Psychedelics

Transcript

Speaker1: There's a feral, sweat-soaked stench hanging in the air. It's primal, raw. The sixth wave hits and my bones vibrate like tuning forks in a thunderstorm. I'm locked in a staring contest with a swirling vortex of color, projected like some pagan deity's fever dream, onto a screen in the center of the ballroom. Purple goddamn squares tumble endlessly into the black oblivion. I feel it, the thud of mortality. A simple thought cuts through the noise like a razor through silk. I will die one day, and the strangest thing is, I'm okay with that. No panic, no regret, just a warm, buzzing acceptance. This story is a complete fabrication of fiction. It did not happen. Any semblance to real events is purely coincidental. Any mention of any other humans is accidental. Any resemblance to real people, places, or events is unintentional and not meant to be a representation of them. Don't do drugs, kids. Drugs are bad. I want to stretch my legs, though, and try out prose for episode 69. Did this happen? No. Again, purely a work of fiction, y'all. Before I begin this descent into the mad world of the lifestyle and before some of y'all inevitably tune out, two important updates to share. Listen to these. I will be at Naughty in New Orleans this year. my wife and i will be helping out at the std hero booth and going to all the parties please stop by and say hi i want to meet you i want to meet my listeners and i know at least a handful of you will be at naughty and we're going to be doing a seminar as well so be on the lookout for that naughty in new orleans is july 9th The second update. I partner with Riske Lifestyle Parties. Y'all hear me talk about their events a lot. Riske is putting on an event at the end of September called Pulsify on the Florida Gulf Coast. Details are available at RiskeLifestyleParties.com. And you hear me. I run the ads for them all the time. I have an update. Pulsify, it was a two-day event Friday and Saturday. Now there are plans in the works to extend that to Thursday. So it's going to be a three-day event. It's all happening at a beautiful resort right on the beach. And my favorite part, one of my favorite parts is there are restaurants within walking distance. This is a huge selling feature for me. I don't have to drive all weekend. Full details on this extra day will be released on May 30th at risquelifestyleparties.com. Onward with a story. My favorite book and movie, y'all have heard me talk about this, is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It represents this wild trip through the human condition that could only happen once in all of creation. A story told through the ramblings of an unreliable narrator in an unreliable state of mind. I have learned much to my dismay that not nearly enough people have seen this movie. And drugs. The movie's about drugs too. So many drugs. I dodged the siren call of psychedelics for years. The timing was never right. The wrong party, the wrong crowd, too much tequila, the wrong vibes, not enough trust. Always a reason, but the question chewed at me in the cerebral cortex. What happens when you finally surrender the wheel? Would it be revelation or ruin, enlightenment or ego death with jazz hands? What does a man become when he hands the keys of perception to some sneaky little molecule squatting in the back of his skull, when he starts seeing the world through eyes that no longer belong to him, twitching in a meat suit operated by chaos? Imagine it, standing in a crowd of horny libertines under the pulsing lights of a swinger convention, each heart being syncopated to the throb of a baseline that doesn't quite exist. Suddenly, you're hearing thoughts that don't belong to you, smelling people's insecurities, tasting the goddamn words in the air like cotton candy and lust. This is no ordinary trip. This is no college dorm room acid fantasy. This is the chemical crucible. You don't come here to find yourself. You come here to burn your old self down and see what's left dancing in the smoke. Vile, glorious, unforgiving. Alcohol and me, we've been on bad terms for years. I see that with the scorched clarity of hindsight, razor-edged and obvious in a way that only time or psychedelics can reveal. All things are defined by their opposites, after all. If booze is the beloved poison of the masses, then psychedelics are the holy sacraments of the heretics, the thinking man's