Transsexual hazard map (2024-present)

The whackadoodle brigade (2024)

I’m just a Progynova baby (Q1)

I woke up on New Year’s Day, not even aware of my surroundings yet, to a very loud message in my head.

You aren’t Alyssa Jones

If I was to keep following the white rabbit, this sign was undeniable. It was another ruse. Whoever Alyssa might be, she isn’t my future self.

For a few weeks, I felt myself to be in a Netflix show hole. That’s just it? My tormentors made me think I had a future with my childhood best friend who’s been doubly-friend zoned for decades, and just ripped it away from me as a New Year’s gift?

Eh. I guess it makes sense.

I continued experimenting with hormones, trying to find at least 6mg a day of estrogen that wouldn’t make me sick after determining the spiro to be safe. In January, I decided to give the Progynova another chance; taking it real easy to avoid a repeat of the last time. I was still getting sick after meals sometimes, but I struggled to correlate it with my meds.

I quickly found that the Progynova was fine. In fact, I found my nipples doing stuff they hadn’t done before. I experimentally determined the threshold dosage of sublingual estradiol valerate to be 6mg/day, the molar equivalent of about 4.5mg regular estradiol; this is what I’d expect.

---

I didn’t know what to do next. In an effort to methodically eliminate problems that might be causing the Freemasons to blackball me like I was pulling shit out of msconfig, I decided to confront my mother about the possibility of my being retarded; before telling her I wasn’t even going to keep doing that weekly text I let her intimidate me into doing.

I know she can’t handle my absence or whatever, but I have felt a little better. Any sort of “regularly scheduled” thing with her is a liability, that’s more likely to get cops unnecessarily involved in my life than it is to actually help me.

---

The first contemporary train of thought, began with yet another of these messages; somehow more grounded than everything before.

There are way too many trans people.

Like, orders of magnitude too many of them.

Oooooohhh, boooyyy…

Remember 2017 and earlier? I sort of did think they might be transtrenders. I was grumpy about how these kids on Tumblr decided to change our words around because we were being problematic… but then I decided to give the LGBT community a chance largely at the encouragement of my doctor and therapist, I thought Regina and Samantha were pretty cool, and the rest is history.

I haven’t been able to shake off the feeling. In middle school, I read statistics claiming only 1 in 30,000 AMAB people, and only 1 in 90,000 AFAB people, were actually transsexual. We were like never nudes. Beliefs like this certainly played some role in my choosing not to pursue transition when I was younger. It seemed much more likely that I was something else; especially with what I perceived to be the weird sex stuff going on with me at that age.

I grew older and laughed at numbers like that. I guess we’ve been here the whole time.

But; how many of them are actually like me? You know… wearing mom’s clothes before you know what it means, secretly wishing you could be a girl like all the time, being in a shit mood all day after someone makes you do something really gendery as a kid, or says “boys on this side of the room, girls on that side”…

They don’t know about any of that.

But, that doesn’t matter. Everybody’s valid… right?

As I reflected on this, I couldn’t help but put my foot down and say

But not Samantha. I definitely have whatever she has.

Oh, Samantha? The transbian domme who just ran off with Brittany? What do you even have in common with her; being a software developer when you aren’t burning down your career?

I had to sit with this for a while before I finally accepted that…

Yes. Even Samantha. These people aren’t like me. They got sucked in somehow, after trans people exploded in popularity.

Virtually none of these people had symptoms before Caitlin Jenner became a thing; and if you have the same thing as me, it isn’t hard to notice. I started researching it before I was thirteen, it was so obvious. And the community was full of people with even worse gender dysphoria than me; I felt like a mere pervert compared to some of these folks.

Goddammit; I may be a pervert, but at least I was born that way.

That’s so many years. I thought I’d found my people, at long last.

It was a fucking mirage. I was that. Goddamn. Thirsty.

It’s like, these people are in the uncanny valley of transsexualism. Take the common transfeminine stereotypes, for example: (my kinks marked with [X])

• Computer nerd
• BDSM; probs submissive
• Anime dork

These people sound relatable, right? And familiar, too. There was enough off-topic computer bullshit on Aunty’s list to prompt the creation of geek@antijen.org; there wasn’t an equivalent for anime, but the BDSM correlation isn’t exactly a new stereotype either.

This seems like the same crowd it was 20 years ago, right? The problem is, my friend group seemed to gradually get diluted until I knew way too many… Well, I did say “weeaboo furries who play dungeons and dragons” at first, but… I don’t think it’s that. D&D is at least fun to watch. Friends have actually gotten me to like a couple animes even if it’s not really my thing and… I’ve met some alright furries, even in the trans community. I don’t know what I’m trying to say here, exactly. It’s not like I’m not a fucking dork… I know there’s always been a crossover between weirdos and other weirdos; which I’ve generally tried to embrace, but…

Again. I really think I got frog boiled. I still think this. I can’t get it out of my head. I’m not exactly a proponent of alien mind control at this point in my journey; but if there is a higher power influencing my precarious and jarringly unexpected fate, I truly believe this might be the bedrock thing I was supposed to learn on my little vision quest. My friends are

Fucking. Weird.

I certainly don’t feel comfortable going to them for help. Again, where’s the childhood crossdressing syndrome with these folks? I remember bringing this up at TT a long time ago, and it was like me and Lauren were the only people who got it.

Look, y’all. I don’t think I’m an alien, I don’t think I have an alien soul, I don’t think anybody has a fucking soul. I’ve made a most fascinating 360° spiritual journey all the way back to being a fucking atheist. Not even a space atheist. I don’t think I’m Dani California, I don’t think anybody is Dani California, and I still think America is a free country despite its problems. I don’t believe in much of anything anymore, good bad or ugly.

I really don’t think I can trust my new friends. I think I made a series of very wrong turns; each one seemingly perfectly logical in its own time. I took a wrong turn being too non-judgmental with some of these people, because I thought they were like me and I didn’t want to be problematic. Either by happenstance or by some twist of fate, I continued making more and more wrong turns, as I reached out to my support network for “help with UFOs”.

I’m starting to worry I’ve been enabling confused neckbeards in playing dress-up.

Have you ever
walked through a room

The irony to all this UFO business is, I have felt like an alien my entire life. My friends all get to date normal men and women, and I’m just… behind.

#snippetThey can’t understand why I don’t want to go out and "get pussy" like them. I’ve always wanted things I can’t have; and that isn’t even an uncommon problem. Most people want a yacht, or a spaceship, or a Lambo, and they can’t have that. I wanted material comforts a little when I was younger, but I got over it. I kind of just… want to be normal. But, I want to be me. And me doesn’t like pussy. I kinda just want someone to fuck me. I want somebody to want me, but nobody wants me like that. It’s actually kind of a joke.
#TODOThis is dark and off-topic
#TODOI’m talking about my dude-bro friends, btw. I guess that doesn’t make much sense.

#snipIt’s totally not a sex thing, though.

This is, precisely, what my sign was. I thought I was a trans woman. I thought I was a kinkster. Then I thought I was a kinky trans woman. Every step of the way, I struggled to find what I was missing. Women seem to have no trouble finding people to fuck them. They actually complain about it. Subby boys like getting pussy as much as any other red-blooded male. There would seem to be little advice for someone in my position.

Then I figure the problem is really just that I’m trans, and I supposed I’d just do what other trans people were doing; but, they don’t really have the same problem either. Hell, a good number of my trans friends were married, with children sometimes before deciding to transition. While I see little wrong with these people “being themselves”, I hardly seem to have much in common with them. Yet, I firmly believed that I must.

I’ve always been weird, and I’ve always been this; but, have they? Frankly, I think the only logical answer is no; unless I were subject to an arranged or highly pressured marriage, I couldn’t imagine settling down with someone without realizing it. I’m just too… bottomy and subby, in a way that isn’t even endearing if you’re trying to be Mr. Slave.

Am I just gay? I realize lots of people in the peanut gallery might be screaming it, but that’s never really made sense to me. I think gay porn is weird, first of all. There’s no woman in it to imagine being. And I want someone to play with my breasts and stuff. Not jack me off like some gay man.

It’s not a sex thing, though. It’s not supposed to be, because that would make me

(goddammit) an autogynephile! (I don’t even care anymore)

Dammit. I’m convinced all of human existence is a sex thing, and religious people are just in denial about it.

This whole autogynephilia thing really just feels like a bullshit way of shaming… I mean, what even is female sexuality, anyway?

Is it being a submissive? Counterexamples: Erika, Dana, Collene, Leslie…

Is it just about liking men? Gay male attraction is demonstrably different from hetero female attraction; in ways I’m not really qualified to talk about because I am neither.

This last section has proven a bit difficult; because I don’t really know what I believe in anymore.

I went on a very impassioned rant about how I think most of my friends are basically bisexual men on hormones; and that I think that’s the reason they’ve been fucking their whole lives while I can’t seem to find the well.

Be that as it may, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to blame ostensibly male homosexuality for my relationship struggles. Because, I’m not sure I’d be any more compatible with an honest-to-goodness true transsexual woman than I would be a gay man; whether or not he was on hormones.

First of all, I think my biggest problem is that I had too weird of a childhood, and I’m missing a bunch of DLLs. Susan is really fucking weird about sex and made me really fucking weird about sex at a young age, then I had all that happen to me, and I’ve never really been normal since.

Second of all, I really think I should date guys. I’ve never given this a chance; I really wanted to be the woman in normal dating, but by the end of high school the idea of some oaf like me ever being treated like that by someone was just a big joke. I think I had a not-very-nice childhood that destroyed my self-esteem.

Which is the third problem. I probably need whatever it is that gives you self-esteem. Though half the time I think my lack of self-esteem is just “realism”. It’s really hard to get to know me enough to figure that out, and I know that because I just did it for the first time.

Dude, this is pointless. It’s supposed to be about UFOs.

I was confused why I struggled to connect sexually with April (or anyone, really), even after fixing the ostensibly final gender problem and finding an ostensibly like-minded trans person.

The problem, as I’ve grown convinced, is that none of these people are actually transsexual. As they are trans-something by definition, I would seem to have no other word to use for them, besides, well…

Transgender. I think the problem is that they’re transgender, and I’m transsexual. It’s ancient wisdom, actually. I’d almost forgotten it myself.

I think their sexuality is, essentially, that of gay and bisexual men. They seem to have no trouble lusting after and fucking each other. The (well, a) problem with April and I was that, from my perspective, I liked it when she fooled around with me, but she was frustrated by my lack of initiative. I kind of just want to be all nuzzly and nibbly and make funny noises while somebody has their way with me; but, I think April wanted me to take an equal share at having my way with her, and my brain just doesn’t work like that.

I guess what I’m trying to say, is that I really need to be the “woman” in bed. But with this polycule, I feel like I was cast into the role of the “gay male third”, which doesn’t really suit me.

It’s so confusing. The problem’s got to be me, right? Being a subby boy doesn’t click, other trans women don’t even click…

It felt like, I wanted it, until it was there, and then I didn’t want it. Goddammit, do I want sex or not?!

It seems more obvious now that what I really want is the right kind of sex. And, so does April for that matter.

I think April has bisexual male sexuality.

I feel I’m backed into a corner, where I have to accept that I’m either a pervert, or argue for a psycho-sexual understanding of womanhood that defines it largely in terms of female sexual desire; a relatively new idea culturally.

I believe I’ve effectively argued that I do have a sex drive, and can be neither gay, straight, nor bi. What even am I? A fourth thing?

There are only two genders!

I know it sounds perverse and like it’s “really just a sex thing”; but what was with all those women being into Fifty Shades of Gray several years ago, anyway? What even is a woman?

Things I might be

• Dominant man
• Dominant woman
• Submissive man
• Submissive woman
• A pervert

Again, I have to ask the reader to resist the temptation to factor out the word “submissive” as a trait that can be shared between men and women. I tried this, and submissive men really aren’t the same thing. I really just want what women are having, in the least creepy way possible. I feel like we need different words for “sexual submissiveness” like the Eskimos have a bunch of different words for snow.

I feel I’ve almost been backed into the ultra-conservative position of having to argue women are these submissive creatures who belong in the bedroom. This… isn’t entirely correct either, though. I’m a multi-faceted person with an entire life going on. Dreams, aspirations… most of them shattered, granted.

I’m a submissive creature who belongs in the bedroom sometimes. There Republicans, are you fucking happy?

They probably aren’t. They probably want to scream about how “trans is a mental illness”.

Well, okay. That’s cool. What am I supposed to actually do, though? Because, I’m still this. I’ve always been this.

#TODOThis section has been a bit aimless and personal, and I might edit it down.

I don’t know about magic and time travel, but I am struggling to believe this is a real timeline. I grew up, dreaming of meeting another person like me, and reading that we were only 1 in 30,000 people. I got older and started hearing about “trannies”, and I knew that people were aware of us. They talked about us in Women and Gender Studies, there was a higher than average number in the BDSM community… then somewhere in the 2010s it just exploded in popularity. I know I sound like a boomer, but like… everybody has pronouns now.

And… it’s not the same thing. It’s not this. I had to write a whole thing about it, because I can’t just call myself a “transsexual” anymore.

There are people who’ve wanted to cut off their genitals since they were toddlers, there are people with a lifelong history of suicidality… and there’s me. I’m just this. Despite the extant vocabulary, I feel like our words have become meaningless to the point that anybody can call themselves anything.

I’ve long suspected there are different types of male-to-female transsexuals; and I’ve long thought Blanchard and his supporters were hitting on a, perhaps distorted, manifestation of this fact.

Whatever subtypes of male-to-female transsexual may exist, I’m afraid there’s far too much noise now to make any sense of them. I think we could at least coin a new subtype called the “whackadoodle” or the “weird internet person”; but I imagine that would be too simplistic, and might fail to capture the full extent of the problem.

It’s like… the general public just can’t cope with our existence. They either want to kill us, or they want to become us. It’s surreal. And I’m… it. It’s almost like I’m…

A witch. Some fear us. Others envy us. Most question our existence. Yet, here I am. Raiding mom’s lingerie drawer, recharging my magical energy by the moonlight…

It’s like, I’m an actual witch; in a world where the sensationalized hype is louder than the real thing.

I feel I may’ve learned the real truth about magic and witchcraft. We always talk about the crazy puritans who went about burning innocent people at the stake. But, what about the other side of the equation? The people who genuinely think they’re actually practicing witchcraft? They exist, too. They feed off each other; their fears, their superstitions…

An environment where people are spooked out about witches, invariably creates an environment where more and more whackadoodles think they’re witches. The 17^th century version of trenders, if you will.

Republicans get more and more spooked out about trans people taking over everything, more and more whackadoodle people think they’re actually a witch or something…

I’m afraid the problem may’ve reached critical mass.

It would seem the conservatives are kinda right. I can’t help but think of all the counter-theories. ROGD, social contagion…

Ugh

I… don’t think I have childhood sexual trauma.

Well, except for the part where I thought I couldn’t be a “normal woman” in the bedroom. That messed me up.

