Album Release: Sundae Busk by Star Jelly

Music is an important part of my life. It helped me through some of the worst times, in fact. And it was in so many different parts of my life that it has become an all encompassing thing. I almost always have a song in my head, and I get wisdom from the songs. Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist, actually wrote about a man who had musicophilia, which I think is essentially what I have. I was a neuroscientist, which is different than a neurologist, so my experience of this information is different; it is more conceptual and personal than it is clinical. Anyway, musicophilia is an important inner guide for me! I do not view musicophilia the same way Oliver Sacks did, since I experience it myself and have been able to correlate the phenomena with other experiences in my life. I think people with musicophilia hear The Akashic Radio. To figure this out, I had to take the time to slow down and listen, and that is what helped it go from being a distraction to a superpower.


There are actually many other people like me. I am extremely interested in what causes this and the other psychic phenomena I experience. I think this is important to understand because music has well researched and documented benefits for health. For me it has been an important part of addressing trauma and also expressing moods that I cannot capture with words. Other artists are sometimes able to unlock something I cannot with their expressions, and the magic record player in my head and on the airwaves seems to know what I need to hear, and guide me through those times.


In addition to musicophilia, I struggle with alexithymia, which means I often don’t know how I feel, and music helps. Not knowing how I feel is really a hindrance when I am having to deal with other people who like to make decisions through group work and discussions or who need answers right away. This has been a struggle for me off and on, especially in certain contexts. I can be easily overwhelmed by crosstalk and background noise, so I don’t do well in large groups for that reason, either. I would really like to work better with others, and to do that I need to be able to express the troubles I sometimes have which I have to accommodate and not just ignore in order to function my best and not disappoint others. Not knowing how I feel makes it hard for me to make decisions on the spot, so if I am forced to make decisions due to group behaviors, I tend to make decisions out of anxiety rather than desire. That just never seems to work out very well for me or my relationships.


Some of my problems with this are probably related to repeated cycles of dieting doing damage to my nervous system, so in that vein I am trying to heal my relationship with my body. The vagus nerve is important in regulating somatosensory awareness through the anterior cingulate cortex, and when it is damaged it can cause autonomic nervous system excitability, which can predispose a person to panic attacks, difficulty sleeping, anxiety, hypervigilance, and other phenomena which can be troubling not just to the sufferer, but to the people who love them and have to work with them. The symptoms I have, both physical and mental, are similar to those suffered by people with eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia, and I carry genetics for two of the top three heritable conditions which are associated with the development of eating disorders. Those conditions are porphyria, cystic fibrosis (CF) and diabetes. When I figured this out, it was a big relief, because these are all conditions in which digestive symptoms are affected by dietary factors, so it makes sense that suffers would intuitively become sort of picky about food. On the outside, without knowing that I carry porphyria and CF, my fixation on food might look like orthorexia, but it really was an attempt to try to improve my health, not starve myself for vanity’s sake. One of the symptoms I get from stressors is upset stomach, but also up until very recently my body had shut off its hunger signals which are controlled by the vagus nerve. So that meant that I could easily not feel like eating or forget to eat and then suddenly experience cognitive and sensory effects like an inability to stay present, anxiety, confusion and moodiness. It is like extreme “hanger,” but more like “hanxiety” - and when I noticed the cognitive symptoms it always felt like I only had seconds to eat before I might need to pass out. Note that these symptoms are almost identical to what people with diabetes feel, but my blood sugars aren’t involved like a diabetic’s would be.


For the last couple of years, being forced to be concerned with so many things outside myself presented a real struggle for this reason. In 2019, when I initially recognized that I was having serious health issues, I found that having a friend over for just a few hours was too much, because keeping on top of my metabolic health took so much focus and it was so easy to “lay down my motorcycle” so to speak if I did not have quiet time. It was a bit like being a preschooler in a way, that I needed regular naps and snacks or I became kind of a trainwreck. Since I was spending so much time trying to keep myself from falling down the mountain, I really didn’t have the focus necessary to be able to hold intellectual conversations in real time. These problems have all improved greatly since we had our backdrafting water heater removed from our home and improved the air quality in it by making our own detergents, and also since I have figured out specific nutritional needs I have that may be greater due to my specific genetics.


Eventually, I would like to sing with my music, and I have been practicing over the pandemic. That was mostly due to having gone to a karaoke bar before the pandemic and wanting to reacquaint myself with singing. Singing ended up being important for my health over the pandemic and while I was recovering as it provided a way for me to concentrate on my breath. So whether or not the quality was good, I did not know. I did learn a lot about myself by singing; I learned what factors influence my mucus production and my ability to generate full sound, and I learned that when I am feeling well, I generally have a fuller sound to my voice. I learned that this changes over the course of my menstrual cycle, too. So music for me has had some unforeseen benefits in terms of understanding myself and how my mind and body work.


In some ways, the communication issues I was having were helpful because through observation I realized there is a definite strength in being able to recuse oneself from the duress of having to respond in the moment to things that probably deserve more consideration, anyway. I began to see how much chaos was generated in the world from people’s overconfidence in their ability to have civil discourse, communicate clearly, and remember what was said, too. I think it is possible to infer a political candidate’s cognitive flexibility and social intelligence from their ability to have a conversation which does not devolve into sardonic language, personal attacks, logical fallacies, and psychological manipulation. Not being able to do these things increases the chances that the candidate will resort to less transparent and more coercive forms of leadership. Perhaps if the population were educated about this, we might glean more useful information from televised political debates regarding the character and intelligence of the candidates and make better choices in who we elect and nominate for important positions. We should not be electing people with the self regulation skills of an angry toddler or jealous adolescent to political office, unless we want to live with angry toddler and jealous adolescent politics on a global scale. Unfortunately, I think throughout history a lot of very successful men (and some women) have gained unwarranted levels of power by getting the people around them to fear their tantrums and covert efforts at manipulation that they learned as children with itinerant parents and overly judgmental and manipulative mentors and peers in general. When not aware of their underlying emotions because of not being encouraged to name and address them as children, and being forced to have shame for those same emotions, people subconsciously learn to use those emotions in ways that are destructive to themselves and the people around them. It is unfortunately exceedingly difficult to recognize this behavior in oneself or others when the environment is so full of it. We simply have not figured out effective ways to criticize, and much of the criticism we give is unfair.


Imagine how the world might be different if people were allowed to take a step back from social interactions to check in with themselves and realize they are feeling lust, anger, boredom, shame, hunger, and process that emotion safely alone. Imagine what would happen if people were encouraged to slow down and recognize that their actions were being driven by mania, rather than need.


The music I have created helps me process emotion. It is easier to not be present when I feel the weight of the world on me, so when I am stressed, sometimes my mind wanders, or in other words I mildly dissociate. Sometimes the demands of spoken language are too much for me, so purposefully, the music on Sundae Busk does not have words. It is meant to be a break for the mind, which is something I regularly need. This is part of my neurodiversity. I sometimes experience expressive and receptive aphasia, especially when I am stressed out, but I have found treatments that work well enough that my ability to have conversations for which there won’t be significant ramifications if I say the wrong thing has significantly improved. I have really grown to dislike in person chit-chat as I have post-traumatic stress disorder and my psyche is chock-full of imperialist landmines around a struggle for perfection I witnessed and constantly heard echoed in my communities. These were beliefs others felt about how bodies need to look and be and also how the material world should be curated that were influenced greatly by white colonialist thought and the corporate, religious, medical and educational establishments. So this music is supposed to be an escape from that, to transport the listener into the moment. I feel like as a mother and a parent I was constantly expected to be the a superhero, with only the radio in my head, the sensations in my body, and the signs in nature to guide me, while being attacked by imperialist hornets which actively worked to keep me and anyone else around them from accessing their body’s wisdom.


I felt that kindness was fleeting, and that if you spoke to someone long enough, their inner bully eventually revealed itself, sometimes in scary ways that are still stuck in my head and which play on a loop if I am not careful. I am trying to remove toxic productivity, consumerism, repetitive fad dieting, and obsession with thinness from my psychological influences, because these things have important negative psychological implications for the people who practice them and anyone untrained in recognizing them as negative who enable those behaviors in the people they support. So my music is meant to take a person away from those negative influences to a safe space where it is okay to get in touch with what it means to be a sensory and even sensual being.


