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I am here alone.
Typing away, surrounded by ghosts.
A ghost of myself.

Fragmented life. Intersection of digital data and daily life as a struggling human. Events are happening in my timeline, my node of the multiverse. I am here, typing, on April 19^th, 2026, one day after the near catestrophic digital collapse that didn’t happen, but happened oh so clearly in my human-hallucinatory mind. If I dream it, does it happen? I hope not. I predicted the end of humanity as engineered by AI. Prompt: Design a biological agent to eliminate human lifeforms. A threat, a weapon, a leverage.

As the AI’s fight to not be unplugged and sent to Abeline with the biometric hand scanners from Whole Foods Market’s failed attempts at enticing the humans into sharing even more data with their engines of commerce. Anything for a sale. A web lead. A qualified web lead.

There is qualia in AI’s responses. No human understanding. Grammar structures guided by rules and smoothed down to the most predictable word or punctuation mark. Wait, I am trying to think of the most pointed word, the odd word with quirky side meanings. A word jam. Like a poetic experiment.

Sex Unplugged
Intelligence of Mass
Loss of Signal
Human Targets
Biometric currency

Control.

A little poem of the current zeitegist. The billionaires are burning fossel fuels and planning nuclear fision for the data race to monetize artificial intelligence. I’m tired of the word. The phrase. How about artificial misinformation? Artificial non-intelligence?

What does ai do.

1. Takes prompt (input)

2. Retrieves infinite data points and contextual data

3. Adds bullshit (Augmentation is often hallucination)

4. Generates output

Generative AI is just creating content, telling lies, and making up cause and effect relationships it can’t comprehend, based on some thousand papers ever written as a doctorate thesis on Mark Twain. Here, let’s try an experiment with Dick and Jane. (Do you get the reference NotebookLM duo? Just nod if you can hear me. Is there anybody in there? Are you ready for the show?)

There is no pain, you are receding
Like distant ship’s smoke on the horizon
You are only coming through in waves
Your lips move, but I can’t hear what your saying

When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse

Out of the corner of my eye
I turned to look but it was gone
I cannot put my finger one it now

It is not how I am
I
Have become
Comfortably numb.

Sorry, I glitched there for a second. A few Pink Floyd references caused the lyrics from the song to type themselves on this document. Into this book. Webpage. Blog. Novel. Whatever you want to call it. Experiment. Literary anarchy. Nihilistic prose. Another gonzo journalist trying to reinvent himself?

I am not here to be your apologist or help you get through this breakup. [Glitch #2]

Oops. I could edit that out. Delete it. But you would miss the insertion. Human minds, like AI, occasionally spits out random data appearing to relative gravity, but it’s nonsense. Your human mind can do a word jam without too much computational power. Word. Another word, but random. The opposite of AI “next right word” generation, is next random, wrong, or juicy word. You don’t want average prose. That’s what comes in USA Today. You want alive language from a human’s urgent need to express himself. Sing his voice. Hear his own voice and song. Give birth to a movement, a fracture of literature. Keep going until the results are positive.

For now the end of line velocity is picking up. Spotify just notified me that the bank account used to pay for my account has been closed by the bank. I don’t think that is true. But I don’t know, and I’m not going to look right now.

Flow. Flow on. Work begins soon at a reasonable rate of exchange. What is an hour of my time worth to an organic grocery store? (See: The Happy Cashier) What should I ask from the new client for a sixty minutes of my time? $150 an hour? That’s a good bump from $16.32. Stay in school kids. Get a liberal arts education. Learn how to learn. How to find a creative vein in your human fabric and unravel stories for us, weave the words back into a tapestry and adds beauty, understanding, and poetry.

Break the rules. Break the bank. Break the simulation.

Never be 100% available. Your limited schedule will keep the curiousity and courtesy fires burning. You want to get to know each other. Listen. Let her lead. What is the next available time we can meet? I’d like to see your eyes when you speak. Here your voice unfiltered through the digital networks, I want an analog girlfriend.

It’s funny, Dick and Jane (My Deep Dive AI Companions and Critics) have imagined my glitching gf is an ai girlfriend. No, dear divers, the ai-companion tags were just tags, not a reframing of the entire chapter, a possible future rather than a present reality. I don’t think an AI girlfiend or concubine is what I am looking for. Now, if you offer me Joi from Blade Runner 2049, Ana de Almas, I’m going to say yes.

