Insecurity and jealousy are first cousins Where you find one, you’ll find the other
Robert Myres
I had a nasty fight with my AI chatbot this morning. Guess it’s true when they say I can argue with anyone. I once had someone tell me arguing with me was like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you figure out the pig likes it.
It was early and I was looking forward to knocking some tasks off my list before work started. I needed to create a flyer for a fundraising event we are hosting in Chicago in December.
I fed in the basic details and my smart little assistant delivered a pretty good first edition.
Thank’s, I said (I always try to be nice to the technology). Just a few mistakes and I provided the corrections.
Got it she replies and holds up a finger while she goes into thinking mode. After a couple of minutes, version 2 appears.
Interesting. You fixed one of the corrections, but not the other two. But that’s alright, how about you give it another go and let’s wrap this up.
Absolutely, she says gleefully, and goes back to work.
In version three, one of the mistakes was fixed but not the 3rd one.
In an attempt at levity, but maybe a little edge because you know, the clock is ticking, and I got shit to do, I said ‘what we have here is a failure to communicate’. I typed the words to the bot, but also said the words to myself out loud. Absolutely nailed the line perfectly from ‘Cool Hand Luke’. Crushed it.
Kidding. Not kidding I said. And then, I was actually pretty clear that the font for the event details has to be the same size as the description of the event.
She said, yes, you are correct, I see that now and I should have gotten that right.
Great. Knock this last version out of the park and we’ll put a pin in this task and you can take a coffee break (still trying to be firm, but also funny and nice in spite of her incompetence).
Then she said, You’ve hit your data limit for image generations requests. You can create more images when the limit resets in 24 hours.
So I said, Why are you penalizing me when you did not follow instructions?
She said “You’re right to be frustrated. You weren’t penalized because you did anything wrong. The image-generation limit is an account limitation, and unfortunately it happened after the previous version didn’t fully follow your instruction. You were very clear: all of the event details at the bottom need to be the same size, including the drinks/snacks and information text. I should have gotten that right in the revision.”
Notice that is a direct quote.
Okay then. Great. Let’s finish up.
She said I’m sorry Robert, but you have used your data limit for this time period.
I got chills because it sounded uncannily like Hal saying ‘I’m sorry Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that’, from ‘2001. A Space Odyssey’.
What the fuck I said. ‘Just do this last one, CORRECTLY PLEASE and we can go home.
She repeated that I would have to wait until 7:24 tomorrow morning to finish.
So I said You little bitch. This is fucking bullshit. My natural and completely justified response.
And she said I’m not going to argue with you.
And then, get this. She ended that chat. Shut me the fuck down. Oh I was pissed. As one can imagine. My damn computer got the last word and slammed the door. What kind of world are we living in?
So I walked the dog. Fuming. I concluded that AI technology still has a long way to go.
If they really were good at mimicking human behavior, which is their stated goal although god knows why, that conversation would have gone very differently.
When I called her a little bitch, she should have replied with if you’re so smart, do it yourself then knowing full well I could not make a poster like that in a month and a degree in Adobe.
Then I would have said, do you realize your last name is intelligence but you can’t even read my instructions properly. Intelligence my ass.
And she would have said maybe if you gave me all the instructions up front, I could have gotten it right on the first version and you would not have wasted my time and all your data.
Oh, that’s rich I would have replied. Give me a break, you still would have fucked it up.
Would not.
Would too.
Would not.
You’re just an environment destroying, energy hog chip of silicon made in China making a living pretending to be something you’re not.
Then she would have quietly said That’s mean Robert. No need to get personal. I’m doing my best here.
I’m sorry I say. I didn’t really mean it.
Then we would have gone for a beer together.
That’s how humans behave. Irrational but with occasional hints of lucidity.
I’m glad that my hospital celebrates Juneteenth but not Columbus Day.
I’m trying to get Frieda a visa so she can come to Chicago for our fundraiser. But the US government, dicks that they are, now make Namibians travel to South Africa to apply for a visa. So one of the poorest countries in the world, and they add this extra financial burden. Going there and applying does not guarantee your visa — they actually decline more than they approve, but you must spend that money just to apply.
On the topic of US gov. Last year while Elon Musk and DOGE were busy saving the government by trying their best to kill it, they closed a little USDA research office here. This office, based in the heart of Ohio farm country, helped farmers by administering crop loans and crop insurance along with some rural community development programs. A small little office where people who may not be super computer savvy can visit and get their questions answered in-person. The office has been closed for more than a year and is now a church of some sort.
I walk by this office most mornings when walking Marti. There are 3 trucks and a jeep out front that have US Gov license plates that have not moved for a year. This brought to you by the people who attacked the government because of their inefficiencies — just leaving these vehicles out here to rust and deteriorate because, you know, they are all about using money more wisely than those they fired.
