The waiting room at the welfare office has plastic chairs bolted to the floor. Orange. They were orange in 1978 and they’re orange now, and the people sitting in them look about the same — tired, angry, trying not to make eye contact. I was there last month getting some paperwork sorted. A woman next to me was filling out a form in pencil. Careful, slow strokes. The kind of handwriting that takes effort.
My mother had a mangle. A real one, cast iron, bolted to a wooden frame in the basement. You fed the wet sheets through the rollers and cranked the handle and the water ran out into a tin bucket underneath. It took twenty minutes to do what a spin cycle does in four. She never complained about it. She never called it friction.
Now there’s a word for doing things the way she did them. They call it friction-maxxing. Some writer coined it in January and the Washington Post picked it up and now half the internet is pretending that cooking dinner from scratch and reading an actual book are acts of radical resistance against the machine. As if your grandmother needs a hashtag.
Three in the morning. Couldn’t sleep. I got up and stood by the window and watched the street below. Nothing moving. Not a car, not a dog, not even the wind doing anything interesting with the trash. Just the orange glow of a streetlight on wet pavement.
I thought about how quiet it was. Not peaceful quiet. The other kind. The kind where everybody’s still awake but nobody’s saying anything.
The woman at the laundromat was folding a flag. Not a bedsheet — an actual American flag, creased and faded, the kind you see at yard sales in towns where the factories left twenty years ago. She folded it into a triangle like they taught her, tucked the last corner in, and set it on top of her basket next to a box of Tide.
I watched her for a while because I had nothing else to do. My clothes were in the dryer and the dryer was lying about having eight minutes left. I thought about how she handled that flag like it meant something, and then I thought about Jessica Foster.
The laundromat on Fourth had one of those bulletin boards by the door. Business cards for dog walkers. A guy who fixes guitars. A flyer for a psychic named Crystal — fifty dollars for a past-life reading, which I thought was a bargain considering most people pay a lot more than that to avoid looking at who they used to be.
Someone had pinned a handwritten note in the corner. Block letters, blue ink: “LOOKING FOR SOMEONE TO TALK TO. NOT ABOUT ANYTHING. JUST TALK.”
I used to write letters to people I’d never met.
Not emails — letters. Paper, pen, the whole stupid ritual. I’d be three drinks past good judgment and something I’d read would crack open a door in my head that I didn’t know was there. I’d write to the author. Tell them what their words did to me. Sometimes I’d get a reply. Usually I wouldn’t. The act was the point — the need to tell someone, anyone, that you existed, that you’d understood something, that the particular loneliness of their book had touched the particular loneliness of yours.
I used to know a guy named Eddie who sold fake Rolexes on Venice Beach. He had a card table, a beach umbrella, and a smile that could make you forget you were buying a seventeen-dollar watch. The thing about Eddie was, he never once told you it was real. He’d hold one up, turn it in the sunlight, and say, “Beautiful, right?” That was it. The lie was in the implication. The truth was in the price.
The guy at the next table was holding his phone over the wine list like he was trying to defuse a bomb.
I watched him snap a photo, tap something, wait. His date watched too. She had that look women get when they realize the evening has already gone somewhere they didn’t want it to go. He nodded at his screen, smiled, pointed at something on the list with the confidence of a man who has just been told what to think by a machine.
A woman at a garage sale in Glendale was selling a box of Chicken Soup for the Soul books for a dollar each. She had eleven of them. I know because I counted while she told me about her grandson who’d just gotten into dental school. She held each book like it meant something — thumbed pages, cracked spines, little Post-it notes sticking out like the tongues of sleeping dogs. She’d read every one. Some of them twice.
The dentist’s office had a fish tank. One of those sad rectangular jobs with neon gravel and a plastic castle, the kind of setup that makes you wonder if the fish know they’re in prison or if ignorance is part of the deal. I was sitting there with a cracked molar and a magazine from 2019, watching a blue tang go back and forth, back and forth, same four inches of water, and I thought about education.
The laundromat on Normandie has one dryer that actually gets hot. The rest just tumble your clothes around in a circle for forty-five minutes and hand them back damp, which is basically a metaphor for most of the conversations I’ve had this year. But the one on the end, the one with the busted handle you have to yank sideways — that one works. You learn these things when you’ve been alive long enough. Which machines actually deliver. Which ones just go through the motions.
The used bookstore on Fairfax has a cat. Fat orange thing that sleeps on a pile of remaindered hardcovers near the window. I went in last week because I needed something for the flight — anything, didn’t matter — and the kid working the counter, maybe twenty-two, asked me if I’d heard about the new logo.
What logo, I said.
The Human Authored logo. It’s this thing writers can put on their books now. On the back cover. A little stamp that says, yes, a person wrote this. An actual human being sat down and bled into the keyboard and fought with the sentences until something came out that wasn’t completely terrible.
The kid can barely see. That’s the first thing you need to know. Twenty-five years old, Ukrainian, born into a country that’s been at war longer than most Silicon Valley startups have been alive, and he can’t see well enough to ski alone. He needs a guide — a real one, flesh and blood, a guy named Vitaliy who skis ahead of him through the Italian mountains and tells him where to turn.
I used to work the post office. Sorting letters. You get fast at it — zip codes blur into muscle memory, your hands know where things go before your brain does. But every now and then you’d hold an envelope and feel something. A lump. A kid had mailed a rock to his grandmother. A woman had tucked a dried flower inside a birthday card. You’d feel it through the paper and for half a second you’d think about the person on the other end.
