I watched Revenge of the Sith in the theater for its 20th anniversary re-release. It had a cool intro by Hayden Christensen, enjoying his new popularity after years of hate. He said, "This is where the fun begins." I was like, "He said the thing!" When I first watched it almost twenty years ago, of course it hit differently. For one thing, I thought it would be the last Star Wars movie ever. For another, I had no idea that it was heavily inspired by the then-current Bush administration's executive overreach and crackdown on civil liberties. Darth Vader literally paraphrases Bush at one point, and morons still think the Sith are Democrats and complain about Mark Hamill "turning to the dark side" when he speaks out against fascism. And now we have another Republican president who simultaneously builds on Bush's legacy and makes him look a lot better. We are in one of the darkest periods of American history. I would consider it second only to the Civil War. But this movie franchise reminds us that there's still hope. Rebellions are built on hope.

Though the orange taint is clearly a net negative for the world, there are silver linings. His phenomenal unpopularity has sunk the right-wing parties in Canada and Australia, which were poised to win their respective elections by substantial margins before he decided to piss everyone off for no reason. You're welcome.

Being surrounded by people with the critical thinking skills of sea cucumbers has baffled me almost as much as it's sapped my will to live. This video shed some light on that phenomenon for me. My only gripe is that he tried too hard to make this politically neutral, saying, "And here's the thing, it's bipartisan. Both sides of the aisle have their own brands of boneheadedness. One side thinks we can shoot hurricanes and the other thinks banning plastic straws will save the whales even though they just flew into the rally in a private jet." The average left-winger doesn't have a private jet, but the average right-winger believes climate change is a hoax and consistently supports policies that harm the environment. Yes, left-wingers can also be idiots, but the dumbing down of the United States is central to the right-wing agenda. Left-wingers don't call educated people "elitists," don't complain about fact-checking, don't want to defund the Department of Education or make student loans unaffordable, and, most significantly, have nothing close to an equivalent of Donald Trump or his cult. It's not a coincidence that educated people overwhelmingly lean left, and it's not because their Marxist professors brainwashed them either. Other than glossing over that reality, this is a good video.

​This week has been a long year. I got high instead of watching the orange taint's inauguration, and then I got high the next day for good measure, and it was all downhill from there. The only part of the inauguration I've seen is the clip of President Musk giving two very obvious Nazi salutes. I'm old enough to remember when presidential inaugurations didn't include Nazi salutes. Anyone who says they weren't Nazi salutes knows they're lying. Anyone who says he didn't know better knows they're lying. I'm on the spectrum too, and I haven't given a Nazi salute since high school. The context was that I said "Guten Tag" to my Spanish teacher as a joke, and my hand just went up by itself, probably because I'd watched Indiana Jones too many times. I didn't realize it until she gasped in horror, but she hadn't even noticed the salute; she just thought I'd said a bad word.

I don't have the energy to recap everything the orange taint did this week to ruin people's lives, and if I make a habit of doing that, I'll never have time to write about anything else. My exhaustion is by design, of course. His blitzkrieg of executive orders was intended to overwhelm and demoralize people so they won't resist his administration. Many if not most of them will face legal action, which will slow them down for months or years and stop some of them altogether. Even the Supreme Court, with all its derangement and corruption, isn't guaranteed to rule in his favor every time because two of the conservative justices aren't complete pieces of shit. His absurd attempt to overrule the 14th Amendment with an executive order has already been halted. But legal processes take time, and he's trying to weaken the resistance up front. We just have to grit our teeth, remain optimistic, and keep resisting. It's inevitable that innocent people will suffer for the foreseeable future, and I won't downplay that, but things aren't hopeless in the long term.

I do want to highlight one egregiously stupid executive order from the Republicunt party's leg-humping obsession with making transgender people's lives miserable, though. It says that "'Female' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell," while "'Male' means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell." So there you have it. Republicunts are so goddamn stupid that they think zygotes produce reproductive cells (and have more rights than actual people, but that's another story). This is yet another reason why I don't accept lectures on "basic biology" from people who believe our species descended from a man made out of dust who boinked a woman made from his own rib six thousand years ago. Some people suspect this text was written by AI, but the chatbots I work with for a living rarely make such stupid mistakes.

I said last week that religions shouldn't be politically neutral but rather should stand up for human rights and social justice. We saw a great example of that in Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde, who triggered the orange taint and countless other sociopaths this week by asking him to be nice to people. Let me be clear: if you found anything objectionable in her remarks, you are a piece of shit, and you would have been first in line to crucify Jesus. The stunning lack of self-awareness in people who call themselves Christians yet base their entire worldview on being assholes isn't funny anymore.