A few years ago, I struggled to explain why I seemed to be the only trans woman I knew of with sexual dysfunction. Brittany, Persephone, Stacey, April, Crystal, AJ, Regina… All of these people were or had been married; sometimes with children.

I’m afraid a more plausible, though less obvious, explanation is that they aren’t like me because they aren’t like me. I may not have been around people with the same underlying medical condition as me since I stopped keeping up with Antijen all those years ago.

I mean, I still remember that weird, uh… thing happening; but, I never really even thought about it much before I started troubleshooting my sex problems back in 2019. I’d rather not spend any more time than I already have on contrived theories; like that my interest in BDSM might stem from it, or that my entire gender identity could be the result of trauma.

I feel like I “caught” childhood trauma from Crystal and Drew and Persephone and them, and I feel really grossed out by it. I never meant to misrepresent myself; and I certainly never meant to appropriate something like child sexual abuse. Writing this document has reminded me that I have enough childhood trauma as is. Then again, I think they caught transgenderism,¹ from their friends or elsewhere.

Likewise, I think Susan caught (or perhaps, self-inflicted) a concussion on account of my trauma work and associated struggle to remember and reevaluate my childhood. While extreme, this would exemplify the behavior of someone with borderline personality disorder.

I believe this episode is a microcosm of human society. I think human behavior… is contagious.

Cults, religions, speaking in tongues, magic arts, transgender people, plurals, Al-Qaeda, QAnon, dancing mania…

If you hang around a group of people long enough, you’ll unavoidably become like them. You are what you eat.

You might think you have the willpower not to lose your individuality.

You probably don’t.

Josh is a libertarian, or… something. April and Drew are card-carrying DSA members. I can talk politics with both of them. I’m a

social
fucking
chameleon.

Spend too much time around Josh and I might inadvertently spout off a talking point about how the Fed is printing money and inflation is about to go through the roof. Spend too much time around leftists and I’ll start unironically using the word “bougie” as an adjective.

Sometimes, I come away from interactions feeling like a piece of shit in retrospect; like I’m a fair weather fan, or like I don’t really believe in anything at all.

I bet everyone else is just as bad, though. They just don’t realize it, because they’ve never tried to live a double life. They go along, thinking they’re a Christian or a Muslim or a Democrat or a Republican or something because of their own free will. It’s nothing more than their own free will not to fall far from the tree.

I don’t really like politics. I mostly just smoke weed and dick around with computers when I’m not preoccupied with some other story arc. At least leftists mean well. Conservatism is all full of gloom and doom and boogeymen, and I usually end up being one of the boogeymen somehow. Of course, the far left is no better for me than the center right. #TODOWhat am I even talking about?

I vividly remember a quote; from what I thought was Aunty’s website, but I couldn’t find it when I went looking for it.

The world needs sensitive men and masculine women.

There was a lot of caution urged to would-be transitioners in the 2000s. This wasn’t crossdressing or drag. This was serious. It was part of why I started to second guess myself.

Today, that caution has been replaced with a sort of cheerleading. It’s complicated, because some people need a little cheerleading, and some people don’t.

Perhaps more concerning is the near-extinction of a species once of least concern: the male transvestite.

There used to be more of them than there were of us. These days, you can’t identify as a “male transvestite” without everybody poking fun at you for being an “egg”.

I feel like you’d actually need will power² not to get railroaded into transitioning today, as someone who may have a less exotic reason for wearing women’s clothing.

With all this discussion, I can’t help but question whether I’m really transsexual. I keep returning to the direction of causality; I found Antijen, because I was wearing women’s clothing at a very young age and I didn’t understand why. I feel bad for younger folks, for whom exposure to transgender people would be endemic, and the direction of causality less clear.

Conservatives often ask the question, “Why would anyone want to do that to their body?!”; as if to question my very sanity, or to invoke the age-old comparison of my body to a holy temple. Regardless of what it is you call me, I hope I’ve made “why I did it” as clear to you as it is to me.

---

I’d lost sixty pounds since the beginning of all this, my hair seemed about as patchy as ever, DIY was my best bet at getting real hormones, and the recurring GI problem could knock me on my ass for a day or two. I could really use a sane doctor in my life right about now.

The office eventually wrote me back and told me I could schedule a visit, but I was on to other things by then. I was no longer convinced any of my medication had been tampered with, and was beginning to suspect more mundane explanations for my illness.

One of the things I had discovered about these attacks, is that laying flat on my back seemed to help. I also suspected it might have something to do with a hiatal hernia I’ve suspected I had since my mid-twenties, that usually doesn’t cause major problems. #TODOBackfill hiatal hernia or talk about it here

I took stretching before meals more seriously; and eventually looked up some proper backstretches online. This really seemed to alleviate the problem.

I wasn’t so sure about Dr. Reid anymore, but I at least took her up on the vitamin suggestion. I’d been taking D, B12, a multivitamin, and some B complex vitamins that had expired a few years ago and needed to be used anyway. I was beginning to feel better; but still dealt with the aforementioned gastrointestinal attacks at random, albeit with improving technique dealing with them.

Despite having a box full of hormones that could be perfectly fine for all I knew, I was still anxious to get my second shipment at my new little PO Box.

Get them to the ocean
Get them on a plane
Hurry, hurry, hurry
Before I go insane

In late January, I found an ominous printout telling me to go to the front desk so they could verify my ID. There was no mention of a parcel, so it wasn’t clear whether this was routine or due to my suspicious package to a fake name with “Don’t fuck with me” on the label. I never took them up on this, and I kept receiving mail.

And, I certainly never had any trouble receiving mail for Harris and Marion, PLLC. But I swear; Alyssa Jones, Dani Elizondo, Isabella Costello… look, I know they don’t actually look at the name unless you have to show ID to pick up a package or something.

This is the goddamn postal service, y’all. Anyway.

I was in the shower trying to wash my face with apricot scrub once day, and when I opened the lid a glob flicked right into my left eye. And I was like

Well, that sucks.

I rinsed my eye out as best I could, and it felt like things were back to normal enough when I got out of the shower.

So, that’s January. It was this sobering month, where at the beginning I still thought I was the subject of an ethically-questionable medical experiment, and by the end I was pretty sure I’d simply lost my fucking mind.

I had my biggest “porn relapse” since I stopped really looking at it years ago. This was almost certainly hormonal, and only lasted a couple of weeks. It wasn’t very long before I was riding the Progynova train.

I resurrected my old VM of Slackware 13 off my barely-usable Macbook, and went nuts torrenting gigabytes looking for these one or two specific things I liked the old pictures of. It really wasn’t worth it. This little hormonal spell didn’t make me feel any more “like a man”, and the extra testosterone really just made me into a much dirtier submissive.

I’m sorry that we have to talk about my sex life or lack thereof. But, we do have to talk about my sex life. Because, I think I’m real and they aren’t. And, I think that could be part of my problem, if there even is a problem other than my fragile psychology. I certainly think it’s a problem, at least.

---

I saw that I had the daunting task ahead of merely even explaining what has happened to me over the last three years. Yeah, I think I’ve lost my mind; but, it seemed everyone else had too. My therapist egged me on for a whole year before dropping me as a client under the most suspicious of circumstances, my friends seemed content to let me play space alien if they didn’t join in themselves… and there I was, looking for help in the seemingly most obvious of places and getting dead-ass nowhere. Everyone either wanted to let me play space alien, or in Susan’s case, desperately vied to restrain me while failing to have a real conversation about anything.

What’s wild is, I feel like I was already stuck in this same unhealthy situation before UFOs happened. I still had the same unhealthy mom, I still had the same whackadoodle friends, I wasn’t really opening up to my therapist about serious problems and she was just smiling and nodding in turn…

I feel like… yeah, my life crashed because of bad input; but who the fuck named their kid Bobby'; DROP TABLE STUDENTS, anyway?

I may be an idiot; but so is everyone else, right?

I really need help. From somewhere. I don’t even know where you’re supposed to go with a problem like this. Hell, I’m not even sure what the problem is.

Shit, dude. How do I even explain this? It would be so much easier, if I only knew what happened.

• Uh, so I’m recovering from what appears to be a vitamin deficiency, I lost my mind and a bunch of hair because of it… yeah, it’s totally crazy!
• So it’s the craziest thing, these people told me I was different and needed to learn about the Freemasons when I was a kid, but then I lost my fucking mind over it when that UFO report came out a few years ago, and… anyway, I think I might be blackballed and it’s really important that I get un-blackballed or something? Do I smell?
• Yeah, so I tried Concerta and that was not a good idea at all…
• Sorry y’all, I guess I kinda just… smoked a bunch of weed and wondered off. Yeah I’ve been smoking on and off since college, but I really fell off the wagon this last time with it…
• Well, I was starting to realize my childhood wasn’t as picturesque as my mother likes to remind me it was, and yadda yadda I just wrote Slaughterhouse-Five.
• Yeah, so, uh… God is real, or something? God, gods…

I adopted the first bullet point as both the most likely, and most sane-sounding theory to introduce the problem with. I suddenly appeared to be more lucid now than I was a month or two ago; if I’m to look at what changed, it would seem to be the vitamins. I’m still smoking just as much pot, and I haven’t touched methylphenidate for a while.

I decided I should try and put together a video explaining my problem, which I could then put on the internet and give to people.

I pulled out my condenser microphone, and started talking into the webcam with an inflated Volcano balloon.

There was so much to untangle. There were so many layers. It was like… dependency hell, or something. I couldn’t really explain this one thing without explaining this other thing… it felt unavoidable that, due to the compartmentalization of my lifestyle, I would have to link in vast amounts of personal information to explain everything to anyone. And the size of this statically linked binary was…

Hours. I spent hours in front of my webcam, trying to explain all the prerequisites and dependencies, so that I could explain the other thing, so that I could ultimately give a complete picture of what events, exactly, led to me crashing my life into a ditch.

Okay. So, maybe I have to tell an abbreviated slice of my autobiographical history to explain the problem. For a while, I really thought I could edit it down into a watchable video.

I spent most of February working on these videos. I’d had trouble getting it all out of me with people face-to-face; I think just because all the layers are so overwhelmingly daunting. And that was a couple of years ago.

At the same time, I sort of feel like most of the layers were bullshit. I’m probably just a pot-smoking burnout, who smoked a little too much pot and got a little too burnt out, and… look, I don’t really know what happened, okay? I didn’t even think this was possible.

I felt like I had to explain it, though. I sent very strange letters to a handful of people believing there was something incredibly profound happening to me, and… there just wasn’t. I guess it just happens.

#snippetHow long could this possibly take? I really thought I could make a 20 minute (or, certainly no longer than 60 minute) video explaining it all.

After a few weeks, I could tell I was making a huge tangle that would take weeks to months of editing to be presentable. I tried doing it from the top in one take, but there was just

(sigh) So. Much. Shit.

I needed to talk to Tommy. Let’s just start there. Because, I really do remember some really weird shit about me, him and the Freemasons, and he sent me that suspiciously timed text message a few months ago. But, I could have a faulty memory, I’m probably seeing patterns that aren’t there, and I’ve been acting crazy. I need to have an adult conversation with him that isn’t all weird and riddled with paranoia, innuendo and bizarre assumptions.

I was still having GI problems, and I remember considering meeting him before having to nurse myself for a day or two and deciding maybe I shouldn’t go on a road trip if I can help it.

It felt like I was crawling toward having a meeting with this guy, who was already talking to me like I was a relapsed crackhead. It didn’t instill confidence that Tommy was about to give me the keys to my spaceship; on the contrary, my future was looking pretty bleak.

Q2

I nervously occupied myself, as if to take my mind off the impending train wreck. All I know is that I fucked up. Bad. I set up make to batch render my videos, before piddling with Rhinote because I was unsatisfied with all extant sticky note applications for Linux, and finally laying in bed playing my switch.

Without much of a plan, and with large amounts of my day spent either recovering from GI problems or stretching in various ways to prevent them, I had little in my playbook except to keep trying to make this meeting with Tommy happen. Maybe I can at least put this past me and work on moving on with my life.

After patiently waiting the better part of the month, I got to sit down and have coffee with this guy. I wore my halal hoodie out of self consciousness, for which it was probably a couple degrees too warm.

Leading up to this encounter, I made no presumption of sanity or correctness. I mostly wanted to open the door to talking about my presumed hypovitaminosis-induced insanity; which led to some very weird messages and letters, and ultimately to a very weird meeting at a different coffee shop two years ago.

After we got ourselves seated outside, Tommy threw me off balance when he opened our interaction by asking me

Why do you think you’re crazy?

Umm, well…

Dude; what do you think?

I took notes about our meeting as soon as I got home, because I didn’t want my already-questionable memory to distort the facts.

If there’s any thesis statement I could make about this visit, it’s that

… Look; this dude is hiding something.

It’s… the last impression I expected to come away with. I expected us to talk about how I was coming to from the craziest experience where I thought I had an alien soul or something?

I said I remembered him telling me I should explore the Freemasons when I was younger.

I never told you that! If anything I’d have told you to stay away from them!

… Okay; thanks. I’ve been through a lot, and I’m not sure I can trust my memory.

Well, let’s say I did…

Alright, you sly fuck. Who is this guy, the fucking Riddler?

He seemed to know an awful lot about Freemasonry for someone who thought I should “stay away from them”. When I suggested I didn’t seem eligible on account of my gender stuff even if I did want to join them, he was quick to point out that

Oh, you could join Eastern Star…

He parroted off lots of generic information about them; that often seemed to contradict the more “underground” things I remember hearing about them over the years. For example,

They’re old, they’re like a secret society, they’re from Europe, think Knights Templar…

Okay; I have heard a lot of things like that, and it tracks with publicly available information. Yet, I feel I’ve also heard they had origins in Ancient Egypt; if not also some bullshit about “how to build King Solomon’s temple”.

And also, aren’t these Freemason people really quick to say “Ah ah ah; we aren’t a ‘secret society’. We’re a ‘society with secrets’…”? (eyeroll)

They have traditions that “go alongside” traditional religion and spirituality; they have special funeral rights; he keeps religion and Freemason stuff very separate.

Well, I know that much is true. Stephanie talked about there being a special section of her family’s graveyard for Freemasons.

The Freemasons can tell you about what they do, but you can’t ask questions

This one really sticks in my crawl. It’s the exact opposite of what I remember from Heather’s weird discussion about the “Simon Says” rules.

I could’ve sworn the deal Heather and Maureen (and even Tommy) seemed to know about was that they could tell you once, and wouldn’t know anything about it if you asked again.

Ugh! I really feel like this dude’s gaslighting me.

Okay, maybe those are their rules; but goddammit what am I supposed to do?! I tore my life apart because I could only remember these goofy “Simon says” rules halfway, and the Freemasons just have… nothing for me? I can’t help but feel these Freemason people careened me into this bullshit, even if my memory is only half right.

I feel like they gave me this extra life in a video game, that you only get one chance at. I feel like I killed Marcus in Fire Emblem.

The lodges don’t have windows.

He went out of his way to point that out. I thought that was a little weird.

Back in 2023, I had “visions” that the lodges lacked windows so that they could be used as a spaceport in a pinch; however, I no longer believe this to be even remotely true.

