I've prudently decided not to discuss how I feel about the assassination attempt on the guy who told the grieving parents of children murdered in a school shooting to "get over it." I will say that I've never wished death on anyone for having different political views than me, but I'm tired of being gaslit that opposition to Mr. "Grab 'em by the pussy" is merely a matter of differing political views.
I moved into my new place this week. It was the only place I considered because I knew that if I looked at more options I would just get more stressed about choosing one. I also knew from past experience that if I prayed for guidance, like I stopped doing years ago, I would get no response and wear myself out straining to hear one. This place was the cheapest I was going to find anywhere and it didn't sound horrible, so I wanted it and I went for it. I think that's how I need to live my life - just going with the flow, not trying to "follow the Holy Ghost." I'll try to be informed and make good decisions, of course, but I've come to realize that because I'm not a billionaire, I actually have zero control over most of the things that affect my life. Agency shmagency. No, it doesn't piss me off at all, why do you ask? I thought it would be just me in the basement and the two guys upstairs, one of whom is a friend of my friend, so it felt better than moving in with complete strangers. But I realized the basement was already inhabited as soon as I descended the stairs. The first thing I noticed was the smell, the most beautiful smell I've ever smelled. It assailed me every time I went up or down to move my stuff. I'd soon realize it was there to mask the cigarette smell, and now I've already acclimated to it, which stinks, pun intended. The second thing I noticed was the decor that had obviously been placed by an old woman. She was the first one I met, and then I thought it was just the two of us, and that was awkward. I was rather relieved when a younger guy introduced himself. And there's a younger woman too, but I've barely seen her, and I haven't talked to her, except that today she left me a note asking me not to put stuff in her cupboard. Time will tell if the smiley face and the word "Respectfully" were sincere or passive-aggressive. They worried me, but I'm trying not to jump to conclusions. My friend who told me about the place had said something about me maybe having female roommates, but then for some reason he caught himself and didn't pursue that subject, and neither did I because I didn't want his friend to not let me have it, and then I forgot about that. I'm cool with having female roommates. I had a de facto female roommate several years ago when my roommate's girlfriend or wife moved in with us and the landlord didn't care. Sometimes she walked around the kitchen in a towel like she didn't notice I was there. One time she tried to convince my roommate to let her kiss me, quote, "so that he can say he's kissed a black girl and I can say I've kissed a white guy," close quote, but he didn't go for that. I swear. If you don't believe me, you can pray about it and know for yourself that it's true. Anyway, I'm neutral on this current situation except that I like it because it would probably scandalize my conservative Mormon parents. My roommates are all kind of weird. I should fit right in. They're pretty quiet and keep to themselves a lot, which is great. I hope we can be friends without them inconveniencing me too much. There are two bathrooms right next to each other, as if the basement was designed with this living arrangement in mind. The bathrooms have sliding wooden doors that are only attached at the top and lock with a little hook and loop. The shower curtains are transparent so that psycho killers can't sneak up on you. The water doesn't get as hot as I'd like, and I had to close the air conditioning vent to stop it from blasting my naked wet body every time I got out. The air conditioning in this place runs constantly, and I mean constantly. The vent in my room was already closed, but I piled blankets up against it as well. My room felt like a refrigerator for the first couple of days. I guess I should be grateful for the privilege of freezing my ass off during a record-breaking heat wave. Oh yeah, I moved to this area just in time for a record-breaking heat wave. It's almost like the climate is changing or something. With that exception, it's a nice area. I live in a quiet suburb, but if I walk two blocks, I'm on a busy city street. I've gone out exploring during the less dangerously hot hours. There are as many Mexican and Asian restaurants in my immediate vicinity as I could possibly want, and a 7-eleven so close that it takes a lot of self-control to not buy a Slurpee every day. I haven't yet seen anything as pretty as the town I left behind. Logan has prettier houses, prettier buildings, and prettier scenery. But with any luck, I'll get to spend more time with my friends who live in nearby cities. I hope they're not always busy doing lame adult stuff. Oh yeah, and my room is full of boxes. I have too much stuff and not enough space. I'll probably leave most of my stuff packed up for however many months or years I'm here. It feels like a temporary situation, but I'm trying to live in the moment and not fantasize about a better future. One where I could afford my own house before I'm ninety, for example.
