On Thursday I "defended" my thesis proposal. I use the term loosely, because it's the accepted term, but it's stupid. I heard it over the years and drew the logical conclusion that it meant my committee would play devil's advocate and try to poke holes in my thesis, or at the very least ask a lot of difficult questions about it. What they actually did was say things to the effect of "This is great, we’re really excited about it, here's some advice, let us know if you have any questions." So that was nice. One of the things I want to do is write a satire about race and racism using aliens, and the consensus is that this could be brilliant and wonderful or it could be horribly offensive, but they feel it will be a good learning experience even if I can't use it in the final product. If I have to scrap it I'll just writer a satire about police brutality and corruption, an overlapping but different issue in which I have some small modicum of personal interest.

On Friday my friend Amanda Esplin had her foot amputated. She's lived with Chronic Recurring Pain Syndrome in that foot for about three years, ever since she was hit by a car while serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. That means near-constant, almost untreatable pain worse than childbirth. I don't know how she's endured it for this long and I don't know how she isn't consumed with hatred for God for letting this happen to her, like I would be in her situation. She's one of the strongest people I've ever met. Check out her YouTube channel, One Footed Phoenix, and if you're a Pokemon fan, check out her other channel Pokehaven 99 that has nothing to do with her foot getting amputated.

On Saturday I attended my grandmother’s funeral, and cried a bit, and it was poignant and sad and heartwarming and all the things. I didn’t know I would cry because I almost never cry. It just doesn’t come naturally. I think I would be healthier if I could cry more often. I sat next to my grandfather, and he cried pretty loud a couple times, when they told the story of how he met her and the story of when he showed her his farm and said “We’ll never be rich” and she said she didn’t care. I've never seen him cry before and that was hard. It was a great experience, though, to see how many people loved and missed her. Of course I always believed she was a good person, but I didn’t know what an impact she’d had on so many lives. As soon as the closing prayer had finished, a little cousin seated behind me asked, "Is Grandma gonna wake up now?" Oof. I'm glad I wasn't her parents right then. Even under the circumstances, being with so many family members, including ones I haven't seen in like seven years, was lovely.

My friend and colleague Kylie Smith, whom I mentioned a couple weeks ago after she accompanied me to the police station to interview with Curtis Hooley regarding my complaint against Hayden Nelson, participated in a Building Bridges podcast episode on "Intent vs. Impact" in improving relations between current and former members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The podcast host put out a call on Facebook for participants, a mutual friend shared it, I saw it, and I passed it along to Kylie because she's passionate about that very thing, and if you care to take a listen you'll hear her give me a nice shout-out, although she calls me Christopher Nelson, but I forgive her for that and I can prove she's talking about me because look, there is no Christopher Nelson, or any Christopher except me, among the graduate and part-time instructors in the English department at Utah State University. Anyway, I don't listen to many podcast episodes because they're very long and I can't multitask very well, but this one is great and Kylie is so soothing and empathetic that she should be a therapist or something.

My maternal grandmother, Denece Jensen Brighton of Milo, Idaho, died Thursday morning. This post is not a cry for sympathy. I'm doing fine, and while of course I appreciate any and all condolences, I'm not soliciting them. But I have to write the post because she was my grandmother and that's kind of a big deal. It would be rather bratty for me to write my weekly post about something else.

It had been less than five and a half years since her father, Russell Jensen, my final living great-grandparent, died at 94. Both of them were preceded in death by two of her younger siblings, Russell "Arlen" Jensen and Necia Jensen Hartgrave, each in their late fifties. Only her brother Dane remains of that immediate family. What a sobering realization that must be for him. At 73, she was still not terribly old by today's standards, and I would have expected her to stick around a lot longer if she hadn't been experiencing so many health problems in the last couple years. She was the closest to me of all the people who have died in my entire life so far, and as such her death seems to herald a new phase of said life. First the great-grandparents, then the grandparents, then the parents and aunts and uncles - though of course, any number of things could happen to mix up that order, and I don't really expect to outlive my parents anyway.

I'm doing fine. I'm not afraid of death. I probably don't even take it as seriously as I should. I know it's just a step in God's plan, a temporary transition to another plane of existence, and in my mind, the choice between making that transition and continuing to suffer in mortality is a no-brainer. I don't ever want to be in my seventies having brain aneurysms and liver cancer and whatever. It will just feel weird to not see her again for a long time. Growing up in New York I saw her for a week or two every other year, and of course since moving to Utah I've seen her rather more often. It feels weird already to think about her being dead. Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet. I am a little sad that she didn't live long enough to see me accomplish anything, but maybe that's a selfish perspective. I last saw her at my sister's wedding in May. She won't be at my wedding. Not in the flesh, anyway.