His church before Elizabethtown was “full of Freemasons”.

Umm… okay? They seem to be walking a thin line between being a “secret society” and telling all their friends, but whatever.

Partway through, he saw a couple at the coffee shop who he knew from his church at Cary. He called them over to our table, and we exchanged greetings for a minute or so. After they walked away, Tommy pointed out that the guy was a Freemason. He had officiated their wedding just before transferring to his new church in Greensboro, and referred to it as the most unique and eccentric he’d ever done. The couple looked pretty boring to me.

I enjoyed talking to your therapist! Are you still seeing her?

Uh… no. Not anymore…

I eventually mentioned the weird reincarnation thing I remembered point-blank; but tried to make it clear that it wasn’t my present belief, and that I thought I was just a little nuts.

Well, I think you’re on a path…

Goddammit, that’s what you people³ always say!

I brought up Warren at some point; mentioning that I did think we were both from there, despite my prior lapse in judgement.

Yeah, I was born in Warren. My mom is from Cary, and I grew up down here.

Okay; I can see how “Born in Warren, mostly ‘from’ Cary” may’ve gotten lost in translation with Vickie as a middle-person. I’ll… allow that; maybe.

After proving to know a little too much about the Freemasons not to rouse my suspicion at least a little, he changed the subject to Susan.

Susan’s eccentric. I’ve met a lot of eccentric people; but your mother is really different.

You know who Susan is? A survivor.

This is another point that really sticks out at me; because, I had just recently made the opposite conclusion. Most of my life, I’ve parroted that belief to myself; Susan had a rough childhood, she’s been through a lot… it’s only lately that I’ve come to the conclusion that she’s really just being an asshole, and there’s little excuse for it.

I’m her adult child, not her lover. While I certainly don’t mean to suggest she’s ever attempted anything romantic or intimate, I do think her emotional attachment and expectations for our relationship are… confused, and unhealthy.

Her trauma isn’t my fault, or my responsibility. Children are supposed to go in the “liability” column, not the “asset” column. Anyway…

He made it very clear that anything we talked about was private. He kinda made it sound like he was mostly avoiding Susan at this point, although it sounded like Nancy might still talk to her sometimes.

He kind of did make me feel better about Susan being a whackadoodle, at least. He pointed out that she’s, apparently, known not to be a very honest or reliable person.

Oh, she lies about everything!

He said at one point. I at least felt a little exonerated hearing that; people from Bladen County mostly treat us like a normal family, even though I know we’re not.

I left; feeling both defeated, and like I still had something I needed to grapple with. There isn’t much more time and money and Rachael to keep going with, though. Hell; I might even need to chalk Tommy up to being a whackadoodle person. Sometimes you’ve just got to cut yourself out of toxic situations and move on with your life; even if you’ll never find the closure you’re looking for.

---

I at least felt a little better, having talked to Tommy. He couldn’t really help me with anything, but I could at least cross him off the list now.

The list

• Tommy
• Maureen
• Heather
• Josh
• Kristina?

Shit, dude. I need help. I really need help. I feel I’ve got my wits about me more than I did, but I remember Heather, Maureen, and even my therapist before I went all Pepe Silvia, knowing about the Freemason-UFO-reincarnation thing. And, Tommy’s still acting like a goddamn sketchball about it all these years later.

I’m chasing my goddamn tail. I know what I remember! And, I know these people are acting about as squirrelly as I was. I’d really feel a lot better if Heather or Maureen themselves could tell me I was imagining things; or, maybe explain what it is I’m misremembering.

Like; Lyra. I’ve known the star Vega was in the constellation Lyra since college. Since Junior year, when I had that talk with Heather, and she told me she was from the star Vega in the constellation Lyra. I didn’t, and still don’t, know jack shit about stars and constellations. I think science is cool…

Vega being in the constellation Lyra is, like, about the only fact I know about the subject matter. I can verify it. It’s on Wikipedia. And I know it, because…

Heather told me. She told me she was from there. I can’t verify anything she told me about Freemasons, or reincarnation, or “exploring mysticism”, or any of that. But, I can verify that. I learned a lot of really weird shit, along with a single verifiable fact.

I mean; if my memory is failing me, this would seem to be a highly specific memory glitch. It’s like…

I mean, come on. I feel like I’m in a Key and Peele sketch or something. This thing jumped the shark like, 18 months ago.

Duh duh duh duh duh duh duh
duh duh duh
duh duh duh duh

We are live! Keep moving!

Duh duh duh duh duh duh
Duuuuuuuuuh duh duh

Maybe I just need one of these Freemason people to tell me to fuck off. I’ll do it, too. Again; wrong turn hundreds of miles ago, no idea how I got here… I swear, everything felt so logical at the time. I feel like I was supposed to meet friends at the beach, and drove my car in blissful ignorance all the way to Wilmington, DE; wondering why everything felt so much further away, for only me.

---

My left eye had been bothering me lately with itching and burning, but eye drops seemed to help. I’d often wake up with that happening, and would reach for the drops that I’d needed to buy more of. Whatever.

I started doing actual backstretches that I’d found online, and could tell this was greatly alleviating the gastrointestinal problem. It was only then that I began to realize how contorted my body had become. My back had curved far inward, and my entire pelvis began tilting back as I stretched. Ridiculous amounts of stomach began sliding back through the aforementioned hernia; I didn’t even know I had that much stomach.

While I had since taken to eating meals standing up in a vain attempt to avoid discomfort related to the hiatal hernia, it was now obvious that no amount of gravity would have caused my stomach to drop down like old times. I really just needed to stretch, like a lot.

It has since become abundantly clear that this is what was causing my symptoms. Not only have I had no gastrointestinal trouble, I’m also able to breathe easier, and I feel much younger and more alive. I probably still spend about two hours a day stretching on average, but it’s vastly improved my quality of life.

I’ve attributed the root cause to an utter lack of lumbar support, or even normal day-to-day physical exercise whilst this UFO business has been going on. I suppose I did it to myself, in a way.

Ugh. That’s just my life, isn’t it? It’s all your fault sweetie, try not to be a dumbass next time alright?

I could tell my hair was starting to fill back in, and I noticed a return in my “Cousin Itt” hair for the first time. My weight had also leveled off at around 160 lbs; the skinniest I’ve been since at least middle school. I didn’t think that was possible. I’ve already told myself I’m just going to stop eating if I ever weigh over 170 again.

I’ve theorized that the weight loss may’ve been caused by the long-term mis-positioning of my stomach. It probably reduced my appetite without me realizing it, akin to having your stomach stapled. If there was malnutrition, it might also explain the hair loss and vitamin problems. The other obvious conclusion would be that the lack of vitamins was making me lose weight and hair; if it can’t simply be attributed to the extreme amount of stress I was under.

---

I spent much of May debating whether I should talk to Maureen or Josh next; before ultimately deciding I should probably just start with Josh. He’s already involved, and I don’t really even know Maureen that well. I was starting to think UFOs and Freemasons might not be my biggest problem; as much as I’m left hanging for the final chord.

Right. He’ll be in town on Sunday. I, uh… forget about that sometimes. That we don’t really…

Umm… talk about religion. I don’t talk about religion with anyone from Bladen County, really.

I’m very open about being an atheist when people ask what I believe in. I’m not sure anyone from Bladen County has really asked me point-blank if I’m still a Christian; except for my mother once, when she was concerned that I watched South Park.

Okay; so Susan is just weird, and unreasonable, and very incompatible with who I am as a person. I’ve had to accept that. She probably won’t ever…

So, I guess it’s just… never come up. Not that it has to be a thing, or whatever. Except…

Well, yeah. It kinda does. Because I was an atheist, then I wasn’t one, and now I’m one again. I don’t know if I’m about to get a probationary warning from Richard Dawkins for that or…

Okay; so he’s a wee bit conservative, and he kinda sorta liked Donald Trump a whole lot last I knew, and when we do talk about politics we tend to bond over the time I went through a libertarian phase when I was younger that I sometimes pretend I never grew out of.

(Sigh) My, uh… childhood best friend is a Christian conservative, isn’t he? There’s a word for this…

Dude. What am I even doing with my life? Have I managed to make even a single friend who actually knows me? I think my entire life is a collection of masks I wear around people to feel safe. Because I’m afraid the entire world is going to disown me or something, for being different

and acting like a queeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnn

This was a bit like a splash of cold water to the face. Let’s just… grab lunch with the after church crowd, and catch up on what’s been happening in this crazy little brain of mine!

Do I really want to go straight to sweet little Jesus boy Josh Johnson with this?

A few days later, I decided

Dude. Fuck trying to make a video. I need to write.

I created a markdown file, and started writing at the part where I was born in Warren, Ohio. I knew this was going to be an incredibly personal piece of writing. I knew this wasn’t “after church special” material.

I kept writing. I looked for something to beautify markdown, and that’s when I got into pandoc. Have you done pandoc? It’s a drug. I did it when I got tired of writing. I started putting latex in the frontmatter to tweak the appearance, until I’d done enough of that to make a .sty file.

While randomly scrolling around on Wikipedia and reading about the Jay and Silent Bob universe, I discovered that “Alyssa Jones” is the name of the lesbian love interest from Chasing Amy. I’ve never watched any of the Clerks movies; though I do feel a spiritual connection to the character of Silent Bob.

Q3

I got to writing about high school, and this realization hit me like a ton of bricks. Why I’m blackballed.

It’s Emma. Remember? She spread a bunch of lies about me after our thing fell apart.

It brought me back to what Bill was trying to tell me all those years ago. Dude… I bet if I look bad to people for some reason, it’s probably because she told everyone I was a rapist or a pedophile or something, and people still believe it. Maybe I was supposed to defend myself more vigorously or something, but I mostly just ignored her. It felt like she was feeding off my heightened emotions from being outed.

I was really pissed off about this for like a week; I kinda doubt it’s even the problem now. I had completely forgotten that Emma exists; it might actually be a good thing I didn’t go to Josh’s wedding if she was going to be there.

I kept writing. I got off to a really brisk start, but I was losing steam.

My left eye kept sucking, and when I woke up with really annoying burning one night I went into the bathroom and was like

Alexa, set a timer for fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes; starting now.

And I was all like

(schwiffiffischwiffischwiffischwiffischwiffischwiffisch)

Cupping water into my hand, until I got to like minute twelve and I was all like

Arghhhaaaaafuuuuuuuckgoddammitaaaaaaaa

And like, a bunch of apricot started coming out of my eye.

Like, I didn’t know you could have so much bullshit in your eye without realizing it. It was like my eye had hammerspace.

This knocked me on my ass for, like, at least a week; but really, more like two or three with recurring problems after it was mostly out.

One of the more annoying problems is that it made me really sensitive to light, to the point my eyes couldn’t adjust to the light outdoors and I could barely drive. I had already become largely nocturnal, but this really encouraged me to get food at night and early in the morning; where I was often still blinded by the lights in the drive-through or elsewhere.

The other annoying problem that might go without saying is that it was like having to work a million little grains of sand out of your eye, that are bound together by what I can only describe as “Satan’s mucous”.

Ugh! Just… don’t, if you can help it.

I got some proper eyewash from Target, and it helped a lot. After a while it felt like it was maybe loosening up a little too much and making my eye burn like crazy; the little cup was always helpful though, even when I just needed refreshing tap water.

Anyway, I’m done with that now, but was still getting a little bit of gunk out sometimes as of a few weeks ago.

Sorry, this is supposed to be about UFOs. Jeez, I wonder why this is taking so long…

Josh sent me this; which frankly reads like some sort of weird copypasta. I need real things I can actually do.

Okay – so, my childhood best friend might be a right wing conspiracy theorist. I guess I should’ve… well, he’s already involved, for better or worse. I swear to god, everyone’s either a neo-Nazi or a literal commie these days.

To be fair, maybe I’m not one to talk. I’m not sure I’m entirely sane, and I do still think there might be something a bit “out of this world” going on with me. I think there’s a scientific explanation for everything, and I’d certainly like to find the scientific explanation for this some day.

I couldn’t really work on writing for a week or two, and used it as an excuse to figure out how to write filters for pandoc, as well as pull my old Jekyll site off my disassembled server. I had planned to simply build a PDF with pandoc and share it out of Google Drive.

I wanted to see how bad things would look just running my markdown through Jekyll, but after writing my own pandoc filters I ended up just running the HTML out of pandoc through the templater.

I was eventually able to get back into writing again, picking up where I’d left off around 2016. I kept telling myself I wouldn’t waste time on various cosmetic aspects of document preparation, but I kept making excuses. There’s still a lot I’d like to do, and I’m trying to control myself.

I had a conversation with ChatGPT to try and see what AI would think of my basic problem; and was amused when it seemed to take the same missteps I did back in 2021, all the way to starseeds and indigo children. I felt at least a little vindicated.

I decided to similarly start back at square one with Google. One source said most people who became masons in the 19^th century were doing it to get insurance, of all things. I’ve never heard that one before.

At the time of writing, searching “Freemasonry’s big secret” on DuckDuckGo produces this as the 5^th result; a seemingly benign article from Gaia.com, which I remember from 2021 as peddling weird goddamn UFO shit and this dude Steven Greer who strikes me now as a sort of cis-male Persephone.

This article on Wikipedia about Gaia.com is an absolute doozy.

Chasing my goddamn tail. Chasing my ever-loving goddamn tail over here.

The seasons just. Keep. Changing. I’m still just… this. Wearing my halal hoodie around, taking my vitamins and my DIY hormones, waking up a few hours after sundown… asking myself whether I should stop smoking pot and eating fast food as I’m careening into oblivion, before ultimately concluding it won’t make much difference either way.

Take my vitamins, check my messages…

I just… never thought I’d end up here. Everyone always acted like I was going to be successful. Like, I was destined for greatness or something. They acted like I was going to be the next Bill Gates, or Curtis Brown or some shit. But, I never had my shit together at all. I prioritized finding companionship over building my career, and ultimately succeeded at neither.

Well, that sucks.

Going through my Discord messages while preparing this document, I found one from Erika I’d either missed or forgotten about.

I… don’t think Erika is transsexual. Not that (he?) explicitly mentioned T, but they were already experimenting with non-binary pronouns, so I’m just gonna assume…

Actually, after reading this again it sounds like she may’ve been telling me Jason is a trans woman. This is somehow more believable; Jason’s the only other subby boy I’ve met who likes doing it with a Hitachi (not that that’s unheard of). I already knew Erika was non-binary.

Nevermind. It’s Eric(a), alright…

Dude. Is this a real timeline? Despite my now-disbelief in any whackadoodleness about me being the face of an errant timeline or something, it does feel a bit like I’m… the thing here, right? Like, the goose in a circle full of ducks?

It’s like… transsexuals are ice-nine. And we turn, like, some percentage of the population, upon exposure, into

… transgender people.

Despite no longer thinking I’m being pursued by the government, I have grown concerned conservatives may institute a pogrom against the transgender population.

It feels inevitable, really. A world full of witches and people who fear them… like a sort of microphone squeal, that starts with one too many trans people whispering into it.

