Breaking Up is Hard to Do.

They're building an addition to a house across the street from us up here on the Gingham Coast. Since the cable companies--which rake in billions and are owned by billionaires--aren't regulated, the wires that connect the internet to the various homes and businesses around here are strung overhead, along with all sorts of other 19th-Century infrastructure. 

Despite the obscene profits companies like Comcast make (doesn't it seem that every sports team and arena is owned by them) they haven't invested in burying their wires. Why invest when you have a monopoly.

In any event, our internet has been out for a week and I can find no one but a bot to talk to. Only the bot can't listen. It can only answer the questions it wants you to ask. It reminds me of a guy that worked for I resort I stayed in once. He'd walk around the pool in the afternoon, nominally surveying customers. "How's the service," he would ask. "Fantastic or amazing."

I finally found a phone number to speak to a tech person at comcast's nazi-rune-derived subsidiary xfinity. Of course, she was located in a call center 10,000 miles from my problem, and I could barely understand what she was saying due to her accent. 

I thought for a moment about what if breaking up with another person was like breaking up with your internet (non)-provider. The dissolution might go like this:

BREAKEE:  Hello, thank you for calling your girlfriend, xfinity. Right now, I'm offering one free mobile-line when you buy one for just $10/month.

BREAKER: Listen, I've had it. I want to break up. And never see you again, xfinity.

BREAKEE: This call may be monitored and recorded for training purposes.

BREAKER: Please don't record this call and use it for training purposes. Just let me out.

BREAKEE: Thank you for choosing xfinity, are you calling about your scheduled service on Friday between 10 and 12.

BREAKER: No. I want to discontinue our relationship. I want it ended. Over.

BREAKEE: Thank you for choosing xfinity. How can I help you today.

BREAKER: I want to drop your service. I'm done.

BREAKEE: I'm tech support, you can't break up with me. You'll have to call someone else to do that. [Gives 800 number.] Do you want to cancel your scheduled service call?

Thank you for choosing xfinity today. Is there anything else I can do for you?

BREAKER: [Hangs up and calls next 800 number.]

BREAKEE 2: Hello, thank you for calling your girlfriend, xfinity. Right now, I'm offering one free mobile-line when you buy one for just $10/month.

How can I help you today?

This call may be monitored and recorded for training purposes.

BREAKER: Yes, I want to discontinue your service now. I want no more to do with you.

BREAKEE 2: Please give me your name and address so I can verify your account information.

BREAKER: [information given.]

BREAKEE: I see you've been a customer for five years. Why are you leaving?

BREAKER: Because a truck knocked down one of your cables and you won't fix it. Your bots keep telling me to reset my modem.

BREAKEE: Have you reset your modem?

BREAKER: Listen, my wife and I both run small businesses out of our home. We can't function without internet. And you people won't listen to my problem or send someone out to fix it.

BREAKEE: You have someone scheduled to show up on July 4, between 10 and 2.

BREAKER: It's been a week. That's sucky service. I just want to discontinue. I want to be done.

BREAKEE: You have to pay your final bill through July 8.

BREAKER: That's fine. I just want to be done with you. Cancel everything.

BREAKEE: I can give you a $40 discount.

BREAKER: No. Just cancel my account.

BREAKEE: You own your modem, but you'll have to return your cable box to an xfinity store near you.

BREAKER: Fine. Is everything done. Are we finished?

BREAKEE: I can send a repairman out now and get it fixed.

BREAKER: No. I just want out.

BREAKEE: Well, I'll send a repairman out in case you change your mind.

BREAKER: You've heard the phrase "a day late and a dollar short?" Where were you a week ago?

BREAKEE: I can give you a $60 discount.

BREAKER: Are we done? Am I through with xfinity. Have you cancelled my accounts?

BREAKEE: Thank you for choosing xfinity.

--

I went to a company called GoNetSpeed.
They showed up in a day.
The technician showed up two hours early--and called me first.
He installed everything in about two hours.
He cleaned up after himself.
It seems, for now, a better alternative.

Still Standing.

When I was young, fit and fast, there was a running club in New York that had a slogan, "They said sit down; we stood up."

That defiant ethos was very much in vogue among people of my generation. We grew up during LBJ and Nixon and the second amerikan Civil War--with race riots and racism often enforced by "authority" figures. What's more, Vietnam was sold to us by a passel of authorities telling us a passel of lies. 

We grew up knowing how to "question authority." In fact, you couldn't consider yourself grown up if you didn't question authority.  

We questioned all sorts of authority--from ossified rules, to ossified parents, to ossified vice-principals still sporting buzz-cuts. 

