​But Harris objectively did generate enthusiasm. Her campaign announcement was followed by record-breaking donations and a massive spike in voter registration. It makes no sense that she got fewer votes than Biden. I also thought, like many, that women would flood the polls in droves to elect her because they're so pissed about losing Roe v. Wade. That didn't happen. In the states where abortion rights measures were on the ballot, they got significantly more votes than Harris herself did. That makes no goddamn sense at all. Voting for abortion rights and the guy who took them away in the first place is like... well, I won't even bother coming up with a comparison because it's self-explanatory. Anyway, I didn't see the same enthusiasm for Trump. Voters rejected him and his ilk in 2018, 2020, and 2022. The midterm "red wave" we were supposed to get didn't happen. Why would I have expected it to happen now? Despite the persistence of hopeless MAGA cultists who would suck Trump's dick if he dismembered their children in front of them, I hardly imagined he could be as popular now as when he lost four years ago. Within that time, he led an insurrection to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, he was found legally liable for rape, he was convicted of 34 felonies, his brain turned into cottage cheese, and several former members of his administration begged us not to vote for him. Attendance at his rallies dwindled, and hundreds of people left early while he rambled about Hannibal Lecter, sharks, and windmills. But now he wins the popular vote for the first time? What the fuck?

I certainly hope the possibility of fraud is being investigated. I said possibility. I'm not asserting that there was fraud just because I hate the outcome, and if no evidence of fraud turns up, I don't advocate for liberals to storm the Capitol and file scores of baseless lawsuits. But the results are sketchy and should be investigated. Republicans constantly accuse Democrats of the things they do themselves, and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if this were another such instance, especially since they have a 900-page blueprint for creating a dictatorship now that they control all three branches of government. It's not hyperbole, it's not a conspiracy theory, it's right there in their own words that have been available to the public for a long time. If we don't have a Christofascist theocracy within the next four years, it sure as hell won't be because Republicans didn't try. It will be because Americans stopped them.

Getting high the night before the eleaction to calm my nerves was a mistake. I should have gotten high the night of the election. I thought I'd want to be sober while I watched the results, and then Harris would win and my stress would dissipate. Instead, as I feared, I became suicidal for two days. When I was high, as I often do when I'm high, I grappled with my mortality. The high is more intense every time, and this time, I thought my heart might stop at any moment, and I felt so out of my body that I felt like if I relaxed completely, I would drift away from it and possibly never return. I had a one-sided argument that I couldn't die yet because reasons. I told this unseen and possibly imaginary something that if I could die temporarily and have a near-death experience right now, that would be great, but I didn't trust it to bring me back. And there was a whole other thing where I wondererd if the water heater on the other side of my bedroom wall would explode and kill or horribly disfigure me, but I decided that I trusted the homeowner to keep it well-maintained, so that was fine. I also heard a helicopter that sounded close enough to crash into the house. Anyway, the high was pure bliss, and if that's what actual death feels like, sign me up.

But instead I was in this reality where the worst person in the world just became my president again, this time with virtually no guardrails. I had to talk to a suicide hotline and several friends to upgrade to feeling nothing. (I also mentioned it to the aforementioned family member, who responded, "You could move to Costa Rica.") Of course my friends wanted me to stay alive so they wouldn't be sad, but they were miserable too, and none of them could promise me that the rest of my life won't suck. I do believe my life will get much worse next year when Trump raises the price of everything with his dumbass tariffs and puts an anti-vaxxer with a brain worm in charge of healthcare and food. My life will continue to get worse in the long term as Republicans gleefully shit all over the environment. Depending on how bad things get, Trump may run out of Democrats, journalists, and late show hosts to persecute and send the military after me for criticizing him since 2015. But I'm not just worried for myself, because unlike my conservative family members (yes, if you're reading this, I'm calling you out again. Bite me), I'm capable of empathy for people who are different from me. I feel deeply for everyone who's explicitly targeted by the GOP's Christofascist agenda and has more reason to be afraid than I do. Empathy is excruciating. I can understand why my family members and everyone else who voted against their fellow humans' lives prefer not to be burdened by it.