I mean, it’s only a matter of time before the research catches up, and we realize a lot of these people are just nuts; right? Then it’s a public health crisis. How do you handle that through policy?

… Quarantining the infected?

I’m very concerned that, nearly ten years post-Jenner, this is at least as big an issue as it was at the start; with a voice that’s managed to grow even more shrill.

What about the children!

And, it’s a good question. Because, Lupron is pretty harmless…

It goes without saying, a generation of people who regrettably transitioned young out of hype is the last thing the transsexual community needs right now. And, it seems a bit selfish to start with that, and not the actual children who might grow up with problems of their own.

I was too busy working on this and rinsing gunk out of my eye to really pay attention to sports, but I kept seeing headlines from the Olympics about how such and such boldly proclaimed that she was a woman. And… it just felt weird.

Because, I don’t really know that I’m a woman. I’m just a human who likes female hormones and sexually submissive roleplay. I’ve kinda always felt like the label of “woman” was something bestowed on me by other people. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, granted, in a very non-sexual way…

This whole thing sucks. I just want my old life back. I used to have a job, and friends, and a doctor, and a therapist… I could still do without Susan frankly, but it is sad I don’t really even have family in the mix.

In 2019, I really felt like I finally had my shit together. I was a late bloomer, but I was full-time,⁴ and was thinking about finally trying to date “as myself” or whatever, I had a job at a “real” company for once…

My life just fell. Apart. I found myself unable to keep up at yet another programming job (maybe for different reasons, granted). There was way too much shit going on with me before there was way too much shit going on with me, I foolishly tried involving my mother because she kept whining that I never tell her anything and yelling at me for not “loving her” enough or whatever, then there was an emergency with very suspicious timing under very suspicious circumstances, which only led to more suspicious bullshit…

A year ago, I was proud of how far I’d come. Sure, I wished I’d have transitioned younger, but…

Now, I can’t help but see myself as a complete failure. I should’ve started taking hormones when I was in college; and, I probably would have if it weren’t for the horrifyingly confusing experience I had coming out in high school. As much as Susan drones on about how much she “loves me”, I really thought I might have Just Evelyn as a parent or some shit. When it turned out I didn’t, I… kept making excuses for her; and decided I might actually understand her crazy ways if I were a real woman.

Love… isn’t words. It’s real stuff. Susan doesn’t listen to me. She doesn’t care about how I feel. She cares about how she feels. She cares about how she feels about me. And, that’s love to her.

Susan doesn’t know what love is. I can only assume her family of origin didn’t really love her. I frankly don’t even know them that well; they’re basically rednecks who say “pop”.

Susan conflates the roles of an adult child with those of a lover or long-term partner; not in some sexual or incestuous way, but like… she yells at me for forgetting things about her, like you’d yell at your husband for forgetting your anniversary, right? That’s… not healthy. Susan and I are so far apart now, I don’t think we could ever “make a deal”. She only wants more and more of me, and I really just want to see her on major holidays maybe.

I don’t think Susan thinks I’m retarded anymore. I don’t think she’s suing me for custody of myself.

I do think she’s kind of an asshole, and I’m still suspicious both of her fall, and of what happened while I was in New York. While it’s extreme that she may’ve injured herself to spend more time with me, this would fit the profile of Borderline Personality Disorder; which I already suspect she has anyway.

Susan’s been… running a racket.

I’m convinced my life would be way better today if I’d never come out in high school, and if I’d have just told her goodbye in college. I would’ve transitioned earlier, and I wouldn’t have had this crazy lady manipulating me and vying for control every chance she got.

I guess I just want to be… understood. Nobody’s ever really gotten to know me. Maybe it’s my fault. I guess I’ve been afraid so long it’s all I really know.

I was so afraid of being disowned or something, after I learned that was a thing that happened to people like me.

This is about UFOs though, right? Goddammit, what even is this?

I’ve nuked my career twice, I’ve missed two of my best friends’ weddings, my house is a mess, my yard is overgrown…

And I just… can’t.

My life is in absolute shambles. There isn’t even a government agency for this. It’s like… I need FEMA, but there wasn’t a hurricane.⁵

I’m running out of money, and I’ve spent most of the year just trying to figure out how to explain the problem. It’s just

So. Fucking. Complicated. I think I was over 100k words last I checked. I’d like to edit this down because I don’t really want to make people read something this long; but there’s just

So. Much. Backstory.

And I still skipped over bits that I need to fill in, but I’ve probably said enough, right? I’ve probably said too much.

I don’t believe in anything anymore. I don’t even trust my own memory. But, I can’t deny my own reality. I think most everything that’s happened to me since the summer of 2021 is bullshit, but I still remember everything else! So fucking clearly!

Heather. Maureen. Tommy. Goddammit, so much weird shit with Tommy. Like, dude; what?

I don’t know what to do, except to tell you a large part of my life story; just as I remember it. And as far as I can tell, everything else about my memory seems to be just fine. It’s just so bizarre.

It seems really obvious now that I started freaking out from paranoia in the summer of 2021 after seeing there was a UFO report and reading stuff online. Okay. I did recently start taking methylphenidate, so who knows what happened there. Maybe I jumped the shark people a little bit.

But; just a few months before that, this stuff casually came up in our therapy session. Go back and look if you don’t remember.

Like; unless my memory’s scrambled, that happened. It isn’t a vision I had, it wasn’t some bizarre premonition… this is a real conversation I remember having with my psychologist over Zoom on a Wednesday, where I brought up Persephone’s enthused “mysticism and magic and UFOs” talk, and she reminded me that it was reincarnation and yadda yadda “Oh yeah, Heather!”

Then there was all that stuff about me needing to learn about the Freemasons, and then… I mean, from my POV, it kinda just seems like all I needed was the transitive property and a little nudge to put the puzzle pieces together.

Given the very likely conclusion that all the “messages” in my head are bullshit, I can’t help but feel the truth might somehow lie in between. For example,

What if it really is reincarnation, just like I remember? But, it isn’t anything Persephone was talking about. Because, I really think she’s a whackadoodle at this point. I was already starting to think that a few years ago, but I still thought she knew about this stuff and I hadn’t cancelled her yet.

Look, y’all. I’m a hardened atheist skeptic who doesn’t believe in ghosts; but I remember what I remember, and there’s still a lot I don’t have an explanation for.

Maybe it’s something indistinguishable from reincarnation, or something that’s close enough? What if it’s technology that can manipulate one’s life force, or transfer consciousness? I’m trying to keep an open mind, while also being mindful of the possibility that my memory’s just shot.

Whatever it is; I don’t fucking know, and I have bigger problems. I have well less than 10k in my bank account, and I can’t see myself getting back to work anytime soon. I know the world’s telling me to get a fucking job, but I feel like I haven’t had a vacation in years. I’ve just been stuck; getting tortured in the prison of my own mind.

One thing’s for sure; I could really use a time machine right about now.

The irony is, I think “spiritual awakening” is the perfect word to describe what seems to have happened. The human mind; it’s just

This. Incredibly fragile, prone to delusion and paranoia… it happens to the best and worst of us. Just look at history. Religion, cults, miracles, visions, ghosts, angels, spirits, demons… Hell; just a couple hundred years ago, schools were teaching that everything was made of earth, air, fire, and water.

We are really young as a society. And I thought I was better than them. I thought I was too smart to fall into the same trap generation after generation of religious kook has found themselves snared in.

I. Found. Jesus.

Light my candles
in a daze
’cause I found God

I feel pretty weird sending this to my childhood Christian conservative best friend. Last he knew, I went through some kind of spiritual awakening. I still believe that I at least heard it was reincarnation, because how else could this have happened?

Frankly, this derailment in my life feels a bit surgical; like, some group of people knew just what to tell me to make me hit a sort of breakpoint right fucking here. I can’t argue that, I really think my life was moving in the wrong direction. I had resigned myself to being such a misfit that I wouldn’t even try normal dating; I based this mostly on my preferences and experiences when I was trying to be a guy, and never really adjusted my dating strategy for my gender change. With BDSM being as normalized as it is today, and with vanilla relations being more palatable with me as the woman anyhow, it seems I might as well just make a Tinder and order a pumpkin spice latte.

But, dude; why does everyone have fucking pronouns now? I don’t want to be in the dating scene as another one of those people. They just… aren’t the same thing as me. I might’ve at least had a chance with a more well-adjusted “tranny chaser” type, but now I’m worried there are just too many of us. I guess I could talk about how truescummy I am on my ODP…

Sorry. This is supposed to be about

UFOs! Goddammit, I wish I could come up with a TL;DR better than

My Freemason preacher had me read “The Kybalion”, and it
destroyed
my
fucking life.

I couldn’t help but laugh when I was scrolling through Wikipedia a few weeks ago, and it dawned on me that the most prominent organization promoting an alien reincarnation theory was (wait for it) the Church of Scientology.

Key Scientology beliefs include reincarnation, and that traumatic events cause subconscious command-like recordings in the mind (termed “engrams”) that can be removed only through an activity called “auditing”. A fee is charged for each session of “auditing”. Once an “auditor” deems an individual free of “engrams” they are given the status of “clear”. Scholarship differs on the interpretation of these beliefs: some academics regard them as religious in nature; other scholars regard them as merely a means of extracting money from Scientology recruits. After attaining “clear” status, adherents can take part in the Operating Thetan levels, which require further payments. The Operating Thetan texts are kept secret from most followers; they are revealed only after adherents have typically given hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Scientology organization.[14] Despite its efforts to maintain the secrecy of the texts, they are freely available on various websites, including at the media organization WikiLeaks.[15][16] These texts say past lives took place in extraterrestrial cultures.[17] They involve an alien called Xenu, described as a planetary ruler 70 million years ago who brought billions of aliens to Earth and killed them with thermonuclear weapons. Despite being kept secret from most followers, this forms the central mythological framework of Scientology’s ostensible soteriology.[18] These aspects have become the subject of popular ridicule.

What are Heather and Maureen; Scientologists? They never said anything about Scientology, and they didn’t even try to recruit me into their little cult. If anything they seemed a bit guarded about some secret they only seemed to take half-seriously.

I feel like I’m stuck in a sand trap. Like, I know I took a wrong turn if I’m wading into Scientology territory. Right?

At the same time, it does feel like there’s been an almost deliberate poisoning of the well of information when it comes to anything involving UFOs and reincarnation. But, maybe that’s the point. Maybe Heather and Maureen and Tommy and them know what can really help me, but they had to push me into this little sand trap because otherwise I was going to wonder off the course entirely.

Enough speculation. I clearly lost my mind; right? And, what about now? Am I sane yet?

Well, not exactly. I still have that feeling. People in my head; but like, actual people. Famous people, boring people, friends and family… like they’re living my life with me, skipping around to certain parts, asking me questions, telling me things. It has to be some kind of delusion, right? What do I, need Abilify or something? It’s like… I was fine, until I just wasn’t. So said everyone with a serious health problem.

It’s actually how I decided my friends were all trenders. The stuff in my head. It’s still there really, just like it has been. I’ve just been pretending I’m more sane, because the stuff in my head has gotten more sane. I no longer think the government is after me, at least. Maybe I’ll be completely back to normal after a few more months.

So, what if my friends aren’t even trenders? That’d be great. I’d love to hear that.

But; why didn’t they have the childhood crossdressing thing like I did? It was a really powerful impulse. You can’t just… pretend you don’t have that going on with you as a kid. You either have it or you don’t.

It’s like, I started grounded in sanity (my memories), and have ended grounded in what feels sane (too many transgenders). As if I passed through a tunnel of insanity, to come back out the other side just a little different.

I… need new friends.

Waiting for Godot (Q4)

It’s serendipitously the first of October; so, this is the first quarter that might also be considered a journal of sorts.

I had decided to reach out to Josh first. I’m running out of time and money, I really need to go to someone I can trust for advice on how to get my life back on track, #TODOI’m forgetting the third thing

I’ve been reading the last few days that there’s really bad flooding from Helene in the western part of the state; where Josh moved back when I was just starting to think I was Dani California. Like, they’ve got literal FEMA out there and shit. I feel pretty weird about that thing I said earlier.

His phone is offline, so I can only assume he’s stuck out there. The best case is that I’d drop this on him right as he got his utilities back. But dude; they got like close to a foot of rain out there. They might be paddling around in a canoe for all I know.

I wonder how much my mother would freak the fuck out if I were stuck out there? Anyway…

I mean, I’m worried about the guy. Less than a hundred people have died, so he probably isn’t one of them. I hope he didn’t buy a house on the riverfront.

This is something bad…

Who else do I go to? Fucking Maureen? I hardly know this woman, and I haven’t seen her in years!

The same could be said about Heather. And, it’s not like I expect either of those people to help me with anything except confirming my insanity.

Despite everything I expected out of my talk with Tommy earlier this year, I really still think he was hiding something. I’m essentially done pursuing it unless Heather or Maureen have something fruitful to tell me, and I suppose I just need to try and move on with my life.

Like, I need a fucking job first of all. And, I feel like I’m just getting back to normal. My hair’s growing back, my delusions are at least becoming more sane… I have no money or health insurance. Where else do I go,

Susan? She’s fucking broke too, and she’s fucking crazy. Now, that’s one thing I’ve come to understand since our “breakup”, and it has nothing to do with her thinking I’m retarded. She does treat me like I’m retarded, though.

I’m just… not going to, with Susan. I don’t suppose they’ve been waiting to give me my old job back? I only got it the first time because Josh put in a good word for me.

I’m just… not cut out for the working world. I’m not sure I’m cut out for any kind of a world. This place is

Just. So. Crazy.

I don’t know how to get up with Heather, except through my trender friends Jason(?) and Eric(a). I guess I could re-write this to wash over the part where I became truescum. But like,

Goddammit, I can’t make people read this 100k+ word monstrosity. Josh’s, like, the only person I really even feel close enough to subject to that. And I don’t even know if he has a house still.

I’m planning to run it through AI for help with… well, ChatGPT can at least be my friend.

I really fucked up.

It seems almost poetic. My life has been torn to shambles by some invisible force of nature that we might as well just call God, and I don’t know of much of anywhere to even go other than my Christian conservative childhood best friend. And, atheist me keeps hoping to pull the Scooby-Doo mask off of “God” and say “Aha! It’s really just our old friend, mild schizophrenia!”

I still lack what I would consider a satisfactory explanation for nonetheless my pre-2021 memories, about meeting lots of people who seemed to know “the truth about UFOs was just reincarnation”. If it’s just mental illness, I think it would behoove me to know what it is, so that I can maybe stop tearing my life apart over stupid bullshit.

I should probably stop smoking weed, because fuck knows what I’ll have to do for money. I just can’t bring myself to care. It’s like watching an oncoming train wreck, and I know the brakes won’t help so it’s hard for me to find the willpower to even pull them.

Dude. I fucked up. Fuck whoever made me think I was going to be the next Curtis Brown or some shit.

I need to get off the planet.

---

A month and a half after first texting Josh, I managed to finally have an over two-hour long talk with the guy. I suppose there was a lot going on.