Of course, as a generation we were as slavishly obedient as any generation ever. We just thought we were being antipodal. But, as I like to say, "blue jeans were what everyone wore to be different." Our rebellion itself was conforming.

We all rebelled as a group. All-together now.

All that said, I have a very bad reaction when someone tells me to do something or when someone tells me something too often. I immediately feel like someone's trying to gull me and I'm being force fed bushwa that will be good for someone but certainly not me.

That extends from meaningless demands to 'have a nice day' to asses who wear t-shirts that say, 'we're all creators, now,' to agencies that say, 'make dope stuff.'

As Ishmael spake, "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball."

That's how I feel so often today.

More and more, I feel rebellious--and angry--over the siege against humanity being perpetrated by the trillionaire, non-tax-paying tech humanoids foisting "Artificial Intelligence" upon us with a binary bludgeon.

The phrase artificial intelligence in and of itself is a semantic thrust against common sense. There's no intelligence, really, involved. That's why, for instance, as advanced and life-threatening and splendid as we're told AI is, it still has a hard time telling a blueberry muffin apart from a chihuahua. My vaunted Alexa by Amazon gets stoopider not smarter as more and more prompts accumulate.

Meanwhile, the house across the street from us up here on the Gingham Coast is being added to, and the construction guys quickly knocked out the cable that gives our little cottage access to something called xfinity internet.

If you believe in the salutary power of AI to help people, to resolve issues, and the "intelligence" part of AI, I dare you to spend more than six minutes typing into one of xfinity's dozen or so so-called AI-empowered bots.

I doubt despite the over billion dollars comcast spends showing people gushing over their giga speeds and the faux live faux
blondes in faux call centers who are faux smiling while helping you, that you can find an experience outside of reading about the trump misministration that does more to make you want to buy a fox-hole obliterating flame-thrower to burn down the nearest (pick-one) monopoly that takes a bit out of your soul with every passing tweezer-full of evisceration.

I can get no help.

I am finally promised a tech will show up at my house between 10-2. But first a phone call that tells me I don't really need a tech, I can use xfinity's diagnostics to fix the problem. The same thing their AI-"enabled" bot told me 31 times after I typed 31 times, "a wire has fallen. I can't use your diagnostics."  The woman on the phone from xfinity repeated everything the bot said and I repeated everything I said. She told me that the bot didn't note that. Because the AI-"enabled" bot only answers the questions they want you to ask. 

It's a sham.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is also in the act.

Why is their AI "co-pilot" automatically put into every doc I open? I don't want it. I didn't ask for it. It annoys me. I have to turn it off each and every time I want to type, costing me time. There's no way to override the flatulence they've built into their system. And with each flaming fart of fatuous, we're told once again about the genius of it all.

Have you seen any genius?

Have you seen any seamless?

You might have "friction-less payments." That is if nothing ever goes wrong. Try to resolve something and you'll have more friction than a ton of gravel in a stale piece of cheesecake.

Meanwhile, as an antipode to AI, I've taken to keeping a running tab of things I read, see and hear that delight me. Things that make me think or laugh or thlaugh--that delightful and rare combination of amusing thoughts.

With each one I write down, I say, "could AI have done that?" The answer is always the same. 

Also, someone invariably will call me a Luddite, without really knowing what a Luddite is. 

I am not anti-tech.

I am pro-proof. I'm anti-making things suck and telling us they're better.

Show AI making my life better (by my definition of better) and I'm in. 

--

I found these three things over the last two weeks. Very human.

1. A description of the old New York Yankee right-fielder, Hank Bauer. One team-mate said his face was so grizzled and care-word, it looked like a clenched fist. The great Dodgers' manager Tommy LaSorda said, "Bauer's face looks like it could hold two days of rain."

2. Christopher Marlowe, the playwright and contemporary of Shakespeare wrote a line many assign to Homer. In writing of Helen, the world's most beautiful woman, who was abducted by Paris, thus starting the Trojan War, Marlowe asked, "Is this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burned the topless towers over Ilium?"

The science fiction writer Isaac Asimov used that description to create a new measurement for female beauty. He called it the "millihelen." It's the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship. A person who was one millihelen beautiful was one-thousandth as beautiful as Helen.

3. "Long ago in the ancient Greek land of Arcadia, writes Plato, the people made sacrifice to Zeus on the slopes of Mt. Lycaeon, “Wolf Mountain." 

"Their offerings included a single human being. When the meat of the animal victims was roasted and served to the worshipers, one bit of human flesh was mixed in. Whoever ate that bit was instantly transformed into a wolf."

― from "Plato and the Tyrant: The Fall of Greece's Greatest Dynasty and the Making of a Philosophic Masterpiece"

A Pain Above.