taboo. See, alcohol, it doesn't free you. It strips you, peels back inhibitions, not to liberate you, but to humiliate. It turns thoughtful men into slobbering homunculi, whiskey-dicked and slurring groping shadows they once called friends. Sloppy, stumbling golems and human skin suits navigating the world with all the grace of a wet sponge in a fistfight. And when it's over, when the final shot glass has been tipped like some sadistic chalice, the hangover arrives like a creditor from hell. That pulsing, pounding drumbeat in the skull is your own goddamn heartbeat punishing you for your poor decisions. The liver screams, the brain lifts, the evil spirits you've swallowed in amber and honey claw their way back out of your mouth one regret at a time. But despite all that, booze is still invited, still loved, still poured with reverence like some toxic, codependent friend from junior high. You know they'll ruin your night, you know they'll talk shit about you in the morning. But you let them in anyway, because what else do you do at a party when everyone's sucking courage from red solo cups like hummingbirds drunk on rotgut nectar? Alcohol flows through this world like blood, cultural, ubiquitous, and liquid lie passed around in the name of bravery, connection, and forgetting. And yet somehow it always remembers. There are alternatives, dammit. Beautiful, twisted, shimmering alternatives that launch your consciousness into the stars without melting your dignity along the way. Substances that bend reality without snapping it in half, things that keep the training wheels on just long enough for you to ride the serpent. I am standing, at least I believe I am. It's the one remaining fact I trust, standing against a wall in a room that is louder than God's final trumpet, where bass lines don't just thump, they penetrate. They move through your ribcage like a resurrection. My blood is doing strange things, lifting, congealing, swimming upstream like it's heard the call of something ancient. My wife turns to me with a face, half-curiosity, half-conspirator, and says, your eyes are huge. And I tell her the only truth I know in that moment. I want to see everything. How did we arrive here on this bizarre wavelength of light and lust? Like all great stories, it began with an imitation. Digital, of course, in this day. A text. A blip on the grid that came two weeks before the descent. A party. A big one. The kind of gathering whispered about in vanilla circles like urban legends. Hundreds of lifestyle adventurers converging in a hotel turned sexual funhouse. A night of weirdness, wonder, and unapologetic hedonism. Thematic costumes. Pulsing lights. Playrooms like something out of Dante's horny fever dream. They exist, God help us, they do exist. You don't stumble into these things, you are summoned. Our first time making the pilgrimage to this one, first time this far from home, from the familiar beds and well-worn alibis, first time wading into this crowd, this swirling, pheromone-heavy soup of kink and charisma. You never know what awaits you on the edge of a new party, who is lurking behind the mask, what secret kinks are hiding in the corners, where the hell the night will go once the sun dies. This wasn't our first rodeo, a takeover, certainly not. No, we've danced this dance before, just showing up at new places, known for charging into the unknown with more nerve than new ones. We have more balls and brains, brave, maybe curious, definitely. Sometimes the dice hits lucky sevens and everyone ends up sticking and smiling. Other times, it's snake eyes, baby, nothing but awkward small talk and limp handshakes, but you don't get the thrill unless you roll. We checked into the hotel, a sleek, sanitized temple to sleep just outside civilization. A necessary precaution. Best to tuck this crowd safely away from the pearl-clutchers and the god-frearing folk in town. This isn't the sort of thing you want to explain to your Uber driver. I made a decision. Tonight, I would partake. For science, I said. For content. For the invisible audience out there. Hello, I see you curious voyeurs from every time zone itching to know what it's like to dissolve into the glittering swirl of a lifestyle convention high on molecules and raw human energy. I wanted to feel all of it, see it all, chronicle the collapse of the mundane, ride the razor's edge of perception like a man trying to surf a