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. Hey Little OneShe 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. Itty Bitty KidKind of an upbeat, almost marching song. Not really a lullaby, it occurs to me for the first time in thirty-one years. Small FryNow 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. Little Kid's WorldIn 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 the public school system and Blippi. 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. TwinkleThis 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..." Why?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?" Before You Were BornOne 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. RainI 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. Little ChildI 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. Tiny PillowThis 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.
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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. Yesterday was my birthday. I was going to write a blog post, but I couldn't log in. Now I have something altogether different to write about than what I was going to write about. I would have written about this anyway, but now I'm not going to wait. A few weeks ago one of my friends had a birthday, and one of her friends gave her some legal mushroom gummies, and she gave me two of them because we've talked about mushrooms as part of our discussions on spirituality. They were two different brands. The first one, as I mentioned, made me exhausted and didn't have any noticeable spiritual effects. I tried the second one last night. I don't know if "spiritual" is the right word, but it sure had effects. I wish my description could do it justice. I don't want to overstate it, but I don't want to downplay it either. I took it around eight p.m. in case it made me exhausted. It took about forty-five minutes to really kick in. I noticed that my mouth was dry and my head felt a little heavy when I moved it, but I didn't know if that was just my imagination. And then since the sun was going down and the insane heat was dissipating, I decided it was time to go toss away some stale bread in the wooded area that I use for compost sometimes. And I thought that maybe I shouldn't be standing near the edge of a steep hill while I was on drugs, but I wasn't feeling very drugged, and I thought it would be fine. A block from my apartment, I decided that I shouldn't be standing near the edge of a steep hill while I was on drugs, and I turned around and went back. I noticed as I walked that my mouth was frozen in a grin. And then reality seemed to close around me like a tunnel, and then I was laying on the couch. Leaving my apartment and coming right back were a distant memory, and I wasn't sure they'd happened at all. I had to look at the kitchen counter and see where I'd placed the bread after I brought it back. That was a recurring theme - ending up back on the couch, things becoming distant memories seconds after I did them, and having to verify over and over that I'd actually done them. The couch was like my home base. My returns to it seemed inevitable, beyond my control. The passage of time became weird. Over and over again, I looked at the clock on the stove and saw that only a minute or five had passed since the last time I'd looked, reassuring myself that the last time I'd looked hadn't been a dream. Since I couldn't remember much of the walk home, short though it was, I thought maybe I'd done something crazy and the neighbors had called the police. With my kitchen windows open, it seemed like everyone in Logan was walking down my quiet little street and being needlessly loud, and every noise made me imagine that the police were coming to my door to be assholes as usual. I got up and looked out the window a few times to verify that they weren't parked out front. But I felt no fear. My heart felt like it wanted to be afraid, but something was gently suppressing it. I just felt warmth and peace. The noises outside and of my heavyseat upstairs neighbor creaking around would have normally been very jarring, since I have misophonia, but now I was able to be fully aware of them and simultaneously remain in my semi-delirious state. I still swore in exasperation a little bit. I wasn't completely at peace yet. After ten minutes or an hour, I got up and closed the windows. Then I looked over and over again to verify that I'd really gotten up and closed the windows, and that I'd failed to close one of them properly. I felt like my consciousness split into three parts - the delirious drug-addled part doing weird things, the self-aware and skeptical part that analyzed and verified, and a running commentary of how I was going to describe this experience to my friend. Every time I thought of telling her that the first gummy did nothing but this one did something, I laughed a little. But that part faded away as I became more immersed in the experience. These three streams of thought ran alongside each other, intertwined, and very, very fast. I wondered if I was approaching a near-death experience, but nobody said anything about it being so fast. I hoped that consciousness after death didn't run at this speed forever, because it was like a roller coaster and I couldn't get off. Yet despite that preference, I felt no fear and no real discomfort. It was peaceful. I kept mentally stumbling and repeating my thoughts like Porky Pig, and my mouth kept moving along with them. My eyes kept darting all over the place, whether they were open or closed. I had the power to stop these motions, but it was easier to just go along with them. Periodically I moved something to make sure I wasn't paralyzed, but the motions seemed to precede my decisions to move. The word "grounding" kept