I’m writing this about fifteen hours after ending the call and falling asleep. I have a lot of complicated feelings about how things went. We had a good talk, and I feel better that I at least closed the loop with Josh.

The bottom line is, he didn’t really have any advice for me; other than “get a job” (in the nicest way possible). Josh’s still a Christian, but he didn’t seem bothered that I was an atheist. His main bullet points were

• Get a therapist; and tell them everything.
• You need to get a job; so that you can get insurance, and get a therapist and tell them everything.
• Susan’s probably a little “off”, but she really cares about you and means well. She seems to still be freaking out about my absence, and is legitimately unaware of how I’m fairing.
• He was less convinced than I am that I had sideburns.
• Nor was he convinced my friends were transtrenders, or otherwise fundamentally different from me.
• Toward the end, he voiced his concern about the young age at which I was into BDSM, and suggested this might be the result of sexual trauma.

I was working down the trauma → BDSM pathway around 2020-2021, and took it seriously at the time. I no longer believe this is a good explanation; though I can’t rule it out. Again, as cringy as it sounds, I really think I caught the ROGD equivalent of sexual trauma and structural dissociation, because that’s what like half my friends were ostensibly dealing with all of a sudden. Ick!

Josh voiced his doubts that Susan really snooped around my house while I was away. Not gonna lie – I’ve had doubts about this myself. I still don’t really see a winning move with Susan, and am less-than-certain about how to proceed with our relationship. I guess I hoped for more solidarity about how much of an asshole Susan was, but I got the impression Josh was underestimating how difficult she is to deal with.

He brought up the weird copypasta thing briefly. I wanted to pick at the parts of it that sounded like it was written by a nine-year-old on cough syrup, but I couldn’t multitask while I was talking to Josh at the same time. Josh at least admitted that it was far-fetched, but also seemed to think it was just as likely as anything I thought it might be. I still maintain that the copypasta thing doesn’t really even make sense; and that we might as well go all the way back to starseeds and indigo children if we’re going that far out on a limb.

As much as I want to tear into it, I frankly don’t think it’s worth my time. It’s obviously bullshit. I think the bigger problem is that my childhood best friend is basically a right wing conspiracy theorist who flirts a little too closely with fascism. #TODOI could talk about this. I almost cancelled him after the Busy Bees thing.

I can’t help but think of what Bill said all those years ago. He asked me if I had any political signs outside my house. It isn’t inconceivable that Josh is my “political sign”. I’ve made an awful lot of excuses for him over the years, but he’s really only drifted further and further to the right. I’m worried I’m going to start spouting off his weirdo talking points just by hanging around him too much.

We didn’t exactly have a bad talk; but overall, I can’t help but feel… disappointed. I mean, I don’t know what I expected, exactly. Given Josh’s seeming lack of enthusiasm to talk to me leading up to the call, I guess I was expecting a “hand up” rather than a “hand out”; but, I didn’t really even get a hand up.

I set the bar pretty low going into the call, and still didn’t come away feeling much better. My biggest relief probably comes from the fact that I now know I can’t really depend on him for much of anything substantial, and that I can finally cross him off the list. I guess I can’t help but feel I would’ve been a better friend to him if the roles were reversed. And, I’m not even talking about the money; although he did take a road trip to Delaware and went to a basketball game before taking the time to tell me to pull myself up by the bootstraps and get a job.

I guess I feel a little cheated. I guess I tried to make Josh out to be my “one of the good ones” conservative friend, and ended up getting my face eaten by leopards.

One thing’s for certain; I don’t want to be Alyssa Jones or Dani California anymore.

---

I remember finding a single gray hair in my late twenties. I kind of just laughed it off as this weird, errant hair that I found.

I have at least two of them now. I can only imagine there are probably more I haven’t found. And, I’m still missing like half my hair.

I’m not doing great. After really teetering back and forth about it, I decided to pay my mortgage this month at the last minute. I probably shouldn’t have. But, I wasn’t ready to start getting hounded for being in default on my mortgage yet, on top of everything else I need to figure out.

I have $3,800.54 in my bank account. I liquidated all $20k-ish I had in my 401k from Avalon earlier this year, and I have no other real assets other than my house. The value has certainly gone up overall despite me not taking very good care of it.

I feel awful. This was such a cute little house. And, maybe it could have a cute little house again. But, somebody needs to take a Bobcat to the front yard.

I can’t take care of a house. I can’t even take care of myself.

Josh was trying to get me to fight. Like a coach when you’re behind at half-time.

Do you want to keep your house?!

Well, yeah…

Then get a job!
Look for anything! Go work at Food Lion!

It feels like everything from Josh to ChatGPT to my own social programming is telling me there is one, and only one, top priority, and it’s really obvious.

I need to get a job.

But, I’m not sending out any resumes. I’m not even thinking about doing that this year. There’s really only one viable solution I’ve found satisfactory.

I need to kill myself.

What really sucks about this, is that I can’t talk about it with anyone without risking involuntary commitment. It seems there’s a decent case for holding me against my will under North Carolina law.

• I have a mental illness and/or a “substance abuse problem”
• I am a danger to myself, and/or unable to care for myself

And, I know what they’re going to do to help with me with my problems. Fuck-all nothing. I’m just going to lay there not watching the Hallmark Channel again until somebody decides it’s been long enough since I last talked about killing myself or being a space alien, and then maybe they’ll let me go. And then they’ll send me a ginormous bill again for the privilege. (They stopped asking about their last bill a long time ago; which I have no intention of paying unless maybe they do a little more explaining.)

For that matter, I’m very concerned they wouldn’t let me take HRT. Because, I am on what some psych doctor with clenched butt-cheeks might call a “sketchy DIY hormone regimen” in light of recent events. And, I still don’t have an explanation for why my doctor pulled me off hormones almost as if on purpose, every time she saw me after the psych ward incident. I’m not sure I wrote about it earlier, but the thought that somehow the psych doctors/court system compelled my doctor and therapist to lie has certainly crossed my mind. I’ve balanced this fear with a belief that I live in a free country with strict medical ethics guidelines; and that nobody has seemingly compelled me to do anything or debriefed me on any sort of mandatory treatment plan. All I know is that I got out of the psych ward, and suddenly my doctor and therapist’s treatment plans turned on a fucking dime without any explanation. And, it just feels shady and unethical as fuck.

Suffice it to say, I do not trust the mental health system. Frankly, I think I’d been pulled in an at least somewhat wrong direction with the work I’d been doing with Vickie, but then shit just got inexplicably weird. And, the first part isn’t really her fault because it’s incredibly hard just to get anything meaningful out of me.

This isn’t the result of mental illness. This isn’t the result of pot. The initial problem may’ve been precipitated by those things. But, now I just need help. And I’m reaching out, and there isn’t any. Nothing except a bunch of people telling me to get a fucking job.⁶

You know what I need right now? FMLA. Remember when they put me on that without asking two and a half years ago? I had them undo it, because I thought I had friends, and a therapist, and a job, and a support network, and a sane HRT provider… It just hurts how quickly things have gone from “Oh, the paperwork for you to take a leave of absence to work on your mental health has already been filed for you, get well soon Rachael!” to “Oh, there you are… why don’t you get a fucking job already…”

Are there government benefits for somebody like me? ChatGPT didn’t really seem to think so, but I should probably talk to a real person. There probably aren’t though, because I can’t pass a drug test.

I just feel like I slipped through the cracks. And, there just isn’t a safety net for people who fall through the cracks. It’s why there are homeless people.

I don’t feel like I need a job. I feel like I need something to live for. I need somebody to snuggle me, and tell me everything’s going to be okay. I need somebody to help me get my life together. I need a self-improvement gigolo. Because, I have no intention of even applying to work at Food Lion.

A lot of people would find that prissy. I don’t feel like it is. I took a $30k/year pay cut to run away to Chapel Hill to fix computers, often doing work that felt close to blue collar.

It’s really not about pride. It’s about my life. It’s about my future. Back then, I was in my mid-twenties, and shifting my life focus to finding a long-term partner, and creating a web application that might help me find a long-term partner. I had plans for the future. I had something to live for. I was doing work now, to prepare me for a future life with that special someone. And then I was just transitioning.

Maybe I should make an ODP before I finally kill myself? But like, I reek of desperation now. I’m missing half my hair. And I’m going gray. I’m a gray-haired virgin.

Somehow, I always knew that would be my fate. A gray-haired virgin. At least I’m skinnier. A couple gray hairs in exchange for 80 lbs probably is worth it. Is this the law of equivalent exchange?⁷

I feel like I need to give you fuckers an ultimatum. Because, some fucking douchebag is going to freak the fuck out that I’m about to kill myself, and they’re going to call the shithead fucking cops again on me, and… look. Here’s the deal. You get me involuntarily committed, and I will kill myself. Just out of spite. It’s like mutually-assured destruction. Sure, I can’t do it when they have me in a little padded room watching the Hallmark Channel, but I can do it eventually. And, that is all I have. It’s my nuclear arsenal. Now you’re fucking with Dani California.

Don’t.

Fuck.

With me.

I will make you regret it, and I won’t have to hurt a goddamn soul to do it.

(Okay, I’ve calmed down a little bit since I wrote this…)

I need help, okay? Do you know what help is? I still don’t even understand what’s happened to me, first of all, and… look, I don’t really even know what I’m asking for. I just need help reintegrating into society, because I’ve totally slipped through the cracks and I don’t even know where to start. And, dude.

I don’t really even want to kill myself. It’s sad as shit that it feels like that’s my only option right now. But here I am, thinking more logically than I probably have this decade, and… I don’t have a better idea for solving my problems than killing myself. And, I really want one. And, I don’t want one of you goddamn assholes to lock me in the looney bin again where nobody’s even going to listen to me.

I just feel so hopeless. There’s just nothing. I got through years of mental torture, thinking some rock star or my future husband or some shit was going to hold me and make it all better at the end of all this, and there’s just nothing. Nothing except cold, hard loneliness and looming poverty. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There is nothing obvious for me to live for.

---

You know what I did today? I spent $150 on weed. Because, I need something to live for. And, that’s what I’m living for right now. I can take it day by day. I have something to look forward to later today, or in a couple of hours. I’m living for something. But, I used to live for other things, too. I lived to hang out with my queer friends. I lived to get tied up and beaten with stuff for fun. I lived for the hope of a future with one or more people. I lived for the prospect of a career doing what I wanted, even if I made risky and questionable choices that put me behind in that space.

You know what I’ve been working on? No, not typing this out. I wrote this in my mind a week or two ago, probably while stretching my back and puffing on a volcano bag.

Ship of Harkinian. There’s something I’ve wanted to do since I played ROMs in college, and that’s make the bank teller in Majora’s Mask less goddamn annoying. He’s always got you pressing the wrong button when you’re in a hurry, and he won’t shut the fuck up and take you back to the main menu when you obviously meant to make a withdrawal instead of a deposit.

I spent more time than I probably should have over the last week, making sure the dialog isn’t weird if you talk to him when the moon’s about to crash, making sure there aren’t any animation hiccups from going to GINKO_ANIM_LEGSMACKING when he’s already doing that… I’ve done everything except make the PR at this point, really. (Okay, there’s more I want to do but never mind that.)

---

(I obviously wrote this before getting IVCed and put on mood stabilizers, but I’m not changing it.)

I’m going through the names of people I should reach out to next. And, I’m starting to feel pretty hopeless and overwhelmed that I probably need to start lying about the whole truescum thing with most of my remaining friends; and I’m feeling a bit at a loss, but first of all

Tommy

Alright, you son of a bitch. I’ve been talking to you with kid gloves on, but

Look; dude. I don’t like Christians. I’ve blamed them for damn near everything that’s wrong with my life. They’re the reason I didn’t feel safe being myself, they’re the reason I couldn’t take antiandrogens as a kid without doing shady shit, they’re the reason my head was filled with weird bullshit about sex that made me feel like some sort of freak who could never find love unless it was at the fringes of society.

I don’t. Like. Christians.

I think the world would be a better place without religion. I think I would be immeasurably better off without religion. They start holy wars, they found inquisitions, they burn crosses…

There would be no homophobia without them. There would be no transphobia without them. There would be no “weird sex stuff” without them (between consenting adults).

I think you’re a decent dude. Frankly, I think you’re too smart to be a Christian; and so is Grace, for that matter.

Look, dude. I really think you’re hiding something. I have no fucking idea what, exactly… I remember what I remember, and that’s been damn near the only constant throughout all of this. I don’t know how the devil you did it, but you knew about shit from the future you son of a bitch!

Why won’t you people talk to me? Is it ’cause I keep trusting Josh? I really am a dumbass for trusting Josh. I feel gross about it. I feel like I gave him the root password to my fucking life, and he was just kinda like “Cool story, bro.”

I haven’t talked about it yet at the time of writing, but I almost ended our friendship like a decade ago after a politically-charged conversation with Cameron got way out of hand. After writing a letter to him about how I thought he just wanted to watch the world burn, Susan bought us surprise tickets to see Van Halen (why?), and I kinda just decided to forget about it. And, he’s only gotten more and more fashy since then. He said some shit about Sandy Hook crisis actors, he said something about (((the Jews))) in the car once, he loves Trump… Like dude, do you even know any Jewish people besides the Goldstein’s?

I feel like I’m friends with this dude because he was the one other intersection between Elizabethtown United Methodist Church and Bladen Lakes Primary School, and then my mom just shipped us like crazy from that point on. I feel like I should’ve just drawn an entirely new hand from the deck when I left home, but by that point I’d been made to feel more anchored to Bladen County and my crazy mother than I actually was.

If I haven’t just made up all that shit I remember you saying forever ago, it’s really obvious to me now that I’ve fucked up by making Josh Johnson my “best friend”. I’m pretty sure you’ve told me not to trust Josh and Susan, and I’ve kept on doing it anyway. So, I’m pretty untrustworthy, I guess.

I can’t imagine it isn’t too little too late for me to realize it. I might just have to die, knowing I could’ve gotten the keys to my spaceship if only I were a little bit less of a dipshit. But, I do realize it now, for what it’s worth. I didn’t pick my childhood best friend really well, or at all for that matter, and I’m a goddamn dipshit for it.

What is your deal, man? Why are you so goddamn sketchy? And, what the actual fuck did you and Vickie talk about? Whatever you said to her, she didn’t want to be my therapist anymore, and she didn’t want to explain why. But, I could really use an explanation as to what happened, because y’all are just acting weird. Like, goddamn. And,

Look, I feel awful if this is some big secret I’m supposed to try and hide from the government. But like… come on, how could they not know something that was that common knowledge among the population? I’m certain that if there is a truth about UFOs, the government must know what it is. Which makes the conversations with Heather and Maureen where they claimed the government wasn’t in on it seem even weirder.

Anyway; I don’t know what to say, except I’ve given y’all time to talk to me without putting shit on the internet. So please, shut me up or just kill me if my words would put innocent people in harms way. But, like, clearly the problem is that I’m not trustworthy enough to be told anything of actual substance; right?

