HOW TO TRIP THROUGH A PANDEMIC

My dealer told me the most popular drug he's selling right now, by far, is shrooms.

Illustration by Daren Newman via

I was on acid when Trump got COVID. The news broke like a bomb exploding in the middle of the seedy taco joint in Silver Lake, where I was getting dinner with a crew of art kids after a socially distant gallery opening. Or rather—everyone else was stuffing their faces while I crouched in the booth in a black latex dress, sunglasses on, brain frying softly under the fluorescent lights. Because I wasn’t eating, I caught the news rippling across the room, phones pinging as people looked up with expressions of disbelief, grabbing their friends. “TRUMP CAUGHT COVID HAHAHAHAH!!!” crowed the goth art curator at our table, shooting up to his feet and pumping his fists. “THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME!!!” The cool girls rolled their eyes. “Yeah right,” they said, “If he really got it, he’d never tell us.” My brain did somersaults around these fresh conspiracies. To me, TRUMP GOT COVID just sounded like a punchline. I ran outside, gazed up at the full moon, and started hysterically laughing. 

I’ve been doing lots of psychedelics this month, as my drug diet transitions from sober September to spoOooky October. Every couple of days I’m eating plasticky gel tabs of acid, sprinkling mushrooms on yogurt parfaits, and snorting research chemicals like 4-AcO-DMT, also known as synthetic shrooms (highly recommend). I pop capsules from Flow State, a secretive members-only brand that distributes perfectly proportioned microdosed shroom kits to well-heeled members. (When I told my friend that I’m living in this liminal permatrip space hoping psychedelics will rewire my brain’s neural networks, she laughed in my face. “Just admit that you really love drugs,” she said… lol, facts.) 

I used to think a devotion to psychedelics disqualified you from the field of sober studies, until someone in Club Sober shared the little-known fact that Bill W, the founder of AA, was also an LSD devotee. Suddenly, AA’s insistence on sublimating the self to a super ego-like “higher power” no longer sounded like Christian lunacy, but something any tripper can relate to. 

My drug dealer in LA recently told me that the most popular substance he’s selling, by far, is shrooms. Makes sense—psychedelics let you embark on a trip when other forms of travel are so limited. They also help us understand that trauma does not define us, and even death itself is just a return to the womb. (Do I sound like I’ve been living in LA too long?) 

“Mycelium seeks out death,” wrote the queer psychedelic guru Bett Williams in her new book The Wild Kindness: A Psilocybin Odyssey, out on Dottir Press last month. Sprinkled between her rogue psychedelic (and romantic) exploits, Bett details how she cultivated her symbiotic relationship to shrooms via encounters with the long lineage of female psychedelic heroes—from Maria Sabina to Kai Wingo and Kathleen Harrison. Growing up, my psychedelic icons were mostly swashbuckling white male psychonauts, so uncovering this alternate history of female psychedelia has been revelatory.

I’ve heard a lot of chatter about how shrooms can help people come to terms with dying, for example, but Bett blew my mind when she went on to explain how mycelium—the network of fungus that produces mushrooms—can literally sprout from a human corpse under the right conditions; she cites an artist at MIT named Jae Rhim Lee who makes mushroom suits for the dead with spores injected into the fabric that eventually colonize the corpse.

“It would be nice to come up with another word for when the whiteness of the mycelium takes over the entire jar of brown substrata, other than to say it is ‘colonized,’ but that’s what it’s called,” she writes.

One of Bett’s most uncanny talents is her ability to hold conversations with mushrooms, who speak to her in distinct sentences brimming with wit and snark. When I tell friends that I’ve met a woman who can speak to shrooms, they snort with disbelief, but Bett is hardly the first person to note the mushroom’s linguistic capacities—the stoned ape theory posits that mushrooms are the source of language itself.

OG psychedelic zaddy Terrence McKenna once wrote, “The mushroom speaks, and our opinions rest upon what it tells eloquently of itself in the cool night of the mind." McKenna would transcribe entire passages whispered to him by the mushrooms about hyper communication, galactic intelligence, and biosynthetic pathways. Mazatac shaman Maria Sabina—who gave the Beatles their first trip and is considered one of Mexico’s greatest poets—also used healing chants derived from the mushroom’s language. 

Bett told me her conversations are more like collaborations, and equal to their moments of profundity, the mushrooms like to talk a lot of shit. “The mushrooms speak to me, but I don’t hear words like you’d hear from another person talking,” she writes. “It’s as if language arises in my own body, though it’s nothing I’d come up with on my own.”

Bett and her partner Beth on a recent beach trip we took to Malibu

The other evening I went over to my friend’s place to eat a truffle filled with NINE different types of shrooms—my friend’s dealer had called it his “greatest masterpiece” and the trip felt like an orchestra, each stage washing over us in waves, some euphoric and transcendent, others dark and twisted. As I sat on the couch with my arms gripping to whatever shards of sanity I had left, I hoped the shrooms would speak but I received no epiphanies or grand statements—just blank, ineffable nothing. 

Maybe I’m doing things wrong. Bett knows there are steps you can take to elevate your relationship with shrooms from recreational to ritual. “In all the fairy tales, a clueless traveler enters the spirit world of a non-human thing without enacting proper protocol and danger ensues, or they get laughed at, or lost,” she wrote in an article for Double Blind, which advocates fasting, prayer, and house cleaning before a trip. “Being prepared, in the way that has been shown to be yours, through practice, is how you show respect. It’s how things WORK.” Maybe one day I will tune into the right frequency, and they will sing to me their secrets. Until then, I’m pressing my ears to the great nothing and listening for clues.

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FRIDAY: A TRIPPY TALK WITH BETT!

I’m so stoked on Bett Williams’ new bhooq, The Wild Kindness: A Psilocybin Odyssey, that I’m hosting an IG Live with her on Friday! We will be chatting about the difference between recreational and ritual use of shrooms—which she writes about at length in her book—as well as how to talk to mushrooms, why she hates microdosing, and her new psychedelic book club, amongst other trippy topics. I’m especially interested in talking about how shrooms can help us work through this hellish pandemic.

You can catch the livestream on my Instagram on Friday at 4:20pm. There will obvi be a Q&A after for all your shroomy questions (To all my beloved paying subs, hit me up on the Discord if you have queries you definitely want me to cover!)