I had the best experience yet getting high last week, but I'm not getting high today because I've decided to take a break for at least two weeks so I don't destroy my brain's pleasure center. Some of my family members are wary about me using drugs, and some people get addicted and get into worse drugs and ruin their lives and stuff, and I ought to be more cautious about that. To be clear, though a part of me does enjoy telling people I got high because it's taboo and "bad," I don't do it for pleasure or to escape from my unpleasant emotions. I do get pleasure and escape from my unpleasant emotions, and I won't apologize for that, but I do it for spirituality. And though I can't prove it, I think the intentions and the preparation that I've brought to this have shaped the experiences I get out of it and made me less susceptable to the potential pitfalls. I came for spirituality, and I got it. I use the drugs as part of my journey, not a crutch or a shortcut. But drugs are not toys, and I'm sure they're not right for everyone even if they're right for me. I'm not encouraging anyone to use them.

This last time, I felt like I was in contact with the spirit world, reaching out to other people's consciousnesses, people I used to know and people I still know, learning about the plans we'd made in the premortal existence, apologizing for how I'd wronged them. I spoke to them with my thoughts. I'm sure none of them heard me. I'd love to know if any of them felt anything at all. I also got an impression that I might die in three days, and then I felt like I was pleading my case to some unseen, unheard personage (not God, I don't think, but maybe, who knows) about why I needed more time and could do so much more to bless people's lives while I'm here. I didn't die in three days, but I don't think that was ever really going to happen. I feel like I just needed to prove to myself how much I want to be here. (For now. After I do die, I sure as hell don't want to come back.) Even though it was just my own brain talking, it felt like a revelatory experience. I'm well aware that I might have just been delusional, but I've already lost much of my fear of death, made peace with a very traumatic past event, and made positive changes in my life as a result, so maybe the world could use more of that kind of delusions.

And I had another little psychic moment that helped to validate the experience for me. I'm not making any real effort to get a girlfriend, but once in a while I'll get on Bumble and swipe for a minute. I can always see that a few women have swiped right on me, but I can't see who they are because I won't pay for Premium, so I just have to hope I'll stumble across them in the natural course of things, which rarely happens. This time, I looked at the first woman who came up, reached out to her consciousness, and somehow found things to say about her profile for fifteen minutes or so. During this time I came to an implicit understanding that she had swiped right on me. And finally I was like Well, I'll feel pretty stupid if she didn't swipe right on me. I swiped right on her, and boom, we had a match. And then she never messaged me, but it was still cool. I also telepathically thanked a woman who had stopped messaging me for briefly coming into my life to tell me I had "the most soulful eyes." I also gently telepathically scolded a woman from Ukraine who said she was "apolitical" even though one American party supports her country and the other does not. I was nice about it, but I was in tears as I pleaded with her to take more civic responsibility.

I debated how much to share because this is my special personal experience that doesn't need to be broadcast to the world, but I do want to share things that might benefit and uplift others in their own spiritual quests. I decided to err on the side of not broadcasting it because I'm too lazy to try to describe this experience in words. You'd never be able to feel its intensity through words alone. So I'll just mention one more thing. I got the real or perceived revelation that Donald Trump chose to play a villainous role in this life so that others could have the opportunity to exercise moral goodness by fighting against him. Obviously I was inspired by the claims of near death experiencers that this life is like a play and we're all just performing roles. Whether my insight into Trump is objectively accurate, I can't say, but it makes me hate him less, so I'll stick with it. I thought, I hope I'm not a villain. And then I immediately thought, I am to some people.

I haven't been planning in advance what to do while I get high. I've just done what came naturally. Last time, I ended up listening to music and having a wild dance party for most of the time. Right there in my room, with little space to move around, I closed my eyes and imagined that I was in other locations, mostly in outer space surrounded by animated characters inspired by the cult classic "Rock and Rule," dancing and surfing and playing air guitar. I can't explain how it felt. It didn't feel real, but it felt intense. I could feel the floor beneath my feet, and the door and the furniture when I bumped into them, but they felt more disconnected somehow and didn't intrude on the illusion that my body had dissolved into another realm. I enjoyed the music more than usual and did a lot of cool moves because the drug raised my confidence, my skill, or both. I tried to alternate between fast rock songs and slower, more introspective ones to see what would happen, but I think I could have gotten results from any song. I didn't know if I'd ever be able to stop and go to bed, but at quarter to midnight I just decided it was time to wrap up, and I did.

