The other day, the Utah Senate passed a last-minute bill to make consumers pay for Rocky Mountain Power's fire insurance so it can keep operating a coal-powered plant and wreaking havoc on the environment. Then a little committee met to discuss the bill and invite public comments before it proceeded to the House. Four people were there to oppose the bill in person on behalf of various groups, and four more including me opposed it over Zoom. That's eight from the entire state. Everyone else's comments were very scripted and cited a lot of facts and statistics, which makes sense, of course, but I hoped that my extemporaneous heartfelt comments about how a rate increase will ruin my life even further would add another dimension and reach some of the legislators in a different way. I just told them that everything has gotten more expensive in the last year, that I go to the food pantry, and that I can't save up enough money for summer rent. I was very proud of myself for stepping out of my comfort zone and speaking out on an important issue. I felt really, really good.
Then the representative from Rocky Mountain Power spoke in favor of the bill, and the committee voted 6-3 to pass it along, as I'm sure they were planning to do before the meeting started. If that doesn't summarize how the Republican party works and how little anything I say or do matters, I don't know what does. I'm so goddamn tired of having no agency because I'm not a goddamn billionaire or a goddamn corporation. I guess I'll just go sell both of my kidneys.
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I really couldn't care less about football. For any non-Americans who may happen to stumble on this post by accident, "football" in this context is not the game where you kick the ball with your foot, but one where you throw a ball with your hands. And the game stops every five seconds for reasons that are unclear to me. I cannot comprehend how anyone finds it exciting, but lots of men are obsessed with football and worship football players. I watched one football game in my first semester of college, and that was enough for me. But when I get the chance, I go to Super Bowl watch parties for the food, the commercials, and the company. Even when I was a Mormon and didn't believe that sports were keeping the Sabbath holy, I felt that bonding with friends was a more important consideration. The local YSA bishop evidently feels the same, as he's (unofficially, of course) hosting a watch party for the second year in a row.
I keep hearing about some stupid controversy over Taylor Swift dating a football player and getting too much attention at football games. I won't mind very much if all the footage of the Super Bowl is replaced with Taylor Swift's face. Actually, I'll pay a lot more attention if that happens. I don't know much about her as a person and I'm only a moderate fan of her music. I'd rather listen to any of her songs than watch a football game, but I don't understand why she's the second-most streamed artist in the world. Still, good for her. I remember when she was a teenager singing country songs about boys. When I heard her almost every day on Q Country 102.9, the school bus driver's favorite station, I never imagined how far she'd go. And if she's making MAGAs angry, she must be doing something very right. I think I know what it is. I've heard various things, but I think what really set these terrible people off the most was when she encouraged young women to vote. She didn't tell them how to vote, but it's a given that most young women will not vote for the senile orange fascist. His cult is scared. And it should be. All Americans, whether they realize it or not, will owe Taylor Swift a debt of gratitude if we just get a civil war after he loses instead of the nightmares he'll unleash if he wins. The legal proceedings regarding Elijah McClain's death wrapped up this week, and the paramedics who killed him with an overdose of ketamine are going to jail. That's one of the best Christmas presents I could ask for. It's very rare for healthcare workers to be criminally charged when their stupid mistakes kill people, but they were so obviously and so much in the wrong this time that I've only seen three conservatives bitching about the verdict and blaming McClain for his own death. Do you realize how significant that is? You have to be a saint in order for conservatives to not think you deserve to die after a police encounter, and McClain was. He deserved to be killed about as much as Jesus did.
