Talking to Myself in Public |
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I got a pleasant surprise this week when Alyssa Grenfell, an ex-Mormon YouTuber with 374,000 subscribers, used my website (specifically this page) as a source in her latest video, "Why Good Mormon Girls Always Say Yes💍." I'm immensely flattered, and my mind is blown that someone with 374,000 YouTube subscribers has even looked at my website. If anyone is here because of her, hi, I'm also an ex-Mormon, and I have a ton of content related to Mormonism on my website, but currently on my blog I write more about politics because, well, if you can't guess, then we aren't going to get along. Also, I'm neurodivergent and stopped caring that I'm weird some time ago. I will say that as a young adult in the LDS Church, I was well aware of the high-pressure dating and marriage culture that Alyssa describes in her video, but I didn't personally experience it much. My YSA wards in Logan seemed more sane than that. When I watched "The Singles' Ward" I didn't think Wow, this is so relatable, I thought Wow, Provo Mormons are freaks. My other favorite part of this week is that protesters ruined Shady Vance's ski trip in Vermont. I hope that was a wakeup call for him. Not a wakeup call that he's a bad person, because I'm sure he's already proud of that fact, but a wakeup call that Americans aren't going to quietly tolerate it. He must be scared. Fascists are cowards who act tough. I'm still doing my part, of course. I wanted to go to every protest in Salt Lake, but I've already missed at least two put on by organizations that I wasn't following. Being unable to keep up with all the protests is a good problem to have. Yesterday, of course, I went to La Gran Marcha, a pro-immigration protest.     Right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley was there livestreaming and asking people questions. Reading the comments on his video was a depressing reminder that conservatives are still a. living in a different reality and b. trash.  Someone broke out in an argument with him near me, and I started filming in case it became violent. He was with some lady whom others later claimed was his mom, and she became speechless and walked away after people looked up her Facebook profile and called her out for being a Nazi. I didn't personally verify that she was a Nazi, but she made no attempt to refute that accusation. It's an embarassing video because I was too mentally challenged to keep my fingers out of the frame, but at least I'm not a Nazi. And I took this clip of him getting yelled at for touching a child from someone else's video. It's really weird that he did that. Of course, I wasn't in total alignment with the views of everyone at the protest either. Someone had a sign that said "Protect People Not Borders." I don't believe in having no border security. Someone had a large anarcho-communist flag. I don't believe in anarcho-communism. Nonetheless, I was happy to march alongside them because I agreed with them on the important point that almost everything the current administration is doing, including the way it treats undocumented immigrants, is evil. Give me an anarcho-communist over a Nazi any day. Or most Republicans, though I concede that some of the protesters are Republicans who actually want limited government and not a fascist theocracy.
The 50501 movement is doing another national day of protest on March 4 at noon because the self-proclaimed king has some big speech that day, probably to announce that our democratic republic will be reorganized into the First Galactic Empire. Go to fiftyfifty.one to find a protest near you. I know a lot of people have to work, but with every fiber of my being I urge everyone who can to participate before it's too late. I've just read about how Republicans in Congress are scared of what will happen to them if they stand up to the orange taint. We need to make them more scared of what will happen to them if they don't. (I am not advocating violence.) Also, here's a new form to report DEIs to the Department of Education so they can fire all the teachers who aren't white. Please don't overload it with spam. A lot of people are also boycotting Amazon, canceling their Prime subscriptions, and so on, due to Bezos' support of the current regime. I self-published my books through Amazon Direct Publishing because it was super easy, barely an inconvenience. Now I'm going to leave them up there just in case a conservative mistakes one for a picture book and buys it, but I'm branching out onto several other ebook platforms with Draft2Digital, which is also super easy, barely an inconvenience and what I should have done in the first place. I think all of these platforms are smaller than Amazon (for now), which should actually work to my advantage. Amazon is oversaturated with self-publications. Fingers crossed.
