Protected?

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I like Macs.  Really, I do.  Ever since I realized that “Windows” was a cut-rate way to imitate Macintosh’s integral operating system, I’ve never been able to look back.  (I don’t have a tech background so I may be wrong in the details.)  Every time I use a work laptop—inevitably PCs—I realize just how unintuitive they are.  Something about Apple engineers is that they understand the way ordinary people think.  I sometimes use software, not designed for a Mac, where I swear the engineers have no basic comprehension of English words at all.  And nobody ever bothers to correct them.  In any case, I find Macs intuitive and I’ve been using them for going on 40 years now.  But the intuitive element isn’t as strong as it used to be.  As we’re all expected to become more tech savvy, some of the ease of use has eroded.

For example, when I have to create a password for a website—not quite daily, but a frequent activity—Mac helpfully offers to create a strong password that I will never have to remember.  Now before you point out to me that software exists that will keep all your passwords together, please be advised that I know about such things.  The initial data entry to get set up requires more time off than I typically get in a year, so that’ll need to wait for retirement.  But I was talking about intuitive programming.  Often, when I think I won’t be visiting a website often, I’ll opt for the strong password.  Maybe I’ve got something pressing that I’m trying to accomplish and I can’t think of my three-thousandth unique password.  I let Mac drive.  That’s fine and good until there’s an OS update.  This too happens not quite daily, but it does sometimes occur more than once a week.

After restarting I go back to a website and the autofill blinks at me innocently as if it doesn’t recognize my username.  It doesn’t remember the strong password, and I certainly don’t.  So I need to come up with yet another new one.  At work I’m told you should change all your passwords every few months.  To me that seems like a full-time job.  For grey matter as time-honored as mine, it’s not an easy task.  I’m not about to ditch Macs because of this, but why offer me a strong password that only lasts until the next system update?  Truth be told, I’m a little afraid to post this because if by some miraculous chance a software engineer reads it and decides to act, a new systems update will be required again tonight.

Fabric of Time

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I’m not a sewer.  I mean, a person who sews.  I know people who are, though, who are quite distressed that JoAnn Fabrics is going out of business.  In an effort to console such folk, I indulged in an online search for fabric shops that led to a couple of conclusions.  One is that the internet is lousy at clean-up, and the second is that big box stores have ruined the ability to find things, funneling all purchasing to Amazon.  Let’s take these one at a time. 

If you’ve ever searched for a physical store (fabric or otherwise) online, you know that sites like Yelp are full of artifacts.  Stores that closed a long time ago and have never been removed.  In fact, when I commuted to New York City I sometimes walked several blocks on my lunchtime, looking for a store only to learn that it had closed five or ten years ago.  It still beamed happily on the web, though.  I have driven to bookstores that no longer exist, based on their location being proclaimed loudly online.  Regarding fabric, I located directories for Enright’s Fabric Warehouse, in nearby Bethlehem.  Nothing online indicated that they were long out of business.  I street-leveled the address on Google Maps and found a building I’d driven past many times; I’d actually driven by it the day before.  It obviously was a large factory-like building, but it hadn’t been a fabric store in the seven years I’ve lived in the Lehigh Valley.  This isn’t the only time I’ve searched specifically for a company/store with the query word “bankrupt” or “out of business” to find Hal-9000 saying, “I can’t let you do that, Steve.”

The second point.  Big box stories come to town, drive smaller stores out of business, then fold themselves, leaving us all poorer for it.  As big boxes go, I liked JoAnn’s.  Probably because they were failing, they had lots of things besides fabrics that I could look at on family outings.  But the fact is smaller fabric stores (which still appear online as existing) went out of business when JoAnn came to town.  There were two JoAnn stores in the Lehigh Valley.  Smaller places closed, and now we’ll be running around naked before we can find a fabric store willing to sell.  I’ve seen this happen with other industries as well.  There was a fine office supply store in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin when I was at Nashotah House.  Staples came to town and closed them down.  If you’ve been in a Staples lately, you know the writing’s on the wall.  I know we’re stuck with big boxes.  More often we turn to Amazon where a few keystrokes will get you what you need.  Check and mate.