These convictions will be a game-changer. The Associated Press cautions that they "could have a chilling effect on first responders around the country." To that I say, good. First responders and all other healthcare workers damn well should be afraid to make a stupid mistake that kills someone. If they aren't, they need to choose a profession with more room for error. The obvious problem here was that Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec just didn't care enough to do their job correctly. Well, that and they had an obvious implicit bias against Black men that made them overestimate McClain's weight by almost sixty pounds. The International Association of Fire Fighters claims that this case "criminalized split-second medical decisions." To that I say, bullshit. Cooper and Cichuniec had more than ample time to communicate with McClain and check his vital signs. They didn't even have the ketamine with them when they showed up. But yes, if they had been paralyzed with fear of making a mistake and just not done anything, McClain would still be alive. They injected him with ketamine because they thought he had "excited delirium." It is unfortunate that paramedics in this country are still being taught that "excited delirium" is a thing even though no legitimate medical institution recognizes it. Just the symptoms of this fictitious condition - superhuman strength, impervious to pain, sudden death - sound so stupid that I can't comprehend how any adult believes in it. But then, millions of adults still worship Donald Trump, so my opinion of the human race, or at least Americans, is obviously too high. Police supporters literally made up "excited delirium" to justify police killings of Black and Latino men in their custody. It's racist as well as stupid. California recently became the first state to ban listing it as a cause of death. Funny how I was raised to believe that California's progressives were the stupid ones. It is most unfortunate that only one of the three police officers who assaulted McClain for no reason was convicted of anything. Roedema was found guilty because his statement "He's definitely on something," which exemplifies police officers' rampant bigotry against neurodivergent people, contributed to the paramedics' decision. Jason Rosenblatt was acquitted because, like the people at Nuremburg, he was just following orders. Nathan Woodyard, the first police officer who assaulted McClain, was somehow acquitted of everything even though he had no legal justification for stopping McClain, he acknowledged in court that he did everything against his training and needlessly escalated the situation from the first moment, and the paramedics would never have been there in the first place if he had minded his own damn business. So he has his job back. I hope he never has a good night's sleep again. After those acquittals, I was ready to go burn something down if the paramedics were also acquitted. The whole point of having separate trials was so that each person or duo could throw everyone else involved under the bus. If our legal system had determined that nobody was at fault, it would be beyond saving. So anyway, Merry Christmas. I do mean that, though I don't have much to add. I've completed the final pass through my novel, I just have some more description and other touch-ups to add, and then I hope to get it published by Friday, though that partially depends on whether the artist I hired comes through with the cover in time. If he doesn't, I'll be kind of pissed, but it won't be the end of the world. Anyway, I'm very sleep-deprived even by my standards. A couple of nights ago I had multiple nightmares, and I don't even know why. First, I either woke up and had sleep paralysis or dreamed I had sleep paralysis and then woke up. I imagined a shapeless white ghost thing coming through my window, and then a vague black demon thing standing over me while I couldn't move. I've read about sleep paralysis, and I don't believe in demons in large part because everything that people used to blame on them has been explained by natural phenomena like sleep paralysis, and it only lasted a few seconds, but it was still terrifying. Then I dreamed that lightning struck hundreds of times simultaneously, all over the sky, and I thought about how much it would hurt to get hit by lightning, and I wondered how anyone could survive that, and I remembered that I was more likely to get hit by lightning twice than attacked by a shark, and I decided that if I was going to get hit by lightning twice, I didn't want to live. It's weird how sometimes my thoughts in dreams are entirely coherent like that. It makes me think my brain is still working too hard. So anyway, this post is basically filler to keep up my goal of writing one every week, and I will continue by mentioning some other things from my Spotify Wrapped that I would have mentioned last week if I hadn't been in a hurry. Spotify said that I'm a "Shapeshifter," and described my listening habits as "eclectic." That's exactly the word I would use to describe it. I also used to use that word for my political philosophy, but then I realized that one side of the spectrum is a much, much, much, much, much bigger problem than the other one. (Hint: it's the one dedicated to fighting against social equality and education.) These were my top five songs, none of which are by my top five artists, because I'm a Shapeshifter. Cerrone - SupernatureA fun Halloween disco track that clocks in at almost ten minutes but is worth it for the way it starts small and layers instruments on each other to gradually build up to the good part. I like it when songs do that. And that's the closest I'll ever get to sounding like a legitimate music critic. Completely out of nowhere, Duran Duran covered it on a Halloween album just a couple of months ago. Omega - Gyöngyhajú lány (The girl with pearly hair)A hauntingly beautiful fantasy song from the sixties that sounds like it must have always sounded old. An English version was released a few years later, but the lyrics are so hard for me to make out that I find it barely more comprehensible than the original Hungarian. Vogon Poetry - Atomic SkiesA fun song about the Fallout games. If you, like me, have never played the Fallout games, then it still works as a fun song about living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. We'd better practice having a positive attitude about that sort of thing. Yarmak - RagnarokI encountered this banger as the backing track for a compilation posted in r/ukraine of the Ukrainian military prepping to kick Russia's ass. According to Google Translate, this is what the artist said about the song on YouTube: "These lines were written just a few days before going to war. It contains my entire inner state, and I want to convey this state to every brother. A great battle is ahead, after which not only our country will change, but the whole world as well. This is a real war between the warriors of light and the forces of evil, the battle of angels against demons, people against the dead. Each of us must accept and walk this path. Today, the future of the planet is being created in Ukraine, and we must do everything in our power to defeat the horde of darkness. Perhaps this will give someone motivation, know that I will not only be by your side in song, but also physically at the front with my unit. It's time to return yours! This is not a track, not a composition, not a song - this is a spell of immortality!" Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit - If We Were VampiresAccording to this song, maybe love is more precious because it can't last forever because we're all going to die someday. It was always beautiful to me, but it became more poignant after I lost my faith and had to take it more seriously. I still think it's possible that human identities and relationships will persist after death, but I'm no longer confident of that, and I am confident that whatever the afterlife may look like, Joseph Smith's eternal sex fantasy is not it. I heard this song a lot because I have three versions of it on five playlists - my 2010s playlist, my Halloween playlist, my fall vibe playlist, my nostalgia playlist, and my death playlist. It works on many levels. I just realized that I should also add it to my twue wuv pwaywist. The bus that picked me up from Green Canyon High School was moving through the final crosswalk before the transit center, already late, when one of Utah's special drivers tried to turn in front of it and forced the driver to slam on the brakes, sending my phone through the air. I took the Lord's name in vain and extended my middle finger toward her, but she probably didn't notice. Then I went to pick up my phone, but it wasn't on the floor. It wasn't on a seat. It wasn't anywhere. The bus pulled in, everyone else got off, and I kept looking back and forth and over and under and behind with no success. I knew my phone was still on the bus because it was still broadcasting music into my headphones. I told the driver what had happened, and then to my surprise, a transit center employee came on and looked for it too. We were already late, and I knew the other passengers must hate me, and I couldn't blame them. But it wasn't my fault, it was that damn driver's fault. The employee said they'd have to look more thoroughly when the bus was out of commission.