At the same time I was enjoying myself so much, I had what seemed like a revelatory experience, though I didn't think for a moment that God was talking to me. Part of my consciousness became independent and addressed the part that was having a dance party in space. It was like, "You haven't overcome your fear of death. It's still there. You're kind of a hypocrite, writing this book to help other people not be afraid of death while you're still afraid of death. Here are some things you need to let go of to help you prepare. It's okay, you still have time. It's a process. Psilocybin will help." And I didn't stop enjoying myself, but it seemed like my fear of death got dragged out into the open, and I felt it in a very muted fashion, like a dispassionate observer, just acknowleding it. I kept telling the other part of my consciousness, "I just want to know when. I hate not knowing when. Or how much it will hurt. I don't want it to hurt." You know, slipping away in bed sounds fine, but I could also break every bone in my body and die of internal bleeding, and I'd rather not.

I thought that if I got euthanized, at least then I'd control the timing and not be taken by surprise. But then people would be sad. I thought of a friend whose sister killed herself and how much pain that's caused her to this day. I thought of my youngest sibling, who hadn't responded to me on Discord for four days, and I wondered if he'd killed himself. I knew I would have no way to cope if that happened, but I would have to find out regardless. And as soon as I thought that, I heard the Discord beep, and I thought it probably wasn't him because I'd heard some beeps over the past few days that weren't him, but it was. I freaked out because I didn't/don't believe in psychic powers. Maybe the THC was just making me overreact to a coincidence, but my freaking mind was blown.

Here are the songs I listened to. I don't remember the exact order because I listened to some on Spotify, some on YouTube, one on Discord (where my sibling sent it to me), and one on an ancient technology called Windows Media Player.

I listened to this one again at the end because I just discovered it that day and it is EPIC.

I don't know why this one is unavailable on YouTube. It displeases me greatly.

In the original flash game, this music is so condensed that it only bears the most vague resemblance to a voice. It still sounds awesome. This version sounds EPIC.

This came up in my YouTube suggestions because I've listened to it before, and after I listened to it again, I realized how apt it was, since I had been thinking about my desire to not die. Get it? Hahahahaha. And no, this is not a Bee Gees cover.

This one, from a 1987 educational tape that I loved as a kid, made me imagine myself in a landscape of animated dinosaurs and real dinosaurs. It also made me contemplate the cosmic tragedy that dinosaurs suffered and died for millions of years without the mental capacity to ascribe any reason to the brutality and unfairness of their lives. Yeah.

This is the one my sibling sent.

Even though I don't believe in Jesus the same way I used to, this is a pretty song with a nice message. I thought it would be a good contribution to my drug-induced spirituality.

I'm on vacation with my grandparents in New York for a couple of weeks, and I'm not going to put much effort into this post. My first flight was delayed by two and a half hours, which would cause me to miss my second flight, so American Airlines' system automatically rebooked me on an overnight flight arriving at 6 a.m. without telling me. The bag check-in lady was able to get me on another delayed flight to Dallas instead of Chicago, and I made to the end of the boarding line with a few minutes to spare. I would like to add my complaint to the many complaints about the Salt Lake airport. I cannot comprehend why I had to walk through empty space for twenty minutes to get to my gate. Why the hell didn't they put the gates in that empty space instead of the empty space? How the hell did this arrangement get designed, approved, and built? I hope everyone involved never works in their respective industries again.

So now I've been to Texas. I have no other reason to want to go to Texas because its governor is a bellend. I had five hours to kill at the airport because my second rescheduled flight was, of course, delayed, and I walked around for a while and I worked on the new book that I just started for a while. I sat with my computer at a charging station by the gate and paid no attention to the pretty young woman seated across from me until a guy across the room yelled at his kids for running around, and I looked over there, and she grinned at me and said, "They're losing their shit!" And I said I couldn't blame them for being bored, and she agreed. And then it occurred to me that I could keep talking to her by asking how long she'd been delayed and stuff, but it also occurred to me that just because a woman spoke to me didn't mean she wanted to have a whole conversation, so I didn't. She went back to her work, and then she went off somewhere.

