Before the, ah, falling out with my ex-neighbor Talease, I hung out with her one evening and she loaned me Wizard's First Rule and we watched Legion because she found horror movies relaxing. Shortly thereafter the book inspired me to create a fantasy-themed Spotify playlist and her fondness for horror movies inspired me to create a horror-themed Spotify playlist as a gift for her, and of course I still have them both even though I've long since burned the book and never developed much of a predilection for horror movies.
The horror playlist is titled "Boo" and recently I added a skull emoji as I was adding emojis to most of my playlist titles. The other day it picked up a follower for the first time, so that was cool. I hope this follower has the right expectations. The playlist has children's songs, but it is not intended or appropriate for children. It has some more intense stuff too. But not too intense because, like Halloween itself, it is meant to be in fun and not just dark and unpleasant. I have an angst-themed playlist for being dark and unpleasant. So for example, I've reluctantly excluded Rammstein's song based on a true story of erotic cannibalism (if you haven't heard of Armin Meiwes, don't Google him), but the tamer one about normal cannibalism is fine.
Like most playlists, after its initial creation and spurt of adding songs for a few days, I settled in and just added another song periodically when I stumbled upon one that would fit. Then last month a new neighbor moved into the apartment where Talease used to live, and wasted little time in putting up Halloween decorations. She put up a plastic sheet with skeletons on it over the front door, and for a while I saw them out of the corner of my eye and thought they were people, and it triggered me into actively seeking out music to increase the length of this playlist. And I asked my returning neighbor Mikki to ask her for music recommendations, and then I waited a bit, and then Mikki added her to our little neighbor group chat, and what happened next is the entire reason for this post that I've been building up to, even though I'm just now realizing it's not nearly as funny if you weren't there.
Now you may be thinking, "That is kind of sassy, but it's not that sassy, just a little sassy." That was my thought, but it turned out to be one too many pieces of sass.
Within like ten seconds, before Levi had even responded, I heard yelling through the kitchen wall. I couldn't tell what she was saying but I could tell it was directed at me. Then with impossible speed, I heard banging all over my front door like a rapid-fire battering ram. This was kind of hypocritical on Mikki's part. She and ex-neighbor Hailey made fun of me once for knocking too timidly, so after that I always made sure to knock vigorously and then they complained that I sounded "like a serial killer" because of course serial killers always knock first, unless they have a no-knock warrant. Yet here she was just pounding away. I opened the door just a crack and she said, "Say that to my face." I pretended not to know what she was talking about. I pretended I didn't remember what I had just said thirty seconds ago because I text a lot of people. They weren't lies because there was no risk of her believing them. I came outside, where she threatened to beat me up. Sadie stood a few feet back with a grin and her phone out to apparently record it. A neighbor from upstairs came down to see what the commotion was about, and my roommate who usually stays cooped up in his room came to the door as well. Mikki held a hand above her head and said she'd had it up to there with me, and then, before I could make a sassy comment, explained, "That's five foot three." She said something about a camel with straw stacked on its back. And maybe, despite her size, she actually could beat me up. Her dad's a cop and may have trained her in unarmed combat. I also know she used to carry around a screwdriver for self-defense. She said she knows how to break into my apartment and she knows where I sleep. Aren't double standards interesting? She didn't beat me up because she actually loves the rush of anger she gets when I sass her. My roommate went back to bed and the rest of us talked for at least half an hour even though I should have been doing homework. Sadie gave me an unexpected number of song suggestions because it turned out that she loved music in general, but she wouldn't like my Halloween playlist because metal is the one genre she doesn't listen to. That story was funnier in my head. Sorry.
This weekend, some of us are ticked off because two apartments are flooding because when the roofers illegally woke us all up at 6:30 to fix the roof the week before school started, they failed to actually fix the roof. So that's nice.
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A Post About the October 2021 General Conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints3/10/2021 You know what, after nearly ten hours of watching General Conference this weekend I was not looking forward to the tedium of also writing a post about it ASAP before another week has gone by, and then I thought, why not just share the five pages of notes I took? With a few little exceptions that I will redact, I don't believe anything in them is too personal or sacred to share with the entire world. Frankly, most of them are just stuff directly from the talks that stood out to me as potentially significant, and I don't flatter myself that they're anything special that anyone really needs to read, but I'm in graduate school and I'm a busy guy and this saves me the time of writing a full post. I approached this conference with the same question I had two years ago, and a lot has changed and my knowledge and insight into that question are light-years beyond where they were then, but it remains ultimately unresolved and just as pressing. For now it's a personal matter but I do hope that in the immediate future it will be resolved and I can write a post or twelve gushing all about it.