Remaining in Shadow

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Some people want to be found.  Others don’t.  Those of us who are curious shade into those who are frustrated when we can’t find someone.  People have been around for a relatively long time now, and we’ve been giving each other names because “hey you” only goes so far.  Even so, unique names are rare since, it seems, the majority of European-derived folk had something to do with smithies.  Nevertheless, the internet offers to help us find people.  I was searching for someone the other day but that person, despite publishing nearly daily on the interwebs, has a very common name.  And he styles himself without even a middle initial.  (He may not have one, I know.)  The point is, perhaps he doesn’t want to be found.  I run into authors like this—they assume their high-level monograph is sufficient fame.  You can’t find them online.

I recently joined Bluesky.  I’d like to leave Twitter, but I still have a large number of followers there (for me), although they seldom interact.  Publishers look at things like the number of X followers you have, so until Bluesky surpasses Twit, I’ll need to keep both going.  On Bluesky more people introduce themselves to you.  At least when you’re new.  Not a few are looking for relationships, sometimes of the sexual kind.  (I find that occasionally on what is called X, but mostly in the account under my fiction-writing pseudonym.)  These are people who want to be found.  The internet, strangely enough, has driven us further apart.

America has always been a polarized place, but the web has sharpened the border.  Indeed, it has militarized it.  I remember the days when meeting people actually meant going outside and stopping somewhere else.  Society had rules then.  Two topics of forbidden discussion were religion and politics.  It was easier to make friends with those rules in place.  Since I’ve chosen to put myself out there on the web, my choice of field of study does tend to come out.  And it’s one of those two forbidden topics.  Since my career goal has occasionally been ministry (still is from time to time), putting religion into the equation is inevitable, for those who really want to get to know me.  Social media is a strange country, however.  I tell new conversationalists on Bluesky that I have a blog, but it doesn’t seem to lead many people to my dusty corner of the interweb.  And it still gets me no closer to finding that guy with the tragically common sobriquet.  He may not want to be found. 

Sherlock Holmes seeks someone without the internet. Image credit: Sidney Paget (1860 – 1908), Strand Magazine, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In Praise of Paper

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I write quite a lot.  I’ve done so for decades.  As I’ve tried to carve out a writer’s life for myself I noticed a few things.  I’ll start a story or novel and put it aside.  Sometimes for a decade or more, then come back to it.  I recently found what looks to be a promising novel that I began writing, by hand, back in the last century.  As electronics forced themselves more and more into my life, I began writing it on my computer.  I must’ve picked this story up a few years back because I clearly began revising it, but I ran into a problem.  The program in which I’d written it—Microsoft Word—was no longer supported by Apple products.  I eventually found a workaround and was able to extract a Rich Text Format from files that my computer told me were illegible.  If you want illegible, I felt like telling it, go back to the original hand-written chapters!

I dusted this off (virtually) belatedly, and started working again.  Then I reached chapter four.  That’s where I’d stopped my most recent revision.  Then I discovered why.  Near the end of the chapter were two paragraphs full of question marks with an occasional word scattered in.  A part of the Word file that the RTF couldn’t read.  Frustrated and heartbroken—there’s no way I can remember what this said some thirty years after it was initially written—I simply stopped.  This time I went to the attic and found the hand-written manuscript.  I went to the offending chapter only to find that the corrupted passage was missing.  It was what we used to call a “keyboard composition” and it was eaten by the equivalent of electronic moths.

Photo by Everyday basics on Unsplash

Now, I’m no techie, but I just don’t understand why a word processing file can no longer be read by the program in which it was written.  Publishers urge us to ebooks but how many times in my life have I seen a new system for preserving electronic files fold, with the loss of all the data?  It’s not just a few.  And they’re asking us to make literature disposable.  If I have a book on my shelf and I need to look up a passage, I can do so.  Even if I bought the book half a century ago and even if the book had been printed a century before that.  I’m aware of the irony that this blog is electronic—I used to print out all of the posts—and I have the feeling that my work is being sacrificed to that void we call electronic publication.  That’s why I keep the handwritten manuscripts in my attic.

Weather Bugs

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In one part of my life (ahem) I’m compelled to use Microsoft Windows products.  (In my personal life I’ve used Macs since before 1990.)  On a recent update they’ve added little, frequently changing icons in the lower left end of the task bar.  It took me a few days to figure out how to stop it from sending distracting news and sports updates (I don’t need these, and they disrupt my concentration).  They also send weather updates.  I couldn’t figure out how to turn off the weather, so I let it stand.  Perhaps it’s a sop thrown to workers who now spend more hours a day on the job because commuting is becoming less of a thing, a bit of relief from staying on task.  Something to make you feel connected.  Fine and good.  But does it have to be so alarmist?

Some of us can’t ignore sudden changes on the screen (much of advertising relies on this).  When the weather icon shifts, which it does periodically, it draws my eye.  It uses the language that’s become typical to dramatize the weather.  Temperatures will “plummet” on Saturday, for example.  I looked at a more sober weather website.  The high would be ten degrees lower than it was for that day.  Hardly a “plummet.”  Or it will tell me, in rather heightened tones, that four inches of snow are coming on Wednesday.  The more sober site says possibly one inch.  An hour or so later, the icon humbly admits maybe it’ll just be one inch.  The question is, do we really need these constant updates?  With theatrical exaggeration?  I turned off news and sports, otherwise the work day would include an almost subliminal news feed that goes from boot-up to log-off.

I get through these difficult days by mostly ignoring the news.  I don’t ignore the weather—it seems more real than what’s happening in Washington.  Besides, I wrote a weather-oriented book once upon a time, and I haven’t lost the interest.  We’re going through the time of year when spring and winter are duking it out.  Every few days it snows or ices, and in-between I find wasps inside that think maybe it’s time we should just be getting on with this.  Meanwhile, each day, all day, I’m sent weather updates meant to shock and awe me.  Into what?  Yet more panic?  I’ve noted before that in some respects I have a monastic personality.  I prefer calm, most of the time, without too much extraneous stimulation.  I go for hours each day without even glancing at my phone.  And for the weather, I prefer just to look out the window.

Finding the Source

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I need to know the origins of things.  Call it a sickness if you will, but I’m compelled to trace things to their source.  This is why I went on to earn a doctorate, and it’s a trait that hasn’t left, despite my career malfunction.  My interest in origins was recently reawakened by the citation, in a book, of a source that was incomplete.  I turned to the internet, of course.  I found the source, reprinted on a Tumblr page, for which I was grateful, but there was no proper citation there either.  Instead, a link to another webpage, which itself consists of yet another link.  Even after pages of googling, I was no closer to finding the source.  This is why I miss libraries.  You were there with books, some of them centuries old, looking at the source.  Outside the academy this rarely happens.  Particularly when you work 9-2-5.

The internet age is one of taking someone else’s word for it.  That’s why it’s important to establish credibility.  The website where I found the information—the top ranked site on both Ecosia and Google—had old books as the background, but no “about” page.  Who had put this information here and where did s/he get it?  The item I was looking for was from the 1700s.  I don’t have a print copy lying around and I was wondering what the source was—a book?  A journal article?  A newspaper?  An actual archive?  And why can’t Google find it in a library?  I know the source actually exists because I also found it referenced in a reputable print book, but one with inadequate citation.  Some of us were cut out for this kind of thing.  Constitutionally researchers.  But you have to work to live.

One of the greatest pieces of advice ever is to stay curious.  It helps keep a mind active, even a 9-2-5 one.  I’ll keep looking for this mysterious source.  I’ll check out likely references in the bibliography.  I’m sure that other people have the same compunction not to take someone else’s word for it.  Particularly not an anonymous poster on some website.  Especially in this day of AI lies.  One of my high school teachers once said that a reputation for being trusted is something you earn by lifelong cultivation.  If people know you are a reliable source, they will believe the things you say.  Anonymous information can be helpful from time to time, but without knowing the source I always remain skeptical.  And curious.

Scrolling Along

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I’ve got a condition.  “Oh, we know!” I hear you say.  But I mean a specific one.  Fast moving images make me nauseous.  It can be debilitating.  I can lose an entire day because I’m stopped at a railroad crossing while boxcars speed past my eyes.  Or because some found-footage filmmaker can’t hold the camera still.  As the old moralizing children’s song goes, “Be careful little eyes what you see.”  The internet has thus cast me into a kind of personal Hell.  You see, it has to do with scrolling.  To find things you have to scroll.  And scrolling, if I’m not careful, can make me quite ill.  When I try to find an old post on this blog, where the keywords are too common, scrolling through old posts can make me ill.  “Ah,” I hear you say, “turnabout is fair play.”

