Embodied Ecstasies: The Sacred Choreography of Party and Play by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
Embodied Ecstasies:
The Sacred Choreography of Party and Play
Abstract
This flash auto-ethnography explores a single chemsex encounter as a site of embodied ecstasy, ritual care, and queer world-making. Drawing from interactionist sociology, queer phenomenology, and critical drug studies, the narrative refigures substance use not as deviance or pathology but as a sacred choreography of consent, moderation, and mutual attunement. Through detailed ethnographic description and theoretically grounded endnotes, the piece illuminates how harm reduction is interactionally accomplished and spiritually inflected. Set within broader inequities of access and criminalization, Embodied Ecstasies challenges dominant narratives of drug use by foregrounding pleasure, tenderness, and ethical intimacy among queer men.
Introduction
This flash auto-ethnography1 offers a first-person account of a party and play2 encounter—what some would call “chemsex”—in Santa Barbara. But what follows is not a spectacle of deviance or destruction. Nor is it an idealized celebration. It is a textured ethnographic vignette that moves between sacred ritual, embodied pleasure, and harm reduction practices, grounded in queer community norms and sociological insight.
This piece is a flash auto-ethnography—a condensed, affective, and participatory mode of sociological writing. It weaves fieldwork and lived experience into a stylized narrative that collapses research, memory, and embodiment into the present tense of storytelling.
Rather than treating moderation3 as a static trait or pleasure as an individual pursuit, I explore how both are interactionally accomplished—enacted, negotiated, and sustained in real time. Drawing from interactionist sociologies4, queer phenomenology5, and critical drug studies6, I ask how people navigate altered states with awareness and care. How do we co-create trust without a script? How do bodies communicate consent without speech? How do ritual, repetition, and affective attunement shape what it means to get high together?
Of course, tensions remain. There are real risks in these spaces—physical, emotional, structural. And yet, what unfolds here resists the clinical scripts of pathology. It is a form of what Kane Race calls “seroconviviality”: an art of living together through vulnerability, intensity, and improvisation. Chemsex, in this telling, is not merely a behavior to be managed. It is a social practice, a spiritual choreography, and for many, a deeply felt expression of queer aliveness.
Recent scholarship on chemsex7 provides vital context for this narrative. Across queer studies, public health, and critical drug research, scholars have increasingly documented the complex interplay of desire, stigma, care, and risk in PnP settings. This literature moves beyond medicalized and moralizing accounts, instead emphasizing how pleasure, intimacy, and harm reduction are interactionally and politically accomplished. Central to this shift is the work of Kane Race (2009, 2015, 2023), who coined the term “seroconviviality” to describe practices that negotiate risk through pleasure, community, and erotic ethics. Additional studies by Nevendorff et al. (2025), Lea et al. (2026), and Clay and Treharne (2021) further explore how queer people construct meaning and safety within chemsex culture. This paper builds on and contributes to this evolving field.
This encounter unfolded in the early days of Trump’s second presidency—an era marked by the aggressive dismantling of the social safety net and renewed assaults on queer lives. Section 8 housing vouchers were gutted, Head Start defunded, over 280,000 federal workers laid off, and scientific agencies stripped of resources. Simultaneously, trans communities faced escalating legal threats, with gender-affirming care criminalized in multiple states, while marriage equality protections were openly questioned by Supreme Court allies. In this political landscape, queer intimacy and harm reduction rituals must be understood not merely as personal or subcultural practices, but as precarious, defiant acts of survival. The infrastructures that once offered minimal protection are vanishing. What remains is the improvised shelter of chosen kinship, mutual care, and the micro-politics of embodied resistance.
That Evening
We chatted for several weeks on Grindr8. Later, Francisco told me he noticed that I had put a capital T9 in the word hosTing on my profile. He caught the code. Of course, I used a radiant piece of erotic art instead of a photo—two tattooed torsos entwined beneath a glowing moon. The image said what I could not.
While the War on Drugs10 has lost its fever pitch, its infrastructure remains fully intact. The number of triple-challenged11 friends doing time—people like Javier, Angel and Jordan—is staggering. One must stay cautious.
Francisco manages a downtown bank. He only parties on weekends, always reserving Sunday for recovery. He’s careful. Disciplined. I appreciate that. For me, crystal enhances rather than impairs. I can write, think, feel—still capable of complex thought while high. Others aren’t so lucky.