Last night I ran through her voice, her mannerisms, her laugh - no particular memory stands out that I feel like writing about at length here, but I tried to keep the whole person in my mind. Yes, there is the usual guilt that I should have talked to her more often while she was alive. I don't talk much to my family members. It's just how I am. I do my own thing and they do their own things. When my sister called me on Thursday, my first guess was that somebody had died because she never calls me and I never call her. But that doesn't mean we don't love each other. I really don't know what else to say. My brain isn't functioning well this weekend. Yesterday I had plenty of graduate school stuff to do but instead wasted the whole day doing virtually nothing because I had no focus or motivation, and I hate myself for it. I'm really not able to give a fitting tribute to my grandmother at this time. We'll see if anything else comes out after the funeral next weekend.

This saga of my police conduct complaint has now become a trilogy. I think trilogies are overrated. Let something be a standalone work for a change, or just give it a number of works that best serve the needs of the story instead of being dictated by the need to make it a trilogy, that's what I say. I will, at least, probably have a postscript in the near future, because the police department is still required by state law to give me written documentation of the investigation.

I misheard the police captain's last name over the phone multiple times and consequently misreported it in last week's post. It's not Hill, it's Hooley, as in "Hooley dooley, they've come a gutser." I apologize for the misinformation.

Curtis Hooley had to reschedule our meeting to attend a funeral, so I went on Thursday at 10:30, accompanied by my emotional supporter Kylie. As a classmate, she had read my essay about Calise, Talease and the police, and I feel closest to her out of all my graduate instructor colleagues because we shared an office last year and have had deep discussions about spirituality and faith crisis on social media. She left The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but wishes she could have stayed, and I'm the opposite, so that gave us a lot to talk about. She rearranged her busy schedule to be there for me and I am most grateful. It was nice, too, that I had a woman with me to send the message "Look, I have friends who are women who don't think I'm a creep."

I know that mentioning Calise and Talease by name after going to the trouble of blotting out their names when I posted my complaint a couple weeks ago makes no sense. Here's the thing. On the one hand, I have no desire to embarrass them or appear vindictive, but on the other hand, I really believe that if they ever happened to stumble upon any of these accounts and read about themselves, they'd realize how badly they ----ed up and feel remorse and want to make it right. Unless and until that happens, the closure I got this week is probably the most I'm going to get. So I go back and forth on the name thing to get the best of both worlds and probably accomplish nothing at all.

Curtis had a nice little office with some toy police cars and fire trucks and a poster that said "I don't need anger management, I need people to stop pissing me off!" That's funny and I personally can relate to it very much, but I'm not sure it's something I want to hear from somebody with a gun and qualified immunity. Likewise, before the police station parking lot was fenced off to be annoying, I used to shortcut through it after jaywalking across Main Street as a preferable alternative to walking an additional block and waiting five minutes at the crosswalk to get to the library, and one of the police cars had a bumper sticker that said "Nobody cares about your stick figure family" and showed a car plowing through somebody's stick figure family, and I found that funnier at the time than I would now. But it appears that Curtis just has a desk job and is too old and heavyset to be out killing people anyway. He was nice, asked me about myself and stuff. I wanted to trust him and believe it wasn't a façade. Having Kylie at my side made that a lot easier.

He asked me to explain what happened before Hayden Nelson showed up - the pre-incident incident, as it were - and I did my best, though I stressed that I don't know what exactly I did that bothered Calise and Talease so much since neither they nor Hayden ever bothered to tell me. Curtis then made it sound like this is not an altogether uncommon situation - boy likes girl, girl decides she doesn't like boy, girl calls police on boy. That simultaneously made me feel better about myself and made me want this whole planet to burn.

We didn't return to the pre-incident incident a lot because Curtis wasn't there to investigate it or take sides, but this was the first time anyone in authority bothered to ask me about it or listen to me. Hayden didn't care, the staff at Logan Regional Hospital didn't care, Bishop Guymon didn't care. Hayden should have asked me about my side of the story in the first place even if it didn't make a difference to what he had to do. He should have been smarter than to take my neighbors' false witness against me as the final word. I'm still kind of frustrated that they've faced no repercussions for bearing false witness against me. I don't want them to be in trouble, I just want them to be told off for it. Part of me wishes they'd pressed charges, because I would have immediately fought them in court instead of just marinating in trauma for the next year and a half.

