Coordinates: I’m at my new Japanese-style low dining table, a kotatsu where you sit on the floor. I got my work setup moved into here this week and OMG happy.
[wonders of the world] When I look at this geode the size of a yacht all I can scream to myself is “when do we GO?!!!!” I wanna go so bad I’m almost mad I’m not there right this minute. Brains are funny things, no? There’s also a different huge one, the Naica Mine, in Mexico a couple of states away which I’m gonna have to make a road trip out to.
[art] Ghouls get to be immortalized in epic woodcuts, too ya know… The great artist Hokusai of wave painting fame also make a series of 100 ghosts to help would-be ghost storytellers remember the details of who, what, when, and whose behalf they did their haunting. One formerly poisoned lady turned into a lantern and chased her cheating husband till he went mad. Our ancestors like a soap opera just as much as we do today.
Japanese has a word that’s untranslatable in English, yokai, which means a friendly monster. Many of my watercolors have yokai in them, and I didn’t even know their name! Silly me.
[art] More demon doodles – this time from Western tradition – flow from our progenitors in 1565. I just can’t get enough of this stuff. There’s a lot of goodness inside this Pandora’s box… probably a lost sock or debit card down there too.
[art-ish?] Ok, maybe I just like watching this video because the guy is super adorable and has an even more adorbzzz accent. No? Just me? Anyways, he gives a surprisingly in-depth history of why the young’uns are getting inked with some seriously silly designs. My skin feels itchy looking at these.
[sanity] I just checked, and there are 81.6 million yoga videos on YouTube, give or take a few tens of thousands. This, however, is from my dear colleague Iris here in Oaxaca. I don’t even care if you do the yoga – put it on in the background just to hear her Belgian accent and calming tone, and your day already will be better.
If you’ve never done Hatha before, I couldn’t recommend it more. It’s yoga designed to attune you to the fine vibrations of energy flowing in your body. Don’t believe me that such a thing exists… go and feel it for yourself.
maiden voyage : how does LSD work?
Welp, firstly I have to specify that if you ask someone who’s sufficiently an expert to know such things they will tell you we don’t actually know how they work. But, not to be a bait-and-switch here’s what we do know. We’ll start this Friday with our counter-culture favorite, LSD, and cover more in following weeks.
One thing we notice is that the serotonin receptor 5-HT2A is involved in our visual cortex. These processes are optimized to help us recognize the face of someone we know. LSD disrupts our usual visual processing and in that suspension of the status quo, we see things that otherwise we wouldn’t. By de-optimizing, we are open to detect patterns and assign meaning in brand new ways.
LSD also made the brain more unified in its activity, and there was more communication between regions that normally work separately. “The brain is functioning in a simpler way,” says Carhart-Harris.