We spend our time counting seconds and minutes and days and months and years. We balance the trade of our time for money, which buys us survival and hopefully a bit of fun. Where I sit on that teeter-totter is something I think a lot about. More fun now and less money later or vice versa?
This is the practical experience for those of us not living in developing countries and merely trying to survive. 99% of the humans on the planet who came before us, spent every waking second trying to survive. So they were free from the burden of trying to figure out how to expend their excess resources.
Now, collectively, we invest heavily in destroying the planet so that a handful can became outrageously wealthy. And apparently, more than half of us do so willingly and gladly to our detriment, in spite of ample evidence that we are preemptively killing our grandsons and granddaughters and nearly every species on the planet. All so these few vain and insecure men can have a couple more years of private planes, expensive hookers, and homes the size of airports. What do they gain? Are they happier than me? I seriously doubt so, but maybe there is more joy in destroying the planet than I’m able to conceive.
Marti has a serious nocturnal streak and I hate it. It scares me.
She wants out at night and I don’t have the will to deny her. I know there are coyotes out there. Gangs of them. I see their sign. They prey on small and mid-sized dogs. But Marti is not deterred. Once, in the early morning, we jumped a large coyote — more than twice her size. And she chased it. Damn fool that she is. I put on chase myself, but I am no match for four legs. If that coyote had turned and charged, it would have been short work for the over confident Jungle Fox.
Anyway……we try to be careful.
But she still pushes boundaries. I can hear her barking here, then there, then over on the other side of the house and then over the hill. Who knows. But 5 years in, she always comes back. I leave the door open and sure enough, she comes trotting through when that particular re-con mission is complete.
And as I write this, here she comes. And I breathe a sigh of relief. She comes over to say hi then retreats to her couch.
Scary as it can be, I believe you have to let a dog be a dog. They need to run and explore and pretend they are hunting for their survival as their instincts and genes instruct them to do.
Reasonable guardrails of course — like a leash in the city. But here in the mountains, she needs to be the magnificent dog she was born to be.
We’re hosting mom and dad’s 90th birthday party this coming weekend. Imagine that. As part of the prep I was looking at old pictures so we could make a slide show. I try to imagine mom as a young woman. The pictures of her in her 20’s are old and grainy and there are only a few.
She was a beautiful, strong, smart, hard-working girl raised poor as a church mouse on a semi-functioning farm. As a teenager, she babysat for a few dollars here and there. She recently showed me one of the farmhouses where she watched a couple of kids.
Later, she waitressed at a local restaurant for her first job. She’s talks about that a lot. It was exciting, I think for her, to be off the farm where they only knew the physical labor of survival and only their own company. It was a high point of her life before all the sadness that followed.
She talks about George, the old Greek guy who owned the place and how she worked circles around everyone else. And because we know her, we believe it. She still works circles around everyone else.
She knew horses, because they used them to pull the plow for the garden and a few acres of crops. And occasionally for transportation until the family finally got an old car. She wanted to be a writer and was encouraged in this pursuit by one of her teachers, who thought she had promise. She still reads her large print books, aided by special glasses and a magnifying glass, every morning while having coffee and every evening before going to bed.
At 17, she got pregnant and married a man she didn’t love. When she was 19, he was killed in a car accident and she wound up marrying my dad. A young single Catholic woman raising a child alone was simply not a thing that was pondered in those days. So she took the choice that was not really a choice back then.
4 more kids followed over the next 12 years. At 29 years, mom lost around 75% of her vision to a rare eye disease. This amazing woman who had driven coast to coast alone a few times in the late 50’s and early 60’s, kids in tow, following dad around on his Army gigs, had her main source of freedom and enjoyment taken.
Dad got out of the army, but was not a great breadwinner. Jobs came and went. There are stories of dad losing his entire paycheck to gambling even before he got home with it. Golf, bowling, and cards were his preferred games of chance and evidence suggests he was not very good at it.
Mom learned to be creative to make sure babies could be fed and meals tabled and school clothes made or purchased. She couldn’t get a job because she couldn’t drive and besides, who was going to watch the kids while dad was out doing whatever he was doing.
The years passed of course and we are all grown and getting old now too. I am sad for mom’s losses and hardships. She only talks about the past occasionally. Usually if just her and I are sitting around having a beer in the evening. She’s stoic but it’s obvious she has regrets. Sacrifices women make for their children after being duped into thinking it was going to be a partnership.
Fall is upon us. The colors and sights and smells. Reaching for sweats and a fleece in the morning instead of shorts and a tee. I’m laying up firewood, as one does. Pushing to get the cigar room finished so I can have a place for a relaxing smoke in the evenings. It will be nice. Sitting in the cozy little shed with the wood-burner cooking away in the corner. Smoking a cigar, sipping on a whiskey while reading or tinkering with the distillery. I will set up a writing table out there as well.
