For a start, the date on this blog being a notable milestone American date, but I don’t feel like going into the nuances of that subject. Suffice to say, it’s not something black or white, so describing my feelings there is complicated.

I’ve said before that every single holiday celebrated in the western world, in particular every American holiday, is rife with material for fueling both cynics and optimists, for being pessimistic or optimistic, depending on perspective of the holidays and which aspects of them, their history, their meaning, their representation, their iconography, etc., you choose to focus on.

The same holiday which can promote arrogant imperialist superiority and the assertion of world dominance, control, and loss of cultural history and identity in favor of a forced unity,
Can also be promoting the ideas of no one person or perspective or way of life being inherently right, and can be used to celebrate progress and the right to live.

The same holiday which can be used by bigots to justify bigotry as their divinely and according to them Constitutionally protected right,
Can be used by minorities to celebrate their validity and right to exist equally to others.

Many things, including holidays, are arbitrary in what capitalism opts into investigate in monetizing en masse, but while those events which get merchandised lead to merchandise being available everywhere, they also shift the focus of the holiday away from creativity and the spirit of the holiday and instead into buying the most expensive display available as the accepted token to celebrate.

In general I am heavily critical of capitalism as a system, and while I recognize in modern civilization there’s a need for a universally recognized equalizer between goods and services, between time and products, I wish money were a secondary, only-as-needed, tool, rather than the default, especially given how late-stage capitalism creates billionaires on the way to becoming trillionaires where a hundred people control more wealth and resources than 99% of humanity combined. 

I’m equally critical of these mega corporations and their effective monopolies having handshakes with politicians where just enough are bought and paid for to prevent any real change despite a majority of people desiring those changes, with politicians not even bothering to debate how to tackle implementation of these things and just refusing to ever try.

But all of that is a given. It’s not what I’m here to talk about. 

Nor am I here to talk about how dire and critical life currently is, with me being on the verge of homelessness and losing everything, again, with no guarantees of current plans working out.

I’m here instead to talk about the hope of my writing, because despite everything, I am increasingly drawn to it.

Part of me has always said, "I’m not ready to present my work, it’s not complete enough". Especially since I can only work on it in the small windows my job isn’t working me to death, which is every workday without fail.

But what if I can actually sell my vision to someone who can advocate for me and get me the resources I need?

It’s just a matter of finding the right person with the right connections.

I know I have a potentially billion dollar franchise idea. I have the plan, I have the world begging to be made, I have all of the tools I need. I just need to present them to the right person.

I haven’t done much writing, but I have done some, so I want to invest in it. I’ve been told, for years now, by my spirit team to be a writer, to embrace my creativity. I just haven’t thought I have had enough to present.

But they've also told me not to doubt myself, and to believe in the improbable, to believe that what I’ve written off as impossible is in fact possible. 

So, if it’s possible...It’s just a question of finding out how.

There’s a lot of parasitic companies who are scammers or have incredibly brutal unfair contracts.

And even legitimate people have entry costs more often than not. 

So, I have no idea how to find a legitimate, fair, non-parasitic, person to pitch my novel to...

...but I know that they must exist, and I want to find them, and then sway them into giving me what I need. 

I’m never going to get the life I want on my current income, especially when renting eats it all up. But I also am largely unemployable, as my failures to land either promotions or new jobs show, in this nightmarish job market. 

Something has to change. Living situation doesn’t look like it’s going to improve, so that won’t magically fix my issues. So what if I just go for it, in finding who to talk to about my idea, and with my passion, providing them the belief I can make it if they help?

I am tired of becoming less and less the person I want to be, of shrinking, of going down a path in life looking worse and worse, every day more grim than the last, every week harder to survive, the struggles only growing over time, and no way out, no hope, no help which actually helps.

I’ve got to find a way which provides that, and it won’t happen if I don’t make it happen. 

After all, the worst which could happen is I waste time and money. But the reward outweighs the risk. After all, when I’m on the verge of potentially losing everything, I’ve got nothing to lose by trying.

So Let’s fight for that better future.

Wish me luck.

I believe in myself enough where I want to try, but keeping it up is something I have never been strong at. But now, I’ll need to be.

I can do this. I have to. Here's to hoping. <3

Creativity without the means to make the idea as envisioned or even remotely close to it is truly a curse.

Because there’s this knowledge about a genuinely groundbreaking brilliant idea which you know would resonate with people, be a big hit, make them feel emotions, and really be seen as the genius they are...

...and the knowledge that as things stand, it'll likely never be made, ever. 

It’s a curse across multiple things. The other day, I actually wrote some in a story for farn--just not the story I needed to be. I was writing bits from the sequel to Records.

The initially planned second book in a trilogy, before I realized Records was too big for a single book. The book which would therefore require me to have written all of Records first.

And I haven’t touched Records of Farn for months.

I’ve also wanted to tackle further formatting my notes and transcribing them all in one or two places, bringing it all together in a single comprehensive place.

Haven’t done that in a couple months, either, although almost every time I go on a TVTropes binge I’m at least inspired to do a couple touchups. (Because Tropes are a convenient tool for describing characters and plot points.)

And now, I am plagued by THREE different cover artist band ideas for music. One would be mostly a meme, but technically the easiest. I’d just need to record my voice multiple times, then learn an editing program to put the recordings together and figure out how to format it for a YouTube video. 

The next easiest would require me to acquire a program capable of writing various different pianos and keyboards sounds/noises, and to properly educate myself on them, learn them, etc. My bells training as a percussionist never left me, so I would have a relatively easy time learning how to write the right notes, but tuning them to sound like the piano beat in my head might take longer. 

But of course, neither of those are the ones I am most called to work on atm.

The one which I want to work on is the one most impossible for me to do solo, and in general, would probably be incredibly difficult and grueling even for a small team to pull off. Because of course I would come up with an idea nearly impossible to be sustainable. 

This third cover song band wouldn’t actually be strictly speaking a cover band exclusively. 1 - 6 times per year, one of their original songs would be released. But the idea is weekly covers, as in, 52 songs per year...but presented in a way which is effectively four times as many.

The idea for this cover band is a Gorillazesque animated band with lore, both in terms of their characters and the actual setting. The world they’re on would have the aesthetic of partially post-apocalyptic, partially-dystopian, but would technically be neither. 

What makes it so hard to make is that each song would have four versions per week. On Mondays, it would typically be the member with a deep voice singing. On Wednesdays, it would typically be the one who belts out the lyrics without a care in the world as to accuracy, a free spirited voice in the spirit of a karaoke night where the aim isn’t to sing the song well, but to just have fun.

On Fridays, it would typically be trying to make an extremely faithful cover, matching as closely to a 1:1 as possible with my voice. 

And on Sundays, the three voices would combine, to form a fourth version, with the frontman and the background singers, kinda like a capella groups, but also still having the song's nonvoice parts too.

The art style for the weekday solo covers would largely be Sepia, often with a touch of lowfi aesthetic, but also heavily featuring black at the edges, and with splashes of color for the characters and important props. (For instance, hair and eyes always colored, and significant objects being held similarly so.)

This art style would frequently be like an animated digital oil painting, but also would frequently be like a thick, thiccc lines anime animation, kinda like the normal Sunday video. (See below.)

For the combined Sunday song, it can best be described as mostly Danganronpa cutscene with a dash of Scott Pilgrim. Muted colors for the background, mostly grays of a lifeless environment which progressively springs into life as the video progresses, with vibrant colors from the singers and their stage. Thick lines for the characters, but an almost lineless (and lifeless) background initially which becomes more animated as the song progresses.

The Sunday ones would be full musical videos, a la Offspring animated music videos or similar. They would do their best to mirror and parallel the original songs' videos, while still diverging into doing their own thing.

The weekdays would be more of an animated comic mixed with lofi vibe. With the focus on the band's members lore during their segments and the focus on the lore of the world and why it looks partially dystopian and post-apocalyptic during the Sunday videos, which would also gradually show the reason why things become more animated and vibrant as the video progresses. (Basically, the music of the trio is quite literally healing the land.)

The scope and scale of this project speaks for itself. It’s not impossible for a small team of artists/animators in tandem with producers to pull off a project of that scope. But it would be stressful to maintain that level of consistency in releasing four music videos per week, even if one or two of them are phoning it in.

And it’s actually not impossible for a single person to do it all! Just highly improbable, and requiring it to essentially be a full-time job. I’m a good enough artist to draw art in the caliber it’d need to be, but not a fast enough artist. I’d need to spend months practicing the styles and background details and character details to build that speed. We’re talking probably a hundred hours of practice minimum, and then teaching myself how to animate on top of that.

Not impossible, just incredibly difficult. 

If I could animate the Sunday video in two or three days, and draw the other three in one or two days, then I could have one to three for recording and producing. 

But producing, as well as animating, would require the coordination to make sure everything is perfectly timed and aligned, a skill taking additional work and labor. 

I have none of the know-how to pull this off at the moment. Yes, I can learn, but it would likely take me a dedicated 48 hours (not two days where it’s 8 hours per day, I mean 48 continuous hours across numerous days so likely a full month minimum) at least in order to build the foundation for at least stumbling through the idea to a workable level.

So of course this incredibly difficult project (not quite Phyrra and Cyrus in scale, but also not exactly viable currently) is what I am currently hyperfixated on expanding and building. 