A few little thoughts before my actual notes: On Saturday afternoon, the multicultural choir intended for April 2020 finally sang, albeit in reduced numbers. Prior to its debut, the Deseret News ran an article that of course drew anger from the usual ilk of Deseret News commenters for "creating division" because "we're all one human race" and so on. Then President Eyring used the phrase "multicultural choir" several times during the conference session itself and those people probably blew a few blood vessels. It was great to see more than three black people and one Asian in the choir before returning to our regularly scheduled whiteness in the next session. Not counting prayers, twice as many women spoke as last time, for a total of four. Most of the thirteen temples announced this time are actually somewhat warranted by membership numbers, and aren't just about reducing travel times. I had noticed most of them on people's prediction lists. Last week my institute teacher solicited our predictions of how many would be announced, and I half-jokingly said thirty-seven, because who knows anymore now that the traditional metrics for anticipating their locations are only reliable half the time. I'm glad I was wrong, because announcing fourteen more temples to service one or two stakes each and be mostly empty most of the time would have been harder for me to get excited about, but I suppose that just shows my selfishness in making this about me when it really isn't. Now, my notes: Three things to listen for
It’s not too late to seek the Holy Ghost Don’t “fix” the tooth, pull it out No man having his hand to the plow and looking back is fit for the Kingdom of God There is divine help for any one of us at any hour that we seek to make a change in our behavior First great truth – God loves us wholeheartedly now He will give us the capacity to love our neighbor and ourselves Study patriarchal blessing Don’t tangle yourself in the net Don’t judge your neighbor harshly and cruelly because we all need the Savior Seek out the good in others As we rely on God’s love, we rely less on the approval of others God’s blessings are not unconditional The world is anti-Christ Can God rely on our love as we rely on His? Can He love us not just in spite of our failings, but because of what we are becoming? It is not where we start but where we’re headed that matters Don’t ignore your negative circumstances, but don’t fixate too much on them Show some humility for the positive circumstances we may not have created ourselves – give back Every blessing of eternal significance begins with faith that God is willing Overcome selfishness and individualism Church participation can magnify our capacity to love Live in accordance with the obligations we have accepted in the temple to receive spiritual strength in every season of our lives If you want justice and accountability, study the Atonement more deeply “Since the price already has been paid for those sins, would you demand that such a price be paid twice?” Heal the wounds caused by another person’s unrighteous exercise of moral agency, receive peace, mercy, and love The Lord knows what is better for us Nephi and his brothers were acting and trusting the Lord, yet failed twice Be thankful that sometimes God lets you struggle for a long time – your faith increases and your character grows One more day, one more week, try one more time God’s love is not found in the circumstances of our lives, but in his presence in our lives Pray to have our eyes opened to see his hand in our lives and his love in the beauty of his creations Focusing on growth is healthier than obsessing about our shortcomings What things do you ponder? What things really matter to you? [Redacted] (duh)
Don’t look beyond the mark or God will give you only confusing things The faithful need not fear the Second Coming And may I add, sisters? The Savior doesn’t fault our shortsightedness re:death The joy we feel has little to do with the circumstances of our lives (4x) Nephi didn’t murmur against the Lord because of his afflictions Lift others’ burdens even during your own Complexity is not a bad thing or something to be avoided Small things bring to pass great things
Only He can bring us true joy, happiness, and peace To believe is to love and follow our Savior and keep the commandments even in the midst of trials and strife Relationships with Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ and those around us = happiness Willing heart to say to the Lord, “Here am I, send me” Repentance is healing and it’s more important than physical healing His grace is sufficient for all + leftovers Feast on the scriptures, don’t just taste them Desire to participate in the gathering of Israel will increase We will want to go to the temple as often as possible and submit our ancestors’ names We will faithfully keep the Sabbath day God’s well-intentioned messages can be misunderstood as hateful Taking the sacrament is like filling up at the gas station Don’t just ask for forgiveness, ask for grace – less time hating yourself for what you’ve done, and more time loving Jesus for what he has done No all-or-nothing expectations – incremental growth – prosper by degrees We are not just walking toward God and Christ – we are walking with them
