Opium: I was immediately intrigued by the idea that I could grow opium and produce this most ancient of psycho-active drugs in my garden from easily obtainable seeds. I decided to give it a try, just to see what would happen. What happened turned out to be a living nightmare, as I found myself ensnared in a quiet but determined federal campaign to stamp out knowledge of an easy-to-produce homegrown narcotic before it became a fad. Caffeine: Mornings were the worst. I came to see how integral caffeine is to the daily work of knitting ourselves back together after the fraying of consciousness during sleep. That reconsolidation of self-the daily sharpening of the mental pencil-took much longer than usual and never quite felt complete. I began to think of caffeine as an essential ingredient for the construction of an ego. Mine was now deficient in that nutrient, which perhaps explains why the whole idea of writing this piece-indeed, of ever writing anything ever again-had come to seem insurmountable. Mescaline: I wondered if perhaps I had found a hidden path out of the labyrinth of anxiety in which the virus and the fires had trapped us, that simply by lowering the horizon of my attention from the future-for the virus and the fire existed mostly there for us-I had recovered some of the beauty and pleasure in living that had been lost since the pandemic began. There was a spaciousness to this present that felt like the perfect antidote to the shrunken-world claustrophobia of lockdown. Book jacket.