coming to mind, and I kept feeling the texture of the couch as if I would melt away into an entirely disembodied state otherwise. Over and over again, I had this thought: it was as if I had agency, and yet no agency. Over and over again, I questioned whether this experience was really happening. Over and over again, I reminded myself that I'd taken a drug, so yes, it was really happening. Over and over again, I wondered if this was a dream, but over and over again, I realized that I didn't have the mental capacity to dream this up. I wondered if this would last forever. Again, no fear, but I wished I knew when it would end, because even though it wasn't unpleasant, it would impede my ability to exist in the world if it lasted forever. I thought about how long it would take me to starve if I stayed on the couch all the time, and how long it would probably take for somebody to check on me. I didn't really think I would die in this state, but the possibility occurred to me, and I decided that was fine because I couldn't imagine a better way to die. I wondered if I should try to resist the high or surrender to it. I didn't fear the loss of agency as I thought I should have. When I did relax, close my eyes, and sink into it, I felt as if I melted into outer space and sensed my body right there below me, yet no longer quite so attached to me. I was myself, yet connected to the universe - and this is a part that I don't want to overstate, as I'm sure it wasn't the grand spiritual epiphany that some people have had with drugs, but it was neat and I don't know a better way to describe it. The couch pillow on top of me felt like an extension of myself. I forced myself back into lucidity to verify that there was a couch pillow on top of me. Then I let myself fade again, and it felt like someone embracing me. I randomly thought about an older gentleman I knew growing up who'd just wished me a happy birthday on Facebook. I thought about what a classy, respectable guy he was, and realized that he was probably bothered by how crass I am sometimes on social media, but he stayed my Facebook friend anyway. I decided I should be less crass on social media for his sake. I thought of my upstairs neighbor who gave me a little jar of earplugs one night when all of his squeaking in the kitchen was driving me crazy because my own earplugs were worn out, and I figured he's been very tolerant of me yelling at my stupid computer, so the least I could do was offer to give back his little jar of earplugs (minus the ones I've used). My natural impulse honed by years of poverty to hold onto whatever I can get was replaced by a genuine desire to return his property. And I thought of someone I'd wronged in a more significant way, but since it wouldn't be easy to do anything about that, I let that thought go. Then my mind went through just a few of my traumatic experiences, but I felt no trauma. I wondered at the time, as I do now, if that was a taste of the "life review" that people often describe in near-death experiences and I'm not looking forward to. People describe reliving their lives and feeling how they made other people feel. The first two people I thought of seemed like random choices, though. I'm sure I've caused much more pain to some other people. I coughed sometimes, and I yawned a lot, and tears streamed down my face, and I had to blow my nose. Like the noises, those physical things all seemed like distractions that I registered on a different wavelength without losing my high. I got up a few times to look in the bathroom mirror at my dilated pupils and my moving mouth. Whenever I did, I sang in my mind, to the tune of a Maroon 5 song, "This drug has taken its toll on me..." I thought that was funny. I fell asleep, and then it was 12:23. I felt normal. I made it to bed and got back to sleep in record time. Then I stopped feeling normal. The aforementioned experience continued through the night - in waking, or dreaming, or somewhere in-between, I can't tell. Sometimes I had to check whether I was in bed or still on the couch. Then I got up around quarter after nine, and the real craziness was over. I listened to "Because I Got High" on my morning walk and thought that was funny. I continued to be noticeably high until about six p.m. The mouth and eye movements continued to a much lesser extent, I had to continue grounding myself to a much lesser extent, and I continued to grin and be easily amused by things. Again, I wondered if this altered mental state would be permanent. But in fairness, I was never really normal in the first place. It seems to be over now, even though my pupils are still dilated as I type this. I can't explain why this experience was so great. It was just a wild ride, yet a peaceful one, and it felt good and it blew my mind. Happy birthday to me! I want to do it again, but not soon. And I'm afraid to try a full dose. I found out this week that the owners of my apartment complex, who have never talked to me, don't want the property management company to renew my lease. I wasn't told why, but I have a few guesses. It doesn't matter. Though this came as an unpleasant surprise, I was trained for it five years ago, when I had to move three times before ending up at this place. I accepted it right away. I happened to read the email in Garden City during a detour from a camping trip with friends, the only interval when I had access to my cellular network. By the way, that really needs to be fixed. I'm all for leaving technological distractions behind, but anyone who has a medical emergency in most parts of Logan Canyon or the surrounding areas is screwed. The point, though, is that I was in the middle of this camping trip with friends. Most of them had actually gone home by then because they had jobs or colonoscopies or whatever.
