Logan just had its annual Summerfest arts fair, possibly the last I'll ever attend, since I'm moving out of town in three weeks. I wandered around more wistfully than usual, but like usual, I awkwardly tried to look at all the booths without making eye contact with the sellers and feeling guilty for not buying anything. I wonder if AI will drive down the price of art. Maybe the amount of labor people put into their art is worth the prices they charge, but how do they stay in business? Who the hell has $4,300 to spend on a painting? Certainly not the average citizen of Logan. If I charged for the labor I put into my novel, it would cost more than a textbook. More than two textbooks, even.
Speaking of which, I spent an hour talking to Nathanael Wright, the author of Fairy Tales of Kindness and Courage, who remembers me from some singles ward or other. Actually, I didn't talk to him the whole time because whenever his target audience came near his booth, he had to talk to them and invite them to take free stickers. So in addition to picking his brain for advice, I got to observe his salesmanship in action. His books are also self-published, though they look much better than mine. He probably had more money to put into them. I didn't buy any because I'm not in the target audience. They are more affordable than most items at Summerfest, though. He said that if he ever finds a typo in one of his published books, he goes and quietly changes the manuscript without guilt. I may have to do that now. I haven't found any typos per se, but I want to pull a George Lucas and keep making my novel better. I do that with blog posts sometimes. I've watched the first three episodes of the new Star Wars show "The Acolyte." I really wanted to like it. I was eager to see an era besides the freaking Empire for a change. And I see it as a good thing that Star Wars has more brown people and lesbians than it used to. But the characters are too boring to save the weak plot. I'm sure I'll watch the rest of the season just because I have an unhealthy relationship with Star Wars, but if you don't have an unhealthy relationship with Star Wars and you don't make monetized reviews on YouTube, don't bother. I agree with most of the YouTuber criticisms, but again, I see it as a good thing that Star Wars has more brown people and lesbians than it used to. I don't feel attacked by that. This one YouTuber complained that the midi-chlorians are racist because a scene of Jedi younglings contained no white males. I want to know if he's ever, even once in his life, complained about a group of people containing no Asian females. Some white males just feel threatened by not constantly being the center of the universe. On the flip side, Republicans are enraged by the possibility of their daughters having to register for selective service and potentially fight in wars. I resent their implication that my life is more expendable than a woman's or that my penis comes with a greater obligation to die in wars that other men started. Making men register for selective service based on their sex is a civil rights violation. Making women register too would also be a civil rights violation, but at least it would remove the sex discrimination aspect, and since Republicans value their daughters more than their sons (even though they have a strange way of showing it by fighting against women's healthcare and reproductive rights), this could motivate them to abolish the damn thing altogether. So I'm all for it. And deranged Utah senator Mike Lee says it will happen over his dead body, so that's a win-win. A friend gave me one of her legal mushroom gummies, and I ate it today, hoping to get a spiritual experience. It made me kind of hungry and extremely tired for about three hours. If I'd known it would have that effect, I would have saved it for right before bed. I wish I had something more interesting to report. She also gave me one of another kind of gummy, so there's still hope for that one. Ultimately, I intend to try psilocybin, maybe after I move closer to the Divine Assembly. I don't think I ever wrote about the book that completely changed my perspective on psychedelic drugs a few months ago. It's called The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku, and I recommend it to everyone. This book makes so much sense of the history of religion and is one reason I believe in life after death. I'll have to say more about it when I'm in the mood. I went to a Juneteenth concert on campus this evening. Racists on social media are still complaining about Juneteenth, and they still need to drop dead. I was going to say something less family-friendly, but I decided to be compassionate. It must be the effect of that gummy. So I went to the concert, and then as I was leaving, I saw Brad Hansen, one of the local cops that I have a problem with. By the time I recognized him, though, I'd missed my chance to flip him off. I consoled myself over this missed opportunity by spitting on his empty car. So we'll see if I get arrested for that.
