I just ran into this being quoted in a YouTube comment and was like, "well, that's horseshit."

There's plenty of examples where I ... well, uh ...

Curious what y'all think.

The comments section on this article is illuminating beyond the story itself (as is frequently the case on Ars) and worth a look.

Anecdotal experience alert!

I've been dealing with treatment-resistant major depression since before the term existed. Presumably, this stems from events when I was 7 and younger which unfortunately informed preferences and decisions starting in college and to some extent continue to this day. My parents were also quite detached, adding in the need to find in adulthood the sort of safety and connection one is supposed to grow up having already felt and thus able to recognize abusive analogs in partners with better than 0% accuracy.

Net result has been a lifetime of self-medication, sometimes with the hope of improvement, but far more frequently some way to just kick the can down the road to avoid feeling those things right now.

My introduction to MDMA came unsurprisingly from the rave scene in 1999. On balance, that period of heavy use (within a year, I'd sometimes roll three times a week, which no one is going to suggest is a good idea) was a net negative, with the silver lining that I did get to feel fleeting connections, but that transitory nature made the reality in between seem that much comparatively worse.

Any amount of research into psilocybin will lead to the phrase "set and setting." The first is short for mindset, the second obviously physical surroundings, including people. What I didn't know back in college was this concept itself, let alone that it applies to any psychoactive substance. At the time, I liked to say that E was a mood enhancer because if I was already feeling low, it was a shovel. And boy, howdy, did I find bottom with a cocktail one night that started with E at a party and then led to intentional contraindicated choices once home.

After a long period away from MDMA, I first rolled again in 2016, this time with my newish girlfriend at my house with chill music and climate control. Wildly different experience. This led to the same sort of experience in 2019 and again in 2021.

By mid-2022, the double whammy of pandemic loneliness and the abysmal job market had led to hospitalizations and detox trips as I hit the point of having a 30-pack of beer delivered to my apartment almost daily. The final detox led to a job, finally, after meeting the owner of a company there, which in turn led to my first year-plus of sobriety by choice.

At which point I was ready to finally tackle some of my longstanding issues instead of brushing them under the rug. Soon after, I heard about Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind miniseries on Netflix, leading to learning to grow shrooms while doing a fuckton of further research into intentionality and realistic expectations.

My first trip removed the rumination -- that constant background voice questioning every choice I made and even every thought -- I'd been dealing with for decades. It was a difficult trip emotionally, though I was never afraid through ineffable reassurance that everything would be fine. On the other side, I was able to take the first step to being present in the moment.

Over several more months, well-spaced trips diminished the frequency and urgency of unwanted memories surfacing, culminating in acceptance that I had to let go to move forward. The final trip of that series also revealed where I wanted to go, and I blew up my life, buying, building out and moving into a van, followed by leaving the soul-crushing job of sending out bills.

After a circuitous path, I've landed. Absolutely no medical professional would suggest what I did, but there's no accessible psychedelic-assisted therapy path I could have instead chosen, which is frankly intentional withholding of treatment. "SSRI's not working? We have no alternative, so you get to suffer!"

Last weekend, I did MDMA in a party setting again for the first time since college. It wasn't planned, but strange things happen in a gift economy with amazing people and music. After eating some shrooms the first night, I finally found my flow state, which I seem to have lost somewhere back in the '80s, allowing full presence.

Other than the inevitable serotonin crash Wednesday, I've felt amazing. Not manic, just happy with who I am and where I'm at and confident about my ability to continue finding my path forward.

After losing decades of my life, I don't want to see anyone else go through that, so I keep tabs (no pun intended) on psychedelic studies, and these MAPS trials seem to be going backward for wider experiments I know can benefit millions. It is so frustrating to have experimental malfeasance from an organization seemingly wanting to move forward but unable to avoid things like sexual assault and other cultlike behaviour from the fucking researchers.

Hopefully, these will lead to further studies with far more ethical guardrails instead of closing the door again.

It's not all wine and roses in terms of requiring sustained fracking, which defeats the purpose of transitioning away from fossil fuels, but the estimate is there's enough lithium (as lithium carbonate) coming from these sites to cover 40% of domestic demand.

