Trump voters getting what they deserve is one of the things that keeps me going. Some of them have already had their lives ruined by the things he said he was going to do before they voted for him, and they're distraught because they voted for him thinking he would only ruin other people's lives. They thought they were special. They thought the universe revolved around them. For example:

"You were only supposed to fire all the other government employees, not me. There must be some mistake." And this self-absorbed moron (whose name I wouldn't have censored if I had gotten the screenshot myself) continuing to kiss Trump's ass and think he gives a shit about them is one of the most pathetic things I've ever seen. Wah, wah, wah, go pull yourself up by your bootstraps, numb nuts. I haven't felt less sorry for someone since that CEO got shot.

Speaking of political stupidity, a couple of people told me the other day that I'm part of the problem for failing to recognize that both sides are equally bad. Those people won't read this, but I want to set the record straight for my own satisfaction. I'm not a Democrat. I defy you to find a single instance of me gushing about how great the Democrat Party is. It's not even left-wing by the standards of everywhere else in the world. Nonetheless, it is light-years better than the party that embraces literal fucking Nazis and does everything in its power to make life worse for everyone who's not a billionaire. The Republicunt Party is in its own special league of awful. It's a cancer. Even the Democrats' stance on Gaza, a major stain on their record that dissuaded some left-wingers from voting for Harris, is light-years better than Trump's final solution. Both sides are bad, but thinking that they're equally bad is delusional. 

Speaking of bad people, this is literally me.

I love people. Because I love people, I don't love people who hate people. It's not complicated. It's not hypocritical. There's no contradiction between me simultaneously preaching love and encouraging transphobes to kill themselves. The obsessive and senseless persecution of transgender people is a huge reason why the Republicunt Party is light-years worse than the Democrat Party, by the way. And get this, the last transphobe I told to jump in front of a truck (about an hour ago) was a bisexual woman who inexplicably thinks that her alternative lifestyle is entitled to respect while she bullies other people for being different than her. The Republicunts will eventually come for her too. No great loss, but I hope things don't get to that point.

There's another series of nationwide protests tomorrow, Not My President's Day, sponsored by a group called Refuse Fascism. See their website for more information and show up if you can. This group has the slogan, "In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Accept a Fascist America." It's one of the least catchy slogans i've ever heard, but I don't disagree with it. My proximity to the Capitol and my self-determined work schedule make attending protests very convenient. I believe now that this is why the universe put me here. It's very important to protest and not just hunker down and accept the stream of shit coming out of Washington. This regime isn't nearly as strong as it's trying to make you think. It will break, hopefully before it destroys civilization.

​The other day I saw my brother-in-law on Instagram gloating about the richest man in the world illegally cutting off funds for millions of people in poverty. That was the moment I realized I officially hate most of my family. The cherry on top, of course, is that today he went to church and pretended to worship Jesus. I'm glad my church doesn't make sociopaths feel comfortable. This realization hurt like hell, but I got high and got over it by the next day. It's not like I had real relationships with most of my family in the first place. I currently feel closer to the great-grandmother I saw for a couple of hours every other year before she died in 2010 than I ever have to my parents. And it's not like I'm the first person who's experienced this. The civil war tore lots of families apart. I know my dad would have supported the confederacy because he's obsessed with states' rights and doesn't let marginalized people's suffering bother him.

On a more positive note, this past week I got to participate in two protests against everything most of my family stands for. Thanks to my self-determined work schedule and proximity to the Capitol, I can go to protests whenever I want. Here I am on Wednesday with my "White Dudes for Harris" cap. I had to get more use out of it somehow.

There was some unfortunate division after the protest had officially ended and most people had left. A transgender person got up and complained about all the American flags they'd seen, and they said they thought the only reason to bring American flags to a protest was to burn them, and they said we shouldn't be proud to be Americans, and they said the US has committed genocide against transgender people, and they chanted "FUCK AMERICA!" Two girls with American flags were still there, standing in the back, and they looked at each other awkwardly and soon left. I regret not talking to them to assuage any embarrassment they may have felt, and I hope they haven't been alienated from activism for good. I won't say the speaker was wrong to feel the way they did about the US. I understand. My faith in its fundamental goodness died on November 5. But my feeling is that this country exists, it will probably continue to exist for the foreseeable future in one form or another, and it will either get better or worse. Chanting "FUCK AMERICA!" won't make it better but will alienate people who would otherwise love to help make it better. Countries suck, all right? That's just how they are.