Like, do I need to run before Trump takes office again? I still don’t have a passport like I planned to get before January, and for all I know I won’t even be around for inauguration day. Because, that’s a good cutting-off point and things are looking pretty bleak for me. Anyway,

What is yall’s deal? Do you want me to kill myself? I feel like I’ve been driven utterly insane just from the apparent gaslighting. What the fuck happened to me? Where do I go? I’m probably just making myself sound even more crazy, but like y’all are killing me with these goddamn Simon says rules! Man, I told myself I was done trying to talk to you, but I can’t even help but give you a piece of my mind! This shit with you and Vickie and everyone else just doesn’t add up!

Okay; now

Kristina

You’re like, apparently, the most sane friend I have. I mean, I guess we don’t know each other that well in the grand scheme of things, but like… you pulled away from our friendship as soon as I started talking about aliens and UFOs. That’s… exactly what I would’ve done. So, I like you. You seem reasonable. And, I really don’t think your ex knows any actual secrets to the universe. But, she probably thinks she does.

You seem like someone sane who might have some ideas for me. I doubt you’d send me anything like that weird copypasta thing Josh sent me.

---

It’s December 12^th, and I’m only now backfilling the part where I worked for Kevin a decade ago. I skipped over that when I felt like I was writing this to Josh, because he was there after all.

I’m just feeling

low.

I have no hope and almost no money, and I don’t feel I even have anywhere else to go except back to Tommy fucking Warren. Maybe I still remember all that weird stuff with him a long time ago because he’s my only hope for survival.

My feed is filled with looming worldwide bans on trans healthcare for minors, and I just

Don’t. Want. To exist.

Even more than I already didn’t want to. And it’s not even like it’s the first time my feed has been filled up with this bullshit, but I’m just

So. Fucking. Exhausted.

With fucking Christians (my blanket stand-in for any cultural conservative who’s pissing me off today, really) talking about me like I’m

Not. In. The fucking room.

Me. And everybody like me. I mean, the people like me. Like little Francis Bacon.

I’m afraid I’m close to eliminating most palatable alternatives to suicide. And, I’ve spiraled to the point that I kind of just want to leave the world with this.

While writing this document, I’ve often felt like I was writing my suicide note. And, I might not’ve been wrong about that feeling after all.

I’m just so

Utterly. Fucking. Frustrated.

At the Christian bullshit that keeps showing up in my feed. Such and such votes against “sterilizing our kids”… “Look at this poor little transgender ten-year-old who’s afraid she’s going to get murdered”…

And

Nobody’s. Listening. To me.

God. Fucking. Dammit, you fucking Christians. You make me want to bang up my trumpet case on the roof of the bus again. I have

Just. Fucking. Had it with you people. God-dammit.

I knew something was wrong when there was a chapter on us in Women and Gender Studies class. Look… we’re like this… kind of unusual thing that just exists from time to time, okay? We just need to take hormones and blend in with society as a normal man or a woman, alright? Because, life and friendships and dating and shit is never going to make any real sense to us otherwise, and without some sort of early intervention these kids are just going to grow to be all… Fucked up. Like me. Just, look at me. Is this what you’d want for your child? Because, this is the world Christians have created. They had a lot of chances to love me, and… they ended up just doing this to me. At the risk of not taking responsibility for my own failures.

“Christian love” kept me from even socially transitioning in high school. “Christian love” made me feel like something was wrong with the way I was born. Like “God” just gave me some creepy, abhorrent sexuality nobody else understood because he loved me so hecking much or something. “Christian love” discouraged me from even trying to transition once I left home. Basically everyone who knew in high school besides maybe Cameron and Noah treated me like absolute shit. Like, my gross, perverted little tranny ass needed to be quarantined until I learned how to be a normal respectable member of society. Just

So. Much. Christian. Love. from these people. Not a single one of them has ever apologized for the way they treated me. Hell, Susan’s whitewashed history into panning herself as some sort of champion of transgender rights on Facebook or something. I’ve let Christians move the goalpost for decent treatment of a transsexual all the way to simply not getting disowned or sent off to crazy camp. And I’ve done it with a smile on my face, because anything feels better than nothing. But just

Fuck you people, okay? We have freedom of religion in this country, alright? And, we have a right to bear arms. You still can’t just start packing heat before you’re of age, right? Well, maybe kids ought to be of age before they can start doing something as dangerous as religion, eh? That’s how I feel. Deregulate porn and make religion 18+. Because, from where I’m standing that’s the real crux of most problems in America right now. Maybe even the whole world. Just

Fuck. Religion. I can’t believe I actually thought I went through a “spiritual awakening” or some shit. I really must’ve not been in my right mind. Not to mention, some of my friends had gotten really weird by then.

And, I don’t know. Maybe part of me wonders if that’s the frustration Republicans have been picking up on. They weren’t around in the 2010s, when this went from just some weird birth defect we talked about on aging listservs to a “third wave intersectionally-feminist thing”. They only noticed the last part after it exploded when Caitlyn Jenner came out, and they’re just grumpy because it does feel like some of these people are just 21^st century college lesbians. I mean, let’s be honest.

It’s like… I’m stuck in a culture war where neither side’s fighting for me. There’s just an overly-permissive, “fly high lesbian seagulls” side and a casually dismissive “they’re corrupting the youth” side. And

Nobody. Gives a fuck. About me. Especially Christians.

Okay, so I am really grumpy. These people keep talking about us like we don’t exist, but there are all sorts of people whose lives are fucked up because of this same sort of “Christian love” that’s still being touted today. And sure, there are probably lots of whackadoodles who “wish” they’d done it younger, too. Okay. But like, there are real people like me who are way maladjusted, because we can’t assimilate into society as gay or straight men, and we lack the socialization to ever really assimilate into society as normal women (as opposed to trans-women, or any other sort of classification that didn’t really exist in mainstream society twenty years ago).

Susan tried to tell me I was too young when I came out at the end of 9^th grade. But the truth is, I was too old before I knew it. After the precocious start that I had, I entered college at age 19 lacking confidence that I was even really transsexual, I started HRT seven years later… and by then, normal women my age were getting married and I’ve never even had a sweet sixteen. Never really been on a normal date with a guy… You know what Susan did when I was that age? She made me go to the prom with Ariel White. Because, she kept telling me I’d regret it if I didn’t go to the prom with my friends. And, you know what I actually regret?

I’m not even going to say it. You know what I fucking regret. The point is, I could’ve used a lot less Christian love, and a lot more actual love; the sort you get from understanding, secular-minded 21^st century people who aren’t cuckoo for cocoa puffs crazy about Trump and Jesus.

And my point is, they need to hear it from us. We need to be on your goddamn fucking news feed. Not some poor little ten-year-old transgirl who says she’s scared and she feels a lot better with her hormones,⁸ not some he-said-she-said finger pointing between some opinionated doctors and politicians and talking news heads…

Me. My life’s fucked up because I didn’t get this sort of life-saving help that really could’ve just amounted to something relatively safe like Lupron and a big fucking hug. And, they don’t even fucking know what Lupron is.

You, know? Lupron? The GnRH antagonist? It’s been around for a pretty long time, and it has a pretty low side effect profile. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a single report of anyone regretting the adolescent administration of Lupron. It isn’t hormones, you know… my crazy mom made that conflation when I tried to get something like that in the year 2006, and it seems you Christian Republicans aren’t really any smarter than my kinda slow Christian mom. I mean, you know what Lupron is?

It’s the conservative treatment option. Because, it does nothing. Fuck-all nothing except delay your shit until your older.

You know what the liberal treatment option is? Like… HRT in mid-high school. Like some kids with parents who actually loved them got to have back in the mid-2000’s. Back when I was that age.

Yes! We existed in the mid 2000s! Us transsexuals with loving parents, taking “hormones” and “puberty blockers” in high school and just flying under the radar. Not dying our hair blue, not using neo-pronouns, not dressing up like a fucking anime girl…

We existed. We blended in. This helps us, you see.

It isn’t just that I didn’t get to have the body I always wanted. It’s that I never got to build a real life for myself as a woman. Instead of having girlfriends to gossip with, I have a bunch of dude-bro drinking and smoking buddies I used to play video games with in college. That’s what I have as my foundation. Not going to the mall, or talking about boys, or really doing anything that might be considered socially-normal female activities. I mean, I can’t even really make a list, because I wasn’t there. I kind of just know the stereotypes, right? Because I was

Socialized. Male. Out of Christian love.

And, those dude-bro friends never really even got me. They always saw me as kind of a downer, or a spoil-sport, because I didn’t want to be their wingman, or “go to the club”, or “get pussy” like them… It’s always like I would slink away from those parts of guy culture I couldn’t really integrate into my own experience. And that’s how guys really bond with each other. That’s the mall shopping and the girl talk part of it. And I never even got to have that at an appropriate age. Because, muver wuved a-widdle Efan so much that she didn’t want a-widdle Efan to guow up to be a cweepy gwoss twanny…

So, here I am. I’m 34 years old. I frankly don’t think I’ve ever even had a “best friend” in any meaningful sense of the word. And lord knows, it isn’t because we didn’t know what was going on with me in middle school. Susan just wanted to cover it up and sweep it under the rug, and hoped she could just find a way to make me grow up normal, somehow. She wuvs a-widdle Efan, but she never really loved me at all; again, in any meaningful sense of the word. I feel like I was some sort of cockroach kid, who she was almost forced into loving because of her religious convictions and not because of any sort of real desire to help me. It’s really just all about her, and her idea of a future for us once she retires. Ick!

Anyway, what the fuck was I talking about? Christian love? Lupron?

Alright, you fucking asshole. Yeah, you. What’s the deal with fucking Lupron? Can you give me even a single instance of somebody growing up to regret taking Lupron before the age of 18? Because, I don’t even think I’ve heard of a single person who regretted taking Lupron as a kid. And, it doesn’t “sterilize kids”. I mean, full-blown HRT might… Which really just makes the whole “don’t sterilize our kids” argument bad science. Which, I guess is exactly what I ought to expect from a bunch of fucking retards who believe in Jesus and hydroxychloroquine. Goddammit, I hate Christians…

Anyway, Lupron? The regretful people list for it? No?

Because, I’d love to put my name at the top of the regretful people list for this. And, you’re never going to see my face on your news feed unless I actually do the thing. You know…

I think I’ve found a cause worth dying for. I’ve been saying I need something to live for. Well, I still don’t have that, but at least I have something to die for. And, that gives me a sense of purpose. It gives me a sense of fulfillment. My fucked up life can still count for something.

Anyway, fuck gun control. We need religion control. Maybe we ought to do a background check before you’re allowed to conceal-carry a religion.

It’s too late for me to be… anything I wanted to be in life, really. I’ll never be a normal woman in society. I’ll never be a rock-star developer. I’ve emptied out my already-belated retirement savings just trying to explain what happened to me over the last three years. But, you know… I’ve always wanted to help people. I’ve always wanted to do something to make the world a little bit less shitty, because goddamn, this planet sucks. And, maybe that’s the real reason I got so burnt out working for Kevin. This feeling that nothing I do really makes a difference in the world, and that nothing I did really brought me lasting happiness or joy. I’m just destined to want things I can’t have.

My cringy high school journal reminded me that I actually wanted to be an activist when I grew up. I was inspired by the transsexual activists of the 2000s, like Andrea James and Calpernia Addams and Lynn Conway. And, I wanted to be like one of those people when I grew up. And, I guess I never really knew what to do with that once I decided I wasn’t really transsexual. But, maybe now I know what to do with it.

I don’t think anybody knows who these people even are anymore. But in the year 2005, you couldn’t be a transsexual and not know these names. I feel like our hidden little world has just been…

Colonized. By overzealous blue-haired feminists with silly pronouns, who kinda just took the liberty of rewriting our history for us. And, I don’t even mean to talk that much shit about feminism in its traditional form. But, shit has just gotten… weird.

It’s too late for me. But, it might not be too late for little Aiden. It probably is though, if they live Tennessee or some shit.

And, don’t trust your Christian parents, little Aiden. Not even if they’re a Democrat. It’s not worth it. Just… figure out your business on your own, and don’t let your crazy family keep you on the hook after you turn 18. Just… be you. You only have a tiny window to learn how to be a woman while girls your age are also learning how to be a woman, and it’s closing fast. Your crazy mom might wuv you so much that she wants you to fink about it until you miss that window. And… then you’ll be like me. Ick, right?

I’m just fucking pissed off at you retarded fucking Christians, and your retarded fucking “don’t sterilize the kids” rhetoric, and your retarded fucking faces, and your retarded fucking Jesus. Because, you people don’t give a fuck about helping the downtrodden when they’re staring you right in the goddamn face, and you’d rather grandstand about some group of remorseful Lupron users that doesn’t even exist. Goddammit, you people are fucking stupid.

And, you know what? Little Aiden might have ROGD. And, you know what else?

It’s Just. Fucking. Lupron.

(I realize this is pretty inflammatory, and not all Christians are even like this. Hell; Donald isn’t even really like this. I guess I just want to dish it back out to y’all, because I’ve been feeling under attack for a while. It’s been a rough few years…)

I hope we’ll get better at separating the wheat from the chaff. Because, shit really is weird right now.

So, what? You’re going to punish little Aiden because the pendulum of third wave feminism is swinging a little too far left? Of course you are! You’re fucking Christians! I’d expect no less from you after the last ten years!

It’s just stupid, because… I’d believe little Aiden over someone who had a sudden epiphany in their 30s or something, but the Republicans want to ruin little Aiden’s life, and also let the 30-something-year-old whackadoodle ruin their life, too. The ideal treatment for transsexualism has always been for the young, and frankly I don’t think shifting the age of treatment forward would do anything to improve our optics.

My point is, we should view the 30-something possible whackadoodle with at least as much suspicion as we do little Aiden. But… we don’t. Republicans certainly don’t…

Okay. So, I might have feelings. Am I ever going to show this to anyone, alive or dead?

I don’t know if I even want to go talk to Tommy again. I think this is what I’m meant to do. I don’t know what the fuck got into me over these last few years, but it feels like I’ve somehow managed to find some sense of clarity through all of it. One I’ve never had before, even when I was still a high schooler intent on doing the thing when I was old enough.

I know how I’m going to do it. Most suicide attempts fail, so I want to employ redundancy. I plan to use a combination of burning charcoal in a walk-in closet (or maybe my car), trying to suffocate on helium, and maybe taking lots of potassium supplements in an attempt to induce hyperkalemia. There are still potential pitfalls, though.

