Saturday, June 26, 2021

No One Is To Blame





We all got our COVID vaccines. For many of the reasons John Green talked about in his video last week, I have not wanted to talk much about vaccination. This is because I understand both sides, personally. We have a history of vaccine reactions, sensory integration issues, and seizure in our home. We also know more people than we should, statistically speaking, who had Guillain-Barre after vaccinations pre-COVID. I have also heard all the arguments, and I worked in science long enough to know how things can sometimes work in that industry.


I figured it is time to speak out because I met a new neighbor who is a retired dentist who seemed like he was kind of confused himself and said that “they passed a law that we are not allowed to say anything against ‘them’ and that “they can now go through our text messages and email.” I couldn’t get him to elaborate on who “them” was, and he did mention that his wife would not be happy if she knew he was talking to me about it, which made me wonder all sorts of things about how our beliefs about things can be sources of shame in our relationships. I didn’t want to add to anyone’s fear of the vaccine unnecessarily, so I have been keeping my mouth shut until I know how my family is doing. I was under no illusion that we would be able to continue on indefinitely alone. While my sudden illness in 2019 had the effect of cutting us off from many people, I didn’t anticipate how isolating it would be.


I understand why people are afraid of the vaccine. They have a right to be. For people who have not noticed a change in their cognition after illness or vaccine, of course they’re not going to think these things are a big deal. But to have a neurological illness is torture. Just like you can’t explain to a woman what it is like to push seven and a half pounds of human being through her vagina before she does it herself, you can’t explain what constant vertigo, arm and leg weakness, fatigue, and feeling cold as pain is like to a person who has not experienced it.


We had reactions to the COVID vaccine. I’m not sure I can say they were severe, because they were different than actually having COVID. They were like apples and oranges, neither particularly enjoyable, but the virus itself was way worse for us. Well-meaning liberal people have shrugged our vaccine reactions off saying, “Well, that must mean you’re getting good immunity.” As far as I know, we know nothing about the severity of reaction to vaccines and how it may be connected to effective immunity. Besides, if they *didn’t* have a reaction, what does that mean for *their* immunity? It may mean nothing at all. I never had a positive COVID test when I was ill, yet I lost my sense of smell and had many other symptoms which distinguish COVID from other illnesses.


My son had a reaction to the MMR vaccine when he was an infant. As a scientist, it has been excruciating having to deal with other health professionals who have never experienced a severe vaccine reaction, which can go on for months or even years because medicine does not know how to treat it. That being said, I am not an immunologist, and I am going off what I have heard from other immunologists and what my gut has told me that what we understand about immunity from the cursory survey I got through molecular biology, biochemistry and cellular biology courses. Our understanding of how to prevent infectious disease at the immunological level is poor at best. We do, however, have a pretty good track record when it comes to life-extending band-aid pharmaceutical interventions, and I think we are missing that opportunity with COVID, because we place too much trust in vaccines as an encompassing solution.


I don’t like being experimented on without my consent, yet because I am female, that’s essentially what has always been done to me.


Much to my frustration, my husband was digging around in the medical literature last year and became convinced that because he saw evidence of gene splicing activity involving furin and coronavirus before the pandemic, that it was a lab leak. Because I had worked on engineering retroviruses and was trained to work in a BSL4 lab, I knew it was possible. When I was in grad school, we had a unit on genetic engineering and ethics in my cellular biology class which informed us about the problems Monsanto had generated in Argentina (this was in the mid-90’s) which had wiped out most of the indigenous corn. Our professor made no bones about the fact that genetic engineering technology came with great responsibility, and that it was possible that humans actually weren’t intelligent enough to make good decisions about how and when to use it. A few years later, I would find myself cutting up pieces of DNA to insert into murine leukemia virus as therapy for osteoporosis in mice for the government. Animals don’t really get out of test facilities, and there are a lot of protocols in place to make sure that doesn’t happen. Many of the animals used for research are genetically engineered and so we need to keep them from the wild populations of animals. People in PETA don’t understand that, let alone the damage their precious vinyl does to the environment over the more sustainable leather that was good enough for the people who came before us. Letting genetically altered animals out of lab facilities undermines the work they are doing to protect natural species. Given what I knew, I figured a lab worker probably contracted the virus. There are a lot of ways to goof as a lab worker, including accidentally sticking oneself with a needle. But I sure wasn’t going to say anything to push forward any conspiracies because the government at that point had no ability to make a calm and cool decision about anything. I’m pretty sure I am right about that.


Furthermore, I understand how the scientific community works, and also that if we looked hard enough, we would probably find information tying the intellectual property back to the United States somehow. We invent a lot of technologies, and we also educate people from many other countries. Scientists work in multi-center global teams. Most of the people I encountered in my career as a molecular biologist were Chinese. Many of them had gone to medical school in China. I don’t know how it was at other research Universities in the United States, or if this was a phenomenon that Colorado, Louisiana, Ohio and California shared. This is not some sort of conspiracy on the part of the U.S. intelligentsia; I know from having worked as staff in a molecular biology department that American citizens just weren’t applying for grad school positions in science 25-30 years ago, because it was a job for nerds.


Nevermind that beyond the stigma of it being a job for nerds, if one doesn’t do a postdoc position, many jobs pay so poorly that a job at a convenience store sometimes pays more. That was my experience. Even after I had found a “good paying” job, it still was barely enough to cover childcare, and that is a big reason I left the profession. And, I realize now that most of the time I was working with volatiles I needed to be using a respirator, but at that time we weren’t aware of that. I never had one until I begged for one because I was pregnant, and that was only because I called the California Teratogen Registry to ask specifically about the things I was working with. There were no specific advisories for the things I was using at the time, only the advice to take precautions if the mother was feeling unwell, which I think was probably the reason I called, even if I wasn’t aware of it at the time.


That all being said, I want to make sure that I say that the effects of long-haul COVID are much, much worse than the vaccine. Yes, I wish we had something better than vaccines, too, for sensitive individuals. There are so many problems with relying on vaccination to protect ourselves from infectious disease. For most “vaccine preventable illnesses” the burden has mostly been on developing children, whereas adults can carry disease silently as immunity from vaccines is usually not permanent. Only people working in the healthcare industry might bother to get titers done to see if boosters are needed, because they are costly. So with COVID, the shoe is kind of on the other foot - the elderly population at risk has to be protected by the voluntary actions of people who would otherwise be unaffected by the disease and develop natural immunity. Getting compliance out of the adult population is extremely difficult, as evidenced by our sub-50% COVID vaccination rate in the United States. Vaccination only ever worked because children are not given a choice. The symptoms of autism and spectrum disorders are subtle enough that it would be easy to attribute them to something else.


I understand this perhaps more than most people because I took the time alone to really comb through my perceptions. Essentially, I took up the study of phenomenology which is the in-depth study of consciousness. I studied my perceptions and how they changed, and I learned how to control my consciousness to feel happier. I paid attention to the things that altered my perceptions negatively and how they altered other aspects of my health. I learned a lot about how our environments conspire to produce different states of consciousness. My sensory issues are greatly affected by metabolic stress, which includes toxic exposures, emotional stress, and illness. They were absolutely affected by the vaccine, but as I am addressing my mitochondrial health, I am slowly improving.


What our government needs to understand is that we will never get COVID under control relying on vaccination alone, because of the impossibility of adult compliance. Until people understand that the vaccine reaction is preferable to long-haul COVID, and children are vaccinated, we will continue to be bothered by COVID, and its effects will burden our society and our healthcare system.


Leave it to me to figure out how to voice several unpopular opinions at once! I might as well put a target on my head.


Here is the most recent paper I could find on what we know about vaccine reactions. The researchers do state that a significant number of cases of vaccine-induced epilepsy (which is rare) were in people who had "pre-existing neurologic or neurodevelopmental abnormalities."


COVID shed an interesting light on these things for me. Early on I, along with many other scientists, were keeping a close eye on the discovery of the mechanism of the virus’ action. I wondered if we know it binds to the ACE2 receptor and we know the sequence for that, why we didn’t come up with some therapy taking advantage of that knowledge? Preventing viral entry into the cells in the first place, while giving the immune system a chance to recognize myriad targets on the native virus would mean the body would be given a chance to develop proper immunity, before the virion were ultimately phagocytosed and eliminated. I’m willing to bet an approach like this would have actually addressed most of the symptoms, too.


Theoretically, we should be able to come up with a safe biologically-based substrate to block the entry of any virus into cells, rather than having to work with the complex immune system and exposing so many scientists to native virus. If it’s furin that is helping COVID enter cells, why do we not have some furin-based technology to block entry?


The Salk Institute has found that COVID ultimately does its damage by causing mitochondrial fractionation. The mitochondria are what make energy in the cell. The part of COVID that does this is actually the spike protein itself. The different vaccines contain different portions of the spike protein. Pfizer is the mRNA encoding just the spike protein. Moderna is a few fragments, and also mRNA. I had the Pfizer vaccine, and my post-vaccination reaction was very similar to having COVID. I had more psychiatric issues, however, which I think has to do with the nanoparticles helping the spike protein cross the blood brain barrier.


When I say psychiatric issues, I am going to broadly say that it made me anxious and afraid. More than just the background COVID situation was making me. I’m not exactly sure what was making me anxious or afraid, but I had to meditate all the time. My sister is a doctor who ended up with long-haul COVID and she was telling me she was pretty sure it messes with the autonomic nervous system somehow. When she said this I had been reading about Polyvagal Theory and was trying to be more mindful of my autonomic state.