tsunami on a bar stool. And I wanted to bring you with me, all of you, every last soul who's ever whispered, what if? Don't go too hard, my wife says as she pulls on her dress, half laughing and half mothering. My wife, the one constant in this swirling kaleidoscope of vice and neon, naked in the soft lamplight, that familiar sacred nudity I see every day. And still, it just punches the breath out of me like a memory I never want to forget. She is art in motion and I, the fool in love with the same painting, every morning. I tell her I won't go hard. But I am not a smart man. A smart man would weigh his doses, respect the alchemy. I am not a smart man. I am a man who sees the edge of reality and wonders how sharp they really are. If one piece is good, then three is better, and seven? Seven is transcendence, damn it. The kind of transcendence that comes with sparkles and regret. So I now become the unreliable narrator at this point, a man whose memory bends in the wind, a man who willingly swallowed a time bomb with a smile and a shrug. I sit, I wait. Dressed and buzzing, time stretches like gum on a hot sidewalk. The clock ticks not forward, but sideways. I'm waiting for two things, the party to start and the come-up to kick the door in. About an hour for both, give or take. Friends drop by. We hug, we kiss, we preen and posture in our costumes. Tribal bonding rituals perform with glitter and cologne. Laughter echoes off the hotel walls like distant thunder. Beneath it all, though, a silent countdown hums in my gut. I can feel the molecules rearranging themselves, and then something. Just a whisper on the edge of my vision. A shimmer of flicker like the air itself blinked. A wave rolls past my peripheral vision, and I flinch. But there's nothing there. Or is it? No, definitely not. Yes. Absolutely yes. The only logical answer is, I must have imagined it. I must have. This is the moment when logic shakes your hand, kisses your cheek, and quietly leaves the fucking building. We step out the door and the first wave hits like a kiss from a psychedelic angel, warmth flooding my limbs, not heavy like sedation, but light, joyful, playful even. Like someone wrapped my skeleton in a towel fresh from the dryer, my skin buzzes with invisible sunshine. I look down. The carpet, oh God, the carpet, a swirling hellscape of green vines and purple flowers, pulsating softly underfoot like a botanical rave. I know with a clarity usually reserved for confessions that this floor will be a problem. Not now, though. Not yet. Eventually, the vines will rise. The flowers will judge me. We reach the elevator, and this, this is where our livestock inventions, they flirt with the gods of chaos. Elevators are both salvation and trapdoors, because when it's only a partial hotel takeover, anything is fucking possible. You press the button and hold your breath, because there's always a chance. Those doors will slide open, and inside like a norman rockwell fever dream painting is an all-american family of nine lawned midwestern disney bound dad dead-eyed from 12 hours behind the wheel of a van that smells like capri suns and broken dreams mom frazzled clutching a pool back in the last shreds of her fucking sanity children freakishly possibly cloned, all demanding to swim in the pool at nine o'clock at night. The elevator opens, and you must make a snap judgment. Do we enter? Not if you're dressed like I am. Neon green shorts, a headband that blinks like an emergency flare, and a obnoxious t-shirt declaring my love of cream pies. These people are not ready for me. I am a myth in their universe, a cautionary tale in human form. If I step into that elevator, I become a story told in hushed voices. They will have questions, or the man in neon green shorts will live forever in their minds, a strange glittering oracle who emerged from the bowels of the hotel to remind them you're not in kansas anymore skip the elevator always skip the elevator i miss the age of heroes and legends no great war to fight no pantheon to join no campfire singing my name long after my bones are dust i will not be remembered by blood or kin beyond this single flickering generation but still somehow somehow i know i will haunt that vanilla family's memories not through lineage but story a mad echo told Thank you.
Speaker2: Thank you. generation. But still, somehow, somehow, I know I will haunt that vanilla family's memories.
