Is it all in the imagination? I’ve never felt that was the case: that everything you see and sense on a psilocybin trip is the projection of your chemically supercharged mind, the product and projection of an intoxicated brain. That’s not how it feels; rather, it feels as if perceptual filters have been lifted, as […]
Image: My Beautiful Apocalypse (detail) by Catherine Forsayeth JOURNAL YEAR ONE /4 Sometimes I experience a disorientation on waking, not knowing where I am. If something wakes me in the night or pre-dawn, I’ll lie there in the dark for a long moment, listening for cues and trying to arrange my surroundings around me. Where […]
Journal Year One /3 An acquaintance of mine has opened a new bar down by Rawai Beach. The Phuket Pirates, he calls it. I met him on an obscure beach about six years ago. It was early in the morning, and I’d had my swim and was mooching around bagging up today’s plastic from the […]
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” These words are from a brief but memorable conversation the journalist Ron Suskind had with Karl Rove, the chief political adviser and Machiavellian ‘teacher of tricks’ to the Bush dynasty. Rove was senior adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff during the George […]
“Legends of the golem, usually sourced as an archetype in Kabbalah, are actually found in Talmud, but may stem from the same magical traditions. According to these stories, sometimes presented as cautionary tales, a rabbi could create a crude, humanoid being, in a travesty of God’s creation. These monsters had no will or intelligence of their […]
the lethal text 