The need to hold up our light has never been greater Pure revelation for the questions in your heart will make this conference rewarding and unforgettable Revelation is always gotten by exercising faith If you have questions and seek answers, you have at least enough faith to hope for answers If it’s important to your eternal welfare, it’s more likely to come (*cough* [Redacted] *cough*) but even then the answer might be to be patient Internal quiet and submission to the Lord’s will. “I only want what you want, not what I want.” Angels speak by the power of the Holy Ghost, wherefore they speak the words of Christ The Savior will not shout commands to you and me Judith Tannery Roiz It’s hard to walk in a straight line, actually impossible without landmarks. True for individuals, also for societies and nations No matter how strong our spiritual experiences have been in the past, we tend to wander Keep our thoughts and actions pure by keep rolling Change this hour to change your day to change your life What narrative are you writing for your life? Will you invite Jesus to be its author and finisher? David could have gone home, back to tending sheep We receive more faith by doing something that requires more faith Spiritual stress test has revealed a need to be more unified and less contentious Failing the test doesn’t mean I’m hopeless, it just means I need to change What can I do to foster unity and lessen contention? Assume that those with whom we disagree are doing the best they can with the life experiences they have Don’t give up our cultural heritage The Savior helps restore order to a life thrown into chaos by our own or others’ choices Thine adversity and thine afflictions shall be but a small moment, and then, if thou endure it well, God shall exalt thee on high Love your enemies if you want to receive a glorious welcome home Nobody changes the principles and doctrines of the Church except the Lord, but methods may change
Pray consistently to understand temple covenants and ordinances We can always trust God even though humans break our trust We endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning The Lord doesn’t forget our sins, he chooses to forget them I can do the same thing with [Redacted]’s wrongs against me Sacrifice was once more closely tied to ancient Latin roots meaning to make sacred or holy Our will/heart is the only uniquely personal thing we have to give the Lord
Don’t expect to go from Attila the Hun to Mother Theresa overnight One of these things could make the biggest difference in your life When we choose to doubt, we choose to be acted upon Only your unbelief will keep God from blessing you with miracles Conversion blesses your life – sorry I was distracted during this one by [Redacted]’s text Focusing on the road ahead is like focusing on the Savior and walking on water No discipleship without discipline Things in front of the hood can distract us from Christ and eternal things down the road Distractions do not have to be bad or immoral to be effective (for Satan) The Savior came to the Apostles’ aid during the fourth watch of the night, not immediately When we must wait, remember that the Savior is always watching Specific steps in the Savior’s work (like emphasizing the proper name of the Church) are revealed at the appropriate time In these coming days, we will be called by the name of Jesus Christ Domains suddenly became available when the name change happened Humility and sacrifice to follow the prophet when it contradicts our initial thinking, we receive the Lord’s affirmation and approval How will we be different because of what we have heard and felt? Counter the allure of the world by making time for the Lord in your life each day. Even otherwise faithful Saints can be derailed by the steady beat of Babylon’s band Nothing invites the Spirit more than fixing your focus on Jesus Christ 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, asklcpd@loganutah.org, 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 Small Update on My Complaint Against Officer Hayden Nelson of the Logan City Police Department5/9/2021 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. Well, I can't complain too much because many others have experienced far worse at the hands of the American legal system. Any victory for them is a victory for me regardless of how my own case turns out. I'm delighted that former Brunswick District Attorney Jackie Johnson was indicted the other day for stopping police officers from arresting the men who lynched Ahmaud Arbery because one of them used to be a cop who worked for her. She was voted out of office last year, but now she'll probably go to jail too. I'm delighted that Kim Potter's charge for not knowing the difference between a gun and a taser, something any toddler could figure out, has been upgraded to first-degree manslaughter. It should be murder, but whatever, we have to take baby steps in these matters.
