This looks as good a place start my journey here as any. I created an account here in the past but didn't end up very active and this website became lost to me again in a sea of bookmarks that I'll probably never get back to. I was reminded of it randomly in a Reddit thread and thought I would give it a try again. Let me introduce myself by using some adjectives. I got a bit carried away, so if you stop reading at this point I wouldn't blame you. I am white with olive skin, Roman feet, Asiatic eyes, part brown, part blonde hair, a y chromosome, a second generation South African whose father was the only one of his siblings not born in the Netherlands. I don't speak Dutch and was raised 100% English. I don't feel at home in my own country anymore or like I belong to any specific culture or creed and I have current aspirations of learning another language and becoming a stranger in a strange land in a South American country somewhere, where I have no sociopolitical battle to confront of my own. But I have no current steps or short term goals for getting there. I procrastinate too much and am currently unemployed with only blue collar skills on my CV and I tend to daydream about being something more without acting on it more often than I'd like. I used to read a lot and write short fiction that I would mostly keep to myself. I was a metal vocalist for a while for three different bands over a short time fuelled by beer, pot, failed romance, financial hardship and in-fighting. I also used to play acoustic guitar and write my own songs. Over the years I lost my way, probably starting from the moment I discovered Pink Floyd's 'The Wall' in my father's LP collection when I was a small child. One of my all time favourite books is Philip K. Dick's 'A Scanner Darkly' and the last book I ever read and thoroughly enjoyed was 'Steppenwolf' by Hermann Hesse about ten years ago. Since then I've battled to get through any book. I also stopped writing music or singing years ago and my guitar currently collects dust in the corner of my cupboard, it's few unbroken strings old and out of tune. When I was thirteen years old, curiosity got the better of me and I ate some highly hallucinogenic flowers without knowing what I was really getting myself into, having never been intoxicated before. It was simultaneously a great experience and a terrible experience. I followed the white rabbit into Wonderland and at times it was hard to remember that I was just creating this strange new strange new world without becoming one with it. Actually at most times it was hard to remember. I still cannot remember if I was in Wonderland for one day or two days and I haven't dared to ask but I spent most of it as mad as a hatter. The only problem is that because I was too young and too stupid, I ate them during a school break time and while my mind was busy changing from a caterpillar into a cocoon on the inside, my paralytic body was being dragged across the school quad into the sickbay, and into a hospital where I spent the next day or two looking for the secret escape tunnel to get away from my captors and into the wild. I ate the same flowers again years later after a particularly bad case of heartbreak and hopelessness and thanks to being around good people, I was much more in control of my experience. That second time was also about ten years ago, coincidentally. Over the years I have grown angry, although I can't tell if I'm angry at society or angry at myself. And I want to regain my love for reading and writing and music and finally let my mind emerge from that cocoon, whether it's as a butterfly or a moth. I want to slow down my news and politics intake and watch from a distance as the world burns without getting too close to the flames. I want to learn multiple languages. I want to teach myself programming. I want to stop smoking so many cigarettes and slow down with the pot. I want to get unstuck. So I guess I'll finally get around to introducing myself to this website. I am Zero22xx, or John Smith as far as the internet is concerned. I hope that I'll find this website to be a place that can replace most other social media and start feeding my soul and my mind more than my base emotions. Somewhere that I can slow down my social media intake without giving it up altogether. I'm even thinking that I might switch to Zen mode after checking out all of the features and workings of this website first. I don't always talk this much about myself and I honestly don't know what got into me here. Glad to be here, I look forward to discovering what this place is really all about and hopefully interacting as positively as possible with other travellers in time.