How to Move to a New Town with No Car and No Friends

The Hermit

My first failed attempt at moving to a new town wasn't without a vehicle and I did manage to have one friend in town. That was when I made the trek out to Colorado. First I had stayed with an old roommate for a couple of weeks while I got my feet on the ground. Once I found a job and a place to stay, I thought I had it made. Until I realized I couldn't find a new place to stay after the lease ran up in two months and the only person I was living with, since the cool roommate left for the summer, was a coke addicted attorney with no license.

Note to Self: Do not try to move to Boulder if you plan on renting with college kids because they all leave after May.

So I did what any normal sane person would do and quit my job to move out to Washington State. The State of Utah did not think so and killed my car within fifteen minutes of crossing the Wyoming/Utah stateline....

Lessons learned from this whole incident:

- Do not impulsively quit your job if you can't find a place to live.
- Do not quit your job so you can take time off to go to Bonnaroo.
- Do not think it's a good idea to move with no money.
- Do not try to travel long distances without checking your oil levels first.

After $600 dollars in UPS shipment costs, a night at a cheap motel, a haircut, a few low alcohol beers at a dive bar, and a twenty plus hour journey across the country, I had returned back home to where my parents lived, in South Carolina.

The Greyhound across country and that gave me flashbacks of middle school where the 'cool kids' would sit in the back and act up.

At one point, the Greyhound bus driver stopped the vehicle and threatened to kick people off, just for making fun of him. I had to make sure that I hadn't inadvertently traveled back a decade...

 A few months went by until I could save enough money to move out and I had tried my hand out west again, this time in Texas!

I lucked out by finding some awesome roommates online and also by moving in October, not April. (Beginning of the school year, not the end)

I decided that I didn't need a vehicle, either, because it would just get me into trouble and I didn't have enough to get anything other than a clunker, anyway. My first weekend in Texas was fantastic, I got a chance to volunteer at Art Outside, which was a great way to jump into the waters of a new town.

Who cares if I had to sleep near fire ants under a pecan tree inside of a one person sleeping bag tent that was too small for me?

My new roommate hooked me up with a volunteer position so that I could enter without a cost, and I took this as a way to force myself to interact with individuals. Upon arriving, I discovered that this was just an extended family from what I had been used to in Asheville. Instead of hedonism being the operative word, however, I discovered that performance was the preferred method of expression.

The name, as it implies, is centered around Art in all it's various forms. The forms that it chose to take were that of fire breathing ironwork sculptures that could easily be misinterpreted as a dragon, given the right amount of psychedelics.

Canvas and dancers littered the spaces throughout the land. My first thought upon watching the movement masters is that they would have to be really, really good if they were on any sort of illicit substances. My god, the things these people could do with their bodies. The amateurs that would watch and try to emulate but their mind-body connection would fail within the first minutes...

Walking through I nearly get run over by a radioactive green vehicle sporting several dozen eyeballs on top and rows of teeth that surrounded the outside edge as it was attempting to shuttle people to their sites.

A loud THUD comes from behind me, and as I turn to see a group of humans dressed in construction attire and mouse noses, it is a life sized version of the game Mousetrap.

Upon sitting in an open field area after having worked for a few hours signing in people and giving them wristbands, I ran into the girl who was working with me at the welcome booth. She seemed to be flirtatious but I wasn't sure if it was the alcohol coursing through her that made her approach me. I knew it was for sure when she decided to stand inside of a cage surrounded by a massive Tesla coil.

The whole event seemed like one massive carnivalesque experience. One that had died out hundreds of years ago but was revived by technology.

There were no exploitation freak shows because everyone here was a freak and it was a celebration of the freaks. Those who make artwork that isn't landscapes that you find in hotel rooms. The artists who use their body to move and glide in the air, held only up by a long piece of cloth. The artists that spin around FLAMING WEAPONS.

There were no real carnivals rides because the experience itself was one long giant ride.

I knew at that very moment that we were doomed as a species. Nothing this good could last forever and it didn't, at least not for this writer. The last day of the festival, I had to get up early, so I left the festivities in order to go back to the sleeping bag tent contraption. All the others in our camping area were off partying, but I had to call it an early night. As I looked up at the big, clear Texas night sky, I was at least grateful for at that moment, I had found a group of people I could call friends.

