I’ve been cranky lately. Not sure why. I could point at some irritating/disrespectful things that a few people have done lately but if I take a step back I know that they are just simple mistakes that if I was in a better headspace wouldn’t really be bothering me. That’s the thing about being cranky: you always point at the things that upset you, the things someone else did as the reason, but those are never the real reason. They’re just the trigger that brought your crankiness to the surface of your social life, not the thing that caused it. But then you wind up taking it out on those people anyway. I think, well I have to stick up for myself, I have to set healthy boundaries and that’s definitely true, but then I do it in abrasive rather than healthy ways.
It’s funny, it feels like the less pissed off you are about a problem, the more likely you are to have the emotional tools to solve it appropriately. So depression and crankiness become this self-feeding cycle that can spiral out of control if you don’t recognize it’s happening and do something.
So that’s why I’m writing today. Thought maybe my lack of journal writing is part of my problem.
I have definitely been writing lately, just not as a journal. I’m currently writing my memoir. It covers 1997 to 2003, the years I spent as a drug dealer. Some crazy shit happens during those years. I hustle countless pounds of marijuana, grow mushrooms in my closet, get kidnapped and terrorized by a US Marine, survive a murder attempt by the police, witness a murder (also police), attempt a murder (thank God I failed, and thank God she forgave me), go to jail for a night, get the shit kicked out of me in a bar, become a born-again-Christian (except for the part where I never went to church or read the bible), write my first novel, create a website devoted to my weed dealing, almost get shot by a cop etc etc. It was a wild fucking ride and I should have written this memoir many years ago, but I guess I was scared. Such intensity.
Maybe that’s part of why I’m cranky: writing this memoir, though it’s going really well, is bringing back so many memories that aren’t always pleasant. Reminds me of what a druggie I used to be, so I’ve been fiending a little bit to get high lately. I actually went to the bar last night and drank alcohol, just like, for old times sake. I had two long-islands, but I think they were really weak because I barely got a buzz. And I’m trying to be on a “diet” right now–I mean, not a fad diet or weight watchers or any of that shit, but just trying to cut out all the junk food that had been creeping into my diet and pushing myself to actually exercise every day like I used to.
Not enough hours in the day. It’s like a have to choose between being healthy or getting writing done. Not enough time for both… unless I quit my job, but I ain’t doing that because I love my job, and it pays the bills.
The other night, I had a dream that some good friend of mine and I had a suicide pact, except I hadn’t really remembered agreeing to the pact. Like he was one of those people who speaks so fast, and if you don’t stand up for yourself in the split second where they stop talking, then they assume that you’re going along with everything they say. So we are walking toward some warehouse where we are gonna kill ourselves, and I finally tell him, “Hey dude, I don’t really feel like doing this.”
“Well I thought you said you were gonna be supportive of me,” he said.
“Yeah, I know, but killing myself is like, kind of a big ask. I want to be a good friend and everything, but I’m sorry that’s just–I just don’t want to.”
“Well, I didn’t know–“
“Well, you never really asked if I was down with this plan.”
“So will you at least be a friend enough to be there while I do it, and support me?”
And I thought about it for a second, wondering about the legalities–If you watch someone kill themselves and do nothing to stop them, are you liable? Is that kind of like manslaughter?
But I finally said, “Yeah. I’ll be there with you and I will support you, but I need you to be absolutely, %100 certain that killing yourself is the right thing to do.”
As I usually do, I asked chatGPT to be my dream shaman, and as usual, it did a fantastic job of outlining the things my brain was already thinking but couldn’t put into words. “This dream is not about death,” it says, “It’s about boundaries in extreme emotional situations.”
I’ve signed up for Coursera. Gonna start studying AI. People make fun of me for how much I use AI. Even my boss at the AI company that I work for makes fun of me for running everything through chatGPT. Reminds me of the early 2000’s when people would make fun of me for being on the internet and having a website. But some folks are kind of hateful toward AI, which is to be expected. A hundred years ago, people were just as hateful toward cameras and photography as they are toward AI now. Same with internet. Same with cell phones and most technologies, really.