But I love these friends. The last time I was in the wilderness with them - I don't say camping because it was cold, and we all chickened out and went home - I stared up at the Milky Way and ached with the desire for our friendship to continue after our deaths. I wasn't confident at the time that it would. Now I am. It's been all but proven by science. We know for a fact that people have died and remained conscious, despite their brains being shut down, for a couple of hours before they come back. I want to shout this fact from the rooftops. Actually, I'm working on a children's book with the working title "Everyone Dies." I've had the idea for this book for a while, but I didn't know how to go about it because I didn't have any solid reassurance to give children about what happens after death, and I'm not willing to lie to them by implying that death is always peaceful or that it only happens to old people. Now at least the first problem is solved. I feel a strong desire to write this book, and I hope it will spread a message of hope far and wide. As random as it sounds, it feels like part of my calling in life now. To reiterate: I love these friends. At this time in Garden City I remained with Steve and his wife. Not for the first or last time, here's the story of how I met Steve, which I never tire of. I used to sometimes visit this girl who lived next door to him. She texted me, I dropped everything, and we sat on her balcony and talked. Then Steve got home from work, and she said, "Steve, come join us!" I didn't like that very much, and consequently I didn't like him very much. At least once, we had three chairs on the balcony, and I put my feet on the extra chair and hoped he would take the hint, but he didn't. I feel so bad about that now. Steve is a really great guy. This whole friend group that I love so much has coalesced around him. In 2019, I jumped at the chance to become his neighbor. I used to ask him for priesthood blessings all the time. Then I didn't because he moved away and I stopped believing in the Mormon priesthood. I still think, of course, that any God who may hypothetically exist can communicate through a Mormon priesthood blessing as well as any other method, but I don't know if that actually happens or how to tell. I've been told things in priesthood blessings that the speaker shouldn't have known, and I've also been told things in priesthood blessings that were simply wrong, and I'm not interested in making excuses like "Maybe it was talking about the next life" or "Maybe it meant something else because God likes to intentionally mislead people." Anyway, since I was there with Steve I asked for a blessing to help me not spiral into depression over this email. And he mentioned something that he shouldn't have known, and something else that I may have discussed with him some time ago, but I don't remember. So that was interesting. The point I'm getting at in such a roundabout way is that because I fortuitiously happened to be with these friends at this time, it took me less than two hours to decide that I would move to the Salt Lake City area to be closer to them. Most of them live there or will be moving there soon. If I move somewhere else in Logan, I'll continue to live with twenty-year-old college students, and that gets weirder with every passing year. Logan is a college town. I love it dearly, but I came to realize that it has little to offer me anymore because I'm not in college or married. Salt Lake will be an exciting new chapter in my life. I'll spend more time with these stable adult friends, I'll be more involved in my adorable little nieces' lives, and since I'm there anyway, maybe I'll start a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah next year. USU doesn't have that program. I am, of course, heartbroken to leave behind the town that's been my home for nearly thirteen years, but life is change, and change more often than not entails some loss. Don't fight it. Don't resent it. As Matthew Stover poignantly wrote in the novelization for Revenge of the Sith, even stars die. I felt that in 2019, a higher power had orchestrated my life to lead me to where I live now. And here I met someone whom I thought was the reason. Maybe she was a reason. As much as I could do without the trauma she brought into my life, I owe her much gratitude for getting me out of the LDS Church and sending me into an existential crisis that brought me spiritual growth that I wouldn't trade for anything. But it seems weird that God would guide me to someone to turn me into an agnostic. Another reason, I see now, was getting closer to Steve and these other friends. He moved soon after I arrived, but if I hadn't lived here, they all might have faded from my life like almost everyone else I've met in this college town. He was there for me when the other person hurt me, multiple times, and he was there for me when we were stuck at home during the early days of the pandemic. I look back on those days with a strange mixture of trauma and nostalgia. After the disaster of early 2020, and I'm not talking about the pandemic, I've felt confused and abandoned and aimless as far as God's supposed guidance is concerned. This upcoming move is the first time since then that I feel once more like my life is being orchestrated by a higher power. I'm agnostic, of course, over whether it actually is. Things happen. Coincidences happen. Human brains are wired by evolution to see patterns and agency where none exist. But I feel good about it, and that's good enough. Not because my good feeling is a guide to any kind of truth, but because it means I'm excited about a new chapter. And also sad. It's complicated. If you only watch one documentary for the rest of your life, make it this one. I cannot recommend it emphatically enough. This documentary falls into two main parts. First, it describes how, from a physical standpoint, the advancement of medical technology has revealed and/or created an increasing gray area between life and death. It's no longer accurate to say that nobody ever comes back from the dead, though of course it only happens under very limited circumstances. This, then, leads into the even more interesting part, which is what people experience while they're dead. As I've mentioned before, I don't know why people aren't shouting from the rooftops that we now know for a fact that consciousness continues after death. This is the discovery of the century. This is why, even though my views on God are all over the place, I'm very confident in an afterlife - not because of wishful thinking or a "spiritual witness," but because of what's been reported and observed. It isn't magic. It follows laws like everything else, even if we don't know what the laws are yet.