My frustration increased a little today when Curtis mentioned a detail I wasn't previously aware of. Not taking sides, not saying it was true or not, he said that Calise said I had "jumped out at her in the dark". I did no such thing at any time. I believe she was referring to the time a week or so before Hayden yelled at me, when she left their little dog Paisley tied up in the snow and forgot about her, then came outside and saw me playing with her. Calise was startled to see me, and I was in turn startled by her yelp, and I later heard from a thirdhand source that she and Talease were ridiculously upset about it, but I did not jump out at her by any stretch of the imagination. I wasn't even standing up. I was sitting cross-legged in the snow on the opposite side of the decorative iron fence around the lower level of our apartment complex. Hayden never even mentioned this particular falsehood to me, even though it sounds worse than any of the falsehoods and distorted truths he actually yelled at me about, but what do I know about police work?

I have only jumped out at a woman in the dark once in my entire life. Ten years ago, still naïve to the ways of the horrible adult world, I was in the campus cemetery at night when I saw two women coming up the path and thought it would be funny to jump out from behind a large tombstone and scare them. I picked up this sense of humor from my dad, but didn't grasp at the time that it was entirely inappropriate in this context. Now it's just one of hundreds of things I've done that I feel really bad about. I'm glad they didn't shoot me. Even back then, though, I wouldn't have considered jumping out at a woman in the dark to be a viable method of making her want to date me, so I don't know why Calise would have thought I'd try it on her and then go on like nothing had happened.

As requested, I brought a printout of the email that the police department never responded to. Curtis was very bothered that nobody ever responded. I had assumed it was intentional. Being ignored is a constant fact of life for me, and I assumed that whoever read the email just thought "Oh, Stalky McStalkerton is mad at us for telling him not to stalk his neighbors" and deleted it. I still wouldn't be surprised if that happened. But Curtis said that while the address I contacted is legit, he didn't recognize it, and he wasn't sure if anybody at the department was even checking it. The address, [email protected], was the address that I saw the police department telling negative Google Reviewers to contact when I tried to leave a negative Google Review last year but couldn't because the pandemic somehow prevented Google employees from working online. If someone had taken my email seriously at that time, they could have checked Hayden's body camera footage, but by now it's been deleted. So that's pretty ----ing convenient for them.

Curtis agreed that Hayden had erred in not telling me which of my neighbors I wasn't allowed to text, call, or talk to. After being harangued about "Your neighbors" this and "your neighbors" that, I thought it was all five of them when it was only two. Kristina said "Hi" to me one evening and I thought maybe she was trying to get me in trouble. So that was kind of a crappy thing for Hayden to do to me.

As far as looking into Hayden's unwarranted choice to intimidate, threaten and yell at me, it would have been really helpful to have the body camera footage, so that's nice. He won't likely face any consequences but Curtis asked me what I think he should have done differently (besides everything) and promised to bring that up with him. At the time, Curtis said, Hayden had been a cop for about a year, and now he's not the same cop he was a year and a half ago. I don't find it reassuring at all that the trauma I've lived with for the last year and a half was contingent on how much experience the cop had, or in other words on bad luck, but at least he's probably not still doing that to people? Curtis said the cops are busy going to one call after another after another, and dealing with suicidal people literally every day, and sometimes they forget to slow down and listen and focus less on the authoritarian side of things. Yeah, any cop like Hayden who depends on their authority to demand respect as a first resort is only proving that they deserve none.

But he was glad Hayden had made me go to the hospital. Hopefully that helped, at least. No, I explained, they also treated me like garbage and made everything worse. Curtis (who really liked to make excuses while claiming that he wasn't making excuses) said that the hospital is also very busy with mentally ill and suicidal people, which is consistent with my experience of its staff treating me like an assembly line product they wanted to finish with as fast as possible. It doesn't explain why they felt a need to congregate in the corner of my room and gossip about me, though.