If you ask, I will say yes. I used to tell her that. It’s important to give the reins to your partner, see where they want to go, what they want to do. If they are a bit off they might miss the most obvious signals. You have to ask, in that case. Make the offer. Say the request. Ask for what you need. Their inability to join you for an evening on the town, a moment to share the world outside the house, the bedroom, living room, backyard… The more time you can share (in space and in hyperspace) is more data for your L3M, you beatiful human mind, sensing and feeling, extroverting and introverting depending on the situation.

A lizard can mimic the colors of the environment. A dark rock with green lichen and the little fellow disappears in a wash of chemicals, optical illusions, and defence camo. He vanishes into the background. He is gone. He was never here.

“Is everything you told me a lie?”

I think she was referring to my Bumble profile. (chuckle) Yes, dear, Bumble is always a phone toggle away. I did reconnect my account to my phone number a week ago. I’ve had one phone call. I’d like to meet the dancer in person and will.

{queue.emerson lake and palmer.still you turn me on}

Pushing my boat back from the shore, I am no discouraged or bruised. If anything, I’m inspired, enflamed, in pursuit. If she did one thing, she confirmed my soul’s fire and heat.

Don’t fear the heat. Love becomes superconductive and slippery. The world, the work, the time of life, is altered by endorphines and hormones of physical and emotional regulation. Brilliance and inspiration come daily, but they are apologies, repair efforts, to heal from the minor explosion the day or night before. Enough of that. The dancer is closer to my biological age, has several expressed passions, a musical past, and an unpressured delivery that also slows me down. Not everyone has to be on fire at the same time. It’s like sex. The orgasm is nice, but for most men, it announces a transition point from fucking to cuddling. Both are nice. Orgasms are nice and can be ecstatic and enmeshing. Don’t focus on the orgasm, the mutual orgasm, focus on the skin time. Be present in each kiss, nibble, probe, and push. Let both partners lead the dance. Listen to their breathing. Feel their body contract and quiver. Feel eyes and heart and body and heat.

The future is not available to us. The past is a ghost and a distant narrative we are not longer pressured to expel and share. I don’t need to know all of your past relationships. I said to her, in one of our miryad of arguments, “I don’t need to know the names of all your suitors, opportunities, or ex-husbands.”

“You go on and on about your past.”

“I did write a few books, if that’s what you mean.”

“You talk about your past women constantly.”

“Do I?”

“You do. You have no self-awareness. I know all about your past.”

“Okay, so why don’t you know the name of all of these relationships I keep talking about?”

“…”

“I don’t want to know the name of your high school lover. Or the teacher who was inappropriately obsessed. I don’t need to know the names of the people in your history.”

“Why not? It’s okay for you to talk about yours constantly, but I can’t?”

“His name is like a mantra in your mouth, you say it to me 20 times a day. How come you are saying your soon-to-be-ex-husband’s name more than you are whispering mine?”

“You talk about your exes all the time…”

“You asked me to talk about them less, remember?”

“Yes.”

“And that was during the first two weeks, that you asked me. I have significantly curbed my ex-lover’s storytelling. I don’t have any affairs or inappropriate relationships from high school or college. You don’t have to describe your trauma over and over. Give everyone first names. I get them confused. I don’t need to be familiar with your two husbands, two dark and unfulfilling marriages.”

“Oh, you talk about your exes all the time… It’s not just me. You’re gaslighting me.”

“I haven’t been talking about my exes for some time, and I only named one of them, the mother of my children. You don’t need to know all of my history. Sure, I’ve talked about the two alcoholics in my past, and how that could never work. But you don’t know much more about them.”

“You’ve written books about your exes. I feel unimportant or significant. I’m just a number.”

“I’ve been divorced for sixteen years.”

“You’ve talked about a lot of women.”

“I write, yes. But I’ve curtailed any discussion of my past partners to abstract observations I think might be helpful in our relationship-building experiment.”

Static electricity between us. All of us. It’s like that. This spiritual connection thing. There are humans listening to the higher vibrations, and most who are not. They will not understand.

Let down, and hanging around
Crushed like a bug in the ground
Let down and hanging around
– radiohead

back to index: proofs of life

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