​But Harris objectively did generate enthusiasm. Her campaign announcement was followed by record-breaking donations and a massive spike in voter registration. It makes no sense that she got fewer votes than Biden. I also thought, like many, that women would flood the polls in droves to elect her because they're so pissed about losing Roe v. Wade. That didn't happen. In the states where abortion rights measures were on the ballot, they got significantly more votes than Harris herself did. That makes no goddamn sense at all. Voting for abortion rights and the guy who took them away in the first place is like... well, I won't even bother coming up with a comparison because it's self-explanatory. Anyway, I didn't see the same enthusiasm for Trump. Voters rejected him and his ilk in 2018, 2020, and 2022. The midterm "red wave" we were supposed to get didn't happen. Why would I have expected it to happen now? Despite the persistence of hopeless MAGA cultists who would suck Trump's dick if he dismembered their children in front of them, I hardly imagined he could be as popular now as when he lost four years ago. Within that time, he led an insurrection to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, he was found legally liable for rape, he was convicted of 34 felonies, his brain turned into cottage cheese, and several former members of his administration begged us not to vote for him. Attendance at his rallies dwindled, and hundreds of people left early while he rambled about Hannibal Lecter, sharks, and windmills. But now he wins the popular vote for the first time? What the fuck?

I certainly hope the possibility of fraud is being investigated. I said possibility. I'm not asserting that there was fraud just because I hate the outcome, and if no evidence of fraud turns up, I don't advocate for liberals to storm the Capitol and file scores of baseless lawsuits. But the results are sketchy and should be investigated. Republicans constantly accuse Democrats of the things they do themselves, and it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if this were another such instance, especially since they have a 900-page blueprint for creating a dictatorship now that they control all three branches of government. It's not hyperbole, it's not a conspiracy theory, it's right there in their own words that have been available to the public for a long time. If we don't have a Christofascist theocracy within the next four years, it sure as hell won't be because Republicans didn't try. It will be because Americans stopped them.

Getting high the night before the eleaction to calm my nerves was a mistake. I should have gotten high the night of the election. I thought I'd want to be sober while I watched the results, and then Harris would win and my stress would dissipate. Instead, as I feared, I became suicidal for two days. When I was high, as I often do when I'm high, I grappled with my mortality. The high is more intense every time, and this time, I thought my heart might stop at any moment, and I felt so out of my body that I felt like if I relaxed completely, I would drift away from it and possibly never return. I had a one-sided argument that I couldn't die yet because reasons. I told this unseen and possibly imaginary something that if I could die temporarily and have a near-death experience right now, that would be great, but I didn't trust it to bring me back. And there was a whole other thing where I wondererd if the water heater on the other side of my bedroom wall would explode and kill or horribly disfigure me, but I decided that I trusted the homeowner to keep it well-maintained, so that was fine. I also heard a helicopter that sounded close enough to crash into the house. Anyway, the high was pure bliss, and if that's what actual death feels like, sign me up.

But instead I was in this reality where the worst person in the world just became my president again, this time with virtually no guardrails. I had to talk to a suicide hotline and several friends to upgrade to feeling nothing. (I also mentioned it to the aforementioned family member, who responded, "You could move to Costa Rica.") Of course my friends wanted me to stay alive so they wouldn't be sad, but they were miserable too, and none of them could promise me that the rest of my life won't suck. I do believe my life will get much worse next year when Trump raises the price of everything with his dumbass tariffs and puts an anti-vaxxer with a brain worm in charge of healthcare and food. My life will continue to get worse in the long term as Republicans gleefully shit all over the environment. Depending on how bad things get, Trump may run out of Democrats, journalists, and late show hosts to persecute and send the military after me for criticizing him since 2015. But I'm not just worried for myself, because unlike my conservative family members (yes, if you're reading this, I'm calling you out again. Bite me), I'm capable of empathy for people who are different from me. I feel deeply for everyone who's explicitly targeted by the GOP's Christofascist agenda and has more reason to be afraid than I do. Empathy is excruciating. I can understand why my family members and everyone else who voted against their fellow humans' lives prefer not to be burdened by it.