But of course, Trump voters have metaphorically stabbed themselves too. They lost big on Tuesday. They just don't know it yet. They're about to learn the hard way just how few shits their orange savior gives about them, and when they do, I hope I'm not too mature to rub it in their faces. At this point they have no excuse for not knowing better.

Beyond the specifics, though, what really crushed my soul and sapped my will to live was the realization of just how fundamentally vile this country is. It could have shown girls that they can do anything, but instead it showed boys that they can lie, cheat, and rape to their hearts' content and become the most powerful person in the world with no qualifications. I thought fascism would be defeated with a few elections and a lot of funerals. Now I see that it's deeply woven into the fabric of American society. I had heard that Gen Z boys were more racist and sexist than previous generations because of influencers like Andrew Taint and Nick Fuentes who for some reason haven't been shot yet, but I had no idea how bad it was. I suppose I should have guessed. A few months ago I documented my own experience with speaking out against sexist comments on social media and immediately being targeted by scores of men who accused me of trying to get laid because that's the only motivation they could imagine for treating women like people, but I thought they were a really loud and annoying minority. The phrase "Your body, my choice" went viral after the election. I recommend that all women carry firearms. Women aren't the source of this country's gun violence problem, so I have few concerns about them abusing said firearms. Also, doxxing white supremacists is not wrong. I don't 'understand why that's even a debate.

Speaking of cesspools, I just joined the mass migration from Twitter (where I've been suspended since June for refusing to delete my response to a racist who said that Juneteenth isn't a real holiday) to Bluesky, which is like Twitter except it isn't crawling with Nazis and isn't owned by a douchebag billionaire (yet). Actually, the CEO, Jay Graber, is a woman of color. Again, as I said last week, that in itself wouldn't be a sufficient reason to use the site, but it is a nice bonus that I get to support diversity in the software industry at the same time that I'm not supporting Elon Musk. I've already reunited with some of my ex-Mormon and progressive Mormon friends from Twitter, but the conservative Mormons who base their entire personalities on hating gay people and apostates are conspicuously absent. The downside is that I don't know who I'm supposed to argue with now. My feed is full of anti-Trump sentiments, inspirational quotes, Nancy comics, Homestar Runner screenshots, pictures of astronomy, and pictures of people's pets. How am I supposed to work up any righteous indignation over that?

This week has been a bleeping roller coaster. First, the highlights.

I've been trying to write some prequel short stories to go with my recently published novel, Crusaders of the Chrono-Crystal. It's been very difficult because I write two sentences, they're garbage, and I have no motivation to continue. This is not a new problem, so I thought back to how I've managed to finish short stories in the past. I remembered that in most cases, I wrote them for college classes, and the pressure of the deadlines and having to share with my peers eventually overrode the writer's block. So I sought out a local writing group and attended my first meeting this week. It was a nice meeting, but the real fun happened when several of us went to dinner afterward. I say "us" as if I'm part of the group already. Well, I feel like I am. They were very welcoming. The leader of the group is this surprisingly boisterous, outgoing guy who tells funny stories and keeps looking around to make sure you're paying attention to his funny stories and feeling included. He said traditional publishing is dying, so I don't need to feel self-conscious about self-publishing, and he suggested that I publish each of my short stories individually before publishing them in an anthology, to boost myself in Amazon's algorithms and drive more people back to my novel. Genius. Except now I have to somehow get fourteen cover arts instead of one.

I got a publicist for my recently published novel, Crusaders of the Chrono-Crystal. He reached out to me on Facebook and offered me a huge discount on his standard rate. Of course I was suspicious, but I verified that he's a real person who's worked with authors who have far more sales and reviews than I could ever get on my own. I don't have whatever it takes to make the universe stop ignoring me. I had a strategy of posting on this blog every week, building a following, and then telling my following to follow my book when I published it, but after almost nine years of posting on this blog every week, that strategy is clearly a bust. Just recently, I thought maybe after some of my friends buy the book and tell other people about how great it is, it will spread organically without the need for a bunch of advertising, and I guess it's too soon to rule that out, but there's just too much competition in self-publishing for that to be feasible. I need someone who isn't invisible to make me not invisible. So even though I'm in literal poverty, I took the chance. In theory I'll make that money back with interest.