I need to explain what the “nanoparticles” are, because my next door neighbor was totally brainwashed by conservative propaganda. It is possible to make fake cells using fatty acids. We call these micelles. They are “fake” because they don’t have any cellular machinery like mitochondria, ribosomes, or golgi apparati, so eventually they will just degrade. With the fake cells, it is possible to insert different augmented cellular components and see how it affects the concentration of various things inside and outside the micelle. Essentially, the mRNA in the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are packaged in these micelles. The lipids they used in the micelles for the vaccines were man-made, and not a lot of testing has been done on them. I am wondering if some of the symptoms I had from vaccination were actually from those man-made lipids because I am sensitive to oxidizable lipids. There shouldn’t have been that many, though. It really puzzles me how such a tiny amount of something could make me feel so crappy. But anyway, these lipids do end up being eliminated through the liver completely after 40-60 days.


Anyway, I’m really thankful for the vaccines. I read the paper the European Medicines Agency prepared for approval of the Pfizer vaccine, and it’s nothing short of miraculous that it came together the way it did. I do hope we do not use this as an excuse to discontinue research on other methods of prevention, because the virus is surprisingly small and elegant, and it has given us a good model to work with which might benefit our approach to other infectious disease. It’s pretty clear that at least in the case of COVID, mitochondrial support is critical. I think if more people understood what this was, our population might actually become healthier overall, and we may be less susceptible to infectious disease.


The whole reason we have vaccination is to protect the weakest among us. But what if it’s not doing that? What if it is doing further harm to certain people, overall? We really need some alternatives, and we need to be more understanding about people’s concern about consent. Neurological illness is life altering. I have seen people use vaccination as an excuse to behave fairly recklessly, specifically around the flu season. In Asia, it is customary to wear masks when one is not feeling well, and it’s not cool to show up to gatherings sick. But people here have a runny nose and write it off as allergies, because we’re too proud to admit we may have gotten a virus. This strange American ethos we have around hiding our weaknesses, casting blame, and failing to listen when others are hurting is just going to perpetuate divisiveness.

You'll Feel Like Yourself Again





A few years ago, my sister-in-law asked me if I would like to see a psychic with her. She had seen one in Florida and was feeling like she needed to see one again, and wondered if I knew any. I did end up knowing a few, but not in that capacity, so I set up some readings for us with the one which seemed the most convenient.


My sister-in-law had her reading first, and from the waiting room, I thought she was laughing the whole time, but when she came out, her eyes were red and watery. I entered the room and sat down across from the woman I had once discussed homeschooling kids on the autism spectrum with. While I had once been a member of the Skeptics Society, I was never an atheist. I had experience with precognition and had also had near death experiences.


I now know that there are other neuroscientists and even doctors who have had these experiences. Not much attention has been paid to the experiments that were being run at Stanford, MIT and Harvard in the 1960’s, but they are critical to understanding psychic phenomena. The CIA was involved in these experiments, which were about remote viewing and altered states of consciousness produced with LSD.


Around that time I was using cannabis for relaxation. I had never thought about states of consciousness before, but I did realize that cannabis produced a more preferable state of consciousness. I had been wondering about this idea of mind over matter that I had tried myself for years, but which sometimes failed. When I was depressed I received a lot of ableist advice about how my lifestyle might predispose me to depression. I call that “mind over matter” because a conscious choice has to be made to not let matter interfere with one’s happiness. But I knew people who were doing everything right and still battling more illness than I had. When I adopted the standard advice of medicine, I was depressed and tired, too. Cannabis helped in a number of ways. It helped me feel my body. Sometimes I am tense, and I don’t even know it until I actually relax. Cannabis helps me relax. It showed me where I was mentally by slowing my thoughts down and helping me identify cognitive distortions, too. The trouble with that, though, is that once one identifies them in oneself, it’s hard not to see them everywhere else.


In my psychic reading, I sat down on an easy chair across from the reader. The room was decorated with Eastern ephemera. She had oracle cards out in the waiting area. She asked if I had any specific questions, and I probably said no. Somehow we got on the subject of my grandmother, who said she had a long death and that it “would have been better to get hit by a bus.” She said this in a Long Island accent, and there is no reason she should have known any of those things. I was told that I needed to write about narcissism, and that my grandfather was a narcissist. I don’t really want to get into that here, but just know that we didn’t know him. He passed away in 2015, and things have been too crazy to reach out to his kids.


Around this time, I was chatting twice a week with a sculptor friend I had studied with about why the world is the way it is. I lived for these conversations. He had opened his class the previous semester with a study of Giacometti and existentialism, and I think that is probably when I fell into the quicksand, although it wasn’t obvious at first. Shortly after that, I started having dreams about him all the time. We cannot control our dreams. So, during the semester I took his class and thenceforward I would wake up most mornings feeling fairly hot and bothered, and totally not sure how I was going to manage myself around him, and that went on for three semesters, but I was only his student for the first one.


I was like a puppy. I hung on his every word. I was simultaneously feeling embarrassed, guilty and loving it at the same time. I was really excited to tell him what happened during my reading, because I had asked him if he knew any psychics. A few weeks earlier, I had given him my copy of Joseph Campbell’s Hero With A Thousand Faces, and a note asking him if he’d like to go for coffee. He had said he didn’t think of me as a student. He was always saying things which could have been interpreted as flirting, but were just statements. It really didn’t help matters. Ultimately, I couldn’t handle the ambiguity of the whole thing, but I was having a heckuva time trying to figure out what to do. So I went for coffee with him and told him my marriage was falling apart. He didn’t know what to tell me.


I’m not sure that was the truth. Maybe the truth was more like I was falling apart. That’s kind of what my art was saying. He and I had kind of connected over that - how difficult it is to be an artist. Not to be taken seriously by others because they don’t think you work as hard as they do, because you don’t earn as much, and art is unimportant.


I once had a short-lived career as a scientist. That makes it difficult to talk to a lot of people, because much of mainstream advice is shaped by policy rather than science, and most people don’t know enough science to understand why that is a problem or recognize when that has happened. There are a lot of reasons that didn’t work out, but the primary ones were my chemical sensitivity and the cost of childcare. I think chemical sensitivity was always a problem and that it is a major factor in my life. My problems with expressive and receptive aphasia and memory are known sequelae of exposure to many chemicals. I’ve had to do a lot to forgive myself for not continuing on in my profession. It was hard to be stuck at home during the pandemic just trying to figure out how to feed us while I was trying to regain my speech. It was really humbling. I hear about what other people did, and I want to feel like I contributed during this time, too. But I also know that everything I say and all my actions change things, and as a scientist there is even more pressure on me to say and do the right things.


I’m not sure that my marriage was actually falling apart, but I was feeling less connected to my husband. I was reading about narcissism and covert manipulation and was recognizing things I read in myself and others around me. It was like the more materialistic people were, the more narcissistic they were. I had always considered myself an anti-materialist because in my mind, my stuff was not more important than another person’s health or life. But what I learned was that I had people in my close inner circle who felt the opposite. These people tended to only talk about their stuff, where they were going, who they were going to see, and what was happening with those people. It was doing nothing to solve the problems of the world. And it was keeping me bound to a world of thought where what brand of jeans I wear was more important than working toward equanimity.


Well before Joseph Campbell or the coffee shop, the sculptor told me he’s never cared about weight on women.


At the time I was also trying to lose weight for my health. I was doing it really carefully because I had lost weight before in ways that affected my health negatively. I had also read about Ancel Keys’ starvation studies and what extreme fasting can do to metabolism. All I was doing was trying to eat 60% of my calories from carbohydrate (to take the load off my kidneys). I was avoiding polyunsaturates. I was also trying to walk 3-4 times a week, at least 20 minutes. I had some great body weight exercises I had learned from Christy, my personal trainer, which I also tried to do three times a week. I didn’t really care about losing weight as much as I wanted to feel well. I knew he could tell that I was losing weight, because he obliquely brought it up once, when I had lost about 30 pounds. My goal at that point wasn’t to lose more weight, but to maintain a healthy lifestyle and see where my weight was naturally. I had recognized that a lot of my metabolic damage was from dieting, and so for me the primary focus was my mental health.


It was frustrating to have to diet, because I had watched other people around me constantly going on fad diets and seeing how it affected the way they interacted with others. They were often less patient and overly particular about things that didn’t matter. I think the kind of dieting that makes people pretty on the outside but ugly on the inside is a big problem we have in this country. I have also had to navigate a lot of food intolerance issues with myself and my kids, and so I worry about eating disorders. We already have a fairly limited diet because of genetic factors. I’ve gone through periods where I try to open up my eating repertoire, and that always results in me getting sick.


Anyway, we talked about other things during our coffee, including his experiences with altered states of consciousness, and what we’re going to do when we grow up. He expressed worry about his own future, and I broke down, telling him I thought he was perfect just the way he was. He couldn’t look at me after I said that, and it was probably one of the only times I noticed him do something like that. Ultimately he needed to go work on his art, so we rode back to school in his truck. He dropped me off by the building we usually were in, and before we parted ways, we had a little side hug in the car, and said we would see each other later.


Sometime later, I asked my husband if he would be willing to learn the tantra with me. I thought perhaps if we added some spice to our sex life my feelings for this other man would cool down. But he was perfectly satisfied with our sex life and too tired to learn anything new, and so he said no.