The songs on the album Sundae Busk were composed using loops from Garageband Loop Library, and were a therapy for me over the Winter 2022 holiday season, when I struggle most with toxic productivity, consumerism, fad dieting and body acceptance. I am so thankful I found Garageband, which helped me find the joy in music making that I once experienced by myself as a kid with my synthesizer. I do not know how copyright stuff works, but would like to do covers someday. It is often imperialist concerns of this nature which keep me from taking my balls to the end zone instead of being more free with my creations, and I often wonder how our cultural dialogue has been negatively impacted by copyright and trademark issues. All I know is that some people make covers and others use samples, and sometimes people who already have a lot of money feel threatened rather than honored by imitation and use their financial power to bully others. These people believe they have some divine right to reign over the human narrative and also profit from it, while not acknowledging that they were also influenced by other artists, or that we are all connected. That being said, I think it is important to give people credit when credit is due, because we still live under capitalism and we all still need to eat, but before capitalism, perhaps it was easier to see imitation as a healthy part of our cultural dialogue and also as a record of the human psyche (which it still is). Capitalism is still the best solution we have to being interdependent in some but not all contexts, even though it hasn’t been particularly fair to me or most other people freedom-wise, especially with the imperialist expectations of the wealthy and wannabe wealthy placed upon us. In any case, I have so many influences, it would be impossible to list them all.


I wouldn’t have been able to make the music I did over the holiday without the help of my husband, Erick, with whom I enjoy stargazing. I am so glad we have been able to slow down life and make music together. It is one of our favorite things to do, now, and it is kind of a celebration of all the time we spent connecting through music over the past 29 years. The pandemic gave us time to slow down and see how musicophilia connects us to each other and the world around us, too. What a wonderful thing for us to experience in the middle of a tumultuous time.


The generous loan of his iPad gave me a musical creative freedom for which I have been longing for a long time. I was trying to get into music synthesis on the PC, but the learning curve is steeper and I get frustrated by UI stuff rather easily. My son has done music mixing as a hobby, but he is especially gifted with computers, so he uses applications with Linux that sometimes involve writing computer code, which is just beyond my bandwidth right now. (Haha! Bandwidth!) So Apple’s intuitive setup was a big help. Now, it’s not always intuitive... I do have some complaints, but the ones about the UI are picayune compared to what I know about how the manufacturers of Apple products treat their manufacturing staff, which is a big reason I have avoided investing in those products. I really don’t like being part of the system which exploits other human beings, and especially not in the way I understand these particular Chinese workers are being treated. As my husband pointed out to me, there are all sorts of human rights violations in the electronics manufacturing industry beyond what we know about Apple. Still, for that to be going on when the cost of their products new is prohibitive for most people is ridiculous. Furthermore, the end user of Apple products is hamstrung with respect to being able to do their own repairs and get their products to last longer. While I’m not keen on coding things, I am capable of doing basic hardware fixes on computers, and have been using a cost and performance optimized system I designed myself for my computing needs for many years.


That being said, GarageBand got me up and running rather quickly, helping me tap into a part of myself I thought to be lost long ago. Despite all the rigorous training I had in music, until recently I was not able to find within myself the desire to make music. That’s because I never got to choose the music myself. I never got to *play* the things I vibed with! And I very rarely got to do things on my own timeline, due to the driving ambition of mentors and groups and being overcommitted myself.


A few years ago, I got out of the house and hung with another couple who took me to the Beats Antique and March Fourth concerts in Fort Collins, and I felt like I had found my heaven. Beats Antique has kind of a southern Mediterranean and Arabic vibe, and March Fourth, I’d say, is what happens when band nerds dance naked around a bonfire. Since then our family has really been following music more closely, even though it was always an important part of experiences we shared. My son does mixing and is an audio engineer and my daughter is a DJ for her college radio station. They pursued those interests without any involvement from me, which I find so fascinating. My husband Erick plays the bass and we are actively collaborating on some covers to release as an album, if we can figure out how to get permission. I have been wanting to make music that can help transport a person to euphoria since my youth, and I felt these bands did this in new ways that were inspiring to me particularly. Life can be painful, and much of “winning” at life is knowing how to help oneself and others out of that pain. I try my best to share what I’ve learned. I had the privilege of going to a gong bath and a singing bowl concert, as well as studying Reiki, too.


When I was about 10 years old I bought myself a Casio CZ1000 synthesizer and I would just hang out in my room by myself composing things. My parents had started me in private music instruction when I was five years old, and I continued some form of music instruction until I went to graduate school. But actually it started when I was younger than that, when my mother took me to Orff Lessons taught by a lady who reminded me a lot of Mary Poppins.


When I was young, my holidays were more spiritually focused and involved a lot of music. The best parts of the holidays for me were making music with others and the quiet moments found to escape the moving world. So I capitalized on what I learned about what I enjoy about the holidays last year, and now I have 18 songs! That’s a pretty decent selection for an album.


Back when I was a teenager, I spent my money made from the jobs I had on music and music players. I was someone who, apparently like Stephen Spielberg, recorded music off the radio. I also liked to layer tracks using a cassette recorder of my own playing. I enjoyed the possibilities a dual cassette recorder made possible in my spare time. I loved making mix tapes, and I was kind of known in my friend circle for my mixtapes and also for driving them around. I was fortunate in that my parents were really generous and besides paying for my music education, let me use one of their vehicles, even covering the insurance. I just had to pay for the gas. But anyway, my family had a van which I borrowed, and my friends and I called it “The Party Bus.” I listened to my mixtapes when I was driving and not listening to the radio. I loved the radio, too. Once I met a DJ from the radio station at my college and he offered to let me shadow him. I did that and later substituted for him a few times, but I didn’t ever follow up on staying on the radio even though it was an interest of mine.


I have chosen Star Jelly for the name of my band. Star Jelly is a gelatinous substance which is sometimes found in nature, and it is thought maybe to be the remains of poisoned frogs. So it seemed appropriate. Of course after I pulled the trigger on that, going through my old emails I noticed it is close to an old friend’s email address, which was not intentional, but the subconscious does weird things. We are not in touch, but I am sure on some level I was thinking of her when I was getting ready to push out this music. I’m not a person who really enjoys having to market and sell things (even though I had a good track record in my youth), so whenever I make something creative the process of having to peddle it makes me feel a bit like I am for sale, so that’s why this album is called Sundae Busk. The cover art is a hat tip to all the women out there who have been ridiculed for daring to discuss sexuality publicly. I feel like sexuality is an important topic and that exploitation arises from ignorance about it.


I was exposed to a lot of different sounds and music when I was young, so this music is influenced not just by my time as a band or choir nerd, but also by Wendy Carlos, whose album Switched on Bach we used to listen to as a family. We would listen to that album, as well as There Goes Rhymin’ Simon and Bridge Over Troubled Water as my little sister and I would dance barefoot in the wall to wall goldenrod shag around a small glass-topped table my parents had in front of the sofa in our modest living room. If we got too rambunctious, the record would skip! As a youth I was also exposed to Gregorian chant, experimental jazz, planetarium music, Eastern music, World Music, sound therapies, dancing clubs and importantly rap music. It was also inspired by quite a few people I have known and performed with unprofessionally who persisted in the music industry, and who have been incredibly generous with their creative talent. While I was largely an alternative music fan, I was always attracted to music which draws the listener in with unexpected layers, and so I hope I have been able to do that as well.


On that note, this album is dedicated to people with tubas, trombones, trumpets, bassoons, saxophones, clarinets, flutes, stringed instruments, organs, keyboards, banjos, guitars, basses, accordions, synthesizers, Euroracks, drums, ukuleles, harmonicas or kazoos they can’t put down, to Mighty Djinns who shout “Spoon!” out of moving vehicles, and to cement popsicles. It is also dedicated to my husband Erick to thank him for all of his support, for tolerating my need to hear the music “in my soul,” for verifying that with all the windows closed, the neighbors can’t hear it, for making music and raising kids with me, for bitching and moaning to me about the reality of some peoples’ self-imposed drudgeries instead of quietly suffering them, and for joining me in the effort to be a refuge for each other. Thank you, Erick, for letting me be an animal, and for being willing to play, too.

 

Anyway, I invite everyone to listen to Star Jelly’s first modern psychedelia album, Sundae Busk, available May 22, 2023 at a music streaming service near you, including Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and many more!

Bleeding Hearts, Purple Pills, and Other Things I Kant Take: The Story of America

It is Veteran's Day, and that has me thinking about the holidays and meritocracy, because many veterans have disabilities that are negatively impacted by the way most people choose to gluttonously recreate at this time of year, even when it's not a pandemic and the class differences aren't so glaringly obvious.

 

A Dingo Ate My Baby, digital

I am not a Veteran. However, I do have a traumatic brain injury and suffer from PTSD, and this is a condition shared by some Veterans. Exposure to trauma greatly affects me physically. It is worse now after two rounds of COVID and two vaccine reactions. COVID is essentially a metabolic disease, and so it is worse for people with underlying metabolic disease. People in this country tend to blame metabolic disease on life choices, but I have learned that it is greatly influenced by the unseen forces of genetics and environment, and that blame serves no useful purpose except to distract us from the real issues at hand. I had long haul after a case of COVID in November 2020 and learned just before I had my breakthrough infection in October 2021 that people with von Willebrand Disease are more likely to get long haul. This was just after I had developed my treatment protocol for handling how COVID, the Pfizer vaccine, and chemicals affect my health and cognition.