Speaker1: Not through lineage, but story. A mad echo told secondhand by someone's aunt who swears she once met me in a hotel elevator, glowing and giggling like a radioactive prophet. Elevators, though, elevators can be blessings. Assuming, of course, they're not filled with a vanilla brigade. The timing is right. If fate aligns and the doors open onto a capsule packed, not with sunscreen, sticky children, but with a glittering sex tribe. My people, then the magic happens. You're all shoved into a chrome rectangle, all skin and costumes and pheromones, trapped. A fever dream in twenty square feet. Eye contact becomes intimacy. Proximity becomes consent to conversation. Names are exchanged, compliments traded, hands brushed, the air thickens. A man in a robe might wink at you. A woman in a sheer catsuit might ask what you're into before you even hit the lobby. The elevator becomes the first mental playroom. Not sex, not yet, but the charge is there. Electric, unspoken, you ride the line between polite introduction and the preamble to an orgy. I'm still coasting the first wave. The warm, floaty space where reality bends just enough to keep you wondering if your teeth are glowing. I offer up frantic prayers to any gods or forgotten spirits who will still take messages from the chemically enhanced. Please, please don't let this elevator open onto a vacationing family from Des Moines. Not tonight, you bastards. Not when my pupils are saucers and my aura is likely visible from space. Just give me a few more floors to safety. Just let me make it to the ballroom. And the elevator. And if the elevator doors open to the right crowd, well, maybe then I'll become a legend after all. Luckily for us, the doors open. It is an empty elevator relief. We take it down. We made it to the ballroom. A black curtain hangs across the entrance like a veil between two worlds, thick and heavy, shielding the holy chaos beyond from the jutting stairs of mere mortals, angels, and demons alike. The devout and the damned have no business peering past this threshold. This is a temple, a jungle, a circus soaked in lube and glitter. Standing beside the curtain is a man, the guardian, security, stone face, built like a vending machine filled with bad decisions. I know, I know that when I reach him, I will have to perform the sacred rite. Flash the wristband. I have the wristband. I've always had the wristband, but this moment feels colossal, mythic, stressful in a way that makes no sense. What does he see when he looks at me? Does he know I'm vibrating on the edge of the second wave, that my molecules are arguing about reality? He doesn't care. But in that sliver of eye contact, something passes between us, a knowing. I speak to him without words, with telepathy. In my mind, I tell him, we are safe, we are beautiful. Let us pass. He nods solemn like a priest accepting a tithe. The curtain parts, and just like that, we are inside the womb of madness. The music doesn't play at these events. It pulses, it breathes, the air is heavy with perfume and lust and the electric hum of expectation. Conversations swirl and fragment like smoke. Bits of laughter moaned invitations names you'll never fucking remember. Bodies glide past us, half-dressed, fully alive. Ladies in lingerie and otherworldly creatures made of lace leather and dopamine shuffle through the crowd like nymphs summoned from a better dimension. We press into the mass of people like a finger into warm jello, soft, strange, yielding. And then boom, the second wave hits, perfect timing like God's drop beat. The senses crack open, no filters, no barriers, every chakra begins to spin like pinwheels caught in a hurricane. I am no longer a man, I am a vessel, a conduit of color and vibration and sacred horniness. People press past me, welcoming, warm, full of light, hands on my shoulders, hugs that buzz, faces lit up by some invisible inner sun. Then she appears. A woman in a stream bikini presses her entire divine geometry against my body flesh to flesh, no words, just contact and intention. Her touch reminds me bluntly and erotically that I am wearing too much goddamn clothing right now. My skin begins to sweat with Thank you. flesh to flesh. No words, just contact and intention. Her touch reminds me bluntly and erotically that I am wearing too much goddamn clothing right now. My skin begins to sweat with sudden awareness. I am overdressed for divinity, and the night is just beginning. My wife takes my hand and leads me to the bar like a patient mother, just dragging her child along. She is not on this chemical vision quest with me. She is grounded, sober, sacred. My guardian angel in heels, my Sherpa in sequins. She is the human tether keeping me from becoming a glittering myth lost forever into the night. Tonight, this holy creature though, she needs a drink. I stumble to the bar, hands clumsy, pockets deeper than they've