Kylie wasn't there to testify on my behalf or anything, but she chimed in a little and I really appreciated it. I had been talking the whole time about mental illness. There shouldn't be a stigma attached to mental illness, so I'd been openly saying that I'm mentally ill, that Hayden was well aware of that fact and should have acted accordingly instead of proceeding from the incorrect assumption that I acted out of conscious malicious intent; that Talease is mentally ill, that Hayden should have been well aware of that fact just like everyone else except me and Calise was, and should have adjusted his perspective accordingly instead of employing Calise's double standard where the weird things I said made me a villain while the weird things Talease said were just delightfully eccentric. But Kylie used more enlightened terminology. She asked Curtis what kind of policies or training the department has around neurodivergence. To nobody's surprise, he admitted that he'd never even heard the term before.

She explained the term and pointed out that this incident involved three neurodivergent people. He explained what we already knew - that Utah is way behind in this area. Yes, we all remember how the Salt Lake Police Department dealt with 13-year-old Linden Cameron's mental health crisis by shooting him eleven times as he ran away from them. He said there's crisis intervention training, but not every officer has it, and it's hard to get every officer trained in it when they're so busy and there's such a high turnover. I don't know if there's always been a high turnover or if this is specifically because cops in the post-George Floyd era think being held accountable for their actions is persecution. This is why people say "Defund the Police" - because most police officers simply don't know what the hell they're doing around neurodivergent people, and have killed far too many of us. This should not be one of their responsibilities. Why the hell did we as a country decide that it is?

As we were wrapping up, Curtis asked if I've had other encounters with the police, and if they were better. My last one was after I got in a car crash, and I mentioned it on my blog but I never told the story - there's not much to tell, but I'll set it down here for posterity anyway. It was kind of my fault. I walked down to the grocery store one afternoon, got some stuff, discovered that I didn't have my wallet, put the stuff back, walked back home, and explained to my neighbor Hailey that I'd gone to the grocery store and discovered that I didn't have my wallet, because she was out in the yard doing homework and I didn't want her to think I was weird. She said she had to go somewhere in a few minutes and did I want a ride? I would have been just fine without a ride, but I figured why not spend a couple minutes with my friend Hailey? So the grocery store was in sight just across the street, we didn't have a stop sign, and the guy coming in a perpendicular direction to us did have a stop sign but didn't wait.

His van loomed into view, Hailey screamed and slammed on the brake, and I thought, We're not seriously about to hit this guy, are we? Oh, we did. That really just happened and there's nothing we can do about it. We're alive. Of course I'm alive; God hasn't finished playing with me yet.

The guy came out with a fistful of cash and tried to pay for the damage right there without exchanging insurance information, but Hailey wouldn't have it. I stayed with her and talked to the cop when he arrived. His name was Officer Deras, but he wasn't the same Officer Deras as the Officer Deras from the University of Utah who shared explicit pictures of Lauren McCkluskey with his co-workers, then got fired and went to work for the Logan City Police Department instead, then got fired again. This was, ironically, a different Officer Deras. As far as I know he was fine. By the end, he was chatting and laughing with the guy in the other car about all the money the latter had recently made from Bitcoin. Hailey's car was crumpled up, and because she'd tensed up before the crash she had some back pain, but I was fine aside from my permanent guilt for being the reason she was there in the first place.

Anyway, after the meeting with Curtis Hooley, Kylie asked how I thought it went, and needlessly apologized for chiming in with her helpful remarks, and asked what my next step was in this process. I would like to sue Logan Regional Hospital for doing things to me without a consent form and then frantically calling me five times to get retroactive verbal consent after I'd already left, but I can't because they have a lot more money than I do. I would like to file a complaint against my ex-neighbors who got me into this by bearing false witness against me in the first place, but even if such a thing is possible, which I doubt, it would be too much work for too little payoff. So I guess I'm done for now. I'm not done speaking out against police brutality and incompetence, though. And Hayden Nelson can still go choke on a cactus.

A week of graduate school is past and I'm already very busy. More importantly, on Friday I heard back from someone at the police department about my complaint, so as far as bureaucracy goes that wasn't a bad turnaround time. I'm going in and talking to Curtis Hill about it on Wednesday. On the advice of my friends, I hope to bring someone with me for emotional support and so he can't abuse me - I don't want to assume the worst of him, but he is a cop and I don't have many reasons to trust cops - and one of my friends and colleagues from the English department has agreed to do it, but I can't get ahold of him and find out if that's allowed until Wednesday. I also hope he'll let me record the conversation so he can't lie about what either of us said. I don't want to assume the worst of him, but he is a cop and cops lie literally all the time.