Here's a former Capitol police officer reacting to the orange taint pardoning the insurrectionists who assaulted him. I've said many harsh things about cops, and I apologize for none of them, but I've never supported assaulting cops who aren't doing anything wrong - or trying to overthrow the government because your candidate lost. Republicunts are rewriting history before our very eyes. Since January 7, 2021, they've been telling us that we didn't see what we saw on January 6. Kind of like they're doing now with President Musk's Nazi salutes.

Here's a fun and educational podcast interview between Jon Stewart and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. I feel more hope for the future knowing that Jon is still doing his show and AOC is still in Congress. I wouldn't complain if they both ended up in the White House.

Here's a text my aunt sent me.

I could be much happier for the foreseeable future if I, like most of my family members, stopped caring about the people around me. I would still suffer a lot from the orange taint's policies, but I wouldn't feel pain for the marginalized groups he's deliberately targeting. But my principles are more important to me than happiness. This is my blog and I can virtue signal if I want, dang it. I've become closer with my aunt because I relate to her a lot more than most of my family. I certainly didn't learn this empathy from my parents. They taught me to be nice to people, of course, but they've spent my entire life demonstrating that they're incapable of empathy for anything they've never personally experienced. They couldn't comprehend that my brain worked differently than theirs, even after mental health professionals told them, so they responded aggressively and callously to my "negative attitude." My dad empathized with my inability to swim due to my low body fat because he had the same issue, but he never had chronic insomnia, so no matter how many times I explained that I did, he would judge me for not getting out of bed before 8:30. At the beginning of the orange taint's first term he mocked an NPR interview he heard with people who were afraid. My mom mocked me for having to talk to a suicide hotline after this last election night. And my parents don't even like him as a person, but they think they deserve gold stars for acknowledging that he's a piece of shit (my words) and then voting for him anyway. His overt bigotry and discrimination aren't dealbreakers for them because they aren't the targets. They would have voted for Hitler if he ran as a Republican and promised to secure the border (which, incidentally, has next to zero effect on their lives in the Midwest). They aren't hurting right now like I am, and of course they'll just see my current pain as another symptom of my "negative attitude." This is my blog and I can rant if I want, dang it.

On a happier note, "Star Wars: Skeleton Crew" is a fun show. It's about a group of kids who have an adventure with space pirates. Watch it before the anti-DEI fuckwits ban it for having a Black lead character.

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 found out this week that the owners of my apartment complex, who have never talked to me, don't want the property management company to renew my lease. I wasn't told why, but I have a few guesses. It doesn't matter. Though this came as an unpleasant surprise, I was trained for it five years ago, when I had to move three times before ending up at this place. I accepted it right away. I happened to read the email in Garden City during a detour from a camping trip with friends, the only interval when I had access to my cellular network. By the way, that really needs to be fixed. I'm all for leaving technological distractions behind, but anyone who has a medical emergency in most parts of Logan Canyon or the surrounding areas is screwed. The point, though, is that I was in the middle of this camping trip with friends. Most of them had actually gone home by then because they had jobs or colonoscopies or whatever.

But I love these friends. The last time I was in the wilderness with them - I don't say camping because it was cold, and we all chickened out and went home - I stared up at the Milky Way and ached with the desire for our friendship to continue after our deaths. I wasn't confident at the time that it would. Now I am. It's been all but proven by science. We know for a fact that people have died and remained conscious, despite their brains being shut down, for a couple of hours before they come back. I want to shout this fact from the rooftops. Actually, I'm working on a children's book with the working title "Everyone Dies." I've had the idea for this book for a while, but I didn't know how to go about it because I didn't have any solid reassurance to give children about what happens after death, and I'm not willing to lie to them by implying that death is always peaceful or that it only happens to old people. Now at least the first problem is solved. I feel a strong desire to write this book, and I hope it will spread a message of hope far and wide. As random as it sounds, it feels like part of my calling in life now.

To reiterate: I love these friends. At this time in Garden City I remained with Steve and his wife. Not for the first or last time, here's the story of how I met Steve, which I never tire of. I used to sometimes visit this girl who lived next door to him. She texted me, I dropped everything, and we sat on her balcony and talked. Then Steve got home from work, and she said, "Steve, come join us!" I didn't like that very much, and consequently I didn't like him very much. At least once, we had three chairs on the balcony, and I put my feet on the extra chair and hoped he would take the hint, but he didn't. I feel so bad about that now. Steve is a really great guy. This whole friend group that I love so much has coalesced around him. In 2019, I jumped at the chance to become his neighbor.

I used to ask him for priesthood blessings all the time. Then I didn't because he moved away and I stopped believing in the Mormon priesthood. I still think, of course, that any God who may hypothetically exist can communicate through a Mormon priesthood blessing as well as any other method, but I don't know if that actually happens or how to tell. I've been told things in priesthood blessings that the speaker shouldn't have known, and I've also been told things in priesthood blessings that were simply wrong, and I'm not interested in making excuses like "Maybe it was talking about the next life" or "Maybe it meant something else because God likes to intentionally mislead people." Anyway, since I was there with Steve I asked for a blessing to help me not spiral into depression over this email. And he mentioned something that he shouldn't have known, and something else that I may have discussed with him some time ago, but I don't remember. So that was interesting.

