PSYCHEDELIC HEALING SHACK

Let me tell you about the trippiest wormhole I fell down this year

Gather around the fire, children, and let me tell you about one of the trippiest wormholes I fell down this year. I don’t know if there is a moral to this story, yet it still feels like a fable… somewhere in these shadows lies a grim truth about psychedelic healing, which has always involved shit, bile, puke, violence, demons, ancient rituals, the occult. (Don’t let the glossy aesthetics of today’s VC-funded ketamine clinics or microdosing apps fool you—this has always been what it’s about.) 

During this strange journey I kept thinking about a question that kept coming up in the autonomous zones last year: what is the price of this freedom that you find in the furthest fringes of the culture? Liminal spaces that promise sovereignty from the status quo always attract the most broken, messy, and darkest of souls, leaving us to tangle with the ethics of trying to save what society has spit out. 

It is too easy to assume a morally righteous tone, to try to scold away the messy putrid muck.  A reporter earlier today asked me why so many writers are hiding their best work in the underground, behind paywalls, and I said “because we’re afraid of being cancelled.” So since this tale is extremely strange and sort of controversial, let’s retreat behind the gates for now. Keep it close, keep it secret. I invite you to make the jump—annual subscriptions are still 40% off for the rest of 2021, and I’m donating some to my friend Aasir’s gender fund. 

OK, here it goes… 

On a cold winter night in Detroit, a 55-year-old reiki healer who fucks with this newsletter picks me up from my hotel. “I’m going to take you to this spot called the Psychedelic Healing Shack,” she says, lighting up a pink doobie in her car. Simply described as a vegetarian cafe on Google, the Shack is a polarizing place to the Detroit community; its Yelp has only five and one-star reviews, with one person praising it as a “raw, spiritual” utopia far from the New Age hipster scourge, while others decried it as “disturbing” with allegations of goldfish abuse and stinky goats. A DJ friend living in Detroit laughed nervously when I asked what he thought: “Uh, didn’t someone die there?”