While Francisco and I could engage in what might be called mindful chemsex, our ability to do so was scaffolded by stable housing, class privilege, and access to harm reduction knowledge. Many of our queer kin—especially trans people of color, the unhoused, and those surveilled by the carceral state—lack these affordances. Their practices of intimacy and risk are no less meaningful but are shaped by different constraints. Our safety was never absolute, but it was unequally distributed.
When he arrived, I wore khaki shorts and an oversized black tee printed with vibrant lowriders. My White Sox cap was backward. When people ask if I’m a fan, I say I thought it said “White Sex.” Francisco laughed when I told him that.
“Sit here,” I said, patting the bed. Between us was a large abalone shell: a wet cloth, glass pipes, condoms, gloves, and a bottle of lube. Hip hop spilled from my MacBook—Chris Brown, Snoop Dogg, Tupac.
I handed him the pipe, then paused.
“Do you mind if I read a ritual prayer12 I wrote for the occasion?”
“A what?” he asked.
“A ritual prayer. I like to treat these get-togethers as sacred journeys. I find I have a better time when I pause and set clear intentions.”
He nodded. “Sure.”
I turned down the music, lit the candle, and read:
⸻
Ritual for Pleasure and Play
Oh Spirit of the East,
Breath of anticipation, crackling with static and spark,
You bring the charge of first glances,
The sharp inhale before contact,
The scent of sweat and citrus, of things about to begin.
You are the element of air—
Open windows, whispered invitations,
The crisp edge of curiosity.
Let this night begin with clarity and communication,
A fierce honesty in our desires.
Oh Spirit of the South,
Throb of heat, pulse of blood rising,
You fan the fires of lust and movement.
You are friction and flame, the low growl and the ecstatic cry.
You are the element of fire—
Sweat on the skin, the sting of slap,
The rhythm of bodies colliding in joy.
Let us burn without shame,
Igniting one another in consensual abandon.
Oh Spirit of the West,
Tide of sweat, wave of touch,
You dissolve boundaries in salt and fluid.
You are the element of water—
Lubricant, kiss, the ebb and flow of mutual need.
You flood us with feeling,
Drench us in vulnerability and trust.
Let us be submerged in sensation,
And washed clean of judgment.
Oh Spirit of the North,
Stability of skin-on-skin,
The grounding pressure of hands that hold.
You are the element of earth—
Muscle, breath, clenched fist and sated smile.
You remind us of the realness of this,
Of the beauty of bodies,
Of the sacred weight of presence.
Let us honor every touch, every limit, every no and every yes.
Vital Force of Life,
Undeniable, incarnate, electric—
We invoke you not as a distant deity,
But as the thrumming in our bones,
The dilation of pupils, the gasp of joy.
We gather not to escape our flesh,
But to dive deeper into it,
To amplify sensation,
To adorn desire with ritual and delight.
As we partake, let us remember:
This is a celebration, not a conquest.
This is communion, not consumption.
We meet as equals, each with their own flame,
Their own limits, their own sacred yes.
Let us enter this space without fear or shame,
Leaving behind the dull weight of repression,
And stepping into the ecstasy of now.
May our pleasures be fierce and free.
May our connections be deep and real.
May we remember this night as a radiant act of aliveness.
So let it be. And so we begin.
⸻
Francisco smiled. “That was kinda beautiful.”
The invocation was not merely poetic—it performed social work. Ritual, here, stabilized consent, signaled intentionality, and created a shared frame for ecstatic embodiment. Like all rituals, it marked a transition from the ordinary to the sacred, turning pleasure into praxis and risk into shared responsibility.
We began slowly, not out of hesitation but respect. The ritual had done its work. We were no longer two strangers orbiting each other’s desire—we had become co-conspirators in the creation of something sacred, something queerly communal. The first touches were light, exploratory. Francisco brushed his hand along my thigh, watching my eyes for a signal. I leaned in closer. He responded with a slight smile and the gentlest pressure of palm to chest. The dance had begun.
These rituals didn’t arrive fully formed. They emerged over years of trial, error, whispered advice, and watching others. Francisco and I had both lived through less intentional scenes—nights of spinning highs, dissociation, and regret. What now feels fluid and sacred was learned slowly, through harm and repair, through listening to friends, and through moments of shared insight after the crash. The sacred choreography described here is as much a product of lived accumulation as spontaneous flow.
