Six months or so after my attempt at suicide I went to live with my family in Hawaii. A few years earlier they had abandoned me in Utah and absconded to the island paradise after several very rough years on the mainland. We had lived in Hawaii for a few years when I was very little—the only time in my young life that any of us were really happy—
Read MoreA plague has been infecting us for a long time now, and no I’m not talking about COVID. Loneliness is one of the most widespread afflictions burdening people today, and this is exceptionally ironic considering the sheer unfathomable amount of human beings alive on this planet. I used to be completely perplexed living in Los Angeles, a region of 12 million people, year after year continuing to suffer from crippling loneliness that plagued my life even as I socialized, dated, and successfully pursued my career.
Read MoreIn 2014 I came down with a mild case of thyroid cancer. I was actually elated when we discovered the tumors on my thyroid because for the last five years my health had been spiraling downward, and no medical professional had yet been able to tell me why, though my tests always came back as showing elevated white blood cell count.
Read MoreA great deal of the current political and social climate is fixated on systems of economy and government and the nature of Democracy, Republics, Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism, with much of the left convinced that Democratic Socialism will fix all our problems and much of the center and right believing we currently live in a divinely ordained Capitalist Republic. All y’all are so, so wrong.
Read MoreWhen I was a young man I lived in Salt Lake City during and after the 2002 Winter Olympic which, in preparation of, the city had put through quite a few changes to clean it up and provide public transport. One of the most important was the installation of a light rail line that went from the University of Utah to Downtown (and south to some other few locations).
Read MoreSo, I am NOT a clean person. I mean, I am—I like a clean house. I find a clean kitchen to be very calming, and there are few pleasures as wonderful as beginning to cook a great meal in a clean kitchen. But cleaning for me has always been a source of serious anxiety.
Read MoreI was really surprised when I first learned about Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, not only because I was only eleven when he retired from the Supreme Court and was not apprised of contemporary politics as an eleven year old, but that someone as progressive as Justice Marshall and the progressive act of appointing a black man to the court had happened before I was even born.
Read MoreA few days ago I was shopping at a grocery store that doesn’t carry my preferred products, and browsing the butter section I was disappointed to find no other obvious options. Frustrated, I grabbed a butter from a brand I recognized, and finished shopping.
Read MoreI sometimes (surprisingly rare, actually) get criticized for the amount of sex in my books. One homophobic person wrote an Amazon review in which they hilariously said there was “disturbing homosexual erotica,” (my book is NOT sold on Amazon) as if my book was some Fifty Shades of Grey and not retellings of my relationship and coming of age experiences.
Read MoreGrowing up in Utah I didn’t actually ever witness very many explicit examples of racism. In fact, because the Mormon church romanticizes some other cultures like Pacific Islanders and Central Americans in their religious texts, some others with different skin colors were often regarded with admiration, and so I always assumed that Mormons weren’t racist.
Read MoreThere are a lot of characteristics which make human beings unique in the animal kingdom—we walk upright, have very large brains in proportion to our body size, and can cook food using fire. But one of our most overlooked characteristics (by the general population) is our hairlessness. It is actually quite unique for mammals to be naturally without near-total fur or hair covering their bodies.
Read MoreThe evidence that face masks are not effective in stopping the coronavirus pandemic has now led to new regulations in the operating room, where surgeons and their support teams will no longer be required to wear face masks.
“They just get in the way,” is a common complaint among medical professionals…
Read MoreLast year I had been spending some time with my parents. They are conservative and consume conservative media, and I have not had much of a relationship at all with them ever since they kicked me out of the house at eighteen years of age for being gay, after which I attempted suicide and afterward struggled with depression and alcoholism for many years (the main story of my book, Fuck Portion Control).
Read MoreSeveral years ago when I was active in online forums trying to help people, an insane lady yelled at me when I talked about how the amino acid tryptophan in milk converts in the human body either to niacin or serotonin, depending on certain metabolic conditions in the human body, where niacin promotes metabolic activity and serotonin alternatively slows down the metabolism, both regulatory branches which help to run human biology.
Read MoreA natural extension of my work has been an increased interest and preoccupation with agriculture, farming, and food production. One of the most noble professions, growing food is actually one of the most precarious foundations of human society, with the great majority of us taking for granted that a constant food supply is an easy feat to achieve.
Read MoreIn 1984 when I was four years old my family lived on the island of Oahu in the town of Kailua. My father’s sister was nannying for us, and my grandparents visited during Christmas. One of my very first memories (if not the first) is looking up with joy from my newly opened Christmas present—a large, Caribbean-blue, plush My Little Pony…
Read MoreIn the mid-90’s when I was in elementary school in Utah we had, each year, a visit from the local police department and volunteer teenagers from the D.A.R.E program to come into our classrooms to shame and scare us away from using drugs. As a direct consequence of their involvement when I became an adult and was addicted to alcohol it took 15 years and serious consequences of my addiction to finally bring me awareness of my problem.
Read MoreDuring the course of some research I was doing on the role of vitamin D in the course of tuberculosis infection, which used to be a major cause of mortality in the world and would frequently take half the members of entire families, I came across a surprising fact about polio which I had not known before, which was that while the effects of polio could be extremely devastating and result in lifelong debilitation…
Read MoreSocial media can be really great for a lot of reason, but it’s impossible to peruse instagram, tik tok, and other outlets without seeing a nauseating volume of garbage about changing your mindset to find happiness, practicing discipline and self deprivation for goals, or setting intention to change your fate and the function of the universe.
Read MoreMy family has a home video of me at nine years of age taken on Christmas Eve in which I tell one of my sisters they are going to be in big trouble if they don’t behave. I had a heavy lisp as a kid, and the clip is a serious source of laughter and has become somewhat of a catchphrase whenever memories of our childhoods are revisited.
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