ever been. The words fall out of my mouth like they've been waiting for release. Two white claws. My wife's chosen potion. Simple, sweet, and forgettable. She's easing into the night like a reasonable person. Meanwhile, I'm soaring towards fucking Saturn wearing a neon headband and no plan. The can is cold in my hand. Too cold. It offends me with this metallic indifference. The bartender hands me my drinks like I've got my shit together, but we all know I don't. I'm held together right now by just vibrations and sheer audacity. We shuffle back towards the ballroom. The music, it calls to me, demands me, it pulses like a living thing whispering through my bones. Follow the rhythm, Jason. Come to my temple. But we are intercepted. Of course we are. Between me and my pilgrimage stand a pair of beautiful, distracted people I know. A redhead, impossibly cute, with hair like flame and a smile that could reroute traffic. And her husband, tall, dark, and just shady enough to be interesting. I can see in my wife's eyes that he's her type. We hug, that warm, sticky, swinger kind of hug where intentions swirl. My wife announces to the couple, he's flying tonight, and I chime in proudly, I intend to go higher than ever before. They laugh. We laugh. But I'm already studying the redhead's drink. It's a glass with ice. Realize I'm fascinated. What is that? I ask like a man who has never seen a beverage before. Rum and Coke, she says. I offer my drink. I'll trade you. I declare holding out my sad, cold, white claw like it's infected. She accepts too fast and doesn't realize what she's agreeing to until the deal is done, and her hand holds the claw of shame. But I've got the glass now, the ice, the way it clinks, the way it just sounds, the way it feels like victory into my hand. I tell her, I'll find you later. I say, which is kind of true, but also a lie. And then I strut. Oh yes, the chemicals are dancing now, my limbs are loose. My body is a marionette operated by a very enthusiastic ghost. Gravity no longer has the same grip on me. I feel bendable. The second wave has fully bloomed. My wife guides me and pushes me really into the mouth of the beast. Through the crowd, through the press of warm flesh and strobe lights, we break through the edges like explorers emerging into a tropical jungle and then we're on the dance floor the womb of nine nices the altar of sound and i am reborn the crushing of people is palpable they're not dancing so much as colliding in rhythm like atoms they are everywhere assaulting present real the crowd breathes flexes swells like a living organism, and I am a cell within it, pulsing with borrowed light. Time breaks. Not gently, not politely. It stretches like a rubber band around my skull and then pop. How long have we been dancing? An hour? Two? A weekend? Did I miss Christmas? I check my watch like an archaeologist trying to decode ancient scripture. The bastard thing tells me ten minutes. Ten human minutes. That's when I know I truly hear a third wave. Time delish. The moment when time throws up his hands, mutters good luck, and exits stage left. Now I am a derived and pure sensation. I'm bound by clocks or calendars. This is how you live in a single moment forever. This is what the high priest whispered about in smoke-filled caves eons ago. This is what yogis chased on mountaintops. I found it on a dance floor in neon shorts. At some point, the drink I was holding, my precious ice-clinking chalice of civilization, vanished, gone, just gone, replaced by a humble bottle of water, sweating in my hand like it knows more than I do. I glanced at it in confusion. When did this happen? Who gave this to me? Was it God, the bartender, a helpful forest spirit? I mumber a barely audible, thank you to no one, assuming correctly that my wife was the one responsible. She's always there in the background, my anchor in a world made of jellyfish and laser beams. The music hits like a damn UFO landing in familiar and equal mind-twisting doses. They said the theme for the party was 1960s and 70s peace, love, daisy chains, hippies, and the unmistakable stench of sandalwood and rebellion. Naturally, this piqued some reckless corner of my brain, and I agreed to wade into this chaos. What they are playing for music is technically from that age of Aquarius, sure, but it's been fed through a blender of synthesizers and manic drum loops, Hendrix on amphetamines, Janis Joplin with a disco ball. The DJ, a manic sorcerer of vinyl and digital sin, is spinning sacred rock anthems into some unholy dance floor Frankenstein. It's like watching history do the cha-cha in platform shoes. I am, as always, slightly off-bee, caught between the groove and the ghost of Woodstock. My feet move, confused but compliant, twitching in a defiance of rhythm, time, and reason. I am both witness and victim to this neon-lit auditory hallucination. I don't know how long