Midvale, Utah, this past week. Note the lack of anything resembling snow. I walked around the neighborhood barefoot today. If you don't believe in climate change, you are an idiot.

The earliest memory I can put a date on is watching "Lamb Chop's Special Chanukah" on December 17, 1995, when I was two and a half. (As I've said before, though, I think I can remember earlier in 1995 because I remember "Roll to Me" and "How Bizarre" playing on the radio constantly.) Because I'm obsessed with nostalgia and the strange passage of time, I've been waiting for December 17, 2025 to watch it again in a different basement on the other side of the country and see how much of it I recognized besides the fragments that stuck with me for thirty years. Answer: not much. I didn't even remember that it had songs. Still a blast from the past, though. I'm on the fence about whether it's good or charmingly bad. The plot makes little sense and the effects are not so special, but the songs are catchy and most of the humor is good or at least okay. It teaches kids about Chanukah and Jewish culture, so that's cool. (I'm not against those things just because I'm against Israel's war crimes and ethnic cleansing.) Feisty, witty little Lamb Chop is a very underrated character. Charlie Horse is a good foil - less sass, more mischief. Hush Puppy is maybe a little bit racist. That's how things go sometimes.

Between my age and the new millennium, the 90s are a different world, semi-ancient history compartmentalized from the rest of my life. The gap between 1995 and 2000 was eons longer than the gap between 2020 and 2025. It just was. I was too young to really appreciate the 90s while they were here, and lately I've mostly been getting into them through The X-Files and DOS games, but this was a more personal connection. ​The nostalgia factor is amplified by all of the lead actors (Shari Lewis, of course, with guest stars Pat Morita, Lloyd Bochner, and Alan Thicke) having been dead for years, even though three of the four were young enough to plausibly still be alive. That's how things go sometimes. I thought about doing a YouTube reaction video of the sort that I waste too much time watching, but it wasn't worth the effort for the likely size of my audience, just like it isn't worth the effort to organize my current rambling into a logical progression of thought. Here's a video to keep you occupied for almost an hour. Or not, your choice.

On one occasion, I took two Kush Kubes because they were stuck together, and I decided the universe wanted me to have both of them. On another occasion, my first Kush Kube didn't have as much of an effect after a while as I'd hoped, and I supplemented it with another one. With those exceptions, though, I take only one each time. Conventional wisdom would suggest that my body would become desensitized to the drug, and I'd be tempted to take higher doses to achieve the same high. That doesn't happen. If anything, the intensity of the highs have trended upward, and the last couple of times were so intense that I've decided to take a break for a month. I picked a month because I'll want to get high again when I'm home alone on Christmas.

I have no regrets so far. Psychedelics have given me the most spiritual, pleasurable, and peaceful experiences of my life. Even these last couple of times, which included some fear and paranoia, were awesome and totally worth it. Best Thanksgiving ever. It was like being strapped to a rocket, even more so than usual. I lost more control than I'm used to - or did I only lose the illusion of control? There are philosophical and scientific arguments to be made that free will is bogus, so maybe psychedelics help me see that I'm just a puppet. Then again, I tend to write weirder texts to my friends when I'm on them, with full knowledge that they're weird and that my friends will find them amusing, so maybe it's not that simple. I wish everyone could feel what I've felt, and I know that I sound insane to anyone who's never felt what I've felt. I'm just taking a break because I don't want to die yet. I don't think one of these things could actually kill me, but I felt like I was going to die or at least have a stroke, so better safe than sorry. I wanted to submit to the experience, but not if it was a medical emergency.

