album about the American civil war by Titus Andronicus. Lady Gaga won my heart when she bled out on stage at the 2009 VMAs as commentary on paparazzi culture. I've been a fan of Kanye West (which sometimes feels more like being a Kanye West apologist) since he turned near-universal vilification after interrupting Taylor Swift's award acceptance speech on that same night into one of the most artistically complete albums I know - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

Although its artist remained polarizing, MBDTF achieved triumphant consensus among the public and critics alike. It topped best-of lists, produced the immortal singles "POWER" and "All Of the Lights", and earned a perfect 10 from the era's authority on "cool" music, Pitchfork (it also arguably set Pitchfork on the path to its fall from grace, but that's a whole other essay). The record is funny, sad, relatable, introspective, maximalist, and heavy on pop appeal. The Kanye West of MBDTF was disarmingly self aware. In lieu of apologetics, West invited us to experience his hedonistic, lush creative mind for an hour and eight minutes. He was unrepentantly an asshole, and reminded us that we all kind of were, too. He sold us darkness as an indulgence.

In addition to, or perhaps as a result of, being an incredible musical achievement, MBDTF gave West control over his public narrative. He'd been a talented, erratic figure in pop music for years, but with this crowning achievement he became the center of pop culture. He was no longer the egoistical Chicago producer with the backpack - he was the unconventional genius who had made one of the greatest hip hop records of all time. He moved into high art spaces, becoming a figure at fashion week, and ascended to the highest highs of celebrity, marrying one of the most famous women in the world. The public gave West a pass for his behavior because it seemed accessory to his brilliance.

The incident with Swift eventually began to take a backseat to West's music. In the years following the release of MBDTF, including the album cycle for Yeezus, his public persona was brash but ultimately benign. He declared himself a god, had some more close calls at awards shows, and liked some of the Gaga songs. He seemed to maintain control of his image, and his fans, including me, got used to defending him for his art.

Over time, possibly as West's mental health deteriorated, this showboating personality became an erratic one. He went through a MAGA phase, a cowboy phase, and ultimately a Jesus phase, each time expressing opinions that were difficult to rationalize with his prior moral alignment and unpopular among the young hip hop fans who hold him in high regard. It has gotten harder to be a fan. In an era where we've called into question whether a bad action can discredit someone's work, and sometimes find that to be justified, enjoying West's music makes me feel like I need to be ready to defend him as a person. I don't think I can in good faith. It's also hard to hang up my nostalgia for West's earlier work and my abiding adoration of his albums from the early 2010s.

The difficult thing about the case of Kanye West is that he has yet to cause material harm. He has come out with radioactively bad takes ("slavery was a choice"), aired his wife's dirty laundry in public, and associated with some of his more concretely morally delinquent peers. He hasn't, to the public's knowledge, hurt anyone. Engaging with West's work post-born-again-Christianity era might feel strange, but it isn't repugnant in the way that celebrating R. Kelly or Chris Brown is. Giving attention and accolades to someone with shitty opinions versus someone who has used their wealth and status to actively cause harm doesn't feel quite the same, and I don't think it should. Fans cling to this as evidence that we can separate West from his art, or perhaps that we don't need to. I have personally rationalized my support for West in this way.

I started this post intending to come to a different conclusion than the one I've come to since the release of Donda. I was going to talk about how our reactions to art aren't logical or rational, and how I think it's human nature to struggle with denying ourselves the things we love. Admittedly, I was writing this to defend my continued consumption of West's work to myself on the eve of the new record's release. I still think that reasoning holds, but I also think it applies to feeling betrayed by an artist and finding one's opinion of their art tainted as a result.

The Independent gave Donda a zero-star rating, citing accused intimate partner abuser Marilyn Manson and noted homophobe DaBaby's involvement with the record as an inexcusable flaw. This review has been derided to hell by the wider internet, and I don't disagree that perhaps it'd have been more professional to publish a refusal to review the album, but I also can't argue strongly in West's favor here. Even if his apparent statement of solidarity with Manson and DaBaby was an attempt at a demonstration of Christian forgiveness, it is a bad look for West to deliver that absolution without comment in a public platform. I was raised Catholic, and having to sit in that weird little confessional booth really drove home that Christian God expects repentance before he's granting anyone forgiveness. Forgiveness can be earned -- and there are many times when the public could stand to be a bit more merciful -- but it is certainly not given for free. Nobody is obligated to forgive Marilyn Manson, DaBaby, or Kanye West. If the album is unlistenable to someone in the context of their actions, that is a fair reaction.

For the record, I actually quite like Donda. I think it's a fine album and the rollout was entertaining. I also know its release was engineered for maximum shock value, and I don't like that Manson's alleged victims were collateral damage.

There's a shade of grey here that I think is often passed over when we talk about separating art and artists, a shade I think West actually leaned into perfectly in the lead up to MBDTF; the art we like can be taken in context of the things we don't like about it. Kanye West makes incredibly innovative music, and is also very difficult to defend as a public figure in good faith. Those two things have never been mutually exclusive, and synergism of the two is what has made West the cultural icon he is. We don't have to talk ourselves into things being unproblematic in order to like them, and it's okay to sit with unresolved discomfort about art.

[highlifesupernova]

A Tale of Two Lockdowns

For the second time in what scarcely feels like a year and a half, I am bored in the house while a pandemic rules my country of residence.

This time, though, instead of my one-bedroom apartment in Seattle, I'm bored in a rented house in a remote area of New Zealand, where I'm temporarily living for work. We've been under level 4 lockdown, the country's strictest pandemic containment protocol, for two weeks, and Auckland is looking at two weeks more. This was a near-immediate snap reaction by the federal government to a single case of the delta variant of COVID-19 being detected in the country.

At surface level, this means many of the same things that "lockdown" and "quarantine" have come to mean in the US: gatherings, sporting events, in-person classes, and nonessential trips are canceled. Here, however, it also means no nonessential businesses are operating -- we have access to groceries, gas, the hospital, and local outdoor areas for exercise, but there is no other activity allowed. No takeaway, no liquor stores, no warehouse workers tirelessly dispatching the conveniences of modern life without taking pee breaks (I too was surprised to learn that man can quarantine without Postmates and gin, but I have lived to write this post). Construction has stopped. Offices are empty. I can count the number of cars I see traveling past my window each day on one hand.

Every day, the Prime Minister and Minister of Health address the public directly, providing updates on case numbers, the anticipated end date of the lockdown, the process for review, and information on testing and vaccines. Only data and plans are given a platform.

Like any pandemic-weary American might, I expected this process to feel familiar. We've been on a roller coaster of coronavirus cases for so long that the whiplash has rendered me numb to new lockdowns. It hasn't felt familiar in the least.

Perhaps most obviously, watching the New Zealand lockdown in action has highlighted just how deficient my home country's governmental reaction to the pandemic has been. Because of Prime Minster Ardern's straightforward updates, I've been hyper-aware of the community-spread case count in the country, which is currently hovering around 600. All of these can be tied back to a single case that managed to leak out of a quarantine facility for international returnees. While these 600 cases may pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of daily infections in the United States, I now see this small number as a large one; a single case that was rapidly contained indirectly caused 600 people to fall ill. It's not difficult to understand how. People implicated in the cluster of cases were going to school and work, having nights out, and going to casinos. To stop the spread, New Zealand simply stopped those activities. In the United States, we do them every single day, at a much larger scale, unchecked.

I've spent the last twenty minutes trying to find numbers on noncompliance and protest in New Zealand to support my anecdotal claim that nearly everyone seems to be willing to follow the rules, and I can't. Parliament is actively debating the lockdowns on the national equivalent of CSPAN and public dissent is certainly allowed, but unscientific rhetoric is not given a platform. If there are mass anti-mask protests happening in Auckland, I don't know about them, and I don't need to. I'm getting the information I need to inform my decision-making from data. Data speaks for itself. Coverage of this disease, itself an instrument of nature alone, has been so bereft of data in so much of the media I consume that this has come as an absurd surprise to me. Doomscroll-baiting with story after horrifying story of the antics of truth-averse malfeasants is not a productive way to report on a public emergency.

This all begs an oft-repeated question of this global mess: what the hell is wrong with the United States? There are, of course, practical differences between implementing an effective lockdown in relatively small New Zealand and the vast USA. It would be incredibly difficult and expensive for the US to match New Zealand's Managed Isolation and Quarantine program at scale, which places all travelers in a two-week isolated hotel stay upon arrival in the country. The power entrusted to states renders almost impossible a nationally unified approach to any given problem. Our legislature has been stuck in ideological gridlock for my entire life.

Are these excuses to let Americans die on ventilators, though? I don't think they are. New Zealand enacted new legislation to carry out their response, because unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. In comparison, American legislators have played a juvenile game of keep-away with the lives of individuals. There's a legitimate argument to be made that the American economy might have suffered more with a stricter lockdown, but to this I pose the same response. Why didn't we use this as an opportunity to create an American economy that doesn't require the safety and sanity of our countrymen as collateral? New Zealand has managed to come up with a plan for a robust economic response to eliminate a choice between safety and staying afloat for businesses and workers. It seems like something the richest country in the world, which has been known to spend billions of dollars on military equipment only to literally burn it to the ground, should be able to pull off.

If there were ever an issue that demanded bipartisanship, one might think it'd be a life threatening disease that does not give a shit which letter is on your voter registration card. What started as some fear mongering for attention by our former president has ballooned into the right stoking every anti-science conspiracy theory they find in the dark corners of the internet to maintain their batshit following while the left desperately tries to appease the same batshit following to get them to take a vaccine.

Where New Zealand has worked to mandate responsible behavior, the United States has, at best, gently suggested it, and at worst, actively discouraged it. I concede that there is no way the United States could have curtailed the pandemic to the extent that New Zealand has, but we could have done something.

I've been contemplating the meaning of freedom in the context of this pandemic since my own stay in an MIQ facility upon my arrival in New Zealand in July. MIQ was not fun. I was confined to a hotel room alone for two weeks, delivered airplane-grade mystery meals, and occasionally allowed to go for a walk in the parking garage or to have a cotton swab stuck up my nose. If I were a very different sort of person, I could've engineered an escape out the window or made a scene in front of the New Zealand defense forces running the hotel. But I did my time, and so did all of my fellow travelers, because we knew that what awaited us on the other end was collective freedom. It was well worth a short period of personal inconvenience to keep what was at the time a very open country safe.

Beyond the failings of our government, the refusal of individual Americans to give up a single luxury in the face of this pandemic is a belligerent affront to our collective freedom. "Freedom" is constantly invoked as a reason to spurn calls for masking and social distancing, but the freedom of our communities to enjoy healthy, long lives is somehow never as important as one's individual right to not wear a piece of cloth to 7-Eleven. In this sense, although the coronavirus disaster in the United States can be in many ways concretely linked to the failure of a bloated government to act, it is also ultimately a failure of rugged individualism. The snake has begun to eat its own tail, and we're watching it happen.

I never felt truly free from March of 2020 until the day I stepped out of my MIQ facility and re-entered blissful, normal life in New Zealand. I don't feel less free in lockdown, because I know we're in it together. We could have this freedom too, if only we could embrace that our true freedom lies with one another.

[highlifesupernova]

The Class Aesthetics of Roughing It

I first moved to Seattle in 2017 as an intern. As is tradition when bringing a sundry group of college kids together, I got to know my new colleagues over a series of icebreakers. And I was ready to come in hot with the fun facts - I had just finished a ten year competitive career in Irish dancing, had spent most of 2016 living in the UK on an exchange scholarship, and had my speed crossword skills locked and loaded for any secret talent prompts. I thought my facts were fun, but my offhand responses to others' generated more interest. What did I mean I'd never been camping?

In popular Pacific Northwest discourse, roughing it - by which I mean electively spending time outdoors without the creature comforts of modern urbanity - is the great equalizer. The cybersecurity engineer and the social media manager might be at odds on First Hill, but in North Cascades National Park, they're just two guys in Patagonia quarter zips trying to light their respective camp stoves. Camping and hiking are safe, generic topics of conversation on the order of temperature and humidity. It's a nice, folksy thought that we're all connected by our collective love for the natural world -- but the commonalities are more surface-level than even that quarter zip everyone seems to have.

You know the one.

Seattle tech workers are largely upper-middle-class and white. In my upper-middle-class, predominantly white peer group, having the time and money to drive to the forest and sleep on the ground is a sneaky status symbol. It's a way to show off your material (REI membership, reliable car, heavy duty hiking shoes) and temporal (fitness to climb mountains, time off work) wealth while engaging in an activity that science and society pretty much unilaterally agree is a highly respectable form of self care. I certainly feel good when I finish walking a hard trail, but I admit that I also feel good when I can share with others that that's how I've chosen to spend my time, and that I've been able to make that choice. It's a way to subtly flaunt one's broader success in the context of a minor victory. Outdoor adventure as understood by young, urban professionals offers a level of unpretentiousness only available to those who have achieved sufficient pretense in the rest of their lives.

Upper-middle-class white people do love to walk a hard trail and end the day with sleeping on the ground. A simple Google image search for "hiking" returns a plethora of well-outfitted white folks on remote, manicured trails. From a purely monetary perspective, outdoorsmanship as the domain of the wealthy makes sense. A basic, small tent with no weather protection will set you back a couple hundred dollars, and a tank of gas to get out of the city is non negligible (not to mention the irony of burning fuel on your way to feel closer to the rapidly warming planet).

The racial lines along which camping and hiking appreciation seem to run are impossible to ignore. In a series of interviews for the Guardian, British journalist Homa Khaleeli found that many Black and brown would-be campers in the UK were put off by the perceived whiteness of not only outdoor activity, but the rural parts of the country they'd have to travel to in order to engage with nature. In the United States, only 20% of visitors to our remote national parks are non-white. It is an inherent privilege of whiteness to move through unfamiliar territory with ease.

Culturally, generational attitudes about consumption and leisure often clash with the ethos of roughing it as relaxation. When I'm asked why I don't have a favorite climbing wall or snowshoeing spot, I usually rattle off something about having never taken to the outdoors because I grew up in the infamously freezing cold Buffalo, New York. Truthfully, New York State has beautiful summers, and I've lived most of my life within a day's drive of perfectly nice state and provincial parks. Spending leisure time roughing it was simply never something on my family's radar. I grew up in a middle-class, white household with two working parents, both of whom were raised by steel mill families in Western Pennsylvania. I had a comfortable childhood (which set me up for my comfortable adulthood), but my parents worked hard and often for it, and understandably wanted to spend their time away from work with their families. I have a physically disabled parent, another hard barrier to trekking out into the woods. Owing in part to the expense of existing as a disabled person in the United States, my parents also just did not like to spend money. Tents, sleeping bags, camp stoves, firewood, camping permits, hiking shoes - none of these low use items were necessary enough to our well being for us to buy. If we were going to go on a trip at all, it was going to be to an aunt's house, where we could see family, relax, stay in a guest room, and enjoy the privilege of travel all at once.

As a college student being exposed for the first time to other kids who'd been on countless outdoor adventures, my lack of stories to share made me feel excluded and admittedly a little resentful of a life spent on asphalt. As an adult who has achieved a measure of class mobility I'm sometimes not sure how to contend with, I've stepped into my parents' shoes. When working to achieve your standard of living consumes most of your waking life, taking a breather to enjoy that standard of living sounds a lot nicer than using a tree as a bathroom. Even as I climb the tax bracket ladder, I can't get into the headspace that climbing a mountain is more relaxing than seeing the same mountain from afar, daiquiri in hand.

I'm never going to enjoy going to the climbing gym the way a kid who spent a week in the Adirondacks every summer does; the great outdoors are simply not part of my cultural context. Even though hiking and camping are perfectly accessible to me, engaging in these activities feels like a step out of line with what past generations of my family would do.

This is not criticism of outdoorsmanship as a pastime. I think we'd all be better off touching grass a little bit more often, and I cannot discount the mental and physical health benefits of exercise and fresh, rural air. I like going outside. I've even been camping now (it didn't go very well, but I still had fun). However, that doesn't absolve us of remaining critical of the barriers, financial, temporal, and cultural, that keep our neighbors in the city.

How can we bring the benefits of outdoor activity to those who don't have a clear access point? How do we make the natural world a welcoming place for our Black and brown neighbors? How can we change the way we talk about engaging with nature to de-center consumption and ostentation? I don't have the answers, but I want to start asking the questions aloud.