Russia + Los Angeles + My New Book Cover

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.