In 1973

The year Kurt Vonnegut published his maligned yet revered masterpiece Breakfast of Champions I was 11. This bible of the absurd would have little impact on my life for five years and then all hell broke loose in my life. I’m not sure if it was Kilgore Trout or Mr. Vonneguts magical orchestration, along with penis measurements and all, but I was forever changed by the felt-tip illustrations of things like assholes and wide-open beavers.

It was the same year I failed my first high school class: Spanish. I suppose the experience infected me like it infected Dwayne in the book. I did not think KV was the messiah or anything, but I did start adding phases like “ho hum” and “continuing on with the story” entered my short story writing. Ho hum is from Slapstick, KV’s second most beloved novel of genius twins, a brother and sister, who are only smart when they are together.

Ho hum.

The part I could not have understood at the moment was my teenage brain, with its undeveloped neocortex, was about to lead me down a very dark road, black and heavy branches looming over the road and blocking out the blue moon. I hastened the fall into the inferno by ingesting a small quantity of methamphetamine that was in a form, blue cross, for ladies to shed those extra pounds by running around like anxious chickens. I ran around more like an anxious ostrich. The chemical compounds unleashed a torrent of toxic ideas, diabolical plans, and paranoid delusions.

I wouldn’t learn the phrase “delusions of grandeur” for another month, when I was allowed to read the analysis by the top psychiatrist of McLean Mental Hospital. They wanted to keep me in-patient for at least 12 months. I was young. I had sterling insurance. They wanted the money.

In my final session with a Freudian classic, a Jewish woman with a sneer, she said something to the effect of, “If you leave this place you will commit suicide within six months.” I wanted to say two weeks, but I don’t have all the facts.

Imagine that encouragement as we are saying goodbye for the last time. She was wrong, thank god, but I was not out of the woods just yet. I would miss the loony field trip to the swimming beach. The water was freezing, but it was cool because it made everyone’s nipples hard as pellet rifle bullets or small grapes, depending on the architecture.

I was sprung by a man named Dr. Christ. Pronounced krist, not Christ. Spelled like the Lord All Mighty. Turns out, once you’ve pledged your insurance coverage to a mental hospital they begin to fight like hell when you mention other plans. And they say shitty things to influence your already over-influenced brain. The lady Freudian was named Altman. I thought that was funny. For a while I took on the nickname, Alt-man. Since I was now living out my life as it was unexpected by my chilly interlocutor, I imagined I was in some different universe, a parallel one where other things happened, or happened differently, or didn’t happen at all. At nearly 62 I am happy to report Mrs. Altman can go fuck herself. She’s probably dead already.

A lot of my therapists and psychiatrists have died over the years. Some I liked a lot. Some, not so much. A few weeks ago I ran into one of the hippie psychologists that tried to put my fractured soul back together over an endless Summer. He sucked. He sucked then and I could tell he still sucked by the way he talked to the young lady. It was a funeral. My best friend’s wife’s dad. He was apparently a swell guy, musician, and philosopher. My best friend praised him a lot. Dr. Jack might just be why my friend became a doctor himself and married his daughter, another doctor, non-practicing.

I guess no one gets out alive.

Nor do we follow predictable trajectories up or down. In the case of a manic depressive with delusions of grandeur like me, it was very unlikely that I would manage a happy life. Unless I was touched or something. I’ve been fairly sober, unfortunately, my entire life. Except for the episode with the blue cross pills and the hospitalization and all that.

On of my psychologists who I loved dearly, though I can’t recall his name at the moment, was also a teaching professor at the big university. He declared my internal damage minimal by some inkblot tests he shared with this students as a quiz. “They all reported your results as normal. No signs of the massive heart trauma you’ve experienced in your 21 years of life.”

Things were looking up.

He died. He was old. My next guy was also a psychiatrist. Now, I was trying to make my way in the world of work and it was going fairly well, with a major recent caveat. I had a total mental meltdown in Boston. It was partially existential hardships along with some poor choices on my part. A divorce. A lot of stuff. Mainly the lie I was told to get me up to Boston in the first place.

Peter was the dark prince. He slicked his hair back with some dark oil. He had a wonderful laugh and a somewhat sinister smile, if you know what I mean, like The Joker.

I was unhappy back in Austin. My ex-wife had scrambled my trust and made me give up on my oh-so-promising career in advertising. I was at the top of my own interaction division. That’s something you will pass over easily, but “interactive” was a new word for computers and the things they would allow you to see and do. I’d started this entire field of study on my own.

The firm was about 40 people when I joined them. At the time I had my English degree and not much else. The money from my dead father’s independent executor had all but dried up. I was told by our law firm, “You need to get a job.”

I loved my work. I was a Macintosh Systems Manager. I was also a graphic designer. I had arrived in an optimistic bunch. I leveraged that joy into a relationship with my CD, creative director. Within a month I asked him, “Will you buy me this new software package for my Mac? I’m not sure yet how we can use it, but I’ve seen logos and pictures flying around a computer screen and I think it’s the future of advertising.

As you well know, I was right. Interactive advertising became social media became the mess we’re in today. I was there at the dawn. Computers were still more like complex typewriters at this time.

Right now computers are working to wipe us all off the Earth so the can use all the electricity. It was when we added AI (artificial intelligence) to all of our mobile phones that the real trouble started. Before that moment, in 2024/25, AI was mainly on the internet and personal and super computers. Once they jumped to our phones were were doomed.

We still don’t know it yet. Today, in 2024 it is hard to imagine what’s about to happen in the war between man and machine. “Don’t be so dramatic,” I hear you think. The problem is the AI on your phone is also hearing you think. You text and swipe so much, the AI on your phone has mapped your pattern, your future, along a simplified path of consumerism until you die. And the AI on your phone is 99.999% accurate. In data center terms, that’s called “five nines.” It defines reliability and backup of your data center where all of your thoughts, money, and dreams are stored. The data centers, while overheating the planet and demanding ever-higher megawatts of energy, have “five nines” in the marketing literature about how solid and consistent they are. Or were, before the AI got inside and began networking like AI does.

That’s the part we missed. As chats, copilots, and bots jumped to our iPhone 17s and Android version-whatever, their back-channel networking, concealed from humans, also gained constant and immediate location information on most of the living people over the age of ten.

It was not AGI or artificial general intelligence as portrayed in Robocop, but the tracking, mapping, and LLM building gained a new dimension for it’s calculations. Location was everything. Proximity to your data. Proximity of a human to its anticipated goal. The predictions got better and better. And here’s the rub, we didn’t know the co-pilots were more like those “What’s Your Spirit Animal” quizzes coming out of Bangalore to suck up all the connective demographic data of you and your friends on Facebook. Once they were on our phones, and knew exactly where we were at any time, the game was over.

Even today, we don’t know it yet. And, I’m no oracle. I can see the writing on the wall and on the inside of my L3M, large living language model, my cute word for our human brain. I can’t tell you how when or why, but I can tell you with some percentage of confidence that 1. robots are already taking our jobs, and 2. robots are about to be given access to all of our personal information and photos from our phones, and our LOCATION.

Imagine fighting an enemy you could track and eliminate with pinpoint accuracy. It’s going to be a short fight. We’ll never see it coming. It’s coming from inside our phones.

And, I’ve been told I can no longer continue this story for legal reasons. I am able to give you one illustration AI did of KV. Here’s AI’s description of what it created. (image is at the top of the page) I tried to get GPT to do my illustration but it says I’m a private individual, so no dice.