A project that is brilliant, but unattainable without a radical shift in my life circumstances enabling a combination of finances and skills and time which I currently lack all of.

It’s still a nice idea though. 

I’m just forever cursed with the knowledge it'll never be made, just like the rest of my wonderful beautiful genius groundbreaking heartwrenching ideas.

A girl can dream tho.

And it feels like there’s a crossroads at hand.

Down the good path, years from now our future daughter will eventually look back at my lifetime of blogging before she came into our world and have a flood of emotions witnessing the struggles in these years, and how it kept getting worse and worse. 

But this good path, the one I seek, eventually would lead to my wife and I having a daughter together through some means. There’s a past blog describing it, but basically, my wife and I at the same exact time had nearly the exact same dream about a future where we were raising a daughter together. It felt like a much-needed premonition of the future we need to fight for, hold onto, and figure out how to manifest. 

And it is that future which is one of the few things giving me the strength to keep existing despite how much has gone wrong, continues to go wrong, all the injustices endured, the exhaustion, the hopelessness, the lack of clear path forward.

That I can still see her, at least some of the time, fills me with the hope she’s still a possible future for us, and that it’s not too late, we haven’t gone down the wrong/bad path YET, and eventually, by some means, she can come into our lives.

...But then there’s the other side of the crossroads. 

Where we just fail.

Where I can’t find the way forward. 

The reality I feel is closer day by day.

And this reality, the one where there’s the death of dreams, is the one which feels increasingly all-consuming.

I did write and perform a song about it (it's on my YouTube, but I can’t quickly easily link it so just look for the song Cry of the Soul matching the publish date of this blog), and I might even write more because I am inspired even further by my misery, apparently. 

But suffice to say...It’s not looking good for us.

It’s looking pretty terrible, in fact.

I can’t see how to manifest my miracle of miracles. 

I’m too tired to fight.
And fighting makes me too angry in ways I swore I never would be again.
And I am too exhausted to try.
And too filled with self-loathing for "wasting time" on a song nobody will listen to and a blog nobody reads, especially since even if people did listen and did read...all it would do is make them depressed. 

I've been isolating myself preparing for that final defeat, because it feels like I shouldn’t be burdening others with my suffering. All reaching out to them does is give them pain, or so it feels like. 

I'm trying to break that mindset. Reached out to one friend yesterday. Gonna try and keep reaching out to more, and reconnecting as best I can. 

It might not help me. It might not help them. It might even further drain me and be a further "waste of time".

But if I can’t find the good path forward, and lack the strength to fight for it...I don’t want to have died on the bad path sad, isolated, alone, in pain and agony, with all my joy dead and gone long before I go.

So, if I am to be in my final moments...then I at least want to try and make them good ones.

Especially if said good moments keep going as life finds a way.

No reason to not live life just because of the possibility of it ending. <3

It’s hard not to be, when I've consistently failed.

There’s good things happening! My wife literally just hit affiliate on twitch, and it’s quite likely they'll start their seasonal job soon(TM).

But on my end, I have precious little in the ways of successes and an endless list of failures.

I failed to send a letter to management in the 10 day deadline.

We're going to get evicted either next week or in 2 weeks.

I've done zero advocacy for myself at work. 

And I have done none of the work to find a place to go after we lose our current place.

Creativity wise, I keep thinking up new things, but making none of them. Heck, I barely write them down.

Instead of pursuing anything productive, I'm wasting time writing this blog. The time spent writing this could be spent writing to an aid group, researching, searching for homes...literally anything which gives a chance at a future.

Instead, I'm wasting my time on this.

And when I get home, I'll waste my time on a combination of sleeping, watching my wife, and maybe if I'm up for it, gaming some more.

Mind you. Spending time with my wife is never a waste. That’s genuinely what I want to spend my life doing in every free moment. Vibing with my wife.

Nor is the rest excessive and wasteful, because my body needs it.

But it’s objectively true we're heading towards the end of our current lives, and I am doing absolutely nothing which is productive towards pursuing whatever our next chapter could or should be.

So it feels like the end of the line. A dead end. The final defeat. Where there’s no path forward, because I failed to make one.

And it’s getting harder and harder to see any. To view the world where we get what we so desperately want and need.

Bills are taking up 60 - 80% of my paychecks.
Groceries and gas eat up 35 - 50% of my paychecks.

There’s no saving money even skipping out on rent, we don’t have the credit + funds/down payment/assets/assurances for buying a home, we can’t afford a hotel yet alone a pet-friendly one, nor can we pay for boarding and we probably can't even afford a storage unit.

Just the car, the internet, the phone, and various monthly insurances? Are costing over $1000/month.

And Groceries plus gas? Easily $600+ per month, often closer to $800 - $900.

And I make $1600 - $2200 at the job which is doing everything it can to kill me, and despite working more than I can handle, it's not enough, and neither myself nor my wife have been able to land second jobs despite aggressively applying, nor can we get more aid than we have gotten.

We don’t have anywhere to move, we don’t have any plans, we don’t have any funds, and we don’t have any time.

So I'm struggling just to live, because I just feel like giving up when I get like this. I’m wasting away, despite how I know I could be doing so much more. 

I could be doing laundry, cleaning the dishes, cleaning the apartment, pursuing the various creative ideas I have, resuming daily check-ins, reconnecting with communities I just abruptly stopped being a part of circa January when this crisis was beginning to become critical...

...I could be pursuing dreams and making the world a better place through my extremely innovative ideas, my sheer creativity, my passion, my joy, my perspective, my various talents.

Instead I am...not streaming, not recording, not writing, not keeping up, not...doing anything. 

And I wish this wasn’t so depressing. Again, there’s good things happening! We've had lots of fun! There’s been plenty of joy!

...but it does feel like more and more, all that is good in my world is going to die very soon, and leave only the consequences of my inactions to show my worst side, if there’s anything left of me to show at all.

I want to believe love will win, and we'll find a way, as we always do. 

But it hasn’t manifested yet, and I currently don’t see how to. 

Sorry for wasting your time the same way I'm wasting mine.

I will genuinely try to inject some joy into lives as I can tho. Is the one thing I'm even remotely good at. <3

...I really struggle with actually seeing any possible path forward to actually follow and listen to their advice.

To give an idea, they have basically four or so messages they keep giving over and over again.

They keep telling me to focus on my creative drive, to write. Good advice, but every time I try to write, I end up unable to. I end up too tired, too exhausted, too burnt out, too overwhelmed. 

I struggle to be inspired, I struggle to find the time, I struggle to really write. I've written a few songs, to be sure, and done some background work on my novel, and brainstormed more in my head, all of which matters and isn’t nothing, but the small amount I’m doing sure isn’t the amount I’m being encouraged to do. They say it's alright, small steps are still steps, progress is still progress, but they want me to be dedicated in my writing as a serious, continuous project. And it isn’t. 

Mostly because I am just too tired and overwhelmed and paralyzed and frozen. Depression, ADHD, and burnout all sap the creative energy from me. Which is where the second recurring message comes in:
"Rest. You need to do whatever it takes to recover."

And I try, but I can never get enough rest. No matter how much I rest, I never get recharged enough to be energized and encouraged to write.

It’s understandable how I can’t write on work days, due to how exhausting they are (to the point I haven’t written my complaint to them about a policy contradiction despite it being something I should've done weeks ago once I spotted it), but I only work three days a week. 

And, yeah, my days off aren’t purely rest. Wednesdays are food bank days. Fridays are usually both errands days and family night visits. Saturdays and/or Sundays are often either catchup errands and/or special events we like to attend such as witches markets and haunted farmers markets and oddball emporium markets.

And I do have chores. Namely, cleaning the apartment of trash, putting recyclables in the recyclables bag, taking the full trash out, hand-washing dishes, loading/unloading the dishwasher and running it, in theory putting clean laundry away (I haven’t for months and that’s my fault), feeding the puppy, playing with the puppy, and taking the puppy O-U-T.

But those errands and chores are things which HAVE to be done. As in, literally cannot live without them being done. Someone has to do them, and it would be unfair to put them all on my wife given my wife already does half of the chores and is responsible for planning and handling the scheduling of errands.

It’s my opinion we currently have an approximately 50/50 split on the workload of errands and chores. I can’t ask my, equally disabled as I am, wife to do my share just because I'm not getting enough rest, because they also aren’t getting enough rest and I can’t ask them to get even less.

So, we can’t realistically get more rest than we do, but we do the best we can to rest in every way. (Outings for instance might be draining in some ways but recharge in other ways, and resting at home covers the areas drained by outings, so we mix the two as best we can.)

And that amounts to a whole lot of...well, basically, rotting on the bed. All day, aside from mandatory upkeep and said errands/chores. I stay in bed and do nothing except sleep, watch what my wife's watching or doing, and vibe in twitch streams. With the occasional bit of gaming, if I'm up for it. (I'm often not, and my computer and laptop are both often not, either.)

This, despite how we've received a 30 day eviction notice of "pay $3569 or vacate the premises" as of this Monday, we have nowhere to go, we have not pursued legal action yet, I haven’t pursued better working conditions, we haven’t gotten any leads on jobs, we haven’t pursued other life things, etc.

Rotting on the bed is basically all I do to rest--and the thing about it is, it mostly works! Kinda sorta, at least. Paired with properly eating and properly taking care of hygiene and other bodily needs, bed rest is precisely the required rest I need to be recharged. 