The point I'm getting at in such a roundabout way is that because I fortuitiously happened to be with these friends at this time, it took me less than two hours to decide that I would move to the Salt Lake City area to be closer to them. Most of them live there or will be moving there soon. If I move somewhere else in Logan, I'll continue to live with twenty-year-old college students, and that gets weirder with every passing year. Logan is a college town. I love it dearly, but I came to realize that it has little to offer me anymore because I'm not in college or married. Salt Lake will be an exciting new chapter in my life. I'll spend more time with these stable adult friends, I'll be more involved in my adorable little nieces' lives, and since I'm there anyway, maybe I'll start a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Utah next year. USU doesn't have that program. I am, of course, heartbroken to leave behind the town that's been my home for nearly thirteen years, but life is change, and change more often than not entails some loss. Don't fight it. Don't resent it. As Matthew Stover poignantly wrote in the novelization for Revenge of the Sith, even stars die. 

I felt that in 2019, a higher power had orchestrated my life to lead me to where I live now. And here I met someone whom I thought was the reason. Maybe she was a reason. As much as I could do without the trauma she brought into my life, I owe her much gratitude for getting me out of the LDS Church and sending me into an existential crisis that brought me spiritual growth that I wouldn't trade for anything. But it seems weird that God would guide me to someone to turn me into an agnostic. Another reason, I see now, was getting closer to Steve and these other friends. He moved soon after I arrived, but if I hadn't lived here, they all might have faded from my life like almost everyone else I've met in this college town. He was there for me when the other person hurt me, multiple times, and he was there for me when we were stuck at home during the early days of the pandemic. I look back on those days with a strange mixture of trauma and nostalgia.

After the disaster of early 2020, and I'm not talking about the pandemic, I've felt confused and abandoned and aimless as far as God's supposed guidance is concerned. This upcoming move is the first time since then that I feel once more like my life is being orchestrated by a higher power. I'm agnostic, of course, over whether it actually is. Things happen. Coincidences happen. Human brains are wired by evolution to see patterns and agency where none exist. But I feel good about it, and that's good enough. Not because my good feeling is a guide to any kind of truth, but because it means I'm excited about a new chapter. And also sad. It's complicated.

I made a simple little YouTube ad for my book. In theory, I have a wider reach on YouTube than on any other platform, because I have 3.45K subscribers, mostly thanks to one music video I posted in 2015 that has over two million views. In practice, this video has gotten six views in six days. Yay, I love being me.

But I'm also friends with a host of a Star Wars podcast, and I arranged to exploit that for some free advertising under the rationale that my book drew lots of inspiration from Star Wars. I listened to this episode on mute because I want to support my friend but I'd rather slit my wrists than hear my own voice. This was my first time being interviewed about what I hope to leverage into a career, and I think I did pretty well right until the end. I've decided that from now on I'm not going to be apologetic or self-deprecating about the fact that I self-published. That was my choice, and I stand by it. I don't know how much rejection I would have experienced or how many changes the publisher would have wanted to make if I'd gone the traditional route, but the fact that I didn't is not a reflection on the quality of my writing. Also, at the end, I should have mentioned my Goodreads author page. I only mentioned my Amazon page and this website and said that should about cover it. My mind was racing with all my different social media profiles, and I thought I should keep it simple by not including them, and then I didn't mention the Goodreads author page because I haven't done anything with it, I have one follower (the podcast friend), and I don't have a strategy for using it to further my career. I should, though. But see, I'm learning already, and it's a very good sign that I don't hate everything about this interview.

A few days later, as it happens, another friend sought out people to participate in a podcast that she's making for a college class. The topic is "life lessons you wish you had learned sooner." I'm not sure if I'll do it or not, because the biggest life lesson I wish I had learned sooner, besides the generic and boring ones, is one that she, a Mormon, wouldn't want to hear. The biggest life lesson I wish I had learned sooner is this: Feelings are not a reliable method of evaluating truth. I've only learned this in the last couple of years. My parents and everyone in the LDS Church taught me from a young age to base my worldview in large part on "spiritual witnesses" that are actually just normal human emotions. As an adult, I thought I was so open-minded and well-rounded because I accepted spiritual methods of evaluating certain kinds of truth in addition to empirical methods for evaluating other kinds of truth. But this sandy foundation, and my desperate wholehearted efforts to follow God's direction for my life, eventually brought me a world of pain and disillusionment. Pleasant feelings are not the Holy Ghost. Unpleasant feelings are not Satan. This is so obvious now. I'm pretty pissed off that I was indoctrinated to think that way. I try not to be pissed off at any specific person who indoctrinated me, because I know they all meant well.