Time Sickness

The screams of someone on a bad trip is not a sound that anyone should have to experience... The blood curdling howls of a person gone mad filled the cold, cold night of my first Texan psytrance party.

I'm used go attending parties that are in the middle of nowhere, not behind some warehouses where the campground was filled with either rocks or horseshit... Slim pickings at this venue.

It was too close to civilization and if there's one thing I've learned from psytrance parties, it's that it should be as far away from society as possible. Looking back on it, this is possibly why the campsite at a local burn had been placed deep into the woods. It's not for the faint of heart and you better be good and god damn ready to have your life shattered and put back together.

The cops had shut the music down the first night around 4 or 5 AM... There was an agreement to shut the music down the second night by midnight... The dumbest possible move that anyone could make outside of hosting such an event in a shit covered field behind warehouses...

That next night was full of substances that would make Hunter Thompson blush. The only one missing from my blood was LSD and a man sitting five feet from me just so happened to have an eye dropper... Until he poured the entire contents, in a drunken stupor, into the hands of his female companion. Granted she was on the larger size, that still doesn't mean she needs over ten god-damned hits of acid... Especially when other dopes are willing to pay you hard earned money for those hits.

Eventually she fell asleep from all the alcohol she had consumed. I later found out that it was her birthday and she had just gotten dumped so her friend wanted to make sure she had a good time... Still doesn't require a puddle of acid.

The music was shut down and we all went back to our campgrounds. I had no tent but was sharing with some kind folks that had brought me to the event. They were asleep so I decided to stick by the fire barrel just outside the tent. Yes, fire barrels were given to people as a means to stay warm in the sub-30 weather. Our little group stuck around the fire, trying to keep warm when the screams of the young lady commenced.

They did not stop for several hours.

The screams became coherent English but not completely coherent in terms of context.

"TIME SICKNESS"

"WE BUILDING MILLENNIUMS!"

"I'M A MOTHERFUCKING PRINCESS"

These statements went on repeat the entire time as if she were on her own time loop, running around, butt ass naked, in the cold. God knows what she was thinking about but I can only assume it had to do with the ending of daylight savings that was occurring that very evening... My God, was she onto something?

Could it be that all of the time shifting was acting as a savings account towards the hours and we were going to experience some sort of illness that involved temporal diseases that the hour savings could help us with, in the future? Was she some sort of princess that was there to warn us about it all but could send more than a few messages at a time?

No, probably not... 

She was probably just higher than the International Space Station...

Guide to Magic Mushroom Journey

Magic mushrooms have been used by indigenous peoples around the world for healing, prayer, and divination for at least 10,000 years.

In the 1960s, psilocybin mushrooms were popularized as a recreational drug after R. Gordon Wasson, a vice president of JP Morgan, traveled to Mexico with a photographer to the mud hut of the Mazatec curandera (medicine woman) María Sabina. They became the “first white men in recorded history to eat the divine mushrooms”, in 1955.

When using magic mushrooms in a religious context, there isn’t ever a “bad trip”… there is purging (or getting well), emotional release, healing, facing your demons and shadows, and transformation, in whatever manner the medicine determines you need to experience.

At the end of the experience, you’ve completed a hero’s journey, and the wisdom, revelation, and physical and emotional healing you’ve received are yours to integrate.

Read More At:

https://entheonation.com/blog/amazing-magic-mushroom-trip/

Even Psychonauts Get The Blues...

Having been stuck in Frostburg, Maryland for a week by this point, downing three bottles of cough medicine to trip just felt like the right thing to do, even it meant risking death…

The thing about tripping on dextromethorphan is that you lose all sense of self, time, and sometimes bodily functions. Fortunately the third did not happen this time. Dissociative also hold such notorious substances such as PCP, Ketamine, and even Nitrous Oxide(Laughing Gas). They are desperate drugs for desperate people seeking to escape whatever situation they may be in and it’s no wonder they share a name with a psychological disorder known to be tied to victims of abuse. Not to say that my situation was anywhere near as traumatic as some people who experience disassociation but there is, in the uninformed opinion of this author, a commonality between the brain’s process of is and the person who chooses to reach that state by chemical means. As I laid on the small twin sized bed that I was fortunate enough to be able to sleep on during our journey, I thought about the factors that had led me to this moment were on my mind.

