Airing of Grievances 2025

 2025 has been heavy with grief, so here are just some of the grievances from this very minute.

Presented in historic and sleep-deprived alphabetical order!

AI

I’m sure one of these days I’ll compose this list using Chat GPT. Why wouldn’t I? I love publishing this list, but I hate writing. Does anyone like writing? I mean, everyone loves a laugh and creating and expressing and feeling like an artist. But on assignment, even self-assigned like this one, is brutal. The words are in me, but until they’re out, it’s just painful. Like upper intestinal gas. I’m obviously tangenting to get away from my point, which I honestly would prefer to avoid. The thing is, AI is gonna help us figure out how to cure cancer so let’s let it do that. But maybe let’s not make it say, sing, sculpt, or scribble our feelings. Shaping our feelings into tangible products is what makes us human. And doing so is hard and painful and, tragically, very often less than envisioned. Not doing so only makes me sad. But in this age of half artificiality, there’s something else that makes me sad. I’m honestly no AI-ologist, but we gotta understand that AI as we’ve presently defined it (not in the Matrix or Skynet sense), isn’t computational reasoning. It’s language, and a lesser language than we usually mean by language. It’s Q&A. We ask it a question and it dips into all the questions we’ve ever asked each other in history and pulls out what we think might be an answer we’ll be cool with. It’s not new. It’s not profound. It’s just a placeholder to get us off its back. The thing that depresses me here though is that every time I need to correct AI and every time it gives me a poem or an image I don’t connect with, I know it yanked it up out of the ocean of human interaction. I hate it because it’s soulless. I also hate it because maybe it’s telling us we were soulless all along.

AI part II

I’m doing a part two of this not because I have a ton to say about it, but because that last line for the previous part really works for me and I want to keep it as a last line. Alas, here’s the other thing about AI I don’t like. My not liking it has absolutely nothing to do with how much I engage with it. Its use is defaulted on every device and I need to go out of my way to not implement it. And more than this, even every human interaction must be gauged by how AI-ness their communication is. Proponents of AI say it’s here to stay and success in society now depends on AI-literacy. They’re right of course. I’ll need to get much more AI-literate, but first I need to correct all the mistakes AI bombards us with and all the mistakes the human collaborators bombard us with. Oh, and also we can no longer believe ANY video footage. The documentation of reality is rewritten. Good job world.

AI part III

We need water to drink.

book

Pretty sure I haven’t mentioned it here, but I’ve been putting together a book for the past five years. I specifically didn’t say “writing” or “working on” because by definition my efforts don’t qualify for those terms. The people closest to me don’t know this, because since I decided to write a book, it’s become the focus of my complete aversion. In the past five years I’ve fled to my bedroom because that room has the most distance in the house from the dining room (where my computer and book documents reside). I have a spreadsheet (of course) of ideas, but every time I open up the blank document page I scoot the chair back and gasp in horror. At one point I delighted in the idea like my own baby. Now it’s become my enemy. A spider too big to squash. I need the world to stop turning. I need a schedule apart from prioritizing one breath after the other. Yes, I need time. Specifically, I need way more time to procrastinate before typing out that first word.

cat

Hot Pocket is my first real pet. He’s pretty cool by my standards, but also objectively dorky. He is not as graceful as he appears. His single eye probably doesn’t provide the best depth perception so his jumps come with thumps. One time I saw him lean backward and fall flat on his back. You know that thing where you’re walking down a hallway and someone else walks toward you and there’s the awkward back and forth about which way you’re gonna pass each other? Well Hot Pocket is the king of that. He never knows the right of way. So he’s alright. I’m just including him here because he’ll probably die before I die and on that day I’ll cry and cry more than I do for humans.

convenience

We live in a land and time of wonder. Thanks to technology we have every morsel of the earth’s culture at our fingertips. We can pretty much send any object to each other nearly immediately. It’s what we dreamed about as children. What we didn’t anticipate is that our every stroke of convenience sends a flicker of power out to the ones with too much power. Things didn’t get this convenient without cutting a few corners. I’d like to say the people at the top of this capitalism thing got there by turning all the cheeks on their bodies, but nope that’s not the case. Every time I save time, I give more power to the powerful. I’d forsake convenience. I’d live in the wilderness, but you know I’m no happy camper. 

divine disappointment

Since it’s the end of the world I guess it’s also time for Jesus to visit again. Those who believe are eager for it. He’ll get rid of those pesky wizards and whoremongers. We totally know that. He’ll control the government and allot out what is deserved. He’ll provide the kindness we can’t find within our fallen society. And then surely he’ll say, “I gave you everything. Why couldn’t you do this for each other? Why did you prioritize destroying your enemies? Why didn’t you at least pray for them?” It will be so great and terrible.

