Recently I went to a fundraiser for Palestine that happened to be a rave. Due to some BS with the police and a landlord, it was moved from its intended location to a beautiful park with lots of trees, which I think was for the best. It was pretty chill, probably not a "real" rave, but I don't have much basis for comparison. Some parents with a couple of little kids were on the playground when we arrived, and they left when the music started. A middle-aged guy showed up with his daughter or granddaughter to use the playground, and he bought something from the Bakers for Palestine table, and then after using the playground for only a few minutes, the little girl wandered around the proverbial dance floor playing with one of the bubble guns that the DJ let her have. Everyone was real nice and careful not to use drugs in front of her. I loved how she kept a poker face the entire time while her father or grandfather beamed at her.

For a while, I sat on the grass and didn't dance or talk to people. Then I joined a circle of people sitting elsewhere in the grass, and they talked about shrooms and weed, and the woman next to me passed around a vape pen full of weed for anyone who wanted to partake. Yes, the scenario of strangers offering me free drugs that I was promised in elementary school finally came true. Since I'd already eaten several THC edibles with no regrets, I gave it a try. She had to show me how. After that, my self-consciousness disappeared, I danced my heart out without caring if I looked stupid, I socialized with people I recognized from multiple protests but never got to know, and I had a great time. I don't think I've ever had such a great time at a social event surrounded by strangers. Richard Nixon can rot in hell for trying to deny me this experience. (And for many other reasons.) Because I wasn't in bed in the privacy of my room, I didn't get a lot of the usual dissociation and hallucination, but I still got some when I closed my eyes and surrendered to the music.

In the process of enriching every aspect of life, THC also makes me more attracted to women than usual. It's not typical for me to see a woman in person and feel compelled to think "God damn, she's cute," but that night, I did. She was just standing there doing the clone trooper dance.

She caught me looking and smiled. I was just about brave enough to go over and tell her that I couldn't help it because she was beautiful and I was high. And it's not like I was the only high person there by a long shot. But I didn't know if she would find that sort of thing amusing, so out of caution and respect, I didn't.

Then just yesterday, I read a study about a newly discovered correlation between THC and early heart disease. This is important to know about, and I'll be mindful of it in the future, but I'm not terribly concerned. This correlation was found in "people who smoked (not vaped) marijuana three or more times a week for at least a year" and "people who consumed THC edibles at least three times a week for at least a year." I haven't consumed THC edibles nearly that often or had any plans to do so. Recently, I've been doing it once every one to two weeks, and now that I've run out, I'm fine to take a break before I get more. I hope they're perfectly safe in moderation. If not, that's unfortunate, but they've had such tangible benefits for my mental health and spirituality that it was worth it even if my heart wears out faster and cuts short the years of old age where everything would hurt and nobody would visit me. I'd like to die quickly from heart failure anyway, not slowly from cancer or starvation.

My landlord is trying to sell the house. I don't know if he'll be able to do that in the economy that Trump singlehandedly broke with his moronic trade war, and if he is, I don't know if I'll have to move. Logically, unless the new owners have a massive family, they should let me and my roommate stay in the basement. It's a self-sufficient living arrangement with its own bathrooms, kitchen, and laundry, and why wouldn't they want to get that income without having to do anything? They'd probably increase the rent, though. And if I do have to move, wherever I go will probably have higher rent. Everything in this country is designed to make sure I'll never save up a comfortable amount of money. The more money I save, the more fucking expensive everything gets. And it's not like this is a great place where I want to stay for the rest of my life, but I really don't enjoy moving.

I'm really trying to let go of my desire and trust that the universe will provide, like I did when I moved here in the first place. It's a lot harder this time for some reason. I've had a lot of anxiety over it in the last few weeks, and the anxiety is an almost physical feeling in my chest that doesn't go away just because my brain tries to talk sense into it. It didn't help that my landlord forgot or failed to add me to the group chat about when people are coming to look at the house, so I was in the shower when some people showed up, and then he was upset with me, and I was like WTF, I didn't do anything wrong, I'm not psychic. I wonder how old that group chat is. All those times he pissed me off by not warning me he was going to make an ungodly amount of noise with his renovations and render my quarters unliveable, maybe he thought he had warned me.

That same day, I went to the dentist and learned that I'll have to get a crown for $1229 (with my membership discount). Hooray. When the receptionist came back to tell me about that as if it were a normal thing I should be okay with, she asked if I was doing anything fun that day, and I said I was going to watch the finale of Andor, and we talked about Star Wars. I said Andor is great because it has a lot of political intrigue, and she said, "It's interesting that a lot of people don't realize how political Star Wars has always been." I fell in love on the spot. Not really, but I felt like I did. Then she called me "love" when I left. She wasn't even British. I understand that her job requires her to smile and be nice to people, but is it really too much to ask for women who aren't British to not call me "love" if they don't love me? Really? The word is "love." Do I need to draw a diagram?

That morning, I had been content with my solitary lifestyle, but then she gave me the smallest taste of the affection that's routinely denied me, and all it did was remind me how hungry I am. Then, because I wanted to have a positive attitude about life and not resent getting screwed out of $1229, I figured at least I'll probably see her again when I go back, and maybe that will be worth $1229. Probably not, but in my defense, last year I got financially screwed to the point of suicidality and it led to me establishing a real relationship with my uncle despite our political differences and spending a bunch of time with his youngest kids, who turned out to worship me, and it taught me that relationships are more important than money. So this isn't just about the receptionist being attractive. But, like, money is still important if you enjoy having any of the basic necessities of life. Don't get it twisted.

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.