But of course, Trump voters have metaphorically stabbed themselves too. They lost big on Tuesday. They just don't know it yet. They're about to learn the hard way just how few shits their orange savior gives about them, and when they do, I hope I'm not too mature to rub it in their faces. At this point they have no excuse for not knowing better.

Beyond the specifics, though, what really crushed my soul and sapped my will to live was the realization of just how fundamentally vile this country is. It could have shown girls that they can do anything, but instead it showed boys that they can lie, cheat, and rape to their hearts' content and become the most powerful person in the world with no qualifications. I thought fascism would be defeated with a few elections and a lot of funerals. Now I see that it's deeply woven into the fabric of American society. I had heard that Gen Z boys were more racist and sexist than previous generations because of influencers like Andrew Taint and Nick Fuentes who for some reason haven't been shot yet, but I had no idea how bad it was. I suppose I should have guessed. A few months ago I documented my own experience with speaking out against sexist comments on social media and immediately being targeted by scores of men who accused me of trying to get laid because that's the only motivation they could imagine for treating women like people, but I thought they were a really loud and annoying minority. The phrase "Your body, my choice" went viral after the election. I recommend that all women carry firearms. Women aren't the source of this country's gun violence problem, so I have few concerns about them abusing said firearms. Also, doxxing white supremacists is not wrong. I don't 'understand why that's even a debate.

Speaking of cesspools, I just joined the mass migration from Twitter (where I've been suspended since June for refusing to delete my response to a racist who said that Juneteenth isn't a real holiday) to Bluesky, which is like Twitter except it isn't crawling with Nazis and isn't owned by a douchebag billionaire (yet). Actually, the CEO, Jay Graber, is a woman of color. Again, as I said last week, that in itself wouldn't be a sufficient reason to use the site, but it is a nice bonus that I get to support diversity in the software industry at the same time that I'm not supporting Elon Musk. I've already reunited with some of my ex-Mormon and progressive Mormon friends from Twitter, but the conservative Mormons who base their entire personalities on hating gay people and apostates are conspicuously absent. The downside is that I don't know who I'm supposed to argue with now. My feed is full of anti-Trump sentiments, inspirational quotes, Nancy comics, Homestar Runner screenshots, pictures of astronomy, and pictures of people's pets. How am I supposed to work up any righteous indignation over that?

The U.S. presidential election is in two days. It's been stressing me out for several weeks. I've considered suicide if the fascist jackass wins. When I visited family recently, I felt impatient and resentful toward my little cousins, and then I felt like a monster for having negative feelings toward little kids who adore me. I haven't been getting high to escape from stress, but this week I'll make an exception. I look forward to it. Truthfully, though, I think Harris will win in a landslide. And then, in this best-case scenario, Trump will go ballistic again, his supporters will become violent again, and people will die again. I don't look forward to that. But then the Republican cancer will either distance itself the MAGA cancer and become more moderate, or it will die, as it's deserved to from the moment it decided Trump was an acceptable candidate. That's a win-win. Oh, and the morons on the Supreme Court might step in and say Trump won for no reason, but they can't actually do anything if the executive branch just tells them to fuck off, right?

I believe most of my immediate family members are voting for Trump again because, despite claiming not to be Republicans, and despite hundreds of actual Republicans putting country over party and endorsing Harris, they can't get out of the mindset that Republican candidates are the lesser of two evils in every circumstance. I've mostly avoided the topic, except when I called out my mom for saying, "I could vote for Harris if she wasn't an idiot," as if Harris isn't Albert freaking Einstein compared to the demented toddler that she's running against. Intelligence aside, I cannot comprehend why self-proclaimed conservatives who spent my adolescence freaking out over Obama's government overreach would even consider voting for a guy who led an insurrection and refused to leave office, said that the Constitution should be terminated so he could stay in office, said that he'll be a dictator, said that he'll fix it so they don't have to vote again, said that he'll give cops unlimited immunity, said that he'll use the military against Americans who disagree with him (like me), and plans to replace tens of thousands of non-partisan government employees with people whose only qualification is loyalty to him. Seriously, what the fuck? I used to think my family members were smarter than that. The prospect that they aren't is very depressing and alienating.