I didn't want to leave without my phone, so I saw no alternative but to stay on for another loop. I tried really hard to take a Buddhist perspective and not be totally pissed off about this waste of my time. The smallest events change the courses of our lives in unpredictable and unknowable ways, so who's to say this waste of my time wouldn't save me from some horrible fate or expose me to some glorious opportunity? Of course, it could also have done the opposite of either of those things, but I tried not to think about that. The point was I didn't know, so I shouldn't be mad. I took the empty spot next to the one girl who had asked me what I was looking for while all the other passengers ignored me. By this point I had turned off my headphones. Maybe she would become my best friend, I thought. Maybe that was the silver lining here. I had the idea to ask if I could log into Google on her phone and use "Find My Phone" to make my phone make a noise even though it was on silent. It took me a while to build up the courage to make such a bold request, but I did, and she said yes. I put in my email and then her phone just spun a loading circle at me and did nothing. She said she'd just gotten it from her stepdad and it didn't work very well. She played with some settings and tried to fix it. She called her mom. I got up a couple of times to look for my phone again in the same places I had already looked four times. It's not like there were a bunch of nooks or crevices for it to be hiding in. The girl couldn't get her phone to work, but she said I could get off the bus with her and go to her apartment and try to track my phone from her laptop. I couldn't believe it. We were going to be friends! So I did that. Her apartment was surprisingly well-furnished and had two cats, one of whom took an instant liking to me. The girl said that meant I was special. I was okay with that as long as she didn't start saying stuff like she could read my aura and my heart was a nice color and she could see the future. She offered me water and said she was a bad host for not offering sooner. I said it was nice of her to invite me inside in the first place. She said she likes to help people, and if most people were as helpful as her, the world wouldn't be in the state that it's in. As you may have already guessed, I couldn't log in to Google on her computer because it required a verification code that it sent to my phone. There was literally no other way to do it. No security questions, nothing. She said I could report it as a theft to the police and they could help track it. I hoped it wouldn't come to that because I hate the police. I went back out to the bus stop in front of her apartment, and she asked if I wanted her to wait with me, and I said I didn't care, so she did. She asked about my life, and she said she wanted to go to USU, and that was when I figured out that, contrary to my assumption, she wasn't an adult. She still had a couple years of high school left. I now realized that we wouldn't be friends because it would be inappropriate for me to try to stay in touch in any way. Also, maybe she shouldn't have invited me into her apartment when her parents weren't home. But it's not like she was unfamiliar with stranger danger. When I said I didn't know my roommate before he moved in a couple of weeks ago, she said she hopes he's not a serial killer and doesn't murder me. Because the bus on this route was so far behind schedule, only partially because of me, another bus came through this time. I went to the original bus and asked the driver about my phone. Still nothing. He said maybe it was in the lost and found. I didn't have time to check right then because I took a detour to campus to turn in my city council ballot. I didn't vote for any incumbents because they all ignored my email of complaint about the police department. Then I walked home and opened "Find My Phone" on my laptop, where fortunately I was already logged into Google. At first it appeared that my phone had somehow fallen off by Mount Logan Middle School, just a few blocks away, even though we hadn't stopped there. But I refreshed the page and saw that, in fact, it was still traveling along the bus route. I took my laptop with me back to the transit center so I could use it to make my phone make noise as soon as the bus pulled in. I could do this because a few months ago, my neighbor didn't pay his power bill, and the WiFi went out, and he gave me access to xfinity WiFi hotspots. I was very curious to see where my phone had ended up and how the hell I had missed it over and over again. So the bus pulled in, I clicked the button, and I got on. Everyone missed or ignored the noise as they filed off, but as I headed toward the back of the bus it got louder and louder, and then my phone was right there on the floor, exactly where it should have landed when it flew out of my hand in the first place. It wasn't camouflaged by any stretch, but on top of that, the white sticker that I'd found on the grounds of Green Canyon High School and stuck on it that very day was still on it. I was too dumbfounded to be upset. And although I've all but completely lost faith that God intervenes in my life at all, I don't have a better explanation this time. Maybe he had saved me from a horrible fate or exposed me to a glorious opportunity and wanted to make sure I noticed even though I'd probably never figure out what it was. |
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- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
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