Even in these early moments, moderation was already being enacted—not as abstinence or denial, but as rhythmic pacing, a finely-tuned sensitivity to energy and need. We each took a small hit of the pipe13, exhaling slowly, letting the heat ripple through us without diving too deep too fast. “That’s enough for now,” I said, and he nodded. “I like to take my time.”
I am acutely aware that the intimacy and safety described in this encounter rely on forms of privilege not evenly distributed—private space, access to harm reduction resources, cultural capital, and community networks that make ‘mindful’ chemsex possible. While these rituals emerge from shared intention, they are scaffolded by structures of race, class, and housing that remain unequally available to queer drug users more precariously positioned.
We moved from seated to prone, from side-by-side to face-to-face. We didn’t narrate the choreography—we just felt it. I shifted my body, and he adjusted without words. His leg slid over mine. My hand traced his back. We were learning each other’s dialects, building a grammar of flesh. Our movements grew more confident. He rolled on top of me, grinning. “Still teasing me with that shirt,” he said, tugging playfully. I laughed, and he pulled it off.
Breaks came naturally, like tides. At first, we paused every twenty minutes or so—water, breath, laughter. I kept reminding us both: “Hydration check.” I handed him a chilled coconut water14, and he drained it gratefully. “It’s so easy to forget until you crash15,” he said. “I’m glad you’re on top of that.” I nodded. “I’ve learned. Crashing isn’t worth the rush.”
There was a kind of ritual discipline in our hedonism—not rigid, but aware. The intention we had set earlier stayed with us, acting as a guide through altered states. We kept condoms and gloves close, used sanitizer, rinsed with warm water between acts. We checked in without ceremony. “Still feeling good?” “Yeah, and you?” “Totally.” It was not only about pleasure. It was about maintaining a shared ecosystem of trust and mutual regulation. That care is itself erotic.
As the drug amplified our senses, everything became a source of wonder. The way his fingers brushed across my ribs. The grain of my bedsheet under my back. The sharp clarity of his breath against my neck. At one point, we stopped entirely and just looked at each other. “What?” he asked. “Nothing,” I said. “You’re just… really here right now.”
e were. Really here.
Chemsex can fracture time—bend it, suspend it. We lost hours. But we did not lose ourselves. We remembered water. We ate oranges. We slowed when one of us needed rest. We laughed—a lot. We made dumb jokes. At one point, he caught his reflection and said, “I look like a saint and a sinner at once.” I smiled and kissed his shoulder. “That’s the point.” We giggled like teenagers.
The temporal warping induced by meth is not simply a pharmacological effect—it creates openings for different ethical relations. Slowing down, staying hydrated, attuning to shifts in each other’s energy—these become forms of temporal care. Altered time allows for consent to be re-checked, needs to be renegotiated, joy to be lingered in.
The athleticism of the encounter revealed itself in phases—sweat and motion, stretch and flex, shift and reposition. We weren’t performing. We were playing. There was joy in the movement itself—like dancing with no audience. We tried new positions, new angles, new rhythms. Not to impress, but to discover. And every discovery brought a pause. “You good?” “That was amazing.” “Want to try again slower?” “Yeah, slower.” Time was rubbery, language minimal, but meaning overflowed.
Of course, the dance can falter. Misread signals, uneven tolerances, or external pressures can tip pleasure into peril. I’ve witnessed scenes where consent blurred under the influence, where someone pushed too far, too fast, or forgot to drink water. Harm reduction is not foolproof—it is improvisational, embodied, and always partial. Yet even failed encounters offer material for reflection and reparation, if the ethic of care endures beyond the high.
There was also tenderness, unexpected and unforced. After a particularly intense wave, Francisco curled against me and rested his head on my shoulder. I stroked his arm and felt his whole body settle. “Sometimes this is all I need,” he whispered. “Just someone to hold me for a while.” I didn’t respond with words—I pulled him closer and pressed my cheek to his hair.
We talked in quiet moments, not as a break from the experience but as part of it. About our histories. Our first crushes. Our exes. “I had this one boyfriend,” he said, “who couldn’t handle this side of me. The drugs, the parties. He said it wasn’t compatible with love.” I looked at him. “But you can love responsibly. You can play responsibly. You’re doing it right now.”