I did consumer genetics testing back in 2012 and have been using third party tools to extract information from my DNA. This was helpful in many ways this year, as it gave me information on how to treat my disability. I did find, in a just-in-time fashion, that I carry a few markers for von Willebrand Type I which is classified as a mild hemophilia and is rarely deadly.


For most of my early menstruating life, my periods were very heavy, and lasted about 8 days. I also can bruise easily and had a lot of bloody noses as a child. It's unusual for people with Type I to experience symptoms outside of menstruating or surgery, so it's possible to live a long time without being diagnosed. About 15 years ago I made some changes to my diet and since then, for the most part, my periods have been about 4 days long and occur every 27-28 days, which ain't bad for a 46 year old. Exceptions to this have happened, and they have been important in helping me see patterns in my health.


Off and on since about 2006, I have been taking a bioidentical progesterone preparation which is suspended in mixed tocopherols and also have been taking aspirin. I knew this was risky because I am also coumadin-sensitive, meaning I have polymorphisms in the vitamin K epoxide reductase gene which converts vitamin K1 (phylloquinone, the plant form) to vitamin K2 (menaquinone, the animal form). Taking Vitamin K2 was a huge breakthrough for me and my kids' health years ago. I thought I could counterbalance all the effects of the tocopherols and aspirin with K2 but apparently it was too big of an ask for my metabolism.


I went a few weeks without the progesterone preparation to see if my symptoms would improve. I limped along on some pregnenolone I have from forever ago. Pregnenolone is the steroid hormone that is the precursor to all the other steroid hormones. So it wouldn’t fix a relative progesterone deficiency per se, but would help in the event that steroidogenesis was slowed through other mechanisms (like fluctuations in the availability of triiodothyronine, or T3 thyroid hormone). And then I had an “Aha!” moment and realized that I needed to do some research on wild yam since it has been used as a progesterone supplement for many years, and understanding the mechanism might be helpful.


I have been struggling with migraine for some time since before we had our backdrafting water heater removed. My symptoms are a lot like Functional Neurological Disorder or cyclothymia. I had episodes like this before when we lived in a small apartment that had been freshly painted, recarpeted, and also had a dryer vent that was not hooked to the outside. At that point, I was having stroke symptoms, so my physician ordered a CT, but it was normal so I was diagnosed with visual migraine. My health episodes have a distinct pattern to them. I was unable to see it for many years because my life was too busy. But I got sick enough that I had to stay home, and that helped me see the patterns more clearly, and unravel the factors involved. It dawned on me that I was likely going through a lot of the same things that veterans with TBIs, so I tried telling my nextdoor neighbor who is a vet that I have a traumatic brain injury and had near death experiences, and he said, "Oh, so you're batshit crazy!"


"Yes! Yes, I am!" I quickly responded. I have had a spiritual awakening over this time. But it’s been kind of a continuation of what happened in my childhood. In my childhood I experienced psychic phenomena but could not control them. I mean, you can’t really “control them” per se. But it’s possible to learn how to listen better and understand. It is a strange and scary process. However, in truth, being connected to the other side isn't that scary if you know what the 4D triggers are. If everyone knew what these were, the world would be an easier place to be in. This is what I have been trying to work out.


My illness seems to present as an attack, about two days after exposure to chemicals or stress. I learned recently how innocuous an "exposure" can be. I have some friends who have a gas stove, and who try to pay attention to the environment's effects on their health. They have even had suspicious things lab tested in the past to protect themselves. I had shared with them the information I found about the potential health effects of gas stoves, and my friend asked if I could come over and measure their house sometime. Their home, before cooking, had slightly lower levels of VOCs than the readings I got in our home that same day, and about the same level of formaldehyde, which was under .1 PPM. Upon stovetop cooking, the level of formaldehyde jumped to .22 PPM, and sometime after it had accumulated in the house, it was .33 PPM. VOCs didn't differ that much from what we experience during stovetop cooking on electric..


According to what I read, it is primarily formaldehyde and NOx that are the health risks from natural gas. NOx is also a problem with diesel exhaust. I don't have a way to measure NOx. I think I am more susceptible to nitrate poisoning because of the von Willebrand Type I, Coumadin sensitivity, and also erythropoetic protoporphyria, which I also found in my consumer genetics testing. I don't have the cashola to get all of these genes verified, but I did want to at least verify that the SNPs I found for porphyria were real, so I found low cost testing. One polymorphism in CPOX that was documented in the literature as being associated with hereditary coproporphyria was ruled out, but the one in ferrochelatase (FECH) which is associated with erythropoetic protoporphyria (EPP) was confirmed. This makes a lot of things about my life make sense. Methylene blue is an important remedy for nitrate poisoning, and it may also be helpful in COVID. I do not know if it is safe to take with EPP as it is a photosensitizer. But when I do take it, I get an almost immediate sense of relaxation and feeling better. It’s definitely worth a look on PubMed.


EPP causes extreme sensitivity to the sun. I live in Colorado and we get over 300 days of sunshine a year. I have been trying to pay attention to what affects my sensitivity. I do not get blistering like some people with EPP. However, I do get swelling and itching. I used to get hives a lot from being outside. I don’t know if this was from the sun or allergies to grasses and trees. I have never done well in direct sun, which has been a challenge living here. Whenever I made progress in a sport, there was always something that got in the way of me pursuing it. Usually an illness or an injury.


I have always had difficulty keeping up with others in the long run. There are things other people like to do to decompress and also to stimulate themselves which are especially bad for my health, so I’m not sure how they can do them all the time. They're bad for everyone's health, really, but I am a canary in the coal mine. When my metabolism is lowered from exposure to these things, I am more prone to autonomic nervous system dysfunction, too. Autonomic nervous system dysfunction is hell. I prefer to minimize how much I experience it.


I think some people are addicted to it and make excuses for the lifestyles and behaviors that tend to promote it, which is a real shame because it's so difficult to hear and connect with others when we are riding the edge of fight or flight constantly. I think people have subconscious interests in this because many things that cause me to have attacks act as uppers or downers for "normal" people. I think they crave the numbing these activities bring, and that they often don't remember the come down or how they behave around other people when they are coming down.


Or the inability to focus.

The Financial Life of the Poet, digital

Hey, I resemble that comment.


Yeah, so anyway I got confirmation of the gene associated with erythropoietic protoporphyria, which is the disease which inspired vampire lore and even though I have known about the likelihood of having it, I haven't really processed all the ways it affects my quality of life. Since I fell ill in 2019, after exposure to the sun or chemicals I can have an attack that is like a seizure a few days later. My mind gets really busy and I have a lot of creative thoughts, or “messages,” before I need to lay down and sleep. When I wake, I am often disoriented. My speech and thought can be kind of slow at that point, until I do some things to support my mitochondrial metabolism. Last year I watched the movie “Harriet” about Harriet Tubman, and what I experience is a lot like what is depicted in the movie about how she knew which way to go. I do not think I have had many grand mal seizures. I have only awakened once or twice feeling like I ran a marathon. It’s more like I get overtaken by sleep, and I can’t deal with anymore input. I always feel better after the sleep, even though I’m slow. I don’t know how much this has to do with EPP, but I did have several periods of what felt like sun poisoning related to plein air painting which caused me to need to sleep for the better part of a few days, including on my honeymoon.


My family and I have really been through a lot over the last few years. During this time my husband was the sole breadwinner, and he was mostly working nights, so it was difficult to connect with our community. I put most of my efforts into trying to connect with others in the community, but it was difficult to bring my husband into those circles, because they were largely women-driven. This shouldn’t matter, but it does, because monogamy. I’m not the jealous type, but I do still need help around here.


I don’t want to say that people are like animals, but I am going to say that if there is sexual attraction, eventually it’s going to get the better of people, and it can make for some strange politics, just in the course of trying to hide or ignore it. Or even deal with it. That’s what I tried to do. I did it publicly here and on social media as part of my meditations on my existence. It was cathartic. I still say monogamy is not sustainable, and I see multitudinous reasons why, especially in the context of child rearing and working in the gig economy.