Some years ago, chasing my three-year-old golden retriever, Whiskey, in the Carl Schurz dog run, I slipped on the gravel and suffered what orthopaedists call a FOOSH. 

A Fall On Out-Stretched Hand.

That FOOSH, ripped out all the tendons and all the gooey stuff in my right shoulder to the point where, at the time, I couldn't lift my arm to take off and put on my winter coat.

I never got the shoulder surgery I needed, of course. That would mean taking care of myself. In all my life, no one, especially not  me has made me a priority. Why start now?

And besides, shoulder surgery has a recovery protocol I simply do not have the patience for. I read something about sleeping in a chair for some number of weeks. I decided the repair was worse than the pain.

Just about five years ago, my left shoulder rebelled with sympathetic arthritis. Why should it miss out on all the fun. In my inimitable Norm Crosby-Slip Mahoney-style, I used to moan that "my good shoulder hurts worser than my bad shoulder."

Anyone close to me knew exactly what I meant. And quickly ignorarated me.

Life when you're old hurts like a sonofabitch. I'm told, though not convinced, it's nevertheless better than the alternative. I haven't bought that platitude, not hook, not line, not sinker. Or stinker.

Especially as gloom descends on me with the rise of dumb and the ugly of bullying trumpdumb. Nevertheless, we're told by the relentlessly positive that we must be relentlessly positive.

They never explain why.

The other day, or night actually, at about three in the morning, I woke up in excruciating pain more pronounced than my ordinary excruciating pain. There's pain and there's pain. This was pain. A can't shake it pain like a crowbar used as a q-tip.

The sound of my shoulder at :08.

I had fallen asleep, finally, with my arms on my pillow, above my head, and my arthritic and torn shoulders locked up there. The pain was such that I could barely bring my arms to my down to my sides. If there were a Foley artist around when I needed him, he would have made an effect like a rusty old vault opening as I tried to ratchet down my arms. With each click of the ratchet came another wince of pain.

For whatever reason, the pain had woken me from a dream of a night fifty years earlier when I did something I seldom did when I played for the Seraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican League. I went out with a gaggle of team-mates to carouse in Torreon, or Aquacalientes, or some sad city where cervezas were served most often with knife fights. 

You got cuts with your suds. 

I was with Issy Buentello, our catcher and at 6'2" and 220-pounds the largest man on our team by about the measure of a  middle-infielder.

"Let me tell you something, if we get into an imbroglio when we are in this bar," Issy said to me. "Where there are men, pretty girls and beer, there is often trouble.

"Let me tell you how to beat up three men at once, which more often than not are the odds against you when you drink at places where the floor is sticky and the mood is dark. There is a way to win."

I listened all the while thinking I would be better off in my small dusty hotel room watching "Hogan's Heroes" over-dubbed in Spanish.

"You take the smallest of the three men you are to fight and grab his Adam's Apple with your left hand or your right, whichever is not busy doing something else. Then apply pressure until he sounds like a fish who is going to die."

"I never much liked fish," I explained.

Issy was undeterred and continued. "You say to each of the other two men, looking each of them in the eye. I can kill your friend here in about twelve seconds. He will be my first today, but not my first ever."

"Maybe we should go to another place," I said before entering the neon and the sawdust.

"It does not matter. The entire world is in effect one bar waiting for three men to jump you. The location might change, the circumstances don't."

"So what next?" I ask. "You tell the other men to leave?"

"No," said Issy. "That is a chump's game. You and me, the entire world of sad men who go to bars like this, men and boys like you and me, we are the same. You must understand this if you are to defeat the odds.

"The man you have throated and everyone else in the place including you from el Norte and me from the rump end of a village raped by both the Spaniards and the church for half a millennia, none of these men have ever been made a priority.

"Someone else's self has always come first, someone else has always been more important. You do not go into bars like this if ever in your life you have been held and loved and loved the most by whoever is doing the loving. You only into bars like this go, if you have never been loved."

"I should feel right at home," I whispered.

"When you have the little man by his skinny pollo neck you have the two other men standing waiting to kill you, you have them lower their pants to their ankles before you remove your squeezing hands from the small man's Adam's Apple. You let them know that you and your neck-squeezing hand is the most important appendage in all the world. Do you see?

"They will say 'no' and resist the mortification, so you must harder on the neck squeeze until the small man sounds like a can of shaving creme that has run out of creme mid-shave."

At that point I was hardly shaving, but I got the idea. I coughed aloud, imitating the effect.