Without any kind of neuroscience expertise, I assume the experiences are getting more intense because I'm permanently rewiring my brain, so each dose of the drug is building off what's already in my head. I do believe I'm permanently rewiring my brain because since I started, my depression has been drastically reduced, I laugh a lot more often, and I have more introspective thoughts without really trying. Again, psychedelics have been overwhelmingly positive for me, but look, I'm trying to be responsible and acknowledging that they're not without risks. I can go without them for a month. I can go without them whenever I want. I've found that my body craves them for a couple of hours ahead of time if I've decided I'm going to take one on a given day, but if I've decided I won't, it doesn't. Simple as that. Anyway, I think the "negative" aspects of my recent experiences are decent preparation for the scary but necessary parts of psilocybin trips. Psilocybin is my goal, the reason I got interested in psychedelics to prepare for death in the first place, but I'm also kind of scared, which is why I should prepare for that by taking as many Kush Kubes as possible - but one at a time, with sufficient rest periods in between.

I, my roommate, and our landlord all spent Christmas at home alone, but at least I did fun things while my landlord decided it was a good day to paint the empty rooms and wash his car. I watched a 1933 short film called The Mascot, which is a live-action fever dream version of Toy Story. It follows a toy puppy on an adventure to get an orange for a little blind girl. It's not a cute children's film, though, because one of the toys gets his head run over by a car and the others spend an inordinate amount of time in hell with Satan and various monsters for no adequately explained reason. Artists, am I right? I loved it, though. The stop-motion effects look phenomenal, and in shots where the toys interact with the real world, they're integrated flawlessly. It's sure to become a Christmas classic in my household.

I'm thinking about this part of the Christmas story:

Now the birth of Jesus Christ was on this wise: When as his mother Mary was espoused to Joseph, before they came together, she was found with child of the Holy Ghost.
Then Joseph her husband, being a just man, and not willing to make her a public example, was minded to put her away privily.
But while he thought on these things, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a dream, saying, Joseph, thou son of David, fear not to take unto thee Mary thy wife: for that which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost. (Matthew 1:18-20)

When I heard this part of the story at church as a kid, this is how I understood it: "Joseph didn't want to marry Mary, but an angel told him he had to."

I reminisce about this amusing anecdote because now my former church is teaching children, "Joseph [Smith] didn't want to marry thirty women and teenage girls, but an angel told him he had to." (paraphrased) That narrative sounds absolutely deranged to everyone else in the world, but it's what they're going with. Joseph, the new illustrated scripture story on the church's website would have us believe, was like, "Oh no, God, please don't make me cheat on my legal wife with all these other women and teenage girls. Anything but that, please. This is the hardest thing ever. It's so hard. It's really hard. I really, really, really don't want to do it, but I will be obedient because sometimes God tells us to do hard things. Did I mention that it's hard?" Yes, the captions use the word "hard" so many times that it seems intentional. And the images depict beds more often than necessary. What they don't depict is multiple wives. Somehow the images remain almost entirely focused on men and how hard they were finding polygamy.

You might think I'd be glad that the church is teaching children about Joseph's polygamy. It never taught me about Joseph's polygamy. I knew about Brigham Young's polygamy through cultural osmosis, but all I ever heard regarding Joseph was Emma this, Emma that. I learned the truth from a secular magazine article when I was seventeen. I thought it was a mistake, but my parents said it was true, so they'd also known about this and never told me, which kind of pissed me off. (My mom hates polygamy so much that she's said she won't discuss or think about it at all, but why she doesn't see that discomfort as a colossal red flag about the religion she belongs to and the god she worships is beyond me.) The church is now being a little more honest because the internet has given it no alternative, but "a little" are the key words here. Its story for children leaves out literally all the actual details of how Joseph practiced polygamy because it's almost impossible to learn about those without recognizing him as a sexual predator. For example, it mentions that sometimes "Emma did not want Joseph to marry other women" and leaves it at that. It doesn't mention that he did it behind her back anyway and told her in a "revelation" that Jesus would destroy her if she didn't quit complaining. So no, I'm not glad that the church is still lying to children.

Rebecca Biblioteca from Mormonish podcast threw together some AI pictures to fill in the gaps in the church's illustrated scripture story. (She loves making AI art. I know that makes her evil in some people's eyes. Artists, am I right?) A lot of people have now gotten hers mixed up with the real ones. They're all based on documented historical facts that the church won't tell children. Well, most of them. The first one is bullshit, but it is a documented manipulation tactic that Joseph used on a least a couple of women.

