blogorahmah

Well, there's 107 minutes and 47 seconds I'll never get back. 

Long, boring, childish, frenetic teleprompter reading, followed by slow, off-script, bloody, gratuitously gory descriptions of heroic acts, some schoolyard name-calling, a smattering of vaguely defined policy, sorry I just can't I mean a hockey goalie got the biggest applause in which Trump basked like a kitten in a sunbeam, gameshowesque recognitions of a whole bunch of white people, half an audience hooting and whistling to signal their allegiance. It was the state of our union. 

 OK.  And now it's Wednesday. 

Well, it might be that time again to write a blog post. There’s the whole New Years Resolution thing, not to mention the climax of the Big Move mentioned in the more recent past posts. 

So, we did move. We’re here, on the west coast, enjoying not so much the fun in the sun, since this is California winter, but the lack of face-stinging cold weather. I forgot, and it’s amusing, how a little rain is a big deal to at least the local TV meteorologists, when Missouri weather does this several times a year--only in the summer. This is not to minimize the genuine issues around the latest atmospheric river weather pattern that seemed to be streaming into a near-record-breaking King Tide. This is the same scenario, but not quite as bad, as the cause of the 1998 flood in the  Bay Area. Also I seem to recall hearing about a flood in the early 50s that I believe occurred for the same reasons. 

On December 12th our movers had come, packed, loaded, and departed, and we followed them westward.  Not directly, but the idea was we would theoretically get to our new place before they did. We took our time and got there on the 16th. We beat’em by three days.

It was fun to be on the road with no particular timetable, really, and be truly homeless and “free,” albeit in a very safe and secure manner. The weather was very nice the entire way, and as a bonus we got to go to a Buc-ee’s  that was replete with 100 gas pumps (count’em) once we reached Amarillo, Texas. Definitely the apex of any Texas adventure. 

Luckily the panhandle of said Texas isn’t that wide and we reached New Mexico handily. 

So here we are, doing a little exploring during breaks in setting up the new household. Really an apartment, only slightly smaller than our last apartment and, believe it or not, still big enough to stash almost everything away. There are some big differences though--for one, we are on the ground floor and our last apartment was on the 28th floor. This is good and bad, but it’s much less stressful not having to worry about the mechanical integrity of 20-year-old elevators. Especially ones that creak and groan like a WWII submarine taken down below its designed maximum depth limit. (We’ve all seen that movie.) 

Christmas was a non-event (well, they all are, nowadays) but I’m here to wish all a happy, healthy, prosperous by certain criteria, new year. 

My resolution is to return to writing, this being the first baby step. 

Note: I keep hearing that it's difficult to leave comments here. If this is the case for you, it's not because I set it to somehow block comments. Everything I see in the setup makes me think anyone, anonymous included, could theoretically leave a comment. 

Moving day is rapidly approaching. I now think about its arrival in terms of days, not months anymore, and not weeks. (Hey, if people can say their infant's age is fourteen weeks, I can say moving day is in 19 days.) 

(Aaaaaa-eeeeeeee!!!!!!1)

So where should the prep for the move be now, developmentally speaking? I'm packing things, but the criteria at this point is, will I need this in the next 19 days? Will I EVER need this? DID I ever need it?? (. . . in a maddening cycle of angst-driven calculations and contemplations.)  This is made slightly more complicated by the fact that it's a cross-country move, so some of the things I will need soon include things needed for a four-day road trip (conservatively figuring) and an unknown number of days living in a motel if the movers don't get there until later. i.e. I will definitely need to shave before we unpack in our new place, maybe more than once, and of course floss. Luckily the floss is in a little plastic dispenser that is easily transported. 

OK, hyper-focusing is a hazard, at this point. 

I now notice or wonder if some of the things I do or see here in the coming days will be last time I do so. 

It's Sunday.  Nothing to do but pack some more. It's the little things that drive you nuts--the drawer with 87 things in it, and they are all very important. 

 I just read my entry in an old chapbook ("Driftwood") published by Asha Anderson. It was entitled, I believe, "No Title" which, in the literary world, is considered one entire notch above being in the "not pictured" list in your high school yearbook and then your name being wrong. Another blogger, affectionately known around the blogosphere as "Wiggy" had challenged me to write a story involving red shoes and peanut brittle. (Relax. I'm not going to paste it in here.) Of course seven or eight ideas immediately sprung to mind. (Not.) What I wrote was a little semi-autobiographical tale of an 18 year old boy leaving Palo Alto for points east in his '57 Chevy, including a sort of perversion of the theme of The Gifts of the Magii. You may call that unforgivable, but, remember, it had to be about red shoes and peanut brittle. Bottom line, the story vaguely referred to my leaving California to move to Missouri. 