• I need to unplug all the smoke detectors, first of all.
• And, I think smokeless charcoal varieties might be harder to find in America. This charcoal-burning thing seems to be really popular in Asia, with their low-smoke charcoal that I think might be made from sawdust or something if I remember? I think I have a bunch of old hookah coals from forever ago that I might try and use, but I don’t know if that’ll be enough.
• It might be helpful to position boards or even just plastic sheeting across the top of the shelving so as to reduce the volume of air I’ll be breathing.
• Party City helium is like 20% air, which would necessitate an effective way of separating out the helium from the heavier gasses. This gas inhalation method is generally popular with the “exit bag” concept, and I really wish I could get the good shit. If only I were a clown or something… I’m hoping I can do something that involves breathing the top air in the exit bag, and keeping the helium intake tube toward the bottom so that the heavier gasses will just pour straight out.
• I wanted to do it for New Year’s (like that chick from Paralytic States, I guess?), but that is approaching fast. I want to get my little “manifesto”-thing I’ve written here on the public internet with redundancy and shit so that it doesn’t just disappear, and I need to make whatever final preparations I might need to feel complete ending my life here on Earth. So… maybe January 20^th, if I have enough liquidity to make it until then?
• And, what do I even mean “my life here on Earth”? Where do I think I’m going; the Pleiades?

Seeing as how involved all of this is, I really wish I could just get a bunch of Fentanyl or something.

Oh, wait! Can I get Ambien off (website redacted)? Just thinking out loud here (literally, I’m writing this in real time).

Ugh, nope. Ambien, Zolpidem… I got the feeling they didn’t sell actual controlled substances as a matter of policy. Rats. Well…

Idk. Maybe I can score a bunch of LSD or something while I do this, at least.

On second thought, that might be a bad trip. I’ll think about it.

(I’m a fucking hippie goddammit, I can’t even score hard drugs. The world is totally not how they made it sound in D.A.R.E. class…)

---

Man; what am I doing? Should I try Tommy one more time or not? I mean, this is pretty weird. There really is a lot of seemingly-credible weird UFO shit in the news again, I really do remember what I remember… I mean, there’s a chance I’m supposed to kill myself. Maybe it’s more pleasant than what’ll happen to me and my whackadoodle friends when Fuckface Patel comes for us. Maybe my death now would count for something.

I’ve been too busy with this to follow the news and the election cycle all that closely, but shit just feels like it’s at a fever pitch. Like, I thought I’d look around on r/lgbt or something to see just how worried I ought to be if I weren’t to kill myself, and I couldn’t get very far before I found a bunch of pride stuff along with polyamory pride. And I’m just like…

Okay. I’ve been adjusting to that culture shock since I was a college kid at the slosh, with Maureen and Erika both obviously having a thing going on with Isaac. So… okay. It’s normal to me…

The other side is starting to scream shit like “THEY’RE ALL JUST PERVERTS AND PORNOGRAPHERS AND PEDOPHILES AND MARXISTS AND THEY’RE STERILIZING YOUR KIDS!”

The reality is… we have a bit of an optics problem over here on the left. There’s been a lot of talk about how Russian troll farms pumped up MAGA, but I think they’re simultaneously trying to drive the left further left. As if it’s somebody’s agenda to drive America apart to the point of sparking a civil war.

I’ve been casually following the Russia thing since the early 2010s, when Jon Stewart reported on unsavory ties between the Kremlin and the then-new RT America news network. It’s really obvious that they want to meddle in our politics, and they probably think they have something to gain by driving America apart. First of all, it would probably mean the end of NATO as we know it… at that point it’d basically just be the “Western European Treaty Organization”.

Jon Stewart, man. Speaking of people who I’ve been thinking could bring America back together again…

Anyway… Russia’s gotten sketchier, Trump’s gotten sketchier… it looks like we’re about to have political prisoners in America for the first time, certainly in living memory…

I mean, I remember reading about Russia a decade ago, and how Putin would freely interchange the words for “homosexual”, “pedophile”, and “beastophile”; so as to perpetuate a conflation between these very disparate concepts. And, now we’re starting to do that over here. Lukashenko’s been arresting and torturing queer people, and sentencing anyone who can be convicted of “distributing pornography” by some weird flimsy definition. And, Project 2025 is basically pushing the same Lukashenko logic, trying to link porn and drag queens and transgender people together.

I mean, I’m either speaking to the choir, or speaking to a Christian dumb-ass by this point, right? Who am I even trying to address? Josh? That dude drank the Cool-Aid⁹ a long time ago.

I’m just pissed off, man. I’ve been dealing with this sensational bullshit about trans people ever since Emma happened in the 9^th grade; and I’d be lying to little Aiden if I told them it gets better. I mean, you can get new friends and improve your situation that way… But the world just sucks for people like you, Aiden. It always has, and it’ll be a really big deal if it ever doesn’t suck for us anymore.

Frankly, I liked the world better when I had to explain to that therapist the difference between a transsexual and a transvestite. The increased visibility doesn’t seem to have really helped us all that much, and now we have fewer freedoms than we did back in 2005.

So, anyway, I’m pretty sure Russian trolls might be the reason my friend group gradually turned into a bunch of furries and neckbeards and commies and plurals and age players. Not that there’s anything wrong with any of those things individually… but my point is, I think at least some of these people might be more-than-a-little impressionable. We have a bit of an optics problem over here on the left. And it sucks, because a lot of the rhetoric on the left over the last ten years suggests that maybe we shouldn’t care so much about optics and that we should just be ourselves. But, like…

This is just untenable. Like, have you ever been to Bladen County?

There used to be a time when city and country could be kept kind of separate, so that we weren’t always at each other’s throats. Us queer kids could just run away to the big city and fall off the map. But, social media just does not help with that.

I’ve only recently accepted that this is the main reason I hate social media and don’t even use Facebook. In high school, I had friends like Cody who might balk at you for even being friends with a “leeebruhl”; and then I started meeting liberal city folks who might side-eye me for being friends with someone like Cody. Then you throw other communities like BDSM into the mix, and consider even basic demographics like “religion” that you might not want to give the same answer to for everybody, and…

Look. Facebook is just not double-life friendly. Okay? Am I like, the only person with this problem?

The (well, a) real problem, is that I really should’ve cut ties with Bladen County as soon as I was old enough. Those people are just… really pushy about politics and religion, and they’re obviously wrong, and they’re usually not the “thinking” type…

I mean, I’m the reason I had to live a double life when I was younger. I didn’t have to keep being friends with Christian conservatives from Bladen County. In fact, I’m convinced trying to maintain those friendships destroyed my soul.

I need to focus. I’m running out of money to even buy the charcoal and the helium. I really need to wrap this up. It’s early morning on December 14^th, btw. Josh told me he was in town this weekend and asked if I wanted to hang out. And I can’t help but think… I probably have better things to do with my time. I don’t think Josh is the droid I’m looking for.

Should I give this to Tommy? How much should I tell him? I don’t suppose I should keep the suicidal bits… What about the part where I basically yell at him and all of Christendom? I mean, I’m running out of time here.

I mean… here’s the deal with Tommy, right… He’s either got time travel, or he doesn’t. If all of that stuff I remember is accurate, he knows what I’m going to do next. He knows I’m going to try and kill myself.

Will he try and stop me? I mean, he either will or he won’t, right? Frankly, I have no business with him if he doesn’t know about the UFOs and the Heather people. And if I do have business with him… again, he would know what I’m about to do. So, logic would suggest…

I really just need to prepare myself to fly the Rocinante into the heart of Cygnus X-1. Because, this place is mad, and I don’t see any help coming my way. Again; it’s possible I’m supposed to kill myself, and if that were the case I suppose it’d be problematic for anybody to tell me that to my face. I’m just supposed to decide whether I want to be a graying virgin tranny who works at Food Lion and lives under the regime of Lukashenko Jr or not. And, maybe I ought to decide now before Mr. Patel decides for me.

---

I’ve been taking vitamins for like a year now. And, my hair is still really patchy. Josh said it didn’t look that bad, but I was using the potato quality webcam in my laptop.

On account of my impending liquidity crisis, I chose not to buy more vitamins D, B12, or Biotin when I ran out several weeks ago. I have continued to take a daily multivitamin. I’m concerned my hair might be thinning out again, and my lips are really chapped, which I thought the vitamins seemed to help with. It is winter, though.

And, it’s one of my smaller worries right now. But, it sucks that I still have patches missing a year later. It doesn’t give me much hope that I’ll ever have a full head of hair again. It seems I have little to look forward to in my future. I only wish I could’ve washed the Bladen County off me sooner, so that I might’ve gotten to live when I had the chance.

I hope my story can at least be a lesson, for how the compassionate minority in America might help these poor souls who were just born different like me. Yeah, my life is kinda filled with weird sex stuff on top of it all, but I was obviously just born that way. Born, or perhaps made that way very young. I certainly never asked for it, and you Christians are just as stupid and ignorant as you’ve always been. You’ve allowed no space for me and people like me in this world, and now everything’s a clusterfuck.

Like… we’ve been trying to explain it to you Christians since a long time before I was born, even. And, you act like it’s some newfangled thing invented by Jezebel and Anita Sarkeesian. But at the same time, I guess I understand why you might think that, given the present state of the culture war, if you weren’t really paying that much attention. I just hope I’ve found some way to make you people think a little more. Because, shit has gotten

Really fucking stupid around here.

---

I don’t know what I want to do. Am I really going to kill myself? Am I too much of a pussy? Will it count for something? Am I even right? Are my friends even trenders? What do I do? I’m running out of time. And all I can do is

Nothing. I’m writing this thing, I’m staying high… after the Josh thing didn’t exactly go how I hoped, I kinda just descended into escapism and kept fucking with 2Ship2Harkinian. I don’t think I’ve even talked about all the stupid bullshit I did. I made Link not slash his sword when you press B to exit first person view, I made the Y axis for the telescopes not be backwards, and then I did the same thing with the shield Y axis. I made the Bombers code fill in automatically once you’ve got the notebook… I fucked around with two-dimensional joystick movement on the Song of Soaring map and kinda got it working, but it was a little weird and I made myself stop. I already talked about the Ginko Man. The bank teller or whoever. I would still need to do some stuff before making PRs for these things, and I don’t know that all of those things would be well received. I like it, though. That’s really why I’m doing it. I just want to get off, or escape or something. I guess part of me feels like I’m going to go out doing what I love, even if I don’t have my shit together.

It sucks that I seem to have no options, except going back to the psych ward or killing myself. I mean, shit. It’s not like I live in a socialist country or something… Then again, they might just put me to work on Stalin’s farm.

Maybe it’s not so bad. Simple life. Cow go mooooo.

I feel like I need something really hard core. Not, like, one of Josh’s pep talks or some shit. Like, I haven’t had a job in years at this point. I feel like I need help just reintegrating into society. And all they’re going to do is tell me to get a fucking job so I can pay them to help me.

I mean, it isn’t even like I don’t want to work. I’ll even stop smoking pot. But it’s just like…

I don’t really have anything to live for, except filling up the Volcano bag again in another hour or two. I’m still missing a bunch of hair after a year… and I keep noticing that I still have a pretty bad five o’clock shadow after all that bullshit with my hormones. I really have been hitting it with the IPL when I think about it, and for all I know I’m going to need additional laser if I somehow manage to survive this. Just…

Fuck my life, dude. I really thought I was getting my shit together a few years ago, too. And like… there’s people who just got freed from Syrian dungeons, and they’re just out on the streets and better off for it. And I kinda feel like a pussy, but at the same time I really just don’t see much of a point. I feel like I’ve gone from field goal range to getting a safety just since the start of 2021. And, I was already pretty far behind to begin with. I just don’t really feel like playing anymore.

Is there really nothing for me? There are suicide hotlines and shit, but they just talk you down. I don’t need another fucking pep talk. I need, like, actual help from somewhere. The system just… assumes you already have love in your life, or at least know where to get it. I just don’t think I can get the kind of help I need.

---

There’s, like, a bunch of UFO shit on the front page of Reddit again. Serendipitously. I even signed out and cleared my cache to try and make sure I wasn’t in a search bubble. It seems related to the drone sightings up north, and there are like a bunch of people reporting shit that really doesn’t look terrestrial.

I just… don’t fucking get it. Is this a real timeline? Could this have anything to do with that stuff Heather and Maureen talked about, or that really important thing Tommy wanted to tell me that now he says never happened?

Dude. What the fuck?

I can’t imagine what in fucking tarnation I could have to do with aliens. I mean, reincarnation? That’s a joke, right? Do they want to help me because my life was going in the wrong direction? I mean, they might not even be aliens, whatever those things are. And, like

What am I supposed to do? Is this even a real timeline? I experienced the fucking craziest sequence of events that took me from a working young professional engineer to a balding graying madwoman, the news is filled with weird and apparently credible UFO shit again, I still vividly remember a bunch of people telling me I was different and there were things I “needed to know”… But like, dude… what do y’all expect me to even, like…

I can really only assume one thing: I’m supposed to kill myself. It’s the perfect example of…

Dude. What am I even writing about? What the fuck is even going on in the world? UFOs?? Goddammit! I’m chasing my tail over here! I’m chasing my ever-loving goddamn tail over here! All these years later, and I still have absolutely no fucking idea how this even happened to me. I don’t even know what happened to me. I mean… I can’t help but believe, at least a little bit. But, I know all that stuff from earlier was bullshit… Dude. What the fuck?

Goddammit, can nobody just tell me I ought to kill myself? Couldn’t this have been done any easier? I’m fucking dying over here! Like, one day soon I’m just not gonna have utilities anymore, and I really don’t have any intentions of going to live in a homeless shelter, or checking myself in to the mental hospital. Either you fuckers who started this need to fucking end it, or I’m gonna fucking end it for you. Because, I believe, dude. Not in starseeds or Dani California, but in this weird shit with Heather and Maureen and Tommy. And this weird shit on the internet about UFO sightings again. And the highly suspicious timing of it all.

Dude. What do I do? Am I in danger? Who am I in danger from? The incoming Trump administration? I can only assume, right? I mean, I kinda trust the aliens… They’re smarter than us, and we don’t have anything they couldn’t just mine from asteroids or barren planets… I hate to break it to anyone who thinks aliens might try and enslave humanity, but we’d probably make better zoo animals than slaves. I frankly see no motive for foul play on the part of extraterrestrials.

Unless the point is that they want to kill off some of the humans who would destroy the planet and wage perpetual unjust wars. I could see that being a little controversial… Frankly, if that were the case, I think I’d just mind my own goddamn business. For all I know we’d be better off for it.

I’m probably a dumbass for still not having a passport, but… like, I’m virtually out of money to do anything else anyhow. I’m a little freaked out that last I knew, it was surprisingly easy to get a passport with your updated gender marker on it if you’re trans. That sounds like something Trump would EO away during his first week in office. For all I know, he’ll EO that trannies can’t even get a passport.

---

I know I already said this, but the Christian “Lupron bans” really do mean that we have fewer rights than we had in the year 2000. And I am

Pissed. Off.

At Christians still. Because, religion is the problem, the way I see it. Am I just bitter? Sometimes I’m less angry about this. But, nobody’s talking about how a bunch of misguided (I can’t believe I’m actually using this word) SJWs had to stoke a culture war about nothing that led to poor hapless people like me and my fellow transsexuals having fewer rights.

