Yesterday, the Russia-supported regime in Syria collapsed after well over a decade of civil war that the Western world had almost entirely forgotten about. Russia was unable to continue supplying the regime with weapons because it's getting destroyed by Ukraine. This is Assad day for Putin and a happy day for almost everyone else.

Also, I played with my adorable nieces today and saw the new one for the first time.

Also, Spotify Wrapped is out after two months of useless "When will Spotify Wrapped be out? We don't know" articles.

This year I listened for almost 93 days, two more days than last year. I gotta keep getting those numbers up. Xeen Music and the Beatles were in my top five artists last year as well. To reiterate, Xeen Music publishes the soundtracks of computer games from the 80s and 90s, and the Beatles are an obscure 60s British rock group. David Arkenstone is a prolific New Age composer whom my family often listened to on Sunday mornings and long car trips. Pete Seeger was a prolific communist folk singer who fortunately didn't live to see the rise of fascism in his home country. Steve Horelick is the main credited artist for the songs sung by the jukebox band on the old children's show "Shining Time Station," and he's in my top artists simply because I listened to every one of those songs after I found them, though I was actually looking (without success) for the original version of the show's theme song.

​My top songs:

Popularized by the dancing doll in the horror film "M3GAN." I used the 12" version because for any song worth listening to, longer is better.

This is hands down my favorite song from Robin Gibb's solo career, but it wasn't on Spotify for a while, so when it was, I listened to it several times.

The original version by My Mine isn't on Spotify, which is a crime against humanity. This version is fine, though.

With the guitars, the synths, the vocal style, and the iffy messaging around consent, this is the quintessential 80s rock song and deserves to be a lot more popular than it is.

This year, I randomly remembered this song from a trailer at the end of the Pokémon VHS tapes my mom threw away, and I nostalgia'd the hell out of it.

PSA: I watched "Heretic" the other day and intend on writing a full review in the near future, perhaps after I've seen it again. I'm not sure yet how I feel about the third act, but the characters are great. Hugh Grant is a phenomenal villain, somehow equal parts charming and douchey. The missionaries are intelligent and resourceful beneath their surface naivete. The themes provoke a lot of thought and discussion. I recommend.

To reiterate for anyone out of the loop, I get high for spiritual purposes. The recreational aspect is just a (substantial) bonus. I was going to write a whole post to go with this, but I simply can't find the motivation. Every time I get high is more intense than the last, and attempting to describe it would be hopeless. I guess people just need to experience it for themselves. Or not. I don't encourage anyone to do drugs. I just try to break down the stigma and share my experiences. At this point, I think I can say that the gummies have permanently altered my brain. I was willing to take that risk because it's not like my brain was in great condition to begin with. I laugh more often now. I've always appreciated humor, but it rarely surprised me enough to trigger the laughter reflex. Now I lie awake at night laughing as I reminisce about a Key and Peele video I watched the previous day. (The lying awake part isn't new. If I can't sleep either way, I may as well enjoy it.) So that's been a delightful surprise.

This time, I felt so blissful and so out of my body that I think my fear of death is almost entirely gone. In those moments it seemed so obvious to me that I don't have consciousness, I am consciousness, and when the body I'm stuck inside stops working, I'll go somewhere else and it won't be a big deal. Then I had all these other profound thoughts and felt moved to reach out to someone I hadn't talked to since high school whose partner killed himself. And I also listened to some music. While I listened to the Michael Stearns track "Encounter," I imagined myself in a field at night seeing a spaceship, then in the woods knowing there were aliens all around me. It wasn't like a real vivid hallucination, perhaps because I'm not a very visual thinker to begin with, but it was intense. I was thinking, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God... It was like a VR horror game that you know isn't real but still get you swept up in the moment. Frightening, but in the best way. And then I just listened to some other stuff that came to mind.

Yeah, as hard as I'm trying to be spiritual and enlightened and stuff, I haven't yet figured out how to generate any tolerance, patience, or love for pathologically stupid people whose pathological stupidity directly makes my life worse. (I did take the time to make sure this one was actually a Trump supporter and I wasn't misinterpreting soem kind of weird sarcasm.) And if being so unkind to her was wrong, why did it feel so, so good? By the way, this is probably the only purple-haired woman on Earth who supports Trump. She's probably unaware that right-wing misogynists use women with unnatural hair colors as a derisive shorthand for everything they hate about liberalism and/or feminism.

ADDENDUM: Literally today. These people have never had an original thought in their lives.

Speaking of "Fantastic Man," that's also the name of a cool documentary about him that I want to share with everyone but can't because I don't know who else cares about such a niche topic. I just think history and culture and music are really interesting. It's only half an hour, so you don't have much to lose. I found it by accident while trying to find information about "Crashes in Love," a movie he claimed to have made in 1977 that nobody has ever seen because that's just the kind of person he was.

Now here's a little mystery that's gnawed at me this week, and possibly nobody else in the world cares, but this is my blog and I'm going to write about it. When Catherine Warwick was fourteen, she sang a few songs on the soundtrack album for the game known as "Mother" in Japan and "EarthBound Beginnings" in the US. The most famous of these is "Pollyanna," a deliciously optimistic number that's perfect for forgetting about how screwed we are, but "Bein' Friends" is almost as good.

After that, she had a couple of unsuccessful attempts at a music career, then reportedly became a music teacher and started a family. I only know that because of my recent unsuccessful attempt to find out if she sang a couple of songs in the Lego Island Xtreme Stunts game. The uncredited singer really sounds like her to me. The voice is perhaps just a touch deeper, which makes sense because she would have been twenty-seven instead of fourteen. These songs were both as good as anything on the radio in the early 2000s, so you should listen to them even if you don't share my curiosity. The first is a chill techno track and the second is a sweet love ballad. Honestly, LEGO media from the 2000s included so much good music that deserves to be on streaming platforms but isn't.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the one my sibling sent.

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