A number of wheels starting turning a year ago. Haltingly ... maybe more like relay switches.

As we need Point A to be able to differentiate from Point B (Point Q is irrelevant to the discussion), I bought a domain for a website that never happened and just lapsed. I was a billing clerk for a small firm that treated me well but didn't want to ever hear ideas about how to streamline operations. My prior role had been automation. For print newspapers. Not a lot of overlap, but if it can be defined in code, why the fuck am I doing this manually?

I'd been sober a year, having met the owner in detox.

And it was miserable. I was pretty sure rent would go up to the extent that I could no longer afford my cat. Cats, my mom would say, are my totem, so this is desperate times. It's actually worse: also no food budget.

It's about this time Reddit shits the bed and I discover Beehaw. After a few weeks, U.S. News is about to be created, and I'm in the right chat channel at the right time. After this weekend, I don't think my introduction post is actually for anyone else, but me finally saying: This is what I want to do, and anything less is unacceptable.

I'd been sketching out 400-square-foot off-grid cabins for about seven years at the time, and I veered into researching vandwelling, as it would provide flexibility if, say, the climate went to shit and whatever land I'd chosen no longer has water.

Lots of research ensues, and I buy a tool van. Learn electricity, put up solar panels and start living off my own microgrid. I build it out at the local makerspace after a Reddit question, where I meet Eric (it is left as an exercise for the reader to determine if I've changed his name), without whom I would not have succeeded.

Work goes south; irreconcilable differences. I get to the point I'm wanting to drink and feel I need to get out, so the Friday before Thanksgiving, the accounting gig is done. Step 2: ???

I had enough saved up for a month and a half, which on this timeline is assuming I'll magically get hired Jan. 2. (Narrator: It didn't happen.) I was throwing darts with applications, finally purchasing the services of a couple of scam artists on LinkedIn.

Truck breaks down (serpentine belt), and I'm out $400 for an 8-mile tow (Class 4). Same day as the fraud becomes apparent ... and things go poorly from there. By the end of the month, I've borrowed more money and basically drank it away, getting me into a ward.

Eric drives me to the ER and comes to understand that after doing so much of the build myself (solar was all me, and when he saw it, he was rather surprised), I'm not lacking motivation but rather resources. He's a retied rich guy (this will be important later) who also knows vehicles, and so after he buys a new serpentine belt, he spends hours over days tracing the problem, which was a loose nut on the starter motor but presented as wild voltage droops from panels because an A/C line runs near it.

So, to start March, I'm mobile and back on the job prowl for random positions. So here, now while everything like meeting Eric had to happen, I had to be parked where I was because of where I take my morning constitutional for the rest of this to play out.

I'm leaving the washroom, and as I like to vape, I head out the patio door to run into my former assistant and his family. Small talk ensues, and he says, "Well, why don't you send me your resume? Trade pub I work for is hiring freelancers."

Briefly, my editor used to run papers I then ran design for, so absolute alignment on journalistic integrity. I took a writing test, and I guess I don't suck. Part of why they're expanding is they want beat reporters. Like as of me; as of exactly then. You start to see how this is all looking suspiciously like when the shrooms told me I want to be a green-energy reporter but were unhelpful as to how some months earlier, it was a waiting game

So, I say I want to cover green energy. Done. Right place, right time. Good pay.

Meanwhile, Eric's purchased four tickets for Burning Flipside, a regional burn about an hour out of Austin.

And here, dear reader, yes, we finally get to the subject of the title.

The van was not the point. The job was not the point. I had to get all of that done so that when I got to Flipside, I wasn't a whiny bitch but an actually interesting guy who apparently has some pretty awesome dance moves now that I'm old and don't care.

To paraphrase my Reddit post, this weekend I learned that is is possible to experience genuine wonder halfway through my 40s, and the thing about wonder I'd never realized is it is a critical component for joy. Joy isn't something you're expecting. You can't plan for joy. So you sure as fuck need wonder.