When it was time to board, I was in the second-to-last group, so I didn't get in line. She returned and also didn't get in line. As I waited, my eyes wandered around and didn't look at her. But then they did look at her, and it seems like she was looking at me before that, because she immediately looked away as an involuntary smile sprouted on her face. I mean, I wasn't in her head and I don't know what the synapses in her brain were doing, but her smile looked involuntary based on my short lifetime of observations and personal experience. I've had the exact same reaction when someone I found attractive looked at me. So this brought me to the realization that, against all odds, she probably found me attractive. Though unusual, this would not be unprecedented. I've been asked to ladies' choice dances. I've been flirted with and realized it years later. That girl in the USU library in 2013 who started a friendly conversation by asking me about a simple point of grammar that she could have taken a few seconds to look up on her computer was probably flirting with me.

I kept waiting for this pretty young woman to get in line, but she kept not getting in line, so I got in line and then she got in line right behind me. And the line moved slowly, and I made a point of pretending not to notice or care about her presence, although sometimes I would turn my head so I could kind of see her and she could see that I could see her and she could talk to me if she wanted. I didn't dare to talk to her. Bad things happen to me when I have that kind of confidence. I imagined her getting on one of the feminist subreddits I frequent and complaining that she can't go out in public without men being attracted to her. Really, I see complaints like that. Apparently some women hate being approached by men in public at all, even if the men don't harass them or refuse to take no for an answer. And they hate it when their guy friends turn out to be attracted to them, even if their guy friends don't harass them or refuse to take no for an answer. Maybe I'm a misogynist for not feeling even a little bit sorry for those women.

As she stood behind me in line and I let her into my peripheral vision, this woman twirled a lock of her hair in an exaggerated manner. This was a less obvious sign of attraction, since I couldn't prove that it had anything to do with me, but nobody else was twirling their hair, and it's such a well-established sign of attraction that it inspired a hilarious Argentinian commercial where a guy has dinner with his girlfriend's family and charms her mother, grandmother, and father so much that they all do it. (Her father has short hair, but he grows a long lock just for that shot.) I became hopeful that since we seemed to be in the same boarding category, we would sit together, and then it wouldn't be weird for me to talk to her. Her seat was several rows up from mine. I decided I would muster my courage during the three-hour flight and talk to her at the baggage claim. She wasn't at the baggage claim. I hate being me.

She probably thinks I wasn't attracted to her and/or failed to pick up on her signals. The first one isn't true, and surprisingly, neither is the second. A third, less likely possibility is that she thinks I'm a weird Republican who refused to flirt back without verification of her chromosomes. I don't want her to think those things. But because I think almost constantly about death and what may await us afterward, it occurred to me almost immediately that maybe when she dies she'll have one of those life reviews that many people describe after they die and come back, and she'll revisit our brief moments together and see my thoughts and feelings and finally know the truth. Maybe she'll know that I thought she was very pretty. Maybe she'll know that her unsolicited vulgar remark gave me a positive impression of her personality. And maybe she'll glimpse the ocean of trauma that made me fear her more than I fear being alone.

There is some drama going on in my apartment. My report on it will have to wait, though, because I owe a tribute to the recently deceased Shelley Duvall. Some of my earliest memories are of her voice issuing from the CD player in my parents' basement. She was a second mother figure to me. I made this meme in her honor.

Her release from mortality is probably for the best because she hadn't aged well. Her physical and mental decline was heartbreaking to see. She largely avoided the spotlight in her old age, but in a controversial appearance on Dr. Phil in 2016, she opined that her Popeye costar Robin Williams wasn't dead, just shape-shifting. She probably supported Trump too. Regardless, a formative piece of my childhood, of myself, is gone. The world of the nineties is quickly disappearing forever.

At least her lullaby album lives on. It might not be Grammy material, but it ironically has far more sophisticated lyrics than the Harry Nilsson songs she sang in Popeye. (Who could forget such classics as "He needs me, he needs me, he needs me, he needs me, he needs me, he needs me"?) Here's that album, direct from my YouTube channel. I recommend it to any parents of little children, though more particularly little boys because a few of the lyrics specify that she's singing to a little boy. That seems unnecessary, especially since she didn't have any children of her own to whom she could have been singing, but it worked fine for me so I can't complain too much.

She opens this opening track with "Hello, I'm Shelley Duvall. I'd like to sing a little lullaby or two for you." Chills. When I heard that as a kid, I knew I was in for a treat.

Kind of an upbeat, almost marching song. Not really a lullaby, it occurs to me for the first time in thirty-one years.