"When they hear that sound, the other men will lower their pants with shame. Their belt buckles with clank on the floor. When you hear that, you lift the small man up by his Adam's Apple and shove him toward his friends. Then you walk out. Staring the two mostly-undressed men in the eyes and smirking at them."

"And what if they follow you," I worried. "It's still three against one."

"Then, my friend," Issy said, "You have chosen the wrong bar."

Issy laughed a laugh that sounded like summer thunder.

We went and drank.

The cerveza was good. 

But it stung going down.

Like a beer from the wrong bar that is life.

What's A Words Worth?

I don't much follow sports anymore. 

About four years ago, the great Rob Schwartz took me out to the ball game. I think we saw the Mets play somebody, but I really can't remember whom, I think the Biloxi Barn Swallows, or whoever has a major league ball club these days. 

 It was my first and only time in the Mets' new stadium which was paid for by taxpayers but named after a bank. That would be reason enough to sour me on going to a ballgame. I hate malefactors of great wealth in all their many forms.

But beyond all that, ballparks today are really shopping malls with food courts and they're blaring commercials loud enough so you can't watch the game itself. The game being an afterthought--just a spur to still more consumption. What's more, I no longer understand the game itself. It's a different game than the one I lived and breathed for 50 years. And I like it not a jot.

Not the corporate logos on uniforms. Not the corporate accountancy that separates a winner from a loser. Not the way the actual game is played where it seems a batter either clouts one or strikes out--with no strategic in-between in the offing.

Though I'm only 67, I might be one of the last people alive who's seen the Metsies in all three of the professional ballparks they've played in. 

First, back in 1962 or '63, when the Mets joined the league and played in the Polo Grounds, the New York Giants old digs up on 155th Street and Coogan's Bluff in Harlem, across the Harlem River from the original Yankee Stadium. 

Next, I saw the Mets in Che Stadium, named after Che Guevara, the Marxist revolutionary, who was assassinated by the CIA-backed Bolivian army and killed in 1967 at the aged of just 39. (The same age as Martin Luther King when he was killed.) 

Finally, in the corporatist-named Citi Field (Citi Group has a $160B market cap) where a hotdog costs $14 and a beer $19.

Despite my disenchantment with sports, I still subscribe to a site called "The Athletic," which is today the badly-written sports-page of The New York Times.

I'm rounding into today's point, so sit tight.

The Athletic is emblematic everything that's wrong with how things are reported today, how we take in information. You can't find standings, or traditional stats on the site and draw your own conclusions. To find those you have to jump off to other sites and go two or three levels deep.

What you can find is article after article jabbering about things which haven't happened and might never happen. Above are just seven fairly-randomly selected examples of what I mean. They're all speculative. None of them involve reporting on something that's actually happened. Which used to be the sine non qua of the sports page. Now, because there's too much space to fill (in the digital world there's no 'bottom of the page' and everything is 'always on') everything is speculative.

Not too long ago, I read a book review in The Wall Street Journal of a new book called:  "Unplug: How to break up with your phone and reclaim your life."

The Wall Street Journal review is just over one-thousand words long. Here are the twenty that got me. “Unless you’re working at the State Department there is no need for you to be checking news throughout the day.”

My feeling is that we are doing so much checking and watching and speculating and mental-masturbationing about so many things, we have all but canceled our ability to actually live, to actually enjoy, to actually see the world around us.

We are going through life at multi-gig speed, too fast to actually see, feel, smell, or live anything. Everything is a blur. We're too busy to actually see things so we turn to clichés and algorithms to tell us what we saw. And then, because a trillion dollars of marketing have told us it's great, we go on social media and proclaim something insipid to be "genius." 

(Worse, though social media is somewhat behind both the loneliness and the hate epidemics, we've been gulled into calling it social media, not asocial media or sociopathic media.)

William Wordsworth died at just over the age of 80 in 1850. I've read that he walked 175,000 miles in his life. Not to "get" someplace, but to live in this world. To smell the roses.

If he walked every day from the moment he was born till the moment he died, he would have averaged almost six-miles-a-day. He didn't even have an Apple watch to keep track.

According to the MIT Technology Review, "by 2028, the power going to AI-specific purposes will rise to between 165 and 326 terawatt-hours per year. That’s enough to power 22% of US households each year. That could generate the same emissions as driving over 300 billion miles—over 1,600 round trips to the sun from Earth."

All that energy.

All those queries.

The $500,000,000,000 pledged via the Stargate Initiative (well more than the cost of the Apollo space program) to build nuclear power plans so we can run more AI. (No word yet on how we'll handle the deadly waste those plants will generate. As a culture, we're strictly buy now, pay never.)

None of that has produced anything as good as Wordsworth, and never will: