Days Now, Not Weeks

Moving day is rapidly approaching. I now think about its arrival in terms of days, not months anymore, and not weeks. (Hey, if people can say their infant's age is fourteen weeks, I can say moving day is in 19 days.) 

(Aaaaaa-eeeeeeee!!!!!!1)

So where should the prep for the move be now, developmentally speaking? I'm packing things, but the criteria at this point is, will I need this in the next 19 days? Will I EVER need this? DID I ever need it?? (. . . in a maddening cycle of angst-driven calculations and contemplations.)  This is made slightly more complicated by the fact that it's a cross-country move, so some of the things I will need soon include things needed for a four-day road trip (conservatively figuring) and an unknown number of days living in a motel if the movers don't get there until later. i.e. I will definitely need to shave before we unpack in our new place, maybe more than once, and of course floss. Luckily the floss is in a little plastic dispenser that is easily transported. 

OK, hyper-focusing is a hazard, at this point. 

I now notice or wonder if some of the things I do or see here in the coming days will be last time I do so. 

It's Sunday.  Nothing to do but pack some more. It's the little things that drive you nuts--the drawer with 87 things in it, and they are all very important. 

Full Circle or Something Like It

 I just read my entry in an old chapbook ("Driftwood") published by Asha Anderson. It was entitled, I believe, "No Title" which, in the literary world, is considered one entire notch above being in the "not pictured" list in your high school yearbook and then your name being wrong. Another blogger, affectionately known around the blogosphere as "Wiggy" had challenged me to write a story involving red shoes and peanut brittle. (Relax. I'm not going to paste it in here.) Of course seven or eight ideas immediately sprung to mind. (Not.) What I wrote was a little semi-autobiographical tale of an 18 year old boy leaving Palo Alto for points east in his '57 Chevy, including a sort of perversion of the theme of The Gifts of the Magii. You may call that unforgivable, but, remember, it had to be about red shoes and peanut brittle. Bottom line, the story vaguely referred to my leaving California to move to Missouri. 

I made the implied promise of a full circle, or something like it, so the point is my partner and I are now contemplating a move to California. For her, it is yet another move, but for me it is something like returning home--even though I readily admit that 1960s California does not exist anymore and you can't ever go home because that would entail stepping foot in the same river twice, etc. etc. etc. That would be the Platte River, by the way. I'm not saying it's a twisty river, but as you drive through Nebraska, you cross it something like 27 or 28 times. So, I'm just saying, "twice" is an understatement. 

By now, you're thinking, wow, he must be desperate to post a blog entry; he's really stretching here. 

That's true. Anyway, I'm excited to at least be thinking of the Big Move, plus we're driving out there, after a brief stop in Jackson, Wyoming, this fall. Making this all easier to think about, and providing ample justification, is the particularly crappy summer we are having here in Missouri this year--it's not the heat, it's the "dew point." Plus the smoke from the current Canadian wildfire that is just thick enough to obscure the horizon.

OK.  Enough of that. 

A Disclaimer

 For those of you who know that I live in Missouri, I feel like I need to say this. Our governor, governor Kehoe, does NOT speak for me when he says Missourians are all in support of Trump's air attack of Iran. He certainly doesn't represent me--clearly demonstrated by how many laws that were voted in by majority vote by me and other Democrats or people of left-leaning ideology, that were rescinded by the state legislature. He certainly does not speak for me nor, I suspect, the majority of Missourians, when he tries to imply a general support for Trump's version of W's WMD fiasco. 

Built into his statement was a further implication that if you don't agree with him, then you must not be "proud of the men and women from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri," [where the B2 bombers are based.]  If we do get into a protracted war with Iran (which I sincerely hope we do not) I do not look forward to the flurry of disingenuous slogans and buzzphrases about "supporting our troops," conflating genuine and appropriate respect for service members who protect us, and support for another reckless and so far unauthorized war.

There's so much more to say, but I think if you got this far you probably agree with most everything I might add. Or maybe not. 

Writing is Hard

Playing the guitar isn't that hard. In fact, it's one of the easiest instruments to learn to play simply. Anyone with reasonable dexterity can learn to form the basic three or four chords and strum a song after one or two days of practice. If they sing along and it's fun, that's great.

Recuerdos de la Alhambra, or Bach's Bourrée in E minor, to be played properly, may take years of instruction and practice, and even then, to be played well will require extraordinary devotion and talent.

I guess it depends on a persons goals and ambitions whether writing is hard or not. But I will say that with fiction, novels or short stories, say, it's all about the story. That's the main thing. A good story and a competent grammar checker may be all you need. 

Back to my music analogy, Bob Dylan wasn't a super great accomplished guitar player, but we loved him for the stories.

Face it--The Pod Bay Doors are Not Going to Open

 I'll open with a digression. A "pre-digression," if you will. I wanted to use the expression whining and pewling in my opening sentence, but thought I better check the spelling of pewling. Is it puling? Turns out, it varies, sort of. The two Google hits at the top referenced Shakespeare, and then Peter Pan. So pewling is an archaic term, though I'm not so old that it would have rolled off my tongue with such alacrity--the whole thing could be traced back to the the time that great big book fell on my head at the library when I was a kid. If you believe in that sort of thing. 

