Now you how to read Michael Pollan's book about really taking LSD.
"Drop acid, not too much, mostly tabs."
5 micrograms, every third day for a month.
A month because experimenting, or because a month just tunes you in permanently?
1: How did I even write that? I think I have dementia.
Draw an analog clock reading 10:10 and fax it to me. I'll have somebody check.
5: A month because experimenting, and then reluctantly discontinued due to the risks of acquiring illegal drugs.
But with some optimistic rambling about how this might produce longterm change due to the research that regular LSD can have lifelong therapeutic results from one or two trips.
8: Did it make her feel different? I assume she wasn't actually tripping.
Just remembered PKD's dedication, "some people who were punished entirely too much for what they did".
When a small vial arrives in her mailbox from "Lewis Carroll," Ayelet Waldman is at a low point
Is she actually claiming that it just arrived mysteriously without her doing anything?
On advice of counsel I invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment.
You only get one amendment per day.
10: Yes, she's claiming that she got significant therapeutic benefit, or else significant placebo benefit. Either way, she did well.
12: Nope, she solicited it, but it was the kind of thing where she had a very few lines in the water to actually procure the drugs, and one of them unexpectedly panned out, and the sender did sign it in a cutesy-Lewis-Carroll way.
You might want to be careful with characters like that.
I think my literary references like I like my women, wearing skin-tight leather.
I mean, the good parts were good, but the bad parts, good god. Not a day goes by I don't wonder about that blue pill.
Insert your own "Opinionated Elizabeth Dole" joke.
What's the supposed mechanism for this hallucinogenic therapy?
I seem to recall LSD is a serotonin analogue. How that would have any persistent effect is beyond me.
21: Something like increasing the plasticity of the brain or something?
24: I thought that had to do with mind-blowing qualities of tripping.
24: After a lifetime as a dedicated gardener, Michael Pollan finally could hear the plants talking.
As per 23, it's a serotonin agonist, which is the case for most hallucinogens.
I vaguely remember a paper coming out over the last year or two suggesting that its therapeutic effects might come from suppressing default network activity, which could have the effect of weakening well-learned sequences of negative thoughts (like for depressive rumination). I don't know how seriously we're meant to take that explanation though.
Here's what my dealers told me --
A lot of this is a matter of interpretation. There are different ways to explain what's happening in the mind, and it's not clear which one is correct. There's a really interesting researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham named Peter Hendricks who is working with cocaine addicts, and he feels that it's the experience of awe that people have on the psychedelic that changes their mindset and gives them a new perspective and allows them to break their addiction.
There's a researcher at UC Berkeley named Dacher Keltner who studies awe, and he suggests that it shrinks the ego, that it results in something he calls the "small self." You're in the presence of something so large that your own sense of self is dwarfed by it. That's a very positive and socially useful emotion. You can reconnect to others after an experience of awe, and he's demonstrated this in a series of interesting experiments. So that's one explanation.
Matt Johnson, one of the researchers at Johns Hopkins, says that we have these stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and we get stuck on them. We tell ourselves that we're not worthy of love, that we can't get through the next hour without a cigarette, and Johnson thinks these psychedelic experiences shake us out of these patterns because suddenly we see them from a new perspective
If working with cocaine addicts helped people gain knowledge the White House staff wouldn't be so fucked.
29: Those are three different interpretations?
It's all fun and games until Larry "Cocaine" Kudlow runs the National Economic Council.
My experience with meditation and LSD has been that they shrink the self in similar ways (with meditation you have to work harder, of course) and I'd cautiously sign on to the quotes in 29.
Since the uncool kids ruin every good thing, the latest out here is that LSD has apparently gotten trendy among startup exec types, who are using it liberally to help visualize their disruptions, you know, just like Steve Jobs did.
I don't do either meditation or LSD, but I tell myself I'm unworthy of love all the time. Trying to work on that, I guess, but not via meditation or LSD.
(This is just to say I haven't written the next Big Sort summary post but I've half-written it. Maybe tonight I can finish it and toss it into the ether to you!)
34.2: What a relief! I was scared that you ate the plums!
33.2: What happened to just wearing a black turtleneck if you wanted to be like Steve Jobs?
I guess Elizabeth Holmes kind of ruined it.
OT: Scott Pruitt resigned to spend more time with his lotion.
Heard the news from the fake North Korean Twitter account and it was great.
I don't know about this, because IME I've always spent a significant portion of any acid trip desperately wishing I wasn't tripping, due to the persistent drag of thinking about/seeing myself being rotten and full of worms, or about endless heaps of dead bodies or the like. I would usually try to preëmpt the madness by purposely thinking of the worst things I could, in the knowledge that one can't sustain any train of thought for long. also, robots or no, sex on acid is reaaaally weird. sure I experienced moments of transcendence, but also long stretches of paralyzing terror. in retrospect I'm wondering why I kept doing it. probably because I wanted to get high. and acid is harsher than mushrooms. maybe try mushrooms? ecstasy?
29, 33 Same, though I've only experienced that at doses much larger, 250-500 micrograms and larger. I can't imagine having that kind of oceanic experience on a mere 5 micrograms.