So over and over again, I'm encouraged to keep resting like that, and to not feel guilty about it. That’s the third reoccurring message. Not to feel guilty about what I didn’t do, what I'm not doing, and what I continue to do. 

Which is easier said than done when facing eviction, and feeling like living situation is continuing to degrade, and ability to live life is being continuously reduced by work demanding more, cost of living increasing, disabilities worsening, and that triple combo causing all three to worsen due to an inability to tackle any of them thanks to the other two. 

And that brings me to the fourth reoccurring message. They are chastising me for simultaneously withdrawing into myself and not asking for help, while also feeling like I am already asking for too much help.

And it’s hard not to feel like I have already asked for too much help. I've asked far too much of my wife. Anyone who knew everything I've asked of my wife would agree I have placed far too great a burden on them.

I've asked too much of my family. They've literally given me tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in the last couple of years to try and keep me afloat despite my living conditions being unsustainable. They give me every bit of food and other resources that they think I might be able to use, and anything I ask for, they often give, if able to. 

I've asked too much of friends. I've vented endlessly about my worsening work conditions, my worsening rent conditions, and financial struggles. The emotional burden is endless, and there’s also the financial burden where they already donated as much as they could, and it wasn’t enough. 

I literally wrote a letter I called my "final call for help", to friends, to strangers on the internet, to anyone who could listen.

But it’s never been enough. The help I needed hasn’t come in a way which has actually given me and my wife any form of stability. A couple of friends have given potential resources, which I have been too drained to pursue, and there's been signal boosting, but no solution. Nothing but temporary bailouts.

Delays of the inevitable disaster, never an actual end to it.

So my guides are right. There’s a guilt in me feeling like I am oversharing, and yet a need to keep sharing my struggles more, to reach out for help, because despite the burden it might be on my loved ones to hear of just how bad the struggle is...

...we need help.

Desperately. 

So yeah. My guides are right on the money on what I should be doing.

They just really suck at telling me how to actually manifest it. 

...I didn't end up making a blog about it this time. I was initially tempted to, but then when I got to my in-law's place I just wanted to rest, so instead I sunk time into my new hyperfixation of Fields of Mistria. (I was THIS CLOSE to clearing the mines quest, on level 97...but then my laptop crashed, and I think I probably lost about an hour's progress. Like, probably wasn't even done with level 90, might have lost an entire museum's worth of RNG items, quest stuff, etc.)

There was, separately from church, a different blog I wanted to write, spurred by a comment on how neighbors don't really talk to each other anymore, and I wanted to go into why I theorize that the shift happened and why I think we should revive the process even if it's not identical to before.

But I'm also not going to write that blog.

Today's blog is mostly to let people know that I'm in the process of preparing to return home. The trip was...disappointing, in terms of accomplishing our goals; we did virtually none of what we wanted to do. But at the same time, it did give my wife some perspective, my wife some new ideas, my wife the family time they were craving, a lot of rest, a change of pace, a long break for me where I mostly got to rest, and inspiration for me.

I've got ideas for how to survive the following months, and I'm sure that when I return, I'll be overwhelmed, but at the same time, I'm hopeful.

I'm not going to say when we're leaving exactly, for obvious safety reasons, nor what route we're taking, similarly so. Those are things I communicate to friends and family in private, not put on a public blog post. I might be too busy to blog when home, and the risk of homelessness might mean I don't get to blog again if I take no action, but at the same time, I remain hopeful, and I will be leaving to return home soon.

I'll update y'all if I can of course. But this is the limit to what I feel comfortable publicly sharing. We're packing and prepping today, I'll say that much, but other than that...I'll hopefully see you on the other side.

Yes, really. I have good reasons to. For my whole life, I have been an incredibly spiritual person. And part of that lifelong spirituality and call to the realm beyond the physical, to more than what science knows? Was in fact dipping my toes into exploring Christianity. I went with my mom on multiple Easters, and now I have gone with my wife on Easter. I enjoyed watching the people, and bonding with the person I went with (my mom as a kid, my wife now), and I wanted to, in my curiosity, explore the religion to see if it could provide a tug to my innate spirituality.

...But every time, it does the exact opposite. My innate spirituality is repelled by Christianity because Christianity is in violation of everything spiritual, at least in the form that it is practiced and, particularly, preached by. As I've explored, I've found how much is so close to being spiritual in a healthy way, which is why I will still sing praises to elements, to aspects of, Christianity, for all of the good they stumbled upon, but it is that very fact that they almost have greatness and then they squander it by rhetoric drenched in shame and pressure and in lessening oneself and promoting one true path and in doing so demeaning those not following said path, that I am as critical as I am of the religion, because the spirituality which could be found there is destroyed and ripped apart by the rigid dogma of their preached doctrines.

The Easter sermon I attended today was in particular a fine show of that, where I could see the closeness to good ideas, and how those good ideas are then hard-pivoted into a self-centered belief system that undermines growth, that undermines faith itself, in favor of obedience to the church. And make no mistake, 'faith' and 'obedience', despite how closely they're often linked, are two entirely different things altogether. One can have healthy blind faith without a lick of obedience, but what I often observe from these sermons is asking for blind obedience without a lick of actual faith.

In fact the sermon I listened to made it clear that faith would give nothing, because belief alone is not enough. The good idea was there, but the twisted execution makes it deliver the exact opposite of an uplifting message of hope, of love, of bonding, of community. The sermon made it clear that the Christian doctrine dictates that the only one with any say in who goes to heaven is God and nothing we do can change that judgement, loosely speaking. Which is a nice idea, but horrible execution.

​And that brings me to one of my main gripes with the religion. An estimated 25 - 33% of humanity allegedly follows, loosely speaking, some denomination, variant, and/or cultist offshoot of Christianity. But by the belief of Christianity, belief in Jesus as the one true savior and the only path to Heaven would thus require that God would condemn a minimum of 66 - 75% of humanity to eternal damnation, per their belief system.

Now, in my last Christianity rant, I focused on how that doesn't sound like a combo ever possible from a God that's all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving. Because an all-powerful God has the power to intervene in any way God sees fit to set things exactly to God's plan. And an all-knowing God would know the exact consequences of those actions and inactions. And an all-loving God would see that under the current path with the level of interventions as they are, the majority of humanity would be condemned.

So by the Christian belief system, we would thus have to assume that God, knowing humanity's free will, would see that the majority of humanity would not follow the path to eternal salvation, and knowing this would happen, didn't...do anything about it, and willingly let the majority of humanity be condemned.

That aside from the contradiction between the idea of Jesus's sacrifice and the justification provided. Per Christian lore (and on Easter in particular this was heavily emphasized and reiterated), there was an Original Sin, committed by the biblical Adam and Eve. Aside from how we scientifically know there never was a singular Adam or a singular Eve and that humanity evolved (which undermines the entire concept of an Original Sin, because if humanity gradually evolved from prior forms of life there was never a garden of eden from which we were expelled from due to eating a forbidden fruit from a tree of knowledge or anything of the sort).

Even by the established lore, Jesus is said to have purged said Original Sin by his sacrifice. So if Jesus purged the original sin, then logically, all those born before would have it removed and retroactively be given a chance at Heaven (this is part of Christian lore as Jesus entered purgatory to remove all of those who should have been eligible for Heaven, per Christian lore), and all those born after would never have the Original Sin, because Jesus already purged it.

So if Jesus purged the Original Sin, then why would we still be dealing with the consequences of the original sin? Jesus paid the toll for ALL of humanity--past, present, and future. So if Jesus paid the toll of humanity for the original sin, then humanity shouldn't be suffering the consequences of the original sin. Yet this, as far as I can tell, just kinda...gets glossed over and ignored by the faith.

The preacher today literally said sin still lives in all of us. Which, I don't disagree with. But logically it shouldn't if Jesus removed the original sin as he allegedly did. And like, while I agree that all humans are imperfect (another part of the sermon), that imperfection doesn't equate to inherently being sinful. The majority of humanity, regardless of their beliefs, are good people who try their best to do their best and want to and try to do good.

Any God that would condemn the majority of humanity, when the majority of humanity is inherently innately good and trying their best? Couldn't be an all-loving God, so couldn't be a God of mine.

Even if we add in adjacent beliefs, like Islam, that's still a good half of humanity damned to their idea of Hell. (Because those of the Abrahamic faith make up about half the human population according to a quick Google search, with about 33% identifying as forms of atheist, agnostic, nothing-in-particular, or pagan, and the remaining being other belief systems if I recall correctly.)

And that's aside from how just belief in Jesus as the savior and the one path to salvation is not enough to guarantee a place in Heaven, as made clear. (And I actually agree on that part.)
Not all who (allegedly) identify as Christian, hold to the standards of Christianity. Aside from the monsters committing the most heinous of crimes against humanity, life, and the planet itself, there's the stringent contradictory standards required of the faith per their doctrine. What rules to follow, what rules to ignore, is something left arbitrary, in a way which it couldn't possibly be if The Bible were truly the One True Word of God showing the One True Path.

If The Bible, if Christianity, truly held One True Path towards Salvation, then which rules to follow shouldn't be so widely debated and so widely different and contradictory. What one branch of Christianity might view as a sacred requirement, another might see as trivial. What one branch might see as a hard line which if crossed condemns a soul, a different branch might see as a requirement for salvation.

