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I am The Maxx. Born and orphaned by age six. Foster homes, adoption, the works. Smoked weed for the first time at 18, a few months after my adopted parents kicked me out--which is biggest favor they ever did for me. An estranged and disturbed older brother gave me my first bag of mushrooms and I never looked back.

A few snowy nights of homelessness, then I get a crappy job and a crappy apartment. I work about a year then go Greyhounding across the country a few times for various reasons. Wind up is Seattle. Snorted some blow, and I smoked meth twice. Two years later I'm headed back across the country. I weave myself into an art collective, warehouse style, which eventually the resident old drunken man burned to the ground. But I wasn't living there anymore.

Now it's six years of being a bike messenger, going through all kinds of adventures. I did acid for the first time somewhere in there, and quite liked it. Mushrooms I ate whenever I could, maybe a couple times a year. I didn't like salvia at all. I tried it several times to find out what I didn't like about it.

Now I write and draw comic books (no, I'm not Sam Kieth, though I greatly admire his work) and live in a basement somewhere in a town near you. A year and half ago I did my first DMT extraction and fell in love. It's what I always wanted acid to be, and now I have a seeming endless source and method of extraction. How cool is that? Frosty cool.

Pharma has transformed my life, or should I say helped me to change myself and all parts of my life are greatly improved.

What else to say?

I've spilled ink. Dang.


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Welcome friend,

I was groovin' on your post. It seems like you have done some traveling and seen some amazing places. This community is another beautiful aspect of your journey.

I look forward to hearing more about you. Using these medicines to change ourselves so we are strong enough to change the world is a message I strongly resonate with.

Peace and Happy Journeys

Welcome to the Nexus!

Whats your dosage for pharma? Do you extract harmalas too? Did you try aya yet?

What would you say was the most important change in your life so far ?

Be well!

Indestructible, life insane and spilling over again and again. What makes you tick? a colossus, somewhere on the wind or in the sand.
Our fictions have the soul of marble.

How did you get started, making money doing comics? It is kind of an obscure art to me, I never really picked many comics up even in childhood.. but I know someone who is trying to cultivate this hobby/talent, and am curious about how that process looks. Getting published.

Enjoyed this, thanks. See you around I hope.

I'm a huge fan of The Maxx! I can't believe you've brought that round! You sound like Julie!

Thanks for the welcome, been busy, but I've got time now to participate more.

Pharma dosage for me is syrian rue tea (4 grams three hours before the journey, 6 grams 20 minutes before lift off) and somewhere between 200-240 milligrams DMT.

I tried extracting caapi once and failed pretty badly. I've been lazy and now buy 10x syrian rue extract online and add that to my changa (which is all I smoke, no plain freebase for this explorer) .

I have not done a traditional aya mix. Pharma is all, with both caapi tea and rue tea. I've stuck with rue since it's so cheap and effective as opposed to caapi, which I've found a bit pricey and hit-or-miss potency wise. Though I do absolutely love the vine, and will explore more when funds are more fluid for me.

Now, for the most important change DMT has helped me with, I would say that would be quitting drinking. I drank every single day for years. When I got my first batch of root bark in the mail (oh happy day!) I put down the bottle for good and devoted my attentions to personal growth. And quitting drinking has helped me with the real focus of my life, which is that of the caterpillar transforming into the butterfly.

"Making money doing comics." That's not really the focus. This is not the business for making money, but for doing what you love the most. Granted, if you can make a living at, as I've managed to do, you are extraordinarily fortunate. It's been a lot of years of struggle and poverty.

If your friend wants to make it in comics, that person must draw everyday. Draw till your hand bleeds, till your eyes bleed, till your soul bleeds. I spent countless 14 hour nights (I work at night) hunched over the drawing table, for years, producing page after page of garbage. Hundreds of pages of crap. But, somewhere along the line, something magical happened: I started getting good. I think it was Dave Sim who said you have to produce a thousand bad pages before you produce a good page. This is an eerily accurate assessment.

For your friend, I would ask: do you have something to say? Something new, original, and compelling? I'm not into "mainstream" superhero stuff (not that there's anything wrong with that genre, it's just not my thing) , but have a pretty good knowledge of the independents. We're a sort of brother/sisterhood of strange folks who love filling boxes with words and pictures that hopefully tell a good story. "Story comes first" (Stephen King said that, and he's much better at telling a story than I'll ever be) .

Here's a link that I found to be the most helpful document ever produced for small-press/alternative comics: http://www.cerebusfangirl.com/artists/nftp/ it's a collection of Dave Sim's Notes From the President, in which he expounds all his hard-earned wisdom on what it takes to make it in comics. Dave Sim self-published 300 issues of Cerebus. I'm not a fan of Cerebus, but I have a great respect for what he accomplished.

Good luck to your friend.

I'm madly in love with Julie Winters. But I certainly relate more to Maxx, who is constantly shifting between dimensions and trying to discover his true identity.