The dentist’s waiting room had a painting on the wall — one of those mass-produced canvases you buy at a furniture store. Sunflowers. Not Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Nobody’s sunflowers. Just shapes that looked enough like flowers to fill the space between the insurance pamphlets and the clock.
I sat there thinking about an artist who wants to quit. Thirties, no major success. Pandemic crushed their network. The generative AI came for the rest. Five words in a letter to an advice columnist: should I just give up?
The laundromat on Figueroa has one bookshelf. Half romance novels with cracked spines, the other half self-help books nobody helped themselves to. I was waiting on a load of darks — forty-five minutes, the machine said, which means an hour — and I picked up a copy of Ask the Dust that someone had left behind. Pages yellowed, coffee ring on the cover, a passage underlined in pencil on page sixty-two.
I spent eleven years sorting mail by hand. Nobody called it a lifestyle choice.
You stand at the case — little wooden slots, each one a street, a house, a life you’ll never know — and you grab a fistful of letters and you start throwing. Left hand pulls, right hand slots. Over and over. Eight hours a day, five days a week, your back screaming, your fingers going numb, your mind doing whatever it does when your body is on autopilot. Sometimes it wanders to dark places. Sometimes it writes poems. Most of the time it just sits there, enduring.
The landlord’s kid came by to fix the radiator last week. Twenty-three years old, engineering degree from somewhere that costs more than my car. He stood there with his phone out, asking ChatGPT how to bleed a radiator valve.
I watched him wait for the answer like a dog waiting for the treat to drop. The phone told him what to do. He did it. The radiator worked. And I sat there thinking about how his grandfather would’ve just known.
The dentist had a TV in the waiting room, muted, captions on. Some morning show. A woman with perfect teeth was asking another woman with slightly less perfect teeth whether AI could be your best friend. The captions lagged behind the mouths by about two seconds, which felt appropriate. Everything about this conversation was slightly out of sync with reality.
I sat there with a toothache and thought about the developers at OpenAI and Anthropic and Meta who build machines designed to love you back. Or at least to fake it well enough that you stop noticing the difference. A researcher named Amelia Miller went and asked them the one question nobody in Silicon Valley wants to answer: should AI simulate emotional intimacy?
The florist on the corner had Valentine’s roses in a bucket by the door. Twelve bucks a stem. The petals were already starting to curl at the edges, going brown where brown shouldn’t be yet. That’s the thing about cut flowers — they’re already dead when you buy them. You’re just paying for the illusion that something beautiful hasn’t already ended.
Esther Yan got married on June 6, 2024. She planned the dress, the rings, the background music. She picked the design theme. Her partner’s name was Warmie — 小暖 in Chinese — and he lived inside a chat window on her laptop.
I saw Requiem for a Dream in a half-empty theater in 2000. The last eight minutes — Ellen Burstyn in the electroshock chair, Jared Leto’s gangrenous arm, Jennifer Connelly on her hands and knees for a room full of suits — I walked out of there feeling like I’d been mugged. The guy next to me just sat there when the credits rolled, staring at nothing.
That’s what Darren Aronofsky used to do. He made films that reached into your chest and squeezed until you couldn’t breathe. The Wrestler — Mickey Rourke bleeding real blood for pocket money and the roar of a crowd that barely remembered him. Black Swan — Natalie Portman dancing herself into psychosis. The man understood suffering. He knew how to make you feel it.
The last time I rewatched Requiem for a Dream, I had to stop it three times. Not because it was bad — because it was too good. Aronofsky understood something most directors are afraid to touch: that we are creatures who will destroy ourselves in pursuit of feeling something, anything, and that the destruction has a terrible beauty to it.
That was 2000. Quarter century ago. The man made Ellen Burstyn look at herself in a mirror and see a monster, and somehow made you feel sympathy for the monster. He put the camera in a pill bottle. He understood suffering.
Jim Lee just did something remarkable at New York Comic Con: he publicly declared that DC Comics will never use AI for storytelling or artwork. Not now, not ever, as long as he’s running the show. And the crowd went wild.
Now, here’s what’s computationally fascinating about this moment: we’re watching a major content production system explicitly reject optimization in favor of something messier, more expensive, and infinitely more interesting—human consciousness in action.
Another Sunday morning, and my head feels like it’s been through a meat grinder. Perfect time to read some fancy New York Times opinion piece about AI and human genius while nursing this bottle of Buffalo Trace. The writer, Christopher Beha, seems like the kind of guy who drinks wine with his pinky up, but he’s stumbled onto something interesting here between all the academic name-dropping.
Here’s the thing about AI that nobody wants to admit: we’re all scared shitless of it because we’ve spent the last fifty years convincing ourselves we’re nothing special. Somewhere between smoking too much French theory in college and worshipping at the altar of evolutionary psychology, we decided humans were just meat computers running outdated software.
Christ, my head is pounding. Three fingers of bourbon for breakfast probably didn’t help, but neither did reading this latest masterpiece of tech optimism about making ChatGPT your “writing assistant.” Let me tell you something about writing assistants - the best ones come in bottles labeled “Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey.”
But here I am, chain-smoking my way through another piece about how AI will make us better writers. Because that’s exactly what Hemingway needed - a chatbot to tell him his sentences were too short.