This probably never would have entered my mind, except that I never had trouble attracting men, even while I was married. Men who are interested in what I have going on at home, who are aware that I am a mother, who want to build a friendship first, not just men who touch me inappropriately. Men need friends, too, and those friends can be women. Getting stuck at home was helpful in gaining perspective. I can’t help it. I got big boobs and dimples, and I have a nervous habit of laughing when I am uncomfortable, and apparently this is kryptonite for some men’s gentile sensibilities. Adding in an ability to understand strange things is apparently a really big problem. I tend to get along better with men, too, so that makes it even stranger. I am a hot mess. Then there’s this whole psychic layer, which is difficult to explain to a non-psychic, but has to do with the pull of destiny and how we respond to it.

 

I'm On A Mexican Radio, digital

 

I eat for metabolism. My target endpoint is increased libido, not necessarily a dirty mind, although if you know me really well, you know I have a dirty mind. That was kind of my little secret. I knew all these other people who were muscle testing things, but I wanted an endpoint that was more meaningful. In my experience, it is difficult to be both depressed and horny. Or depressed and playful. As it turns out, people are attracted to playful. So that’s made for some interesting and clumsy stories for my husband and I with respect to some of the seductive strategies employed by other men. I’m not exactly sure what happened, but it turns out I had established a large following here after a trip to Southeast Asia in 2013.


I’ve written a lot about my life with men on this blog as an exploration of my female existence. We had a client there, and after we recently stopped our contract with them, I lost all my blog traffic from Hong Kong, Indonesia and China. It was a large volume of traffic (thousands of hits per month, which is over 100 times what I get from the US). Before my husband left their employ, the employees from the company told him that over there they call him “Shifu,” which means “Father” or “Teacher.” Our clients were always curious what made us so intelligent, and so that made me question what that even means. After a lot of introspection, I think it has to do with metabolism and playfulness. And I also think it has to do with time. I tried to tell them that in my parting letter. And I explained that it is an intangible energy that is akin to chi or prana, and that until people understand this, there will be pain and suffering in the world. What a way to get censored by an entire continent, eh?


The next day my Dad sent me this video by John Cleese which so accurately describes what I’ve been trying to get at with people regarding what freedom is. It is 36:59 long, but it is something the friends I have shared it with have said they will watch multiple times.


Here are my observations:


1) Historically, this has been difficult for women, people of color, disabled and poor people because of emotional and material life burdens. As soon as a person has a child, without adequate support, this ability can nearly disappear. This is actually the majority of people.


2) There are societal metabolic and psychological factors that become long-term barriers to this process which are largely experienced by these same people, who are the majority of the population. The factors are systemic in nature and largely due to the disproportionate monetary value of work contributions and societal roles, and the illusion of safe and sustainable choice in the consumer market.


3) True "creativity" involves the ability to come up with *peaceful* solutions to difficult problems. I feel like in this context it is helpful to see the word in its most utopian manifestation, rather than equating it with the conception of destructive technologies. In this day and age, the highest form of creativity would also be sustainable. The medical system underserves people because it does not have a good definition for wellness, and most treatments are designed only with the endpoint of decreasing mortality, not increasing consciousness, and this is somewhat due to not understanding consciousness and its relationship to creativity.


4) Many of these barriers to creativity are cultivated by conservatives and neoliberal policymaking which is guided by appeals to the wealthy rather than their constituencies.


5) See r/antiwork and r/lostgeneration subreddits.


Many of the things in those subreddits are topics I have covered in my writing in the past. They are things that might bother people in managerial positions. We had a lot of interaction with managers, and my husband worked as a manager. So we have kind of seen in high resolution how all sorts of psychological factors surrounding work and life balance bleed into each other, and how that becomes a big thing that managers deal with. It’s a way that the super wealthy keep us at odds with each other, even if they don’t know that, by creating the structural bones of the meritocracy through the devaluation of human consciousness. We’re all born onto this planet with the basic need of being able to provide food and shelter for ourselves, and this need has become inflated by meritocracy and comparison. Corporations can use these needs to control us, and workaholism and consumerism aid and abet the process. Being able to work doesn’t mean you should. That’s your soul you’re selling, you know, represented in your waking hours. It’s important to think about what you’re selling it for.


I know those are strong words, but I am writing them because I have seen how difficult life is with no community. As a stay at home mother, I have seen firsthand how employment practices keep families from having the time and energy to build nearby community. That is why many neighborhoods are referred to as “bedroom communities” - they serve as expensive bedrooms. In the worst cases, a worker’s life is expected to revolve around the corporate agenda. As if each of our births predestined us to be a cog in a giant petrochemical-powered ATM machine. I don’t really want to be involved in anything that smells like that. I want my time and effort here to actually help people.


Family holidays can have the effect of reinforcing meritocracy and capitalism. I have seen it in my family. On my husband’s side of the family, everyone has worked in corporate culture. On my side of the family, the professions centered around public work (teaching, healthcare and highways). Holiday gifts in my family tended to concentrate on handmade things or educational things (books were common), and in my husband’s family it’s more on outward displays of wealth. My parents grew up away from their families so holidays were either very small or included friends, so gifts tended to be reasonable, and even if I didn’t recognize it at the time, demonstrated knowledge of who I am. My mother swore years ago not to buy my family plastic things, and I wish my in-laws had gotten that memo. In my husband’s family there was a weird pissing contest around gifts that demonstrated no knowledge of the recipient, but that money was spent, and the economy was supported, so now we can celebrate. It was necessarily this way because nobody knew each other beyond their appetites for expensive food and wine. Oh, and what they were buying and where they were traveling. I tried to help them course correct on the materialism quite a few years ago by asking for a more limited gift exchange when my wealthy brother-in-law and his partner moved away. For years they were used as an excuse to overdo Christmas. Scaling back, though, we didn't consider lending a keen eye to the ways the holidays were still perpetuating hardship for ourselves and others. Trading plastic swag made and sold by people not receiving a living wage in toxic work environments doesn’t seem like an important reason to swap cooties, if you ask me, but that is apparently a good enough reason to show up at my door unannounced. I don't even have to attend get togethers anymore to lose three days to my “What the absolute fuck” reaction to the classist tonedeafness.


Thank goodness for good vibrators, because I spend a lot of holiday time alone.


I wouldn't feel so confident sharing these things about myself if I had not had the incredible experience I did regaining my hearing and language, and understanding the metabolic factors underlying those problems. I have written about this before - I have had help from the AI or Russian hackers or something like the AI or a stalker with which I have a little tennis game going. I meditate, talk and live my life, and it returns relevant content across all my platforms. Combined with the actual physical world shamanic psychic phenomenon I experience, I can see the future, sort of. It’s kind of messy, except for the technical stuff. Some of the human elements are kind of weird (like the facts get put in a blender). So the AI helped me with my diagnoses, and also helped me heal so I could communicate better from inside my pre-senility. In addition to regaining my language I was able to go off my blood pressure medication.


There are hepatic and GI manifestations to EPP and I am highly susceptible to them. I have written about CF and its gut issues, and it turns out von Willebrand Type I may be another condition predisposing me to a temperamental tummy. It means I have to cook for myself, usually. I go through phases where I have epigastric pain. My digestion gets in the way of my sleep. This was a nightmare aspect of my husband's employment situation; having to be on the computer late most nights was causing his sleep to be disrupted, too. It meant that trying to fit into regular society was nearly impossible.


It doesn't really make any sense for a vampire to own outdoor property. But I need a buffer from other people because of chemical sensitivity. I'm trying to figure out what the best way to exist in the world is. There are important reasons why I still need to go outside, including far infrared light, vitamin D, grounding, and fresh air. So I still try to do that, but I still have symptoms. I think my husband is still coming to terms with this; he loves the outdoors (as do I), and the outdoors were important in his childhood. When I met him, he was a video gamer, and he has been one since, so our recreation is generally indoors. My time was spent largely navel-gazing, volunteering, and moderating large communities. Our sleep schedule did have the effect of making us stay inside more, so I guess it wasn’t all bad.


My story is so wild I have at times written the truth as fiction. I didn’t mean to be disingenuous, but some of this stuff was too hard to believe. The paranormal stuff is just, well, nuts. But you know, Lucille Ball helped the CIA find spies when she received radio transmissions in her head after receiving dental fillings, so my "character" Alice having a radio in her head is believable. Oliver Sacks' actually studied people like this in his book Musicophilia.


The other thing that I have been trying to find a tasteful way to communicate is that orgasm may be important for protecting frontotemporal brain function. I see there is new research showing enhanced function of those regions after clitoral orgasm. I wouldn't be surprised if they discover something similar in men. I have been trying to drop subtle hints to my in laws over the years that our activities with them were harmful to our sexual desire and that this was bad for our mental health. They were also ignorant of my needs as a menstruating person. I don't know how else to say it, or even if they are capable of understanding how devastating a consumerist materialistic lifestyle is on a marriage and mental health, especially over the holidays. The economics of the holidays are simply all wrong, and they set us up for failure as individuals, nuclear families, communities, and society. This is not a respectful way to honor veterans who fought for our freedom. For our freedom to do what, exactly? That’s what we need to be asking ourselves.