we danced. Could have been 20 minutes. Could have been long enough to reincarnate. But it was long enough for the fourth wave to come barreling in, No warning, no mercy. Are you ready to party in paradise? Risque Lifestyle Parties presents Pulsify 2025 at the Island Resort on the sparkling waters of the Gulf Coast in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, September 26th through the 28th, 2025. Come for the two-day party that will take hotel takeovers to the next level in one place, with many stories and endless fun for you and your sexiest friends. Spend the day relaxing by the pool with swim-up bars, evenings on the white sand beach, and your nights with the hottest of things the vanilla world can only dream of. 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I need faces. I need the bar. I lean in close and tell my wife with all the seriousness of a man discovering calculus, I need another drink. What I mean is is I need to escape. I need to unleash this storm of affection bubbling in my chest. I need to go hug strangers. She pats my arm, wise and suspicious of me, and guides me like a kindergarten teacher, ushering her favorite liability out of the ball pit, off the dance floor, through the curtain, back into the hallway, into the bar, into the world. People, so many people, a sea of possibilities and fishnet and harnesses, faces to greet, souls to commune with, names I will forget and stories I will never remember telling. I float through them like a technicolor ghost, shun shackled from decorum. Social norms melt like ice on the sidewalk. I think I'm charming. I feel like a champagne-soaked panther, gliding from one conversation to the next. But reality, dear listeners, a cruel, cruel little bastard. Later, my wife would tell me gently, with great affection on the way home, that I was going up to people, stating my name like a cult leader, handing out blessings, hugging them like I had just returned from war, and then vanishing into crowd like a goddamn folk legend. Over and over and over again. Hi, I'm Jason. Hug. Poof. Gone. At the time, I believed I was building relationships, laying foundations for a hundred beautiful new friendships. In truth, I was leaving a trail of confused smiles and faint glittery handprints like a feral confetti canyon of love. This, this is why it's good to have your spouse at these things. Someone to tell you what actually happened when your soul took the wheel and your brain went out for a smoke. My wife informed me the next morning with the exhausted clarity of someone who survived a minor hurricane that I had achieved peak friendliness, weaponized charisma. She said that, but at a decibel level that rattled teeth and bent spoons. I don't know.
Speaker2: I don't know. hurricane that I had achieved peak friendliness, weaponized charisma. She said that, but at a
Speaker1: decibel level that rattled teeth and bent spoons. Some people drink, some dabble in pharmacological absurdities. Not that I did any of this, of course. Let's be clear for the sake of future legal proceedings. Don't do drugs. And what merges is a mutant personality, some hideous thing from the depths, all teeth and shame. That's not me. No, the beast inside me is no secret monster. It is the same sun-kissed bastard smiling on the patio. Just the volume knob sheared off and turned up to obliterate. There is no transformation in me. Nor my personality. Only escalation. Then came the fifth wave, the narrator wave, the hush, the internal monologue that swallows reality whole. We are now sitting in the corner of the bar. I'm surrounded by beautiful people creating a corral to contain me. I asked a friend if I was talking too much. She laughed and she laughed like I had asked if water was wet. She told me you haven't said a word in 20 minutes. I've been running full commentary mode inside my brain, locked in a goddamn sensory fugue state. That woman over there is holding a drink. That man just took 20 steps across the room. My shoes are shining. I am in a chair. This chair is green. The chair is hostile. All of it racing through my skull like a broadcast. Only I could hear. The signal was pure. No static. Every neuron turned to the frequency of God. I could hear thoughts. I could see past dimensions. I could smell truth. Smell. And it smells like sweat, cheap perfume, and it goes to bad decisions. There's a smell leaking from the playroom over there. Not a scent. Not a whiff. A smell. Aggressive. A punch to the olfactory cortex. It's the stink of sex. Raw, unapologoid of metaphor you do not ease into this it hits you across the face like the air itself has been corrupted by rutting mammals two people fucking in room you don't notice it four people might you might start get a whiff like something ancient creeping in through the floorboards but 30 40 sweaty snarling groaning humans locked in a chamber of mutual destruction, that