Maybe Russia’s the real problem here. I’m pretty sure it’s their trolls who keep fanning the flames. Like… we used to have role models like Andrea/Lynn/Calpernia in the 2000s… until some faceless entity must’ve decided those people were “too white” and “too privileged”… and now we have different role models, like brick-throwing Stonewall rioter Marsha P. Johnson; somebody I’d never heard of until the post-Jenner world came into existence. It really feels like somebody is trying to entrap the queer community into embodying all the old negative stereotypes about us: violent, perverse, corrupting the youth, sympathetic to communism…

Like… “Drag queen story time” is a very new concept. There’s this phrase I learned in the BDSM community. It’s, uh… what is it? Oh, right.

Don’t scare the nillas.

See? We knew how to manage our optics back then…

It’s like when we couldn’t block out the entire hotel for Debauchery and had to share it with a wedding party, except on a national or even global scale. We’re just… scaring the nillas. We have scared them. And, this is something bad. ¹⁰

Did I mention how a coalition of Christians, misguided SJWs, and Russian trolls have started knocking transsexual rights back to the 19^th century? Goddammit, I fucking hate Christians…

Dude. I didn’t even really use the term “SJW” unironically until all of this happened to me. I promise I’m not, like, a Republican or something. I guess I’m just complicated.

Am I being problematic? I should probably keep getting ready for the killing myself part.

I mean, I feel like I only have two real options given the situation:

• Kill myself
• Go to Ukraine and fight the son of a bitch who did this to my country

So, I got all science brain while I was having a smoke earlier this morning, and the problem with this 80% helium from Party City is that the bottom fifth of a normal, head-sized exit bag is always going to be breathable air. This would seem to make the classic design untenable, but I don’t think it’s entirely a non-starter.

• I could construct an exit bag that ties off at the torso or waist, or even one that contains my entire body. As long as I can keep my head well into the upper 4/5ths of the bag it should work as far as I can tell.
• I could construct an intermediary container out of something like a bucket and plastic sheeting and tubing, that would allow me to breathe in air from the top.

---

It’s early morning on Christmas Day, and you know what I’ve been doing? Writing touchscreen support for Majora’s Mask. I think it’s pathological. I got it working directly with SDL, and then I spent a day writing the layer so you could add win32 support because that build doesn’t use SDL. I really can’t let myself do anything else until I crash the airplane or fly out with the ejector seat. I don’t know if these metaphors are any good.

I fucked up my back again, and I was sick all day yesterday because of it. I was going to get a pizza and cheese sticks to get me through Christmas, but my back was sore and I had a bad headache and I felt really weird like when I’m about to get sick with the GI thing. I delayed my food run until the evening, spent the whole day stretching and staring at my phone in bed, and then I threw up right as I was about to make myself go to Papa John’s. I think Ship of Harkinian has been distracting me from stretching properly, and I guess now I have to get Chinese tomorrow. Not that that’s bad or anything. I haven’t eaten in 36 hours, but I don’t really feel all that hungry after being sick all day yesterday.

Dude, what am I even talking about? I sound like my mom for christ’s sake. She’s always got to tell me about all her latest ailments and shit… am I unsympathetic? I really do want the best for her, but I don’t think our relationship was healthy. And, now I don’t even know what to tell her.

My little gay Festivus day or whatever is tomorrow, and I’ve really thought about just sending this to Tommy unedited. And, I don’t know if I want to talk to him again if I can’t get anywhere like usual. I just… really still think he’s hiding something, and I feel like I’m mostly over the delusional part of my experience. My main mental health problem would appear to be the suicidal ideation, and that’s entirely situational.

I always knew killing myself was the ultimate, bottom-of-the-list option if I found no other way to resolve my little problem that started back in 2021; but, I guess I thought I’d try more stuff before I got to that point. I thought I’d at least try and talk to Maureen, or go bang on Heather’s door or something… but now, I feel like I’ll probably just go out with a whimper. Who knows if my death will even count for anything. At least it’ll all be over.

The Republicans have gotten even crazier since I last yelled about Christian Lupron bans. And, I’m sorry you had to read that, Tommy. I don’t even think you’re a Republican, but I guess we’ve never really talked about politics. They’re talking about coming for Canada, and Greenland, and Mexico, and Panama, they’re beating the drum about coming after “cultural Bolsheviks” like me… I think this is the first time I’ve been genuinely afraid to live in America. I mean, this is the sort of talk that happens right before the Night of the Long Knives. I felt a little twingy during Orange Man’s first term, but I also felt like there were a lot more steps in between 201x and putting me and my friends in concentration camps. Now, I don’t feel like there are all that many more steps. Well… except for the Night of the Long Knives. All I’m waiting for is for him to “intern” the “cultural Marxists” in preparation for his “patriotic war for freedom” to “liberate Greenland” or something… I mean shit. It could happen on January 21^st, for all I know. It probably won’t, but…

And, I’m kinda freaked out that I might be on a government watchlist just for associating with April and Drew and Stephanie and them.

I mean, maybe I’m supposed to kill myself, before the holocaust or whatever. Maybe that’s what these time-travelling UFO people have been trying to tell me all these years. “You like travelling?” “There’s things going on you should know about…”

I feel as if I’ve been a victim of Zersetzung; a technique conceived by the Stasi to clandestinely break down dissidents that was both non-lethal and life-destroying. Shamelessly coped from Wikipedia at the time of writing:

Tactics and methods employed under Zersetzung generally involved the disruption of the victim’s private or family life. This often included psychological attacks, in a form of gaslighting. Other practices included property damage, sabotage of cars, purposely incorrect medical treatment, smear campaigns including sending falsified compromising photos or documents to the victim’s family, denunciation, provocation, psychological warfare, psychological subversion, wiretapping, and bugging.[45]

Ironically, attempting to do even a little more research on Zersetzung quickly leads me to conspiracy theories that are essentially variants of Josh’s “copypasta”-like text from earlier in the year. I suppose I could call this the “targeted individual”, “gang stalking”, or “street theater” conspiracy theory, since the variants all seem to employ these keywords.

Despite the similarity of my plight to the GDR’s application of Zersetzung against its undesirables, I’m having an awfully difficult time suspending my disbelief while reading the modern American conspiracy variants. They seem linked to the right-wing conspiracy tradition, which doesn’t really fit my lifestyle. If someone wanted to Zersetzung me, I’d assume it’d be one of Trump’s minions; or, perhaps a private actor who really doesn’t like trans people. But then, why me? Why not Regina or Brittany or Samantha or Stacey or Persephone or Stephanie? I mean, a lot of these people are more likely to make a big splash than I am. Stephanie is into pretty radical far-left shit, Samantha’s at least a more established developer than I was and was also a bigger deal in the local trans community as the facilitator of TT… What would even be the motive for walking right past all of these people and coming straight for little old me?

After learning that one of my favorite musicians believes himself to be one such “targeted individual”, I don’t really even know what to think anymore. Hell; maybe they’ve got my brain so scrambled that I laugh at the truth.

I can’t afford to start second guessing myself, though. A lot of this stuff just doesn’t pass the sniff test.

---

Several weeks after discontinuing the extra vitamins D and B12, I’m pretty sure my hair is starting to thin again, and I’ve lost another 10 lbs after having stabilized around 160. So, I figure I should maybe get more of those if I plan to keep on living. I don’t know what I plan to do though, and so I still have neither. I’m already worried some of the hair loss might be permanent, given I was taking B12 for the better part of a year and still have patches that haven’t filled back in.

A big enough part of me is trying to make this new little December 26^th deadline for giving this to Tommy. It’s still a little rough around the edges; but then again, so am I.

This is probably a really bad idea. It’s probably going to get cops involved in my life again, and I’m really worried some asshole is going to take away my hormones “for my safety” or some bullshit.

There’s just a lot of uncertainty in my life right now. All I know is, something really bad is about to happen to me. I’m about to die, or I’m about to get locked in the looney bin again, or I’m about to be homeless, or at least in default on my mortgage… I only wish I were more prepared, and managed to come up with a plan by now. I don’t have one, and I probably never will. At least, not one better than talking to a bald preacher about my angst for Christians and my premature hair loss. I guess I just… need to sacrifice my queen because the timer’s about to go off. That’s how I feel. No winning moves, and the hammer’s about to drop.

Anyway; I’m sorry you had to read this, Tommy. You’re actually a really nice guy, and despite my anger with Christendom, I don’t think I’ve ever really been angry with you at all. I’m just mad at the system I guess, and I feel hopeless.

I don’t even know what I’m looking for by sending you this, really. I guess half of me still thinks you know something despite all of this, and half of me thinks I’m just making an ass out of myself. And, maybe some small part of me wonders if I’m just gonna find myself in my old bed at Avent Ferry after coming down from DMT or some shit. I guess I feel like I have to start somewhere if there’s any chance I’m not just gonna go out with a whimper when the lights go out.

Well… Consider this the airing of grievances. Happy Gay Festivus, Tommy.

---

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I haven’t heard anything from Tommy; except for an initial acknowledgement that he’ll read my thing when he gets the chance. He said he was in Florida and that it would take some time.

I’m just now feeling a little bad that I yelled at Christians so much. I’m not sure that was called for. And, I really doubt he knows anything about UFOs at this point; convincing as all my weird memories of him and Heather and Maureen are.

I made a scum-removal branch in preparation for giving this to Samantha and Brittany, who’ve been wondering what happened to me; and at the same time my guilt is setting in about textually screaming at Tommy, I’ve started to consider just giving this to them unedited. Maybe it’s the hypocrisy that I would protect my queer friend’s feelings while disregarding Tommy’s. Hell; maybe I should stop using mod_rewrite and let Josh see this version if he ever decides to look at it again.

I mean, I’m probably all the way batshit crazy, given Tommy’s somewhat expected lack of expediency. My friends probably aren’t even transtrenders, for that matter. I mean, I don’t want them to be. I always enjoyed their company…

I’m getting really close to the point where I need to make a decision about killing myself. Maybe the fact I want to show this to more people before I die proves I really am just making idle threats for attention. If my therapist wasn’t serious about that DBT thing before, I guess I need it now…

Helium. Costs like $5040 for a little tank of it at Party City, and I probably want two. I need some rubber tubing from the hardware store, and maybe some of those big construction-grade trash bags to get inside of. Hopefully that would be sufficiently airtight.

And then if I try charcoal and potassium at the same time… I could be looking at close to $150 for an attempt. And, I know I don’t want to still be struggling with that choice when I’m on my last $150.

Am I being pessimistic to think there aren’t any other options for me?

I’ve been taking it one day at a time. Hell, one hour at a time. I’m struggling to see past the $10 burrito I’m about to get in 90 minutes.

I guess I could sell the house at the last minute. I wish it weren’t in the state that it’s in. I wish I weren’t in the state I’m in.

So, okay. It’s starting to sink in that I might have some false memories, on top of the delusional thinking I’ve already come to terms with. I guess I can at least find out if Samantha’s brother really does fly helicopters for the Navy and knows something about UFOs; though I think it best if I just assume he, uh… does not know the truth about UFOs. I certainly doubt he’d be running his mouth at a cocktail bar if he did. I, uh…

I’m crazy, aren’t I? I mean, I’m having a hard time believing I’m one of these “targeted individuals”…

Goddammit, dude. What is it about mental illness that makes people go all Pepe Silvia over Freemasons and UFOs and spirituality and shit? Like, I was never even in to that stuff. I mean, not except for the part where I used to very ironically watch Ancient Aliens for fun in the mid-2010s.

I guess it’s a stereotype for a reason. Freemasons and UFOs and tinfoil hats… I really did try to make a Faraday cage for my electronics out of tinfoil at the height of all this, before realizing the task was utterly futile with the materials on hand.¹¹

I’m tempted to buy some vitamin B12, even given the dire straights I’m in. Because, I’m pretty sure that’s what it is. I’d think I’m at least getting enough D from my multivitamin to keep things from getting worse. But, things definitely have gotten worse over the last two months.

I don’t know. If I decide to try and live, it’d probably be the cost of 1-1.5 meals. If I’m gonna try and kill myself it obviously wouldn’t be money well spent.

Ugh. It costs $7.79. I just looked it up. I feel a little silly going without it, now. I’m about to spend more than that at Chipotle. I wonder if the self checkout will be open, because they’ve been closing it lately and I don’t want to talk to people. Fuck. I’m sorry I’m telling you all of this. I know you don’t care; whoever you are.

I’m pretty close to needing TP too, while I’m talking about shit you don’t care about; but I’ve really been making an effort to conserve it lately.

I had a crying session earlier this morning, from the realization that I don’t think I have any real friends. But, I don’t want that to be true. And, I don’t think it was before UFOs happened. I know Tommy at least skimmed over my thing that night from looking at the server logs (is that creepy?), and I’m starting to feel like he just doesn’t want to talk to me. I know I overshared, and I probably made him feel bad. I feel gross again. I fucking hate this.

The recurring hair loss is really taking it’s toll, and I think I’d feel a lot better if I was back on vitamin B12. I’ll probably just do it. But, I really need more of a plan than that. Because, it’s only a tacit admission that I might not follow through with my plan to kill myself.

Oh my god, I’m an idiot. I just picked up some B12 at Target for like $4.18. I swear, putting off shit like this is, like, one of my anti-patterns. I took one in the car and swore I felt a little different by the time I was driving home, but that was probably just psychosomatic. I mean, I am basically tin-foil hat crazy.

I guess I was too much of a pussy to get the potassium supplements while I was there. I did think about it, though. I don’t really want to give myself a heart attack, and would rather just slip away quietly with some helium or something.

The small tree that’s inadvertently grown by the side of my house is probably fucking up my foundation, and its giving me daily anxiety. I probably have bigger problems because I’ll be in default in, like, less than 24 hours, I think? I just stopped myself from continuing to flip through VS Code figuring out the coordinates for the pause menu in Majora’s Mask. I know I have a problem, and I guess I thought I had more of a safety net. I’ve got the distinct feeling I scare off everyone I show this document to, and I’m feeling like I’ve got nowhere else to go other than the morgue; or maybe under a bridge like my rockstar boyfriend.

I feel like a flip-flopping politician with the way I’m treating my friends; but I should probably just assume nothing that’s happened to me has any basis in reality, and that ROGD really is just some bullshit. I’ve always liked my friends, and I don’t want to believe my friends and I aren’t part of the same continuum of gender-fuckiness. In fact, it’s probably about as likely as Tommy having an actual flying saucer in his garage; or even Samantha’s brother knowing anything about UFOs. I’m having a really hard time accepting it, but maybe I somehow did confabulate all of that stuff from earlier in my life. I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t feel like I was being gaslit, though.

In the interest of transparency, I think I will show them all of this discourse. And if I survive this ordeal, maybe I can get on Abilify or something and I’ll be all better. Ugh, I’ve had a rough life…

I mean, it’s probably just that. I use cannabis, Wikipedia says that really does increase the risk of psychosis… and I guess I seem to pass the duck test for it. What the fuck, though.

I feel bad that I just went through a phase where I decided all of my friends suck. And, maybe I’m just pretending my feelings have changed because I don’t really have anywhere else to go.

I don’t want to feel that way about my friends. I just want things to go back to the way they were. I’m probably not any more enlightened than I was a year ago, when I still thought I was Alyssa Jones. Whatever we actually think of each other, this is what happened to me. And, I haven’t really had the words to explain it until now.