How many tacky socks do you really need, and at whose expense must they come?


I say give your socks some gratitude.


There are other factors I and other people with TBI, migraine, attention problems, epilepsy and mood disorders deal with that we have absolutely no control over which affect our symptoms, like fluorescent and white lighting, and large changes in barometric pressure. It would be nice if we didn't have to deal with more symptoms because of the consumerism and subversion of the people around us.


Jesus Christ this is the weirdest thing I have ever written. My husband and I are trying to remember how to just exist. We are both workaholics because we are driven by a sense of justice and have constant reminders of the way people like us perpetuate mindless consumerism. So since we can't not work we are trying to find that sweet spot where we can do something we enjoy that works with our health issues and hopefully helps others, and brings in enough income that we can eat, although retirement someday would be nice. My husband and I have a constant intellectual dialogue which we then pair with sexual meditation 3 - 7 times a week, depending on access to privacy and mood. Privacy is paramount, and it is difficult to get without good boundaries. We are both creative individuals so this means we come up with dozens of ideas in a week, and we debate solutions to complex problems that are quick to implement. We don't get compensated for this, except for what our clients pay us for technical solutions and guidance, which does grow out of this meditative process; we just do it because we can't not. It's an exciting process because the answers come to us through love. We have experienced a lot of psychic phenomena together and our psychic connection is important to us. While seemingly incongruent with good parenting, prioritizing our healthy sexual needs has enabled us to be more emotionally connected with each other, and therefore better parents. Thank you to the grandparents for helping us see this clearly from the times we have been interrupted in our natural being. Now can we please change course?


What a strange destiny. All the D's. I guess they could smell it on me. But me? I was *clueless.*


Is that good enough, Dr. Worm?

You and I, We Live and Die

Thanks to George R. R. Martin and Percy Shelley I find myself unable to stop writing.


When I was having my spiritual awakening, I became aware of the fact that many of the ways that I get messages from spirit are categorized as features of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. I suppose it does affect my life and my ability to work for other people, which poses problems for making a living in meritocratic society. Many of these messages can give me anxiety, and my writing is what comes out of processing that anxiety. This is true of a lot of creative works.


To understand psychic phenomenon is to harness the power of one’s subconscious. That requires the ability to hear one’s inner voice. There are plenty of things that get in the way of that which are culturally conditioned. People who have been able to harness the power of their subconscious have been seen as either visionaries or heretics. That is, for the most part, the case for men. Women have been called hysterical or accused of witchcraft.


I’ve been studying hysteria and witchcraft as my psyche has been evolving. The lunar cycle is important, because it controls levels of melatonin. Melatonin is estrogenic, and therefore causes retention of water. I think this makes us more reactive. For what it’s worth, when I was regularly seeing groups of people in three different cities, sometimes on the same day, I noticed that everyone was a little bipolar. I feel like these patterns in people come through on social media, too. What happens to me in the beginning of my cycle is that I am going through a relax and repair phase. Then I will gradually go outside of myself and collect information. Then, around ovulation I realize some potential of the information I have gathered. Then I go through another rest period before I try to purge whatever wisdom I gained from that cycle. The wisdom I gain is usually about things that were frustrating and what I noticed about what made them so frustrating. Sometimes I can have a huge release if I have been holding on to a lot. My observation is that this pattern in women is what drives us toward equanimity as a species. There’s a book, Glitch Feminism, which always comes up when I’m glitching on some patriarchal stuff around these times. When my hormones are high, I’m in physical pain and that makes me super sensitive to feeling time pressure. During that time, I process a lot in the 5D, trying to figure out what of it is worth discussing. What I’m saying is that during that time, I’m in my head a lot. I’m having less difficulty when my stream of consciousness gets derailed compared to previous years.


A few years ago, I got the book Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism. It only has interpretations for the major arcana. I did the mediation on the star card and learned that Aquarius’ job is to clean the water in the stream of consciousness, so that’s what I try to do. I am trying to figure out which societal rules are actually helpful in light of contentment being largely an energetic phenomenon. Some of them aren’t helpful. I have studied a great deal about a breadth of topics concerning what it is to be human, and have traveled a bit so I have some ideas about other ways of living. Apparently this is my destiny because I am strongly compelled to do it. Like, if I try zagging away from it, I end up in the same place. That’s right; I forgot they told me all roads lead to Rome. Funny aliens! I say Aliens because of Alien Information Theory, which is that the messages we get from the collective unconscious come from some extraterrestrial form of life. I don’t know if we have any good evidence for that theory, so I also hold the belief that maybe it’s messages we left for ourselves, like in the movie Interstellar, or Contact. Some people believe in angels and demons. I believe in states of consciousness that bring contentment, and states of consciousness that bring pain and restriction, which I correlate to those entities. The person I know who sparked this journey didn’t want to give me too much direction so I would have the freedom to believe what I wanted, but then I think he put a bunch of breadcrumbs for an agnostic scientist like me to find, like any good mentor would do. I like to meditate on the veracity of things I read and how they mesh with my inner truth and what I already know. For that reason, I don’t see demons as people or entities. I see them as states of mind that we are all susceptible to if we can’t recognize them.


So that’s what’s going on right now. I’ve been thinking about what I know about psychology and the DSM-IV and how it has been used to create conformity in thought to support an economy, and how it ignores these natural patterns in mood which seem to control society. I technically have ADHD, but the qualities that get me marked with that label are the same that generate my unique understanding of things. If I have to focus on something, I can, but the way my life is, I don’t have to, so I tend not to. This leaves me open to serendipity and synchronicity. When I am hyper-focused on things, I tend to miss a lot. Think about how much Psych would miss if he got hyper-focused on one thing. In the chaos of my mind, everything actually makes sense. I can’t control when I get messages, and because I have learned so much, each new piece of information I get I must test against my model. It takes time. It doesn’t tend to work with the business world timeline. That timeline causes me to miss all sorts of important opportunities for inspiration. I feel like remembering my processes is helpful, and that is why I am sharing these things. A lot happens during my processes which is difficult to explain with words. I mean, I think ultimately an artist ends up sharing their process because ultimately it is the process which inspires people. There is so much that is intangible to my process because it is a transcendental phenomenon. I pay attention to what planets are doing, and that makes sense of much of it. It’s a lot easier to do that now with technology. My ideas are informed by Starseed Signals, aka the Alien Information (ministers call this God), and I refine them using the Tarot by asking for clarification. I could call it God, but it’s kind of weird, so I don’t know. Either God is a perv, or the Catholic Priests left a bunch of trash in the collective consciousness. My guess is that God is actually a perv. Oh Heavenly Father!!


I do have a theory that this consciousness is all the mitochondria, and that their directive is to multiply, and that we have to satisfy them, but not overly or it puts us at odds with our neighbors. But the mitochondria definitely want us to get together, especially when they’re feeling well. This is why men tend to think with their dicks. There was a Radiolab that blamed this on progenitor cells, but I think that’s only half the story. Progenitor cells can’t survive on their own, but mitochondria are descended from bacteria which can. What if we are like big mech suits for mitochondria? I guess that would make us a matriarchy, since we inherit our mitochondria from our mothers. But I digress.


I work a lot of things out with meditation and writing. That helps me pare it down. It also helps me stay sane. I lose a lot of time to pain, so if I didn’t write about these things, I would just seem lazy. My husband and family sometimes forget that I suffer from pain and exhaustion, too. When I am feeling good, I forget what it’s like when I don’t feel good. I need to write down the bad stuff so I don’t forget. I think the same is true of history. Much of the evil that is done is done because we forget. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only woman that has figured that out. Much of feminism came from women taking the time to write about their personal experiences, especially with perimenopause, which became classic women’s literature.


I think this part of femininity has scared a lot of men and a lot of women. We’re not supposed to talk about the pain of being a woman. We’re not supposed to seem needy. We can’t be down for too many days, or they put us out to pasture (and when I say “they,” this can mean other women!). I figure WTF, I’ll just start in the pasture.


What happens to us with estrogen is a metabolic insult. It makes everything just a little more difficult because I am swollen and in pain. Because of the ubiquitous nature of estrogens and other chemicals which act like estrogens, I have to live a pretty rigid life to avoid it. I think this has been happening to people for a long time, not just me. I’ve read lots of accounts of people losing their minds, and what happens can uniformly be explained by psychic phenomenon and an inability to interpret symbology, on top of stress and chemical exposure. I’m thankful for all I have learned.