There was a very specific point in my life, age seventeen, where I chose to continue believing the church, despite all the evidence I'd stumbled upon that Joseph Smith was a fraud, because of the powerful "spiritual witness" I'd felt at EFY. It's hard to say I regret that as such. I don't regret moving to Utah, going to USU, or meeting many wonderful people and having many great experiences through the church. It's impossible to even say how my life would have turned out otherwise. But eventually, my fidelity to this decision - to God, I thought - drove me to twist myself into intellectual pretzels, put up with a lot of bullcrap that was so clearly wrong, and waste several years of my life defending and promoting a lie. I wish I had still come to Utah and gone to USU but left the LDS Church years earlier. And I hope to help others figure it out sooner than I did before they base their major life decisions on unreliable feelings, perhaps with less positive results. Think of all the women who gave up their dreams because their prophet told them to be stay-at-home moms, for example. Think of all the irrational things people may do because they think the Holy Ghost told them to. Someone posted this on reddit a few months ago. They filed it under Humor/Memes, but it's not funny, it's terrifying that children are being groomed to think this way. Or more precisely, to not think at all.

People in every religion appear to get the same "spiritual witnesses" that the LDS Church wants to monopolize, and I point this out at every opportunity. Mormons typically give me one of two responses. The first one is that of course all these people feel the Holy Ghost because all religions have some truth. But that still undermines the claim that Mormons' spiritual witnesses specifically prove that their religion is the most true. Mormons have no right to assert that their subjective personal feelings are more powerful or more authentic than everyone else's subjective personal feelings. This also fails to explain why "the Holy Ghost" bears witness of the truth of suicide cults, as attested by people who have been filmed bearing emotional testimonies a few days before they killed themselves because their prophet told them to. And when I bring that up, Mormons give their other response, which is that Satan deceived those people by mimicking the Holy Ghost - something that the LDS Church specifically taught me he couldn't do. My sister said that's why we have to evaluate religions by their fruits. I tried to explain that nobody in the world sees the LDS Church protecting child abusers or lying about its obscene wealth and thinks "Ah, this must be the true religion."

Someone posted this on reddit a few days ago. I can vouch that nothing in it is inaccurate. I was taught all of this in the LDS Church, and now, from the other side, the manipulation and circular reasoning are so obvious (without even getting into the fallacious claim that the church is automatically true if the Book of Mormon is true).

The LDS Church quite noticeably pulls this same bullcrap with tithing. If you pay it and good things happen, that proves tithing is a true principle and you should keep paying it. If you pay it and good things don't happen, that means you need to wait on the Lord's timing or you're just failing to notice the subtle ways he's blessing you, and tithing is still a true principle and you should keep paying it. There is no scenario in which the church will concede that the tithing promise has been falsified.

While I'm on the subject of the Book of Mormon, though, I want to address a couple of faith-promoting cliches that I saw all over Twitter when Mormons began studying it in their church curriculum this year. The people saying these things weren't the usual alt-right jerks that I interact with, so I left them alone unless they specifically invited feedback. But I can't stand the claim that Joseph Smith only had 85 days to translate the Book of Mormon and therefore it was miraculous. According to his own narrative, he had five and a half years between the time he first mentioned the golden plates and the time he started translating them. His mother later wrote of this period, "During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of travelings, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life among them." He even got a bit of a practice run when he dictated the original 116 pages and then didn't reproduce them after Martin Harris lost them, as he would have been able to do if he'd actually received them by revelation. And then he only needed to dictate for three to six hours a day to get the Book of Mormon finished in 85 days. Suddenly it's a little less miraculous.

I also saw a lot of assertions that the Book of Mormon has "held up to scrutiny" for almost two hundred years. That one just baffles me. Orthodox Mormons will continue to believe in it because of their "spiritual witness," not because of external evidence or internal consistency, regardless of what anyone says. Meanwhile, the people outside of the LDS Church and the tiny Mormon splinter groups who take it seriously as an ancient document can be counted on one hand. Virtually all scholars of anything regard it as an obvious work of nineteenth-century fiction. Even many Mormons regard it as a work of nineteenth-century fiction. I have no real idea, but I think it would be generous to estimate that 0.05% of people in the world believe the Book of Mormon is what Joseph Smith said it was. So why does that tiny fraction of a percent, whatever it happens to be exactly, get to decide that the book has "held up to scrutiny"? What does that even mean under these circumstances? Just that the book has continued to exist? That's a pretty low bar, and not miraculous by any stretch of the imagination. It's the same bar to which they hold the entire LDS Church now that its "miraculous" growth rate has been plummeting for three decades in a row.

So that's why I'm not sure if I'll appear on this other friend's podcast.