After a year of slacking off at a sandwich shop inside a gas station, I had essentially been fired from the crappy minimum wage job after regretfully expressing my desire to work from home in a higher paying position. Unknown to me at the time, the customer service position I had lost my job over would fail spectacularly since I didn’t feel like ripping off old ladies try to sell their jewelry in an attempt to recover from the Great Recession that had just happened. I was in the same boat as them, only instead of selling jewelry, I was selling my vast collection of DVDs that I had accumulated for several years.  Also, I was fortunate enough to have parents that would throw me a bone here and there when I truly needed help.

One day, a friend of mine had convinced me to road trip with him, first to Maryland and then to Virginia. He had briefly attended school at Frostburg State University only to ditch it, and a lot of his possessions at his old apartment. After months of not picking up his stuff, he was notified that he had to come get it, or else it would be tossed out. Everything, including a friend’s canoe he had borrowed. Since I had no job or future at this point, I figured why not? A few days turned into a few weeks…

When you’re not going to school or work in this town, you’re pretty much a vagabond. There wasn’t much to do, especially as it was in the last part of winter. So, to pass the time, one of his friend had shoplifted the cough syrup to extract dextromethorphan and trip. Unfortunately the brand he decided to unlawfully take was one that is produced in a way to make it pretty hard to extract. A wasted venture. Until I offered my services in disposal. One bottle became two and then it quickly became three. Since I am naturally a large person, the amount hopefully wouldn’t kill me… I had decided to rest my eyes until the drugs began to take hold.

Upon waking up, in full blown disassociation mode, I walked downstairs to where my friend and our host were watching television. There was some absurd reality game show featuring solely reality stars.  This was not necessarily the best material to put into your brain, sober or not...

I opted to look outside instead of the television only to discover the world had been destroyed. The whole apartment had been moved into a deep underground cavern, so deep that it somehow was snowing… It was also in eternal darkness, aside from the amber street lights. I wanted to feature outside but the coldness was able to cut through my numbness. It was like the bunker in “A Boy and His Dog” only less people, and no one had weird white face paint…

The only source of entertainment in this post-apocalyptic future was shitty reality television. “This can’t be what life is all about, can it?” I thought to myself while staring out the window. I turned around to talk to the people that surrounded me, trying to find out more information as to what happened during my Rumpelstiltskin slumber. Oh my God! They’ve all been entrapped in cocoons! I grabbed a dull butter knife and began slicing the cocoon to free them. They gasped their first fresh breaths of air and my friend immediately turned to me to say, “We have to get out of here."

Luckily my vehicle was still there and we hopped in, he drove of course… We drove deep into the night until it was finally daylight. The nightmare trip was coming to a close…

Having an existential crisis at age twenty isn’t very fun, especially when you’ve barely lived. The trip on DXM had shown me what I was previously denying to myself that I was experiencing… The sense of being trapped by poverty and depression. The feeling that everyone around me was complacent and not willing to actively change their lives…

It pushed me into confronting those feelings and heading towards a new day.

We had arrived in Charlottesville, of all places, but years prior to the unfortunate incident that took place in the summer of 2017.

We were there to see the Dead, with Warren Haynes subbing for the late, great Jerry Garcia. It was my first time experiencing it. The lot, the show, every part of it. It was magical. It’s just a shame that the magic couldn’t be captured.

Despite being relatively sober for the first half, I could already feel the positivity rushing through the air. In between the sets, I was gifted a gram of mushrooms that began to peak midway through and then I could physically see the energy. It was a 180 from the trip in Maryland… It was a sense of achievement in finding a community that could all bond together through a unifying source of sound.

I began to peak on the walk back to our friend’s car and despite there being cops everywhere, I was able to huff on a nitrous balloon while walking by a squad car with their lights flashing. There were just too many Deadheads to stop everyone that might’ve been doing something illegal and they were there to manage the traffic flow out of the stadium. It was at this moment that I had discovered the beauty of community that beats isolationism. Then again, I could’ve been just way high off my mind.