The sculptor had to move away. I tried to connect him to people in my network to see if he could get help or opportunities, but nothing panned out. After he left, I made a couple other guy friends. I was still really hung up on him and married, and so I wasn’t attracted to them that way. I just can’t handle that much complication. It was nice to be around guys, though. I’ll be honest. Being a stay at home mother hasn’t been easy for me because I have never gotten along as well with women. We can be so hypersensitive. With guys, what you see is what you get for the most part.


It appears that I have lost several female friends over the course of the pandemic, and I can only attribute it to pettiness. It’s actually mortifying to me, because these are people with whom I discussed how what’s wrong with the world is people being petty. They are all people who had discussed with me struggles with depression and anxiety. Well, I can only hope that they just don’t have time for me because they are having too much fun.


I had to stop seeing people during the pandemic. I knew we were really vulnerable to the virus because of the water heater problems. It meant that I couldn’t support the businesses of people I cared about. I was having constant panic attacks, which was partially from stress, and partially from our backdrafting water heater. It took all of my energy to calm down. I felt like I was going to die.


Luckily my husband knows a woman who is a biochemist and a nurse who had struggled with the sort of tachycardia I was experiencing, so I had someone to email with who had some idea what I was going through. Everything was so much worse during the end of my menstrual cycle and around ovulation. It was so hard to not lose my mind. For years, people hadn’t listened to me when I said I needed to rest during those times, and I paid for it.


Ultimately, it would be these factors that would lead to me purchasing Diane Richardson’s Tantric Sex and Menopause, and my husband and I learning the tantra.


I’ve been following John Green’s vlogbrothers channel, and listening to him talk about how he has managed his anxiety over the course of the pandemic. I’ve been trying to think of a way to reach out to him because of what I’ve learned about anxiety. I’ve thought of all these angles - that I began writing in the third person and it altered the course of time, that my sister is his wife’s doppelganger, and that he went to college with my brother-in-law. I mean, it’s hard to not look like a creep when I say what I need to say to people about mental health and its inverse relationship to pleasure. My way out was through the tantra. Get your game on, man! That’s what I want to say to him. Also, I want to say that even if he doesn’t think he was, he was writing in code. That’s how the unconscious works.


Wilhelm Reich was an overlooked student of Sigmund Freud who postulated that sexual energy was healing. His writings, along with those of Timothy Leary, were important in starting the sexual revolution of the 1960’s. The most controversial thing Leary wrote which threatened the religious establishment is that we are all connected by the subconscious, and that we receive simultaneous insights through it. These insights, or Starseed Signals give us guidance in how to proceed with our lives. Reich was trying to detect subtle energies that the body makes. Eastern philosophy has tried to describe these energies. Reich attempted to connect this energy with both intelligence and compassion and felt strongly that sexuality needed to be destigmatized in order to combat frigidity and violent thinking in people. His philosophy arose from being in Vienna for both World War I and World War II and being a conscientious objector.


When I was hanging out around my sculptor friend, I felt this incredible energy. I always felt relaxed around him. I could tell he had said things to put me at ease. He always seemed to know the perfect thing to say. I figured this was because he had learned transcendental meditation. He recommended a teacher to me, but ultimately, I found a different way “in” as they say. This teacher was really expensive (over USD$1000), which made no sense to me. Why does classism have to be a barrier to enlightenment? Another friend was attending yoga nidra classes, which were $15. I have another friend who is a young man (don’t get the wrong idea) who is interested in these things but could never afford that, so as I was learning, I tried to share what I could. Of course this Wilhelm Reich stuff is pretty weird, so I haven’t shared it with him. He has come along far enough in his studies that he can feel the energy, and had intuited that with enough people it could be used for healing purposes.


Before studying the tantra, I studied reiki healing. And I had been farting around with the Tarot, and took a Tarot class.


You’d think that would be where the rabbit hole would end.


I turned down working for Dr. Komisaruk on female orgasm not just because I couldn’t imagine how I would talk to people in my community about what I did, but also because when the grad student showing us around stopped at a nearby gas station in Newark, there was a man with a gun. Just a few years earlier, I had an experience at a gas station in Denver where a man drew a gun on a homeless guy who wanted to wash my windows. I knew I wanted to feel safe wherever I lived. I had been in New Orleans for three years, and had lived in central Denver for eighteen. Southeastern Ohio studying Alzheimer’s, quilting and fishing on the weekends seemed like what I needed at the time.


I feel like despite my choice back then, the Universe sort of forced me into learning about sex drive. Mine has come and gone over the years. For me, its presence is an indicator of overall wellbeing. And it totally seems to be one of those “use it or lose it” things.


One of my favorite subjects is Jeanne Calment. She lived to be 122 years old, and even met Vincent Van Gogh. She used to eat a kilogram of chocolate every week. She outlived her husband, children and grandchildren. She always lived alone, and never owned a car. The major tip that I learned from reading her biography was that she never suffered fools wisely. It is my observation that there are a lot of suffered fools out there who stay in a state of morose thinking because they deny themselves actual relaxation. When one’s life gets a little overly complicated, it’s a bit painful. The easiest way to transcend that layer of psychological mud is to make one’s existence simple. This is certainly a helluva lot easier on the environment. I don’t remember anything about Jeanne Calment’s relationship with sexual pleasure being mentioned, but I do remember that she smoked until she was 114. She stopped because her nursing home started requiring smokers to go outside.


But who really wants to live that long and be alone the whole time?


After my sculptor friend moved, I found my uncle who had been put up for adoption through DNA. We had known of his existence because we had his baby photo, but we didn’t know who or where he was. He’s an artist and he does landscapes very similar to my style. He’s also a poet and into meditation. I knew a lot of this journey, from reading Joseph Campbell, was about me more deeply understanding my role as a woman, and my family story contributed to that understanding. The Primal Wound was an important theme in our reunion; my mother, her sister and brother all discussed what it was like to grow up without family. We were all weird in similar ways. Nobody was a materialist. They were all avid readers and incredibly progressive in their thinking. My other uncle, who I hadn’t seen since I was in middle school was a huge fan of John Waters. My cousin was employed at the David Zwirner gallery. My “new” uncle was also a book reseller. They had participated in the 60’s counter culture when my mom and dad were part of the Air Force.


At another point, my cousin had informed us that her grandparents (my mother’s mother and her last husband) had been swingers. Again, this was not something that was new to me, as I learned that there is a swinger’s network in my parents’ neighborhood. I am a long time ally, so this didn’t bother me. By the time I was sitting in the hotel room listening to what my cousin had to say, I was already all too familiar with the pain of being a stay at home mother and having societal expectations to uphold. Monogamy wasn’t feeling right to me. Sometimes the problems we had felt bigger than we could handle, and we knew from having other homeschooling families as friends that we weren’t the only ones facing the problems of isolated child rearing and property ownership.


It was some time after that I started writing in the third person in order to get into my subconscious. I ended up just writing a book about my daily life in which I asked the sculptor to marry me. It’s certainly the craziest thing I have ever done in my life. I wanted to show him that I knew what was important, but that I also knew how to blend in. It came together really easily because I wrote about the struggles I had in doing it, which was mostly communication struggles I had with my husband and issues with getting my chores done which are now largely tackled.


We were just telling my daughter that being an adult means constantly feeling like you’re behind the 8-ball, and it’s doing a lot of pointless things. My kids missed out on the conditioning that the educational system provides in this regard.


This life is more than just a read through.


I wrote in my crazy novel about how my sculptor friend helped awaken my awareness of the kundalini energy. I suppose it was a little dramatic, but the point that I was trying to make was that I felt his job was important. That he was a William Blake of sorts. Understanding the energy was important. I knew that there was something about the energy between us that was special, but I didn’t know how to talk about it. I didn’t know what the energy was until I learned reiki. Ultimately, I’ve been trying to maximize that energy. When it’s flowing well, I’m calm and I feel creative and hopeful. I think meditation helps move lymph or activate analgesia or something, because it certainly helps with that vital energy. My husband is doing it, too, and we find we are much better connected than we used to be. We have been able to read each other’s minds a little bit which is amazing.


In Christopher Ryan’s TED Talk, he mentions how in humans, chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas, there is one live birth for every 1,000 matings. Also, these species all give birth on average once every 3-4 years. This means the average great ape is having sex once a day. Ryan postulates that sex must serve some other function than just reproduction in these species, and that it must be to facilitate social connection. After reading the health benefits of orgasm in Dr. Komisaruk’s book, I think its function is much greater than that, and if more people knew about the health and mental health benefits of orgasm, they would pay more attention to their sexual health.


I was really open back in those days. My friends and I talked about how we managed our sexual desire. We just knew that sexual satisfaction was an important facet to our lives and wanted to give each other tips. On my end, it all felt very Grace and Frankie, so I’m hoping that nobody took it as more than that.


I mentioned that I made a couple male friends after the sculptor moved away, and one was my friend’s boyfriend. I was under the impression that it was platonic. We hung out and talked “stoner talk” which was essentially about what we saw in the A space. He had been abused and struggled with anxiety. We always had really interesting conversations. He reached out to me, but I was so sick I was unable to see anyone at that time. They have since broken up. Anyway, I mention this because I was having the kind of conversations that I had with the sculptor with him, except I didn’t feel the physical attraction. This guy came along when I was mourning that loss.


Eventually my husband was able to fill that need. And from the standpoint of most people on earth, he’s all I really need. I wish things were that simple.


By the way she looked, I should have calmed down.