When the belief is so divisive as to what matters and what doesn't in terms of salvation and damnation, it cannot be seen as one true path, because every branch views themselves as the best path, and thus, they cannot all be the mandated path of salvation by God. Now, there's nothing wrong with a doctrine deliberately leaving things arbitrary and up to the individual. That's one area I mean in how Christianity comes so close to true spirituality.

Leaving spiritual beliefs and practices for what matters and what doesn't up to an individual with none more or less valid than the other? That, I can get behind! I believe in precisely that! But every single branch of Christianity, every single denomination, doesn't present their faith in that light, from what I've found. To the contrary, they do the exact opposite. They try to portray Christianity as one unified faith with one unified path towards salvation where if certain rules are followed it puts you in good graces with Jesus whereas certain other things will be judged by God as worthy of eternal damnation.

​There's definitely beliefs that tend to be more widespread, of course. In particular New Testament focus, on Jesus's words, on Jesus's preaching, on what Jesus said and on what Jesus did. But it should be no surprise, then, that this is where I find my greatest disappointment in Christianity. If I were ever asked by a Christian, I would say "I actually follow the teachings of Jesus, but because I follow the teachings of Jesus, I cannot identify as a Christian because no branch of Christianity I know of follows them to my satisfaction".

As one example of many, I've found that all modern churches I know of, without exception, fail to follow one of the most important tenets of their alleged savior Jesus.

If they were to truly embrace Jesus's teachings, these churches would organize volunteers to keep their doors open 24/7.

They would accept, around the clock, regardless of weather (within their capacity to reach the church and keep the church powered, at least), people staying in the house of God, for as long as they wish. This tenet of Jesus's teachings was historically known and followed, with churches as sacred places of refuge, of sanctity, of shelter. These places were safe spaces, places for even those who weren't true believers, who weren't of the Christian faith, to come to at any time they needed, even in the dead of night.

Christians in churches, if they were actually following Jesus's teachings, would have kept to that. Providing shelter from the elements, water, and bathrooms, all for free, all for as long as they need them. If desired, they would provide sermons, and similar services. To direct those who come seeking aid to places they can find it, to teach, to read, to give those in need some love and support in their time of need.

I would ask all Christians who attend church:
Why doesn't your church do this?
Why doesn't your church, with all of its members, with all of its volunteers, with all of its community members, with all of the services it offers, with all of the donations they receive and resources they have available, organize a way to keep the church open around the clock to give year-round services to the needy, to the poor, to the unfortunate, to the vulnerable?

Why does your church have hours of operation? Why does your church shut down during times that are often the time people most need help? Why does your church turn away people who are at the door requesting aid, requesting services, requesting entry? Why does your church not try to help those people more actively and passively?

I want those Christians who attend church to give that some real, good, long, thought.

Because the answer is often more uncomfortable than they're willing to admit:
The answer is, quite simply, a failure to follow in the footsteps of Jesus as they allegedly aim to.

The answers most Christians would give for why their church doesn't do that, I guarantee would be in violation of the faith's fundamental teachings. How many passages deal with treating every single person as if they're God, as if they're Jesus, as if they could be an Angel, and showing them kindness, showing them empathy, showing them love, showing them compassion, and trying to help them? Even me, without being someone who has read The Bible start to finish, is familiar enough with it to paraphrase entries along those lines. Bible nerds can quote the exact passages I'm sure.

So if they know that they should be doing those things...why is their place of worship...not built to provide those things? Why are churches not designed to provide 24/7 humanitarian relief and service humanity as a whole?

I understand Christians who have private property they live on not opening up their home to everyone; that is their right. (It probably isn't supported by the faith, but I personally support it, because people deserve to have their own personal sanctuaries, their own safe space, their own control over their own domain and their own homes are theirs, as far as I'm concerned, regardless of what The Bible may say.)

I understand Christians also often operate services like food banks and homelessness shelters, so it's not exactly like they don't do any humanitarian work at all. (Although many branches don't do any, I will at least acknowledge some do.)

But unless those services are available 24/7, then they run into the same question. Barring logistical impossibilities, where there's not enough people to run it, where there's no ability to get there, where there's no power, where there's severe weather making it impossible or extremely unwise to get there...why aren't they open 24/7?

To give to the needy, to give to the poor, to give shelter and refuge to all, no matter what, is something that is baked into the faith, which is at the heart of Jesus's teachings. To have humans help humans, to the best of their ability, and that all of humanity when they network and band together are capable of doing a better job at it than any individual human would be.

And Jesus got very mad at the greed, the corruption, the waste, of those who used their wealth to further enrich themselves and reject the poor and to become elite and entitled. Jesus flipped tables and encouraged nonviolent resistance to said elite, to make reform and to advocate for the needy, the poor, to chastise the rich and the wealthy for wasting their resources and not distributing them to those who need them.

​There was a time Christians understood this and were known for following it, where they would provide a place of refuge to even those accused of crimes--even at the risk to those within. They would risk their church, they would risk their lives, to protect those who were seeking sanctuary, particularly from forces of oppression.

​Now, I understand the church does have a bad rep in going too far in this regard, notoriously having sheltered those guilty of war crimes (particularly, smuggling them after world war 2 for instance), and more infamously in modern times, actively protecting those who enact the worst of crimes on children, women, and fellow humans.

But there's a difference between shielding those worst-of-crimes-individuals from the consequences of their actions (something allowing them to continue to propagate harm to humans),
And providing a place of warmth and basic human decency to all, regardless of risk.

The latter is something Jesus demanded of all his followers. A level of personal risk in trusting in the inner goodness of humanity. To serve, to assist, those in need, without prejudice, regardless of whether those in need are thankful, loosely speaking. I would, in my personal belief, state that there are of course reasonable limits to this. You can't pour from an empty cup, and all that. But I don't think The Bible itself has any verses from Jesus where he states there are limits to providing compassion. That, I admit, I could be wrong about, but at the same time, I think you understand where I'm coming from in how the faith, per Jesus, demands that level of faith in the good in humans and trust in them and the command to help those to the best of our ability to.

​I know a lot of Christians justify not providing these services off of the belief that those receiving them are exploiting good faith--that their good faith in humanity is being exploited, being used, by people. Often "they're lazy". But that sounds awfully judgemental, doesn't it? Nobody knows the circumstances of others. Only God does, per their belief. Only God gets to make judgements, per oh so MANY verses in The Bible. God being the Judge, not humanity, is kinda a very big thing in The Bible.

So stopping to provide services on the belief that those receiving the services are lazy, are exploiting the services, are greedy, are sinners, are unworthy of being helped, cannot be helped, don't need the help, etc.?

All of that sounds like, to me, passing judgement and taking God's place as judge. As judging humans who these Christians do not know everything about.

I can understand there being certain cases where tough judgement calls must be made. Do you value one human you want to help over the safety of all the humans you already are helping, for instance? Of course you would want to, but it would be totally fair to say, "I can't, we don't have the ability to help you while also helping those we already are". It would arguably be irresponsible to try and help everyone while knowing you can't.

But at the same time. There's a difference between logistical realities (those are things we must acknowledge and tackle overcoming and cannot ignore),
Versus preconceived biases in notions of what can be done for humans and who can be helped.

​Jesus would lecture, disappointed, every Christian guilty of the latter, for closing the doors of their churches, because the one good use of those churches should be to serve communities. Jesus had lectures about how religion was largely something to keep between the individual and God, in that religion was deeply personal, and that the institutionalized organized churches of his time were straying from that, straying from God, by serving to succumb to corruption, to greed, to apathy. (Sound familiar? It should.)

And while I don't think churches should be abolished, I do think they should be structured in a way to avoid greed, to avoid apathy, to avoid corruption, by having them be geared to provide said 24/7 services to their community.

According to Christian lore, Jesus knew the risks going into Jerusalem, that he was going to die doing what he was to do, but he went anyway, under the belief he was going to save all of humanity by doing what he did. He faced the worst of humanity, without fear, without judging, for the sake of humanity at its best, for the sake of the parts of humanity worth saving.

Yet churches close their doors in fear of humanity's worse. Fearing looters, fearing vandals, fearing druggies, fearing the unclean, fearing the diseased, fearing the ill, fearing the deranged. And in doing so, in closing their doors to humanity's minority, in closing their doors in fear of humanity at its lowest, those churches forsake humanity at its best.

According to Christian lore, Jesus died for us, because he loved us.

Yet Christians who close their doors to their churches are unwilling to risk death out of love for humanity.

That shows why churches not open 24/7 (barring logistical impossibilities of this) are, on a fundamental level, not following in the footsteps of their alleged lord and savior. They put hours on the church for when the doors to God are open, rather than leaving God's doors open around the clock. And I bet you they do it primarily out of fear, out of prejudice, out of passing judgement on their fellow humans, despite being human.

Despite being imperfect and having imperfect knowledge of other imperfect humans, they deny continuous service to those other imperfect humans.

If I ever found a church that was organized such that it kept the lights on and doors open 24/7, offering free access to shelter, to bathrooms, then that alone might interest me in joining the church. I could never share their faith in believing Jesus is divine and the one true savior, but I would happily help them in servicing their community and serving as a beacon of spirituality and offering sanctity to all.