0 Comments
The type of people who read my blog aren't likely to be the type of people who ask stupid and disingenuous questions like "wHy IsN't ThErE a StRaIgHt PrIdE mOnTh?" But the latter are probably dumb enough to stumble here by accident while looking for Trump porn, so just in case that happens, I'll explain it again. Pride Month and Pride parades evolved from the Stonewall riots, which were a backlash against police doing what police do best: harassing and bullying marginalized people for no reason. Gay people decided they didn't want to live as third-class citizens anymore. They decided they should be allowed to exist in public and love themselves. If straight people had literally just not persecuted them, Pride Month wouldn't be a thing. So everyone who never lifted a finger to defend their rights or dignity but now has a problem with Pride Month existing ought to shut the hell up. The more you bitch and moan about being forced to notice that LGBTQ people exist, the more you prove that Pride Month needs to exist, and the more you motivate people to Pride even harder. Derp. I'm not gay, even though I was called "faggot" five times a day in elementary school, but in honor of Pride Month, I decided to share the time I was attracted to Rudolf Nureyev when I saw him on the Muppet Show as a kid. It wasn't like the crushes I had on girls whom I thought were pretty. He just had some kind of charisma that I couldn't define. He just fascinated me in a different way than the other guest stars. When I looked him up and found out he was gay, I concluded that gayness must be contagious. I think a lot of straight men have historically thought that being gay was contagious. I think that's why they've used slurs and committed hate crimes against gay men instead of being grateful to have less competition. Today in 2024, morons still think that their children will become gay if they're allowed to see gay people existing, so we still have a long way to go in conveying to Republicans a basic understanding of how the world works. So anyway, that frightened me a little. The fact that he died of AIDS also reinforced my perception that gay people were sexual degenerates. He had fewer partners than Donald Trump, though. And a lot fewer than Joseph Smith. I've been watching The Muppet Show from start to finish this year to make the most of the overpriced Disney+ subscription that I share with a friend. When I got to the Rudolf Nureyev episode, I realized that people may be skeptical of me saying that my attraction to him wasn't physical. In one scene, he wears tight white pants that leave little of his ass cheeks to the imagination. In another, he wears a towel in a steam room. This scene revolves around Miss Piggy sexually harassing him, singing "Baby It's Cold Outside" (which really wasn't a sexual harassment song in the cultural context of the 1940s, but is in a very different context here), and (spoiler alert) eventually pulling his towel off. I guess it was extra funny because of his sexuality, which was an open secret. Besides the obvious problems with this scene, I'm a little sad that they didn't sing "Rudolf the Red-Faced Russian" instead. Watching the show as an adult has made me realize that Miss Piggy is a straight-up sexual predator. Even in the 1970s, people wouldn't have laughed at the dynamic between her and Kermit if the gender roles were reversed. She's worse than Pepé Le Pew. At least he was sincerely oblivious and never karate-chopped Penelope into a wall for refusing his advances.
But on a more positive note, I was also astonished to learn that the Great Gonzo has been canonically bisexual since 1979. I can't believe I've never heard anyone mention that before. In the Leslie Uggams episode, Gonzo is smitten with Big Bird. I thought the punchline would be him realizing that Big Bird is a boy, but the actual punchline is Camilla getting jealous and dropping a flowerpot on his head. It's never implied that the same-sex aspect of this attraction is weird or degenerate. (Technically Big Bird has the mind of a young child, but Gonzo didn't know that, so give him a break.) In the Roger Miller episode, he finds Kermit attractive after the latter turns into a chicken. Since the film "Muppets in Space" established that Gonzo is an alien, my hypothesis is that all the aliens in the finale were male, and the females of his species look like chickens. Nureyev feared for his safety and defected from the Soviet Union in 1961 in part because of his sexuality. If he were alive today, he would still have to avoid Russia, because it's still an extremely homophobic country. It's a country that arrests journalists for interviewing gay people. No wonder Republicans think Ukraine is the bad guy. Yesterday was the four-year anniversary of George Floyd being murdered by police in broad daylight. I had just written a blog post the previous day about American police murdering people, which of course is a very old topic. I wasn't surprised when it immediately happened again, but I was surprised that this time turned out to be the final straw. In the years since then, the United States has taken a few teensy-tiny baby steps toward putting police officers in their place and holding them accountable for their actions, fought every step of the way by Republicans who distrust the government but believe that police officers should have unlimited authority and immunity. I wasn't too shocked yesterday to see them still spreading the lie that George Floyd died of a drug overdose, making tasteless jokes about his death, and/or asserting that he deserved it because he had a criminal history. If Jesus said "Let he among you who is without sin cast the first stone" to a crowd of Republicans, the woman taken in adultery would be a bloody pulp. The responses to this event accelerated my irreversible alienation from my religious community, which had started with the responses to the you-know-what pandemic. I was mortified that people who claimed to be followers of Jesus treated Covid like a joke and prioritized their individual convenience over everyone else's health, and I was mortified that people who claimed to be followers of Jesus had such ass-backward moral compasses