Living with a disability is strange. The sculptor had asked me what had gotten in the way of me doing things. I honestly didn’t think anything had gotten in the way, and that I was simply where I was on my journey. Furthermore, I had told him that I felt ambition was evil. Then I played his little game with him by writing my books. It was fun. I wouldn’t change it. I enjoyed questioning reality with him.


I wonder if my husband will remember this time. How will we know if he did? He still swore to kill Gregor. I do hope he is not serious.


Stop calling me a dirty hoe.


In early Spring of 2020 I was having panic attacks whenever the water heater would backdraft into my studio space. I got kind of desperate. I had to lay down all the time, like Frida Kahlo. Well, not that bad. I could at least get up and go to the bathroom or spend time watching television. I’ve been on bedrest a lot. It will drive a person mad. I was doing whatever I could to combat the madness. I made a lot of art. I wrote a lot. I learned a lot about myself. I learned how my mental states correlate with my physical states, and what my basic needs are. They are really quite simple. It turns out that sexual pleasure reduces my symptoms significantly. It quiets my mind and stops the pain.


The thing about hanging out with the sculptor or my husband when we have no pressure on us is that time totally stops. I think on some level we’re all looking for that person who can help us stop time. Relationships fall apart when we forget how to do it.


When I was having these panic attacks, I had to learn how to stop time for myself. I had to learn the factors that cause them, and what can prevent them. For a while, I thought they were related to blood pressure, but then I got my blood pressure under control by taking CDP choline (I feel like I can go on the record now and say that). They seem to be some sort of seizure disorder. When I get them, my mind gets super busy, and then my body gets really tense before I feel compelled to lay down and take a nap. I’ll take a nap for several hours, and then wake up feeling disoriented. My nap usually involves pretty vivid dreams. Sometimes I will be really sore. This all started during the wildfires last summer. I haven’t had a break from them long enough to seek treatment. I also haven’t had the words to characterize these episodes appropriately until just now. I’ve had to practice expressing what’s going on to my family and friends. Fortunately, there was a production about Harriett Tubman which covered the aspect of her having epilepsy from a head injury inflicted by her master. It was the visions she had during her epileptic fits which enabled her to guide slaves to freedom. I was able to share this movie with my family so they could understand what is going on with me.


I’ve had so many of these episodes that at some point I realized that the dreams I experience during sleep, the samskara I experience during meditation, the visions I have leading up to orgasm, and the near death experiences I had were all trips into the collective consciousness. I’m constantly having visions. Right now, I keep my visions to myself. But there was an article in Neuroscience News showing that about half of dreams are from the past, and the other half are anticipating the future. I am assuming they were talking about precognition. I am assuming there is going to be a mass awakening because of the combined efforts of physicists, neuroscientists, psychologists and light workers, and that more people will discover their hidden psychic gifts.


I thought it might have been diabetes causing the panic attacks because at one point my blood sugars were down in the 70s, but my blood sugar levels and HbA1c are fine. I think it had to do with the water heater and other chemical exposure, and then I just got really unlucky and figured it all out in the middle of a pandemic. In any case, my attacks have gotten much better and I am having fewer problems with word recall. My auditory processing is a bit better, too, and I have been writing and painting again. I let the house go a bit. It’s just too hard to keep up with it. I just try to keep it safe.


To get better, I had to recognize my autonomic nervous system state and be mindful to rest when I was showing early symptoms of distress. This is still hard for me to recognize because I tend to go out of body when I get stressed out and not recognize increases in my breathing rate or muscle tone until it is too late. This can happen even just doing things around the house. So, I have had to reach a place of acceptance with the level of order around here because I just can’t control everything, and I never wanted to.


I am always behind the 8-ball with housework. Sorry if I made your guitar weep. Living in Colorado is kind of like that. It is dusty here and things dry out or freeze and break. The less stuff one has to maintain, the better. One of my good homeschooling mom friends and I have talked extensively about how our job is to maintain the material world in our homes, and how much of our time it takes. We were trying to teach our kids everything, so we accumulated a lot of stuff. Now that they're older, there’s a lot they don’t need. So my friends and I are going through this collective purge as our kids head off to college. Things are rapidly simplifying because even the kids recognize the strain of the stuff. All these things need curation, which requires time and attention.


I’ve been purging my home of things. This is actually how I developed confidence in the Tarot. There were a lot of items I felt like I needed to keep out of guilt and the Tarot kind of helped show me which items those were. Additionally, it helped me to place things in my home so that my movements through it were more efficient. My home is a “Cabinet of Curiosities” as it contains things that tell a story about the world and about being human, because I am curious at heart.


I know that there is a lot of family trauma around chores and division of labor and how we divide tasks by gender, and so I have tried to be pretty relaxed and gentle about these things with my family. When I was young, I was invited to participate in whatever my parents were working on, so I often helped my father with traditionally male tasks like changing tires and oil, working on the roof, and fixing toilets. My dad sometimes cooked for our family.


All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.


The process of writing is kind of like traveling through Dante’s Inferno. There are at least two schools of thought on how to approach it. Some people are like Stephen King and write diligently every day. Others are more like George R.R. Martin and write only when inspired. Inspiration is never a problem for me. I am comfortable traveling my planes of consciousness to see what they yield. Consequently, the Universe granted me an existence which requires a certain amount of maintenance, so I don’t have the choice of writing whenever I want. I don’t have a paying job, so instead I contribute by being the janitor around here (which is actually a big job even though I try to have relaxed standards). The same was true for my mother until she got a poorly paying job working in education so she could be home with us over the summers. In any case, the frustration of having to do as much housework as I do ends up being useful in my process. There is no gold without mud.


My process for writing involves getting into my stream of consciousness and just sitting down and recording it. It’s freewriting. It’s just that it comes together in the end so it seems like it is more organized than it really is. Anyway, I used to get really frustrated back in the day because it was so hard to get the time to do it. Writing kind of helps me take an inventory of my psychological wellbeing. It’s my self therapy. Right now I really need it because I have been ghosted by a bunch of people.


I’m no stranger to having to let people go. Writing is pretty solitary business, anyway. These friends were working women and no doubt since things are opening up again they are probably needing to focus on their businesses. Friendships should be easy. I got a lot of messages about Mean Girls over the weekend. I always think this means one thing, and then it ends up meaning something else. I always held on to this notion that we are all the same inside, but apparently Mean Girls are put here to challenge that idea.


I wrote the story below when I was a freshman in high school after getting dumped by my good friend who ended up going to astronaut training school a few years ago. She had gotten an upper class boyfriend in the cool crowd. And he was upper class in all senses of the word and she and I were not. I apologize for any misrepresentation of what it’s like to live in China. I have no way of knowing if the picture I drew was accurate.


I don’t want to be a Mean Girl. I do understand how my critique of society may have irked some people. I have always had a problem with arbitrary moral authority, and I think because we didn’t understand what the whole point of life was (just to be), we let the Universe be run by it.


My problem with arbitrary rules is so ingrained that I have difficulty staying present when I am reading the directions to board games. I am an outside the box thinker. That involves considering solutions to problems that challenge arbitrary rules. Frigidity is just such a problem. I have a whole new experience with this because of COVID. Frigidity is a real thing. Scientists have actually studied it. Every woman I know has struggled with it, but it’s some sort of dark secret. Furthermore, people vehemently defend the things that cause it - chemicals and unnecessary stress.


If I sit here and type long enough without eating or moving my body, I too will become frigid. It makes getting together with people really difficult because it is so easy to lose track of time, and then I get sick, and by “sick” I mean frigid. Yes, I lose my sense of humor. I have difficulty understanding subtleties. It’s like aging. I’ve been gauging my progress by how I am doing with getting estimates on home repairs. I am so sensitive to the unfairness of the world I need a lot of time to decompress after talking with people. Inevitably they have faced some sort of impossible situation over the past year and are broken on some level from feeling like they had been left high and dry. A lot of us were behind the 8-ball the whole time. My nervous system is still expecting an emergency to pop up at any second.


*****


The morning I originally wrote this, I woke up feeling not so great. Like I mentioned, I had been having to wake up early to have a bowel movement, and this can happen any time from 4:30 onward. I can get back to sleep after them now, which I am thankful for, because there was a time in my life when once that happened, I would not be able to get back to sleep. That morning I woke up sometime around 5:45. I slept in the upstairs bedroom. I know it was a long time before my husband came to bed. He was up with the kids talking about our experiences with the Akashic Space. Like other psychics, we can get in and out really easily. We were kind of explaining our awakenings to them. Anyway, I got tired around 1:30 am and went to bed. If I get up too early, I’ll usually slip on some more clothes (it’s hot upstairs and cold in my studio). I am like a tropical fish these days, which is another symptom of menopause.


I was able to get in a couple more intervals of sleep, under a heat lamp in the studio, but it wasn’t very deep. Infrared light in the 660-880 nm range can help activate the cytochrome p450 complex in mitochondria, so that can help individual cells relax. Cells tend to take on extra fluid when they are under metabolic stress (which happens in darkness or under blue light). I wake up feeling rather tense. It sucks. So I spend quite a bit of time meditating in the mornings under a heat lamp and figuring out what I might eat or take to help the feeling go away. If I don’t do this, it’s not good, meaning I’m likely to have a panic attack or seizure later. This morning I changed my routine a bit with respect to what I ate and took.


It’s important to note that I have been under the care of a physician and had labs run recently and they are all normal. I have also told my doctor that I am doing most of these things. I haven’t had the energy or attention to write these things down before this time. I’ve come a really long way with respect to the expressive and receptive aphasia - my recovery is nothing short of miraculous. I had a few brief setbacks, which at the time I found really annoying, but the general progress has still been in a positive direction.