But to my knowledge, no Christian church like that exists. And that is perhaps one of the strongest reasons why I cannot get behind Christianity as a faith. It is quoted to cliche about how much it is said Jesus was a chill guy but his Christians are insufferable and unable to be endured. So while I can truthfully call my beliefs Christian-adjacent because of all of what Christianity almost does right, I can never follow the faith itself in proper, because Christianity as it is laid out by Christians is the foil to everything I consider spirituality to be:

An example of so many things gone close to healthy, gone close to uplifting humanity, but twisted in a way which only biases and divides as most Christians understand their doctrine.

Once again, though, I want to reiterate that I actually endorse many of the ideas of Christianity. My point in this blog isn't to purely deconstruct Christianity, tear it down and leave atheists out of previous believers, to leave doubters out of those previously holding faith. Rather, it's me doing my own reconstruction of Christianity, by calling out the parts that need to be called out, and to shine a light on the better parts of the faith.

I said previously that Jesus might not literally be the son of God, but I still see him as divine, and that remains true--because I feel like his teachings provide a great amount of insight into spirituality, into how to help humanity, how to bring humanity together, and his legacy there is undeniable. Many spiritual practices state that humans can be elevated to divinity in some form or another by their legacy, and while I personally don't ascribe to that belief, I would certainly agree with anyone who holds that belief stating Jesus more than qualified!

His life is something only those were there knew about. And those who saw, believed; those who don't but still do, are by Christian scripture, extra sacred. (Yes this was given, the Bible version was verbatim given in the lecture during Easter, although I'm obviously paraphrasing.) This history was given orally over a couple of generations, then written down in various accounts, then translated a couple of times, then some of them arbitrarily compiled, and while the true form of it was known only to those around to witness it, the fact we have at least pieces of his life over 2,000 years later is incredible.

I might have beef with the religion and all of those who identify as Christian without being much like Jesus, but I still hold a level of reverence for it, and believe there is merit in a lot of it. But for now, that's all I have to say. Happy Easter, to all who celebrate. And to those who don't, I hope you can find your own things to celebrate. I don't have the energy to reconstruct the holiday of Easter the way I have previously done on my blog for holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, but I hope you still enjoyed the read.

I won't share exact details for safety but this trip is going to take until mid-April.

What I can share is the reason why; it's a last-ditch effort spearheaded by my wife to save us having a life together.

Because we're running out of time and resources and likely to get an eviction notice...again. Because we're a month behind in rent and don't have $3400 (and nobody we know can pay that amount or even remotely close to it) to pay two months' rent.

I firmly believe Washington State, especially on the west coast, is the best place to live in the United States, and arguably the entire world.
There's a natural beauty here not found elsewhere.
The weather is wet, of course, but is otherwise mild in comparison to the extremes elsewhere. Our weather might be bipolar, rapidly swapping from cold to warm to sunny to rainy and so on and so forth, but at the same time, these swings aren't to an extreme that makes them insufferable. Quite the opposite, they're kinda inviting, a nice surprise, a welcome change.

We have some of the richest culture of art in the entire country, and are a prominent place for the entire world in terms of the culture of the arts. While we don't have the same hundreds of years of culture as elsewhere in the country, the culture we have developed is one of high appreciation for the arts, for creativity, for expression, for experimentation.

We have one of the best healthcare plans in the entire country, with constantly proposed legislation to adapt healthcare modeled after that of the majority of civilized nations, where every Washingtonian receives free healthcare paid for by taxes.

We have some of the best trans healthcare policies of any state in the country, with the barriers to receiving gender-affirming care lower here than anywhere else and trans people eligible for three months of hrt medicine free of charge.

We have programs for assistance not found elsewhere, and even those with national versions, our state is better than most or all.

We have one of, if not the highest, levels of innovation in the entire country, which as an innovator myself, makes it my backyard.

We have the best coffee in the entire country, and the highest diversity, too, with independently owned and operated coffee stands literally everywhere.

We have one of the highest incomes of any state, with generous policies in place for work conditions and worker rights.

We have great natural wonders including just about every biome on the planet, including rainforests!

The outdoors are unbeatable in what they offer, and how they are largely safe.

It's got great growth in terms of connection and infrastructure.

Music here is arguably the best in the country with many of the biggest artists in alternative and rock getting started here.

The problem is.

The cost of living here keeps on going up.
And the wages for jobs like mine...don't.

We're drowning in debt, and we can't get more money, more resources.

We're being priced out of the state because it's such a good place everyone knows it and wants to be here and that gives the people setting prices for things like places to live and jobs like mine...leverage. They know they can replace me as a tenant, they know they can replace me as a worker, so they drive rent prices up and keep wages low, and that means...we...can't afford to live here anymore.

We're being driven out.

And my wife is placing hopes on their home state of Michigan having a lower cost of living.

So the trip there is largely scouting things out, talking to people, and seeing if we can swing a move there somehow.

So. You're not likely to hear from me a lot, if at all, going forward.

​I wish I had more to say, more to explain, but I'm tired, and got so much to do before leaving. Hopefully, see you on the other side.

And as is usually the case, that probably means I'll end up talking about each of them, but none to the level I want to, especially the later I go and the longer this takes.

I'll start with the follow-through on my last blog. It's overall worse, but at the same time, there's a reality of somehow making it through and that reality provides hope. At every stage, I feel like there's more and more setting us up for failure and less and less providing a path for success. But at the same time I still do cling to the hope my wife is right and that everything they dream of is possible.

That we can pull off a cross-country move.
That where we will live will be cheaper.
That where we live will have employment.
That where we live will allow us to finally progress in areas of our life that have remained stagnant for years.
That where we live opens up the avenue for building a future family together and starting the rest of our lives together.

After all, there's a lot going for us. For a start, my line of work is more likely to have openings because there's fewer who would qualify for and have the certificates I have, with my experience providing me an edge over other applicants.

We have tangible places to look at we know the general pricing of, which don't price us out or breed restrict us out.

We have the potential support of who knows how many others, from potential friends, family, loved ones, and maybe even coworkers.

There's the potential to maybe have transitionary housing with a relative.

We might even be able to use credit cards in this transitionary period to pay off big bills and then make gradual payments off on said cards even if it's only a small amount over time and accrues a huge level of interest.

All we need is the help getting through the door, and we would likely be good.

The hope-crushers are all getting more problematic for me to try and ignore though.

This would mean that for the second time in a row, we can't pay for the full lease of a place we're currently renting. We know the old management for our place would definitely have been willing to work with us, but at the end of last year our apartment complex was bought out by a more parasitic toxic management who is immediately violating state law in refusing to offer payment plans. Which is funny because we learned about said state law being a state law from the current lower management who helped us move in in the first place. The lower management is great and would love to offer us the accommodations we would need, but the higher up company policy overrides their sanity.

And we might not be able to meet their insane demands, despite actually desiring to pay them what they are owed. (We like our current place enough where we WANT to pay them the full amount of our lease, plus any moveout costs, plus any fines and interest that are reasonably accrued. For instance we would fight them on a charge of repainting the walls because nothing about any of the walls was damaged by us as tenants, but there's definitely some upkeep cost we would likely be responsible for.)

Moving half-way across the country loses all of the benefits of my current state. I don't think people understand just how many programs we have here that are helpful, and I genuinely believe my state offers some of the best public and semi-public and non-religious private education in the entire country across every level of education from pre-K all the way through college up to master degrees at a minimum. We'd be closing ourselves off from being eligible for state healthcare, from my state's education, from my state's culture and diversity and education and from being in one of the few places to have the ability to opt out of shopping at a big corporation like Walmart.

We would have to begin paying for things we currently receive through my parents. AAA membership and car insurance being the big ones.

We would have to somehow pull off a move of all of our stuff with me as the only driver, and to also get our car to our new place too despite my car and the rental truck likely being half the country apart.

Employment isn't a guarantee, it's just a hope--and there's no guarantee I receive gender-affirming care of any kind in a state which is less blue than Washington State would be. Not only on a social level (would I even be able to use the women's bathroom, locker room, etc.?), but on a medical level as well (here as long as you have medical insurance of just about any kind, you're eligible for all the services needed to transition pretty much for free with the maximum copay being $60 or so at the most expensive, with most cheaper ranging from free to $15 or so).

We have no protections against something going wrong. With our car for instance, or with moving vehicles.

There's less support available from family and the support available more likely to be toxic and come with conditions. I know I can rely on my family for any services they can afford to provide. They can't pay thousands per month, which is why we're in as dire a straight as we are, but they can provide a lot of help for things like food, transportation, storage, etc., all without conditions. My wife holds hopes of receiving that, but I don't think that the family in the area we would be going would be able to provide.

We would lose all of our social connections in the area and need to start over, when getting the few we have was difficult enough already. No friends in the area we would be going, and far less programs we'd be interested going to. I genuinely love going to Sapphic events and to Witches Markets. While I've gained some level of cynicism for both (Sapphic events overbook for their venues getting too crowded and provide too few protections from drunken ladies becoming too drunk to have spacial awareness aside from parking being paid; witches markets have poor parking availability, vendors outside are ridiculously cold, vendors inside don't allow dogs, and a lot of the vendors don't feel properly vetted), I genuinely love both and they have provided me enrichment and fulfillment in my life that I never thought possible going out in public.

Where am I going to get that in a place with far fewer people and far less diversity and far fewer outside of the cult of Christianity? There's probably still LGBTQIA+ events a plenty to be found, but would there be Sapphic events specifically? I doubt there's enough sapphics to generate the demand for monthly events the way we have an overabundance of Sapphics here. (Demographically we have a disproportionately high number of queer femme-presenting people here, our state is probably one of the top five in terms of queer ladies being openly queer.)

