TURN ON, TUNE IN, LEAVE SOCIETY
An extremely stoned interview with Tao Lin
An illustration of Tao Lin writing while stoned, by Thu Tran via my WEED book
Tao Lin’s highly-anticipated new novel Leave Society dropped this week and I’m really fucking with it! Tao Lin is a writer best known as the daddy of the alt-lit scene—a small but influential literary micro-movement that germinated in New York City in ~2011 by a bunch of extremely online and socially awkward writers, who loved blogging about their lonely, depressed lives. Tao and I met around this time, I think through our mutual friend Giancarlo DiTrapano, and while I don’t remember our conversations (we were both partying on a lot of drugs back then), I remember him hunched in the shadows of various East Village dive bar coke dens, mumbling to the young literary acolytes who always surrounded him.
Over the years, we kept in touch sporadically; recently I contributed to a tribute that Tao put together about Gian, who passed away unexpectedly this year (RIP to a legend).
The title of Tao’s new book comes from an epiphany he had in 2013 after infamously taking 2.5 grams of shrooms in his NYC apartment and throwing away his laptop in the dumpster. “Leave society” was the main message he’d received from this trip—if you listen, shrooms really can speak!—and that is exactly what he did, carefully and deliberately over the following years: ensconcing himself in stoned hermitude in his apartment, replacing pills and friends with cannabis and books, and developing a new worldview through his new interests in psychedelics, history, nature, the imagination, and holistic medicine.
So you can see why I’m into this book: Leave Society is a story of recovery—from addiction to pharmaceutical pills like xanax, adderall, and oxy, but also from capitalist materialism, porn addiction, and other plagues of everyday existence. Tao is an obsessive researcher, and some of the best parts of this book are him at his nerdiest: poring over medical data on topics like thyroid cancer and radiation while trying to convince his Taiwanese parents of his ultimate conclusion: society is damaging and many mainstream health beliefs are wrong. To drive home this point, the epigraph to Leave Society is a quote by Kathleen Harrison, wife of psychedelic guru Terrance McKenna: “Nothing is as it appears to be. This is not glib.”
(If this all sounds kind of conspiratorial… you’re not wrong! There is a definite thorough-line between psychedelics, wellness, and conspiratorial thinking, as exemplified by... the shroom-loving Q-Anon Shaman.)
Around the same time Tao left New York to live part-time in Taipei with his parents, tripping on LSD that he smuggles through customs while trying to cure his chronic pain with natural medicines, I moved to LA and started throwing weed parties and writing about the psychedelic frontier. In 2019, I accidentally kickstarted a movement when I coined the term “Cali Sober” in an essay about my own struggles with addiction. Even though I didn’t realize it at the time, our lives were bending in similar arcs as we moved instinctually towards healing, shedding our New York druggie delinquency for greener and trippier pastures. Leave Society suggests that this evolution is natural, necessary, and part of the broader zeitgeist; reading it helped me feel a lot less lonely.
(Also, while most of the narrative is pretty low-key, some parts of this book are really fucking crazy… Maybe it’s because I’m still too terrified to talk to my Singaporean parents about drugs—in Singapore, drug users face the death penalty—but I cannot get over the scenes of him secretly tripping balls in Taipei with his Asian parents, who don’t do any drugs except tea!!!)
Anyway, while looking up Tao’s email in my inbox today, I accidentally found an unpublished interview we did in 2018 for my book about weed! (Coincidentally, we share the same publisher…. Tao appears in my book alongside Q&As with weed sommeliers, “cannasexuals,” and stoned exercise trainers lol)
Most of this interview never saw the light of day because it was too long for my simple bong table book, so after quickly consulting with Tao, we’ve decided to share it with ya’ll here as a treat <3 At the time I was writing a lot of my book extremely stoned, so wanted to dig into how weed influences Tao’s meticulous and research-obsessed creative process… hopefully I’ll get to interview him about doing acid with his parents next ;)
(Tao Lin with giant nugs and mandalas that he likes to draw. Image via Merry Jane)
Michelle: How does being stoned affect your writing?
Tao: I'm not sure, because I've been stoned daily since September 2013. I don't think it affects my writing that much, maybe because I edit so much. 95% or more of my time writing is spent editing. Maybe being stoned impacts my writing most just by motivating me to write and by increasing my interest in life and various ideas, which can seem dull and boring when not stoned. So it makes writing more enjoyable and I do more of it maybe.
Do you think weed helps you feel more vulnerable—or have the courage to face yourself on the page?
It gives me another state of consciousness to create within writing or drawing. I feel more emotional and am more moved by things, by people and love and interactions, so writing and drawing can be more enjoyable and intense and compassionate while stoned. If I'm completely sober, I don't enjoy writing or drawing, so it's harder to do it.