This post is about AI. I mention that early in the post, in case you want to hit backspace now and go back to the Weather Underground site, to save you some time. What's at the top of my head at the moment is, how can I write to differentiate my "product" from that of an AI LLM? To throw in a few grammatical or punctuation errors is just too easy. 

Anyway; moving on. 

I'm used to the idea of AI now, and to me it's just one more irritant in today's technological world, like spam email, cell phone apps, or car dashboards that have a learning curve. 

I don't "fear" AI. When I write something, I absolutely know that somewhere there is a human who is writing better stuff than me. I might even resent them if I knew who they were and it seemed like they were so good that writing well was effortless for them. So now there's AI also. It may produce a good story worth reading (I'm still not so sure about that, though,) and so might I. Nothing has really changed.

I will also say that I put very little extra value in a piece of writing just because it is completely and totally free of grammatical and spelling errors.

In addition to all that--and I just thought of this--the existence of AI writing may trigger a good effect among human writers. We may strive now to make our writing more human, and this may result in some pretty interesting stuff. As far as the "hack" human writers, of which there are aplenty, it seems like their lifeless and unimaginative stuff that takes so long to churn out just won't be able to compete.

End of Blog entry, mistakes and all. I'm not even going to check. This is very liberating. Silver lining! 

Conservative Readers?

 I know this blog is fairly pathetic, statistically, in terms of readership, (despite my engaging run on sentences,) but I wonder if I have any conservative readers. If I do, I want to say I am trying hard to be inclusive, and I recognize that most political or ideological issues have at least two sides. Furthermore, I don't claim to be right all the time; only that at any given moment I think I'm right--that is until I see otherwise, whether from internal logic or external conversation. 

That said, I see the logic, that is, I understand, in some conservative takes on some issues. Not mostly, but I can see their point. What I have trouble with is the underlying philosophy that government should leave people alone so that the "social order" can shake itself down, with winners at the top and losers at the bottom. 

I actually wonder if all the Trump supporters or far-right conservatives I know think that they are the "winners," or at least if they think they can become so if only left alone by the government. I would imagine it would be difficult to support Trump and Musk right now if I thought it meant I was going to be a peon in the new feudalistic order that would arise under them given enough time. I would much rather be any ordinary citizen in the country of Jefferson. 

Sunday Musings in Central Standard Time on Less-than-optimal Sleep

 I want to write another blog post--I mean, it's about time--but there's so much going on and almost all of it outside my control. The one situation I seem to have stewardship over is the making of an appointment to repair a root canal, which may be easier than ousting the GOP or its offending parts but still not something you would characterize as "fun." Plus I got some weird virus over the night that's making my body ache and my brain feel like it's floating in an insular, room-temperature bath of incredulity and dread. Although the latter might have to be referred back to the GOP thing. 

I have just one or two observations regarding this. Now, I'm not an "Internet hater" but it occurred to me that without it, recent history might have had, by necessity, gone another way. Maybe a better way.  I love to say that when King George said something stupid or obnoxious, it took six weeks for the news to reach the per-Revolutionary War Colonists. I can't help but think if they had Internet back then it would have gone worse. 

Anyway, maybe I'm wrong but I'm pretty certain that without the Internet, without computers and databases, in a world where bookkeeping was done by clerics, it would be very hard indeed to wreak so much havoc on a country in such little time as we have witnessed lately. 

Or maybe in writing this blog post I'm just pandering to a fantasy where a government pseudo-agent is beating on the door of a government office and is suddenly and violently repelled by a well-placed musket ball. 

Forest. Trees.

 Of course if we observe someone in Washington to be breaking laws, we should take steps to stop them. This is just to suggest that we stop focusing as much on the shenanigans of the new Trump/Musk administration and return to the legitimate issue of Trump's lack of fitness for the office. The former requires months of litigation, the latter only that we open our eyes and see how absolutely fucking insane Trump has become. I'm not a doctor, but I don't need to be. Let's not forget or lose sight of the fact that Trump has lowered our expectations of Presidential behavior so much that we have become numb to it and are giving him much too much latitude. 

I add here that only a crazy person would believe that the insane, outrageous utterances via "truth" social can in any way be construed as reasonable or even remotely connected to reality as we know it. Yet Trump must think this. Or if he indeed thinks we're that stupid, his mental capacity and ability to reason must have degraded by now to a new low normal. Correct me if I'm wrong--could any other American politician in living memory do even just one of the things Trump has done and still be elected and allowed to stay in office?

This has been said over and over until it's kind of lost its meaning and impact, but STILL TRUE. 

The other thing: Musk has no more authority to do anything in our government than I do. I don't care if Trump has dubbed him Special Government Secret Agent with a "license to be an asshole." Literally speaking, the only authority he seems to have is what we have willingly given him. I realize it's more complex than that, but that's what it is. 

Sorry to veer off into politics. There is so much to debate, I don't want to get into that, but I have to blow off a little steam--just a little--before I go off the deep end.