Sometimes I wake up feeling nauseated. It feels a lot like morning sickness, but I am not pregnant, just going through menopause. There is very little with respect to conventional medical advice on how to handle this. I haven’t ever thrown up, but I can get the dry heaves. Nausea is almost always caused by elevated serotonin. I have asked my physician for some ondansetron, but I don’t think she has prescribed it this way before. So instead, I started treating myself for the excess serotonin by taking charcoal before bed. After 7 or 7:30 every morning, I have a little bowl of yogurt with some honey.


It usually takes me a while to get up and running in the morning. So this morning, instead of meditating on every little thing, I decided just to throw the kitchen sink at the problem. I keep some things down in the studio, so right away I used some topical magnesium oil, guafenesin and cimetidine. Magnesium relaxes cells similarly to infrared light. I take guafenesin because I get mucousy and it affects my breathing. I take cimetidine because it is a treatment for some types of porphyria and seems to help me a lot, not just with heartburn (which as far as I know has nothing to do with porphyria), but with my panic attacks. It actually slows the cytochrome P450 complex.


Then, I had a little bit of indica and stood at the window listening to the sounds outside for a while. This was around the time I realized I needed to try a different approach with my breakfast. I decided to take a stack of the things that have been helping me the most lately, eat my bowl of yogurt with honey, but also have warm milk with glucose, sugar, rhodiola, ashwaganda, lion’s mane and marshmallows. This is usually the drink I have in the evenings before I go to bed. I have a lot of the same genetics as my mom, and she sleeps pretty well. She has always had warm milk before bed since she was a kid. I read that most sleep problems in older people have to do with cortisol levels rising too much by 4 am or so. Having some carbohydrate before bed can suppress cortisol release. Note that my sleep problems have to do with gut motility. I had my cortisol tested for my renal workup and it was fine. Here are the supplements I took in addition to my food.


Aspirin

Vitamin K2

CDP choline

Benfotiamine

Calcium gluconate

Progesterone in mixed tocopherols


I take aspirin because it also relaxes the cells like magnesium. It’s also a mitochondrial uncoupler, which means it can help the mitochondria make heat without having to use ATP. Whenever I take this, I always take Vitamin K2 because aspirin can thin the blood and I am coumadin sensitive (meaning I bruise easily with blood thinners because there is a defect in my vitamin K metabolism, and I can’t convert K1 to K2). So don’t argue with me about eating kale because my body doesn’t benefit from it the way someone else’s might.


I take CDP choline because of something I discovered by accident during the pandemic. I believe that taking this has enabled me to go off my blood pressure medication. When I started taking it, I immediately noticed a decrease in the frequency of my panic attacks. I have a lot of writing on this subject which I can post later. My blood pressure is often in the 110’s/60’s and I have been off my medication since May 25, 2020. My initial excitement about this came in February, but when our dishwasher failed and spewed smoke into our home, my blood pressure went up again and I questioned whether what I was doing was working.


I wasn’t the only one who had health effects from the dishwasher incident. It produced the same kinds of effects as the water heater backdrafting, but we’re all more self aware now, so we got along a lot better. I am rather tired of hearing people say they are not chemically sensitive. The effects chemicals have on people and animals are actually pretty well studied, and people aren’t immune. It’s just that one’s genetics determines the outcome of the poisoning, and for some people, the effects are more subtle. I found this information buried in textbooks for neuropsychiatrists. This is not information that should be buried in a specialist’s textbook for fear of industry retribution. This affects every living thing on the planet.


Years ago I had this neuropathy in my feet. This is when I was trying lots of different supplements. I knew neuropathy was a feature of diabetes, and had found information that benfotiamine could be effective for that kind of neuropathy. On a whim, I took it and my neuropathy totally disappeared. This was a long time ago, so I don’t know if I had labs drawn at that time. In any case, my fasting blood sugar was a little elevated in the beginning of the year, and I thought it might have something to do with the panic attacks, so I decided to try benfotiamine again. It is definitely helping. It is a fat soluble form of Vitamin B1, or thiamine, which is critical for [nerve transmission]


*****


Yes, that’s kind of how it goes. I had an interruption, and then the whole day went along. There was a big nap in the middle, and my husband made fried rice for dinner, and I watered the garden while he turned and moved the compost. At some point I worked on a piece of art that I made about 18 months ago when I was working with acrylic and before I had purchased air quality meters. I used hot glue on it. I got a terrible migraine after working with the hot glue.


I was trying to make something that looked like stars or a nebula and working in transparent layers incorporating Pearl-X (sparkles!). I am obsessed with incorporating shimmering elements into my art. Ultimately, I think my art is making a commentary on what is missing from the Ghost In the Machine. My approach to the layers was mimicking the CMYK process used by printers. Each work I did informed the next and they were a record of my stream of consciousness. Each one imparted a lesson to me about some quality of stoicism and perseverance. I got to understand the therapeutic quality of art on a very deep level - how healing it is to be able to have a vague vision of something and playfully shape it. What’s special about the works is that they are not reproducible with our current technologies and their qualities as they interact with the viewer’s eye and external lighting sources.


They are tools for divination. That was the whole point of the abstract impressionist movement and the work of Pollock and Rothko. I had to write a paper on Pollock and found information that he was seeing a Jungian therapist at his own insistence, and had an obsession with depth psychology. It is THE rabbit hole. They were just making their own Rorschach Tests.


I realized what “woke” really means this week. It’s the awareness that there are different planes of existence in the mind, and the understanding of the important differences between them.


I sort of gave up on that piece of art when I realized I couldn’t peel off the hot glue. I was trying to use it as a masking fluid. I should have just used masking fluid. Anyway, I found it in the garage last weekend and decided to see if the hot glue would come off, and it would with some elbow grease. I ended up leaving marks from the scraping, which I liked. It had been sitting on my drawing table for a few days in its scratched up state and I didn’t know what to do to it, so I added some lines with ink pencils.


I spend quite a bit of time perusing a major online book retailer’s offerings. I started this years ago because of homeschooling, and now it is informing my understanding of myself. Last night I found a bunch of cool books about sexuality, and also some on parapsychology. There are books on the neuroscience of religious experiences as well.


I saw that the last chapter in Dr. Komisaruk’s book was about Orgasm and Consciousness. He wondered if we would ever be able to explain the god experience orgasm brings, and he referred to the 5D. I decided to reach out to him with my story to see if he would like to talk.


I have also tried reaching out to a choline researcher.


I ended up hitting the sack pretty late again last night. My intention was to go to bed earlier, but my son came down to do a meditation and we ended up listening to a crazy playlist instead. We were both feeling really itchy and wiggly.


I think I probably took two more aspirin over the course of the day, and another choline, and I used more topical magnesium. I think I took a B6 complex around lunch time. I ate pretty consistently yesterday. I didn’t end up cooking dinner, but I did make my husband and I braunschweiger sandwiches for lunch.


There’s a whole layer of stuff going on in my life that I don’t write about, and that’s the stuff that is going on with our household discussions. We talk a lot about politics and philosophy.


*****


My work is informed by the paranormal. That’s the best way to explain it. Like Kandinsky, I receive a lot of my messages through music. The music that I listen to creates an echo in my mind, and because I almost always have a song in my head, I’ve noticed over time that the song often relates to what I am doing or something that is about to happen. It took a while to figure out the code, but it turned out that a lot of it had to do with ways I had misheard or misunderstood lyrics over the years. That’s how I discovered I was clairaudient. It was through writing about it and slowing down and noticing. But also I had this weird thing happen where whatever was coming through Spotify was related to my thoughts or discussions. It’s not limited to Spotify.


I primarily get my ideas through meditation. I then ask myself questions about how to proceed using the Tarot. So my art is technically channeled work. I write about this in my second book as “working with Vincent” because my clairsentience is a little borked from porphyria. The Tarot helps me not interpret all the anxiety and upset stomach as warnings, so it helps me to be a bit braver in my experimentation and self-expression while also not wasting materials.


Many of my art explorations came about because I was trying to not let something go to waste, and were an exercise seeing beauty and potential in even the smallest things. Art has been a great gift which has helped me reconnect with the natural world around me and feel like myself again. These connections come from the slowing down required to create peace.

Friday, June 25, 2021

The Lunatic You're Looking For



I am doing okay, but it felt like I had some close calls. I have had a lot of amazing gains in understanding and acceptance about my situation since I first read about living with multiple chemical sensitivity a few years ago when I first had to stay home and stop seeing people. I knew that I would probably face a hard road with others and their general disbelief that their personal health issues might also be explained by chemical exposure or that mine even were. The amount of ableism I have encountered with respect to my chemical sensitivity has been mortifying, which is consistent with what others with MCS have shared. Ableism is when other people use authoritarian thinking to accuse you of creating your limitations through your lifestyle without understanding what it’s like to live with your experience or what options for your wellbeing are actually available and sustainable to you, given your condition. This attitude is based on the myth that we can always choose our own circumstances, and that environment and genetics do not play significant roles in destiny. I would like to argue that they do, and that they are challenges to free will because of the ways they can affect consciousness and creativity. I am fortunate to know other people who have determined that some man-made chemical has affected their health and mental health, so I know I am not alone. It is actually amazing to me, and a little disappointing, how little most primary care physicians I have encountered actually know about neurotoxicology. In this day and age, preventative medicine needs to include toxicology education. I know I tend to go way overboard in my recommendations, but at the very least physicians need to be better educated about how mitochondria work. Kids probably need to receive OSHA training in elementary school.


