120122 setting up the Kenwood tuner and the old Energy 22 speakers up here in my room, a funny thing happened—I enjoyed myself. Alone. I guess I thought my problem was that I spend too much time alone, but it’s quite the opposite really. I spend almost no time alone. During the day I’m with “work;” afternoons and evenings and most of weekends I’m with the girls. Which is all good, but—huh. In’erestin, kinda. I’m trying it again now, on purpose this time: listening to my little buzzy retro rig up here by myself. Would you believe I resisted coming up here? Might even go so far as to say I felt *guilty* about not being available? Like any second someone’s gonna be like, *What are you doing in there? What’s your problem? Are you avoiding us?* or whatever. The funny thing is, *they aren’t going to say that—* they’re fine. They can and often do do their own thing. I guess I just got accustomed, suddenly and then gradually all these years, to my role of “being present,” or “being a presence” or like I said “being available.” Like that’s what shaped my identity, kept me solid. NO FUCKING WONDER I MISS MYSELF. NO FUCKING WONDER I’VE STAYED LONELY. I haven’t given myself permission to be an individual person. Dude. That shit’s crazy. Heheh, but it’s cool. It’s like Don sent me an affirmation via this old stereo detritus: *Don’t budge me* 121322 outrage is (just) a(nother) strategy the rule is: *if you want something more, come and get it* then they sit back in their battlements and snicker, knowing you can’t, cause they got all the machines and the drugs and the rules and the complicated computations all sewn up so you gotta get creative break the law curry favor invent something subvert someone but most of these strategies end with failure most of the time so you gotta band together-- three little planes could always beat the big dumb slow one in Atari-- one of your planes is outrage it doesn’t matter who “believes” what or what the “truth” is all that matters is winter’s coming and there’s only so many nuts so start chittering my friends perch on an oak branch, chirrup and chitter and twitch your bushy tail till everyone in a hundred acre radius knows how pissed you are ai is to supplant regular i, not augment or heaven forbid “do something” for us. the answer to “only so many nuts” is “we’ll make more.” the answer to “out of what” is “imagination” (because fiction is currency). the answer to “there’s no such thing as infinite anything, even imagination” is *switches on a black box, backs away with hands over ears.* the answer to “i can’t eat imagination” is “well ai can” 121522 ## work is the path of least resistance walk into discomfort , displeasure, inconvenience, delayed gratification, pain why bother? sometimes you barely have to think about it: life or death situations foremost, but why other times? environment, people you’re with, getting good results, etc… but if you can volunteer to walk back in when the storm has passed, there’s nothing you cant at least make progress on discuss. 122222 i fucking love my weird new/old stereo setup up here in my millie’s former room, temporary as everything is, and not knowing how i will recreate it when we move, as always, you yearn for the better thing then mourn what you’ve left behind but yeah, for some fucking reason these fucking speakers just massage my brain. they’re like, rich, thick, chocolately, but thick like hardees not culvers, it’s like clean but not sterile, dense like a classic old manual lens, it’s like if honey could turn into a giant piano that somehow was able to give you a big fucking bear hug, they have way more bass presence than anything this relatively small has a right to, but it’s not dumb bass, it’s like smart bass or something, strong and commanding and tight but not seething or tensed up, and just i don’t know, they just find the aural g spot and press on it with perfect pressure. i don’t know why but it’s cool as fuck. i’ve never had a setup as opinionated as this and don’t expect ever to again yeah the old carver cube makes a buzzing sound but you know what? I CAN’T FUCKING HEAR IT FROM OVER HERE WHEN THERE’S MUSIC PLAYING AND I DON’T FUCKING CARE audiophiles are fucking idiots except when they’re not. like i stfg the schiit dac makes this shit sound better too haha i’m a fucking idiot too but at least i’m not an original idiot and yeah the tweeters don’t match but again who the fuck, plus i got the other replacement in a box just ready for the time comes. and a whole little plastic thing full of lil connectors for the wires, god i’m rich baby 122322 chatgpt ugh fuck mee i’m talking about the thing everyone’s talking about except of course i’m not actually talking because we don’t need to do that anymore because chatgpt can do it for us. isn’t that what all this ai shit is? offloading *all* the bullshit and just letting the computers do literally ALL of it, both question and answer, student and teacher, master and servant, merchant and customer, artist and audience--IT’S LIKE A COMPUTERIZED GAME OF CANDYLAND--roll the dice x number of times and the rest is literally predetermined, turn by turn except there’s no need to wait in between the turns and poke your cousin ava and say “it’s your turn!” right down to the final senseless victory and fatuous loss, it’s just one big number. done and delivered. so what are we meatheads needed for anyway? we can wander off to the park while the computers are burning electricity going around in circles repeating everything that’s ever been said before, mixing it into “new” combinations. weren’t we promised leisure time like this before? and didn’t we just become meat instead? the time machine wasn’t about time travel. except it kinda was, because we’ve been here before. i dunno man, fuck it. stay drunk. but lose weight and stay in shape too, knowhatimean? don’t be too tasty. you have too much confidence in civilization. you think you’re profound, asking “can AI replace [____] (fill in the blank with something you’re used to thinking of as a ‘job’)?” but the real question is, why are we bothering with [____] in the first place? not “can chatgpi write this podcast” but “can chatgpi listen to this podcast for me?” why not both, plus “can chatgpi argue about whether or not chatgpi can argue about whether chatgpi can listen to this podcast better than i can” and so on. the intelligence we’re gawping at here is less artificial than our own; we can only emulate randomness but never quite achieve it. real intelligence is just randomness plus processing speed. for speed you can substitute all the time in the whole expanding candyland universe. if my phone can auto suggest every word in a conversation (fuck, it doesn’t just suggest, it insists--it fights me for it) and yours can too, why don’t we just let the phones have the conversation and you and me can fuck off down to the lake and get naked. does my phone really need my fat finger to argue with over what i thought i meant to say? i give up. it probably wasn’t that important. what’s the point of this semantic thumb wrestling match. nothing is real but hunger and love, and even those may just be side effects of the drugs we let our algorithms invent to try to become more artificial. stop trying to explain shit. let chatgpt take care of that. nobody’s listening anyway. except chatgpt. *sucking up all the data.* see what i’m saying? meet me in the morning. 56th and yamaha. honey you working know it by me babe. everything’s been starkness since tot green five for now, i’m gonna go with: anything you do that’s for sale “can be replaced” and anything you do for other reasons, i can’t finish the sentence because I only write nonsense. (it’s all i’ve ever been really good at) or as [Cory Doctorow pointed out](https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/), “A mindless bot who makes regular purchases is all that’s really needed.” in other worlds, sometime you have to do the thing you’re supposed to do, you’re meant to do, the thing it’s your turn to do, you’re up, it’s your line, your turn, go, go ahead, harmonize, speak up, say your thing, and it’s ok if you need to take a minute, slink off to your room for a minute, be a useless sack of crap for a sec, pout, grin upside down, count to ten, get mad, punch the wall, whatever you gotta do as long as you don’t hurt anyone if you can help it (usually you can, maybe not always, i dunno), but only for a moment. a beat. you get that one beat and then it’s time to shine, bucko. be a sparkly silver crayon. be beautiful and tall. be a homely gnome. be whatever it is you happen to be, it honestly doesn’t matter, as long as you do the thing next. right now. what’s the point of waiting around? note that a beat isn’t a unit of *time,* it’s a unit of blood. megan can be so self-centered. she knows how to act, she can activate manners mode and i’m proud of her for that and for plenty of other things too, but underneath i still see a layer of selfishness and defensiveness—that wild animal watching from the woods’ edge, ready to bare fangs or scamper away as the situation requires they’re all sitting together coloring now. it’s nice, and it’s also a little like watching someone else’s campfire she’s also perceptive and i care what she thinks about me, which is a little weird. i mean i care what they all think about me but with her it’s more... i dunno... i’m more insecure for some reason, guarded, defensive. she said millie was afraid i was going to yell at her about the avalon mirror, but she said “He’s the son of his mama... I don’t think so.” i’m tired of feeling powerless. every time mom reminds me of how shitty my apartment is, i feel a little more wretched. this is a problem, because i’m too fucking old to let my mother’s judgment affect me like that, but at the same time i’m obviously the one who’s going to be taking care of her now. which is fine. there has to be a possible reality where you can be something other than one pathetic cartoon extreme or another. right? it’s just weird that i never quite got a fully developed time where i wasn’t linked to her. what to do about that. how to navigate that. i can’t accept just giving up and considering my “life” to be “over.” i ran anne off, she coulda been part of an independent family. but that’s happened more than once, and i regret the way i did it, and still feel unfinished about that, but i don’t think OMG SHE’S THE ONE I WAS MEANT TO BE A GROWNUP