I TAKE this blog very seriously.

My half-dozen readers are counting on me for accurate, unbiased takes on Bay Area culture—a genuine read on the pulse of the collective consciousness. So when a friend invited me to the 2024 Secular Winter Solstice festival, I knew I had to deliver some serious boots-on-the-ground reporting of the event.

I wouldn't consider myself a "rationalist" by any means, despite my profoundly autistic qualities. Nor do I sympathize with the "post-rationalist" navel-gazing endemic to the theater kid slash hippie types. No, it feels we've taken a specific moment in 2019 and churned it into a gray paste. None of it appeals to me. If I were to aspire to a label I would be a romantic—I want to feel things—but it's hard to wring poetry out of a life fixed to a monitor, so like most boring people I turn to chemical enhancement.