Fear and Loathing in the Trumpine Era

How did it come to this? How did a stable-minded member of the community, devoted father, former seminarian, esteemed psychologist end up piloting a ‘90’s minivan full of horseshit up a 45 degree incline loaded to the gills on nearly-legal sativa cannabis, Cut Chemist banging in the speakers, headed for his destiny on the front steps of the United States Secretary of Treasury, the very Pope of the Church of Mammon?

Let’s see, start with the topic sentence and then work your way backwards. Start with who you are and what you do? That’s what you do when you’ve taken a huge hit of acid the night of the election, and you can’t really remember who you are, and you have to find the string you unspooled in the caverns of your own mind, so you can find your way back to the surface. And then when you get there, you find out the most baffling news. I think therefore I am, motherfucker. Isn’t that what Descartes said? Isn’t that what he really meant in Discourse of the Method. You know he wrote it in the height of the 30 Years War, which took out a good third of the men of Europe, right on the tail of the Black Plague, which had taken out an earlier third of the men of Europe. Those were some weird times, too, right? It was basically a giant religion-based Civil War between Catholics and Protestant factions, not so dissimilar from the use of religion in our current Civil War. Anyone who saw footage of literal Nazi’s marching in the fucking streets of Charlotsville — and I literally mean literally. Anyone who saw the footage of one of those religious terrorists plow a vehicle through a crowd of protestors, sending bloodied bodies flying through the air — there’s nothing nicer we can call it. It’s a Civil. Goddamn. War.

Remember back right after Trump was elected and we were all in complete shock. We started questioning reality. Remember that meme that went around on Facebook — “Are We Living in a Matrix-like Simulation” — positing the idea that all the unconsciounable idiocy that was not our socio-political reality was a sort of glitch that provided the evidence for such a hypothesis? That was some weird shit, huh? So, what did my fellow Kentuckian, Hunter S. Thompson say? “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” I had already joked with some fellow ex-seminarians about starting a monthly church social called Psilocybin Psundays, where we all dose on heavy psychedelics and go to Anglican high mass and commune with the Most High, in our most high state of mind. Well, in the face of such universal-scaled absurdity, there seemed like no better response. What if we were living in some bizarre simulation? What if I spent the year living as if it did? And that’s how I spent the year sleeping outside like a homeless person, doing drugs under the Stars, as a form of macrocosmic ritual magick.

Where was I? That was weird. It was like a completely different part of myself, a part both my higher self and my more vulnerable self. See, I have a weird job. My profession. I went 6 figures into debt for grad school, so I could make a good living listening to people talk about their problems all day. In the hopes that I may hear a pattern they haven’t come to grips with and might be able to nudge them towards a better version of themselves. I am an editor for people’s lives, helping them write a better version of their own narrative. Is it telling that I use a lot of passive language? I try to work on that. I try to help my clients with that. But I myself fall guilty.

There are two therapy groups I lead at the clinic mainly. One is my Monday Morning Men’s group. It’s a trauma and addiction recovery group, and yes the two are related. It’s for men that have been on the short end of a legal system that only works for rich, white men. The other group is Mindfulness Meditation for Anxiety. And it was in that group, I sat on the second floor of Hollywood Mental Health Center in Vine St. looking with my clients out at a skyline covered with billboards, that were designed to manipulate their consciousness with feelings of inadequacy and to overload the landfills with planned obsolescence speeding up at an exponential rate. It was week 11 in our group cycle. And I was teaching my students how the principles of Vipassana could liberate them from the cycles of compulsion and anxiety.

But it was starting to feel inadequate, arcane, out of proportion with the level of absurdity and rage pulsating from every smartphone in the nation. Working at the Lord’s Lighthouse homeless outreach at Hollywood Presbyterian Church, I saw an increase in homelessness, many of whom were Red State refugees, fleeing states that did not take care of their own, filling the streets of a city that was struggling with its own newly homeless due to the fact that it is damn hard to find affordable rent in Los Angeles, even for the average working person. Thanks to the almost gleeful dismantling of any corporate restriction in the first year of the Trump administration, 2 or 3 publicly traded investment firms just completely sucked up all the available properties and rentals and sat on them, using them for Air B&B, and artificially driving up prices.

In these surreal times we needed to meet absurd on absurd’s terms. So, winter solstice of 2017, just a few miles from Zorthian Ranch, in a non-descript Altadena location, 12 cloaked figures partook of dry psilocybin mushrooms from the hierphant and circumnambulated on a black and white chessboard floor, around an altar, whose sides were a unit of the diameter of the circle. A man with a booming Morgan Freeman voice recited the Orphic Poem to the Sun. The cloaked figures circled one at a time through 4 altar stations on the North, South, East, and West of the temple, that vibrated with opposing neon colors, entering through invisible doors with “the sign of the Enterer,”, calling upon invisible angelic allies on this darkest day, in the time of Capricorn. This wasn’t just any darkest night of the year. Saturn and Jupiter were in conjunction within the House of Capricorn, the first time since the Rosecrucians kicked off the Great Reformation. Whose house? As a Capricorn, mine. This was the time for decisive action. The 23rd would be the most efficacious day for such an action, for maximum ripple. This wasn’t just a box of poo, some fratboy prank — this was an extended act of ritual magick, of ancient Christian theurgy, where the charged symbol of horse shit became the 95 Feces, the mirror-absurd of the 95 Theses of Martin Luther. Instead of the Door of Wittenberg Chapel, it was at the doorstep of the Pope of Mammon Worship — the antithesis of Christ’s Gospel of Good News to the Poor.