He also asked me to bring in a copy of the email I sent to the police department over a year ago, which I mentioned in my complaint just in case it would help with any statute of limitations they didn't bother to mention on their website. He said somebody dropped the ball by never responding to it. I mean, I'm pretty sure the lack of a response was very intentional, but either way, this is a great and unexpected bonus. First of all, someone else who treated me as less than human, albeit in a far less dramatic fashion than Officer Hayden Nelson, may also get in trouble. Second, I now get to share the mocking and sarcastic words of my email with this investigation even though I kept my formal complaint restrained and professional. I think I successfully conveyed my anger and contempt in both media, but the email has more raw emotion. And yet even that was restrained. Because it was written to be a Google Review, it has no swear words in it. I will put the email text in italics here to avoid confusion with the quote within the quote.

Because Google is apparently not publishing business reviews at this time, I decided to send this to you directly. I expect the only thing it will accomplish is to give me some small sliver of satisfaction from knowing that you know that one of your officers single-handedly erased all of my respect for law enforcement months before George Floyd's murder, but I'll take what I can get.

[Quote:]

In January a couple of officers abruptly showed up at my apartment, responding to a complaint from my neighbors. I had no idea what was going on. These neighbors had never once said anything to me themselves about real or perceived problems. The police never explained to me in plain English why they had come. They never asked me one single question about my side of the story. Instead, one of them said nothing while the other immediately launched into throwing his weight around and trying to scare me into compliance even though I never showed one iota of resistance or disrespect. For at least ten minutes he was nothing but belligerent while I was nothing but cooperative. He never explained what exactly the problem was but from the details he dropped here and there made it obvious that either my neighbors had straight-up lied about some things or he just hadn't bothered to get them straight himself. He told me to stop doing things that I had never done.

He told me not to talk to, call, or text my neighbors ever again. He said, "Consider this a warning." I would have complied with this "warning" if my neighbors had been adults and made this request themselves instead of pretending to be my friends for months, and I would have complied if the officer had just explained it to me without turning it into a threat. Despite this being my first time hearing any of this, he chose to assume from the moment I let him into my apartment that I knew exactly what I'd done wrong, wouldn't cooperate, and needed to be taught a lesson. And he knew that his uniform gave him impunity to treat me in a manner that would have gotten him fired from any other job.

When this officer was done verbally abusing me, he switched tactics and started pretending to be concerned about my emotional health and asking if I felt suicidal. Yes, he literally tried to play "bad cop good cop" by himself even though he had another cop with him. If he was really so concerned he could have maybe, I don't know, not prefaced it by deliberately confusing and scaring the crap out of me? He made me go to the hospital despite me explaining that I had no health insurance. He knew this was part of his purpose for showing up in the first place and still chose to first treat me in a manner that anyone over the age of three could have told him would only make me more suicidal (which it did, very much).

I was not arrested or accused of anything illegal, but before driving me to the hospital they frisked me for anything I could use to hurt myself (even though the hospital rendered this precaution entirely superfluous by taking my clothes away). For no legitimate reason that I can discern, they chose to do this after we had left my apartment, on the sidewalk in front of their police cars and in full view of the entire block. After the abusive officer dropped me off he said I could call the station and ask to talk to him if I wanted, because he apparently thought I was the stupidest person on the planet and would see him as something remotely resembling a friend or ally. The only reason I would ever want to talk to him would be to say some things unfit for publication in this review.

I forgave my neighbors after about a month because one of them was brain-damaged and delusional in the most literal sense of the word. All of our mutual acquaintances including their own roommate felt that their reaction to me was stupid, immature and uncalled for. But at least it wasn't malicious. I can't say the same for the police. I don't fault them at all for taking the complaint seriously and looking into it - they would have been criminally negligent in their duties if they didn't - but the way they went about it was wrong, full stop. I would feel safer entrusting my mental health to the first person I see on the sidewalk than the Logan Police Department. Their gross incompetence has traumatized me since then and probably for a very long time to come.

[Close quote]

It was a one-star review, of course, but only because zero-star reviews aren't an option for some reason.

- Christopher Nicholson

So yeah. Hayden Nelson has probably read my complaint by now, and I hope he has a great Labor Day weekend experiencing a sliver of a fraction of the shock and bewilderment that he sprung on me out of nowhere. And by that I actually mean I hope he can't sleep or focus on anything. And after I submit a copy of this email to the investigation, really, it's only fair that he should get to read it too.