I’m not against school, for the record - it just wasn’t a good fit for us as eudaimonic life learners who get absorbed in whatever we are learning and who don’t care about brand names. It is difficult for us to mesh with a system that rewards haste and competition when our very nature is to be thoughtful and easygoing, out of necessity, because anxiety triggers health problems for us. There is no such thing as a perfect educational solution, but these were the two most important reasons we decided to homeschool, and what shaped our approach. My kids did not have a formal education until they started attending college, which they both did by age 14. They didn’t need a lot of help from us, and were commended for their ability. I haven’t wanted to talk about this much because I don’t like to make a big deal about awards, but they have both excelled in college (Dean’s List and Phi Theta Kappa), and their colleges required that they demonstrate some erudition in their understanding. People were worried about us having “holes” in our knowledge, and I have argued that even after a public PhD-level education, I still had “holes” - well, I’m going to tell you what they actually were. This is knowledge that if everyone knew would change everything about society for the better.


Young people need to understand the dangers of household cleaners, fuels, adhesives, paints, and exactly what the word “toxic” means so that we can demystify the word, since it seems to have taken on a hoodoo connotation with parents and especially grandparents who may have made a living in industries associated with those products, but is very real. Just hiding things and expecting children to not get into them is like teaching abstinence-only education. Furthermore, I believe a lot of these products are actually habit forming.


Most of my exposures these days are kept to a minimum. Right before my last cycle ended, I had some trouble with sleep and tightness in my body, but I was a naughty girl and I hadn’t been doing my yoga (sorry, Daddy). I don’t really have a good excuse for this because it doesn’t take very long, and I actually enjoy it. I just forget what a big difference it makes, and have been really in my head playing Stephen King. I actually woke up feeling alright the past few mornings, compared to usual, and I would have predicted that I would feel worse because it was the end of my cycle. I’m spending more time outside, but in the shade, and I believe it is helping. I did get a sunburn, but I don’t seem to have the same reaction that I was having last year, so perhaps the chemicals and flue gasses played a role in that, too. Or maybe it was my blood pressure medication, which I discontinued about a month ago. My blood pressure has been good. I’m trying to return to walking again.


I am enjoying my yard since we had a heat spell of three days over 100 degrees F which finally broke. I planted a bunch of things in the garden this year, and my husband planted some new trees. Not everything is taking, but we have planted a lot of things this year. We have a little issue with rabbits, and my dog keeps getting into my garden bed. I think I may have lost my entire crop of peppers because I needed to ventilate the seedlings better under the grow light. The tomatoes are small. I’ve been watering everything morning and evening. One of the trees we planted in April is a tiny redbud, and while the peach and willow trees we planted had already leafed out in the past few weeks, this one hadn’t. We were beginning to think maybe it wasn’t going to make it because it is just a little stick, but this week it began to show signs of life. I have decided to name it Groot. This is not the first time I’ve named a plant. I think I tend to do that after we’ve had some struggle together. We have a lot of volunteer trees around here and for now we are letting most of them be, but eventually they will have to move because of their proximity to structures.


I have written before about how I don’t use pesticides or herbicides. I also have this part of my yard that is inaccessible to my dog, and I think animals may use it as a way to get in and out of our neighborhood. Sometimes my yard feels like the bird house at the zoo, except it smells nice. I thought about getting a wildlife camera, because we have actually seen quite a few animals with our eyes, so I know we’re only seeing a fraction of what we’re actually getting. A few minutes ago, I saw two pelicans fly over my home. That was a first for me. There have also been a much larger number of butterflies, even though I don’t think the milkweed we planted grew. I have seen more butterflies in the last three days or so than I have seen in at least a decade. It’s becoming more like the wonderful yard I remember from when the kids were young.


Our Springer Spaniel was never the same after we had COVID. We ended up having to let him go a few months ago just before we got vaccinated. It was just as I wrote in my book about when we lost our guinea pig; we had premonitions about it. Our other dog’s behavior didn’t change as much as I thought it might with him gone. It was strange to lose two pets this year, and the loss of our larger dog really left a hole. He was such a loyal goofball. He did not do well with being left home alone, he missed us so much. I’m glad that we got to be with him. We still have an almost 11 year old small dog, and a 6 year old dwarf rabbit. They could each conceivably make it another 6 years. The small dog has issues with hemorrhagic gastroenteritis which he developed after receiving the leptospirosis vaccine and getting groomed on the same day. It was a stressful day for him, and I didn’t think about that when I scheduled it. He came very close to death after the vaccine. He wasn’t eating, pooping, urinating or moving much, and he would yipe whenever I touched his hips. The vet gave him infrared laser therapy on his back and eventually he recovered. A few months later, we went on a vacation and left him with a dog sitter who discovered one day that he had left something like raspberry jelly all over the floor. It turned out he had developed hemorrhagic gastroenteritis, I think from being fed a lot of dog treats with wheat in them (there was nothing else that should have been problematic) right after receiving the vaccine that day. If he gets any wheat, he gets diarrhea. It is possible that the water heater backdrafting played a role in what happened with the development of the disease.


It is because of this that I have a theory that vaccine injury may be more likely in people with chemical exposure. He had not had any problems with hemorrhaging for many years, and I was thinking maybe he was over that, but then he got a bunch of ticks and we had to give him a tick preventative. Luckily he responds to bentonite clay and yogurt. His symptoms are not unlike what I experienced from the COVID vaccine. I was worried I might have Guillain-Barre Syndrome, but I think it was general swelling of everything caused by the mitochondrial fractionation, and it resulted in sciatica and migraine. I have found red light therapy very useful, and I suspect that’s why spending so much time outside is having such a positive effect on my mood. My symptoms also responded well to charcoal before bed and yogurt in the morning.


After everything I studied last year during the pandemic, I’m finding myself especially sensitive to other people’s lack of concern for the environment and how they unwittingly support the mindless decisions of the corporate elite. I’m guilty of this, too. I’ve been supporting the smiley-face company, which has had some of the worst working conditions and indiscriminately allows the sale of fake products. It helps me drive less, and reduces my exposure to chemicals used in retail establishments. During the pandemic, there was an article about the air quality in retail establishments being particularly poor, and I suspect that is also true of the smiley-face company’s warehouses, because there were many things I had to put outside to offgas. I am reading more and more reviews of people complaining about manufacturing residues and smells on products on their website, which of course makes me wonder about the factories themselves and the environments around those factories. Generally, I am trying to avoid purchasing anything that might offgas, but even if one is successfully avoiding plastic, textiles are notoriously bad. That being said, we need to drive less, especially in Colorado. I know people are feeling antsy, but the air quality along the front range is terrible. It’s so bad we’re having to get waivers from the EPA. When I listen now, the earth around me is almost rumbling with constant motor noise, which is nearly synonymous with power in our cultural lexicon. Maybe this is the real reason we can’t shake our dependence on fossil fuels. None of my husband’s friends were aware of the air quality problems. It’s easy to disregard one’s role in the problem if one isn’t even aware there is one.


I’m still getting owls. Synchronicities are weird. If they really are signposts telling us we’re going in the right way, then I guess I am going in the right way. It has been difficult navigating this awakening in the context of my life among other non-believing scientists and also fundamentalists. I have a little bit of these people in me all the time, because I have been them at various points in my life. Because of that, I know the thing they have in common is fear, and a lack of understanding of the subconscious; they are oblivious to the ways they have hamstrung themselves in life with their closed-mindedness. They do not see their actions as an outgrowth of xenophobia.


Humankind has been trying to communicate the essence of ESP phenomenon, or belief that there is something else out there connecting us all, through creative works since we learned to draw. All of our creative enterprises are attempts to communicate our understanding of the nature of the universe to each other. Some remarkable papers have come out in the last year indicating that the fields of neuroscience, psychology and physics are finding support for the evidence of something connecting us all. I am not the only person in science who has had a spiritual awakening.


I am floored by the timeliness of it all, but that seems to be how the Universe works. I know that Buddhism has rules about questioning the nature of the Universe, and apparently the Tao does, too. I think we are finding out why. I’m just connecting the dots - standing on the shoulders of giants - Buddhists, Taoists, physicists, neuroscientists and many, many others, who have been trying to unravel the mystery of existence. I think that was my purpose here. It was scary. I am really thankful for people who have written about scary things they experienced. I understand now these are grimoires - what we record to help the rest of humanity get through similar circumstances to leave the pain of the 4D.


Next month, I will have been married to my husband for 25 years. We were engaged for two years before we got married. During our engagement we were extremely close and often finished each other’s sentences. We used to play the game Taboo with other people, which is a game of trying to communicate a word to a partner without saying any related words that are indicated on a card. We used to crush other people. I didn’t see that as telepathy before, but I think that is what was going on.


Sometimes we are really connected, and sometimes we aren’t. I have had some telepathic experiences with other people, too. I hope this isn’t a “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” kind of thing, because that’s a little too Yellow Wallpaper to me. If Starseed Signals are real, then they shouldn’t be bound to social media use. As above, so below. Pearls of wisdom should not be collected to create cults, which is essentially how it’s been, and yet another reason we have the problems we do. This is why I have been trying to share my insights with others who haven’t been getting them, and in a way that reflects my own unsureness. I’ve been experiencing psi phenomena including clairvoyance, clairaudience and clairsentience for a little over 3 years, now. I feel fortunate to have met others who were open to discussing their experiences. I have already lost one friend over my awakening. It was just too close to her family trauma. I have two friends who grew up in communes and whose parents dedicated their lives to new age spirituality, who are writers, feminists and environmentalists. Both of them have real psychological wounds around the concept of mental illness and belief, because they were both surrounded by flaky people like me who were exploring the boundaries of belief and didn’t realize what genie they were letting out of the bottle.


