groovygardener42069

groovygardener42069 OP wrote

The thing is, it's the downtown of a major US city.

Of course it's overrun with homeless people. This is fucking America.

If you don't want people coming inside asking for water, put a goddamn Igloo cooler outside and around the corner from the door with a stack of cups next to it.

It's like a hundred fucking degrees outside with 100% humidity

I just don't understand how people live with themselves

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groovygardener42069 OP wrote

That's an interesting take. I thought it was a little less centralized and more about the fact that the kava/kratom scene has a lot of overlap with the addiction recovery scene, and fascists are known to recruit in places with broken-down young people

But I also have a little bit of insight into the natural foods/vegan/hippie fascist wing of society as well and ... that kinda tracks with what I know?

I mean there has to be a supply chain for this shit. People with money know other people with money who know expats (in my experience, often fascist or fascist-adjacent) in areas where they grow the stuff.

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groovygardener42069 OP wrote

"Frozen with incredulity" is a great way to describe it.

I was really just like... what the fuck... is this for real?

And I do feel guilty - I want to do something, I wanted to do something in the moment too. But now what? Leave a yelp review so all the nazi kava/kratom people know which kava bar to go to now that the one with the trump flag shut down?

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groovygardener42069 OP wrote

I had rose water infused desserts from the indian grocer a while back that were really good, but I have no idea how to make something like that. I'm not really a gin guy normally but with the rosewater it takes the harshness out of that floral aftertaste

I think a couple of mint leaves and this thing would be perfect

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groovygardener42069 wrote

Reply to comment by lettuceLeafer in by !deleted30

Admittedly, it was a bad metaphor. Didn't mean to come off so south park-ish

Also admittedly, I didn't read OP so I'm missing a lot of context

But yes all of that is possible and actively happens in our culture under the matrix of oppression

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groovygardener42069 wrote

Reply to by !deleted30

Imagine, if you will, a hot stinky steak fart.

You can't separate the heat and stinkiness from the fact that it came from an old ass raunchy bag of steak 'ums. One feeds the other. It's clear that if you remove the steak 'ums from the diet of the offending crop duster, the hot stinky steak farts will stop.

However, we can complain about the steak farts and their source independently from one another, and this is key. The farts are particularly rancid and awful, and it makes no sense why someone would eat those nasty ass steak 'ums knowing that for the next five hours they need to stay in a well ventilated area to avoid a tragic methane explosion. There's the discourse around the pain we feel after a particularly raunchy wet blast of ass, as well as the intellectual pain of knowing both knowing the cause of our olfactory oppression and the fact that we have no way to stop it at the source.

I didn't read the OP but I still hope this metaphor is helpful in some way

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groovygardener42069 OP wrote

I would assume the database for neurotypical people is almost instinctual? Like I think the metaphor would be less, you as a toddler learning social cues, and more, how does a fish know how to swim? It just does.

For me a lot of the problems in my life surrounding my autism were actually downstream from my symptoms and mode of being itself. Most of my feelings re: anxiety and depression went away to a certain extent when I had a lens to view myself through that finally made sense.

For example, when I was younger a -lot- of people took advantage of me in different ways, because I was too oblivious to social cues to see people's intentions (you know that gut feeling you get when someone is just like kinda dressed-up-but-kind-of-a-sociopath off? yeah I don't get that) and it took me a long time to realize what to look for in people who come into my life and how to properly set boundaries.

I also get obsessive. Like wikipedia rabbithole obsessive. Like I got so into collecting records that my friends teased me into becoming a DJ. And the reason it was records is because it's easier to find things like random side project recordings with that one conga session musician you like from the 70s digging through flea market crates than it is trawling through download sites. Like I started gardening a couple years ago and now I gotta figure out what the hell I'm gonna do with my coca plants obsessive.

Dating - ho-lee shit. I obsessed over women who tolerated me (often ending real badly). I assumed women weren't into me when in fact they were wondering why I acted so "cold" all the time and really wanted to get with me. If I were still single now, I still don't know how I'd do it - with my (now) wife, I just honestly stopped being coy when we first started dating. "I like you, do you want me to kiss you?" It was scary as shit but it felt better than sitting there after the fact picking apart my unreliable memories of my unreliable reading of social cues

Small talk - what the fuck is that? I'm incredibly bad at small talk and take it to really depressing places because I don't know how to fake pleasantness convincingly.

But I don't really have too many other classic autistic traits like stimming or debilitating sensory overload so I pass as neurotypical in most settings. People who enjoy my presence call me "real." People who don't call me a downer.

I don't think I would be happy if I was neurotypical. I don't know what it's like to be innately aware of social hierarchies and to care about my place within them. That sounds like a fucking drag, man

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groovygardener42069 OP wrote

I mean there's never any one way to be, that's why it's a spectrum

My whole life I thought I was a weirdo, and kind of identified that way, self-deprecation and all. When I finally connected the dots that it's "high functioning" (whatever that means) autism, a lot of the stuff that used to keep me up at night (social faux pas, etc) kinda melted away.

The only person I've talked about my autism with irl is my wife, not even my mom. Kinda for the same reasons, why do they need to know and why do I need to deal with their projection?

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groovygardener42069 OP wrote

To your point, I kinda fumbled through life until I self-diagnosed and a lot of things suddenly clicked for me. I don't need some asshole in a cardigan to explain what's "wrong" with me but making a realization about why I'm different allowed me to better navigate the world as presented to me

Also I mean, autistic people can be selfish and uncaring too

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groovygardener42069 OP wrote

And that's the other thing - to my understanding the ancient egyptians didn't fuck around when it came to hedonism, which is what makes all of this so wild to me.

I -do- know that you're not really supposed to eat lettuce when you're on certain MAOI medication or the ayahuasca diet.

Lettuce isn't really in season for me right now but I'll run a few extra plants for science in about 3-4 months

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groovygardener42069 OP wrote

Now this could just be herbalist woo or there could be something to it, but I've been told that with a lot of this stuff freshness matters and so does ROA. Something about alkaloids that are especially fragile compounds or effects being caught up in the essential oils which evaporate off fairly easily.

In any case I would never expect lettuce to be a substitute for opium but maybe as a gentle sleep aid or similar?

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