He nodded. “Thanks for saying that. That’s what I’m trying to figure out—how to keep the joy without the destruction.” We weren’t just getting high. We were doing emotional repair work—naming wounds, reimagining futures, validating each other’s attempts at balance. That’s not pathology. That’s kinship.
Later, when we paused again, I brought him a vitamin B-complex and a small protein bar. “This is so parental,” he said, grinning. “Yeah, I know. I’m everyone’s harm reduction mom,” I replied. “Better than the ER.” We laughed again.
There were moments of non-verbal ecstasy—his hands gripping my hips, my fingers laced behind his neck, eyes locked, breath syncing. Not a single word was exchanged for nearly ten minutes as we moved in pure flow. It was not a climax, it was a sustained communion. Every gesture said: I see you. I honor you. I welcome this.
Even the comedown16 was shared. It wasn’t an exit; it was a descent, slow and mindful. We wiped each other down with warm towels. I dimmed the lights further. He stretched out, legs sore but smiling. I rubbed his calves with arnica. “This is next-level care,” he said, voice thick with gratitude.
“Of course,” I said. “We came back together.”
The comedown was not just a neurochemical dip but an existential tremor. What remained—warmth, fatigue, hunger, fragments of memory—had to be reassembled into meaning. In these quiet aftermaths, the sacred choreography extended: making eggs, laughing over fragments of the night, watching the sun burn away the mist.
He lay there, eyes half-closed. “I used to think these nights had to be about losing control. But this felt like the opposite. Like we were in the driver’s seat the whole time.”
We drifted into silence again. Not from awkwardness. From fullness. The candle was nearly out. The music had softened into ambient rhythms. I watched the shadows dance across the ceiling and felt a kind of peace I rarely allow myself.
Not because I was high.
Because I was whole.
None of these practices exist in isolation. They circulate through a dispersed but vibrant web of queer harm-reduction knowledge—Instagram posts, Telegram groups, YouTube videos, informal zines, late-night conversations. The prayer itself was adapted from fragments I’d heard in other contexts—modified, personalized, but always embedded in collective wisdom. If this was a duet, it was scored by a larger choir of chemsexual kin.
And yet, this carefully cultivated intimacy unfolds within a zone of relative safety—one shaped by access to private space, stable housing, harm reduction resources, and a partner I trust. Not everyone can count on these conditions. Friends of mine who are unhoused, undocumented, or racialized as threats often find themselves navigating public surveillance, legal precarity, and interpersonal risk. Many are incarcerated, excluded from these rituals of care. The relational competencies I describe—checking in, dosing gently, waiting for a nod—are not unique to the privileged. But their enactment, without fear of punishment or exposure, too often is. Any ethic of mindful use must begin by acknowledging these disparities.
In the stillness after, I offered him the wet cloth. He wiped his face. “You good?” I asked.
“I feel more like myself than usual,” he said.
We lay together in quiet. The candle flickered. The music thinned. The moment felt eternal.
⸻
Closing Reflections: From Micro-Practices to Macro Meaning
This encounter was not only about pleasure; it was about presence. Drawing from symbolic interactionism, we can see how meaning is continuously negotiated through micro-acts: eye contact, pauses, offers of care. These gestures do not merely signal consent or intimacy—they constitute them. They are the small, often invisible acts through which erotic safety, mutual recognition, and embodied trust are achieved.
This narrative also challenges dominant frameworks in drug policy17 and public health18 that frame chemsex primarily as risk behavior. Yes, harm exists. But so does agency. So does joy. What unfolded in this room was not reckless hedonism but relational competence: an improvised choreography of self-regulation, mutual attunement, and collective care. These capacities are not innate—they are cultivated through practice, through peer learning, and through the sedimentation of shared rituals.
This account reflects a specific positionality—one shaped by relative safety, race, and gender privilege. The rituals of care and control I describe are not equally accessible to all. Queer people of color, trans folks, and economically precarious users often face intensified surveillance, stigma, and criminalization. Any harm reduction ethic19 must begin from these disparities, resisting narratives that universalize a single experience of chemsex or recovery.