WITH. I need to be able to see who to do it with NOW, even though it’s late as fuck and I’m old and have responsibilities. That’s possible. Right? I’m just overthinking this and being too narrow, right? Need friends to help me answer this. Like Tom did that one day in front of Dave’s after the bike ride on that one trail. “you don’t need a diagnosis for everything. just accept that you’re weird, and move on” says megan when millie talks about wanting a diagnosis for autism sometimes what the next thing you’re meant to do is, is so trivial and pedestrian, you don’t even notice it. until you give up on your stupid pride, and quit making everything about you, and just fucking relax a little and let shit slide, because you can’t fix everything in one beat anyhow, join in on the conversation without having to be the white-hot starmaking glowing godlike radiant nebula at the center of it, and discover that they don’t mind having you be part of the campfire after all. when everything got all interrupted cuz of the mirror thing, everyone scattered for various reasons, and megan said mom said “so no one wants to watch this with me?” (it was the beauty and the beast 30th thing, even tho the girls wanted to watch a different movie) and went on to bed, and i still feel like shit about that. the beats continue, one after another, in varying tempos and pitches and paces. apparently 2003 was the original “i am scared in my breast like a robin”; it’s time to bring it out now and put it on the hearth. stand back. scry. what the fuck is going on with me? i guess i’ll get the medical profession involved. sigh. cel just went to a lot of trouble to get megan’s song to play on spotify for free reminder: ask ruth if she remembers what the advice was she was going to give me there’s nothing necessarily wrong with being a mama’s boy, as long as you’re not weak and creepy about it. you have to be your own boy, too, boy. if i had a therapist, i’d be all about this. this, “what phase of my life is this now, and how do i maintain independence and take care of my mom at the same time?” this “i can’t go back to being a slave again, i swear to fucking god i know what it feels like to want to disappear and i will not fucking go back there” and she’d be like, well, that’s a good start. and yet i feel pretty invisible right now did you notice i just *informed* megan and millie (and, especially megan, not until practically the last minute) that we were going to sean’s on xmas, rather than, like, asking them like you would ask an adult but then later we talked about it and i said thanks for coming down here, i know you didn’t have to and i ray appreciate it etc etc so i feel a little more clear about that but i’m still pretty freaked about the epiphany that i feel like i never really achieved actual independence. like that time in my life never arrived. speaking of staring into the abyss. that’s a good start. now what? what did i do instead? hid. turtled up. daydreamed. seethed. bought things instead of saving and investing. ate and drank and smoked things. ok ok yes i get it but what were you *doing* all this time? trying to be a parent. and... and? blaming my failures on other people and circumstances? HOW DO I STILL HAVE AN ADVENTURE? how? did i completely fuck it up and squander all my opportunities? cuz they were all either not perfect or too scary? HOW DO I DO IT? SOMEBODY FUCKING TELL ME. NO SERIOUSLY. I’M GONNA DIE SOON, FUCKERS. IT REALLY IS GETTING LATE. FUCK. HELP ME how bout this little titbit: if milwaukee is not as great as it once seemed, or as you want it to be, can you contribute something to making it better, instead of just observing or complaining? independence is not the same as just not having anyone to tell you no, or not having to work things out with anyone it has something to do with being willing and able to make (and know when it’s time to break) your own rules. or: it’s not about not having rules, it’s about being able to choose which rules to agree to live by and sometimes the hardest part is seeing the *invisible* rules that you’ve accreted over time, and having the humility and guts to say, this is dumb, i’m gonna change this because i care about the people in my life and don’t want to keep taking them for granted or treating them like shit (including myself) 122522 You get fascinated by the wrong things. Being bored means you would rather be doing something else. What is it, and why aren’t you? *You* also have something to offer *them—*it’s not just you trying to get what you need. spirits of the opposite of the mundanity you dread, appearing and disappearing every time you turn around— What is the #drug an “easy button” for? listening to songs in a foreign language anticipating the crash, the fall, the disappointment, the itch, the irritation, loss, decay, regret grieving in advance but you can’t unsee the prophecy you’d have trust issues too if the deepest time you ever trusted someone ended in disaster and it felt like it was at least partly your fault just cuz you have failed at something you really want doesn’t mean you should have settled for the thing you could have had but... can you really say you’ve failed if you haven’t fully tried yet?