And I'm delighted that the three police officers and two paramedics who murdered Elijah McClain have been indicted for manslaughter and reckless homicide, even though the police department's previous "investigation" of itself determined that they did nothing wrong when they stopped him for no ----ing reason and injected a fatal dose of ketamine into him for no ----ing reason. Once again his family can thank Derek Chauvin for this case being taken more seriously now than it was when it happened. To be frank, Nathan Woodyard, Jason Rosenblatt, Randy Roedema, Jeremy Cooper, and Peter Cichuniec should be publicly executed just like they publicly executed Elijah McClain, sorry not sorry. Oh, and let us never forget how three other police officers unrelated to the incident (Erica Marrero, Kyle Dittrich, and Jaron Jones) photographed themselves at Elijah McClain's memorial smiling and recreating the chokehold used on him. "A few bad apples" my ----ing ass. This case hits close to home because he wasn't neurotypical, and I'm not neurotypical, and I've also had some anonymous asshat call police on me for "acting weird" while I was minding my own business and doing nothing wrong. I was even the same age. It was a Saturday afternoon in September 2016, I was swinging in a public park, and somebody decided my mannerisms looked odd enough that the police needed to get involved. When you're not neurotypical, you constantly have to justify your existence to the people who think they're the default humans and you're an unfortunate aberration. On that occasion the police just checked my ID and asked if I needed any help and then left me alone. It set my self-esteem back a few years, but it didn't traumatize the hell out of me like Officer Nelson did. I've also, subsequent to Officer Nelson traumatizing the hell out of me, been dismissed and dehumanized by so-called healthcare workers who were supposed to help me not kill myself but instead decided to make it as obvious as possible that they didn't give a rat's ass about me. So Elijah McClain's case feels personal for me, but the obvious difference is that I've never been tackled to the ground and injected with drugs. White privilege is very real. I've felt that if I could channel my anger constructively into advocating for police reform, what happened to me would be worth it. But that hasn't happened because I don't have much of a voice through my obscure little blog or my Facebook shares that the algorithms make sure are never seen by more than two people. I kind of just write about things, express outrage over injustices and happiness over indictments and reforms, creating for myself the illusion that my commentary has any impact on these impacts that go on in a sphere entirely separate from mine. Still, I guess it gives me a sense of purpose. I'd hate to get to the other side and try to explain to God why I was more upset about a black man kneeling during an old English drinking song than about men, women and children of various races, but disproportionately black, being abused and murdered by the men and women who took an oath to serve and protect them. I'm very excited for school to start in a couple days - excited for my class on Monday, excited for my class on Tuesday, excited for the classes I'll teach on Tuesday even though I won't have Zoom as a crutch and wouldn't have chosen to start at 7:30 if it were up to me, excited for what feels like a five-day weekend every week but really isn't because it just means I need to be a very responsible adult and determine my own schedule for the many things I have to do outside of classroom time, excited for the vaccination mandate that USU is preparing to implement because asking nicely just isn't enough in Utah. The future is bright, up until the end of this year when I really need to start getting a handle on whether I'm going to get a PhD or just take a job somewhere and if so, where, and supposedly I'm going to get married at some point before I die and it would be really nice to have that at least underway by then so I could make these decisions with my wife or wife-to-be instead of us both charting our life paths separately and later struggling to mesh them together. But nobody asked me. You know, my first first day of college was ten years ago. This may or may not be my last one. As a student, I mean. I should be waxing all nostalgic about that, as is my wont, but I don't feel articulate enough to do it justice right now. Of course, the week or so leading up to school has its drawbacks, and my desire to just relax and savor it was somewhat thwarted. Logan Preferred Property Management sent the carpet cleaners to my apartment complex without telling anyone, sent the normal cleaner to my apartment complex without telling anyone, and sent roofers to replace the entire roof without telling anyone. All of us except my roommate who can sleep through anything were pretty pissed. When the roofers woke me up at 7 a.m. on Monday, I couldn't believe LPPM had the audacity to do that after I complained about the idiots with the chainsaw who had done the same thing despite being ordered not to start until 8. I complained again and got the same empty apology and reassurances. The next day the roofers started later, but on Wednesday they started banging away at 6:30, which is, as I understand it, illegal. So I complained to management for the third time, and apparently "illegal" was the magic word that got them to stop lying about addressing the problem and actually address the problem. I decided I'd file a noise complaint if it happened again, and then I decided I was pissed enough to file a noise complaint anyway. I know what you may be thinking - Ah, Christopher, you fool, you complain about police all the time and now you suddenly need them. Why didn't you call a crackhead for help instead? Correction: I didn't "need" the police for anything. I could have dealt with the situation myself, but our society has arbitrarily decided that pushing people off of roofs is also illegal. So I looked online for some kind of form I could fill out instead of talking to a human, and stumbled instead on a different form entitled "Personnel Complaint". I got so excited about this that I considered the roofers a blessing in disguise. As both of my long-time readers are aware, on January 14, 2020, aka the worst day of my life, D'oh. Anyway, on that day I learned firsthand that police officers are the natural enemies of anyone with a mental illness, when Officer Hayden Nelson showed up to "help" me and instead did the opposite of that. I didn't do anything about it at the time. My first priority was to get out of the hospital before I got stuck with a buttload of medical debt (because 'Murica), and then my first priority was to live through the night despite the unbearable pain for my friend Katie's sake, and then I just kind of wandered through life as a shell of my former self for a couple months. I didn't know anything about formal complaint procedures and I feared the police retaliating against me if I did complain to them. You have to remember, this was before George Floyd became one police murder too many, and nobody was putting them in their place. As Officer Nelson was abusing me I knew that he knew he could do it because he had a blue uniform and de facto authority to kill anyone who didn't show him the respect he thought he deserved. If he hadn't been in a blue uniform, I would not have tolerated the way he spoke to me. Largely thanks to the well-deserved anti-police backlash a few months later, I got over my fear enough that I started to hope he would see my blog posts or Facebook posts and comments where I told the world, usually in rather crude terms, exactly what I thought of him. And I knew I would not respond the same way if anything similar ever happened again. A while ago I had one of my occasional nightmares that the police were coming after me again, and I was terrified, but determined that despite my fear I was going to give them a piece of my mind. I woke up before that came to pass.