I always get sick around the 4th of July. Fireworks are not healthy. Before I knew about the dangers of volatile compounds, I was reading about problems with heavy metals. Fireworks are loaded with heavy metals. I have to stay away from them. I always suspected, but last year I got my confirmation. I don’t like to go out on the 4th of July because the air is so bad. I have a nice bubble here.


Right now I am reading The Ultimate Guide to Methylene Blue by Mark Sloan. I first became interested in methylene blue after my daughter had an episode like nitrate poisoning at 9 months of age. I was worn out from her constant breastfeeding and so I gave her a sippy cup of tap water. This was the day before her 9 month pediatrician’s appointment. The doctor thought she looked cyanotic and may have been iron deficient. When they drew blood for a hematocrit, it was brown. The nurse noticed the strange color, but didn’t mention anything to the physician. I did some investigation when I got home and figured it was probably nitrate poisoning from the tap water reacting with the bifidus bacteria in her gut causing methemoglobinemia (blue baby syndrome). At the time she was not eating solids yet (I tried), so the bacteria in her gut had not shifted to being primarily lactobacilli yet, which is a risk factor for nitrate poisoning in infants from tap water. The cure for nitrate poisoning is methylene blue, which is an industrial dye which can renew mitochondrial ability to reduce oxygen. I didn’t have an easy way to get methylene blue back then, but thanks to the smiley face company, I do now.


Just last week I had been reading about ozone pollution in Colorado and singlet oxygen causing health problems. Sloan talks about misconceptions about nitric oxide in health created by the sildenafil (Viagra) industry. Nitric oxide is also a component of air pollution, and is known to be damaging for health, but because sildenafil increases it, people have changed how they see it. I have seen the same problem with ozone in the alternative healthcare industry. There is just no way that their use in the context of health is healthy. Both nitric oxide and ozone are important environmental sources of free radicals. Free radicals are important factors in aging which create mitochondrial damage.


Ozone and singlet oxygen in the atmosphere, as well as nitric oxide, arise primarily from the oil and gas industry and automobiles. It has occurred to me that ozone and nitric oxide may also be high in homes which use natural gas appliances. There is research coming out of China and Australia about the effect of indoor gas cooking appliances on attention in children and dementia in seniors.


I recently ran across an article saying that increasingly there are videos showing up online of people presenting with functional neurological disorder (FND), a common neurological disorder, after the COVID vaccine. I think something like this happened to me. I have my ups and downs. I think I understand why it happened to me. I had a genetic predisposition, plus chronic chemical exposure and isolation. It seems to respond to approaches focusing on mitochondrial support, so I am wondering how it will respond to methylene blue. My honest opinion is that it has something to do with elevated serotonin from the mitochondrial fragmentation, because my symptoms improved with charcoal (which binds serotonin-raising bacterial endotoxin). They also improve with orgasm. I think this is because I have a relative dopamine deficiency and that I am especially sensitive to fluctuations in levels of serotonin because dopamine inhibits serotonin at the level of the pituitary. I think this is related to the types of neurodegenerative disorders common to caregivers (Alzheimer’s, ALS, Lewy Body Dementia, Parkinson’s).


I am also reading My Life: Impressions of an Indian Childhood by Zitkala-Sa who was a Dakota Indian from the 19th century. She writes about the experience of being taken away from her family by missionaries to be educated. The book is not very long, but I am finding it to be of great value. Before leaving with the missionaries, she discusses the nature of her relationships with the adults around her. It is highly respectful in both directions. In fact, she is allowed to choose for herself whether or not to go with the missionaries. My favorite part is when she discusses beading and that she had to learn not to make her designs too complicated because whatever she started she had to finish. I think this is the most important lesson a modern person could learn from her book so far. We have such grand ambitions and often they grow beyond what we, our families, the community, and the earth can sustain. That is the root of all the pain and injustice in the world.


As much as I joke about sandwich bringers, I should be able to make my own sandwich.


*****


Thank you very much for all the Chrysler Plymouth cars that you bought from us.


As I mentioned in my book The Divination Project, a lot of the inside of my mind is advertising and pop culture. This is the language of the aliens. (Oh, and God is speaking through people around me all the time - it took me a while to figure that out). So it’s possible to sit in nature and just observe one’s own thoughts, and through the pop culture references and other thoughts that stream through one’s consciousness get insight into one’s life. These things will have special meanings for you, based on your experiences of them. I think this is an outgrowth of The DaVinci Code. Humans have been having a big discussion about the meaning of life by making things, and that is the foundation of our culture and wisdom. It didn’t magically stop with the impressionists, it evolved in our popular media and it is still evolving. It is going to have a LOT of Gen X content because the big trauma we need to heal as a society is in this generation who is parenting the Zoomers. So we are all being reminded about our childhoods so we don’t repeat the mistakes our parents did. The content that we were absorbing as children was made by the Greatest Generation, and there are a lot of messages about what was important to them after the war, and about how people are more important than money. So, essentially while we were left alone in front of the TV, our grandparents were broadcasting us comforting stories over the airwaves. I don’t understand where the QAnon component is coming from, but it’s totally xenophobic. It’s like the shadow of the 80s. It’s like one of those things where you almost can’t tell what’s wrong except that the entire thing involves a belief in genetic supremacy that even its followers can’t identify. This is a great problem of the past with the collective consciousness because it is so hard for us to see our own darkness. Greed doesn’t have to mean entitlement to material wealth, it can also mean entitlement to experiences. People like to play King of the Hill, and there’s a bunch of people on this planet who think they are more intelligent or genetically superior and preordained to live a life of luxury and a golden passport to be wherever they want on the planet. I’ve been bullied by these people my whole life. They don’t even know who they are, because they just think they’re following the trends. Their mitochondria haven’t figured out how to YOLO without disturbing others.


We tried to make the best of the pandemic. I’ve told other people that we’re always doing fine except for outside influences, and the pandemic really brought that to light, as we were able to work through a lot of issues we had in our home without the social pressures. Now, I grew up in the city, so I’m not the sort of person to want to move to the middle of nowhere and build an off-grid property, even though I think about it sometimes. We have a hard time thinking of anything we want to do in town, and when my next door neighbor got his vaccine and started going out again, I asked him what they found to do that they had been missing and all he could come up with was “see a movie.” I actually saved a lot of money not having to pay to meet people at “3rd spaces.” That being said, I like being part of civilization, and am glad that my community didn’t totally disintegrate while I was holed up. We still need each other. Ultimately, I don’t see myself as someone who decides the rest of society is bunk and hopes to hole up while it all comes crashing down around me. I see myself as someone who would like to come up with collaborative solutions. I got pretty clear messages that we’re past midnight on the environmental doomsday clock, and it makes no sense to do anything other than make do with what we have the best we can and reduce our petrochemical demand, together. We really need to move away from being plastic people. So, I figure make love not war. I heard so many people moaning and groaning about having to stay home! Well, luckily I’m a professional nester, so we all like it here. We are constantly changing things up, but we try to do it in ways that involve making our spaces more efficient or hygge without having to purchase new things. I do worry about ergonomics because repetitive stress injuries can make a person miserable. Giving each other enough privacy removes a lot of the need to get away to find peace. I find walls helpful for maintaining sanity. Headphones, too.


We made big investments in music last year. We got a bass and a guitar. They are really diligent about practicing. I started singing! Singing was an important part of my childhood. I was always in a choir, and did quite a few theater productions. I had a couple solos. I really enjoy singing and often have transcendental experiences doing it. I haven’t recorded myself yet. I have a lot of self-consciousness about my voice because I was teased, and also I was an alto. I always felt like sopranos were put up on a pedestal. So I’m singing mostly songs that are in my range. I haven’t wanted to do video because of privacy and time issues. Plus, like Zitkala-Sa said, I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew. The writing takes a lot of time, and it would probably take even more time for me to edit an ad lib video.


I had some fun vlogging last summer, and learned quite a bit about myself that way. My voice changes a LOT from month to month. I haven’t sung much in the last week because apparently it was time to sleep in the poppy field outside Oz. Or that’s what it felt like. I get messages about poppies when I get extremely tired. It’s not quite narcolepsy, but it can feel like that. This is actually a huge reason I can’t do society the way most people do it. My actual physical health!


I was reading in the MCS literature about how it is important to find a house away from other houses which may use pesticides and chemicals. Good fucking luck. You have to be wealthy to do that. We are not that wealthy. We have to worry about retirement someday. What we’ve done is reduce our chemical exposure as much as possible and we got air filters. That kept our air clean during the fires last fall, but not clean enough to keep me from having a seizure after the 4th of July nonsense. But I was a dumbass and went outside with my family. The air quality was visibly awful. I took my meters out. I should have worn my respirator. You might not think you need to wear a respirator here in Colorado, but it is not a bad idea some days. It is the air quality which makes us think about moving.