Now, the anti-highlight.
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A school filed an incident report against me because I yelled at some students to leave me alone and threatened to call the police if they didn't stop harassing me in the bathroom. I misspoke. I didn't mean call the police at the station, I meant talk to the one officer who's already at that school every day because it's a shithole. Seriously, this school has hands-down the worst behavior problems of any I've been to, and I try to avoid going there, but I was just substituting for an art teacher, so I thought that would be fine, and it mostly was, except for this part. So someone from the staffing place called me to tell me that she would send me an email to go to an online calendar to make an appointment to talk to someone else about it. Literally the first opening on the calendar was eight days later. I called the person back to tell her that, and the number was no longer in service. I responded to her email to tell her that, and she ignored me. So for a minimum of eight days, I can't work, and this job that already wasn't paying me enough to survive will pay me nothing. And then maybe they'll just go ahead and decide to fire me anyway. I had an assignment scheduled for this entire week, filling in for a special education aide who's going on spring break from USU. Now that's canceled, and the school won't likely be able to replace me on such short notice, and it will assume that I'm to blame. I have an eight-day assignment scheduled beginning next week at the youth facility where only people who have done the special training can substitute, and maybe they'll reinstate me fast enough to do that if they don't fire me, but I'm not counting on it. They're clearly in no rush.

For the second time in a month, I became suicidal and only held on for the sake of the people who love me. I see no purpose for and no end to my suffering anymore. I hate this job and I hate having no rights. I doubled my efforts and lowered my standards in the job search. I'd rather use my Master's degree to stock shelves at Costco than be bullied by students, stabbed in the back by two-faced administrators, and kicked around like a lump of dog shit by apathetic bosses who wouldn't likely appreciate it if someone stopped them from earning money and ignored them for over a week, but of course nobody would do that to them because they, unlike me, have rights. I'm stable now. I'm doing the work to change my life into something that I don't hate. But because the world is fundamentally unfair, there's no guarantee that I'll succeed in doing that. Ever. Hence my depression and lack of will to live. There is one tantalizing prospect that I should hear about within the immediate future, but I don't want to jinx it by talking about it.

Also, Daylight Savings Time started today, and I hate that so much that I got in trouble for threatening violence against it.

Crisis struck last weekend. Prudence, which it runs out I am capable of possessing once in a while, dictates that for the time being I keep it to myself apart from a half dozen friends and all of my Fiction Writing classmates who deserved an excuse for why my second story is garbage compared to the first. For a few moments after seeing the news I never wanted to see, I tried to wrap my brain around the fact that my life and my faith were about to shatter beyond repair. Then I ran into my bedroom to pray but discovered that I couldn't speak. I tried to pray silently but discovered that I couldn't think. So my prayer was just Help me, help me, help me, help me, help me.

I reached out to this guy in the ward that I know a little bit for a priesthood blessing. I didn't want to be too much of a burden on the guys I usually ask. While waiting for him to get back to me and then waiting for him to arrive, I cooked a frozen pizza and force-fed myself half of it, despite my complete lack of appetite, because I was starving. I offered the rest to him when he arrived, and he said it would be a good idea to make himself eat, and he appeared to have an even harder time doing so than I did. He wasn't doing well. He asked if he could stick around for a while after the blessing so he didn't have to be home alone. He asked if I've ever had questions about my faith, and I outlined the most recent one in very vague terms. I didn't want to tell him about my situation because I just wanted comfort from the blessing; I didn't want to open the channels for advice that I wasn't ready to accept. And he gave me the shortest blessing I've ever gotten and I appreciated that. He cried afterward. I think it helped him more than me. So that was cool.