With the same matter of fact tone from which I’d set off on lunch break from work a few years earlier to help anarchists shut down a branch of Wells Fargo for their corrupt banking practices, I bid my wife and kids adieu, and told them I was off to the horse stables, to gather up my gift for the Secretary of the Treasury. I drove over the recently charred moonscape of the Northwest 210 on the way to Sunland, a town on the high desert outskirts of Los Angeles county known for horse ranches and Hell’s Angels. I name dropped the friend from seminary who boarded horses at a large stable there, and soon I was standing before a mountain of horseshit, mixed with dust and hay, swinging a shovel until my two gift-wrapped mini-fridge cardboard boxes were nice and full. I switched the old minivan’s CD player to Song 6, Creation, a 16 minute tome of esoteric cosmology by Incredible String Band. Without an ounce of hesitation, I started driving West, around the Silverlake Resevoir, doing East Sunset, West, all the way to Hollywood Hotel in Beverly Hills, where Hunter S. Thompson himself had once planned for the ultimate psychedelic tour into the American heart of darkness, the temple of Mammon that is Las Vegas.

I had called CNN earlier that day — for 3 reasons — all based on my consulting with a respected labor organizer who was familiar with the ins and outs of high risk direct action. One, I needed to beat the enemy to the press, establishing the fact that I was committing an act of political theatre not terrorism. Second, if I didn’t make this public, then all this time and effort was political masturbation, a mere act of catharsis for my own shits & giggles, not that anything’s wrong with that. That is plenty good enough reason for such acts of absurdity for friends of mine who were part of the historical Cacophony Society, whose antics included SantaCon, No Pants Bus Massive, and of course the gigantic board game of chaos magick, Burning Man. The 3rd reason I informed the press and left social media pics and commentary in real time was to garner popular support in case that I was met with intimidation or arrest.

I turned left and drove past Steve Mnuchin’s Beverly Hills residence, an average Beverly Hills flats mansion within suprising Malatov cocktail range from the sidewalk. I eyed a body builder sitting in an idling Aston Martin that I imagined to be security. As matter of fact as a UPS driver, I pulled the van into the portion of driveway street side of the gate, and carried my cardboard box over to the gate. I rang the doorbell, hoping to half a face to face delivery and to film the reaction. No such luck. I taped on my Christmas Card, a lovely little card I’d gotten at a nearby carwash gift shop that with cats in Santa Hats that read “Merry Catmas.” Inside I left my message, “Misters Trump & Mnuchin. We’re returning the gift of the Christmas Tax Bill you got us. It’s complete and utter horseshit.” Surprised by how noneventful the whole delivery felt at this point, I got back in the van and drove for Mnuchin’s Bel-Air address, within a 15 minute drive of his Beverly Hills address. It was around dusk now. Every mansion on the winding mountain road had a helicopter landing pad and walls of glass and steel that looked straight out of a James Bond villain’s lair. I pulled into Mnuchin’s driveway, rang the bell, and after a few tries, dropped off the second box as uneventful as the first. I took my time, fully expecting to be ambushed by security, my wife and friends notified of the bail plan should I be incarcerated. I fantasized about proselytizing gang members behind bars — showing them that the true enemy is not each other but the oppressive forces of Mammon, of Wall Street. After another relatively quiet drop off, I got back in the van, dialed in some Bob Dylan on the Pandora, lit up a joint I’d been saving in the event that I was able to actually drive away from this incident, and drove down the hill, and headed East on Sunset, blowing smoke, and singing triumphantly at the top of my lungs.

“I’m home,” I chimed, walking in the house, fists raised in triumph. Some neighbors had come over for an impromptu dinner gathering and kids’ play date. After popping open a new bottle of pinot with my friends and regaling them with my adventure story, I went to bed. My phone started pinging relentlessly at some point in the middle of the night and didn’t stop for the next 48 hours. When I woke up every on-line news source from LA Times to Buzzfeed to HuffPo to BBC to RT had pictures of me holding a shovel full of horseshit, another of the gift-wrapped boxes placed in front of the mansion, another a shot of the inside of the card I’d posted. For the next few days, my FB Messenger feed popped up a new message every few seconds from someone that either wanted to kill me or buy me a beer.

When I walked into work I received a standing ovation from my coworkers. And I was quickly ushered to the director’s office. Due to threats that were now coming in to the clinic as well, my personal information having been doxed by fascist trolls, I was placed on paid administrative leave. I knew my next move instinctively. I had learned to observe my cycles with Mindfulness Meditation, that after an expansive period, I often go into a contraction cycle, a crunch, and a bit of a depression. A member of my ritual crew advised me on compensating for Saturn by voluntary asceticism. I’d always wanted to do a 10 day fast, so I loaded up on water and cannabis and disappeared into the mountains. This was only the beginning.