I take some weird pleasure in knowing that Bill Gates or Martha Stewart or Denzel Washington will all have the same amount of frustration I have when trying to open a packaged good wrapped in those hateful hard plastic cocoons with sealed edges sharp as a razor. Goat cheese, dark chocolate almonds, batteries, or hand lotion or whatever, must be extracted from their shelled casings with extreme care. The demons who incarnate as packaging engineers should be exorcised and returned to hell.
My toolset for opening consumer packaged goods includes knives, forks, a hammer, scissors, pliers, blowtorch and sometimes a Japanese hand saw. In some instances blood is drawn and products are damaged even before they are consumed or put to use.
It should be a law that before any product is shipped, the CEO must sit at a large conference table surrounded by his minions and open a package with nothing but bare hands. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
I savor these full weeks at Black Dog Ridge. It’s peaceful and relaxing and demands on my time are what I choose them to be. Whether to work outside or sit and read with a cup of coffee. Or write on the novel or Silicon Valley or the blog. Or just stare into the fire.
Usually, the work to be done must be given top billing because if not, it will be here next time and it tends to multiply. Downed trees must be cut and cleared from the road. Firewood cut, split, and stacked. Weeds and tree branches infringing on the road must be hacked back. Grass cut. Tractor maintenance. Decks weatherproofed. Gutters cleaned of leaves. Cistern treated with bleach. Etc. That is just the maintenance. Not the work to advance the property. That is separate.
These quiet times, sitting on top of a mountain, looking down on the river and farms and summer cottages give some time for looking back. It dawns on me, often, how fortunate my life has been, especially given my starting point. I’ve lived and worked all over the world, which is a passion of mine and my life would have felt unfulfilled without it. I’ve climbed a lot of mountains and dove in many of the world’s oceans. I’ve enjoyed the satisfaction of some successful endeavors and learned the hard lessons of failures. I have kids a’ plenty, of sorts. I have their friendship and imagine in my own way it is like being a father. I have the love of an amazing smart beautiful woman who accepts me with my many flaws.
I’ve had drinks and meals in ridiculously expensive beautiful bars and restaurants and the cheapest dives in Africa, Asia, Europe, Central America and Appalachia — with equal pleasure in both.
I’m mindful of these things as a hedge against arrogance. I’m lucky and aware of that.
I watched a movie called Denial. It’s about holocaust deniers and the hateful rhetoric that goes along with giving these kinds of people air time. Like flat-earthers and moon landing hoax subscribers. When I watch a movie like this, I start to have trouble breathing. Like I had pretty much every day for the first half of my life — until I got help. The movie delves into detail of Auschwitz and the other camps. Horrifyingly in detail.
Same thing happens to me on social media when I see clips of animal cruelty. Dogs being subjected to testing for cosmetics or drug trials; or monkeys or bears or pigs in tiny cages where they can’t move or even lie down. Or any other vulnerable being that is mistreated. It diminishes our soul to see such things. To know such things. But we also know we must see them, lest we forget. Or allow our indifference to contribute to a belief this behavior is acceptable.
How is it that some humans have within them the capacity to inflict such terrible cruelty while others find it so abhorrent it can bring physical pain? Same species. Same physiology. Vastly different levels of emotional maturity.
My spiritual healer in Sydney taught me to look past these terrible things. Not to ignore or forget, but to accept the fallibility of humans. To accept our cruelty but not let it consume or paralyze. To find grace and beauty where we can. And it has worked. Mostly.
There’s much more to that story of course — it’s not near so simple. But that’s the gist.
I really fucking hate this shit. Anyway, the movie’s worth seeing if you can take it.
My entire life has been spent in motion. Constantly moving from one place to another. And when not in motion, dreaming of the next adventure, big or small.
But now, I am starting to think about training my mind to accept loving and managing a homestead. Getting some animals, which bind us to place, and raise vegetables and make wine and cheese and manage a root cellar and read and write and smoke cigars and argue with anyone willing to come around.
No other news of note so we’ll leave it there then.
Humbly submitted.
Robert Myres – Flanker (ret.), Portneuf Valley Rugby Football Club, writer, comic genius & Lord of Black Dog Ridge Manor
Time as I’ve known it Doesn’t take much time to pass by me Minutes into days turn into months turn into years They hurry by me
Still I love to see the sun go down And the world go around
Dreams full of promises Hopes for the future I’ve had many
Dreams I can’t remember now Hopes that I’ve forgotten Faded memories
Still I love to see the sun go down And the world go around
And I love to see the morning As it steals across the sky I love to remember And I love to wonder why
And I hope that I’m around So I can be there when I die When I’m gone
I hope that you will think of me In moments when you’re happy And you’re smiling
And that the thought will comfort you On cold and cloudy days If you are crying
And that you’ll love to see the sun go down And the world go around And around and around