I invited him to accompany me to Come Follow Me with people from the ward. While there, I went through mood swings and wasn't in hell the entire time. I sat there for half an hour while two girls and four guys discussed the proper care and washing of different kinds of hair, a topic that I found altogether uninteresting but still better than being home alone, and then as I was poised to go be home alone again some others arrived very late and we played Werewolf. I threw myself into it with gusto. When I figured out that my in-game lover was a werewolf, I protected her with as much zeal as I would a real-life lover who murdered people. When others falsely accused and killed me, I was only upset that it would lead to her death as well. I can be selfless like that.

I didn't look forward to bedtime because past experience had given me some idea of what I was in for. I'd gotten the obligatory blessing, and I would pray, and I would get sufficiently calm and peaceful to fall asleep, and I would wake up an hour or two later in a cold sweat with my heart doing its best impression of the ungodly screaming over the bridge of Rammstein's creepy and inappropriate song "Mein Teil", and there would be no more calm or peace or sleeping for the remainder of the night. Well, I did wake up and fail to get back to sleep until the sun rose, but the rest didn't happen. I didn't feel good by any means, but I felt all right. I soon came to the realization that God was shielding me from the worst of the pain. And He continued to shield me throughout the week, and I thanked Him and prayed more and tried harder and got better. Wednesday morning I woke up from a nightmare that ruined most of my day, Thursday morning I woke up from a nightmare that ruined the next half hour, and Friday morning I woke up from a nightmare that I was able to put out of my mind right away.

It's not like I'd never thought to pray for comfort before. I'd just rarely noticed any of this magnitude, no matter how hard I pleaded. I don't know what's so different this time, if the nature of the situation has made me more desperate or more deserving or what. I do know that whatever suffering remains is a part of life that I shouldn't try to avoid or expect to be exempted from. Now I feel like I'm in a good place where I haven't stopped hoping for and believing in one specific outcome based on God's previous communications to me no matter how unlikely it looks at the moment, but I'm also patient and trying to be open to any outcome and the necessary understanding that will come with it. I know, I hate having to be so vague too. I'm annoying myself.

One thing I've consciously done to enhance this effect is listen to a playlist I started nearly two years ago, which has taken on ever greater significance. Sometimes, like in the mornings when I wake up feeling like a dead battery and vulnerable to all manner of negative emotions, songs like "Head Above Water" and "Echoes of Andromeda" and "Boasting" have returned to my head.

I canceled my Tuesday morning classes so I wouldn't have to get out of bed until I felt like it, which greatly disappointed my students, I bet.

My ex-neighbor and dear friend Steve drove up from Salt Lake on Monday evening. We talked a little about what happened, but mostly watched Disney+. We watched Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, and then some of my favorite episodes of The Simpsons - "Bart Sells His Soul", "Miracle on Evergreen Terrace", "The Springfield Files", "Lisa the Skeptic", "Bart on the Road", and possibly another that I forget at the moment. He went home around noon on Tuesday, which I later realized was his birthday. He gave up a third of his birthday for me. And I couldn't believe it was two years to the day since we went to see Jojo Rabbit, aka one of the finest films ever made. Where does the time go?

My classmate and colleague Kylie also offered to hang out, so after our class on Tuesday I went up to ask if she was still good to hang out that evening. As soon as I started to speak, she put her hand on mine, and I thought about how USU's sexual misconduct prevention trainings told us not to touch someone without permission, even though we know full well that's not how neurotypical people live their lives. And I thought about my old friend Bracelets who used to touch me on the shoulder a lot until she saw the Temple Grandin movie and decided I didn't want to be touched. And I thought about a girl in my ward who came up to give the closing prayer after I had spoken in sacrament meeting, and touched my knee as she walked by. I think, in fairness, that this isn't just about neurotypicals vs. autistics but about women vs. men. Because women are raised to be more affectionate and nurturing, I think they can touch men's hands or shoulders or knees without these automatically coming across as romantic or sexualized gestures, whereas the reverse is not true.