Of course, nobody's been dead for very long before coming back, so many mysteries remain. I don't want to commit to any specific beliefs without evidence. Here's what I think right now. Our most basic and true form is consciousness, which inhabits a different plane of existence from the physical universe, a more subjective yet more real one. The physical universe is a pale imitation of it, like Plato's cave. Our brains are like radio sets that harness consciousness. Not only do they not produce it themselves, they severely limit and distort it. We'll see and understand so much more the moment we're freed from physical constraints. But in the meantime, there's some reason we're here, even if it's difficult or impossible to see, which I believe is by design. So I don't advocate for trying to cut short our time on this craptastic planet, tempting though that may be. Here's where I diverge sharply from my Mormon upbringing and hew closer to Eastern religions. I was taught that bodies are super awesome and that every disembodied spirit yearns to have one. I mostly just find them disgusting and inconvenient. Some have suggested that we all derive from one big mass of consciousness, that we're the universe coming to know itself and just pretending to be different people, that we're all one entity in the most literal sense. That's beautiful in a way, but I think it actually cheapens love in the long run. If my love for others ultimately boils down to love for myself in a literal sense, then it doesn't seem special or praiseworthy to me anymore. I also think it's great that the world is populated by people with different personalities, talents, interests, and I was going to say opinions, but that's only true to an extent because a lot of opinions make the world a worse place and don't deserve to exist. I hope that in the next world, we will become more one than we are now, but still retain our indiviidual identities and consequently our interpersonal relationships. But I don't have a belief about that, because my hoping won't make it so. I don't believe in a "traditional" heaven and hell, or in the Mormon three-tiered heaven and outer darkness, but then I wonder what's to become of the truly evil people. Because all this stuff sounds lovely, but if Hitler and I are part of the same mass of consciousness and get unified into the same eternal bliss after our deaths, that doesn't sit right with me. Maybe he'll get reincarnated until he gets it right. Someone from the Unitarian Uniersalists raised this point a while ago. She said she doesn't want anyone to burn in hell, not even Trump, and if she were a loving God, she would send him back to Earth as many times as he needed to qualify him for heaven. I like that idea. I really don't want to be reincarnated myself. Having to suffer on this planet all over again with no memory of the helpful things I already learned in my previous life sounds worse than purgatory. It's supposed to suck, which is why the point of Hihduism is to make it stop. Like the oneness thing, it also would render my concern for others a lot less selfless. I could be reincarnated as a gay black woman, so making the world a better place for those demographics would be in my own best interest. I've read some stuff, but I think this was my first time actually seeing and hearing people describe the experiences they've had while they were dead. They brought warmth to my heart and tears to my eyes. According to my Mormon upbringing, this was the Holy Ghost testifying of truth. I know it wasn't. I would have had the same emotional reaction if this documentary were a fictional movie. I had that reaction because these things are uplifting and beautiful. It's just fortuitous that they also happen to be true. Though many mysteries remain, it seems we've begun to empirically discover that despite all the inexplicable suffering and injustice in this blind, uncaring world, the universe, at least in some dimension, is ultimately uplifting and beautiful, and our existence is a happy thing, not a tragic accident. |
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- 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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