Yesterday was my birthday. I was going to write a blog post, but I couldn't log in. Now I have something altogether different to write about than what I was going to write about. I would have written about this anyway, but now I'm not going to wait.

A few weeks ago one of my friends had a birthday, and one of her friends gave her some legal mushroom gummies, and she gave me two of them because we've talked about mushrooms as part of our discussions on spirituality. They were two different brands. The first one, as I mentioned, made me exhausted and didn't have any noticeable spiritual effects. I tried the second one last night. I don't know if "spiritual" is the right word, but it sure had effects. I wish my description could do it justice. I don't want to overstate it, but I don't want to downplay it either.

I took it around eight p.m. in case it made me exhausted. It took about forty-five minutes to really kick in. I noticed that my mouth was dry and my head felt a little heavy when I moved it, but I didn't know if that was just my imagination. And then since the sun was going down and the insane heat was dissipating, I decided it was time to go toss away some stale bread in the wooded area that I use for compost sometimes. And I thought that maybe I shouldn't be standing near the edge of a steep hill while I was on drugs, but I wasn't feeling very drugged, and I thought it would be fine. A block from my apartment, I decided that I shouldn't be standing near the edge of a steep hill while I was on drugs, and I turned around and went back. I noticed as I walked that my mouth was frozen in a grin. And then reality seemed to close around me like a tunnel, and then I was laying on the couch. Leaving my apartment and coming right back were a distant memory, and I wasn't sure they'd happened at all. I had to look at the kitchen counter and see where I'd placed the bread after I brought it back.

That was a recurring theme - ending up back on the couch, things becoming distant memories seconds after I did them, and having to verify over and over that I'd actually done them. The couch was like my home base. My returns to it seemed inevitable, beyond my control. The passage of time became weird. Over and over again, I looked at the clock on the stove and saw that only a minute or five had passed since the last time I'd looked, reassuring myself that the last time I'd looked hadn't been a dream. Since I couldn't remember much of the walk home, short though it was, I thought maybe I'd done something crazy and the neighbors had called the police. With my kitchen windows open, it seemed like everyone in Logan was walking down my quiet little street and being needlessly loud, and every noise made me imagine that the police were coming to my door to be assholes as usual. I got up and looked out the window a few times to verify that they weren't parked out front. But I felt no fear. My heart felt like it wanted to be afraid, but something was gently suppressing it. I just felt warmth and peace. The noises outside and of my heavyseat upstairs neighbor creaking around would have normally been very jarring, since I have misophonia, but now I was able to be fully aware of them and simultaneously remain in my semi-delirious state. I still swore in exasperation a little bit. I wasn't completely at peace yet. After ten minutes or an hour, I got up and closed the windows. Then I looked over and over again to verify that I'd really gotten up and closed the windows, and that I'd failed to close one of them properly.

​I felt like my consciousness split into three parts - the delirious drug-addled part doing weird things, the self-aware and skeptical part that analyzed and verified, and a running commentary of how I was going to describe this experience to my friend. Every time I thought of telling her that the first gummy did nothing but this one did something, I laughed a little. But that part faded away as I became more immersed in the experience. These three streams of thought ran alongside each other, intertwined, and very, very fast. I wondered if I was approaching a near-death experience, but nobody said anything about it being so fast. I hoped that consciousness after death didn't run at this speed forever, because it was like a roller coaster and I couldn't get off. Yet despite that preference, I felt no fear and no real discomfort. It was peaceful. I kept mentally stumbling and repeating my thoughts like Porky Pig, and my mouth kept moving along with them. My eyes kept darting all over the place, whether they were open or closed. I had the power to stop these motions, but it was easier to just go along with them. Periodically I moved something to make sure I wasn't paralyzed, but the motions seemed to precede my decisions to move. The word "grounding" kept coming to mind, and I kept feeling the texture of the couch as if I would melt away into an entirely disembodied state otherwise. Over and over again, I had this thought: it was as if I had agency, and yet no agency.

Over and over again, I questioned whether this experience was really happening. Over and over again, I reminded myself that I'd taken a drug, so yes, it was really happening. Over and over again, I wondered if this was a dream, but over and over again, I realized that I didn't have the mental capacity to dream this up. I wondered if this would last forever. Again, no fear, but I wished I knew when it would end, because even though it wasn't unpleasant, it would impede my ability to exist in the world if it lasted forever. I thought about how long it would take me to starve if I stayed on the couch all the time, and how long it would probably take for somebody to check on me. I didn't really think I would die in this state, but the possibility occurred to me, and I decided that was fine because I couldn't imagine a better way to die. I wondered if I should try to resist the high or surrender to it. I didn't fear the loss of agency as I thought I should have. When I did relax, close my eyes, and sink into it, I felt as if I melted into outer space and sensed my body right there below me, yet no longer quite so attached to me. I was myself, yet connected to the universe - and this is a part that I don't want to overstate, as I'm sure it wasn't the grand spiritual epiphany that some people have had with drugs, but it was neat and I don't know a better way to describe it. The couch pillow on top of me felt like an extension of myself. I forced myself back into lucidity to verify that there was a couch pillow on top of me. Then I let myself fade again, and it felt like someone embracing me.