And even if there is...what would there be in terms of witchy events? Maybe, maybe, there would be some form of yearly market that is witchy-adjacent. Here we have a nerdy market which is technically focused on nerdy oddities particularly focused on Dungeons and Dragons and D&D-adjacent topics, which runs four or so times a year, and has a good 60 - 80% of the same vendors as the eight yearly witch markets.

And here we also have gothic markets covering darker things, loosely of the edgy hail-satan variety, but not really. The type of market covering metal music, and emo music, and similar genres, black clothing and lipstick and makeup and all types of things with spikes, bones, and similar.

And here we also have krampus markets, similar to the above.

Between the three of those, nerdy D&D-adjacent markets, gothic markets, and krampus markets, there's probably one or two that would run at least once a year...but I would be shocked to find witches markets for all eight witch events anywhere outside of where we live right now because as far as I know...the pacific northwest is the only place in the country with the level of diversity and cultural identity to have the level of demand to fuel these events being run rain or shine year-round.

Basically, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of cultural identity, social acceptance, in basically every way except for the cost of living, we already live in the best place in the entire United States for queer disabled neurodivergent witches. We live in a place where queer folk, disabled people, neurodivergent folk, and witches, are all at a level of unusually high percentage of the population. Anywhere else in the country isn't going to have the same amount of "our people" locally, at least not as openly so.

We have no real plan to get all of our stuff moved. We have only the hopes of it being cheaper and the cost of living actually being reduced lower than the increased amount of things we'll have to pay for and the likely decrease in comparable pay.

All of that is building up to be a weight because I'm on the verge of receiving all of the care I need here. I'm going to physical therapy and making huge strides in not being in constant pain. I qualify for behavioral health being given to me. My depression could get proper medication, as could my ADHD, and I have the access to medication for my disabilities, and I have access to HRT. I lose all of that when not here.

And those took me years to get, here, in the place considered one of the easiest in the country. How long would it take for me to get them in a place less queer-friendly, less neurodivergent-friendly, less disability-friendly?

My depression is getting to the point where with all of my anxieties, with all of the pressures, with all of the weights of the bills we're liable for and responsible for, with all of what we are likely to be dealing with...I'm just feeling hopeless and defeated.

I'm at the point where I feel like I am the obligatory sibling who never amounts to anything and is a total failure in any family of four or more kids. It's to the point where I feel bad enough where I've contemplated ending my life for only the fourth time in my entire life and only the third time since I got with my wife, for the third time since July 2023. (The other two being December 2023 and then around June 2024 if I recall correctly.)

Now, to be clear, I'm not actually suicidal, yet. If I were at risk, you'd know. I'll say that the best way for you to keep an eye on it is that my enemies should really be praying for my success and not my downfall because if I do go down I'm not going quietly into the night. I'm not going to be radio silent and then end my life. If I go down I go down swinging and will mince no words about any of the traumas, any of the abuses, any of the injustices, I've faced, my wife has faced, etc.

I've held back from ever lashing out like that because at the end of the day, as long as I have a hope for living a life, I don't want to live a life with hate. So if I succumb to hate, if I succumb to lashing out, then you'll know that I'm close, because if I am going to air out every secret I have, it's only because I don't want those weights to drag me down in whatever comes after my current life.

Again, why I say my enemies should be praying for my success, because I know enough to take them down with me and the only reason I don't take them down already is because I don't want to. As long as I have a hope for a future, I will never want to. But if they pray for my failure, and then it turns out I do indeed fail and lose my last reason for living...then they're gonna find out the hard way why they should've been wishing me well because the things I know are things I would be willing to go to the grave with if I live a long life but aren't things I'm gonna let be left unsaid and secret if my life were to end early.

Now, granted. I use the term "enemies" here mostly to invoke the stock phrase of enemies wishing success. I forget the exact phrase at the moment, but you probably know it well enough. I personally am of the Vinland Saga of "no person has any enemies". As I said in my last blog post, I'm slowly becoming the worst version of myself, the version of myself I least want to be. And that's the version which would retaliate against people who I know aren't bad, by and large, and deserve to live their own lives of prosperity. The worst version of myself would forget that.

But the me that I am, the me that is the best of myself and my life, believes that most humans are good, and that very few people deserve to be condemned. I believe in us all sharing a lot of the same desires in life and being owed the chance to pursue those things.

I believe in building people up rather than tearing people down. That to find common connection and to find the ability to empathize with each other and help each other is far better a life and future than a life where we're dunking on people for their worst sides and excluding them for their shortcomings. A life filled with joy and with awe and with passion is one far more fulfilling than a life filled with paranoia about the people you know secretly being terrible, more fulfilling than a life tearing down those around you, than a life of hatred and dividing and excluding those who don't meet the standards set.

I have this belief that "childlike awe, childlike wonder, childlike joy, childlike idealism, childlike passion", are not in fact traits of children but rather innately the inherent nature of humanity. That what makes humans be humans is that we have a natural innate awe and wonder of the world around us, we have an innate desire for the joys of both laughter and happiness, that we have an innately positive view of the future and of the world around us and of others, and that creativity is arguably the most human thing which is human above all else.

And that any association with those things being childlike is an artificially enforced view by an artificially built modern society that encourages conformity over individuality, but also selfishness over community, when it should be individuality over conformity and community over selfishness.

Yet despite how strong I am...I'm not so strong as to hold these beliefs so strongly I would rather die for them wordlessly, silently, in a young age. The pressures of society are enough, I know, to break me, and while in my better moments I believe all of the above...in my worst moments the amount of pain and suffering I've lived through on a daily basis is enough where I know I would lash out in hate, in bitterness, in despair, in destruction.

It takes years to build what can be destroyed in seconds. While that makes the efforts to build all the more sacred, all the more precious, all the more things we can and should appreciate for lasting as long as they do...that destruction is something I actively have to suppress, because the worst mistakes in my life and the fuel for the things I need the most therapy for are from not having been strong enough to prevent from lashing out as I did.

All of the lost friendships.
All of the burnt bridges.
All of the things I destroyed from anger, from desperation, from apathy, from asking too much and giving too little.

That's what I don't want to continue to be. And you'll know I've given up on life if I give up on not being those things and actively am throwing them away--and I'm dangerously close. I'm dangerously withdrawn. I'm in far less spaces than I was last year. Ever since January, I've been shrinking myself to be less and less out-there, to the point where I've stopped being involved with many of my closest friends.

I've stopped providing daily check-ins.
I've stopped talking to friends.
I've stopped coming to streams.
I've stopped keeping up to date on discords.
I've stopped visiting websites I've had as a core part of my life since I was 13 years old despite my age now being a flip of those two numbers. (31 going on 33, because I haven't felt like the last year has had anything really noting me as having a birth.)

I've largely lost my passion for games, given up entirely on content creation and streaming, and while my passion for writing was recently reignited...it chose the worst possible time with me unable to really put any time or energy into nurturing it. Most of what I'm passionate about right now is organizing my notes and making them more coherent, connected, and consistent. All of which there's secretly an ulterior motive for, in that it's also one of those suicidal ideations, where I have this idea that if I were to note every aspect of my work then it would be okay for me to not make it if it were released publicly in a way anyone could follow and make.

Now, I know better from experience. ComicFuryians literally lost one of their most beloved members to a suicide where the person gave up on life, released their work, and took their life. To this day, nobody as far as I know has continued their work and nobody likely ever will. I am the only one who actually will make my work and logically I know that. But suicide is never logical and illogically, it feels more okay to have my life end if I have the potential of a legacy after, and releasing my work in a way where anyone could pick it up fuels that.

Butstill. At the end of the day, that wasn't what fueled the reignited passion. In fact, quite the opposite. It was me just...wanting to. To have this pure passion, this unbridled joy to share my work with the world, reignited. I had a fire lit under me to show what the world of farn is really like, and I want to share it with everyone, in full, which is something requiring me to be there to work on it.

So that's one of the few things keeping me alive right now, and it's something hard to keep. I've been creating stories and ideas and games and such since I was 13. To date, nearly 20 years later, none have been realized, because I can never see them through.

​And I do have a lot of ideas.

My most recent idea, which is both kinda political but also kinda not, is that I think websites should stop being lazy with their filters for content in terms of age being largely a binary setting tied to maturity, and that for all content filters it shouldn't be a strict binary but rather a sort of slider, which both posters/creators can set appropriately and readers/viewers can filter for also appropriately.

As I see it, this should be a universal thing for websites, because it would also help create further protections for children.

"I never make content with a target audience of children", "I very rarely make content with a target audience of children", "I only sometimes make content with a target audience of children", "I make content with a target audience of children about half of the time", "I often make content with the target audience of children", "my content is near-exclusively targeted towards an audience of children", or "all of my content without exception is targeted towards children".

A filter would then be for what is defined as children. "12 and below", "14 and below", "17 and below", or "20 and below".

Set that as the first setting. "I never make content with a target audience of children" would automatically skip the following filters based on mixed audience targeting in favor of focusing exclusively on more mature ones, whereas "all of my content without exception is targeted towards children" would automatically skip every mature/adult filter. Those filters would note why they are disabled by the above.