As a method, flash auto-ethnography invites us to study from within—to generate knowledge not through distance, but through immersion. In narrating this ritual of chemsex, I aim not to glamorize or condemn, but to honor its complexity: the negotiations of consent, care, risk, and sacredness that rarely appear in public health literature or policy debates.
Finally, this flash ethnography participates in a broader tradition of queer phenomenology and critical drug studies that reclaims stigmatized pleasures as sites of knowledge. Moderation is not abstinence; it is a social skill. Pleasure is not excess; it is a human right. And chemsex, when practiced with intention, can be not just recreational but transformational—a Dionysian mode of being-in-the-world, where bodies become sites of grace, communion, and sometimes even transcendence.
Notes
1. Flash auto-ethnography compresses narrative and analysis into a single, embodied moment, challenging the temporal and epistemic separation between fieldwork and representation. Scholars exploring flash ethnography include McGranahan (2022) and McGranahan and Craig (2023). Scholars like Arthur Bochner (2020) and Carolyn Ellis (2009) pioneered auto-ethnographic approaches, but recent developments embrace more experimental, time-compressed forms. On performative autoethnography see Spry (2017). The Handbook of Autoethnography, edit by Holman Jones et al. (2016) is an outstanding resource for those new to this emerging research methodology and writing process.This essay extends auto-ethnographic method by fusing present-tense narrative with interactionist analysis in real time. Rather than recounting a past episode as memory, it immerses the reader in the temporal unfolding of the scene, collapsing the distance between observer and participant, and positioning the event itself as analytic.
2. “Party and Play” (PnP) is a term commonly used within MSM (men who have sex with men) communities to describe the intentional merging of sex and drug use—most frequently involving substances like methamphetamine, GHB, and mephedrone. This socio-sexual practice has been examined through multiple lenses, including intimacy, risk, pleasure, and queer world-making. Seminal analyses include Race (2015), Souleymanov et al. (2019), Hakim (2019), and Mowlabocus (2023), who trace both the health implications and affective dimensions of PnP. A recent overview by Møller and Hakim (2023) outlines the emergence of “critical chemsex studies” as a field that foregrounds social context and lived experience. Hakim et al. (2019) note that “chemsex is a socio-sexual practice that to an overwhelming degree is constructed, negotiated, enacted, maintained, and critiqued via digital platforms,” situating it within a broader “emerging assemblage” of digital, chemical, and communal infrastructures.
PnP practices unfold within distinct queer subcultures that often defy heteronormative imperatives of self-control, monogamy, and productivity. Scholars such as Ahmed (2006), Muñoz (2009), and Race et al. (2024) have theorized how queer temporalities and experimental ethics emerge in these spaces, challenging dominant narratives of pathology and offering alternate ways of being, caring, and connecting.
3. Moderation, often idealized in public discourse as an internal character trait or moral virtue, is more accurately understood as a socially negotiated and interactionally sustained achievement. Zinberg’s (1984) influential framework explains drug use outcomes through the interplay of three key variables: drug (the pharmacological properties of the substance), set (the user’s mindset, personality, and expectations), and setting (the physical, cultural, and social context of use). This triad helps explain how certain individuals manage controlled or functional substance use, even with potent intoxicants. Keane (2023) critiques the moral psychological framing of self-control as a neoliberal demand, arguing instead for context-sensitive understandings of agency. Brookfield et al. (2021) provide ethnographic accounts of people in recovery navigating methamphetamine use through communal practices of care, structure, and self-awareness. Duff (2004), drawing on Foucault, theorizes moderation as a “practice of the self,” shaped through embodied routines, spatial organization, and ethical reflection.gr
4. The analysis draws heavily from symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology, which examine how meaning is produced through situated practices. See Goffman (1967), Blumer (1969), Garfinkel (1967), Sacks (1992) and Maynard and Heritage (2023). Foundational interactionist studies of drug use include Lindesmith (1947) and Becker (1953) and foundational interactions studies of sexuality include Gagnon and Simon (1973) and Plummer (1975).
5. Ahmed’s concept of queer phenomenology helps frame the experience of bodies moving through spaces not designed for them, opening new modes of attention, intimacy, and knowledge. See Ahmed (2006) and Halberstam (2020), for elaborations on queer embodiment and affective spatiality.