I randomly thought about an older gentleman I knew growing up who'd just wished me a happy birthday on Facebook. I thought about what a classy, respectable guy he was, and realized that he was probably bothered by how crass I am sometimes on social media, but he stayed my Facebook friend anyway. I decided I should be less crass on social media for his sake. I thought of my upstairs neighbor who gave me a little jar of earplugs one night when all of his squeaking in the kitchen was driving me crazy because my own earplugs were worn out, and I figured he's been very tolerant of me yelling at my stupid computer, so the least I could do was offer to give back his little jar of earplugs (minus the ones I've used). My natural impulse honed by years of poverty to hold onto whatever I can get was replaced by a genuine desire to return his property. And I thought of someone I'd wronged in a more significant way, but since it wouldn't be easy to do anything about that, I let that thought go. Then my mind went through just a few of my traumatic experiences, but I felt no trauma. I wondered at the time, as I do now, if that was a taste of the "life review" that people often describe in near-death experiences and I'm not looking forward to. People describe reliving their lives and feeling how they made other people feel. The first two people I thought of seemed like random choices, though. I'm sure I've caused much more pain to some other people.

I coughed sometimes, and I yawned a lot, and tears streamed down my face, and I had to blow my nose. Like the noises, those physical things all seemed like distractions that I registered on a different wavelength without losing my high. I got up a few times to look in the bathroom mirror at my dilated pupils and my moving mouth. Whenever I did, I sang in my mind, to the tune of a Maroon 5 song, "This drug has taken its toll on me..." I thought that was funny. I fell asleep, and then it was 12:23. I felt normal. I made it to bed and got back to sleep in record time. Then I stopped feeling normal. The aforementioned experience continued through the night - in waking, or dreaming, or somewhere in-between, I can't tell. Sometimes I had to check whether I was in bed or still on the couch. Then I got up around quarter after nine, and the real craziness was over. I listened to "Because I Got High" on my morning walk and thought that was funny. I continued to be noticeably high until about six p.m. The mouth and eye movements continued to a much lesser extent, I had to continue grounding myself to a much lesser extent, and I continued to grin and be easily amused by things. Again, I wondered if this altered mental state would be permanent. But in fairness, I was never really normal in the first place. It seems to be over now, even though my pupils are still dilated as I type this.

I can't explain why this experience was so great. It was just a wild ride, yet a peaceful one, and it felt good and it blew my mind. Happy birthday to me! I want to do it again, but not soon. And I'm afraid to try a full dose.

Logan just had its annual Summerfest arts fair, possibly the last I'll ever attend, since I'm moving out of town in three weeks. I wandered around more wistfully than usual, but like usual, I awkwardly tried to look at all the booths without making eye contact with the sellers and feeling guilty for not buying anything. I wonder if AI will drive down the price of art. Maybe the amount of labor people put into their art is worth the prices they charge, but how do they stay in business? Who the hell has $4,300 to spend on a painting? Certainly not the average citizen of Logan. If I charged for the labor I put into my novel, it would cost more than a textbook. More than two textbooks, even.

Speaking of which, I spent an hour talking to Nathanael Wright, the author of Fairy Tales of Kindness and Courage, who remembers me from some singles ward or other. Actually, I didn't talk to him the whole time because whenever his target audience came near his booth, he had to talk to them and invite them to take free stickers. So in addition to picking his brain for advice, I got to observe his salesmanship in action. His books are also self-published, though they look much better than mine. He probably had more money to put into them. I didn't buy any because I'm not in the target audience. They are more affordable than most items at Summerfest, though. He said that if he ever finds a typo in one of his published books, he goes and quietly changes the manuscript without guilt. I may have to do that now. I haven't found any typos per se, but I want to pull a George Lucas and keep making my novel better. I do that with blog posts sometimes.