40 I've often had the same reaction. Almost all of my trips have been a marriage of heaven and hell. And I do much prefer mushrooms. And DMT.
41: That's a lot of acid. Maybe don't do so much acid? I also vastly prefer mushrooms though.
42 That was over 20 years ago, but yeah, that's a lot of acid.
Even reading the descriptions of people who enjoyed acid, I don't really see the point of acid. Or meditation.
Never tried acid, but mushrooms were a very pleasant experience.
My memories of my LSD trips are almost all positive. No idea of the dosage. I never tried any other psychedelics.
29- I'm sure Douglas Adams had experience with LSD, but he claimed the Total Perspective Vortex drove people mad.
I haven't dropped acid in several decades, but I remember it fondly. The first time I did it (I was probably 18), I was convinced that my brain had been changed forever -- in a good way. Even today, I don't find this belief ridiculous. I like all of peep's 29.
Keep Scott Pruitt moist, for the love of God!
I've always spent a significant portion of any acid trip desperately wishing I wasn't tripping, due to the persistent drag of thinking about/seeing myself being rotten and full of worms, or about endless heaps of dead bodies or the like.
According to Waldman, people who study such things take a lot of care with set and setting. There were researchers priming people on how to solve specific problems they'd been stuck on, priming people to work on their relationships, etc, etc, but bad set-ups make for bad trips and certainly if one's internal mind lends itself to bad trips, I can't imagine it'd be therapeutic.
I can't imagine having that kind of oceanic experience on a mere 5 micrograms.
She definitely did not get the oceanic thing. She got a little less irritable and a little more able to roll with life's ups and downs. A little better able to focus on the day after. That kind of thing, but nothing approaching tripping.
Like having two beers, but still able to do math correctly?
A single tab is theoretically around 100 micrograms, I think. I could imagine a 5-microgram dose making you a touch more alert and the world a touch more vivid; I'd also believe that repeated small dosages could correlate with measurable positive effects. But even if it's good for you I don't want it to be utilitarian; I'm still creeped out by the robot thread.
One nice thing about macrodosing scotch is that it doesn't come with any accompanying nonsense about how it's somehow good for you.
dosage varies hugely from batch to batch in my long-ago experience, as does the swill that it's cut with. Stay away from amateur/anonymous chemists, especially when the synthesis is technically demanding, I'd say.
At intermediate doses, stuff like the AI image enhancer that does this seems pretty close. Easy to watch without any associated emotional dislocation or unsettling obsessive ideas. Nobody really knows how all the cells in your body cooperate to keep you alive.
50 I've always been a fanatic about the proper set and setting but that still didn't prevent my trips from being a mixture of heaven and hell. Maybe my set has always been askew.
48 Same here. Even decades later I still feel like I'm drawing on those experiences.
50 I've always been a fanatic about the proper set and setting but that still didn't prevent my trips from being a mixture of heaven and hell. Maybe my set has always been askew.
48 Same here. Even decades later I still feel like I'm drawing on those experiences.
Trump's in Montana today. Apparently the crowd cheered for Putin.
Are we sure they're not already microdosing us all?
Did someone already post this phenazepam thread that lurid found the other day? That stuff is not good for you.
It's true that I didn't anticipate how surreal our slide into fascism would seem. Also, I never quite understood how propaganda functioned in the boldfaced lie sense, as opposed to the PSA sense, until the past few years.
Did Trump write Pruitt's resignation letter?
I believe you are serving as President today because of God's providence.
I guess that means Trump didn't win Rhode Island?
59 is incredible and I'm not even a quarter way done reading that thread.
||
So the short list to replace Kennedy is down to Kavanaugh or Kethledge, because obviously what one K needs is two more.
|>
Someone must have been telling lies about Brett K., for without having done anything precisely wrong he was chosen one morning to serve on Trump's Supreme Court.
I believe you are serving as President today because of God's providence.
That could very well be true.
"I am the punishment of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you."
The thread in 59 links to a description of four nights' ridealong with Ukrainian paramedics which is even better. https://gist.githubusercontent.com/drguildo/2073b2457717f0fc7bec/raw/945d3ee092c10a7fbfc2d26d19231cf96df74eeb/gistfile1.txt
67: If he campaigned on that, I'd have more respect for those who voted for him.
This is why all the tech people need LSD to make it through the day.
Sounds like an unfogged joose club is in order.
71 I read a longer portion of that thread than I care to admit before I realized it was not being anti-Semitic.
I don't necessarily 100% believe every story on that joose thread.
73 Well, talk about your unreliable narrators...
I have been lurking now & again & but I just read the first night of the Ukrainian Ambulance & now I am probably dead.
Ukrainian Ambulance #3 is fucking wild. I mean it kind of escalates. Don't read Ukrainian Ambulance #4.
I'll confess I had to pause. Not dinner reading, I am sure.
I have now read all of Ukrainian Ambulance and the mishmash of farce and tragedy is better than anything Cormac McCarthy ever did.
71: I'm in. I obviously picked the wrong 20-year period to get clean and sober.
in post-soviet ukraine, joose mess with you.