Roll the Bones: California Sober

Panic-stricken, I sat immobile and unbreathing, gazing in horror as the venomous wounds bubbled and spurted. The walls of the farmhouse began to melt and completely disappear, and in the distant desert I could see the faint silhouette of a hanged man, his lifeless body backlit by the moon, swaying at the end of its noose.

In an instance the pain in my ankle was gone, and I slipped into a strange liminal void where I was simultaneously experiencing both my life and an alternative version of my life, one in which I died from a rattlesnake bite. Or at least that's what seemed to be happening— truthfully, it’s not easy to know what to trust when you’re tripping on mushrooms.

My mother says that I am "California sober,” a buzzy identifier brought to popularity by those Hollywood hopefuls who smugly refuse an overhyped cocktail from an overpriced restaurant, and who capitalize on the moment by oversharing about their angelic avoidance of alcohol and detailing their routine of microdosing before morning yoga.

An individual who abstains from alcohol, opioids, and stimulants, but consumes marijuana and mind-altering substances, such as mushrooms or LSD, for their therapeutic benefits might identify as "California sober." While I do not identify as such, the term does accurately detail my illicit substance use, and I enjoy advocating for drugs that can help and can heal.

When I moved to California in June 2012, I was six months sober and recovering from a dark period of alcohol abuse, and grieving the very recent passing of my father. Each day I relied on quick, sharp tokes of marijuana to smooth out the rough edges of the day and help me abstain from old ways of coping. At the start of the global lockdown, I enjoyed daily small doses of psilocybin, which helped me embrace the idea of again acting like a carefree child as I drew pictures with color markers and ate cereal in my underwear. Six years after arriving in California, I drunkenly stumbled back out of the state with my tail tucked between my legs and a whiskey bottle beneath each arm, and I know now for certain that there is nothing healing to be by consuming alcohol.

There are other less volatile options for easing my malcontent, and fortunately for me it is becoming more acceptable to acknowledge the potential of mind-altering drugs. Oh, how the times change: I used to illegally buy weed from a drug dealer and hide out in a buddy’s uncle’s basement to smoke it from a four-foot-long bong, and now I can order a half-ounce on Uber Eats and smoke a spliff while I play with my dogs at the neighborhood park.

Marijuana always makes me anxious, but since that feeling typically doesn’t persist for too long, I smoke every night, because on the whole it helps more than it gives heebie-jeebies. The mushroom is my favorite, because it strips away the facade of everyday existence and shows me the strange beauty that exists just beyond us. The more you succumb to the trip, the more likely you are to experience ego death, which is a slightly scary, oddly satisfying undoing of self that lingers long after the drugs wear off and can guide you toward becoming a better, more balanced person.

With mind-altering drugs, while there is the potential to have vividly horrifying hallucinations like my grotesque snakebite,  in my experience those frightening visualizations are few and far between. But, be wary: if you decide to smoke a little indo or eat some funky fungi and take a “spiritual pilgrimage” through some beautiful or barren place, watch where you walk, because while the snakebite was a figment of my drug-induced imagination, the rattlesnake was very real.

It was about five years when a friend and I stayed in that creepy old farmhouse on the outskirts of a desert town called 29 Palms, a few miles past the road sign that says "last services for 100 miles" and not too far from the bohemian-style vacation compound "Nxwhere" where we recently photographed "California Wild," the &Sons spring-summer 2025 collection. That night we ate every one of the shit-stink stems and caps that were stuffed into a 16-ounce glass jar, and we walked across the desert.

Under the full moonlight, it looked like some salt-crusted alien planet covered in bizarre flora, and with each step I felt like an astronaut floating through effortless space, until I floated a bit too far, came back down to Earth, and stepped on a rattlesnake. It rattled with terrified surprise, and I jumped as high as I could straight up into the sky. Seeing how I was about to fall straight back down onto the snake, my friend lunged and shoved me mid-air into the safe embrace of a prickly cactus. We dusted ourselves off and didn’t stop laughing until long after we made it back to the farmhouse. 

A good psychedelic trip takes you down paths of elation and joy as well as paths of melancholy and fear, and in the end it spits you back out into the real world so you can learn from what you saw in the void and apply those learnings to your unaltered life. The rattlesnake night shook me to my bones and gave me a deeper appreciation for life, which is why it was my second most remarkable psychedelic trip.

The best and most remarkable psychedelic trip of my life happened in the summer of the pandemic at a high-altitude camp alongside a chain of alpine lakes in the Rocky Mountains. Just past midnight, as I sat alone in a nylon chair in the middle of the pine woods and looked up at the stars through the breaks in the tree branches, I suddenly felt my father’s beard rub against my cheek, which was strange because he’d been dead for eight years.

A charming asshole even in his phantasmic form, my dad and I talked for hours, though not one word was spoken. As he said goodbye, a soft, warm wind breezed through the trees, and there was a dim flash of light, and then he was gone. I cannot fully explain that night, but without a doubt, for me it was the start of much-needed closure, made possible through the healing potential of marijuana and psilocybin.