From there, the next filter would be:
"None of my content is suitable for all ages; all of my content is inherently 18+ and for mature audiences", "I very rarely make content suitable for all ages; the majority of my content is inherently 18+ and mature in nature", "I only sometimes make content suitable for all ages; most of my content is 18+ and mature", "about half of my content is suitable for all ages; I don't try to be mature but don't shy away from 18+ material", "I often make content suitable for all ages; the majority of my content is not mature, but I have occasional 18+ material", and "all of my content is designed to be suitable for all ages; I never have mature or 18+ material in my content".

There would likely be a similar filter for the maturity range of the content. "My content is 18+", "My content is 21+", "My content is late 20s and above", "my content is young 30s and above", "my content is 36+ and above", "my content is 40+".

Similarly, "none of my content is suitable for all ages" and "all of my content is designed to be suitable for all ages" would disable most of the following filters by and large, with the disabled filters explaining why they're disabled.

"I am an adult whose content involves adult material at all times", "I am an adult who frequently covers adult material", "I am an adult who often covers adult material", "I am an adult and about half of material I cover is adult in nature", "I am an adult and some of the times I cover adult material, but it's not my focus", "I am an adult, but I never cover adult material", and "I am not currently an adult", or something approximately close to that.

There would also be a filter for definition of adult. 18+, 21+, late-20s, early-30s, late-30s, and 40+, potentially both for the age of the individual and for their target audience. There might need to be an option for "my material has aged as I have".

Obviously children, as well as those selecting that they never cover adult material, would be locked out of describing the filters for various types of adult material, and this would be a list of trigger warnings and essentially how often they are shown.

Nudity: "I show full-frontal nudity, including sexual acts", "I show full-frontal nudity, but no explicit sex", "I show breasts and butts, but any lower frontal nudity is partially censored", "I show breasts and butts, but lower frontal nudity is heavily covered or censored", "I show butts, and heavily suggestive near-nudity, but full nudity is avoided or partially censored", "I show butts, but heavily suggestive nudity is avoided or heavily censored", "I don't show full nudity, but lewd body parts may be prominently featured and/or near-nudity is displayed and/or nudity is heavily implied", "I don't show full nudity or near-nudity, but lewd body parts may be prominently featured", "I don't show full nudity or prominently focus on lewd body parts, but near-nudity may be present", "I don't show full nudity or focus on lewd body parts, but nudity might be implied", and then at the SFW end, "I don't show or imply nudity, near-nudity, or prominently display lewdness".

Maybe breaking the above into two filters, one for nudity and one for lewdness.

Sexual content: "I show sexual content, including explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, including implied explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, but don't show explicit sexual acts", "I show sexual content, but it is limited to lewdness and kissing", "I show sexual content, but it is limited to lewdness", "I don't show sexual content". This one I had a better version of in my head, I'm running out of momentum on how to explain it.

Adult topics: "I always talk about adult topics and themes", "I almost always talk about adult topics and themes", "I frequently talk about adult topics and themes", "I talk about adult topics and themes about half of the time", "I talk about adult topics and themes occasionally", "I on some rare occasions will talk about adult topics and themes", or "I never talk about adult topics and themes". 

This would probably have subcategories for what constitutes adult topics.

Always/almost always/frequently/about half/occasionally/rarely/never for:
Death,
Depression,
War,
Genocide,
Abuse,
Finances and Employment,
Living Conditions and Situations,
Food Struggles,
Life Skills,
General Darker Themes,

Probably more, I can't think of everything which would constitute an adult topic.

Violence would require at least two filters. The first:
"I exclusively focus on violent content", "I heavily feature violent content", "I frequently feature violent content", "I often feature violent content", "I feature violent content about half of the time", "I feature violent content sometimes", "I feature violent content on rare occasions", or "I never feature violent content". This filter would mention that it explicitly ties into any of the sub-filters.

The one I can think of being,
"I show the most gruesome form of violence including extreme gore", "I show heavily bloody content, including some light levels of gore" "I show heavily bloody content, but avoid gore", "I show bloody violence, but avoid extremely realistic and/or over the top levels of blood and violence", "I show bloody violence, but stylized and/or in moderation", "I show violence, but avoid extremely bloody content regardless of how stylized it is", "I show some blood through violence in weapons and fighting", "I show violence in weapons and fighting, but blood is kept minimal or nonexistent", "I show weapons and fighting with minimal extreme violence", "I show weapons and fighting but there's no violence", and at the lowest end, "I occasionally show weapons being displayed and discussed but never used and/or I occasionally show characters hitting other things".

Or something to that effect.

​To give an idea of how these filters would apply to, say, my blog?

I never make content with a target audience of children.
Arguably (and what I would do for safety), none of my content is suitable for all ages; all of my content is mature and inherently 18+.
Similarly, I am an adult whose content involves adult material at all times--even my earliest 2014 blogs were made after I was already an adult, albeit a very young one.

As such, my content is aimed at 21+ adults at minimum, with the content aging as I have. This blog is not designed for young-20s anymore, but the earlier 2014 entries were. I don't know what the minimum age for current blog entries would be, but it ain't 18-year-olds, I can confidently say that much at minimum. You could say anything 21+ is okay, my personal definition is usually "if you were born after 9/11 you're probably too young to be here", but you could go up to saying the youngest allowed age would be my wife and anyone younger is too inexperienced to really be dealing with the heavy topics my blog has delved into at times.

I never show nudity, and very rarely do I talk about nudity, but I do talk about kinks and lewdness on occasion (probably need to refine the filters for that).

I am extremely lewd, with lewdness almost always mentioned (deez nuts and hardly know her jokes in particular but also pickup lines a plenty and innuendos of all kinds), so sexual content isn't shied away from whatsoever.

I almost always am talking about adult themes and topics.

​Literally all of them have those themes, in heavy levels.

I feature violent content sometimes.
But it's in moderation, with me not going into gruesomely detailed versions of things, I'd say.

Then from the perspective of a viewer/reader, you would have filters.

First being selected age range.
"I am currently considered a child", with filters for "12 and under", "13 - 15", "16 - 17", "18 - 20". This would lock the user out of the majority of content regardless of selection, but based on the filters of the creators of content it would have some more available. (For many websites, arguably 12 and under being selected should auto-ban the account.)

"I am an adult", with filters for "18 - 20", "21 - 25", "26 - 29", "30 - 35", "36 - 39", and "40+". This would lock the user out of content which their age range makes them ineligible to view. Namely it would lock them out of content exclusively made for children and content heavily targeting children, as well as content they are too young for.

I think that mandating filters of this sort to be implemented on all sites offering content would make the internet a safer place for everyone. Does it stop people from lying? No. Does it stop people from misapplying filters? Not entirely, but these would be things that people would try their best at, with small misapplications corrected and punishments only for those who are wholly and entirely in very obviously extremely wrong classifications.

You might not know the difference between some violence and moderate violence, but if you're showing extreme violence with a filter set to showing almost no violence, you know your filter isn't properly applied.

These might be somewhat variable in being applied to specific content or to the account or to both, depending on the medium. Artists for instance might have filters for their content in general, but specific pieces might have filters that are different from their general filter. Streamers might have some filters for things that change, but likely less things change stream to stream than for an artist piece to piece. Posting on social media is something that likely wouldn't be viable to set most filters for most posts, so that would rely heavily on the profile filtering.

The specifics there are less important than their existence in general existing.

And this was my latest idea.

The third thing I wanted to talk about is religion, specifically how I believe that Christianity is arguably the only false religion in the world and arguably the only one to not be intrinsically tied to specific cultures, but also going into why many of the beliefs of Christianity are arguably applicable to nearly any culture and any religion and any belief system despite the religion being invalid.

But I don't think I have the energy to cover that in detail.

What I'll say there is basically that to accept the path of Christianity as valid requires first a belief that Christianity is not put on a pedestal above any other mythology. From the onset, the idea of "God" and Angels should be taken as no more real than Zeus and the Olympian pantheon, Odin and the Aesir and such from Norse mythology, Ra and the Egyptian pantheon, etc. You get the idea.

There should be the understanding that the universe wasn't made in 7 days, that evolution is real and there was never a real Adam or a real Eve, that there was never a Noah's Arc that contained literally the entirety of all life on earth in pairs of two, you get the idea. Science comes first, and that includes things like a virgin birth and the parting of a sea and the presence of mythological divine plagues and divinely striking down enemies and instantly vaporizing those who touch an artifact.

These should be considered as having the same basis in historical fact as any other piece of mythology from any other culture, in that whatever truth there may be behind these accounts has been heavily filtered by the mythology of numerous isolated cultures through countless generations of oral tradition that changed the tales and were eventually attempted to be written down long after they happened and were attempted to be unified even longer after they were written.

That in the same way there's no unified singular Greek Mythology or Egyptian Mythology or Norse Mythology with the mythologies of them being from countless different cities/tribes/etc. told over centuries or even millenia, the stories told throughout Christian lore are from countless different groups over a period over a thousand years, and as such, they have the same level of variance with there being no one singular truth above all others.

And that also, there needs to be a viewing of things as they would have been seen at the time, not as we have reimagined them over the millenia, before we can truly apply a modern lens on those ideologies. Jesus was understood to be a Jewish man (a man of color), and while it can safely be assumed he genuinely thought himself to be a man of reform, a man divinely inspired by God to reform the Jewish people, Jesus did not view himself as being born from a virgin. Jesus did not view himself as having mythical origins as being literally born from a supreme deity.