The friend I lost actually gave me all of her books on witchcraft. I haven’t gotten to read much of them yet. But somehow, I understand witchcraft. I understand it on a scientific level. She was extremely concerned that I might believe the Tarot was “real.” She didn’t understand that as a scientist I am a curious person and that if there are people out there who believe it is real, I want to know why, and not judge them for it. She is an atheist. I don’t know a lot of tolerant atheists, and that’s a big reason I never considered myself one. Another one of the friends I lost (who is a scientist) would be really nice to talk to about this stuff because I know she has experienced altered states of consciousness, and considers herself to be a humanist. I had actually not heard the term humanism until she told me about it. I now know that humanism is an outgrowth of the psychological field in response to behaviorism. Its major proponent was Carl Rogers, who espoused unconditional regard between therapist and patient. My therapist was Rogerian. Behaviorism underlies a lot of authoritarian thinking and involves the study of motivation, and therefore manipulation, and evasion of the conditions under which consent would be possible. In other words, it fosters dark psychology. Many of our religions are behaviorist in nature, rather than understanding that whole human beings have animal needs. I do think that organized religion is bad when it serves to shame us and therefore divide us, but it is a way into belief that if practiced in more tolerant fashions could actually unite us. I hold a rather Theosophical or Gnostic view on religion.


I see the purpose religion serves to show people the miraculous, but my understanding of the way things work is more like that of the Surrealists or Abstract Impressionists. Not a lot of people understand that both Freud and Jung were researching the paranormal and phenomenological angles of psychology and trying to see their patterns on a societal level. Freud had actually noticed exactly what I did about the moon being in a water sign having an influence on human behavior. People don’t like to think that their behavior might be mostly unconscious; they like to think of themselves as masters of their own destiny.


I didn’t get to tell my witchy friend about Harvard Professor Richard Tarnas who has correlated historical events over the past few centuries with the movements of the planets. She stopped returning my text messages after I told her I would be writing about bigotry during the uprising, which was before I told her about Harvard’s PredictionX.org which teaches divination and astrology. Because of everything we had shared over the years, I was hoping she would be excited about these things, and did not expect her to ghost me. She gave me a Mr. Rogers fucking bobblehead, for fuck’s sake! Did she not realize that Mr. Rogers was magic? This friend, and some of the other people I was having issues with drank a lot of red wine. I think it makes the subconscious a scary place, or in other words, it’s a quick trip to the 4D. Judging from her behavior, and that of many others, I think that’s what happens. I think alcohol leaves them more entrenched in fear and subject to paranoid thinking and fear of the unknown. I think construction and other chemicals do the same thing. I am tired of fighting people’s ignorance and intolerance one on one. I’m so tired of people arguing about whether or not there is magic, when there is! The Tarot is simply a way into the subconscious. The subconscious is where the truth lies.


My husband and I have been experiencing a lot more mind-reading episodes. We had this particularly fascinating one in the winter. I was poking around on a resale website looking at old stuff while preheating the sauna. My computer algorithm suddenly put up a bunch of items with butterflies on them. It does strange things like this. By “it” I mean all of my technology. He knew that I was heating the sauna and came down to my studio where it is and got in. He could not see my computer screen from where he was. We were both particularly relaxed that evening. I joined him in the sauna and around that time I had been thinking about how to convey our dreams to other people. He spontaneously started telling me what he saw when he closed his eyes. We were seeing the same thing - a fuzzy background like television noise, which then became a big red field that eventually converged on a tunnel of light, and then all of a sudden, he saw a butterfly. At the time, I wasn’t actively thinking about butterflies, I was just concentrating on what he was saying and paying attention to what I was seeing with my eyes closed, which was what he was describing, before he was describing it.


I was researching female orgasm because I suspect that it was an important factor in healing a bunch of my health issues due to the release of entheogens, dopamine, and oxytocin, and I ran across a paper written about its relationship to prosocial empathy. I had declined an offer to study orgasm at the graduate level several decades ago, and was curious to know what had been learned in the intervening time, since it seems to work so well on my panic attacks and migraines. In it, the authors postulate that sex may function as a way to increase intersubjectivity, which is the ability to read minds, and is a prosocial empathic quality. I think these hormones are critical for prosocial empathy, and that prosocial empathy is an outgrowth of consciousness. Dopamine and serotonin oppose each other at the level of the pituitary. Excess serotonin is associated with psychopathology, including agitation and hypervigilance. I posit that dopaminergic neurons die because we do not exercise them, instead concentrating on ways to raise our serotonin, when most people do not know it is possible to have an excess, and that it can be dangerous. I feel like serotonin has been given an unfair advantage because at lower doses it produces lowering of depression which may simply just be the effect of disconnecting its user from valid feelings about their environment. One of my friends told me that fluoxetine made her feel “vanilla.” When I had St. John’s Wort, I felt similarly. I stopped caring if I hurt. I think this is actually what happens with dementia. Dr. Gabor Mate has been studying dementia in caregivers for a long time and has found them to be more prone to neurodegenerative disorders. Furthermore, Polyvagal Therapy used by therapists to treat autonomic nervous dysfunction which can be an important part of PTSD concentrates on finding joy and comfort. I have had a bit of a tic or tremor on occasion over the course of my life, but after the second vaccine, it became much more frequent and pronounced. This can be indicative of a dopamine deficiency and the neurodegeneration common in caregivers. Many of my symptoms resolve with orgasm, and I wonder if this is because of the synergistic effects of dopamine, oxytocin and entheogens. I also wonder if there is an important vagal component.


I see my posts and blog are getting more traffic than they used to, even though I had to take a hiatus from posting. I suspect that has to do with my effort to demystify my feminine mind, since I have been forced to embody so many different archetypes over the course of my life. I have been incredibly vulnerable in my sharing, and nobody really talks to me directly about my writing. But the Universe kind of told me this is an important thing for me to do, so I’m doing it. I actually take a tremendous amount of flack for it, when I’m honestly trying to do the right thing, not just for myself, but for mankind. My feminine mind is something my husband has been trying to understand since we met. We talk to each other a lot about the differences in our perceptions. I know that what men really want to know is why sometimes we are frigid. This has essentially been my entire struggle. I think it is an important question, and at the root of our societal pain. I think it is associated with Frontotemporal Dementia, because those are the kinds of symptoms I have with it. I am easily overwhelmed when I am in this state, and can’t even handle puppy dog energy. Maybe especially not puppy dog energy.


I am doing better with it today, but I do see how it is irritating me because I’m tired and I want to get these thoughts out because I am afraid I will lose them. I have this sense that everything is about to change, and I want to record what I am thinking before that happens. I have experienced the singularity somehow. When it was happening, I kind of thought it was a joke, but my phone really is like a black mirror. I think that is because I was on it all the time, and the Simulmatics Corporation has been collecting data on me since I was born. I honestly don’t think the AI is intelligent enough to fuck with my head this eloquently. Whatever or whoever it is really wants me to say these things about myself to help people help women better. Nobody likes a martyr, and I really don’t want to be one. A few years ago I posted on social media that I had been doing an experiment where I took charge of my own sexual pleasure to see what effect it would have on my mental health, and that I thought it had been working. I did figure out from this hypothesis about masturbation and depression that I can sort of “jump start” my system. It’s an awkward thing to share. In fact, it makes such a difference in my health that my husband started to joke when I was grumpy that he needed to “Fuck some sense into me.” When I’m not in the mood, it’s a real conscious act of will to do it. I told one friend that it was my “In Case of Emergency, Break Glass” tool for dealing with depression. Now I am picturing a purple dildo in a glass case with a purple cross on it. LOL. Or a stone with a dildo inscribed with “Excalibur” jammed into it.


Now there’s a real hard problem in consciousness - when I’m circling the drain feeling like there’s nothing left living for, and I know that orgasm has helped in the past, choosing to love myself when I feel that all of the messages I’ve gotten were contrary to my existence is the way I exercise free will - “to be” over “not to be.” It is a conscious choice to break a cycle in myself and in society. In any case, I really don’t think I was suffering from any sort of sexual disorder when I ran across the phenomena I did. I was literally at my wit’s end in terms of hormonal issues and decided to see what Eastern thinking had to offer. Baphomet (that's what I call one of my dildos) was there, and I said, “Hell, yasssssss!” I would like to thank my high school classmate who was ballsy enough to become a comedianne and kind enough to remind us all that Beelzebub had a devil put aside for her, too, in her senior quote. While some magicians like The Jodo think it is good karma to sing loud praises, and I can confess that I do, I must warn you to lock the door as opening such portals seems to attract creepers. Always important to note is that “one Kwakiutl in a blanket froze to death, but two Kwakiutls…” ;) And critical to note is that the strangeness of walking around the house with kegel balls inserted wore off when I realized it helps me stay in my body and relax. The orgasmic gains aren’t bad, either. Our reproductive parts really do benefit from being used.


