22:00
Would an actor named Cunidan Chesterbutt be funny, or is it just me?
Sorry
22:01
Like not sorry, cause I’m laughing, but sorry it’s weird, but not like Trump weird so it’s fine [cry-laugh emoji]
22:04
2 mins later: Shit, I hope I sent that to the right person
22:30
Chesterbed Cunningbald. Saved for reference. I knew you’d understand
22:32
Kylie no Kyping. No cops
22:33
I know that’s not a word, okay. It was a joke that I thought was funny but you probably won’t – emoji or no? Okay

22:37
Kylie: What in the world, Chris? [two cry-laugh emojis]

22:38
Chesting Cunningbutt. Running gag keeps me grounded to you
22:39
It’s not illegal. It has a store here
22:41
I am delirious and aware at the same time. I know I’m weird, but not Trump weird. I know this will brighten your day, which makes me laugh a lot
22:42
Not a bot
Remember Angie, it’s really me
Oh no not Angie
22:43
I’m fine, just joking, no sadness, only joy and love and peace
22:44
I can write better than this if I’m not high
22:47
This is what you get for earning my trust
Tell me to stop if you’re not having too much fun
Or enough
22:48
Not in a flirty way. If that sounds flirty, disregard. I’m over-explaining myself to make sure because I’m high
I just thought too much fun was a weird phrasing, but it sounded high, so I added to it
22:49
If I stop, I’m not dead. I’ve done this twice before
It’s not illegal
Even in whatever state I’m in. I know, but you don’t
22:52
I have more profound thoughts than Chestingham Cunningbutt, but they’re not yours
22:57
If I remember the Sesame Hindu gods, if I remember the connection
Note to self
22:59
Sydney Sweeney has a martini,
What is she going to do?
I had some ideas for eating Puccini*,
But I couldn’t write a haiku.
 