that they couldn't see the problem with a police officer kneeling on a handcuffed man's neck for nine and a half minutes. To be fair, though, I think at the time it was being reported as seven and a half minutes. Regardless, I was appalled that Mormons overwhelmingly responded "George Floyd was no saint" instead of "Murder is wrong." One of them told me that police abuse was a lie by the media, when I already knew firsthand that it wasn't because I'd been on the receiving end of it from Hayden Nelson of the Logan City Police Department that January. (Ironically, since the worst day of my life was in January 2020, the rest of the year was an improvement, though it didn't exactly validate my choice not to kill myself after that motherfucker nearly bullied me into it.) I also later got a crash course in police lies and corruption after Captain Curtis Hooley promised to conduct an investigation and share the results with me and then just didn't. And despite what many would claim, the institutional LDS Church with its history of anti-Black racism and its unholy love affair with right-wing politics is far from guiltless in fostering these "cultural" problems. Its teachings and policies are directly to blame for Mormons in Utah being overwhelmingly white and conservative and sometimes never even having met a Black person before. The church's "official" response to this social movement was actually on the right side for a change, but it was much too little, much too late. "God does not love one race more than another," Russell Nelson declared in General Conference that October. Why the hell did we need a prophet to tell us that in 2020? Why wasn't Brigham Young telling us that in 1852? So that caused me some cognitive dissonance and added some more weight to my proverbial shelf. I was thrilled when Dallin H. Oaks said "Black lives matter" at a devotional that same month (followed, of course, by Mormons parsing his words to explain that he didn't mean for us to support the organization Black Lives Matter, which according to them was a terrorist group). Now I don't need an apostle's permission to say "Black lives matter." I don't need to look to men older than my grandparents to validate literally anything. I know right from wrong. Police brutality is wrong. Systemic racism is wrong. Denying that either of those things exist because you've never personally encountered them and you believe in the just-world fallacy is wrong. Derek Chauvin should have been fired and/or prosecuted the first seventeen times people filed conduct complaints against him, and George Floyd should still be here, saint or not. If anyone said "George Floyd was no saint" to me in person, I would punch them in the throat and respond, "Neither am I." Oh yeah, and then the next year, I was at a church activity where someone told a couple of racist jokes, including one about Black people being afraid of police, and everyone except me laughed. I knew she had no malicious intent, so I didn't want to embarrass her, and I didn't call her out on it. I've regretted that ever since.
The legal proceedings regarding Elijah McClain's death wrapped up this week, and the paramedics who killed him with an overdose of ketamine are going to jail. That's one of the best Christmas presents I could ask for. It's very rare for healthcare workers to be criminally charged when their stupid mistakes kill people, but they were so obviously and so much in the wrong this time that I've only seen three conservatives bitching about the verdict and blaming McClain for his own death. Do you realize how significant that is? You have to be a saint in order for conservatives to not think you deserve to die after a police encounter, and McClain was. He deserved to be killed about as much as Jesus did.
These convictions will be a game-changer. The Associated Press cautions that they "could have a chilling effect on first responders around the country." To that I say, good. First responders and all other healthcare workers damn well should be afraid to make a stupid mistake that kills someone. If they aren't, they need to choose a profession with more room for error. The obvious problem here was that Jeremy Cooper and Peter Cichuniec just didn't care enough to do their job correctly. Well, that and they had an obvious implicit bias against Black men that made them overestimate McClain's weight by almost sixty pounds. The International Association of Fire Fighters claims that this case "criminalized split-second medical decisions." To that I say, bullshit. Cooper and Cichuniec had more than ample time to communicate with McClain and check his vital signs. They didn't even have the ketamine with them when they showed up. But yes, if they had been paralyzed with fear of making a mistake and just not done anything, McClain would still be alive. They injected him with ketamine because they thought he had "excited delirium." It is unfortunate that paramedics in this country are still being taught that "excited delirium" is a thing even though no legitimate medical institution recognizes it. Just the symptoms of this fictitious condition - superhuman strength, impervious to pain, sudden death - sound so stupid that I can't comprehend how any adult believes in it. But then, millions of adults still worship Donald Trump, so my opinion of the human race, or at least Americans, is obviously too high. Police supporters literally made up "excited delirium" to justify police killings of Black and Latino men in their custody. It's racist as well as stupid. California recently became the first state to ban listing it as a cause of death. Funny how I was raised to believe that California's progressives were the stupid ones. It is most unfortunate that only one of the three police officers who assaulted McClain for no reason was convicted of anything. Roedema was found guilty because his statement "He's definitely on something," which exemplifies police officers' rampant bigotry against neurodivergent people, contributed to the paramedics' decision. Jason Rosenblatt was acquitted because, like the people at Nuremburg, he was just following orders. Nathan Woodyard, the first police officer who assaulted McClain, was somehow