6. Critical drug studies challenge the dominant biomedical, criminal justice, and moral models of drug use by centering power, pleasure, stigma, and resistance, drawing from sociology, anthropology, queer theory, and critical public health. Foundational texts include Reinarman and Levine (1997) and Kane (2009). Hart (2021) challenges popular assumptions about drug addiction through science and a forthright account of his own heroin use. A foundational collection of readings is Granfield and Reinarman (2015).
7. his essay contributes to a growing literature that re-theorizes chemsex as a socially negotiated, affectively rich practice rather than a form of deviance. Kane Race (2009, 2015, 2022) introduced foundational concepts like seroconviviality and ritualized care. See also Nevendorff et al. (2025), Clay and Treharne (2022), and Murphy et al. (2024) for further elaborations on queer pleasure, relational ethics, and stigma navigation.
8. Grindr and other hookup apps do not merely mediate encounters but shape affective, spatial, and temporal fields. Queer sociolinguists and interactionists have analyzed these platforms as spaces of negotiation, categorization, and performativity. See Roach (2021), Shield (2019), and Souleymanov et al. (2020).
9. The term “Capital T” (slang for crystal meth) is part of a lexicon that encodes desire, risk, and subcultural belonging. Language here is performative and often euphemistic, signaling insider status while navigating surveillance and stigma. See Race (201 and Souleymanov et al. (2020).
10. U.S. drug policy disproportionately criminalizes people of color, queer people, and the unhoused—what some advocates call the “triple-challenged.” See Reinarman (2020), Netherland and Hansen (2016), and Alexander (2010). This work draws attention to the intersectional harms of carceral drug control.
11.The meth pipe is not only an object of pharmacological delivery but of ritual and relational significance. Its aesthetics, gestures, and temporality shape experience. For symbolic and functional analyses, see Brookfield et al. (2021), and Race (2023).
12. The invocation of the four elements draws on earth-based traditions, but is reconfigured through a queer and naturalistic lens. This spiritual approach finds the sacred not in transcendence but in embodied ecstasy, invoking an immanent spirituality rooted in sensation and consent. For related approaches, see Steinhart (2018), Corrington (2015), Wildman (2016) and Goodenough (2023).
13.Hydration checks and small doses are core harm reduction practices. Harm reduction here is not compliance but mutual care. See Race (2012) and Souleymanov et al. (2020) for recent studies on embodied harm reduction in chemsex contexts. See Rigoni et al. (2018) for a full review of harm reduction practices associated with methamphetamine.Harm reduction cannot be universalized without attention to intersectionality. The safety I felt was not only built—it was inherited, from systems that punish Black and brown queer users far more harshly. The very ability to recover, narrate, and theorize is itself a form of privilege.
14. The meth comedown is not only biochemical but affective, moral, and existential. It can be mitigated through community care and narrative reconstruction. See Clay and Treharne (2022) and Race (2023) on how queer users manage post-use states.
15. Dominant public health models often pathologize drug use, masking structural inequalities and moralizing pleasure. Critical public health literature challenges the depoliticization of harm. See Fassin (2018), Fraser and Moore (2019), and Birk (2025).
16. Pleasure is both an object of knowledge and a mode of resistance. This theme recurs across queer studies, drug studies, and phenomenology. See Plummer (2011), Ahmed (2010), and Klesse (2023) for arguments linking erotic pleasure, narrative, and world-making.
17. Rather than separating safety from eroticism, this work insists that care is itself erotic. This echoes themes in Race (2023), Souleymanov et al. (2020), on how pleasure and protection are not opposites but co-constituted.
18. The sacred is not abandoned in this post-secular ethnography—it is refigured. This Dionysian spirituality resonates with the ecstatic rituals of queer history, pagan traditions, and new naturalisms. See Keen (1968), Grey (2020), Hogue (2024), and Corrington (2015) for recent theological and esoteric reconfigurations.
19. In the past five years, chemsex research has exploded across disciplines. Key themes include harm reduction (Lemain et al. 2025), pleasure (Flores-Aranda et al. 2019), digital mediation (Souleymanov et al. 2020), care (Race et al. 2024), and intersectionality (Nevendorff et al. 2025). The field now includes user-led studies, critical public health, and queer theory, with growing attention to cultural context, resilience, and epistemic justice. This essay contributes to that body by offering a situated, first-person, interactionist account of mindful, moderated PnP.
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