smell gains mass. It becomes a presence. It seeps out of the walls like a fever dream. It beckons. Like a half-drunk knight summoned by a vision in the midst to go fight a dragon, I must follow this foul oracle. I rise, not gracefully, a noble stagger, if you will. The practice balancing act of libido and delusion. My wife clocks me instantly. Eyes sharp, jaw set. She knows that look. The look of the damned and the determined. I'm going on an adventure. I'm going to go look in the playroom. I announce like I'm requesting entry into Valhalla. That's a bad idea, she replies. Firm but resigned, I whisper. I need this. My audience, all of you, need to know this. I must share. I say with the gravity of a man confessing to a crime he fully intends to fucking repeat. She sighs. She's used to this. She's married to this, and God bless her, she takes my hand. We press down the hallway, a slow motion wave through a human tide that sheds clothing like burdens. The deeper we go, the more skin I see. The air gets warmer, heavier, charged. We're approaching the mouth of the beast, the orifice, the sacred hole. A man in a robe stands at the threshold, silent guardian of this Dionysian dimension, and nodding him with reverence, one gives a high priest or a bouncer at a nightclub, I wonder, will he judge me? Will he sense the chaos burning just behind my eyes? Nope, he smiles. Shakes my hand like I'm family. Hugs me like I'm clean. Parts the curtains. Always a black curtain. All the defining moments of my life lately seem to be hidden behind black curtains, and every time a black curtain parts, the universe shifts on its axis. We step inside the playroom. I see things. Not just with my eyes, with every receptor in my flawed, trembling body. I witness scenes carved from the fevered mind of some unhinged deity. A writhing mosaic of flesh. I can't count the bodies, even if I try. Another one folds out of the dark, hips grinding, hands grasping, mouth open like they're screaming prayers to a pagan god of friction. Moans, grunts, and the percussive slap of bodies meeting like thunderclaps in a storm of lust someone is chanting fuck like he's the only word left in the english language the air is sex and ozone and velvet heat this is not the room for a man whose senses are set to goddamn eleven this is not a room for thinking this is a room for fucking i close my eyes to shut it down shut it off, shut it out. I clutch my wife's hand tight. A silent SOS, curiosity satisfied, curiosity overfed. It is time to retreat. We shuffle out like survivors of car crash. The hallway greets us with cool air and closed confusion. That's when I realize I'm shirtless. How long, how many minutes, how many realities ago did my shirt disappear? I look down. Two women, not strangers, acquaintances, people I know, names I know, voices I've laughed with. Now their hands are on my chest like I'm a popsicle. One mouth grazes my nipple and tongue dances down my sternum. I am the sacrifice offered up on this altar of hallway hedonism. These women are serpents, beautiful and smithing, winding themselves around my body. I blink. I smile. This is nice. I slip away like dream. They just slip away like a dream. My wife is laughing, laughing at the whole thing, and I love her for it. She grabs my hand and pulls me towards the music, into the pulse, back to the dance floor. The timing is divine because the sixth wave slams into me like a freight train made of light. Reality fractures. I stare into the screen. Not a screen anymore. Not anymore. A portal. A sacred geometry swirling with impossible fractals. Birth into rhythm. Light birthed from sound. The sixth wave has arrived. The sixth wave is acceptance. The sixth wave is surrender. The sixth wave is truth dressed in freedom skin. It's the moment where your soul stops resisting and simply signs the waiver. Yes, it says, I agree to this reality. I ride it out and see who we become on the other side. I don't know how long we danced. Time has dissolved. It has no edges now, no numbers, no evidence. The drinkers begin to collapse, bodies drifting out of sight, back to their rooms maybe? That's how I know this night is aging. A rig of men forms around a clump of women. Always the circle, the screw, geometry, and protection are possession. Women in the center, men on the edge, the keepers of a makeshift fortress of flesh and sweat. They're not guards, they're predators. They're wolves around the sheep, they're orbiters. Satellites pulled in by the gravity of femininity. And over there. Over there is a different sight. A couple spinning alone in a sacred circle of their own making. Ten feet of empty dance floor claimed like sovereign territory. They are not dancing to the music but through it. Baptized in the rhythm untethered. Heaven isn't up there. It's spinning. It's in this space, this spinning space they've created. Time flows. The crowd