Confident in where I was at and unwilling to squander this opportunity, I quickly broke camp and just started looking around. Needless to say, as a former raver who sadly still views a kinky chick with short unnatural hair as the dream, I was not disappointed.

Most amazing weekend of the past 15 years. Walking in expecting nothing, came out with everything. Like, I'm not fucked, we all actually realize how toxic society is. The couple thousand of us, I guess.

I made friends; for the first time, I just danced without giving a fuck, which should have happened at my first party in 1997, but I was wee. I had fucking DJs making it a point to thank me for dancing! People came up to me like never before ... I'm terribly introverted, so yeah ... not where I expect to shine. And I don't mean like two people; I had like four DJs and four new friends in two hours.

Either I didn't care or they didn't care. This is a burn, so assumptions about sobriety per substance are likely incorrect.

But oh, my god.

I recently had that feeling of "you're exactly where you're supposed to be" for the first time since 2009. This weekend was just beating the drum, basically saying: and here's why.

I have the van. I have the remote job. I have the tribe. I am fucking done with your constructs, and cute ravers will cuddle with me for finally getting here. Seriously, what can you ask out of a holiday weekend that is reasonable and exceeds this?

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Niche question, I realize, but I'm going to lend a bit more weight to responses here than elsewhere.

This winter did not go as planned, and as such, I find myself still in Texas, which is bad enough, but I live in a tool van, and even with 2" insulation, it's a metal box exposed to the sun. The forecast for the weekend is 97 all three days, so that reminded me of a friend's suggestion to look into this site.

Ultimately, what I'd like to know is whether it's worth the annual upfront cost to provide a service (unexpected), as while it could get me in air conditioning before leaving this hellhole, it would also be pretty badass to be able to travel the country with indoor plumbing and appliances as my anchors.

Archive link

Archive link

Oh, and restoration of firearms rights.

Archive link

(hed fixed to 19)

The universe has a strange way of fucking with one. In my experience, long and frustrating lulls where nothing happens are punctuated with "oh, you didn't like that? Well, here's everything at once."

I should open with that I am not looking for advice; I've already made up my mind. I'm looking to commiserate and vent.

Requisite backstory: Through a series of events much like what I described with getting back into journalism not too long ago, we met. This required my former boss, the lesbian who was my first real girlfriend, my parents, friends of my parents having moved to Oregon and, oh yes, I-5 freezing the day after said boss was done with me couchsurfing and we disagreed over "by the weekend." She was on the coast and I needed to get to Tacoma two days later.

We'd been talking on OKCupid for at most two weeks. I looked at my options and determined nonfrozen roadway would be preferable, so I sent a very short message: "Fancy a visitor?"

This was 2009, and she felt it was safe because to her mind, there was no way I was straight (bleached hair at 30, amirite?). We've now been divorced for eight years. I'm not going to talk about what went right or wrong. It is firmly in the past, and we have worked in recent years to get back on speaking terms, which varies in efficacy, usually depending on her inebriation level, which is itself horrifically ironic.

So, after she offered to mail me an ounce in April and then went completely silent, with no ounce showing up, she finally popped up last night. She's about an hour away through the week before likely heading to Connecticut for an unknown period of time. No car -- she's going to figure out the transport down here -- but nonetheless, distilled, knowing that I live in a van with a bed too small for two people who aren't fucking: "Fancy a visitor?"

And the reality is I do. Said that once before ...

But wait, there's more! I'd already interacted with her in 2004, when she had a different account. Learned that one the day I moved into her house five days after meeting (which was a drive) and she showed me an old photo. Of her. Wearing what's in retrospect a rather pedestrian collar for something that actually has cone spikes.

I can only say this in retrospect, because I went full Paul Hogan for the wedding after commissioning two artists: That's not a collar ...

She fucking wears her wedding collar to this day (you want it to last, you want a blacksmith; also, be aware that a leather backing can cause cysts). And kept my name. So, you know, it's not entirely out of the blue that after all this time ...

It's the surprise of it all. Even though it really shouldn't be surprising. So, maybe it's just the timing.

I hate to go as cliche as "surprising absolutely no one," but really, this is not a surprise.