The phrase "Son Of God" was, in the historical context of the time, seen as a phrase for one enlightened by God, more or less. Someone with divine inspiration and backing. It was applied to all prophets from my understanding, not specifically Jesus and Jesus alone above all others being just Jesus. It was understood to not be an indicator of literally being the child of a divine being, of not literally being fathered by a divine being, of having no mortal father and only a divine one, but rather to be in the metaphorical sense of being divinely chosen to be divinely empowered to have a divine fervor, divine favor, divine spark, to be divinely empowered to deliver divine messages and miracles.

That Christianity culturally appropriated YHWH, the God of the Jews, and artificially elevated YHWH to be a supreme deity that is omnipowerful and omnipresent in ways that YHWH is always displayed in Jewish material as not actually being, because YHWH was The God Of The Jews, with The Jews as YHWH's chosen people, the two intrinsically being linked with a symbiotic relationship.

That even in the time of Moses, it was understood that other gods were as real as YHWH, but that YHWH had power over The Jewish People, and that YHWH's power over The Jewish People allowed YHWH to be more powerful than those other gods in service of The Jewish People, but that YHWH's domain was not so absolute as to totally trump those other gods. That those other gods were not in fact demons in disguise, but were in fact genuinely gods and recognized as such.

Including how witches were at one point consulted as mediums, in ways which no servant of YHWH was willing or capable of providing, meaning that explicitly there were limits both on YHWH's power and scope of knowledge and reach and ability.

That there is in fact no unified message or truth in The Bible because it is filled with contradictions.
Lucifer/Satan/The Devil (not even really named as such as we tend to think of) could never have successfully led a rebellion against an all-powerful all-knowing supreme true ruler, because by virtue of being all-knowing and all-powerful, God would be able to know of this plan in advance and instantly quash the rebellion before it began.

This would also require God to have known Lucifer/Satan/The Devil would create this evil, and willingly let it happen. God would have created Lucifer/Satan/The Devil knowing Lucifer/Satan/The Devil would create evil in rebelling against God, and God still made Lucifer/Satan/The Devil knowing this and let it happen without either stopping it or discouraging it or preventing it.

There's contradictory narratives about how humanity was given free will by Adam and Eve eating from the fruit of knowledge and by virtue of being the only creatures with souls being the only ones with free will, and how Lucifer/Satan/The Devil and a third of all angels rebelled against God. If they had no free will, then that would mean God literally designed them to become evil in a deliberately designed failed rebellion.

God would know Adam and Eve would have chosen to take the forbidden fruit, yet still commanded them not to, despite knowing they would violate the command.

God would have known everything was going to happen, and yet still have created those circumstances and let them happen, despite being supremely powerful and able to stop these things by virtue of being supremely knowledgeable about all that would happen.

These actions make zero sense under a God that is actually all-powerful and all-known as is Christian doctrine, but are perfectly in-line with depictions of deities that are extremely powerful and knowing but not quite all-powerful and all-knowing, akin to Odin from Norse mythology.

It is commonplace in many cultures for a deity to rebel, to resist, to kill, to fight, another deity in their lore, to varying degrees of success. In Greek lore Zeus was the THIRD-generation ruler. Not second, that'd be his father Kronus (might have spelling there wrong, but not to be confused with Chronos, they were two different titans I'm pretty sure but are often combined to be one), and not first, that'd be a deity I don't remember the Greek version of but I think the Roman name for that first-generation ruler is Uranus.

If memory serves, Uranus + Gaia produced the titans including Kronus and Rhea (by the way a big part of many mythologies people tend to forget is that literally almost every religion is heavily laced in inherent incest), and Kronus and Rhea then produced the next generation of Gods (both Olympian and those of the Underworld which I forget the exact term for), including Zeus. Just as Kronus and Rhea and the titans overthrew his father, Zeus and the Gods overthrew Kronus and the titans.

In Egyptian mythology you've got the struggle of Sett after murdering Osiris with Osiris's son (whose name I can't remember at this exact moment).

In eastern culture you've got some arrogant rebellion in the form of things like Sun Wukong.

And so on and so forth. Across countless cultures and religions, you've got tales of rebelling against the divine, to various levels of success. In terms of Jewish folklore, it would make total sense for a failed rebellion of a servant of their Jewish God to take place, because with said Jewish God not being all-powerful or all-knowing, the rebellion stood at least a chance of succeeding. With a third of all angels being involved, it was a genuine threat and one that almost was victorious, because of how close the two sides were in power.

But that doesn't work if God is all-knowing and all-powerful because that would mean that Lucifer/Satan/The Devil, knowing that God is all-knowing and all-powerful, deliberately entered a rebellion against God, knowing God knew about it and knowing God could end it at any time by virtue of being all-powerful. And that also only works if Lucifer/Satan/The Devil shares the gift of free will with humanity, because without the free will to rebel in the first place, then it wouldn't be rebellion; it would be a divine command from God.

In short, in order for Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to have rebelled, it either requires Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to have free will and a third of all angels also had free will to join (in which case, free will is not in fact unique to humanity), or if they lack free will then God literally designed Lucifer/Satan/The Devil to rebel and a third of angels to join, because that was God's plan, meaning God by virtue of programming them to do what they did would be the one who created those evils in the first place.

The entire mythology doesn't hold up to scrutiny, either scientifically or as a continuous narrative. It is filled with hole after hole, and even someone as casual as me can point these out. Christianity for two thousand years has spun narrative after narrative to justify these contradictions, rather than just admitting that they are contradictions. Or when they do admit there's contradictions, they pick and choose which parts to follow.

Any religion which you have to pick and choose which parts to follow could not be that of an all-knowing all-powerful God, and that requirement to pick and choose which parts to follow demonstrates why the religion is built on a temple of lies, inconsistency, and fabrications that people blindly believe to be truth despite their logical and rational brains being capable of noting how this shouldn't make sense.

But I'm not covering this in the detail I wanted to. In short I wanted to both deconstruct the flaws behind Christianity, while also rebuilding the strengths of it.

Jesus was against organized institutionalized religion because he knew the harm to come from it. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus believed religion should largely be a personal practice kept to an individual, private. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus was against deification of humans, because he knew the harm to come from it. A good belief to hold true to.
Jesus was against hoarding of material wealth, because he knew how pointless it was. A good belief to hold true to.

Jesus preached about how what we do to everyone is what we do to God (you all know the full verse for this). How we treat others is reflective of how God will judge, essentially. That means treating to the poor and needy, showing empathy, etc., are all good things to do, and that's a good belief to hold true to.

Jesus was a pacifist, teaching nonviolent resistance, but 'nonviolence' was defined as not hurting others, with him perfectly willing to flip tables and cause property destruction and damage so long as no humans were harmed. A good philosophy to ascribe to.

Jesus preached love, empathy, and forgiveness, pointing out humanity is inherently imperfect. Nobody is without sin, nobody is without their faults and flaws. A good philosophy to live by.

And so on and so forth.

Christianity also has an excellent grasp on many spiritual practices, which have been adapted by the religion over the centuries, including an understanding of what many in the witchcraft community believe to be an understanding of the nature of "the universe", our role in it, and what follows after we die.

There's certain interpretations of Christian scripture which portray 'Heaven' and 'God' as one and the same, a state of everything everywhere all at once. Everything that ever was, ever could have been, ever will be, ever could, all existing simultaneously in one space happening all at once, and that we reach our highest self by joining with that whereas we experience 'Hell' by rejection of it, and punish ourselves.

And there's many other examples on how Christianity touches on many good spiritual practices.

But the religion itself is arguably built on cultural appropriation and the only religion to have been built without an existing culture it is inherently innately integrated with. (I would argue that even Islam, a religion which took from Christianity, is inherently tied to the Arab people at the time of Mohamed. Although by that logic it might also be possible to argue that certain branches of Christianity, such as the Eastern Orthodox version, do have the culture of their people integrated within. I'm not too concerned with defending my argument since my argument is mostly a combination of clickbait and a thought experiment more than it is a viewpoint I really want to defend. It's mostly a way to engage in the subject rather than a core belief if that makes sense.)

That makes it one of the religions easiest to apply to everyday life and widely broadly giving it appeal to billions across the globe even in this age of skepticism and science.

But it also makes it a religion fraught with issues from the get-go. The Bible was made 400 years after Jesus by a council arbitrarily deciding what to include. The books included were all written 60 - 120+ years after Jesus lived, and translated numerous times. That's a lot of men involved and no proof of divine, yet there are far too many who to this day still believe The Bible to be the Word Of God, despite their bibles being translated and transcribed numerous times and compiled and recompiled by men who had an agenda fueling their decisions.

So I do wanna delve into how to deconstruct the religion and why I do believe it's possible to reconstruct it. I personally don't follow Christianity, since I am very much a witch believing in no specific religion but with my brand of spirituality pooling from my own experiences, beliefs, and what resonates with me from numerous cultures and research, but a lot of my beliefs are Christianity-adjacent so I have an interest in showing how while the text of Christianity doesn't hold, part of the spirit in the most important messages does.

Jesus might have just been a man, but he left a legacy that could arguably be called divine, and I would love to delve into it more.

But alas.

For now, that's it. I've been writing this blog for five hours. The first subject about me, I covered pretty well. The second about my idea of reform for a better internet, kinda got across. The third about religion...didn't really get done, but I've done my best to at least touch on the subject, with the hope of doing more some other time.

​Thanks for reading.