The other problem with this dishonest indoctrination is that the church is making it much easier for child predators, of which it has no shortage, to copy Joseph's manipulation tactics. "Sometimes God tells us to do hard things," a priesthood leader might tell a child. "Sometimes God tells us to do things that make us feel yucky. Sometimes God tells us to keep secrets." I don't think this is intentional, of course. I think the leaders of the church and the people who design its curricula are just very out of touch with how the real world works and how normal people think. Of course, the part where the church's lawyers protect the church's child predators and fight against their victims in court is always intentional.

Mormon polygamy is weird, but it isn't bad because it's weird, it's bad because it's manipulative, predatory, abusive, and degrading to women and girls. It's indefensible as a divine practice, and the sooner the church gets a clue about that, the better. I don't see that happening for several years, but I think it's inevitable. Just like the church had no choice but to start talking about it in the first place, I think it will have no choice but to come around to the position of Patrick Mason, one of its own leading faithful scholars and apologists, who said that Joseph Smith's polygamy looks like sin and that defending it is like putting lipstick on a pig.

The legal proceedings regarding Elijah McClain's death wrapped up this week, and the paramedics who killed him with an overdose of ketamine are going to jail. That's one of the best Christmas presents I could ask for. It's very rare for healthcare workers to be criminally charged when their stupid mistakes kill people, but they were so obviously and so much in the wrong this time that I've only seen three conservatives bitching about the verdict and blaming McClain for his own death. Do you realize how significant that is? You have to be a saint in order for conservatives to not think you deserve to die after a police encounter, and McClain was. He deserved to be killed about as much as Jesus did.

These convictions will be a game-changer. The Associated Press cautions that they "could have a chilling effect on first responders around the country." To that I say, good. First responders and all other healthcare workers damn well should be afraid to make a stupid mistake that kills someone. If they aren't, they need to choose a profession with more room for error. The obvious problem here was that Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec just didn't care enough to do their job correctly. Well, that and they had an obvious implicit bias against Black men that made them overestimate McClain's weight by almost sixty pounds. The International Association of Fire Fighters claims that this case "criminalized split-second medical decisions." To that I say, bullshit. Cooper and Cichuniec had more than ample time to communicate with McClain and check his vital signs. They didn't even have the ketamine with them when they showed up. But yes, if they had been paralyzed with fear of making a mistake and just not done anything, McClain would still be alive.

They injected him with ketamine because they thought he had "excited delirium." It is unfortunate that paramedics in this country are still being taught that "excited delirium" is a thing even though no legitimate medical institution recognizes it. Just the symptoms of this fictitious condition - superhuman strength, impervious to pain, sudden death - sound so stupid that I can't comprehend how any adult believes in it. But then, millions of adults still worship Donald Trump, so my opinion of the human race, or at least Americans, is obviously too high. Police supporters literally made up "excited delirium" to justify police killings of Black and Latino men in their custody. It's racist as well as stupid. California recently became the first state to ban listing it as a cause of death. Funny how I was raised to believe that California's progressives were the stupid ones.

It is most unfortunate that only one of the three police officers who assaulted McClain for no reason was convicted of anything. Roedema was found guilty because his statement "He's definitely on something," which exemplifies police officers' rampant bigotry against neurodivergent people, contributed to the paramedics' decision. Jason Rosenblatt was acquitted because, like the people at Nuremburg, he was just following orders. Nathan Woodyard, the first police officer who assaulted McClain, was somehow acquitted of everything even though he had no legal justification for stopping McClain, he acknowledged in court that he did everything against his training and needlessly escalated the situation from the first moment, and the paramedics would never have been there in the first place if he had minded his own damn business. So he has his job back. I hope he never has a good night's sleep again. After those acquittals, I was ready to go burn something down if the paramedics were also acquitted. The whole point of having separate trials was so that each person or duo could throw everyone else involved under the bus. If our legal system had determined that nobody was at fault, it would be beyond saving.

So anyway, Merry Christmas. I do mean that, though I don't have much to add.