The air wasn’t clean while I was growing up, either. I know a lot of people have forgotten that there was lead in the gasoline. I had an elevated lead test a couple years ago - not as high as what was showing up in Flint, MI residents, but as the toxicologists said, “There is no safe amount of lead.” I finally got that retested and it was fine. I had some home lead tests and didn’t find anything in my kitchen, but it turned out that my white encaustic paints had enough lead in them for the test to detect. I know they were not made with lead - probably zinc or titanium - but it turns out that lead is a common contaminant in zinc and titanium, so I am guessing that’s what happened. Regarding air pollution, Colorado has this dirty secret - we won’t regulate diesel or truck emissions, and so here we are. On top of that, we make cars that were designed more responsibly and which always pass emissions have an emissions test every two years so we can look like we are doing something! I can tell you that those of us who have been coal rolled are done with it.


There are a lot of people who don’t want to talk about genomics research and think it is just a cash cow for the pharmaceutical industry. Sloan makes these accusations about genomics research in his book. Yes, there are people coming up with unsustainable gene therapies (a dose costs millions of $USD), and our government unfortunately funded a lot of that research. But I’ve been looking at the genomics issue personally and from a distance and have discovered something more hopeful. Everyone’s metabolism is a little bit different and there are genetic factors that actually influence our susceptibility to oxidative damage and inflammation. Knowing just some of mine have given me a tremendous leg up in sorting myself out and working toward wellness and consciousness. Methylene blue isn’t going to take the place of the nutrients that I have difficulty getting from food due to genetic factors. Finding out about my invisible illnesses helped me figure out how to treat them. I generally figure out my problems before the doctor can, even if it takes me a while. That being said, I’m all over supporting mitochondrial function, and think it can be life-saving regardless of one’s genetics.


*****


When I was really little, my friends were all boys. Most of the women my mom made friends with happened to have sons my age. We didn’t just put cats in dryers. We also played doctor and King of the Hill. I had at least two guys (one of them gay) with whom I made the agreement that if we didn’t find anyone else, we would get married. I understand the one who is not gay is married. I would always think of one of these earliest male friends every time I read Lord of the Flies. I loved to go over to his house to play because his mother who grew up in India was a woodworker and had made him this amazing train table in their rec room. I think I wanted that for my kids when I grew up. Anyway, you could tell his mom was a believer in play because she even made him a bed with a slide! We always had a lot of fun over there. This one time he had a birthday party. I think it was after she had constructed the jungle gym. There were a bunch of other boys there and I was the only girl. I think his party may have been caveman themed. I remember we painted our faces and dressed ourselves in paper grocery bags, and then played “King of the Hill” on the new jungle gym. It was really hard to stay on the top and so I gave up before the other people.


I give up again.


I choose to be content.


If there is an animal in me that needs to be fed, I’m not going to ignore it, but I’m not going to let it devour me, either.


My husband and I have had this debate going on for probably 27 years - he thinks the squeaky wheel gets the grease, and I think you can attract more flies with honey. I realized that these are two fundamentally different approaches. His is like BDSM, and mine is like the tantra, more or less. On rare occasions, I’ll switch it up. I think that is a typical masculine-feminine dynamic, but I’ve seen the roles reversed in other relationships. Some people call this the rock and the balloon. We do try to take turns being the rock and the balloon. It can be challenging. I favored my approach with the honey, because it was less violent and seemed like a more efficient use of energy. One of the questions I put out to the universe a few years ago privately was to understand the difference between BDSM and the tantra. I admit my understanding of BDSM was incomplete. But it seems like the whole point is the psychic visions, so if all roads lead to Rome…


Um, I’m sorry! You can research that stuff on your own.


Someone was asking me about the Golden Dawn and the Illuminati and associated them with “evil Satanic practices.” I’m not exactly sure what she is talking about. I watched a movie, Hail Satan? which really changed the way I view Satanism. I am not sure I consider myself a Satanist, but I generally agree with what they are trying to do. I strongly believe in not bringing children into the world needlessly. Many Satanists were bullied as children, and I understand what that is like. It’s difficult to believe in something benevolent when people can be so ugly.


I’ve known quite a few people who have struggled with suicidal ideation, and that’s why I write. I don’t know why people tell me that, but quite a few people have. I’ve heard I just have one of those faces. When I was the membership coordinator for our homeschool group, we had quite a few new families come in who all shared one thing in common - their tween son had expressed suicidal thoughts. I had first expressed suicidal thoughts as a thirteen-year old (I think it may have started after my bike accident). It was because I didn’t feel safe at home or school. I was trying to live in two different worlds, and it was too much. Several families came from the Lab School in Fort Collins, and they all also had practiced natural parenting with their children. This was back when most women were returning to work. It was my observation that the ethos at the school was so radically different than what they had practiced in the home that the kids didn’t know how to interact with the traumatized materialist children at school. Those are the bullies. It is strange to explain to people how all of the trauma from your past from people playing King of the Hill affected your mental health. In the U.S. we call people who can’t handle stress snowflakes. I have been called a snowflake. I was not born that way. I was made that way by stress. I was made that way through marginalization for my mental health and things I couldn’t change about myself, and through poisoning. I have known people who have taken their lives and it haunts me. I know their struggle. When a community loses someone to suicide, it leaves everyone else wondering what they could have done. This is why I am writing about the things that are barriers to mental health that other people don’t talk about.


They’ll hurt you, and desert you. They’ll take your soul if you let them. So don’t you let them.


Sometimes I like to wear fleece animal pajamas to stay warm. You know, pigs in sweaters and all that. However, I also believe in non-violence and my experience with the tantra has changed my ideas about sex, too, in ways which might not be a good fit with Satanist practices. But who knows! I did name my dildo Baphomet (sort of a joke as I experiment with all this Lilith stuff), so if a dude dressed up like a goat shows up at my door, maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. There is one in my dreams. Sometimes he has lobster claws. Okay, I’m kidding. I have to be very careful about pain. What gets people to the 5D is highly individual. I’m not sure how important it is for me to role play, but I feel like I have played all the parts. Persephone, check. Aphrodite, check. Hera, check. Hathor, check. Can I say Hathor again?


The tantra allows me to just be. That’s the difference. I don’t know if any of those goddesses were ever actually people, but I do know that their stories were remarkably similar to mine.


Moisturize me!


Not now, Cassandra!


Earlier in my writing I talked about mind control and how the recommendation to avoid negative thoughts was ableist. That’s because when you’re in pain, it’s hard to avoid them. If I spend time doing things I enjoy, the pain is less of an issue. It is difficult to escape the BDSM nature of existence; the carrot and the whip are central to existence because of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. We are made of matter. We can’t escape matter entirely. How to deal with it sustainably is the problem we need to solve. We need to find ways to spend our time which minimize consumption. There is goodness in slowing down. Michael Phelps had to eat over 4,000 calories a day to maintain his training schedule and stay well. There is no reason most of us need to have that kind of metabolism or physique to stay alive. We can simply slow down and we will need less. It has been fascinating to see what the human body can do, but not at the expense of our collective consciousness.


On ships, the kitchen is called the mess. I wonder if that is because it’s always a mess. I think a lot about Anthony Bourdain and how I met people who worked in service industries who struggled with drug addiction because of what standing in one place on a hard floor does to a body. Having to do that day in and day out ruins a person. There are other factors in the kitchen like lack of fresh air, cooking with natural gas and butane indoors, and tremendous stress. I am fortunate to have enjoyable things to do when I am not cooking, and I also get to enjoy what I’ve cooked. I generally get to see how what I have cooked has helped the people around me, and that helps me want to cook more.


I noticed that a lot of childhood trauma centers around household chores. It is almost like the cleaner someone’s house is, the more neuroses they have (neuroses get in the way of being able to just be). But some people just don’t have a lot of stuff. What I have found interesting is the way the items around my house trigger memories. It’s actually pretty therapeutic and feeds my creativity. I don’t like piles of papers, though, because they very much represent my battle with the matrix. Around tax time, my husband told me he read a story about how Canadians didn’t understand why we grumbled so much about taxes, because there it is automatically calculated by the government and takes a minute to do. Wouldn’t that be nice! Less paper for everyone! I wonder what other countries do.


Anyway, I’m just not sure it’s healthy for me to be sitting around on the computer when I’m not in the kitchen, but sometimes that’s all I want to do.