I remembered when a friend in high school was crying about her grandmother dying, and I needed to comfort her but I didn't know what to do but I didn't want her to think I didn't care so I finally admitted, "I'm trying to decide if I should put my arm around you or not," and that made her laugh through her tears a little so I guess it was better than just putting my arm around her. Speaking of dead grandmothers, I was at the funeral of mine a couple months ago, seated right next to my grandfather, who howled with grief a couple of times. If ever there were appropriate contexts to touch someone without permission, these were them. And it was still hard, it still rebelled against my conditioning, to put my hand on his wrist. And then I felt awkward. Should I take it off now? What if he wants to move his arm? I'm not really letting him move his arm. I envied a little Kylie's ability to put her hand on mine all casual-like just because she knew I was having a rough time.

I couldn't think of anything more exciting to do than watch a movie, but fortunately for me, Kylie hasn't seen any Star Wars except for Rogue One and both of SNL's Undercover Bosses skits with Kylo Ren, so I picked the original Star Wars movie to guarantee that I would get invited back at least eight more times. She observed that Darth Vader is a jerk for kidnapping his own daughter, that stormtroopers don't aim very well, and that the use of computers in warfare was a pretty new idea in 1977 and that's probably why the movie was so popular. After the next movie, she reiterated that Darth Vader is a jerk for strangling his own men, and also reflected on the lack of women and racial diversity that's been somewhat fixed in the more recent movies. She said Princess Leia is an interesting character - specifically, it's interesting that she's a strong character but she still has to be sexualized. I hate myself for using that word twice in one post. Anyway, Kylie wasn't judging; she said the movies were fair for their time. I should have apologized in advance for what happens to Leia in the next one.

She made me watch the SNL skits, and I made her watch the Robot Chicken sketch that introduced the world to Gary the stormtrooper.

I also talked to my old friend Eliana on the phone a couple times, and the first conversation mostly turned into her complaining about the Church. Kylie has left the Church too, but we have nuanced and mutually respectful discussions about it, and I look forward to reading her folklore paper about how patriarchal blessings might have roots in the Smith family's fascination with folk magic. When Eliana left a couple years ago she still believed in the Book of Mormon and stuff but didn't trust the leadership because of their past mistakes and current LGBTQ policies. Now she sees nothing good, wholesome, or true in any of it. I didn't try to argue and I hoped that my listening allowed her to let off some steam. But I kind of wanted to ask, Can you live with yourself knowing that I'm still in the Church because of you? I used to tell her about all kinds of issues that bothered my testimony, and she was so chill about all of it and confident that the Church was where God wanted her to be. She was my anchor many times. You never can tell what the future holds, can you? Anyway, we don't talk much anymore but I appreciate that she's still there for me.

For Thanksgiving, I was going to visit a nearby great aunt whom I shamefully never visit because I'm always welcome but that means I have to kind of invite myself at any given time, but she got sick. So I went to my bishop's house. Although I haven't always cast him in the most flattering light, he is a great guy. I wish I could say the same about my last bishop. Some others from the ward also showed up, and someone else in the ward had a friend who wasn't in the ward but was going to come, but he went to the wrong house so we started without him. He showed up fifteen minutes in and guess what? He was one of my students. So he saw me without a mask on and sat right next to me and that's kind of funny, isn't it? I hope he didn't take it as a personal jab when I said that I like teaching college students because if they don't want to be there, they don't show up.

Today I tried really hard to pay attention in church and be open to the Spirit, and I did pretty well. I didn't even close myself off when a couple of people in Elders' Quorum said a couple of things about gender roles that made me want to stab my eyes out.

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,

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.
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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.

Ventana Student Housing in Orem, Utah learned the hard way last year that evicting a student for vocalizing suicidal tendencies - yes, in case you missed it, that's literally exactly what they did, no exaggeration - is not okay. They experienced a tsunami of thoroughly deserved backlash in which I was proud to play some small part. They responded to this backlash by refusing to answer the phone, deleting comments from their Facebook page, and generally removing any question as to whether they had a legitimate side of the story that would make them look less evil. Now it brings me great joy to know that the student, Austyn Sorenson, and the Disability Law Center of Utah are suing them for this blatant violation of the federal Fair Housing Act. If she hadn't chosen to sue them, nobody else could have done so, and they would escape the legal consequences that they deserve on top of the suffering they've already faced. Unfortunately the law doesn't provide for the management to be imprisoned for life and have their company confiscated and given to actual humans, but at least I can be satisfied that they're not having a fun time right now.