thins. This is how I know time is at least moving by subtraction. Some bodies slip back into the playroom, lured by musk and memory. Hands reach for us with smiles, inviting, welcome, hungry. But no, not this night. We decline. We decline again and again, kindly, reverently. This is not the time and place for fucking. This is a temple. This is the sermon. This is communion with the divine through base and trouble. We are not here for bodies. We are here for souls, our own in each other's burning bright and strobe light's sanctity, breaking apart and reforming with every drop of the beat. The crowd is thinning now. The great migration begins, bodies peeling off the dance floor like petals of a drunk flower. Friends find us, smiling, swaying, one foot still in the party. They shuffle us toward the elevator as the speakers die, a sudden surgical death. The music has stopped, the party is over, and it is horrifying. Welcome to the seventh wave. Silence, but not true silence, worse than silence, the aggravating hum of fluorescent lights. The shrill cheeriness of people still high on connection, not chemicals. Laughs too sharp. Voices too loud that just reverberate down the halls. My sense is still raw and open like flayed skin twitch at every sound. My body is moving, but I don't remember the steps. We're in the elevator now, and I stare at my reflection in the mirror doors. And there he is. wild-haired, eyes glowing with a residue of strobe light entertainment, skin slick with effort, joy, and some other sacred fluid I don't know. Every muscle hums like an engine left running too long. I am a Viking marooned in a hotel. This is the face of a man displaced, too big for this time, too weird for this silence. I look like I should be storming a village or howling into a storm, not riding an elevator to a king's suite in a granola bar. I'm not done yet, the beast whispers, but the night is. The night is done. The door is open. I worry about that vanilla family. Maybe they just wanted to get pizza at 3 a.m. and they're just encountering random swingers, wild lifestyle people wandering this hotel. Maybe they wandered down from the wrong tower, blissfully unaware. They booked a room in Babylon. It's possible, entirely possible. I flinch backward out of instinct, out of some primal sense of protection for civilians who are probably imaginary. No one is beside me, my tribe, my wife, and my friends. They're five feet behind me, laughing, glowing, moving like creatures who survive something cosmic. We've crammed into the elevator now. Six bodies, one ecosystem. Pheromones, clothes clinging to damp skin. I realize I had a shirt once at some time in the past. Where's my shirt? I ask, and no one and everyone. My wife holds it up like the goddamn Ark of the Covenant. She is my anchor, my archivist, my holy fucking archivist of lost garments and fragmented realities. The elevator spits us out into an empty hallway, but the silence is a lie. Doors hang open like mouths ajar, and the entire corridor is alive with the sounds of fucking, joyous, committed fucking moaning. From room to room, a symphony of sighs slaps, giggles, groans like someone cranked the volume up on humanity's mating call. I shake my head. I want no part of this. Not out of prudishness, but the simple fact that my soul has left the fucking building. This is not my time. The hunt is over. The party is done. The eighth wave hits. The wave of final surrender. The end of the night, the end of need. All that's left now is a soft, inevitable gravity of sleep. I want darkness. I want a pillow. I want a pillow that smells like home. I want to dissolve into dreams without questions. All right, everyone, that was fun, right? Total work of fiction. This did not happen to me. But if it did happen to me, and if it does happen to you, well, I can't leave an episode without giving out some kind of advice. Don't drugs and if you do anything besides alcohol but i know you won't because you don't want to disappoint all those sweet vanilla people in your life if you do decide to do this have a babysitter or a trusted person to rely upon and keep your ass under control i always appreciate hearing your feedback and comments on episodes or suggestions for topics so feel free to reach out to me at host at thatofthelifestyle.com. My website is thatofthelifestyle.com. Personal disclaimer, I am not a medical professional nor a trained and certified educator of any kind in any way. I am a guy with a microphone sharing my personal experiences with you. This podcast is for entertainment purposes only. Please join us for the next episode. Remember, SDI testing is important, takes a community to make a difference. Go to stdhero.com and use my promo code TOL15 for 15% off your order. Whatever you may do today, I hope you have a fantastic time doing it. Know that you're appreciated and loved. Have a great day. Thank you.