I made the implied promise of a full circle, or something like it, so the point is my partner and I are now contemplating a move to California. For her, it is yet another move, but for me it is something like returning home--even though I readily admit that 1960s California does not exist anymore and you can't ever go home because that would entail stepping foot in the same river twice, etc. etc. etc. That would be the Platte River, by the way. I'm not saying it's a twisty river, but as you drive through Nebraska, you cross it something like 27 or 28 times. So, I'm just saying, "twice" is an understatement. 

By now, you're thinking, wow, he must be desperate to post a blog entry; he's really stretching here. 

That's true. Anyway, I'm excited to at least be thinking of the Big Move, plus we're driving out there, after a brief stop in Jackson, Wyoming, this fall. Making this all easier to think about, and providing ample justification, is the particularly crappy summer we are having here in Missouri this year--it's not the heat, it's the "dew point." Plus the smoke from the current Canadian wildfire that is just thick enough to obscure the horizon.

OK.  Enough of that. 

 For those of you who know that I live in Missouri, I feel like I need to say this. Our governor, governor Kehoe, does NOT speak for me when he says Missourians are all in support of Trump's air attack of Iran. He certainly doesn't represent me--clearly demonstrated by how many laws that were voted in by majority vote by me and other Democrats or people of left-leaning ideology, that were rescinded by the state legislature. He certainly does not speak for me nor, I suspect, the majority of Missourians, when he tries to imply a general support for Trump's version of W's WMD fiasco. 

Built into his statement was a further implication that if you don't agree with him, then you must not be "proud of the men and women from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri," [where the B2 bombers are based.]  If we do get into a protracted war with Iran (which I sincerely hope we do not) I do not look forward to the flurry of disingenuous slogans and buzzphrases about "supporting our troops," conflating genuine and appropriate respect for service members who protect us, and support for another reckless and so far unauthorized war.

There's so much more to say, but I think if you got this far you probably agree with most everything I might add. Or maybe not. 

Playing the guitar isn't that hard. In fact, it's one of the easiest instruments to learn to play simply. Anyone with reasonable dexterity can learn to form the basic three or four chords and strum a song after one or two days of practice. If they sing along and it's fun, that's great.

Recuerdos de la Alhambra, or Bach's Bourrée in E minor, to be played properly, may take years of instruction and practice, and even then, to be played well will require extraordinary devotion and talent.

I guess it depends on a persons goals and ambitions whether writing is hard or not. But I will say that with fiction, novels or short stories, say, it's all about the story. That's the main thing. A good story and a competent grammar checker may be all you need. 

Back to my music analogy, Bob Dylan wasn't a super great accomplished guitar player, but we loved him for the stories.

 I'll open with a digression. A "pre-digression," if you will. I wanted to use the expression whining and pewling in my opening sentence, but thought I better check the spelling of pewling. Is it puling? Turns out, it varies, sort of. The two Google hits at the top referenced Shakespeare, and then Peter Pan. So pewling is an archaic term, though I'm not so old that it would have rolled off my tongue with such alacrity--the whole thing could be traced back to the the time that great big book fell on my head at the library when I was a kid. If you believe in that sort of thing. 

This post is about AI. I mention that early in the post, in case you want to hit backspace now and go back to the Weather Underground site, to save you some time. What's at the top of my head at the moment is, how can I write to differentiate my "product" from that of an AI LLM? To throw in a few grammatical or punctuation errors is just too easy. 

Anyway; moving on. 

I'm used to the idea of AI now, and to me it's just one more irritant in today's technological world, like spam email, cell phone apps, or car dashboards that have a learning curve. 

I don't "fear" AI. When I write something, I absolutely know that somewhere there is a human who is writing better stuff than me. I might even resent them if I knew who they were and it seemed like they were so good that writing well was effortless for them. So now there's AI also. It may produce a good story worth reading (I'm still not so sure about that, though,) and so might I. Nothing has really changed.

I will also say that I put very little extra value in a piece of writing just because it is completely and totally free of grammatical and spelling errors.

In addition to all that--and I just thought of this--the existence of AI writing may trigger a good effect among human writers. We may strive now to make our writing more human, and this may result in some pretty interesting stuff. As far as the "hack" human writers, of which there are aplenty, it seems like their lifeless and unimaginative stuff that takes so long to churn out just won't be able to compete.

End of Blog entry, mistakes and all. I'm not even going to check. This is very liberating. Silver lining!