In your book Trip, you write that weed helps you see the world with "unselfconscious, appreciative eyes." How does this sense of awe affect the way you put the world into writing?
I think it actually takes me away from writing. It makes me write less, because seeing my computer screen with "unselfconscious, appreciative eyes" doesn't really help me at all. It helps me when I'm with friends or in nature, and trying to interact with friends or nature, to focus on them and to focus on enjoying instead of focusing on worrying and feeling self-conscious and mired in my own thoughts.
Do you have advice for people who want to use weed to treat anxiety and depression?
I used to use Xanax and Adderall and caffeine to be calm and talkative and not depressed in social situations, and would feel terrible the next day. Now I use cannabis and caffeine and organic tobacco, and I feel okay the next day. I advise that people experiment, starting with small doses, and that people try to see what the unique effects are on themselves, instead of reading what the effects were on someone else.
Do you consider weed a psychedelic?
Cannabis seems more similar to psilocybin and LSD to me than to stimulants, sedatives, or opiates. I view it as a psychedelic because it removes me from the creodes of my habits, brings in my unconscious and emotions, and significantly affects a part of my consciousness that is rarely disturbed in normal life.
What is your ritual for consuming weed when you want to be creative/productive?
This is hard to answer, because I want to be creative/productive all the time, every day, and I have been. Writing Trip, I worked every day for an average of eight hours. So my ritual was just to wake up, drink coffee, smoke weed, start working. But in 2017 I started smoking around five hours after waking, so now I can work on caffeine not stoned, then work stoned later. I have sometimes prayed to cannabis, by just closing my eyes and thinking to it, thanking it, but it hasn't become ritualized, i've only done it maybe five times.
Are there certain strains, products, or ingestion methods that work best for you?
A water bong has worked best for me. Vaporizers have worked worst for me, even though I still like them; worst because they seem to break easily and also often I feel like I'm not getting enough fast enough.
Are there scenarios where weed might hinder your ability to write? (For example, weed hangovers or getting lost in a task.)
I've been hindered by weed when I get too stoned. This happened somewhat often for a while, while writing Trip, by some time at night, I'd start getting too stoned to work on writing or even edit, at which point I would draw, though. I've rarely gotten too stoned to draw, maybe only once or twice on edibles and smoking, have I been too stoned to draw. But I noticed that I was getting too stoned at some point and was able to control that and stop it.
There's that cringey Hemingway quote, "Write drunk, edit sober" —is there a difference in the way you approach writing vs. editing with weed?
I write and edit both stoned and not stoned, and on caffeine and tobacco, and other drugs. My quote would be "Write sober and stoned, edit sober and stoned. And also write and edit in other states of consciousness, so you can keep seeing your work differently, and keep working on it."
What are the funniest things you’ve created while stoned?
Since I've been stoned every day—except sometimes while in Taiwan, or for isolated days in other countries—since September 2013, I would say the funniest thing I've created while stoned might, to me, be Trip's DMT chapter, in which I become very paranoid for two or three hours and think my friend is a CIA agent or journalist trying to frame me.
The hardest I've laughed while stoned is maybe while on an edible at a concert at Carnegie Hall by the pianist Martha Argerich. I couldn't stop laughing—for no reason—and neither could my girlfriend Yuka and we had to leave the hall and we just left, it was near the beginning. Yuka was on edible also and she said that the same thing had happened the previous time she went to a classical piano concert.
Do you think there’s a difference between getting stoned with a vape, edible, joint, or dab?
I'm most creative on any of those, but if I've had enough sleep. I'm most creative when I've had a lot of sleep and sunlight and then use weed—for writing, probably vape or joint or edible. Writing is so linear and somewhat constricted, typing words in a row, so I feel I can get too stoned for it to be ideal for writing, with dab or or wax or strong edible.
Did you get stoned with Kathleen Harrison when you took her plant drawing class?
The day before the plant-drawing class, I talked to her in Botanical Dimensions' library, then we went to her garden, and she offered me cannabis. She refrained, but her son Finn and I smoked, and Finn also gave me some of a hash and tobacco joint. The next day, after the plant-drawing class, we went to her garden again, and this time we all smoked—her, Finn, another student named Chris, me. Kathleen and Finn also made sure I had enough weed for the rest of my trip. I felt cared for.
What are the three most interesting facts that you uncovered about weed while writing your book? I’m particularly interested in its historical evolution alongside humans.
1—Cannabis evolved in the Himalayas from probably 50 million to 10 million years ago, when our ancestors were evolving from squirrel-like to monkey-like to ape-like.