*Pun because it sounds like a pasta
I’m not faking it
23:00
I’m making you laugh, I hope. It brings me joy to share my joy. Gag, virtue signaler
23:02
No one says Coinkydonk. How will Kylie react to that? It’s stupid
23:04
I write these things and then I lay back down in bed and instantly, it’s a distant, hazy memory because of how time works because of the time break, I mean the drug. I choose the words to make them sound drugged, but I can do better, I just want to do them like that and go back to bed and be like woah (sound drugged)
I can do better because I have an English degree. You know that. Good night
23:13
I made a connection. Maybe I drowned in a previous life, and that’s why getting water in my eyes went to just hating it and not wanting to swim. Even though I’m skinny so I can’t float. Is that profound? I think so, and I’ll see in the morning.
I thought it was falling at first, that I died by falling, but it could be both. Multiple lives
23:14
Margaret please, I beg of you, it is three o’clock in the morning
23:22
I want you to know, don’t worry, it’s kicking my ass in the best way. Even if you’re not high, that’s clever
I know you’re not. I mean you in the general sense. Please don’t block me
23:23
The Margaret thing was a meme, or at least it sounded like one
Waiting to explain that later is funny while I’m high. It’s probably not too you. But maybe, if the timing is right.
23:24
*to, dang it, I swear that’s the first time my writing’s been so messed up. But you can see I’m aware now. And funny as I am, I’m not clever enough to fake this. Right? It’s self-evident.
23:27
I checked to see that you said, “What in the world, Chris? [two cry-laugh emojis]” Because now that seems like a distant memory, even a dream. Did I really write so much? I’m sorry. I’ve got to sleep soon, which changes the context of the apology in English, and I’m laughing because I hope you’re smiling, or vice-versa, so that’s all for now. I hope I have no bad thoughts to spill out with this truth serum. But I’m happy. I hope you are too
And stuff, I debated adding to the end of that sentence
23:28
Not wanting to be too high, not wanting to be too dull or prosaic
23:36
Bishop Verlo Howell: does he love me? Does anyone care for me? These things come to me, I think of sending them to you, it seems stupid, then it doesn’t seem stupid, then I do it. I have agency, but then it’s like a dream and I don’t. But I only do what I want and then conk out. And it’s a whole other realm, so to speak
23:37
Like that was stupid right? But I did it as if it wasn’t. My shoulder hurts. I’m going back to bed. Is this weird enough, or too weird? One thing’s for sure, it’s the best experience of my life. It will go great in my book.
23:38
Research, doncha know [wink emoji]
My actual book, not my metaphorical book meaning my opinion
23:39
Restraint. You don’t know a hundredth of what I’m going through. I can’t make you get it, but it’s all good, so good. I could die tonight and be satisfied with everything in the universe, but I won’t. I have stuff to do. And this is legal, even here. Callback to earlier when I said that.
23:41
It’s like a roller coaster that goes for what feels like twelve or twenty hours, but I never get sick. I just love it, and I hate rollercoasters. But there’s a time break, I mean a drug. Callback.
See, I can make connections. My brain’s not fried even though it’s in a constant state of explosion
23:42
Writing that was amazing. Everything is. You are, but don’t get cocky.
23:44
I keep thinking about Mary. I kind of love her, but as a friend, that’s all I know. She’s a goddess, but also an alcoholic, and she’s working on that. I love her, and I want her to succeed. Regardless of anything else. idk the future, do you? If you do, you’ve been holding out on me. Okay? I just spaced out guy a minute. It felt like longer than that. I’m not trying to be cute with the Mary thing, I promise, I’m just irrational but also aware, but not of how stupid it is to say these things.
23:49
Kylie, I won’t tell anyone to do drugs, but this is the best fucking thing of my life. (Swear for emphasis.) My smile grows as I share it, but you can never understand what it’s like to smile like this. I mean, you smile, but I mean you’re not having my experiences, and I can’t do them justice in this dead language
23:49
See, I sent my previous text 4 mins ago, but it felt like I took a nap for two hours in between then and now
23:51
I had a grasshopper in my room today. I got it out. It’s not jumping on me tonight. That’s all. It’s stupid to write those things, but then I do it like a dream. I’m dizzy though. Good night.
00:16
I’ve just been cruising non-stop. It feels like six hours or more. I want to remember to listen to the Arab chipmunk song when I see this in the morning. That’s a real song, but just what I call it.
00:20
Fortune cookie idea: The afterlife doesn’t care that you’ve lost weight.
00:23
Connection between Hume’s colors (not Plato’s) and the language filtering that one lady talked about. Note for tomorrow. You’re my notepad, Kylie. But I can’t describe most of this.
07:39
I’m alive. Told you [cry-laugh emoji]

08:25
Kylie: Oh good [two cry-laugh emojis]
08:26
Kylie: I mean, I was a wee bit worried about you. But at the same timem it sounded like you were having a grand time [cry-laugh emoji]

Cunidan Chesterbutt was apparently my brain's attempt to pronounce Benedict Cumberbatch, and I found it hilarious. I knew it would be less funny to someone who wasn't high, but also that me finding it so funny because I was high would be funny to Kylie. This is the Arab chipmunk song:

And I think the rest is self-explanatory. Maybe you can't tell, but it really was, without hyperbole, the best experience of my life. It was a thousand times better than an orgasm. I was peace, love, and joy strapped to a rocket for what felt like twelve hours. At one point I felt like my arms and my left leg dissolved into the universe, and it felt great, and I rooted for the rest of my body to dissolve. I'll work on that. And I ​understand now why Elijah McClain told the cops who were killing him for no reason, “You all are phenomenal. You are beautiful and I love you.”

I inadvertently shared political misinformation in last week's post. Trump's nickname for Harris isn't "Laughing Kamala," it's "Laffin' Kamala." We know this because he spelled it out to his supporters at a rally, and they laughed and cheered him for it because they have the mental capacity of slugs. I apologize for misrepresenting the pathological liar.

Speaking of morons... oh, my God. Holy crap.