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I had a bit of a drug flashback this morning while I was half-asleep and delirious. Not the cool oneness-with-the-universe part, just some of the weirdness. I wonder how often that will happen. It's been almost two weeks since I ate the mushroom gummy. I don't regret it yet.
Today I'm still with extended family, and tomorrow I'm moving to Midvale. Where I was excited before, now I'm nervous and depressed, and I'll probably just have to wait that out. I think this move is a good thing, but it comes with an opportunity cost, as change always does. Anyway, I'm going to make another brief post. Of all the things I could write about after this week with family, I think the most important is a recommendation to all parents or prospective parents of young children to not let them watch an awful show called Blippi. My little cousin loves that show. Lots of kids love that show. But I could tell within seconds from the host's overenthusiasm and goofy voice that he thinks kids are stupid. I could tell the difference between this show and superior kids' shows that aren't excruciating for adults to watch because the writers put some actual effort into them. I knew I couldn't be the only adult who recognized this, so I did some research, and after accidentally finding out about the disgusting viral video that Stevin John did before he became Blippi, I found this Current Affairs article that explains why his garbage show won't help your children develop imagination, critical thinking, or empathy. (I actually think it's kind of weird that the author brings Trump into it, but his points are well made.) My Blippi-loving cousin is so uncultured that he complained about watching Mary Poppins, which I felt an urge to watch for the first time in a long time because we flew a kite. I appreciate more than ever how funny and heartwarming this movie is and how good the music is. I also realize now that even though it's sixty years old, if it came out today, conservatives would melt down over its woke feminist and anti-capitalist undertones. Of course there are the obvious bits about women's suffrage that don't affect the plot in any meaningful way, but I can also imagine certain YouTubers complaining that all of the male characters in the movie are made fools of by female characters. George Banks is hotheaded and irrational and mean compared to Winifred, and Mary Poppins manipulates him with ease. (I also realized what a gaslighter she is to him and the children, but that's neither here nor there.) Mary Poppins scolds Bert and Uncle Albert for their foolishness. Michael can't snap his fingers, and at a pivotal moment, he says something dumb and Jane tells him to be quiet. Oh, how the YouTubers would hate that if Disney did it in 2024! And why does the movie's female protagonist have to be practically perfect in every way? The Mary Sue jokes write themselves. As for the anti-capitalist part, the bank (run by white males who are portrayed as jackasses, of course) is portrayed as an antagonist. Childlike whimsy and nonsense and frivolous expenditures to benefit wildlife are portrayed as superior to acting self-important and making frugal investments in colonialism. Jeez, that was too easy. If I didn't hate my mannerisms and my voice, I'd make a YouTube video about it instead of a blog post and make some real money. Prior to my move, I'm once again on vacation with family including my loveable but exhausting little cousins, and I forgot to write a post yesterday. I could have done it while they were all at church, but I did other stuff instead. I have to crank something out now to keep up my goal of writing something every week even if it's garbage.
I've reflected on my legal drug experience last week, trying to figure out if it was the best experience of my life or one of the best experiences of my life, and if so, why. I can imagine someone reading my description and wondering what's so great about a weird and confusing experience like that. First of all, it was inherently interesting because it was like nothing I'd experienced before. Second, as I've realized even more upon reflection, the peace I felt throughout was really incredible. It may have been the only time in my adult life that all my worries didn't just fade to the background but ceased to matter altogether. Even now, as I enjoy time with my family, part of my brain is devoted to the stresses of moving to another city, paying rent, dealing with my property management company for what I hope is the last time, and possibly losing what's left of democracy in my country if the demented lying orange jackass is re-elected because his opponent acted too old during their recent debate and then appoints three more supreme court justices whose life goal is to drag society back a hundred years. But nothing worried me when I was high, and that was great. And then, of course, there were those moments when I felt disconnected from my physical body and connected to the universe. Again, I don't want to overstate those, but as I reflect on them, they were pretty great. I think that if I did this again knowing what to expect and relaxed more, surrendered more, analyzed less, I would get more of that part. I want more of that part. The reason I wanted to try psilocybin, which is not yet legal, except through a religious freedom loophole that I intend to exploit when I'm settled closer to the Divine Assembly church, was to experience death before I die. That's done wonders for the mental health of terminally ill people. Legal mushroom gummies don't contain psilocybin, and I don't know if I can achieve that full experience with them, but what I got was close enough. I want more of it regardless of what it is. Anyway, there's plenty more I could write about besides drugs, but I should go be with my family. 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.