I've watched the first three episodes of the new Star Wars show "The Acolyte." I really wanted to like it. I was eager to see an era besides the freaking Empire for a change. And I see it as a good thing that Star Wars has more brown people and lesbians than it used to. But the characters are too boring to save the weak plot. I'm sure I'll watch the rest of the season just because I have an unhealthy relationship with Star Wars, but if you don't have an unhealthy relationship with Star Wars and you don't make monetized reviews on YouTube, don't bother. I agree with most of the YouTuber criticisms, but again, I see it as a good thing that Star Wars has more brown people and lesbians than it used to. I don't feel attacked by that. This one YouTuber complained that the midi-chlorians are racist because a scene of Jedi younglings contained no white males. I want to know if he's ever, even once in his life, complained about a group of people containing no Asian females. Some white males just feel threatened by not constantly being the center of the universe.

On the flip side, Republicans are enraged by the possibility of their daughters having to register for selective service and potentially fight in wars. I resent their implication that my life is more expendable than a woman's or that my penis comes with a greater obligation to die in wars that other men started. Making men register for selective service based on their sex is a civil rights violation. Making women register too would also be a civil rights violation, but at least it would remove the sex discrimination aspect, and since Republicans value their daughters more than their sons (even though they have a strange way of showing it by fighting against women's healthcare and reproductive rights), this could motivate them to abolish the damn thing altogether. So I'm all for it. And deranged Utah senator Mike Lee says it will happen over his dead body, so that's a win-win.

A friend gave me one of her legal mushroom gummies, and I ate it today, hoping to get a spiritual experience. It made me kind of hungry and extremely tired for about three hours. If I'd known it would have that effect, I would have saved it for right before bed. I wish I had something more interesting to report. She also gave me one of another kind of gummy, so there's still hope for that one. Ultimately, I intend to try psilocybin, maybe after I move closer to the Divine Assembly. I don't think I ever wrote about the book that completely changed my perspective on psychedelic drugs a few months ago. It's called The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku, and I recommend it to everyone. This book makes so much sense of the history of religion and is one reason I believe in life after death. I'll have to say more about it when I'm in the mood.

I went to a Juneteenth concert on campus this evening. Racists on social media are still complaining about Juneteenth, and they still need to drop dead. I was going to say something less family-friendly, but I decided to be compassionate. It must be the effect of that gummy. So I went to the concert, and then as I was leaving, I saw Brad Hansen, one of the local cops that I have a problem with. By the time I recognized him, though, I'd missed my chance to flip him off. I consoled myself over this missed opportunity by spitting on his empty car. So we'll see if I get arrested for that.

Yesterday I had a splendid time at the annual writing symposium at USU hosted by the League of Utah Writers. I'll keep my remarks brief because I don't see why I should share everything I learned with people who didn't pay the $30 fee.

First I attended Shaun Anderson's presentation "The Dark Arts: Unforgettable Villains." I saw Shaun went I went to eat on campus a couple of days before the event. We were in a class together nine years ago, but I've only talked to him a couple of times. Knowing that he was a part of this symposium and that he's been in charge of Helicon West, I thought of him as a "real" writer and myself, who's only recently started getting involved in such things, as a poser, but he admired that I'd published a full book while he hasn't yet, so that was some kind of poignant lesson about how we're too hard on ourselves or something. (He has published non-fiction pieces, like an essay about being a gay Mormon missionary that made a big impression on me when I was Mormon.) In this presentation, he suggested several questions we could use to flesh out our villains. I was struck by a perspective he shared that I'd never considered: by making a character a villain, we're asserting that they're wrong in some way, and thus making a statement about our own morality. Mind blown.

Bryan Young, who writes for Star Wars and other less important IPs, gave a presentation on "Captivating Character Creation." My favorite takeaway: we learn more about characters when they're forced to choose between two terrible options. Mind blown.

Bestselling author John D. Brown told us about how to keep readers hooked by triggering anticipation, hopes and fears, and/or puzzlement or mystery, and then delaying the payoff. It sounds simple enough, but the way he said it was more entertaining. He showed us a bunch of his Amazon reviews that said they couldn't put his book down, so he knows what he's talking about.

*Break for pizza*

Jennifer Sinor presented on "Scene, Summary, and Musing: Controlling Pace and Developing Depth in Prose." She started it the way she starts every one of her classes: by making us do breathing exercises to center ourselves and return to our bodies. This time, however, Russ Beck was presenting next door with his exceptionally loud voice, which made it difficult. She walked around barefoot while she talked, so I'd like to have a word with the anonymous creeper on Twitter who said that I'm weird for "wandering around shoeless" outside. I love Jennifer. So carefree, so compassionate, so spiritual. I hated the class I had with her as an undergraduate, but that had nothing to do with her as a person. The class I had with her in graduate school went much better. The essay I wrote in two parts, "Things That Rhyme with 'Elise,'" left an impression on her that she said she would think about for a long time. Her response to the second part still cracks me up in a sick kind of way. SPOILER ALERT:

Yeah, that makes two of us.