In a Salt Lake Tribune editorial, Robert Gehrke summed it up pretty well: "Unless you’re vying for the title of 'Utah’s Worst Person,' it’s hard to comprehend that your reaction when someone comes to you and tells you a young person is considering suicide would be to evict that person from his or her apartment." Indeed. I read another editorial months ago about the ignorance around mental health, which is a legitimate problem, but not relevant to this case. Evicting someone for vocalizing suicidal tendencies isn't ignorance, it's sociopathy. I also appreciate that Gehrke mocked the author of the eviction notice for writing "undo" instead of "undue", one of three spelling errors that I noted in my previous evisceration of that damnable document. Since then my English graduate instructor training has taught me not to criticize people's spelling and grammar, but I'm still going to make an exception for this person and I hope Beth can forgive me for that. I only criticized people's spelling and grammar mistakes when they were being jerks anyway. And people like this person, and everyone else at Ventana Student Housing who either signed off on it or did nothing to stop it, are the reason hell exists.

Yesterday I went to the park to read The Merlin Effect, one of the scores of books I've acquired over the years and never read because I was too busy wasting time on social media. It's part fantasy, part sci-fi, so I could kind of justify reading it for my thesis even though it wasn't on my list. It's very creative, tying together a bunch of ideas and plot hooks into a strange and satisfying whole, and I really enjoyed it even while silently critiquing its shortcomings, such as entire chapters of expository dialogue. (I have to notice those things for my own improvement as a writer.) I just breezed through it and didn't count down the pages until I could be done like I did with some of the books on my list.

A group from Gospel Peace Church had set up a pavilion in the park with free Popsicles, face painting, and cornhole. I got invited over there twice. It's an evangelical church that's just been planted in Logan a few weeks ago as a spinoff of a church with a similar name in Salt Lake City. (Proactive church planting is often a far more effective method for growth than my own church's preferred method of waiting until congregations reach a certain size, which may or may not ever happen, and then splitting them.) Leadership had come from as far away as Michigan, so I can only assume that this church was planted specifically as an outreach to Mormons, whom many if not most evangelicals assume are all going to the same place as the management of Ventana Student Housing. Of course they asked about my religious background and I told them, and they were chill about it and didn't criticize. They said their LDS neighbors are all really nice and the temple grounds are beautiful.

I hope they stay that way. I hope they aren't like those guys who used to set up on USU campus and seemed far less interested in promoting their own beliefs than in tearing down other people's beliefs. There's a big difference. By all means, promote your beliefs, explain why you find them credible and compelling and whatnot, and let people decide for themselves whether they then find your beliefs more credible than their current beliefs or lack thereof. I have no objection to that. I have no objection to everyone enjoying the same right to proselyte as my own church's missionaries - but my own church's missionaries aren't trained to go around poking holes in other churches' theology or history. Taking that approach is far less likely to persuade someone than to make them think (correctly) that you're a dick. Atheists who go around social media comments trying to deconvert people from belief in general, offering literally nothing in exchange, are even more obnoxious.

I also welcome any increase in Utah's religious diversity. Even believing, as I do, that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the "most true" religion, I don't want it to monopolize any area because that results in too many of its members becoming arrogant narrow-minded jerks (as is human nature with any lack of diversity) - and since it explicitly teaches that people who don't join it in mortality can still do so in the next life, there's no downside. (That's often the elephant in the room with religious diversity. "I love you and legitimately respect your differences in belief, but according to my beliefs you're still going to burn in hell forever." My church's workaround for this problem is one of my favorite things about it.) And if they do end up pulling their future membership from my church's current membership, oh well - my church has plenty of people that I would be happy to give away.