2—A 2015 paper in Emotion found that awe/wonder, more than any other positive emotion, were linked with lower inflammation levels, meaning that lowering inflammation levels via exercise/diet or other ways can increase one's capacity to feel awe/wonder, and that feeling awe/wonder can lower inflammation. Cannabis increases my capacity to feel awe and wonder through two ways—by decreasing inflammation via THC/CBD and by significantly interacting with my CB1 and CB2 receptors, which normally I only modulate through my endocannabinoids, which people are deficient in due to glyphosate, lack of animal fats, and other reasons. So as humans became more inflamed over millennia, since agriculture developed around 12,000 years ago, then became even more inflamed after the industrial revolution and even more inflamed in the twentieth and then twenty-first centuries, cannabis probably became more magical-seeming and powerful to increasingly inflamed humans.
3—Cannabis is like Salvia divinorun—once isolated in a mountainous area, then spread across Earth by humans. Cannabis took millennia, salvia with computers and internet and airplanes, years.
Tao Lin’s Leave Society is out now—and you can also cop my WEED book if you haven’t already
A NOTE ABOUT INJECTING VITAMINS…
Last week, in my subscriber-only story about a steamy sexcapade with an NYC cab driver, I wrote about injecting vitamin B-12 in the back room of a techno club. I knew this post would be a little scandalous and was hoping that people would hop behind the paywall to read the wider context… I should have known better lol. Unfortunately, a bunch of readers immediately unsubscribed, presumably because any mention of IV drug use is so taboo?
(BTW if you want to peep this piece and future wet hot subscriber-only content, annual subscriptions are 40% off—for just ten more days!)
So I just want to explain that I truly believe injecting vitamins is next-level harm reduction that subverts the super stigmatized needle-junkie aesthetic by reclaiming it for sober ravers. The DJ who gave me the shot is an ex-heroin user, and other followers have DM’ed me to say that shooting vitamins like B12 and L-carnatine has helped them not to relapse. Not to mention that intramuscular or subcutaneous injections are also how the original psychonauts did psychedelics, and is how medical ketamine is administered…
I don’t have all the answers but I think destigmatizing needles is a conversation worth having if we want to move towards a smarter and less fear-based drug culture. Let’s face it: coffee and maté can only go so far when you’re raving… next time I need a clean energy boost at like 4am, I’m going to reach for a b12 shot so help me god. VITAMIN IV WILL BE THE FUTURE.
RAVE ALERTS
Omg so many cute outdoor parties in LA this weekend… my prediction of the rise of PLANT-BASED PARTYING is coming into full bloom. Btw, PLEASE STOP DM’ING ME TO ASK WHERE THE PARTY IS AT. I do not have the energy or capacity to be your personal rave directory lol… the audacity! My picks will be served in this newsletter *only*, and this week’s flower-powered faves are below:
BLACK CHARMED’S BLOOM BALL
Ostbahnhof is one of the biggest and cuntiest underground queer raves in LA, and this Sunday the crew behind this party, Black Charmed, is throwing a ROLLER SKATING PARTY in a botanical garden. “She’s serving open air, don’t care,” reads the event description, “Grab your best disco chic and wax your disco stick because I’m laying the love on thicc.” Limited capacity, limitless insanity—tickets here.
CONCRETE JUNGLE: HARDCORE VS. JUNGLE
Concrete Jungle is the wildest 90s-style renegade rave you’ll ever find in this city—this is the crew that throws the infamous drum and base parties by the train tracks under the bridge. This is hardcore shit for real ravers only: DJ decks set up in the middle of nowhere, with the scent of graffiti fumes wafting over the muddy dancefloor. Sunday’s party is 100% free and BYOB, and features my boyz Baseck, Flap Jack, Dier Times, and Beatrix.
FLOATING
I recently subscribed to a text-only group chat for a mysterious roving party called Floating, and got an alert earlier this week that their next party will be this Saturday in a Japanese garden in Pasadena with “sonic blessings” from Yialmelic Frequencies, Dustin Wong, and Jeremiah Chiu. Text “garden” to 310-421-0869 for more info!
DJ TENNIS AND GERD JANSON’S CHINATOWN BLOCK PARTY
This outdoor block party by international heavyweights DJ Tennis and Gerd Janson caught my eye… even if it might be swarmed by basic bros, dancing under the red lanterns of Chinatown’s Gin Ling Way is one of LA’s greatest pleasures, so pull up with your vaxx card and maybe grab some dim sum on your way out!
BALTRA, MILEY SERIOUS, AND A CGI BLUE ELF
Not sure where this party is going to be, but I have to shoutout my homie Minty Boy for storming back onto the scene with this wild event, featuring a performance by a CGI BLUE ELF named Mia that they created for this party? Other headliners include Parisian rave queen Miley Serious, New York house king Baltra, and LA scene staple Bianca Lexis… but let’s face it: we’re coming for the sexy blue elf!
"Culture is not your friend" - Terence McKenna
https://youtu.be/x68jH-S-LyQ