acquitted of everything even though he had no legal justification for stopping McClain, he acknowledged in court that he did everything against his training and needlessly escalated the situation from the first moment, and the paramedics would never have been there in the first place if he had minded his own damn business. So he has his job back. I hope he never has a good night's sleep again. After those acquittals, I was ready to go burn something down if the paramedics were also acquitted. The whole point of having separate trials was so that each person or duo could throw everyone else involved under the bus. If our legal system had determined that nobody was at fault, it would be beyond saving. So anyway, Merry Christmas. I do mean that, though I don't have much to add. I could rehash my angst over the uneven distribution of suffering in the world and my powerlessness to do anything about it and how that challenges my conception of God as anything but an apathetic observer every time something awful like the current situation in the Middle East happens, but that would get old fast, wouldn't it? I'll just say I don't like it. That's inadequate, but so would be anything else I might say. Everyone needs to just get along. Nothing that either side has done justifies committing torture and rape and genocide against civilians on the other side. That, for some reason, is something that many people actually need to be reminded of. And that goes for anywhere. As much as most of the world would be better off right now without Russia in it, I wouldn't support Ukrainian crimes against humanity either. Fortunately, that's not their style. Russia, on the other hand, might have actually won by now if it focused on military targets instead of hospitals, schools, apartment buildings, and supermarkets. But I've had some luck, or blessings depending on your perspective. I think of it as luck because I can't think why God should concern himself with these details of my life while doing nothing discernible to help the victims of torture and rape and genocide, but to each their own. I started therapy a few weeks ago and eventually I'll write a whole post about that. I get it the same way I get my haircuts; cheaply from an unlicensed student. I think she's doing a fine job, but at a bare minimum, she's a captive audience. It feels so good to have someone who listens to me so much and acts like she cares about me so much. I knew it would, and I assumed I would consequently develop unprofessional feelings for her, and I almost tried to get a different therapist because of that, but I realized that would basically be discrimination, so I decided it was my own problem that I'd just have to deal with, but it hasn't been an issue at all. It's just been great - dare I even say, therapeutic. I also found an artist to illustrate my book cover, after my first five choices didn't work out. That's a big relief. A mutual friend recommended him to me, and he consequently gave me a discount. I hate spending money, but this is a very important investment since people will, after all, judge my book by its cover. I can't wait until I have some early designs to show. And then, I guess this doesn't concern me directly, but it hits close to my heart. I feel a connection to him because I'm also neurodivergent and I've also been abused by dumbass cops, but I strongly suspect that my situation turned out different because I don't have the same skin color. I've had him as my Facebook picture for quite some time, with the intention to leave him up until his killers were brought to justice. This past week, the two cops who joined in the scuffle after the first cop assaulted him got their verdicts. Randy Roedema guilty, Jason Rosenblatt not. As much as I'd like to see them both hanging from lampposts, the different verdicts are a good sign that the jury did its due diligence. The one found not guilty was already the only one of the three cops who had been fired, not because of McClain's death, but because he responded "Ha ha" to a picture that three other cops, also fired or resigned, took at the sight of McClain's death to mock McClain's death. Yeah, cops freaking suck. Normally he could just go work at any other police department in the country, but hopefully he's gotten enough bad press that even they won't touch him. Now the trial for Nathan Woodyard, the cop who stopped and assaulted Elijah McClain for "looking sketchy" in the first place, is underway. And there's no way in hell he won't be found guilty, because it's an established fact that he had no legal basis for the stop. I hope these convictions will send a message to cops everywhere to fuck off the next time they're thinking of harassing someone with no legal basis. And then there's the almost-unprecedented trial for the paramedics who, without making any attempt to communicate with McClain or evaluate his health, overestimated his weight by eighty pounds and injected him with a fatal overdose of ketamine. I honestly hope they get the stiffest sentences of all, and that it sends a message to healthcare workers everywhere that a. they are not law enforcement agents and b. Black people do not have a completely different physiology from white people. I had a negative experience with healthcare workers too, and I don't have much respect for them either. It blows my mind how people whose literal job is to care about people's health and safety can be so callous and apathetic. Anyway, these trials are off to a good start. And it only took over four years. I wonder how long it would take me to go to court if I killed someone.
|
"Guys. Chris's blog is the stuff of legends. If you’re ever looking for a good read, check this out!"
- Amelia Whitlock "I don't know how well you know Christopher Randall Nicholson, but... he's trolling. You should read his blog. It's delightful." - David Young About the AuthorC. Randall Nicholson is a white cisgender Christian male, so you can hate him without guilt, but he's also autistic and asexual, so you can't, unless you're an anti-vaxxer, in which case the feeling is mutual. This blog is where he periodically rants about life, the universe, and/or everything. Archives
July 2024
Categories
All
|