The Pink Cloud Effect
part one of Deathclown Rules!
Any seriously disorganized system or subsystem will improve if sufficient stimulus is applied to it. This does not mean that the stimulus is good, true or sane, just that the disorganized system responds positively in some regard to almost anything.
This is why and how bad, corrupt and untrue things can appear to help certain people, who then bond to those things the same way a baby duck bonds to the first face it sees when it hatches.
To the baby duck, there is no ability to discern between correct and incorrect bonding. There is just bonding to the organizing force, in this case, a mammalian face, as the first step towards orienting inside of its chaotic, disorganized state. It entrains, hopefully, to a more organizing force.
But this force could be corrupt. This force could be stupid and also disorganized, but just have slightly more physical power.
Do you see what I’m getting at? Do you see why we are drowning in a sea of insane systems, methods, so-called therapies and interventions? Why people are bonding to conspiracy theories, why you can seem to be helped by cults and cult leaders up to a point? The help has little to do with the person, the system, the ideological nonsense baked into the stimulus.
It is merely because your system is so regressed and infantilized that any organizing force improves some of its chaotic symptoms.
Yes, cults and conspiracy theories are organizing systems. Somatic domination and moral hypnosis are organizing stimuli.
If you are lucky enough to survive this initial re-parenting attachment delusion, it’s likely that many of your original symptoms will return in different ways, meaning you will backslide. You backslide because your system has acclimated to the initial buzz of the stimulus and the methods of the system are untrue, wrong, abusive, not actually helpful for your underlying conditions, etc.
The caffeine-like dopamine high of the initial bonding is wearing off, but the lust for feeling connected and feeling taken care of, feeling certain about the worldview remains, making you feel bad for pulling away from your addictive bond.
But you must pull away because your body is devolving again, and the symptoms are trying to tell you how stupid you are behaving; how stupid your bonds are.
This is why in more advanced stages of life and practice, real help becomes rarer and more specific. Because if you can learn some maturity and become more internally organized, you hopefully will not fall for things like a baby duck anymore, so you won’t get the dopamine rush of any-port-in-a-storm bonding to a stimulus.
Most of what constitutes as help, support and progress in the west is just a sufficiently organized scheme that propagates a mythology of salvation and connection, with flimsy techniques and methods that dazzle a disorganized system into temporary dopaminergic bliss.
author’s notes:
(special thanks to leah petroski for the name of this phenomena)
I’m writing some new material because I want to begin to host small group cohorts/incubators/artist labs that are centered around what i have been calling deathclown method, a style of performance arts that works with “taboo” or intense feelings, impulses and ideas in ways that metabolize and integrate without addicting or (re)traumatizing the performer.
But this method requires mature actors. When I say actor or performer, I mean player, enactor, agent… any person who is willfully learning the craft. And it is a craft, not a salvational system of “healing”. I can say it is therapeutic, but definitely NOT therapy.
People fail to realize is that I was a trained clown before I was a trained counselor. The inherent spiritual and artistic therapeutics inside clown training are a way that anyone can reclaim themselves from the chaos entrainment and learned helplessness of the modern western culture. Clown is a practice of the commons, of the people, long before it became a highly stylized performance aesthetic.
However, there is a massive pink cloud effect in the initial stages of the deathclown work, of the craft, that must be named transparently. Many people have never been in a container like this before, and the buzz of the techniques and worldview of deathclown have psychedelic potential which can be a destabilizing force.
Learning to use this destabilizing force and all that it reveals in us (apocalypse = revelation) as MATERIAL for the strange craft of artmaking, soulmaking and culturemaking ON PURPOSE is the long, crooked trail of clues to the center of our fateful labyrinth and the door to the otherside that we find there — already unlocked, slightly ajar, gently creaking back and forth from some unknown wind. Something, someone, has already broken through.
To be Continued in part two - Theater of Precarity, and part three - Cartoontra
Other notes
Hi! It’s 2023 and society continues its macabre orgy of addiction and entitlement to an absurd degree. I’m using this series as a soft reboot for the rest/end of my life. I’m chronically ill and don’t know how long i will have a semi-abled body. I already don’t in many regards. Funny thing, you can’t focus or meditate your way out of systemic issues no matter what science or conscious bros tell you on tiktok reels.
I cut out a lot of things and relationships last year, and this year is looking like that trend will increase. I recognize I have witnessed the rise and immediate fall of “Pop Trauma” so that now every sad queer and wannabe 6 figure coach parades themselves around like a trauma expert without ever having done any real rehab on their own addictions, dissociative and narcissistic tendencies. This culture rewards people for dishonesty. I learned over the last few years that few people who say they want “healing” are willing to put in the work to achieve the result. I really, really wanted to help. Because I found a path out of my own inherited hell and learned helplessness, ableism, internalize xyz yadda yadda. So a few years ago I thought, “well i’m not seeing much like what is working for me, so i’ll share it.”
Fast forward to now, and i’m a deeply cynical, annoyed and shat upon person. I quickly saw the putrid underbelly of the somatic wellness and therapy industry, with all the famous authors, coaches and wannabe cult leaders. I burned out on private sessions because, not many people seemed to be able to understand what i was offering.
So, many many months of being sick and contemplating how i can continue to exist within such a toxic and immature field.
What I realized in the depths of last winter (dec 2022) was that i was totally over the masturbatory seriousness and precious sadness masquerading as “doing the work”. If i see another white person fucking talking about “sacred grief rituals” so help me god.
I’m a sick person, but because i was a clown BEFORE i was a counselor, and because i started this in my late 30’s after having real poverty, disease, and near death for years, I feel like i avoided some of the navel gazing patterns i see being upheld as “compassion and empathy”.
So, with my sickness slowly eating me even though my doctor has validated that i’m doing all the right things to the degree i can do them, i had to make another big choice and move onward toward death in a way i can feel good-enough about.
What that looks like is focusing primarily on deathclown method, a somatic performance methodology that utilizes many interlaced systems of practice to get us to be able to PLAY, directly with spirits, sickness, emotions, taboos, trauma and whatever other phenomena you want, in ways that are actually sane and healthy and creative.
I will be using this new series of writing to lay out the basic introduction about the whats and hows of deathclown, and then i will set up a way to help people learn it, experience it, without them corrupting it into something it’s not.
So that there can be more real fun, and less fetishized pain stories.
Watch me fail, watch me die, watch me enjoy the hot mess of karma that we have decided will be our legacy.
