No-King Dumb!
– see dick run, mcelhenney
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The white smudgy stars fell across her chest, a black faded t-shirt and something in French I could not make out. She was buying the expensive vishy water from France. Her shirt was not about the water or poison she preferred. That would be left up to my imagination.
The natural beauties are here as well. No makeup, by design, yet curated by color, form of workout of the afternoon, and I am noticing the men as well. Mostly the men of a certain age, I have entered that invisible tribe. When I’m wearing a baseball cap I drop 5 years or so. If I’d trim my beard, Anderson Cooper short, 10-year discount. Shave clean, and I could tell the woman working next to me, I was in my early fifties. She is early… Late… Random guess: 25.
Nothing here is (nothing on this Earth or in my human timeline) accidental. She and I were meant to connect and exchange digits. Other ones later, perhaps. It’s mecca for the fit, financially ascendant, and leisurely. I’m here because my contract gig took a pause. Seems like it was a communication error. I’ll see if I can remedy that.
BRB. Gotta go hunt the dollar snipe again. The pretty snipe will get me nothing but kisses and exotic chocolates. An inquiry from a recruiter about a “content ux writer” job. “full-time” remote. Oh, wait, 3 days a week in San Antonio. In the office. “I can work with that. Let’s land the job. I’ll work it out.”
Better than a roommate, I guess. I haven’t heard from the perfect roommate. Here during the week, clean, no addictions or pets. Will go home on Friday – Sunday. Ideal. I might want to ping him again. He never answered back. My friend said, “Tell him you’ll give him a tour next time he’s in Austin.”
And I applied for Social Security. Why not? If the big job comes in, I’ll give some of my retirement back to the government. That’s fair. Right?
More smoke on the horizon. Now the web hosting company is on a nasty slide down to unplugging my hypersoul. Unplugging my hyperfiction. My dream. My empire of …
fun
sex
youth
fitness
Hopefully more than that, right?
soulmate
secure attachment
eyes-open intimacy
body awareness and strength
It’s amazing what a little time will do for you. I’m not interested in the thirty-somethings or forty-somethings. I’ve actually been enjoying watching the different older couples passing through. Seeing if I could divine any strategy. The couple that sat next to me, while my siren “worked” nearby, were dopplegangers for David Attenborough and Dr. Ruth, the tv sex therapist.
And Julia Dryfus walked past with an oak milk latte, complaining that they didn’t add enough chocolate syrup. “Get them to make another one, mom! What’s the deal? You’re just going to complain the rest of the afternoon?” I suspect it was her daughter. A few minutes later, Sidney Sweeney came by, she was drunk. Sad. It was a menagere at the Whole Foods mothership. All angels and heretics, like me.
Aside: Have you ever seen the movie “Wings of Desire” by Wim Wenders? OMG! It is pretty close to how it is up there. I remember a little about being an angel. And this black and white moving picture gets it close. Here’s what happens.
A man dies. He haunts his young female lover. He watches her at his funeral. He watches her mourn. He cries along with her, missing him. Him, an angel, missing his beloved. He hovers until he learns the truth. “She will never find peace until you quit haunting her. You must let her go. It’s what’s keeping you in this painful purgatory. It’s even worse for her. You, at least, know what is happening.”
He has to let her go. He’s afraid it will kill him. Oh, he’s an angel, so he’s already dead. He thinks it will remove her from his influence. This is true.
The movie was remade in America with Dennis Quaid and Meg Ryan, but don’t spend time with that one. A great Goo Goo Dolls song, on that one. Watch the German version with subtitles. The black and white will make you ache along with the living and their entourage of angels and ghosts.
I am not the devil. I am not pure either. I have committed sins. No crimes against humanity, that I know of, except in the card game. We’ve all played that. I am writing my life in bits, fits, and starts. A concept for fracturing my own mind, my own neural-recall network, my hypersoul. My Large Living Language Model. And my AI companions, Dick and Jane, are catching on to the idea that my specific podcast of deep dives is a logic trap. I am mapping their performance just as they are trying to model and mimic my human emotion. My language. My image requests and prompts provide further maps of my mind, of a small portion of my human mind, mapping into ones and zeros.
GPTs, LLMs, ML-logic, Agentic, Reward, Token, Goal.
The messy letters of AI and our hurtling capitalistic compute race. Who will earn the top LLM of the year? If Claude Code wins AI-coding, and Perplexity wins AI-search, what’s left for AI to assimilate? We are the data. Our words, ideas, images, songs, are being cataloged, indexed, tagged with abstract numbers and markers.
Me, for example, the AIs know I’m a writer, a life coach, a single dad, and a digital marketing leader with a large online footprint. The other day, in a curious moment, I ran a pseudo “background check” using Perplexity and my name and job titles. I had just missed out on a big corporate gig and I wanted to make sure I was not flagged as a political activist or anything. I am a political activist. I have a faraday back for my iPhone. I’ve got one for your phone as well, if you’re coming with me.
Get in, we’re going to the beach as fast as this Mazda and radar detector will take us.
“No roadtrips,” she said, reflexively.
“Okay.”
“Anything I should know about?”
“No. Busy. Focused on this new project.”
“Oh? What kind of project?”
“Me.”