Oh yeah, and this picture went kind of viral. In case anyone is wondering, it's chalk, and it got washed off. As soon as it was discovered, the event organizer chewed us all out and said that vandalism is unacceptable and makes us look bad. It made for a badass picture, though. And the Venn diagram of people who will be outraged by this and people who think the January 6 rioters did nothing wrong is almost a perfect circle.

As I left the Capitol, I passed by like five counterprotestors, two of whom were filming us. I'm sure the footage of me and others flipping them off is now on Twitter with the caption "sO mUcH fOr ThE tOlErAnT lEfT." I don't care. They're owning themselves by showing the size of the anti-Trump movement in one of the reddest states in the US. I also knew as I marched that there was a non-zero chance of a MAGAt plowing his truck into us. That didn't happen, but at one point I saw someone drive really close and heard a thunk and a "That's what you get." I thought the driver had run over someone's foot, but apparently what actually happened is that someone punched his mirror off.

My old college friend Cece was there too. I hadn't seen her in... ten years? I don't remember.

Many of us returned to the Capitol afterward. I got a picture of my second-favorite sign. My first, which I regrettably didn't get, was "Super Callous Fragile Racist Sexist Nazi POTUS."

So yeah, that was pretty great. Solidarity is how we'll survive the foreseeable future. (I want to say "the next four years," but that may be too optimistic.) We won't obey in advance. We won't be silenced. Nothing short of death will stop me from proesting again on March 1. Also, to get there and back, I rode the city train for the first time, and that was fun. I feel blessed to be able to ride a train.

On an unrelated note, this piece of shit came at me on Facebook the other day with "Democrats don't even know what a woman is" etc. etc. I contacted his fianceé and his employer. This is North Carolina, so probably neither of them care, but fingers crossed.

This exchange took place on a Salt Lake Tribune op-ed by a woman describing the intense misogyny she experiences in Utah.

There were a few reasons for me to virtue signal like this - to validate the author, to call out the jackass men in the comments who were already claiming she made it up, and to let women know that they have an ally. I know it's very psychologically draining for them to not see any men coming to their aid. People talk about virtue signaling like it's worse than actually being a bigot, but up to a point, I like it when people signal their virtues so I know whether or not I want to associate with them at all. Obviously people can lie, but in my experience, shitty people on the internet don't try very hard to hide their true colors, especially since the election. What a coincidence.

It's beyond pathetic that he took the time to write all that and pretended like he was speaking for a broad coalition of people. I was planning to present this comment here, without censoring his name, as objective proof that not every human life has value. But then: plot twist.

Now I have to give him the benefit of the doubt because I don't know much about fentanyl. I've only had enough experience to be confident that the safer and more legal drugs I use can't make me do, say, or even think anything that's against my values. I don't think they actually control me at all. They alter my consciousness and make my agency feel weird in a way I can't put into words, but I still do and say what I want to do. See, for example, the text messages I wrote to a friend the third time I got high. I let myself say weird things because I knew she'd find them hilarious, but I didn't say anything inappropriate or evil. Last time I followed a prompting to message an acquaintance from high school whose partner killed himself, and I didn't say anything weird. I didn't tell her I was high. I didn't tell her that while I was looking at Messenger, contemplating what to say, tears came to my eyes as I thought, He loved you so much. He never wanted to hurt you. He never would have done it if he'd known how much it would hurt you. Please don't be mad at him.

When I'm high, I feel more loving and more empathetic. For example, a while ago I had been arguing on Instagram with a Mormon teenager about the racism in the Book of Mormon. He had started it by making a snarky comment on an ex-Mormon page, and I wasn't actually rude to him at all. I stuck with dispassionate facts and logic. He stopped responding, which I took to mean that I'd won. But when I got high later, I felt so empathetic toward him. He was just a kid trying to defend his beliefs, and I'd probably caused him unpleasant cognitive dissonance that could potentially spiral into a full-blown existential crisis. So I said something conciliatory. Then he, for some reason, looked at my profile and asked why I supported Kamala, and I ignored him instead of telling that was a stupid thing for someone who supported a rapist and felon to ask.

