The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
How do you break the toxic cycles of quarantine drug abuse and historical trauma?
Welcome to RAVE NEW WORLD—a newsletter on the intersecting futures of nightlife, weed, and cyber-counterculture. This week, we consider the CIRCULAR TIME LOOPS of quarantine, drug (ab)use, and historical trauma. Also, a trip report from the surreal frontlines of the HOLLYWOOD PROTESTS, and the launch of a new SOBER CHALLENGE for paid subscribers, because sobriety is a political praxis.
Quarantine time is a circle—no momentum, just stasis. “Another Groundhog Day,” my neighbor sighs every morning, when our daily routines intersect on our front lawn. The hummingbirds that emerged earlier in lockdown are gone, the pregnant air ruptured only by the brrr of choppers circling palm trees, spying on protestors down the street. Unlike the wails of New York City pig cars, which modulate in pitch as they pass, the helicopter’s ambient drone encroaches you from all sides at once. When danger is invisible yet omnipresent, the instinct for violence circles back on the body. Which is probably why we’ve all been getting so fucked up.
I hear whispers of DMT cults in Berlin, druggie dinner parties in LA, meth orgies on Zoom. Even amongst the normies, the sober-curious trend is dead, while boozing and blazing every night is trending again. A stoner bro who works at a popular weed drink company told me that sales have doubled during quarantine. Even nightlife veterans who used to preach the path of sobriety have happily hopped off the wagon. “That lifestyle doesn’t feel useful anymore,” a friend confessed to me recently, after DJing a virtual gay sex party. “I just want to do drugs all the time.”
Getting high these days feels like self-preservation. When LA went into lockdown, Angelenos stockpiled weed and guns. It turns out cannabis is the perfect companion for quarantine; blunting the capitalist mania for productivity, it soothes the body into lounging and languorous forms. I’ve been smoking heavy, waking up with a burning throat every morning, vowing to take a breather, yet reaching for the weed jar as soon as the sun sinks. Facing the night sober is unbearable—the desire to leave my body is too overwhelming. Why not retreat from this hellscape of uncertainty, loss, and suffering, back into the infinite void?
But the body is always the first site of knowing, and when self-care dances across the thin line into self-harm, a physical feeling of dread starts to chase every craving. Drugs are an internal technology that rewires your operating system, and when the machine adjusts back to equilibrium, what was magic becomes mundane. Looping is a sign that the system is glitching, like flashbacks during a bad acid trip. The mind triggers cravings even when there is no release, like a jamming button eliciting a pathetic Pavlovian thirst.
Addiction is thus a nostalgic desire to circle back in time—disputing the idea that the past will never return, you chase a memory of when the mechanisms of pleasure were working. Then maybe the circle becomes a spiral, and you reach for something stronger. The addict’s fatal loop always finds you falling back into what you’re trying to escape—what you turn to for salvation ends up destroying you. Eventually you realize: this shit isn’t working. One night, as I puked into the toilet after shoveling too much ketamine, a voice in my head told me: stop coding your pain into your flesh.
Experts like to use geometry to analyze this moment in history, as if shapes could give chaos a logical form: How do we flatten the curve? Will economic recovery be shaped like a V, L, or U? Yet the Euclidean shape I keep returning to is the circle: the time loop of quarantine’s perpetual Groundhog Day, the regressive patterns of addiction, and most of all, the abusive cycles of historical violence and trauma. “I can’t breathe” said George Floyd, and this haunting refrain we hear over and over again reminds us that history conceived as a linear rush towards infinite progress is ultimately an illusion. This sense of being stuck in sickening cycle can easily spiral into despair.
But every time we relapse, there’s a chance to interrogate the narratives we’ve being fed. I embrace any perceived shifts in the public discourse, clinging to the hope that they represent breaks in the toxic pattern. Right now, it feels like the economics of rioting during a recession have really popped out, culling attention towards the racist roots of wealth disparity, property ownership, and who is “allowed” to loot. When the government is printing bills to bail out billionaires, who are the real thieves?
So this week I decided to break this loop and go sober, because searching for an easy fix is not really a solution. After months of immobility, I unlock myself from the couch and hit the protests sprawling across the star-spangled streets of Sunset Boulevard, which are now paved with police. Every business is boarded up—a hypebeast shoe store was broken into, while a pawn shop has scrawled on its walls: NOTHING LEFT EVERYTHING ALREADY STOLEN. The protest plays out a like a surreal wartime scene: armed tanks are stationed outside the TMZ headquarters, and soldiers toting AR-15 rifles shout “stay safe!” at tourists snapping selfies.
We march down the highway in a cloud of car honks and smoke, hot sun prickling in our faces like mace. A car rolls by blasting NWA's “Fuck The Police” and everyone cheers; a black man in the back seat slowly raises his fist and looks straight at me, eyes blazing. Chanting the names of the dead, I find my voice in the chorus of others, and for the first time in a long time, I feel like I’m back in my body.
I believe there will one day be a chance for for summer of ‘69-style partying again. But I’m starting to think that now is not the time to escape into druggy haze, to check out, to be mute, to withdraw within. Now is the time for mobilization, interrogation, and focusing your attention on change. Sobriety is not just a pander for social respectability. It is above all a political praxis—a choice to remain clear-headed at a time of mass confusion, and to process pain without numbing your psyche. The beatings will continue until morale improves. Does it feel like shit right now? Hell yeah. But the only way out of this fatal loop is to grit your teeth and push through.
SOBER CHALLENGE
Today, I am kickstarting a sober challenge to all paid subscribers of this newsletter, with 100% of proceeds going towards Black Lives Matter and related causes. If you’re interested in recalibrating your relationship to substances, breaking destructive cycles, and facing this hellscape with sober eyes, please subscribe to any paid tier and email me to express interest. Remember: “sober” in this context does not have to mean total abstinence—you can be California Sober and just smoke weed. (Personally, I’m quitting all drugs except for microdosing psychedelics.)
This is not AA, and there are no real rules: you get to choose your drug diet and the terms of your sobriety. I hope this can be a support group for everyone struggling with substances right now, and a way for us to share our battle stories. The revolution will not be stoned.
QUICK HITS
In Defense of Looting / Black Riot — Two critical essays dissect the tactical motivations for property destruction, from the Civil Rights movement to the Sudanese Revolution. Share this with everyone clutching their pearls over looting. (New Inquiry)
“Tou Thao and the Myths of Asian American Solidarity” — A new Substack newsletter covering Asia and the coronavirus points out an oft-overlooked schism between Asian-American elites and poorer Asians in America. (Time to Say Goodbye)
A PDF library of 200+ radical queer texts — including essays by Agamben, Fanon, Malcolm X, and Mbembe (via my academic-raver qomrades)
WHERE TO SPEND YOUR STIMULUS CHECK
Justice for Breonna Taylor— Today is Breonna’s birthday, and her killers have still not been arrested. Help her family reach their $500,000 goal on GoFundMe.
National Bail Fund Network — Donations are distributed across 60+ community and bond funds to help people out of immigration detention and local/county jails.
Black Art Futures Fund — A fund directing grants to black artists and arts organizations across disciplines.
TOP OF THE BOPS
“Infinite Depression Loop” by the supreme stoner (and Weed Rave OG) Russell EL Butler, whose latest EP Emotional Bangers Only is a hazy compendium of soothing synth poems about depression, PTSD, delivery food, and revolutionary action. Like medicine for the heart.
Today is Bandcamp Friday, which means Bandcamp is waiving its fees so artists receive 100% revenue. Use this opportunity to support black artists—here’s a directory of black electronic musicians on Bandcamp to check out (h/t SVBKVLT)