I can't even with this bullshit about the Olympics. I can't tell you how tired I am of weird right-wing maggots spreading flat-out lies about Imane Khelif long after they lost any excuse for not knowing better. I mean, on the one hand, watching conservatives who have spent the last several years being the genital police suddenly swear up and down without a trace of irony or self-awareness that a person born with a vagina is really a man is kind of funny. But then I remember that a. most of these chucklefucks are allowed to vote and b. these chucklefucks are actively making the world a living hell not just for transgender people but for any cisgender woman who might look a little masculine. So yeah, sorry not sorry, but I don't think the world would lose anything of value if they all held their breath for about ten minutes. I'll admit that's a moral failing on my part. Sue me.

Imane Khelif is not a man. She never was a man. Muslim countries like Algeria hate LGBTQ people as much as Republicans do, and the chance that one of them would put a transgender athlete on any of their sports teams is zero. Imane Khelif apparently has some biological advantages, just like all Olympic athletes have biological advantages over the average person and many of them have biological advantages over each other because news flash, life isn't fair and everyone's bodies are not the same. A boxing association that's run by Russians and not affiliated with the Olympics disqualified her partway through a match based on the unspecified results of some sketchy secret test, conveniently allowing the Russian athlete to win. Many lying right-wing bigots (sorry for the redundancy) claim that the IBA statement says she's a man. It doesn't. It says she was "found to have competitive advantages over OTHER FEMALE COMPETITORS." (Emphasis added for the mentally challenged.) Regardless, the constant bitching about "uNfAiR aDvAnTaGe" from people who have never cared about women's boxing, never complained about any other athlete's advantages, and never heard of the IBA until this week is the reason I have no faith in humanity. And isn't it funny, by which I mean disgusting, how conservatives suddenly care about unfair advantages after all the time they've spent denying or justifying the unfair advantages that people have in society because of their race, their sex, and/or their parents' wealth? Where's their outrage over asshole billionaires like Elon Musk doing whatever the hell they want? Imane Khelif has also lost more matches against other women than she's won, including in the last Olympics four years ago when none of these crayon-eating arse ends knew she existed, so you know, fuck off already.

What we're seeing here is conservatives' brains breaking in real time as they're forced to stop pretending that intersex people don't exist. There's actually no proof that Imane Khelif is intersex, and for her sake I hate that the internet has exploded into a debate over what she has in her cells and between her legs, but someone at some point said that she has XY chromosomes and that became an accepted fact. So suddenly genitals don't matter and chromosomes are the sole determining factor of biological sex. There has to be a sole determining factor because bigots are incapable of nuance or science. Their worldview has no room for the complexity of sex and gender that exists in the real world. Intersex people have been known to exist for thousands of years longer than Christians have existed, but they're still scary and dangerous to the conservative ones. And now they've forced themselves into a position where people with vaginas should use men's bathrooms if they have XY chromosomes. Good Lord. Too bad chromosomes are harder for bigots to police. It's a statistical certainty that a non-zero number of women who insist that Imane Khelif is a man have XY chromosomes themselves and don't know it.

Anyway, this whole controversy erupted because Imane Khelif's opponent, who appears to have the same body type as her, had a public meltdown about getting punched too hard in a sport that consists entirely of people punching each other. It wasn't her first public meltdown either. And she also happens to be a police officer, so she probably just wasn't used to attacking a brown person who was allowed to fight back. She has since said, "I want to apologize to her and everyone else. I was angry because my Olympics had gone up in smoke. I don't have anything against Khelif. If I were to meet her again, I would embrace her." This would be a good signal for the troglodytes spreading lies and hate on her behalf to shut the fuck up, but of course instead they said she had nothing to apologize for and doubled down on spreading lies and hate. And that's a perfect illustration of why Donald Trump became president of the United States and why he has a non-zero chance of becoming president of the United States again. God, it makes me ill. Speaking of rapists, a child rapist named Steven van de Velde who only served one year in prison also competed in the Olympics, but conservatives sure were quiet about that. I wonder why.

The good news is that calling these brainless fascist pricks "weird" has turned out to be a surprisingly effective and brilliant strategy. In four minutes, this video explains why.

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.

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.

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.