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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I really couldn't care less about football. For any non-Americans who may happen to stumble on this post by accident, "football" in this context is not the game where you kick the ball with your foot, but one where you throw a ball with your hands. And the game stops every five seconds for reasons that are unclear to me. I cannot comprehend how anyone finds it exciting, but lots of men are obsessed with football and worship football players. I watched one football game in my first semester of college, and that was enough for me. But when I get the chance, I go to Super Bowl watch parties for the food, the commercials, and the company. Even when I was a Mormon and didn't believe that sports were keeping the Sabbath holy, I felt that bonding with friends was a more important consideration. The local YSA bishop evidently feels the same, as he's (unofficially, of course) hosting a watch party for the second year in a row.

I keep hearing about some stupid controversy over Taylor Swift dating a football player and getting too much attention at football games. I won't mind very much if all the footage of the Super Bowl is replaced with Taylor Swift's face. Actually, I'll pay a lot more attention if that happens. I don't know much about her as a person and I'm only a moderate fan of her music. I'd rather listen to any of her songs than watch a football game, but I don't understand why she's the second-most streamed artist in the world. Still, good for her. I remember when she was a teenager singing country songs about boys. When I heard her almost every day on Q Country 102.9, the school bus driver's favorite station, I never imagined how far she'd go. And if she's making MAGAs angry, she must be doing something very right. I think I know what it is. I've heard various things, but I think what really set these terrible people off the most was when she encouraged young women to vote. She didn't tell them how to vote, but it's a given that most young women will not vote for the senile orange fascist. His cult is scared. And it should be. All Americans, whether they realize it or not, will owe Taylor Swift a debt of gratitude if we just get a civil war after he loses instead of the nightmares he'll unleash if he wins.

I've spent most of my break from work adding to my Spotify playlists, bingeing the Muppets, reading a book about the history of psychedelic drugs in religion that so far has taught me more about spirituality and the human condition than 29 years in the LDS Church, celebrating that my asshole roommate is gone for a long while, and trying to get my money back from a scam company. I have plenty of time, and no excuse for not writing a long, thoughtful post except that I don't feel like it. I do feel like reminding people, however, that my humorous science fiction novel is out. I've sold at least three copies, and I don't know how many more because the purchases take over a week to show up. But I need to sell many, many copies, and I have no advertising budget, so I'm going to be a bit of a nuisance about it. This is my lifelong dream and my only hope of escaping from a life of mediocrity and borderline poverty we're talking about here.

ebook - reminder that this option is cheapest but gets me the most money because it has no printing costs.

paperback

hardcover

Now here's a nice underrated song for the new year. Of course, the numbers we attach to dates and times are really meaningless, and nothing is going to magically change at midnight tonight, but celebrate if you want to. Myself, I'm just happy to be at home with no responsibilities and no roommate.

I've completed the final pass through my novel, I just have some more description and other touch-ups to add, and then I hope to get it published by Friday, though that partially depends on whether the artist I hired comes through with the cover in time. If he doesn't, I'll be kind of pissed, but it won't be the end of the world. Anyway, I'm very sleep-deprived even by my standards. A couple of nights ago I had multiple nightmares, and I don't even know why. First, I either woke up and had sleep paralysis or dreamed I had sleep paralysis and then woke up. I imagined a shapeless white ghost thing coming through my window, and then a vague black demon thing standing over me while I couldn't move. I've read about sleep paralysis, and I don't believe in demons in large part because everything that people used to blame on them has been explained by natural phenomena like sleep paralysis, and it only lasted a few seconds, but it was still terrifying. Then I dreamed that lightning struck hundreds of times simultaneously, all over the sky, and I thought about how much it would hurt to get hit by lightning, and I wondered how anyone could survive that, and I remembered that I was more likely to get hit by lightning twice than attacked by a shark, and I decided that if I was going to get hit by lightning twice, I didn't want to live. It's weird how sometimes my thoughts in dreams are entirely coherent like that. It makes me think my brain is still working too hard.

So anyway, this post is basically filler to keep up my goal of writing one every week, and I will continue by mentioning some other things from my Spotify Wrapped that I would have mentioned last week if I hadn't been in a hurry. Spotify said that I'm a "Shapeshifter," and described my listening habits as "eclectic." That's exactly the word I would use to describe it. I also used to use that word for my political philosophy, but then I realized that one side of the spectrum is a much, much, much, much, much bigger problem than the other one. (Hint: it's the one dedicated to fighting against social equality and education.) These were my top five songs, none of which are by my top five artists, because I'm a Shapeshifter.

A fun Halloween disco track that clocks in at almost ten minutes but is worth it for the way it starts small and layers instruments on each other to gradually build up to the good part. I like it when songs do that. And that's the closest I'll ever get to sounding like a legitimate music critic. Completely out of nowhere, Duran Duran covered it on a Halloween album just a couple of months ago.

A hauntingly beautiful fantasy song from the sixties that sounds like it must have always sounded old. An English version was released a few years later, but the lyrics are so hard for me to make out that I find it barely more comprehensible than the original Hungarian.

A fun song about the Fallout games. If you, like me, have never played the Fallout games, then it still works as a fun song about living in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. We'd better practice having a positive attitude about that sort of thing.

I encountered this banger as the backing track for a compilation posted in r/ukraine of the Ukrainian military prepping to kick Russia's ass. According to Google Translate, this is what the artist said about the song on YouTube: "​These lines were written just a few days before going to war. It contains my entire inner state, and I want to convey this state to every brother. A great battle is ahead, after which not only our country will change, but the whole world as well. This is a real war between the warriors of light and the forces of evil, the battle of angels against demons, people against the dead. Each of us must accept and walk this path. Today, the future of the planet is being created in Ukraine, and we must do everything in our power to defeat the horde of darkness. Perhaps this will give someone motivation, know that I will not only be by your side in song, but also physically at the front with my unit. It's time to return yours! This is not a track, not a composition, not a song - this is a spell of immortality!"

According to this song, maybe love is more precious because it can't last forever because we're all going to die someday. It was always beautiful to me, but it became more poignant after I lost my faith and had to take it more seriously. I still think it's possible that human identities and relationships will persist after death, but I'm no longer confident of that, and I am confident that whatever the afterlife may look like, Joseph Smith's eternal sex fantasy is not it. I heard this song a lot because I have three versions of it on five playlists - my 2010s playlist, my Halloween playlist, my fall vibe playlist, my nostalgia playlist, and my death playlist. It works on many levels. I just realized that I should also add it to my twue wuv pwaywist.