When I did briefly look into the possibility of a formal complaint, I read something about a six-month statute of limitations, and looked no further. I also knew that Derek Chauvin, in his nineteen-year career, had accumulated eighteen conduct complaints resulting in literally nothing but two letters from his boss asking him not to do it again. But this complaint form on Logan City Police Department's website said nothing at all about a time limit. And now the climate around policing is much different. I figure there's a very real chance of getting a tangible result. Even if I don't, I at least have the satisfaction of knowing that Officer Nelson has been blindsided by this coming back to bite him in the butt long after he'd forgotten about it, and by the realization that this doormat he trampled on actually has feelings and a brain. I wish I could see the look on his face when he reads my complaint. I'd like to think he already has, and that it ruined his weekend, but with bureaucracy being what it is I doubt it's moving that fast. Another cop was there, but he said three sentences the entire time and wasn't a bully or a jackass, so I said little about him in my complaint but I did list him as my sole witness despite not knowing his name. I only know Officer Nelson's last name because he told me, and his first name because a helpful stranger on the internet told me. A few months ago when I was in a car crash and had to talk to a cop, he had his name printed on his uniform, but I'm pretty sure that was a post-George Floyd reform. Anyway, I'm sure they'll ask this cop to evaluate my account, and I can only hope that honesty is more important to him than backing the blue. On that note, the form claims that the investigation will be "objective", which is kind of a red flag whenever I see it because nobody on the planet is objective about things that matter to them at all. Even if they really are trying, police officers investigating another police officer are not going to be objective. They just aren't. They can, however, still do the right thing if they choose to be honest. They'll surely consult with Brad Hansen, the USU police officer who first received my neighbors' complaint and delegated it to the city police. My neighbors went to him because he was in our bishopric. He never spoke to me again after that day, but I made a point of resting my hand on my face with the middle finger extended when he walked by, and I know he noticed. I'm excited for him to read my complaint too. And they really should ask my ex-neighbors about what they said and how they said it, because they more than likely were overdramatic and told some outright lies that influenced Officer Nelson's response to the situation. I didn't devote nearly as much space as I could have in my complaint to explaining why their complaint was wrong, because that's not really the point, but it is still relevant because Officer Nelson was an idiot to take it as gospel truth and never ask me about my side at all. I have let go of all malice toward my ex-neighbors because, as mentioned in my complaint, one was delusional and the other gullible. (And I was equally gullible, which is how the problem started.) It's the trained law enforcement personnel who should have known better. I assumed that walking into the police station and handing my complaint to the woman at the desk - I visualized a woman at the desk with a few male cops nearby, and I told myself that was a sexist assumption to make, but of course that was exactly what I saw when I went - would be terrifying. I assumed that I would have to be courageous and push through the fear. But it wasn't and I didn't. It was no more stressful than going to the post office. Maybe God was with me. After the woman at the desk said "Hello" I felt a little bad at repaying her kindness with a personnel complaint form, but I wasn't about to back down at the last minute. I made scans just in case she or someone else "misplaces" it. Here they are for posterity. |
"Guys. Chris's blog is the stuff of legends. If you’re ever looking for a good read, check this out!"
- 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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