Excel no border

I wouldn’t say I’m an expert at Excel but I would say It’s a big enough part of my life that every time I need to think about something for more than 30 seconds, I decide to put that thing in an Excel sheet and think about it there. That really just means lots of sheets and that same deep green border bleeds through all of them. I deal not with dozens of Excel pages, but instead a giant Excel blob. Solving problems is a matter of figuring out which appendage of the blob to push or pull and all my Excel sheets don’t define their ever-blending green borders with each other.

hair

I’m not sure why mammals need hair anymore. I’m ahead of the curve evolution-wise, at least as far as the top of my head goes. 2020, brought new adventures in hair. I decided to not cut my hair until Covid went away. It’s still around, but now more of a neighbor than an alien invader. Katie came along and brought two more things. Her silky fine 50-inch scalp hairs, and her soft demand (or perhaps hard request) that my face stay forever bearded. My face hair more than makes up for my missing scalp hair. It seems to be coming in two to a pore. It holds pens. The final hair piece – Hot Pocket – that cat has hair. It’s a fantastical amount of hair. He’s a tribble with more appendages. Our hair is glorious, when it’s still attached. Katie doesn’t have the baldness problem I have, but we have a name for her long strands: vacuumenades (actually I just made up that name just now and I don’t think it will stick). What I mean is while Katie is the least sheddy of us three, it’s her hairs that wrap around and bunch up the vacuum roller. I’m the one who leaks head hair like fluid. My deceptively long Homer strands fall like springs. My Santa beard strands fall out just as much, but they have the look of hair that's a bit more personal. Also those are the hairs I'm most pulling out. Okay but then there’s the cat’s hair. He breaks the laws of conservation of matter. If I were to take a day and collect all his fur stuck to everything, I’m sure I could compose at least a dozen new cats. I guess post-neutering, it's his only method of reproduction.

haven’t I pooped enough in my life?

By this time I would expect to at least start losing weight.

mental health

Popping this one right here in the middle as a sort of catch-all. 2025 has just been... well, it's been a thing. 

resumes

I’ve said this one before. And I think I feel differently than most on this one, but if there’s one place for a standard, specific government form, it should be in the place of resumes. As someone who has, at times, submitted myself to work for someone, I just want to let you know that I’ve worked for someone else before and here’s the list. As someone who sometimes fields prospective job holders, all I want is a silly list of what that person has done. In both cases, I see no need for artistry. Keep those flourishes out. Looking at one and then the other, there’s a period of re-learning the format. The creative, individual flourish that’s supposed to single one out becomes the annoyance of re-translation.

self

I’ve been around too long and no matter how hard I try, I can’t get rid of myself. I wake up and he’s there. I drop into bed and his breathing wakes me up. The party doesn’t end and I can’t go home alone. He’s always here. I’m always still there. We’ve started to run out of things to talk about. I’d take separate company, but I tired of the rest long before I tired of me. 

sleep

Sleep is one of the miracles of living in that you get to stop living for a few hours. Every night is the wonderful afterlife full of rest regardless of how much we deserve it. The problem is apparently I might stop living too much in my sleep. Despite proving I'm still alive by loudly snoring, the doctors are now telling me I might be taking 10-20 breaks from breathing during my slumbering hours. If true, then my sleep isn't just a loud, obstructive experience for those who happen to be around, but it's also a waste of MY time.

the unreal world

I’ve spent decades (that’s right, decades, plural) running away from reality. It was my generation that demanded all Star Wars content all the time rather than watching the news like once a year. I never understood the pleasure of a non-fiction book. My real life was really meant for the phony lives of video games. Fiction was a kind word for what I sought out as my reality. Artificiality is the less kind word. Now that artificiality has broken free of daydreams and has seeped into everyday living. Most of my perception is actually what’s fed to me through screens by entities obsessed with perceived truth rather than actual truth. I never thought I’d say it, but here I go – I miss the real world.

windows

Someone tell me where to get the kind of basic window screens for my old 1937 house. Every spring I plan on opening the place up to the ventilation of cross winds, but I’m just not much of a glazier. If I don’t sort it out I may just wind up throwing rocks through my windows and then open and close them through the positioning of taped garbage bags.