Secret racial baiting hand signals... Or acid paranoia?😂

Trip paranoia or legitimate happening? Thoughts?

So, I live in a heavily conservative town. Conservative to a degree larger than I’m aware of a lot of the time. I experience it as a POC, which isn’t always easy to relate to the other residents of said town that I may talk to. Especially, if they would rather believe everyone has it like them more or less, regardless of consequence. My mother moved my sister and I here after I turned 11 (I’m 23 now) to be closer to our grandmother/her mother. I am currently an unemployed student. I feel extremely lucky, and privileged to be able to live pretty harmoniously with my family, a family in which the primary breadwinners, my grandma and mother, happen to have experienced a very healthy amount of material privilege (and so, so have my sister and I). Whether I believe any of that was having to do with them being white ultimately doesn’t make any difference, but I do feel it contributed. I Also feel incredibly privileged go to school while they’re still able to help me in many ways I need, but these two major life privileges make me feel extremely self-serving and undeserving when I think about them and how I’m simply lucky to have not been born into the world, being more heavily discriminated against by the people in your life, like many others I’ve talked to.

The reason I preface this story with all of this excessive detail is because I feel my chosen hyper-awareness of these particular facts of my life may have heavily affected my judgement in the trip moments I’m about to describe and I, even while writing this, am not sure whether it would be healthy for me, while moving forward, to believe that this happened to me when I can’t take any action to change the past, and personally, believe I am still a lot better off than many who feel they experience moments of prejudice. I’m so sure, however, that I experienced these things, that I had to put it out there at the risk of sounding deluded.

Anyway to get to the tripping. I woke up on a Sunday and took a tab and decided to walk down to my local downtown park and play some guitar. When I got there I sat down on the bench of one of those very common, aluminum, park picnic tables. As I tried to play my guitar through coming up, and this particular feeling of vulnerability that I’ve found comes with my rise to the top, so to speak, I noticed an older white man walking his little dog close to my left. I tried to ignore him and focus on my fretboard at first because I wasn’t feeling up to smiling and acknowledging my-self, let alone another-self, but as he neared me I saw that he was not concerned with greeting me, and seemed to be directing hand signals at me, the nature of which I do not know, but they seemed to be directed at me. I immediately had a frazzled, cliche, acid thought: “oh man those are probably some racially motivated hand signals or something, can’t believe I’m actually seeing this shit.” Once he noticed that I noticed whatever he was actually doing, he seemed to switch gears and sorta muddle his hands as he moseyed away from me towards the other side of the park, not strange behavior for someone who catches you staring. From that point forward we seemed to be generally aware of each other, which felt odd, but we were both at the park, and again, maybe he was weirded-out by me scrutinizing him when he was actually minding his own business, signing to himself, wiping his nose strangely or something.

A little later, I had been mentally drifting away playing some lick, when I caught sight of him sitting on another aluminum park bench, across the park diagonal from me. He was throwing a toy for his dog who didn’t seem to know where it was, as he was just running around on the grass, but as I kept looking I saw he was throwing no toy, but was doing a “heil” movement with his arm as his dog just ran around near him on the grass.

At this point I obviously felt like I was going crazy because “why would I be seeing this?” “Maybe there was a toy? I am tripping on acid.” “But, I do live in a racially biased area... that seems like a lot though.” These were things I was thinking in order to gain some sense of confidence in what I might or might not be seeing.

The last straw was when I was noticing him walk toward the edge of the park into the surrounding downtown area and before reaching the edge, he turned around, seemed to acknowledge, even confirm, my gaze and then fed his dog a biscuit; I packed up my things and walked home extremely unsure if I could trust my-self to believe these things could have happened in such a casual setting as a small downtown park on a Sunday morning.

Two other moments that happened, the last of which relates, but both of which I found fascinated me: I would try to focus on the grass, trees, etc. as to avoid meeting the scrutinizing eyes of other park goers, and when I would be looking at certain points on the grass, a dog, being walked nearby, would enter my line of sight, sniffing at that point, as the owner tried to yank it away, in relatively casual fashion. It was as if it could smell my gaze, or sense my concentration somehow. I remember this happening at least three times. The last thing that happened that made me sure that I must be experiencing a delusional state of some sort, was that I mistook a white SUV Ford Explorer that was in my periphery as a cop car, and had a moment of legitimate panic before realizing. Thanks for reading, don’t be shy if I sound batshit! Let me know! 😂.

TL;DR I took a tab had some experiences at my local dt park that felt like they could be very real, and don’t seem that far-fetched for the area and the current socio-political climate, but I feel that because of my life circumstances up to this point and current mental state it could have been extremely strong delusion and it may not be healthy to believe I experienced these things which ultimately amounted to a self-fabricated racially motivated theatre piece in my head.

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source https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracytheories/comments/jiq9am/secret_racial_baiting_hand_signals_or_acid/