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PSA: Here's a recent example I observed firsthand of how Russian trolls and bots manipulate millions of Americans who should have been declared mentally unfit to vote.   If you believe this is a real person, you're as stupid as you are racist, and I know you voted for Putin's sock puppet, and I can't wait to mock you when you reap the consequences. I was going to say this obvious propaganda didn't work on me because I graduated high school, but my friend who dropped out of high school can also see that the orange jackass is evil and a disaster for the United States, so... As I write this, Los Angeles is being destroyed. Thousands of people have lost their homes after their insurance companies canceled their policies. News outlets are fixating on the celebrities who have lost one of their multi-million dollar homes. Mormons are celebrating that their easily replaceable temple has been spared. Republicans are spreading lies about the fire department's response and calling the chief a "DEI hire" because she's not a straight white male. She literally has as much prior experience as it's possible to have for that position, and the main reason for any shortcomings in her department's response is that the city cut its budget to give more money to the fucking police. Anyway, the scale of these fires, like the scale of the storms in Florida a few months ago, is unprecedented. Climate change isn't some hypothetical future boogieman, it's actively destroying civilization right now. Good thing the United States didn't just get a president who will do everything in his power to make it worse for the foreseeable future... oh, wait.  Hell is real, and it was brought to us by oil companies. Reminder that my new memoir is out as an ebook on Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble. I want to talk some more about how much I love the cover. I was very disappointed with the cover for my first book. The artist ghosted me for weeks at a time and then turned in a half-assed job at the last minute. I can barely think about it, let alone look at it without getting depressed, and I'm not very sad about the possibility of AI crushing his dreams. This cover, on the other hand, is one that I'm actually excited to show people. It was created by my transgender ex-Mormon brother, the only member of my immediate family who won't be upset that this book exists. (On the other hand, my genderfluid ex-Mormon cousin was the first person who bought it.)  It's primarily based on a nightmare I had after reading Carl Sagan's Cosmos at the height of my existential crisis, which I describe in the book. It gave me an unsubtle visual representation of how much I didn't matter and almost brought me to tears. The Milky Way in the background is a touch I didn't request, yet it fortuitously happens to align with another bit that I mention in the book - namely, the time I was in Logan Canyon with friends looking at the Milky Way and thinking deep thoughts, and thanks to Carl Sagan's Cosmos, I was able to tell them that it's called the Milky Way because it came from the goddess Hera's breast.
We wouldn't have been able to put that on the cover anyway. The Milky Way looks, rather, like it's coming from Heavenly Father and Heavenly Mother, the exalted heterosexual couple that rules the universe in Mormonism. Heavenly Mother is cut off a little to subtly indicate her inferior status. She's not worshipped or prayed to, she's rarely talked about, and nothing is known about what she actually does. They're looking at me with disappointment, which is self-explanatory. It occurred to me just this week that they could also be considered a representation of my real parents. The latter respected my decision to apostatize (which I appreciate) and have never wanted to talk about it at all (which I don't appreciate), but I know they can't be happy about it because their lives revolve around Mormonism. I remember my dad's annoyance when his sister and brother-in-law left it, and I have no reason to think he's changed since then. "I thought they got it," he said. I feel the same way about my parents voting for a fascist with dementia who embodies the opposite of every virtue they ever taught me, so we're even. The flying saucer is there because I wanted a flying saucer there. I have no real justification. I like science fiction. There's a chapter in the book about aliens, but it has little to do with anything else. I've never felt less happy about the New Year. My country is almost certainly about to enter its darkest hour since the Civil War for no reason except that a majority of its voting citizens have no principles and are easier to brainwash than first graders. At this point, I sincerely believe the best-case scenario would be a bird flu pandemic disrupting President Musk's government and naturally selecting a big chunk of stupid out of the population. I'd rather not have a pandemic every five years, but oh well, at least I already have a remote job this time. On the plus side, I beat the odds by living long enough to experience my country's death by suicide in the first place.  I published my new book on the last day of last year. I don't know how long I'll keep up publishing a book every year, but two is two more than I had two years ago. I could say a lot about this book, but there's no point because it's all in the introduction that you can read in the free sample. Cover art by Sarah Nicholson Amazon Kindle link
Barnes & Noble link (I just replaced the initial sketch of the cover with this one. If it isn't showing up on the sites yet, come back in a few hours.) Even though this book is about me, I wrote it to help others, and I think it's more important than ever with the dark times we're heading into. By "we" I mean Americans but also everyone else who will be negatively impacted by the Rapist-in-Chief and his cabal of lunatics. I don't claim to be super spiritual or know everything, but I think I'm kind of spiritual and know some stuff, and the journey to get to that point hurt like hell, so I've got to make it worthwhile by sharing it. I have more missionary zeal than I ever did as a Mormon, perhaps because what I have to offer now is based on evidence and logic, not feelings. Again, I'm not claiming to be right about everything, which is one reason I'm only publishing the book digitally at this time so I can update it easily. I don't care if people end up agreeing with all my beliefs or not. I'm humble about them. I will correct misinformation, though. Just today I corrected someone on Facebook who claimed that near-death experiences are caused by "the brain switch[ing] to a dream state to deal with it coming to an end." I was polite, but that's nonsense. When was the last time you had a "dream" that felt more real than reality, even after you woke up from it? Never, that's when. Also, there's no plausible explanation for how the brain could have evolved an adaptation like this. A pleasant death does zilch to improve anyone's odds of passing their genes on. I explained this, and then some guy who wrongly thinks being an atheist makes him smart laugh reacted to me and didn't say anything. Anyway, I explain all this in the book. Of course, I have enough integrity to correct misinformation about my former religion too. Today on Instagram I saw someone claim with total confidence that Mormons can't eat chocolate. Sheesh. Months ago, my great-aunt told me that my great-grandmother loved me so much and said I was a good listener and had a deep soul. That came as a surprise because I saw my great-grandmother for a few hours 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, it'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. My Religion 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. Writing 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 A letter was like an email, but on paper. Equality for Negroes  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 that 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. Nature's Little Joke |
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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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