But seriously, scrolling can really be an accessibility issue.  An unrecognized one, for sure, but still an issue.  I have very long lists.  Books I need to read.  Movies I need to see.  Stories I haven’t finished writing.  And to find things, I must scroll.  It’s worse with pictures.  With pure text you can sort of avert your eyes.  Of course, you might miss what you’re seeking.  A small price to pay for not spending the rest of the day with your head between your knees.  If you’ve been to this blog a time or two, you know that I consider myself a neo-Luddite.  I use technology but I am ambivalent about it.  It sure makes navigation easier (until you lose the signal, then you curse yourself for not having a paper map).  It helps physicians and makes book buying much quicker.  But it can also make you sick.

It is possible to create this kind of nausea on the printed page.  It’s also easier to catch the early eye-strain that warns an episode is coming and close the book.  Besides, most books don’t cause this to happen.  Increasingly, scrolling is triggering it.  Looking for an image in the thousands of posts I’ve published here to reuse to illustrate a point.  Trying to find that book I know I saw on my endless Amazon wish list.  And just how many movies do they have on Netflix anyway?  Merrily we scroll along.  It’s just that some of us have to pull over to the side of the road awhile, get out of the car, and breathe deeply for a bit.  Don’t worry about us.  Just speed on by.  There are places to go, and me, well, I’ve got a condition.

More my speed. Image credit: “Boekrol Esther 18de eeuw uit een sefardische synagoge in Sevilla” public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Hungry Eyes

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They’re watching.  All the time.  I may be a quasi-paranoid neo-Luddite, but I have proof!  Who’s the “they”?  Technology nameless here forevermore.  So my wife and I attend Tibetan singing bowls once a month when we can.  It’s the night I get to stay up late even though it’s a “school night” and get bathed in sound.  Our facilitator is a kundalini yoga instructor.  To those of you with experience, you know what that means.  At the end of each session we sing the “Longtime Sun” song.  Each and every month the next morning I groggily look it up.  I know it’s a recent song (hey, I’m in my sixties) but I can never remember by whom.  So for the record it was written by Mike Heron of the Incredible String Band and it’s part of a piece called “A Very Cellular Song” on the 1968 album The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter.  (Now I remember!)  Okay, so I’ve got that out of my system. (I must add that this is disputed, with some claiming it’s an old Irish blessing. But note, AI only complicates the issue because it doesn’t do actual research.)

Incredible String Band: Image credit—Bert Verhoeff / Anefo, under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, via Wikimedia Commons

So how’s that proof?  Well, there’s an unconventional website I check daily.  Are you surprised?  Really?  To get headlines I have to reload it daily and the ads sometimes refresh.  I checked this site a mere five minutes after searching “Longtime Sun” for maybe the fifth time and the ads in the refreshed page were for singing bowls.  Just five minutes earlier I’d been searching a hippie tune and already they were preparing ads for me.  You see, “Longtime Sun” is a standard of many (I gather from the interwebs) kundalini yoga classes.  So much so that it’s commonly said that this is a traditional Tibetan song.  Well, I suppose to call it “Very Cellular,” or even “Hangman’s Daughter,” might harsh the experience a bit.

Kundalini yoga is very esoteric stuff if you read a little more deeply.  For me such reading is an occupational hazard, so I’ve read enough to know that many respectable people might be a bit shy upon hearing the details.  That’s not to say that it’s ineffectual on the level of singing bowls.  I have great respect for esotericism, although Hinduism isn’t in my background.  But if “they” know what kundalini teaches, what kinds of ads might begin to show up on the websites I visit?  What’s truly amazing is that a web search for a specific song brought up an ad for something that would be puzzling, were a reader innocently wanting to find out about “A Very Cellular Song.”  For academic purposes, for instance.  Of course, they know, you can merch anything.  You can trust the internet only so far. And they are watching.

In Praise of Paper

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There’s an old saying that the tech industry might consider.  “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”  I’m thinking books.  I work in an industry that’s running after ebooks, sometimes at the expense of actual books.  You know what I mean—the kind printed on paper.  With a cover.  An object.  What techies don’t seem to understand is that something happens to you when you’re reading a book.  It changes you.  Curled up in a chair with a half-pound of bound paper in front of you, you become absorbed.  Chair, person, paper.  All one.  And you’re taken somewhere else.  I’m not saying that reading online isn’t valuable.  Clearly it is.  The experience, however, isn’t the same.  Industry moguls express surprise at vinyl’s return.  They shouldn’t.  It wasn’t broke either.