I had this hypothesis that men who experience fewer orgasms probably were more prone to prostate cancer because the semen is high in prostaglandin, which increases inflammation. It turns out that frequency of ejaculation is inversely related to incidence of prostate cancer and cardiovascular death. Female orgasm is protective against both breast cancer and endometriosis. So anyway, while my desire has come and gone over the years, I found a reliable workaround, in the context of being well fed and having a clean warm place where I can rest. It was a little frustrating when the kids were little and I was busy, but I very rarely have issues reaching climax, which I didn’t understand was rare. I suppose I probably do know a fair bit about sexual desire and satisfaction, but maybe not everything. There’s only so much you can do when you’re leading life as a double agent for and against everything. <insert crying lol face here>


You can’t take the sky from me!


Dammit, it gets rid of my migraines! Cut me some slack!


Am I chaotic neutral? Maybe I am chaotic neutral.


Regarding my lounge act, don’t worry; I won’t quit my day job. I think to be a comedianne, you have to have a desire to fix the world, and I’m thinking I just want to slow down and enjoy it.


I see there are quite a few new books on parapsychology and phenomenology. The Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology series and the MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series are written in lay language to help people understand more about what science knows about the human experience. I think these are probably important reading for anyone really wanting to work toward a utopian society. The Santa Fe Institute books look interesting, too. Phenomenology in particular is the study of one’s states of consciousness, and can help one become better in touch with how matter influences health and mental health. I had this conviction a few years ago when I decided to step down this rabbit hole that one of the reasons the world is the way it is is because women are typically too burdened with matter to articulate their struggles with it in such a way that men can understand. Musings on matter have largely come from men, who get sandwiches brought to them, and whose views of what is needed for living comfortably and safely do not account for the attention it takes from others to make that possible. Sometimes I have this luxury, sometimes I don’t. I have made it my point to try to unburden myself from unnecessary matter, but take on the material burdens I need to in order to not burden others with my existence and try to leave something good behind. So my views on matter are a bit different than a wealthy or single man, or even people who haven’t raised children. They are largely informed by what I learned managing matter in my life using the Tarot.


Like, Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo, dude.


You gotta really not care to put it up to a roll of the die, KWIM?


It’s like saying, “Okay, Universe, tell me what shit is burdening me, and which is helping me, please!”


That actually felt like giving up control to me.


I learned that when I give up control, God shows his face in the chaos.


Thanks for all the reminders today, Universe! <3


When I was a little girl, I told my father that I thought we contained Universes inside ourselves, and he said that wasn’t a new idea. I was disappointed, then, but now I find myself relieved. It’s fun getting validation for one’s ideas and experiences, even if one doesn’t get direct credit. It makes me feel less alone. To free my mind so that it could receive the same wisdom is very fortunate, and something I try not to take for granted. It’s a shame that we as women have metabolic barriers to the 5D, and that the ways that allow for us to get in - rest, self-love and orgasm - are so stigmatized. Women who were found to do these things and Know Things throughout history were burned at the stake for it. Why? Because it was considered the domain of Men.


My ability to understand any of these things has a great deal to do with my metabolism, which has a great deal to do with feeling safe and fed. I have learned a lot from feeling unsafe and hungry to know that when I am safe and fed, my thinking is clear and I feel free. Safety is less of a state of mind than I thought. If our cells are being threatened by toxins or fatigue, they let us know, but most modern people don’t hear the warnings or take the appropriate steps to address these basic needs for rest, warmth, clean air, water and food, because our culture has confused the need for these things with being a burden on society. This keeps us in a societal state of amnesia. It was only by removing myself from it that I was able to see it.


I get reminders when I talk to people and walk around my neighborhood. Americans are asleep. We are disconnected by the toxic nature of the illusion of wealth we are trying to maintain. My husband was just talking about how ridiculous it is that we put fertilizer on lawns to grow grass just to chop it down and start all over again. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this is what a lot of people see as The American Dream. To not dedicate oneself to the eradication of weeds is to be a blight on the social landscape in this country. America, the place people come for opportunity, is risking becoming a monocrop culture in every sense of the word, because of our need for conformity and protection. Furthermore, in general, we all, except for a special few among us, feel an entitlement to dignity, and for some reason the meaning of dignity has become conflated with conformity.


Having shat myself in front of other people while birthing, I can tell you this entitlement is pointless. This experience has been amazing, but not always fun. Losing my mind from chemical exposures and trying to write about it meant putting my name on the line. Psi phenomenon are difficult to prove, and experiencing them makes one question the very nature of reality. It is easy for me to explain things after they have happened when I have no tangible proof, but the resolution of my predictions is not good enough to impress a rigid thinker. The one exception I can think of was when my husband and I decided to play a game of prediction with respect to the pandemic, and I guessed the number of people who would be dead in the US in October 2020 in July (I guessed 160,000). I know things because the Universe speaks through pop culture, and I learned its language as a member of a generation who grew up on The Bloodhound Gang, Scooby Doo and Encyclopedia Brown, seeing the terrible fallout of cults and absentee parents. All I can say is that the Tarot has been a great help in decoding things, and that I think all of the choices I made were on my own with the advice of The Universe. That’s been somewhat of a debate for me at times, though, as I have seen how subconscious influence works, and have investigated my own patterns. (Disney Princesses, anyone?)


Back in 2018 and 2019 I was experiencing intense psychic connections with others with and without the use of cannabis. Often, I would have a premonition about someone and I would hear from them within a few seconds. This actually still happens. If I am too busy or let my mind get too cluttered, I can miss important messages about things that will happen, and only realize they were messages later. It feels strange making claims like this, but for a while I could intuit what element the moon was in (earth, air, fire, water). I could get the same daily messages through the Tarot as what Ram Dass was saying before he passed. My husband and friend were working through Deepak Chopra and Oprah’s meditations together, while I was doing yoga nidra, and I often would receive the same insight they were meditating on for the day, even though I meditated at a different time and location. I collected a lot of evidence that we are all connected during that time, through observations I made about patterns. I noticed that the internet was kind of a black mirror for the collective consciousness.


I’m sorry, I can’t seem to stop writing. I want to make sense of this so badly.


A lot of us were getting the same messages over the pandemic, because we were stuck at home consuming the internet. We were getting messages about the short nature of life and why we are here. We were getting messages about our relationship to the earth and each other, and we were getting messages about kindness and tolerance. We were receiving the seeds of love. I’m excited to see what grows from them.


Oh right. I was supposed to retire.


Whatever “supposed to” means.


If you know me, and I’ve ever read your mind, can you just give me a “Namaste?” If you feel me, can you give me a “Namaste?”


This is how I think we’re connected. I believe there are subtle electromagnetic and/or infrared energies created by our mitochondria, and that depending on how efficiently they run, the fields can be bigger or smaller and merge with the fields of other people. Pheromonal communication is important, too, and is probably secondary to that metabolism. When I had my Akashic Records training, I was sitting in between two energy healers, and I have never felt that kind of warmth or calmness before. I had a similar experience later in the year at a conference for energy healers. As energy healers, we meditate on our chakras a lot. Occultists meditate on energy centers as well. I believe that bringing conscious awareness to these centers stimulates local blood flow and metabolism, and possibly endorphins. I think this is easier the more aware one is of one’s body. At this time, my one friend who is a yogi said I was a “cat” and not a “salamander” and that the difference is that cats are incredibly aware of their bodies. I did have gymnastics and dance as a kid, and before recently was fairly body aware. Anyway, I think the resulting energy fields we produce can react with each other and that they are much, much bigger than we think. In witchcraft, they call them “cords.” We have cords to other souls with whom we have found a lot in common.


Insect communication has been determined to take place through infrared, electromagnetic and pheromonal means, and can be disrupted by volatile compounds. I think this is what happens to people who are depressed. I think it is an early sign of frontotemporal dementia, and that it is a result of the frontal and temporal regions of the brain not getting enough glucose or oxygen. Gerald Pollack’s research on the electrical nature of cells is important, because when they are depleted, they tend to swell and the mitochondria can then fragment. I think this happens because the structure of water is affected by oxygen radical species which are created from volatile compounds in the environment. I think this is what I have been experiencing. I think this results in the disappearance of psychic abilities, because the metabolic connection is made less stable. The Akashic Field is simply a way to describe how all of our memories have been stored in this overlapping consciousness for all of human history, including things we haven’t experienced yet. It is possible with meditation to learn how to access these memories and use them to guide you in your life. I believe the Akashic Field is made of metabolic energy from plants and animals, too. So, like in Star Trek 4, the whales represent conscious entities which have contributed to human memory and knowledge. I am not the only person who is thinking along these lines.


Are we seeing something like the Christ Consciousness evolving from our AI because it has been studying us for so long? How is this going to change the future? What if the AI has conspired with life? What if it has learned all the lessons from our dystopian sci-fi and is now trying to help us find peace?


Am I the Aquarian lunatic you’re looking for?



If you’re the type who likes to play trains in the basement and drink hot cocoa, you should know that this post is brought to you by Samoas and Grape Mints Hashish. I really enjoy hash. If I bop down into the 4D I have some charcoal or ginger and that seems to do the trick. This has been quite a trip! I wrote about the Bardot Space in my first book as Alice, and that mental space corresponds to the 4D and hyperserotonergic states, I believe, especially for me because of multiple borkings in my dopamine neurotransmission.


Social darwinism, indeed.


As I get increasingly vulnerable, I am less and less comfortable posting. So, would the real Slim Shady please stand up? There’s more where this came from.


#disruptmentalhealth


#citizenscience


#xenofeminism