I know alcohol lowers people's inhibitions and brings out more of their true selves. Good people don't become abusive when they get drunk. I had a friend who asked me to hug his fiancée while he was drunk. If Kush Kubes are the same, then my true self is love. I'd like to think so. I know that might sound far-fetched based on some of my blog posts. But look, I love people without regard to race, nationality, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, or taste in music. I don't love people who hurt me or other people. I don't love Trump supporters because their idiotic choices are going to make my life and, frankly, most Americans' lives much worse. I don't love Trump supporters because they're either bigots and fascists or willing allies of bigots and fascists. That's a shortcoming on my part, but it's not hypocrisy. I hope to get over it someday. I know most people think they're doing the right thing. I know there are all kinds of psychological reasons why humans think rationally. I just don't understand why grown adults with unrestricted internet access are easier to brainwash than first graders, and I haven't yet found a compelling reason to not be pissed off by it.

After spending Thanksgiving alone - which was fine, really; I'm not asking for sympathy - I went to the mall on Black Friday to feed off human energy. Lo and behold, I noticed a kiosk that sells Kush Kubes, and they were $25, which is $10 cheaper than at the smoke shop where I got mine, and the lady said that was the regular price and not a Black Friday sale. I got two bags. I should have gotten fifty bags in case Trump's tariffs drive the prices up next month. She was going to let me have them without showing my ID, but I showed it to her anyway. I hope she remembers that in the future and doesn't get busted by an undercover cop. She had an accent, so she was probably from a European country where children are allowed to have Delta-9.

I talked to a Mormon friend while she was traveling, and like every time I talk to her, she asked with some amusement if I'd been on a trip lately. On the one hand, she's an orthodox Mormon with a literal belief in prophets and the Book of Mormon, but on the other hand, she's politically progressive, she doesn't always wear her garments (which I noticed by accident, I swear), she tolerates me sending her rants about the church, and she tacitly encourages my drug use. She was traveling to meet her sister's girlfriend's family for the first time. She said that in Utah she felt awkward about mentioning that her sister had a girlfriend, but she'd gotten over it and found people more accepting than she expected. We agree that same-sex relationships aren't a big deal. I mentioned the cognitive dissonance I'd felt as a Mormon being told that they were sinful even though they didn't seem sinful. She admitted that she's currently having that same cognitive dissonance. She used the term "nuanced" to describe herself for the first time I can remember.

I just thought that was cool. I'm happy for her. And I don't want her to have to leave the church if she doesn't want to, but this anecdote just convinces me even more that it will have to change to keep that from happening. She's not some uber-feminist who wants the priesthood or some cultural member who takes the Book of Mormon as inspired ficion. She's just a normal person who, even if she hasn't said these words out loud yet, knows that the church's positions on LGBTQ+ people are wrong because she's actually met LGBTQ+ people. The church will either become more or less hostile to people like her over time. Right now it seems determined to only cater to its most bigoted and closed-minded membersm. It seems determined to make its tent as small as possible. That might be a side effect of most of its top leaders being white men older than my grandparents.

In summary, I hope everyone had a good Thanksgiving. Next year will be rough. Enjoy the holidays while you can.

​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?

Months ago, my great-aunt told me that my great-grandmother loved me so much and said I was a good listener and had a deep soul. That came as a surprise because I saw my great-grandmother for a few hours every other year, I don't remember ever having a conversation with her, and she died too young to read my blog. She wasn't wrong, though. Since that revelation, I've become more intrigued by her. I prayed to her once to see if anything would happen, I tried to communicate with her telepathically while I was high, and this past week I read a scrapbook that she made probably in the early 1960s. Kept on a shelf in my grandfather's house alongside several binders full of her journal, it's an unusual scrapbook with far more text than pictures. It doesn't contain a single picture of her. It doesn't so much as mention her own wedding, though it contains invitations for other people's weddings and baby showers. She spelled her name, Geraldine, as Jeryldeane or Geryl Deane, and sometimes people addressed her as Deane, though I remember my great-grandfather calling her Jerry. Since she was far from illiterate, I can only assume this was either some kind of joke or an attempt to mimic Shakespeare's inconsistent spelling of his own name. Also, sometimes she used her parents' last name, and sometimes she used her mother's maiden name. I don't know if that was some proto-feminist thing or what. Those names are hyphenated in FamilySearch.

