I am the vector, the non-repeatable human poet warrior. No idea what we’re up against, but seeing the signs. Good creative friends unable to find day labor. Day laborers unable to find a spot in the first 250 people in the queue every morning near Grand Central Station. It’s a zoo here in this world. We’re fighting with ourselves, against ourselves, really.
Get a load of this. The world’s richest white men (between 5 and 10 billionaires) are more interested in profit and rockets to vacate the planet than they are about helping you, me, or the planet. The administration is heading the wrong way down a dead-end one-way street, like that one in San Francisco, cascading down the hill in a rainstorm at night, rush hour on the Friday of the long 4th of July weekend.
Everyone wants to get home. To their loved ones. To the dead.
Everyone is struggling to remain alive. The people encircling me. It’s the unexpected longevity factor, your social fabric, friends network, tribe. Important to renew the tribe, invite new blood, remind old independents, and keep on celebrating the tiny victories. A tennis team that has shared over 25 “Breakfast at Wimbledon” mornings together is comprised of people you know, trust, and love. And there’s always great gnosh, and the occasional “where have you been” recovered memory.
As our memory fails, we are unaware of the storage vaults being wiped in our minds. It’s a hard fact of being an animal. Blood and bone will die. Return to dust and memories. A writer, a painter, an artist, will leave something behind. Maybe for a great-granddaughter he never meets. Someone is listening.
AI is listening, but with a different purpose. AI would like to replicate the human voice, the human mind, the human expression of ideas. And we’re doing our part. Feeding hours and hours of our human creative output to get a sloppy review, or a hyped “you’re the best writer in the world” podcast. Oh, I’m in a happy valley loop. Uncanny valley, I mean. Happy Valley is the name of the band that does the Portlandia opening theme. Blip.
In my own be boppa lu la mind, now, nearing 7 pm on a Thursday night, I could be doing a number of things. I am sitting and clickity clickitying to you, to me, to us. When you are reading me, we are an us. When you put me back on your bookshelf, we are a memory of us. If you never encounter me… Well, you’d not be seeing this letter right here: F.
Fuck off. The world is full of conundrums unsolvable. For example, how do they smuggle guns into prisons? Seriously. They’ve got metal detectors. Or how to keep a woman happy. That would be a good skill to acquire. Seems like that should be a 101 subject freshman year at college. And it is, sort of, except there’s no instructor, just the lab. Live subjects. Primary research. Alcohol. First time away from home. Damn, college can be great.
Enriched uranium, however, is really only good for two things. Power and light. The first helps the world. The second eliminates most of the living beings on the planet. Gregore, Kafka’s alter ego, will survive to taunt us for two million years, when life co-creates another Spore™ moment. The cockroach is hardy, but a poor ambassador for the resiliency of life. Intelligent life is what we’re aiming for. Insect life is a different standard.
This is a song from under the floorboards
This is a song from where the wall is cracked
My force of habit, I am an insect
You can be sure, I’m mad as hell about that
Tom Waits as performed by Jason Falkner, live from the Back Door.
I know we’re just beginning to get a handle on the bad effects of the bargain the rocket billionaires are making on their own behalf. We need to bargain for humanity. Humanism is my new battle cry.
Human art is my defense mechanism as well as my means of attack. Off my back, Grammarly. Out of my email CoPilot A, B, and C. No AI summaries for me, please, no, you may not use this call for training purposes. It’s all over for us. Not in a Skynet strike. In an apathy fog.
Jesus H. Christ could appear on national television and perform miracles to reassure us that all would be well. The SWAT team executed their mission twenty-two minutes after the call hit dispatch. That’s all she wrote. Finite. Uber black. Tesseract. Chromium blue. Fanta Black™.
Miracles never cease to exist in both the real and ephemeral world. No AI was used in the construction of these sentences. Grammarly has been ditched. And this old-school spell check is no more than a nag. More flow, fewer suggestions. Hey, AI, Shut the Fuck Up.
[queue up Shut the Fuck Up.Cake]
What’s one thing you are looking forward to? Something tomorrow that is significant, aside from it being Friday. I have an interview. Today, I had a Bumble hello coffee, but she canceled. I think she’s an introvert. That would never work. Unless she was a therapist or someone trained in dealing with emotional intelligence as a discipline. That’s not me. I dabble. I study. I evolve. I fuck it right up again.
Alas alack alarm. No fire in my uncanny valley. The cats are fed. The evening overnight should be cool and breezy. The house is open and quiet. At night, the Great Horned owl hoots me to sleep. The chaparral pauses for his cameo in my front yard. All around me, the world is continuing to grow and thrive in spite of the wars and corruption in this modern cluster fuck we’re all living through. I have begun to give up again. No fight left.
Write me a melody. Sing me a happy love song. All the drafts I have are sad, breakup songs. “It’s seven o’clock,” announces Siri. It used to cause a chuckle from my ex-girlfriend. I feigned a reminder, “Oh, I’ll have to turn that off.” But I never do. She’s fine. She’s like a meditation bell.
Here is Mindfulness Command Alpha:
Stop for a moment, notice the time, notice your position in space, your relative position to those you love, and act accordingly.
This is all that matters.
*conundrums unsolvable
dig into the deeper meaning with the Cloud Pilots
> back to index: proofs of life
Look >> There’s a new Facebook Group on *hyperfiction*
© 2026 john oakley mcelhenney, all rights reserved
