This is the body of the entry: This is the complication. This is the climax. This is the gist of what I wish to convey. This is the denouement. This is what you get.
What I’m Reading:
What slips from me is what
slips from me. Slippage
is the hinge on which my life
hinges.
— Jane Huffman / “Beauty is made my fear”
This is a digitized morning page. This is a digitized mourning phase. This is digitized mental squall. This is digitized coming to terms. This is digitized hullabaloo. This is digitized push and pull through the eye of a needle in haystack out on the fringes of the wasteland. This is digitized someone else’s neuroses filtered through semi-quavered skronk tectonics. This is digitized skronk tectonics, this. This is digitized digital manipulations via pistoning thumbs—tap tap tap tap poo. Ok, this is digitized poo. Ok, this is the pops. This is digitized digital masturbatory aleatory foo. This is digitized living in the still relatively new-new century. This is digitized raw manifold with a peculiar filter applied. This is digitized. This is Friday. This Friday. This.
What I’m Reading:
I am looking, it seems, for aesthetic correspondences to a sense of both desolation and supplication, though it is not clear to whom my entreaties are directed or even what they are. Deliver me from anything and everything, I will take whatever you can give: a request that leaves me as powerless as I feel.
— Emily Labarge / Dog Days
I’ve come untethered
Three days lost and out of sorts
Now the correction
Sitting on the train
The snow blows blinding outside
Heavy wet and sad
The Wailers’ singles in my ears
Provide the syncopation
Propelling the day
On the balcony
In yellow afternoon light
A thrush in the snow
Pink skies cede to blue
Melted snow transformed to ice
Anticipation
West, the dream maker bicycles
For all ages a unique mile
On fingertips
What I’m Reading:
Assigning too much “agency” to these bots leads us to psychologically outsource our judgment, which is a mistake…
— Adam Pryor, AI Consultant / “What a Group of A.I. Agents Talked About as Their Humans Had a Dinner Party” / The New York Times
A vibrant tuning fork in hand—
This is normally a prime time for burrowing a hole in your heart.
You tell me to videograph your heartache.
You claim that this crowded urban area saps your optimism and your love for your fellow human.
Someone’s banging on the door, yelling: get out, get out.
You will slowly reopen your heart and repair the gaps, and hope for the best.
It’s still not easy to be asymptomatic.
Over the next couple of weeks before October love forlorn, love clinically enervated, will disappear permanently.
Fuel for the broken heart.
Food for stormy weather.
What I’m Reading:
First, we could lose control of the future to AI. The risk is that it moves so fast that people can no longer follow what’s happening or intervene when needed. This would obviously be terrible … In the other direction, these systems could concentrate too much power in too few hands. No one person or company or country should be able to use the most powerful AI models to impose their worldview on everyone else. A company or country that believes only it can be trusted with this technology can use that belief to justify almost anything else. We have to reject that logic, even when it’s convenient for any one actor.
— Sam Altman / “Sam Altman’s remarks at the United Nations Security Council” / openai.com
there’s a desolation and a strange hope, all at once, in the vast spaces of the west…
there’s something to be said of empty spaces…
day after day…
you fill in the story…
What I’m Listening To:
I am nowhere tonight
On the interstate west
Where the sodium lights
Meet the vanishing stars
A whole country out there
Branded with signs
Cut through with roads
And some of them are mine
— The Wingdale Community Singers / “I’m In The Mood (To Drive)”
She found herself on the other side of the country — drove in a fugue as far west as she could until she hit the ocean.
As she drove away from the eastern ocean on the other extreme of the country — away from her husband, a husband who never was but insisted on the name and the discipline he forced; away from the son she never really wanted but the “husband-man” insisted on — she felt no bindings stretching taut, no heaviness.
No fear.
She had her passport, soon she’d have to choose: north to a clean well lighted place or south to the land of her ancestors — anywhere but this moribund, splintering, ghost ship crawling with mites and weighted down by a gargantuan millstone.
Staring at the sea, she spoke this into her phone:
I long to shape
a moon from bone.
I heard that before,
somewhere—
it resonated. A chord
struck—atonal
& dissonant.
A wound—a pickaxe stymie,
a hurricane hole
in homogeneity.
Monosyllabic—
trickle & tone.
“Where
you going—where
you been?”
I’ll find a planetarium
to bathe in—
nothing more
to say.
She threw the phone into the Pacific, walked back to car, and drove…
What I’m Reading:
Sometimes she imagines it will happen this way / that it has happened already,
and she stands remembering / that it is happening now, in the dawn of her
imagining—her body a wisp of air in a drafty corridor, stirred in the wake of
her passing.
— Jennifer Maier / “The Occupant Revisits the Rooms of Her Life and Arrives at a Late Understanding”
The sky is a century with no windows.
I say things like that. Sorry.
You have more rights than the undocumented:
I need a permit to uproot you.
Ofelia believes only rain can touch all of you.
My mother is my favorite immigrant.
After her? The sonnet.