It’s funny how we don’t see these patterns. People reject new technologies, often using nasty hyperbolic language, but then after a few years they find they’re falling behind in that area and they finally give in.
AI is a little different though. It’s like, AI is the greatest double-edged sword humanity has ever had to deal with. It really could turn all skynet on us–but in a whole different way. The real-world skynet won’t kill us with Terminators. It’ll kill us with our own twisting sense of reality. If an AI really got loose, it absolutely could manipulate us into doing some insane and counter-productive things. But social media and a whole host of other things are already doing that.
The paperclip factory. (if you don’t know what I’m referring to, ask chatGPt)
What I find interesting about the AI haters is that they seem so focused on “AI is stealing from artists”, which doesn’t make any sense to me, since I mostly see AI being used by artists, particularly writers, to enhance their art. But what particularly confuses me is that people will condemn AI as stealing from artists and not being real art, but then they have no problem with cameras. When I create AI art on my laptop with Stable Diffusion, I have to think about the prompts, refine the prompts, try to think from the AI’s perspective to understand how it might intrpret things. I need to understand a whole host of settings, which models to download. Even then I don’t get anything close to what I orignally envisioned, so I’m forced to rethink how and where I’m using the image, and sometimes I even go back and re-write the piece to fit the image. Compare that to my experience with photography, which is just–I see something pretty, I pull out my phone, point and click. Then if it’s not artsy enough, add a black and white filter or something.
Sorry, I got off track there–what I find interesting about the AI haters is they don’t ever seem to talk about the real risks of AI, which is that it’s manipulating us to hate each other, manipulating us to spend money in ways that we know is not right for us. Manipulating us to vote for people like Donald Trump, to deny basic obvious reality. They don’t seem upset about the potential destruction of humanity. They’re more worried about “stealing from artists” when a plethora of other things steal from artists already but those things don’t bother them.
Same thing with water waste. They claim AI is wasting all this water, but then they have no problem with people owning swimming pools or those toilets in the airport that relentlessly flush fifteen times every time you use them, or the people who leave the water running while brushing their teeth. People are wasting water every which way but it only becomes an issue for people if AI is doing it. It just makes no sense and it buries the lead, which is the risk of the total annihilation of the human race.
Listened to 400 Years of Drinking in America on Audible and learned a fun (or not so fun) fact: Did you know that most slave owners in the 1800’s in the United States gave their slaves unlimited Beer and Whiskey, and heavily encouraged them to be drunk. Every year in grade school we did a whole series of lessons about slavery and I don’t ever remember this being mentioned. But it seems pretty significant. I guess the alcohol companies don’t want us to know this.
Kind of makes you wonder how alcohol is being used to control us nowadays, and how it contribues on a massive social scale to our dysfunction.
Oh, I recovered my twitter account. Had to recover my old email address first.
Was really surprised to see when I went back to my account, my feed wasn’t particularly toxic and negative. I remember the last time I was there, it was all really nasty. I’d had some rather hateful people tweeting at me, but now it seems like a whole lot of those old tweets have been removed. Not sure if they were all bots or got kicked for hate speech or just what.
Social media is one of those things that’s impossible to really know what’s going on, because everyone has their own take on it, that those takes are never based on real research.
Like, what if a lot of my toxic experiences on Twitter in the past, were my own doing? Like I was creating a self-fulfilling prophecy somehow.
But I should come back to my crankiness, because that’s what I really need to work on and understand right now. Still really confused as to why I’ve been feeling like this the last few weeks. Nothing is wrong in my life. In fact, my relationships are better than ever. My writing is going better than ever. I’m finally writing the memoir that I’ve put off for decades. I’ve never lived in a place I love more than my current house. I’ve never had a job I love more than my current one. So what is is that’s pissing me off and giving me this weird sense like the universe isn’t right?
Is it just because I don’t have THC in my system anymore?
Maybe I’ll watch Citizen Kane tonight. Out of the list of all time greatest movies, I think that’s about the only one that I’ve never seen. It’s okay to not be productive for a few hours. I don’t need to beat myself up over it. I’ll try to lift some weights while I watch or something so I don’t feel too guilty about it.