After reading a meaningful book I’ll carry it around with me for days like Linus’ security blanket.  Its mere presence reminds me that something profound happened to me while I was spending time with that tome.  Especially meaningful books I hesitate to shelve away with the others.  No, I want them to hand to remind me.  To bring back, at a glance, the fascination they engendered.  Let’s call it enchantment.  Capitalism removed enchantment from the world.  In the heat of materialism’s fervor, it made all alternatives irrelevant.  That’s what’s driving the ebook craze.  Hey, I’m fine if you like to read on a piece of plastic, but please leave the option of paper for those who prefer to truly get lost.

I spend most of my waking hours (and all of my sleeping ones) surrounded by books.  When my eye falls on one that I really enjoyed, I take a nanosecond pause to appreciate it.  We all have to decide how we’ll spend our time on this weary old planet.  A good deal of it will be work, and if we’re lucky it will be doing something we enjoy.  Otherwise we have roughly five hours of waking time five days a week to squeeze in the necessary and the enjoyable.  Some will go out and party with friends, others will stay home and read a book.  Many will use devices to fill the time outside the office, whether alone or with friends.  I tend to be in the book crowd.  I’m not embarrassed by that.  Books have been good to me.  Very good.  They say reading is fundamental.  I would add that reading a real book is life itself.

Not Content

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I write books.  When I want to “create content” I do it on this blog.  (And a few other internet sites.)  These aren’t the same thing.  I find it distressing that publishers are trying to drive us to ebooks where content can easily be changed, as opposed to print books.  The shelves of this room are lined with books and the technology doesn’t exist to come in and change “data” without my knowing it.  Facts are secure in print, right Ilimilku?  I’m not looking forward to a Star Wars future where there’s no paper.  I was born in the last century and, perhaps, I’ll die there too.   You see, when you write a book you have a project in mind that has an endpoint.   It may change and shift as you write, but you know what a book is and that’s what you produce.  It gets shelved and you move on to other things.  (At least I do.)

Content is something different and the creative process behind it also differs.  If I find something wrong after the fact, I go into my past posts and change it.  I’m not afraid of admitting I’m wrong.  The point of this blog is to share ideas with the world, not to write a book.  (Although, I confess that I would not say “no” if someone in publishing wanted a selection of worthwhile posts for a book… just saying.)  It amazes me how publishers have pretty much gone after the money and have forgotten what the creative process is like.  Of course, they’re having to figure out how this whole internet with free content plays into it too.  But still, my book writing uses a different fold in my gray matter than my blog writing does.  All of it feels pretty different from writing fiction too.

These things together adds up to a writing life.  I have a ton of “not for publication” writing.  This is something different again.  I suspect it will never be read by anybody, moldering away on some old hard drive after some AI-induced apocalypse.  I write it for of the same reason, I suspect, that people used to spray-paint “Kilroy was here” on things.  The book of Job, it seems to me, was the preservation of words that someone simply had to write.  We know the framing story is folklore.  But those who have words to carve with iron on lead, or engrave on a stone to last forever.  It’s more, I hope, than just “creating content.”

Tech Trust

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Tech problems are a part of life, of course.  The recent problem at CrowdStrike that grounded airlines and prevented 911 from working and interfered with medical services is a scary thing.  The word “fragility” was used in the New York Times.  Please allow me this jeremiad.  I appreciate technology and what it can do for us.  I really do.  I can usually find a movie to watch online on a day off work.  I can navigate most places without a map (although recently when there was no 4G coverage, I was left lost for a little while).  What’s really scary, to me, is those who claim tech, and only tech, is our future.  I’m a simple guy with simple tastes.  I enjoy reading books and watching movies to stimulate my restless imagination.  Yet I’m constantly being told that I should read on a screen, not on paper.  And that artificial “intelligence” can—or worse—should run things.  What happens when the grid goes down?

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I love art glass, but I’ve also broken quite a bit of it over the years because life is rough and tumble.  Some fragility is part of the attraction. For a while, when I was young, I was fascinated by card houses.  Constructing one that used an entire deck was not only a goal, but its own kind of art.  Sometimes the beauty of art inheres in its very fragility. The house of cards took skill, but someone slamming a door, or even walking into the room could bring it all down.  A trembling hand or a drop from a millimeter too high could spell the end of this particular installation.  But nobody died.  No worldwide travel plans were interrupted.  The consequences were minimal.

