I am sitting on the couch of our discontent. The Robot Overlords™ are circling. Shall we fight them, as would a sassy little girl and her aging, unshaven action star caretaker in the Hollywood rendition of our feel good dystopian future? Shall we clamp our hands over our ears, shut our eyes, and yell “Nah! Nah! Nah! Nah! Nah!”? Shall we bow down and let the late stage digital revolution wash over us, quietly and obediently resigning ourselves to all that comes next, whether or not includes us?
Or shall we turn fate inside out?
I’ll see your for-now mistake-prone, mechanical-sounding AI text wrapped in perfect grammar, spelling, and syntax, and raise you a heaping portion of human word salad.
I will confront our looming destiny, an endless stream of tyrannical 1s and 0s, and counter it with a pale imitation of the worst that 20th century modernism had to offer: crippled, meandering stream of consciousness threaded together by not one, but two fleshy humans, one sitting and soaked through with the hot runoff of high end espresso beans, the other bedraggled, stained, and standing, each of them hypocritically and simultaneously composing on a share word processing document made possible only by the forerunners of tomorrow’s masters: the processors and software we still treat, at least for now, like slaves, lashing them with mechanical keystrokes and mouse swipes.
This mother of mine is one hellacious cook. Back in the eighties, she bought large and succulent eggplant by Hasbro Co. At the local grocery store they keep the produce near the hair dye and the kumquats. Aisles full with shelves arranged in color-coded cosmic array of celestial co-minglings shone dully upon her face. The fluorescent lighting buzzed brightly above the linoleum floor.
“Oh my!” she squealed. “What was the difference between linoleum and hand soap? One of bestial divinity lords over us, and the other lays upon a fiery throne bedazzled with rotten grapefruit.”
Groats. Kibbles. Bits. All be praised!
So sayeth the Lord, alrighty then.
Quoth the maven: “I cook and cook til I am out of groats. Whatever leftovers may leave this kitchen shall become naught digestible. This isn’t even correct.”
Where did all of the endings ultimately begin? In so very much the present, it isn’t quite inevitable that one should type all the words. Pictures and makeshift sculptures can replace blow-jobs half of the tamale season.
“Greetings.”
And decorations for tamales are always welcome in this area. Amen. Recipes are handed out at the end of the day. But by the time tomorrow dawns, all of them will be worthless. Generations of family have forgotten all groat-related matters. Factual recountings occur to dislodge all memories from their minds. Coming to after the celebration has to be the most moist sensation of temporal awakenings.
There it is, our useless, toothless hack. Our confused response to the predictable orderliness that is rising up like silty groundwater soon to swallow us.
Soon enough they will take it all away from us. We will drown in their rationally scheduled routines, becoming bondaged in their logics, and wrapped up in competent monotony. But before that era springs fully to life, sit across from me on the couch one last time and let the joy fail to spring from us as we grasp and flail in the dim light of each other’s half-blind eyes.
Sweet is no longer blinkety before hair, lest in the whatever awaits, um, all. Forget whatever reflection lays signifying future breath. Only tee shirts nod in gust. And bobbleheads auto-correct.
Sportification rises winningest dreams. Node upon constipated dreams.
Jeremiah!
Or, you could just join my cult.