I often struggle to reconcile people's political behavior with what I knew or thought I knew about them. This one woman I used to go to church with seemed perfectly normal and reasonably intelligent. She shared a ten-second clip of Harris that had very obviously been taken out of context and had scary music added. This brazen attempt at manipulating emotions would have insulted the intelligence of a third-grader, but she bought into it without question. This clip, in her mind, confirmed that Harris would be a dictator, so she needed to vote instead for the guy who said he would be a dictator. When people in the comments brought up Trump's behavior, she said she didn't believe the media's lies about him. In all seriousness, I can't wrap my brain around how adults are walking around out there and leading productive lives with the critical thinking skills of sea cucumbers.

My uncle, who doesn't like Trump as a person but leans right, goes on long political rants when we're alone together for a long time. It's fine. I get on political rants sometimes too for the simple reason that politics affect every aspect of our lives. I just listen and don't argue. He's not trying to change my mind; he just gets worked up. Last time, he said that Harris can't speak in front of a camera, which I know isn't true because I've watched several of her speeches and interviews. He said he hates it when people are called sexist or racist for not voting for her. I agree that not voting for her doesn't make you sexist or racist, but voting for Trump means you're either sexist or racist or have decided that sexism and racism aren't dealbreakers. Also, many of the attacks on her from Republicans, up to and including Trump and Vance themselves, are sexist and racist. But I think her sex and race are advantages overall. She's energized young people who weren't interested in voting for yet another old white man, and anyone who wouldn't vote for her because they're sexist or racist was already going to vote for Trump regardless. Her being a woman is not, in itself, a sufficient reason to vote for her, but given a choice between two candidates who were identical except their sex, I would pick the woman because shattering glass ceilings matters. I want my nieces to grow up thinking it's normal for a woman to be president.

My uncle said that Trump isn't worse than other politicians, he just doesn't know how to keep his mouth shut. He said one reason people support him is that they're fed up with the double standard. Democrats defended Bill Clinton when he had his sex scandal. I wouldn't know about that, since I was four years old when it broke, but I will say that at least he only cheated on one wife, and the double standard I see now is against Harris for being a woman. Because she's had sex ever in her life, she "slept her way to the top." Granted, if she were a Republican woman it wouldn't matter. My uncle thinks Trump will end the war in Ukraine and establish peace because he'll threaten to use nukes, and the world's dictators will know he's crazy enough to do it. Spinning his dangerous mental instability as a positive thing is certainly a take. I'm pretty sure Trump would end the war in Ukraine by giving Ukraine to Russia, just like Republicans have wanted to do for the last three years because somehow Russia has lobotomized them. Putin is not scared of Trump. Putin has his arm all the way up Trump's ass. Putin will manipulate Trump as easily as Harris does. Putin wants Trump to be elected. Every Instagram account with no face, no posts, and no followers is making anti-Harris comments.

A lot of Puerto Ricans have recently gotten pissed off and turned against Trump because a bully, I mean "comedian" at his Nazi rally in Madison Square Garden a week ago made a "joke" about Puerto Rico being a "floating island of garbage." Whatever works, I guess, but if his campaign's bigotry isn't a dealbreaker for you until it targets you personally, you're kind of a shitty person. I bet my family members wouldn't vote for him if he said something rude about Mormons. It cannot be overstated how unacceptable and disqualifying this bigotry should be. Economic policies aside, I could never in good conscience affiliate with such a profoundly discriminatory movement, and it baffles me that so many ostensibly good people can. It was bad enough when it happened in 1930s Germany, but nobody in today's world who made it past seventh grade has any excuse for not knowing better.

Months ago, my great-aunt told me that my great-grandmother loved me so much and regarded me as a good listener with a deep soul. That came as a surprise because I saw my great-grandmother once 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, t'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 it 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 is 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.

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.

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.