I did that with lsd, on my first trip after almost ten years… and then had a fucking horrific time in the Warhol museum

Oh wow, that sounds like a really rough time.  Redosing seems like an almost guaranteed shitshow, and winding up in public just sounds scary…

You have my admiration for keeping it together long enough to get home :-) (and my sympathy for the lousy time). 

But look on the bright side; it could have been bath salts…

YES

This guy gets it; we should take a “bath” together, roll on down to the mall and get into some serious werewolf/highlander shit.  Whoever survives can write a bestselling book mythologizing/deconstructing the experience (presumably from prison).

oh, also? the kids have discovered nutmeg again, poor idiots. and the funny thing is that the authorities think it’s a new thing. i’ve heard some truly horrific stories about that particular means.

Ah, I see you know me sir ;-)

[yes, it’s terrible and will make you sick, and no the “high” is not worth it]

there’s actually some stuff that’s not pcp that’s being sold as bath salts. it’s all the rage these days. cray-cray effects. so it sounds consistent except that the street name’s not ‘bath salts’. funny i gotta know this shit for my job.

I know some folks who’ve been wrestling with the “bath salts,” and I know they’re actually not really bath salts (or PCP), I just find the various euphemistic names adopted for “legal” drugs lately to be hilarious.  There was that San Pedro based “potpourri” that was pseudo-mescaline, there were the synthetic cannabinoids marketed as “spice” [which was a big problem in the Air Force… er… spacing guild], and now some sort of wildly hallucinogenic/dissociative drug sold as “bath salts.” 

I don’t know why it’s so funny to me.  Maybe it’s because I spent too much time trying to get high off of stuff you find around the house when I was a kid. 

PCP FOR LIFRAGHHHHHHHHHHH

Seriously; if the drugs you’re doing don’t involve stripping down, hulking out, and/or killing or biting everything in sight, you’re wasting your life.  Who does drugs so they can sit around and “chill out?” I want to turn into some kind of raging, voodoo t-rex science experiment for eight hours.  Gotta find some bath salts and get clean a few times before the DEA finishes locking that shit down.

the bath salts DEFINITELY sound more like PCP

yeah my first thought was PCP. i mean the whole story is hideous. yet fascinating.

Glad I wasn’t the only person who’s head went there. I even knew some dust heads who called getting high on PCP getting “wet,” so there’s even a potential “bath” connection. 

I knew a dude who cut his own hand open (down to the bone) with a boxcutter while doing PCP.  He claimed that he did it in order to get workman’s comp (he was doing PCP at work), but I feel like that was definitely a post hoc rationalization. I also knew a dude who spent four hours in the middle of the night chasing “a squirrel” through the woods on PCP, who fucked up his face and hands pretty bad on tree branches (he said that everything was moving in slow motion like on the Bionic Man). 

And those are two of the “better” PCP episodes that have been related to me.  Sounds like the “bath salts” are kicking it up a notch.

“He speaks in two voices at once, and his touch raises blisters, but he knows where all the good vegan restaurants are…”

But it was worth it.  A long stay on an island in Maine, a highly successful pilot wizard’s picnic, and void worship at 80mph on I-95 in the dead of night.

hahaha you think that’s reactionary, you should have heard me bitching about the NIV with my hyper-orthodox russian piano teacher circa age 16 - it’s not ugly *because* it’s contemporary, but it’s still ugly as sin

Exactly so.  It will be ugly in 200 years, and it would’ve been ugly if it were written in the 17th century. 

I just try to mind my P’s and Q’s, because I never know what’s likely to get branded as reactionary around here :-)

[To be clear: I see things that seem really reactionary or, frankly, medieval (to me) being described as progressive or marxist, and a lot of things that seem progressive to me (or at least harmless) get branded as reactionary. So I try to be careful not to transgress the local laws of taste and decency.]

heksenhaus said in reply to this:

oh, i don’t think that sounds conservative at all, and i would tend to agree with you.
and i like to have new translations available along with older translations (of texts in general), as it can make for really interesting comparisons.

Oh definitely.  In my main field of study (classics), alternate translations can be very, very helpful, especially when your Greek isn’t what it could be and you want a bit of perspective.  But as you note, it’s also really interesting as a capsule cultural history.  I have 8 translations of the Iliad (not counting the weird abortive Arabic one), and about a dozen translations of the Aeneid.

It’s fascinating to see how different authors in different centuries have reacted to the work, and it’s even more fascinating to trace persistent “choices” of translation and/or mis-translations.  You can learn a lot about a culture and time period by its translations.  For example, the modern bibles have certain “hoofprints” in them that immediately identify them as modern.

I actually wrote a longish paper analyzing comparative translation and prosody in different translations of the Aeneid.  FUN FACT: 4 out of 5 translations of the Aeneid get something wrong in the first paragraph.