Let's Talk

One of the suggestions from a brainstorming session for set design for a Psychopolitica call-in show.

Hey.

I haven’t posted anything new here for the last couple of months.

(I’m reasonably active on Notes though, and it’s a cool place — come join me there!)

The last 1.5 years have been packed.

I left Russia when it invaded Ukraine (Nightmare Journal), got married (Weddings and Bombings), buried my grandma (Back to Russia for a Funeral), visited home (A Priest on a Train, A Taxi Ride), got questioned by the FSB on my way back (Out of Russia), had a surgery and consequently gave up smoking, did some DMT (A Pinch of DMT on a Tuesday, Reconnecting with the DMT World), got a nomad visa (and a membership in a cannabis club) from Spain, and am now preparing to move there in January of 2024.

Of course, this all happened against a bigger-things backdrop: the war in Ukraine (My Country Started a War, Fear and Power in the Russian Dreamscape, Russia’s Psychotic Break), Prigozhin’s failed coup (The Mutiny: 1, 2, 3), the ethnic cleansing of Karabakh, now Gaza…

The stress has been catching up with me.

I decided to let go of my attempts at maintaining creative discipline until the end of the year.

I do have big plans for Psychopolitica in 2024. I dream of moving into a nice empty apartment (in walking distance from both the seashore and a cannabis club) and building an office/studio there — none of the 6 or 7 apartments I’ve lived in since my exile have had a proper desk for me to work at. I’m quietly developing a large collaborative project and a vision for a weekly call-in show.

But for now, I want to invite you to do two things:

1. Write me an email. It can be a question, an experience or an idea you’d like to share, a drawing or a song or a story you’ve written — or, frankly, anything else. I’ll respond to all privately and to some (depending on the volume) publicly in this newsletter. My email is nikita.s.petrov@gmail.com.

2. If you’re a paid subscriber, schedule a video call with me. I’ve done some calls like this in summer of 2022, and have just returned to the practice in the last couple of weeks. It’s been fascinating.

You are a really cool, interesting bunch. You make music and art, raise kids, have hallucinations, deal with anxiety and addiction, work in mad houses, operate fork-lifts in (Substack tells me) 126 different countries.

I want to get to know you better myself, and to see if there’s a good way to introduce you to one another.