I don’t dislike computers.  It’s just that I think balance is desirable.  After work, which is pretty much all online these days, I tend to move away from the internet for the rest of the day.  I pick up a book, made of paper.  Sometimes I’ll watch some media, preferably on DVD.  I don’t miss VHS tapes, I assure you—although we still have quite a few of them, some of which contain media that has never been released either on disc or online.  I can’t watch them.  Oh, if I had the time, gumption, and cash I could purchase a player.  I’d have to buy some kind of adapter to connect it to the TV.  Is that a downgrade?  My understanding is that CrowdStrike’s problem was all caused by an upgrade.  I’ve known smaller catastrophes with upgrades, and they seem to come every couple of months now.  What’s to be done?  Maybe we should slow down a little and read a book.

Doing Without

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I’m a creature of habit.  Although I’m no internet junkie (I still read books made of paper), I’ve come to rely on it for how I start my day.  I get up early and do my writing and reading before work.  I generally check my email first thing, and that’s where something went wrong.  No internet.  We’ve been going through one of those popular heat waves, and a band of thunderstorms (tried to check on their progress so I could see if it’s okay to open the windows, but wait—I need the internet to do that) had rolled through three hours ago, at about midnight.  Maybe they’d knocked out power?  The phone was out too so I had to call our provider on my cell.  The robovoice cheerily told me there was a service outage and that for updates I could check their website.  Hmmm.

I can read and write without the internet.  I’m on Facebook for, literally, less than two minutes a day.  I stop long enough to post my blog entry and check my notices.  I hit what used to be Twitter a few times a day, but since people tend to communicate (if they do) via email, that’s how the day begins.  This morning I had no internet and I wondered how tech giants would live without it.  I’m no fan of AI.  I use technology and I believe it has many good points, but mistaking it for human—or thinking that human brains are biological computers—flies in the face of all the evidence.  Our brains evolved to help our biological bodies survive.  And more.  The older I get the more I’m certain that there’s a soul tucked in there somewhere too.  Call it a mind, a psyche, a spirit, a personality, or consciousness itself, it’s there.  And it’s not a computer.

Our brains rely on emotion as well as rationality.  How we feel affects our reality.  Our perspective can change a bad situation into a good one.  So I’m sitting here in my study, sweating since, well, heat wave.  It was storming just a few hours ago and I can’t check the radar to see if the system has cleared out or not.  What to do?  Open the windows.  I’ll feel better at any rate.  And in case the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, “open the windows” is a metaphor as well as a literal act on my part.  And I don’t think AI gets metaphors.  At least not without being told directly.  And they call it “intelligence.”

Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash

Passing Words

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I’ve never counted, but it must be dozens.  Maybe a hundred.  And they have very high memory requirements.  Especially for a guy who can’t recall why he walked into a room half the time.  I’m talking passwords.  The commandments go like this:

You can’t use the same password for more than one system/platform/device/account

You can’t tell anyone your password (duh!)

You can’t write it down

You can’t send your password to someone electronically (duh!)

You must logoff your device when it’s unattended

You will be held responsible for anything done under your login

The word of the Lord.

Now, how much more ageist can you get?  I’ve never counted the number of passwords I’ve had to generate for work alone but I can’t remember much without writing things down.  Even the chores after work.  I hear that there are “keychains” you can get that remember your passwords for you.  I suspect you need a password to access your passwords.  Replicate the commandments above.

I know internet security is serious business.  My objection is that you’re not supposed to write any of this down.  I carry a notebook around with me (it has no passwords, so please don’t try to steal it) to keep track of everything from doctors’ orders to how to call the plumber if there’s a leak.  I can’t remember all that stuff.  Some of it is personal information, but with everything you’re expected to keep in memory these days—at the same time we’re unleashing AI on the world—is madness.