A side effect of my recent month of desperately not wanting to be alive anymore was that I grew closer to some extended family members I rarely talked to. I was surprised to learn how highly my uncle thinks of me. I knew he liked me just fine, but we hadn't talked at all since he stopped using Facebook, and when he was on Facebook, we often disagreed about politics. Some of his kids used to love playing with me, but they outgrew me around the same time they all got iPads. His youngest kids weren't old enough to have personalities the last time I saw them. Anyway, I just had a delightful week at their house. They're such a beautiful, loving family, and it was the first time in fourteen years that I went a whole week without feeling lonely. The youngest ones, now five and three, wanted to be around me all the time. They exhausted me, but I loved them dearly. It broke my heart to leave them, and even more to realize that someday they'll outgrow me too. I had to hold the three-year-old to make him smile because he was crying about my imminent departure. The five-year-old refused to smile. The face she made represented her personality pretty well, though. I want to share some cute quotes. The five-year-old stumbled upon a deck of Book-of-Mormon-themed Go Fish cards and said, "Where's the wicked Laban?" And then I swear to God she said, "The Lord told Nephi to kill the wicked Laban. But the Lord doesn't actually tell people to kill. That's weird." I was amazed. I don't think I had that level of insight at her age. I just hated church because it was boring. The three-year-old, in contrast, raised his plastic sword and said, "KILL THE WICKED LABAN! YEAH!" The morning of the day I left, I was playing with the three-year-old while the five-year-old, to my surprise and disappointment, played with her iPad for at least an hour. I gently inquired whether she intended to do that all day. I was like, "It's just that I'm going to leave today, and I don't want you to be sad and think 'Oh no, I wish I had played with Christopher while he was here...'" Rather curtly, she said, "But I didn't choose that. What I choosed is the iPad." And I was like The three-year-old would never have chosen an iPad over me. The three-year-old worshiped me. The three-year-old said "Hey, watch this!" and did something dumb every time I went two seconds without paying attention to him. But eventually, the five-year-old joined us and explained that she choosed me too. She choosed both. And no, I'm not making fun of her for regularizing irregular verbs, I just think it's cute.
When we had some rare alone time a little later, she said, "You'll miss me so much, you'll forget about your family." Then she wondered about my family's whereabouts, and then she thought it was sad that I didn't live with them anymore. I explained that it's normal to leave your family when you grow up. I told her that when she grows up, she might go to college, she might get married, she might get her own house. I immediately felt guilty for lying to her about the house. She said, "But where's your true love? I know you don't have a true love, but when are you gonna marry one?" I didn't know how to explain to a five-year-old that I have the sex appeal of a road accident. While I was there, I watched E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for the first time in twenty-three years. Because I'd read the novelization probably two and a half times before 2010, I forgot what was from where, and the movie, despite being almost universally recognized as one of the greatest of all time, felt incomplete to me. The novelization includes many more scenes and explains so much more. It shares a lot of E.T.'s perspective, Elliott's mom's perspective, and even Michael's friends' perspectives. So in the movie, a lot of things felt underdeveloped and unfinished. I still enjoyed it, but now I really want to read the novelization again. Also, I was in the car with my uncle when it started raining hard, and that reminded him of a massive rainstorm he experienced during his LDS mission to Venezuela, and that led him to talk about how politicians have screwed over the people of Venezuela, and that led him to explain his political philosophy for a long while. He's libertarian. He's not one of the godawful conservatives who's actively trying to build a Christian theocracy and make life worse for everyone who's not a billionaire. He recognizes that Donald Trump is a godawful human being and not the second coming of Jesus. He just believes in freedom. I believe in freedom too. I just disagree about the extent to which certain obligations we have as members of a society should trump our freedom - taking public health precautions during a pandemic, to name a totally random example. He said there are many people on both sides of the political aisle that he'd like to see die long, painful deaths and/or burn in hell for a long time, and I certainly found common ground with him on that point. It was heartwarming. In conclusion, I want to become the kind of person that my little cousins think I am. |
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- 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
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