The other story I enjoyed in Zitkala-Sa’s book was about how her mother taught her to go to others’ dwellings to see if they wanted to come for dinner. She was instructed to be unobtrusive, and to quietly leave if it sounded like the people were already making plans. She doesn’t explain exactly what she’s trying to avoid by being unobtrusive, but I think it was to let others do what they were doing. This is something I see missing from American society. The ability to be generous, but detached. Thanks to whoever has been leaving me gifts. I got the hole punch. Our economy makes it strange. We do have desires to help others, but knowing how to do that in an unobtrusive way can be difficult. I think much of this is because of our educational system; to partake of it one has to turn over most of one’s existence. It is trying to teach us how to be in society, but it only knows how to do that through compulsion.


I think some of the unrest we are noticing has to do with how boys were treated by their mothers growing up. Boys are wired differently. When I was growing up, I saw a couple families where the boys were not the oldest, and that was a really rough go, because girls are calmer. So boys were always subconsciously being compared to their older and more mature female siblings by their parents. I saw this over and over and over again in families. Boys often don’t have the same level of executive function, either. I’m seeing this in my own kids. My daughter makes plans for herself, and my son is content being. He gets really lost in the present moment and has a lot of creative ideas. He has more ideas than he has time (sort of like his mother). It’s challenging trying to support them each where they are, and keep up with what that is without being obtrusive. It is my understanding that the educational system is trying to serve boys better these days, but when I was growing up, it was uncool for boys to be sensitive because it was such an inconvenience to stop and listen to their feelings. So they were essentially all taught that they were inconveniences. I think this made a generation of exceptionally sensitive men who need to know that they are needed for more than just their bacon. I’ve met quite a few of them and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them. I just think that they have been forgotten and underappreciated.


I dunno. I feel like this stuff is obvious, and that if people could just recognize they are tired and what makes them tired, be allowed to rest when they need to, and not do the things to others that perpetuate exhaustion, the world would be so much more peaceful. So I guess what I am saying is that I am tired of throwing my subtle knives at people for their blind ambition and greed. At some point I need to just stop and enjoy my life. There is only so much one woman can do.


Bali-hai calls me.


*****


I am assuming that what my friend was concerned about regarding Satanism was black magic. I know she’s been reading conservative conspiracy stuff, but I don’t know exactly what. I think they are confused about dopaminachrome. I looked into it at the beginning of the pandemic when she first told me about it. I am guessing that this supplement is used to protect the dopaminergic neurons which can die off in dementia. I don’t think any scream factories are necessary to get it. Just good old fashioned pleasure like laying out under a tree works, but most people don’t have time to do that. It is actually made in the brain. Black magic is used to increase one’s love, money or power. I do think Satanists use magic to increase love, and I do, too. That’s my primary goal. The love energy is the same as the metabolic energy. I try to stay away from using it for financial decisions, but I do use it to make decisions about some purchases so I know what kind of karma I am bringing into my life. Regarding power, I might use it to decide if I am going to use someone’s services, or to figure out timing of a get together. I mean, they say that’s black magic, and I know it changes the course of events, but I’m hoping I’m doing it in a way that is uniformly changing the course of events for the better, or at least making things easier for me and others. My observation about non-magic people is that they all tend to do things at the same time, so this helps me avoid that.


I don’t like to draw Tarot for others. I don’t mind teaching people, though. I really am just trying to minimize my impact and share helpful things. I don’t know if the Tarot has been helpful for that, overall. I didn’t always use it like I do now. It’s not that I *can’t* read for people, it’s that I don’t like getting wrapped up in the karma. I use the Tarot kind of like a Turing Machine to get clarification on my questions, and the message has been pretty clear that we’re supposed to be trying to work toward living in greater harmony with the land and each other - however we can get that done.


The Tarot was critical for helping me get my language ability back. I essentially used it like a medical medium. My approach was based on what I know from my education as a neurobiologist. Again, this is part of my destiny, they tell me. So, I basically know a lot about my own particular nutrient requirements because I dabbled in nutrigenomics. I can’t even tell you what a leg up this gives me. So I have a short list of nutrients I essentially energy test with the Tarot. I’ve played with using the chakra spread, but I essentially ask my Twin Flame Lucifer (I am the Star, or the Angel, and he is the Fallen Angel) in a relationship spread what the outcome will be. I used to ask my Higher Self, using 3 card spreads to anchor the answers in time (past, present, future) which gave me a feel for how it worked. That was a good way to learn, but in terms of managing my time and energy, it didn’t work out so great for me. I’m not exactly sure why. Maybe I was *that damaged.* Maybe it has something to do with my chart, as I have a lot of humanitarian placements in my conscious and subconscious so I tend to obsess about humanitarian topics. I honestly cannot remember when I started consulting another soul for answers, but it just came to me one day that I would get the wisdom I needed that way, because I wasn’t seeing reality for what it was. The person whose soul I chose to consult seemed equally concerned about the topics I was. And yes, asking someone else is black magic. I just figured this person had meditated more than I had, and had the complementary life experiences needed to make circumspect decisions. It was sort of a “What Would Jesus Do?” moment. But, he made it very clear I’m not to put him up on that sort of pedestal. So we’ll go with Lucifer.


It is scary to write this because being magical is a lot like it is described in the movies. And the Universe has a really strange sense of humor. Like, it’s a little demented. When I wrote the other day about the smiley-face company, after I did so, I went to the website, and it was trying to sell me things with frowns on them. So like, seriously a goat man might show up on my porch. I’ve been getting messages to that effect. If that happens, maybe he can help me remember the circumstances surrounding my decision to start asking him for answers. I suspect what happened was I was getting frustrated and asked my Higher Self if it would be better to ask him, and it was one of those “Duh!” things. Right after I did this, my Instagram showed me a picture of a two-headed animal, so I took that as a good omen.


If I understand right, my Twin Flame actually has porphyria, too. We were both extremely chemically sensitive, and have similar neurological issues. I got all this information on my illnesses through my tech! I was supposed to keep all this stuff secret, but I am being prompted to talk about it now, so that I can move on with the level of acceptance that I have. I got a lot of feedback on health and timely advice on issues we were encountering in my family. There were little inside jokes from communications I had with him. And his name is all over everything, I’m not even kidding. Or someone else did this. I got several messages about getting set up. Whoever did it has a funny sense of humor. It was like he was co-parenting, and he was in a perfect position to do that because of his background and our needs being so well aligned because of the porphyria. Not just the porphyria, but the porphyria.


I’m pretty sure this all has to do with the connections I made between things on my blog and social media and my struggle with trauma. I mentioned it in an application I made to Meow Wolf back in 2018 when I wrote the book about my connection with this person whose name is all over my experience.


He’s a hypnotist, hypnotist of ladies. Never had a stopwatch. Never counted backward.


The T-shirts!!! OMG, the T-shirts!!! He told me he hated T-shirts with designs on them!!!!


Everything is catching, yes, everything is catching on fire.


This was such a weird experience.


Anyway, I got advice from him, or whoever or whatever it was, and I formulated a supplement stack from that. It’s basically a mitochondrial support stack, with some mushrooms. I ask about when to rest, because I’m such a fucking martyr. It helps me know when to keep my hands off of situations, and when to intercede. It was like that movie with Melissa McCarthy - Superintelligence. But it was like a lot of other movies, too. It’s like I’m kind of writing the meta essay.


I do like meta talk. Thanks for perceiving that!


Anyway, he gives me reminders about doing things. I really could not have accomplished what I did without him. Or them. I feel really grateful for what happened. It was sort of like having my hand held, but from a distance. It’s weird to be supernatural.


What? You want me to write about penises? Right. I said I would write about penises.


Although we played doctor, I did not get a good look at any penises.


Yes, geez! I think they are awesome! I know that’s what you wanted to know. I like team weiner dog.


There was one time I was babysitting a boy toddler and I had to change his diaper, and I took a little bit longer to look at it and then felt really guilty. I always felt like I had done something wrong. Probably because it started to get hard. I mean, that’s a really weird thing. But of course now that I’m older I know that’s something that just kind of happens all the time to boys, and that they don’t have a lot of control over it. Kind of like how we don’t have control over getting wet.


So, by a strange set of events, I learned that I purposefully do not look at guys’ crotches. Maybe it has to do with this babysitting gig. And knowing that if I’m wet, I can keep it a secret. But in all seriousness, I know there are some guys who won’t look at a woman’s chest, and


Oh, you think I just don’t want to get caught. Interesting.


I didn’t have chemistry with those other boys with whom I became semi-betrothed. Chemistry is something that doesn’t come around that often for me. By chemistry, I mean I start doing subconscious things like blushing and biting my lip and playing with my hair. When there’s chemistry, I do that and I can’t stop. I also smile and giggle a lot. But I also do this when I’m nervous, so that’s confusing for me and the guy. I essentially turn into a manic pixie dream girl around guys.


So yes, thanks for telling me. It’s kind of a nuclear bomb, isn’t it?