A friend pointed out that AI books are written without authors.  If I remember correctly, my response was “AI has great potential, but let’s leave the humanities to humans.”  I hope I’m remembering that correctly, because I thought it clever at the time. I wish I’d written it down.  Those who make the rules about passwords aren’t as close to their expiration date as I am.  My grandmother was born before heavier-than-air flight took place and died after we’d landed on the moon.  Guys my age regale their kids (and some, their grandkids) by telling them telephones used to be attached to walls and you could walk away from technology at will.  Now it follows you.  Listens to you even when you’re not talking to it—our car frequently interjects itself into our conversations.  At least she isn’t asking for a password while I’m driving.  I couldn’t write it down.  Our love affair with technology is also driving.  More often than we suppose.  It’s driving me too… driving me crazy.

Tech Warning

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My moon roof is open.  That’s what the late-night alert says.  Thing is, I don’t have a moon roof.  Maybe I should go out to the garage and check, just to be sure.  You see, these new cars, which are as much computer as they are a means of conveyance, are subject to glitches just like the computers at work always seem to be.  And if this is true of a massive and lucrative company like Toyota, how can the rest of us really trust what our devices tell us?  After all, mainly they exist to sell us more stuff.  So whenever we take the Prius out, after it’s put away I get some kind of warning on my phone.  Nearly every single time.  If somebody’s been sitting in the back seat—or even if a bag was resting there—I’m cheerfully reminded to check the back seat once I get into the house.  I appreciate its concern and when I grow even more forgetful I may need it.  But that moon roof…

I use and appreciate technology.  I believe in the science behind it.  It makes life simpler, in some ways.  Much more complex in others.  I confess that I miss paper maps.  Do you remember the thrill of driving into an unknown city and having to figure out how to get to an address with no GPS?  Now that seems like an adventure movie.  Our cars practically—sometimes literally—drive themselves.  I’m no motor-head, not by a long shot.  I do remember my first car that didn’t have power steering or power brakes.  It had a stick-shift and you had to wrassle it at times.  Show it who was in charge.  With technology we’ve all become the serfs.  It breaks down and you have to take it to an expert.  Not quite the same as changing a tire.

I worry about the larger implications of this.  As a writer I worry that my largest output is only electronic.  Publishers don’t seem to realize that those of us who write do it as a way of surviving death.  We have something to say and we want it etched in stone.  Or at least printed on paper.  Tucked away in some Library of Congress stacks in the hopes that it will remain there for good.  I often think of dystopias.  The stories unfold and ancient documents—our documents—are found.  But unless they get the grid up and running, and have Silicon Valley to help them, our electronic words are gone.  It’s as if you left the moon roof open, even though you don’t have one.

Adulting

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Young professionals that I know often say adulting sucks.  Quite a bit of the time I tend to agree with them.  The 9-2-5 makes just getting along difficult, at times.  I’m sure there’s software to ease some of the woes, but you have to learn how to use it.  And that takes time.  Time I’d rather spend writing or reading.  For example, to get a small break on state taxes, if you work from home, you need to calculate your office space and then how much it costs to exist in your house for the year.  When I remember to do so, I can look utilities and mortgage up in Quicken.  Sometimes, however, when a book in my mind is distracting me I just tot all this up on the back of an envelope.  Then I need to type it in so my accountant can see it (taxes are far too complicated for mere mortals) and, I can’t underscore this too many times: numbers are adulting.

Photo by Tyler Easton on Unsplash

I’m an idea person.  The 9-2-5 (numbers!) that keeps you in front of a computer all week long means that things pile up.  Weekends seem too short to spend on numbers.  But you’ve got to balance that checkbook.  And even tot up the number of hours you give to “the man” each day.  What could be more adult than accounting?  Don’t get me wrong—at times numbers can be interesting.  Numbers, at their best, are philosophical.  One squared is one.  When you square any number greater than one, it increases.  One doesn’t.  And you can’t divide by zero and get zero for an answer, as handy as that’d be from time to time.  These abstract concepts come in useful but adulting involves serious numbers.  Numbers that imply liquidity.  Cash flow.  

Time is made up of numbers too.  If a social event comes up on a weekend, there goes your grocery and cleaning time.  And writing a book takes a tremendous amount of time.  It’s a second job on top of the other one you work 9-2-5.  All of this makes me think of those TIAA-CREF ads that showed prominent professors and captions that said “Because some people don’t have time to think of money.”  Or something similar.  That’s what I’m talking about.  Adulting is all about money.  And money must be taxed.  And you have to keep track of where it all goes.  I’m sure Quicken could help me with this, if I had time to learn it.  (We pay for it after all.)  But I’m kind of busy writing this book…