eBay Sales: vintage doll
Craft Projects completed: Shortened the sleeves on my Halloween shirt. I’m going to use the leftover fabric to make gauntlets.
#MilWody Update: 58,627 ( 2818 words/day to complete on time.)
I was listening to a podcast about St. Anthony’s Fire. It’s a horrifying disease that I only knew about partly. It was a medieval disease which [Trigger Warning for Intense Disease Discussion. If you are at all squeamish I’d skip this paragraph and the next.] in which the limbs felt as though they were on fire, then turned red, blistered, then turned black and fell off accompanied by stench and hallucinations. So lovely.
My brain was instantly believing that this was leprosy (limbs dropping off) or a form of the plague (Red and black pustules which bleed and decay along with fevers) before the actual reality of it being ergot poisoning came up.
[Safe paragraph. Trigger Warning for discussion of LSD] Ergot, if you haven’t heard, and many haven’t, is a mold which grows on rye. It has been blamed for the Salem witch trials. (Mostly debunked. See Unobscured Podcast Season 1 for more information on the Salem Witch Trials.) And for an outbreak of violence in France/Prussia. I can’t talk to whether those are true stories even, and I’m not really going to address that here. I’m going to give a very brief discussion of Dr. Hoffman.
Dr. Albert Hoffman was working with lysergic acid in 1943. Now, the story I was told in college was that he got a little onto his hand and either rubbed his eye or touched his face. However it happened, he ended up having a 24 hour trip during which he actually managed to bicycle home. After recovering from his very intense and interesting adventure of tipping balls, he returned to the lab to eventually create LSD. He also worked with other psychedelics like psilocybin and was the one to isolate the compound.
Thing is, this man was an incredible an incredible chemist with more than 100 articles and several books. I am looking forward to trying to read his work in actual German. It will be a challenge, but he has an entire book dedicated to LSD which I want to read. I can only hope to be as prolific or live to his advanced age. He was 102 when he died. Possibly because he was smart enough to commute with a bicycle for part of his career. Something I will probably never manage to do.
Well, that was a tiny overview and a happy memory of my History of Psychology professor. He was a proponent of empathogens and psychedelics use in counseling activities. Especially drug rehab and end-of-life work. I’ll talk about that more on another day, when I can see where the research is currently. In other words, maybe in a few years when I feel up to facing the actual reality of reading psych journals again.
Anway, Love, leaves, and laughter! G’night!
BitterSuites 