Psychedelics, Ulysses (Mr. Psychedelic), and Which Pen, Exactly?

Artists are strange animals. We live half a step to the left of consensus reality, accused of chaos while quietly studying its grammar. Picture a Ferrari threading the cereal aisle; every cell in the engine wants to redline and take the shelves and the entire supermarket with it, just to see what remains. That’s where I write from: the aisle, the engine, the itch.

I’ve always been the family outlier—the cautionary tale in heels. With my brother, I censor advice because I know rebellion sounds better than it plays. Still, some of you may have felt the furnace under my paragraphs: the gym rep gritted through, the monkish insistence on the present, the rage at a world that lets beauty slide through its fingers without even turning its head. Stay. Witness. Make. Be moved.

Calm will come, I suspect, when I befriend every shadow that keeps me feral. This is why I have always been a proponent of psychedelics. The loudest one still in the cage is the creative. I draw and I write, but if I had to choose a last instrument, I’d die gripping a cheap Moleskine ballpoint. Storytelling is the oldest magic I know—building worlds on a tight deadline and a mortal body. Thinking is the heavy labor; walking is how I process. Then comes the harder thing: cutting until what’s left can breathe.

“I have made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.” —Blaise Pascal, Provincial Letters

Productivity myths don’t interest me, but devotion does. I try not to overthink; I want my mind to play on paper without an ulterior motive. So I set myself a dare: one page a day, one clean entry, no bargaining with the blank.

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I met Ulysses while he was rolling paint across a wall for a board-game founder—my Venn diagram: art and games kissing in the middle. (Remind me to tell you about my stint in a neurodivergent-designed board-game startup; it deserves its own labyrinth.)

On our first walk, I told him and the sky that I was grateful to find an artist while I was still bleeding out a heartbreak, dredging my unconscious for gold, and rewiring my life. I needed to make things; not just execute subroutines.

Ulysses’s story spirals like all real ones. The line that lodged under my ribs was this: “I told myself I couldn’t be like every other artist. I had to go bigger. I kept going and going and going. I almost quit—and that day was my break. Joe Rogan reached out.”

What interests me isn’t the celebrity cameo; it’s the hinge: the inch between quitting and consequence. The hero’s journey is less a plot than a pressure system; failure condenses, redemption storms. Hearing him name that threshold made me ruthless about time:

Play more. Make more. Stop narrating the making and just make.

The universe is stingy with instructions but generous with breadcrumbs. They hide in a line of paint, in the precise angle where a loss refracts into a lesson, in the person who collides with your day at the exact speed required to wake you. I’m still metabolizing the experience of orbiting so many makers at once here in Austin. Part two will be about visuals and sound—how music organizes my ghosts and dares them to dance.

For now, consider this a toast to the ones who keep building worlds for the rest of us to visit when ours are on fire. Thank you for your stubbornness. Thank you for the proof that dreams are not delicate.

And if you have a minute, go look at Ulysses’s work on Instagram. If it cracks something open, good. That’s the point.