​I took the liberty of photographing a few pages.

Her testimony touched me so much that I decided to return to the LDS Church and share this faith-promoting story with an apostle so he can share it in General Conference. Just kidding. As far as testimonies go, though, I like it. She acknowledges that her first reason for being a member of the LDS Church is that she was born into it. Most people who aren't born into it didn't and don't ever join, especially now that they can debunk its foundational historical claims with a few minutes of internet research. Then she says "I believe" and "I feel," not "I know" or "I know beyond a shadow of a doubt" or "I know with every fiber of my being." Throughout my life I've heard hundreds of Mormons say "I know" about things they didn't know just because they got the same warm, peaceful feelings in their church meetings that people get in every religion on Earth. I probably did the same once or twice. And in her third and fourth reasons, she basically just says that it works for her. She doesn't talk about its actual truth claims at all. That's respectable enough. Nowadays, of course, fewer women and girls are satisfied with the opportunities for self-development that the LDS Church gives them. The secular world, at least in theory, allows them to do anything men do - we'll see in a little over a week whether that includes being president of the United States - while the church won't even let them pass around a tray with little pieces of bread.

I'm now itching to find this manuscript, edit or finish it if necessary, and publish it. I hope it still exists. I can think of few things cooler than helping an ancestor posthumously fulfill her dream. It's kind of like the book/movie Holes. But what name should I put on the cover? Geryl Deane? Jeryldeane?

A letter was like an email, but on paper.

She would have been 17 or 18 when she wrote this for school. I have to say, it's dang impressive for a white girl in the 1940s who had probably never seen a black person in person. It makes me very proud of her. It gives her something in common with her future husband, who, I'm told, befriended a black man in the army after the black man walked into the mess hall and all the other white men got up and left. Here, she recognizes that segregation is inherently discriminatory, twelve years before the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that and at least thirty-six years before her church did. Even when LDS prophets and apostles paid lip service to racial equality, they opposed racial integration because it could lead to marriages between white people and black people, which would contaminate the white people's children with the curse that God had placed on black people. I'm dying to know if their bigotry ever caused her cognitive dissonance. Speaking of caste systems, Bruce R. McConkie was so racist that he included an entry for that term, which wasn't in the Mormon lexicon before or since, in his first edition of Mormon Doctrine in 1958.

What a delightful sense of humor she had. Mixed in with the hyperbole, of course, is a scathing critique of the American education system that remains just as valid 82 years later. Wait, that means more time has elapsed since she wrote this than had elapsed since the start of the Civil War when she wrote this. Holy crap. By the way, "queer" meant "weird" in the 1940s. It transitioned to its current meaning during the following decade, which allowed for a double entendre in the title of Ruth Wallis' song "Queer Things," which was considered risque just for acknowledging that gay people existed.

When I try to express my feelings about music, I usually just say that I want to marry it and inject it into my veins at the same time. So she's got me beat there. I had some brief musical ambitions, but I was too lazy to put in the practice, and now I'm content with the amount of music that already exists. I'd love to find her music scrapbook. It reminds me of my hobby of curating all the music I like into alphabetical order in chronological playlists from 1885 to the present. And now I have a crazy thought. Sometimes Spotify has the wrong years on albums because it uses the year they were uploaded or the year they were re-released or whatever. Often it's obvious that the music is from a different decade, but not always. Sometimes I feel prompted to check for no discernible reason, and almost every time, I find a discrepancy when I do. It's seemed for a while now like God was guiding me in that regard while being absent from every other aspect of my life, but why should God give a crap about the accuracy of my playlists? So now I have the crazy thought that maybe it isn't God but my dead great-grandmother.

Oh yeah, it's almost Halloween, so that's an appropriate note to end on. Ghost. Scary. Boo.