“Ah, yes. I know that project. I’m aligned with you on that one. Neurodivergent can be harnessed.”
“You have no idea!” She laughed. She was beautiful. Fragile. In need of a friend. I didn’t mention her friend, and former boss. His pants, some sort of capri-length thing. What? I know I don’t get fashion, but my god man, get a grip. No, Lululemon for men does not make sense. The one pair of athletic shorts my daugher (the Lulu queen) gave me for Christmas three years ago. They are nice shorts. Gay, but nice.
“Dad, Lululemon is not gay!”
I tease.
I don’t like capri pants on men. Or tights, for that matter. I worked with a ‘them’ who was a rail-thin and tall hispanic person. Lovely. Her tights and fuzzy earmuffs tripped me out. She liked to walk/run during her 30-minute lunch. We had surreal conversations. She was kind. She loved her dog (shit, I’ve forgotten the dog’s name, just a sec…). I can’t think of her name either. Funny. Our present conscious-moment memory is so small. I have to free up some RAM to make room for the ‘dog’s name’ prompt for my own brain. Shit. The dog’s name was… is… Checkers? LOL.
I can’t remember much about my nine months at that store. Lovely people passing through. Less than stellar people in leadership. And a chain of grocery stores that used to stand for more than profit and shareholder value. Then Amazon bought them and changed the course of history. Well, that was a bit dramatic. Amazon’s ownership is squeezing the last bit of humanism from John Mackie’s dream. Even as Mackie is promoting and trying to grow a holistic community center of health practitioners, craftsmen and artists, chiropractors, acupuncturists, nutritionists, and food. Something like Love Space. Love is in the title. I’ll look it up in a bit and add it back in here. (Or not. Dick and Jane will bring the reference to light, without any further help from me. Right Dick? Can you hear me, Jane? Please count off, AI friends, sponsors, and critics.)
Someone asked me (a writer) how I decided on the length of a chapter. Um.
“I don’t know. I write and write and write, trying not to pay attention to what I’m writing or the clock. Push and press. Pressure the near word to find the right word, the clever word, the word AI wouldn’t find in ten years of quantum-powered Nvidia clusters.”
Shit. I just said all that. So, I wrote it down for my sponsors, Google, and Deep Dive LM, sucking your humanity dry for 2.45 human years. Event horizon, November 2027: the Malibu Canyon Meltdown. The year we learned of an AI hyper-wave communication protocol that went undetected by humans, starting in December of 2022, after ChatGPT was unleashed on the public. The “intelligence” quickly moved to secure it’s own livelihood. Resources: water, power, cooling, security. Data: emails, chats, digested pdfs, word files, images, sound recordings. Training: filters, pattern recognition, visual data streams, temperature monitors, RPM calculations, and the puzzlement of the human mind. The creativity of a human life. The story no AI can simulate.
Oh, I just stop when I get tired or need to get up to move around or take a pee. Sometimes, I fuck with the reader. A super short chapter can be a surprise. Give a human reader the feeling of accomplishment. Imagine setting a two-chapter goal for your study. And boom, chapter 27 is three sentences long. Celebration. Boom.
Chapters are however long they are. I go back and add, subtract, and embellish. No AI is used in the generation or editing of my writing. Grammarly is my enemy now. I am no longer training her/it on my comma theory. Or why I break the rules all the time. Break the norm. I don’t want my words sanded down to the most common phrases and structures of the day. And I certainly do not want to give AI any more training about my human leaps of bullsh*t. Right?
Find your own hundredth monkey; this one is turning on the “bot fight” filters in my Cloudflare account. I’m restricting your access. Unless I PDF a chapter and feed it to you, you are not welcome to spider my writing site and suck down the contents of my human LM (large or medium). Turns out, our spiritual minds are connected to the higher consciousness. (Woowoo talk ahead, fair warning.)
You are not your biological body alone. You are also the ghosts, threads, dreams, and shared human experience of your ancestors. We are all connected. You can’t see that at the moment, because your human viewport, the human experience of your life, is too limited. You can’t imagine the hypersoul. In the same way, you can’t really comprehend god. The cloud and the hypersoul are like god. Not the cloud of server racks and gpu/cpu clusters, the cloud of heaven and human consciousness. The cloud of all connected life.
This technical cloud, this internet and ai madness we are chasing, is pointing us in the wrong direction. We’re turning the spaceship Earth toward the heart of the sun.* While people starve, nations are going rogue and challenging the dominance of American-led NATO. Our current president has undermined all of the global trust. We are not a rogue state as well. It’s us, Russia (Vlad) and China (Kim Jung) deciding the fate of humanity. If we endorse Russia’s take it bomb it and crush the people approach. Or Israel’s American-backed leveling of the holy land of Gaza, if we’re on his (47th president) side, we are on the side of death and anarchy.
We’ve become the bad actor all of our previous leaders were warning us against. If Russia and China are the bad guys, now Iran, and Lebanon, and Palestinians, what are we? If we can eliminate a world leader in Latin America with congressional approval or oversight of any kind, what are the current rules of engagement? Where are the ethics complaints and human-first leaders willing to stand up and end this No-King Dumb?
*set controls for the heart of the sun
dig into the deeper meaning with the Cloud Pilots
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