Now this is more of a lullaby. And now we really feel the depth of her feelings for her imaginary little boy as she sings, "You... are the apple... of... my eye." That sounded sarcastic, but it wasn't.

In a similar vein to Madonna's "Dear Jessie," but less treacly, here's a tribute to the boundless imagination that most children have before it's squelched by Blippi and the public school system. I admit the chorus is a little weak, though. "In a little kid's world, a little kid's house, you can find anything from a rabbit, to a mouse." Wow, very range, such a diverse. That sounded sarcastic because it was. I still love her, though. Shelley Duvall, I mean, but Madonna is great too.

This song is more poignant than any children's lullaby has a right to be. Here, she sings not to her imaginary little boy, but to a star outside her window that she considers her "dearest friend." Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but damn, she sounds lonely. SPOILER ALERT, the ending tears my heart out: "I know that I can't touch you... but I want so very much to... You know how much I love you... Liiiiiiittle... star..."

This song is a tribute to the curiosity that children have about literally everything, but it resonates with me more than ever as an adult grappling with existential and philosophical questions that I could never have imagined back then. She alludes to those ever so slightly, though, as she sings from the child's perspective that she adopted just for this one song, "Is there someone special called God?" And like her, I plead, "Tell me how? Why? I wanna know! How does it work? What makes it go? If it's just a puppet, then who pulls the strings? Is it all magic? Or is it just a dream?"

One of the reasons I took so long to leave the LDS Church was that it teaches the existence of our souls before we were born more consistently and "officially" than any other religion I'm aware of. That concept made sense to me then and it makes sense to me now. Based on my research of near-death experiences, I still believe it, though of course I don't believe the specific details about the war in heaven and Black people being less valiant and all that jazz. Anyway, I think a lot of people intuitively sense this truth without being taught it. In this song, Shelley Duvall (who was never LDS) tells her imaginary little boy that he was in heaven before he was born. And she says a lot of other stuff that's really sweet.

I love the sound effects and the sproingy instrumental thing during the chorus that kind of evokes raindrops even though it sounds nothing like them. If I knew anything about music, I could say what the instrument is, but I don't. I just know what I like.

I don't know what to say about this one. It's just a nice little song about how much she loves her little child, in case she hadn't managed to get that point across yet.

This is the perfect song to close the album, as it's the best one to fall asleep to. So soft, so soothing, the aural equivalent of a pillow. An unidentified male joins her for the chorus, and I always imagined he was the imaginary little boy's father who had finally gotten home from work.

Prior to my move, I'm once again on vacation with family including my loveable but exhausting little cousins, and I forgot to write a post yesterday. I could have done it while they were all at church, but I did other stuff instead. I have to crank something out now to keep up my goal of writing something every week even if it's garbage.

​I've reflected on my legal drug experience last week, trying to figure out if it was the best experience of my life or one of the best experiences of my life, and if so, why. I can imagine someone reading my description and wondering what's so great about a weird and confusing experience like that. First of all, it was inherently interesting because it was like nothing I'd experienced before. Second, as I've realized even more upon reflection, the peace I felt throughout was really incredible. It may have been the only time in my adult life that all my worries didn't just fade to the background but ceased to matter altogether. Even now, as I enjoy time with my family, part of my brain is devoted to the stresses of moving to another city, paying rent, dealing with my property management company for what I hope is the last time, and possibly losing what's left of democracy in my country if the demented lying orange jackass is re-elected because his opponent acted too old during their recent debate and then appoints three more supreme court justices whose life goal is to drag society back a hundred years. But nothing worried me when I was high, and that was great.

And then, of course, there were those moments when I felt disconnected from my physical body and connected to the universe. Again, I don't want to overstate those, but as I reflect on them, they were pretty great. I think that if I did this again knowing what to expect and relaxed more, surrendered more, analyzed less, I would get more of that part. I want more of that part. The reason I wanted to try psilocybin, which is not yet legal, except through a religious freedom loophole that I intend to exploit when I'm settled closer to the Divine Assembly church, was to experience death before I die. That's done wonders for the mental health of terminally ill people. Legal mushroom gummies don't contain psilocybin, and I don't know if I can achieve that full experience with them, but what I got was close enough. I want more of it regardless of what it is. Anyway, there's plenty more I could write about besides drugs, but I should go be with my family.