New York City part four
Last post on my NYC trip.
I wasn’t sure if I should do another NYC post, but then I decided to do it, since I like writing here—it’s easy; I don’t try; it just comes out—and I rarely travel.
My last trip was also to NYC, last November, seven months ago. I went for four days that time. I was smoking tobacco and cannabis back then and I smoked a lot of both of those during that trip. This trip, all I smoked was two hits of a cigarette that Jordan was smoking, my friend Jordan Castro, author of the forthcoming novel Muscle Man. Jordan took this photo of me and duck:
On Instagram, Daniel Pinchbeck posted a short clip of my lecture and added this text: “DIMES SQ HIPSTERS SUDDENLY CARE ABOUT DMT AND THE AFTERLIFE! THE APOCALYPSE MUST BE COMING.” To me, though, the people who came to my lecture weren’t Dimes Square hipsters; they were a variety of people. I talked to many of them and they seemed well-adjusted and nice and considerate and sincere.
I’m open to doing another extemporaneous lecture somewhere for money. I enjoyed preparing for the lecture by making an outline and by working on my in-progress essay titled “DMT, Near-Death Experiences, and the Afterlife.” Working on the essay—and doing research for the essay—both doubled as preparation for my lecture. It was like having an MMA fight or some other sports competition to prepare for.
I didn’t know how many people would come to my lecture, so I promoted it a lot, posting about it like 10 times. A lot of people came. The venue was filled and people couldn’t get in. It was encouraging to me that people wanted to hear me lecture them.
I talked to so many people after the Muumuu House reading and the lecture, in part because I was selling mandala prints, and people had to come to me to pay me.
I spent the second to fifth hour of each day working on my writing and on my lecture. It’s my favorite part of the day usually—working on things while caffeinated.
I asked two people how their eczema was going—a friend’s fiancée and my brother’s wife. I told many people about vitamin A toxicity. I criticized liver to many people. Liver, the food. I “opted out” of the body scanner at the airport on the way to NYC; they call it that, “opting out.” You’re allowed to forego the scanner to get patted down. On the way back to Hawaii I didn’t opt out because I didn’t have enough time. Last time I went to NYC, on the way back to Hawaii, I wanted to opt out, and the person who was supposed to “pat me down” said he wanted to go to the bathroom first; he didn’t return for 15 minutes, so I had to go through the body scanner, as I was going to miss my flight.
On the plane home, I finished watching the Japanese movie Analog that I’d started on the way to NYC and it made me cry. The ending sequence of Contact, which I also watched on the way home, also made me cry because it was about a materialist scientist having a DMT-like, materialism-shattering, unbearably poignant experience. I didn’t cry at other times during my trip and I rarely cry. I haven’t been using cannabis while at home but I did during my trip—ingested as cannabis ghee—and on the plane home, so that was a contributor to my increased emotions. It felt good to cry. Tears are high in lactoferrin, I learned recently.
Some people I met for the first time:
August Lamm. I associate her with England and kind of think she’s British because when she contacted me asking me to be an art show she was curating she was living in London, I think, but she’s American, not British. I’m excited for her forthcoming books. She posted that she lost ~1k followers on Instagram after doing and posting on Instagram about the Muumuu House reading. Most of her fans on Instagram follow her for her art, it seems.
Rebecca Grace Cyr. I first heard of Rebecca when she submitted things to Muumuu House during Muumuu House’s open submission period. I read at least part of every of the hundreds of submissions that I got. I would read from the beginning and stop when I lost interest, and I printed many submissions to do this afk. I thought Rebecca read really well. She’d read only once before this, I think she told me. Excited to read more writing by her.
They’re both active on Substack. Follow them here and here. (I also met Carlen Altman,
, and other people I’d previously only talked to online.)For the Muumuu House reading, I wanted to invite people I hadn’t met before, and I didn’t want to have an all-male reading, which could have easily happened, as I seem to know many guys I’ve published on Muumuu House that live in NYC.
I enjoyed doing Hamilton Morris’ podcast a lot. We recorded for 2 hours 11 minutes. I usually assume that people who seem skeptical against non-dominant theories and who aren’t into “conspiracy theories” view me as a flaky “nut”—and I kind of thought Morris viewed me this way too, to some degree that might cause us to clash uncomfortably during our conversation—but during the podcast he said he admired my expressing unpopular views on “9/11, vaccines, and glyphosate” (pretty sure that’s a verbatim quote of him). We had a good discussion where we disagreed with each other often—he’s a materialist. I liked getting the chance to point out that I express controversial opinions only because I’ve been convinced of the veracity and importance of these opinions scientifically, through evidence, and that I don’t like being viewed as an idiotic “conspiracy theorist.”
Mainstream media makes it seem like there are people out there who will deliberately express an unpopular opinion for attention or some other self-serving reason. But actually people—especially people whose incomes are attached to their popularity, like artists—express unpopular opinions despite their awareness that expressing said opinion will alienate many people and cause negative attention to go toward them, I think.
I enjoyed telling my brother about near-death experiences. He seemed interested and open to them. I updated him on our dad’s debt too. His kids are both doing Tae Kwon Do which seems really good, learning a martial art as a child.
When I got home, I didn’t see my cats. Lali came out from the forest after around an hour and ended up spending all night with me, near me, looking at me and being pet by me on the dining room table where I was using the computer. I didn’t see Nini.
In the middle of the night, I heard Nini meow his newly expressive (now that he’s on a no-dairy, low-vitamin A diet) meow. He jumped onto the bed. Instead of coming to say hi to me first, he went to say hi to Lali first (even though he’d been with Lali every day the past week, in and around the house), sniffing her head. I called him, and then he came to me, and said hi to me. He lay by my head and was gone by morning. I’ve seen him more times this morning, feeding him beef and turkey. I like how unattached he is to me, even though I’m the only human he knows. If he was attached to me, he would feel bad when I wasn’t near him. Instead, he seems content even without me.