Where was I? Oh yeah, so then I went to another presentation by Bryan Young on "Setups, Payoffs and Endings." He mostly used movie examples in his presentations because he assumes we've seen more of the same movies than read the same books. I suggested Raiders of the Lost Ark as an example of a good ending, and then later he had a picture of the warehouse scene as the backdrop for one of his slides, so I nailed it. Key takeaway: problems with the ending are often actually problems with the beginning and the middle. And I'd already done the technique of writing the ending and then revising everything that came before so it all looks carefully planned and perfect, so it was nice to be validated in that.

Finally, I attended "Seeing the Extraordinary in the Ordinary" by Shanan Ballam, which focused more on poetry but was still applicable to other things. ​Shanan had a stroke a couple of years ago and had to learn how to walk, talk, and write again. I'm inspired by her resilience and pleased that she continues to recover. I had two classes from her, Fiction Writing and Poetry Writing. One of them, probably Fiction, was the class I had with Shawn. As if the nostalgia factor wasn't high enough already, the notebook I used to take notes at this symposium was the one I had purchased for that class, used in that class, and then never written in again until yesterday. It still has the note in the front that she left after I wrote something that made her worry about me. I don't even remember what it was.

I had a note from my first class with Jennifer that I wish I could find because I think it was hilarious. It was something like, "Christopher - I'm not sure you understood the assignment - but you did it! 100"

There were also presentations entitled "Level Up Your Social Media," "Becoming Your Own Boss: Your Guide to Indie Publishing," and "Amazon Advertising Strategies" that I'm sure would have benefitted me because I suck at those things, but I was more interested in learning about the writing craft itself, because that's what I write for, so I'll just have to stay true to myself and face the consequences for sucking at the other bullcrap I have to do. The symposium was well worth the $30, and again, I regret that I'm just now getting involved in the local writing community and I'm going to move in a month.

I'm not gay, even though I was called "faggot" five times a day in elementary school, but in honor of Pride Month, I decided to share the time I was attracted to Rudolf Nureyev when I saw him on the Muppet Show as a kid. It wasn't like the crushes I had on girls whom I thought were pretty. He just had some kind of charisma that I couldn't define. He just fascinated me in a different way than the other guest stars. When I looked him up and found out he was gay, I concluded that gayness must be contagious. I think a lot of straight men have historically thought that being gay was contagious. I think that's why they've used slurs and committed hate crimes against gay men instead of being grateful to have less competition. Today in 2024, morons still think that their children will become gay if they're allowed to see gay people existing, so we still have a long way to go in conveying to Republicans a basic understanding of how the world works. So anyway, that frightened me a little. The fact that he died of AIDS also reinforced my perception that gay people were sexual degenerates. He had fewer partners than Donald Trump, though. And a lot fewer than Joseph Smith.

I've been watching The Muppet Show from start to finish this year to make the most of the overpriced Disney+ subscription that I share with a friend. When I got to the Rudolf Nureyev episode, I realized that people may be skeptical of me saying that my attraction to him wasn't physical. In one scene, he wears tight white pants that leave little of his ass cheeks to the imagination.

Watching the show as an adult has made me realize that Miss Piggy is a straight-up sexual predator. Even in the 1970s, people wouldn't have laughed at the dynamic between her and Kermit if the gender roles were reversed. She's worse than Pepé Le Pew. At least he was sincerely oblivious and never karate-chopped Penelope into a wall for refusing his advances.

But on a more positive note, I was also astonished to learn that the Great Gonzo has been canonically bisexual since 1979. I can't believe I've never heard anyone mention that before. In the Leslie Uggams episode, Gonzo is smitten with Big Bird. I thought the punchline would be him realizing that Big Bird is a boy, but the actual punchline is Camilla getting jealous and dropping a flowerpot on his head. It's never implied that the same-sex aspect of this attraction is weird or degenerate. (Technically Big Bird has the mind of a young child, but Gonzo didn't know that, so give him a break.) In the Roger Miller episode, he finds Kermit attractive after the latter turns into a chicken. Since the film "Muppets in Space" established that Gonzo is an alien, my hypothesis is that all the aliens in the finale were male, and the females of his species look like chickens.

Nureyev feared for his safety and defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 in part because of his sexuality. If he were alive today, he would still have to avoid Russia, because it's still an extremely homophobic country. It's a country that arrests journalists for interviewing gay people. No wonder Republicans think Ukraine is the bad guy.