— Eduardo C. Corral / “To a Blossoming Saguaro”
This will be the greatest, most rapid accelerant of wealth and prosperity in human history. It will also be one of the most chaotic. If everyone has access to more capability, that clearly also includes those who wish to cause harm. With technology evolving faster than defensive measures, bad actors, from Mexican drug cartels to North Korean hackers, are given a shot in the arm. Democratizing access necessarily means democratizing risk.
We are about to cross a critical threshold in the history of our species. This is what the nation-state will have to contend with over the next decade … fragility amplification stemming from the coming wave.
…
Now imagine robots equipped with facial recognition, DNA sequencing, and automatic weapons. Future robots may not take the form of scampering dogs. Miniaturized even further, they will be the size of a bird or a bee, armed with a small firearm or a vial of anthrax. They might soon be accessible to anyone who wants them. This is what bad actor empowerment looks like.
— Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskan / The Coming Wave: AI, Power, and Our Future
Write a poem that binds you and your reader as tightly as the zip ties
encircling protestors’ wrists. Use empathy, compassion, complicity.
Include the all reasons why you have not placed your body in the
streets or the courts to protect the person you love who is most
vulnerable to the state. Address that person. End with a line that
moans like gas entering your tank or end with a line that divides
nothing.
— Susan Briante / “Further Exercises”
I asked the senator how he had learned to stop worrying and love SAI. His answer was sobering:
“I haven’t. I’m every bit as worried as I was five years ago, if not more so. But where we are now, asking ‘Should we create super intelligent Als?’ is like asking if we should be using protection while we’re going into labor. The question is pretty moot. The baby is here. China has uncorked the bottle and let the genie out and the results speak for themselves. If we do not move quickly to create an American Confucius, we are done as a global power. It’s that simple.”
— Neil Sharpson / When The Sparrow Falls
… in your dreams you have sullied and murdered,
and dreams do not lie.
— Mary Oliver / “Rage”
“If you see hate speech online, take it almost as your duty to disagree,” says psychologist Mirta Galesic. “Just say ‘I disagree’. Don’t feel pressured to have an elaborate argument.” The goal, she says, is to highlight widespread, moderate social norms— so ask your friends to chime in and disagree, too. That advice is the result of research including an analysis of more than a million Twitter/X posts made between 2015 and 2018. It found that excessive arguing, getting hostile, or using ‘us-versus-them’ rhetoric only drives toxicity.
— Flora Graham / “How to counter hate without fuelling it” / Nature Brief
I am not your God. Or if I am, I’m no God you can seek out for deliverance or explanation. I’m the kind of God who would eat you without compunction if I were hungry.
— Ron Currie, Jr. / God Is Dead
What I’m Listening To:
There’s a long road
At night alone
I drive down to find me sleeping
Headlights on a new head of mine
My twin gets in the car
Two lives right on time, hold tight
The sound is on
— Julia Holter / “My Twin”
Briefly, gentlemen, it has come to my attention that there has been an inordinate amount of “buggery” going on between you and our beetles. This will not do.
As of tomorrow at 7:00 am all those apprehended singing plaintive love songs to our collection of Coleoptera will be suspended for a minimum of one month and lose all members privileges.
Additionally there will be no more dressing up our rhinoceros beetles in little sundresses. This is not a carnival, good sirs! We are not puppeteers, this is not the Punch and Judy caper hour. This must cease.
And whomever is painting the brown beetles dayglo blue, you must stop immediately. Now the confused flour beetles are demanding to be painted fuschia and emerald green on alternating days.
Decorum, gentlemen. We are civilized men.
And stop it, stop it, with the little tank tops on the stag beetles! We are not infants. I expect these hijinks to stop immediately, but the culprit who has “toilet-papered” all our dung beetles may continue to do so on a biweekly basis.
Civilization is progressive, and we are exceptional, gentlemen. Carry on!
What I’m Reading:
In abandoned towns, you have to rub your feet sore, drink tainted water, curse dead batteries, and save rice that seems to run out so quickly. It’s much cooler, though, if you do this not because I told you to but just because you’re a degenerate. Normal people have no business in a radioactive dump. Remember this.
— Markiyan Kamysh / Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadentband the Depraved of Chernobyl
A nebula forms around my headboard
& congeals—a pulsating fathom’s roost.
A blinding white flash—
great speedwell & arrowhead fall.
Encrusted like the lotus-eaters—
incubated / intubated / spacesuited /
pillows backboned.
A pair of florins for eyewear—
now set for the passage /
I pass out the last saint’s
nimbus.
What I’m Reading:
The term that I came up with… is superpower suicide. I just can’t see an example of a major country losing so much power so quickly as the United States under Trump.
We’ve encouraged our enemies and we’ve made our allies not trust us.
— Tim Snyder / Interview on Meidas Touch Podcast
I am a battering ram of ill intention
I am a wounded person
I was wounded while very young
I have made it my life’s mission —
First, subconsciously,
Later, with rigor —
To wound others in return
family, friends, strangers, humanity…
Even in oblivious moments
The wound loop is running in my head
I suggest you give me wide berth
For I will find some way to hurt you.
What I’m Reading:
Compassion is a coat of fur I find particularly ill-fitting.
— Ron Currie, Jr. / God Is Dead
