Ask Lemmy

Cats are pretty great

My German 'must have more' was the sauerkraut. It is sooo much better there than in the states, and it was slightly different in each town I tried it. My staple meal was whatever the local version was of: sausage, sauerkraut, and wheat beer.

A holiday

Parts of your life are definitely more interesting than mine

Do you have ADHD? I've heard that people who do and try coke end up pretty calm or unchanged.

One day I was cleaning out my second child's too small clothes and legitimately thought "If we have another I won't have to do this right now." Babies are cool indeed!

Miata
Is
Always
The
Answer

Breathing, the deadliest addiction.

Yep. This is why I don't touch alcohol anymore. I don't have an addiction or dependency, but when I drink a beer it makes me want another, and that one makes we want another. Then I'm hungover and filled with regret the next day. No point to it, so I just don't do that anymore.

Mine was, oddly enough, LSD. It’s not even physically addictive. I didn’t even particularly enjoyed tripping, but in my day-to-day life I have aphantasia; I can’t visualize anything.

If I asked you to close your eyes and picture an apple, then rate 1-5 how realistic you could make it look, most people would probably land somewhere around a 3 or a 4. Not photorealistic, but it would at least be recognizable as an apple and convey the important parts. A few artists or particularly visual people may land on a photorealistic 5. The people who are more biased towards speech (like an internal monologue) may land closer to a 2, like a rushed sketch, or even a 1 where it’s just a coarse outline and some color.

I land on a 0. I just see the backs of my eyelids. I can describe an apple to you. I can tell you what it smells like, what it tastes like, what color I would want it to be, how big it is, how heavy it is, what it feels like to crunch into it and get a little bit of the peel stuck between your teeth, et cetera… But I can’t visualize it.

I always thought the “picture yourself doing/going/working/etc {x}” types of things were just a figure of speech. Like if I was in elementary school and an art teacher said to picture a thing then draw it, I would just skip the first part. I’d still use my imagination before putting anything on paper, but it wouldn’t be visual.

But with LSD, that’s different. I can actually visualize things. Not particularly well, because everything is wobbling around like it’s made of tiny ocean waves… But I can do it. I quickly found that creative outlets were much easier when I could actually plan things out visually before putting them on paper. It was like I had been stuck using black and white paints my entire life, and then someone handed me some red, green, and blue for the first time. I also quickly realized how boring life was when I couldn’t just conjure images out of the ether at will.

Sadly, shrooms (which is commonly compared to “like doing LSD then smoking a blunt” in terms of feeling) doesn’t do it for me. I guess it doesn’t activate the same parts of my brain. But for whatever reason, LSD specifically allows me to overcome my aphantasia. I haven’t done it in years now, but I occasionally get the whim to try it again. Not enough to actually bother tracking down a new plug, but enough to muse about it while I type out shit like this.