The End of Love Letters

hello, stranger –

please pardon the delay since the last time i wrote. it hasn't been from lack of wanting to - or even trying, for that matter.  my head’s just been in a fog these last couple weeks; or maybe it's actually been coming out of one… either way, if the first half of the month was like a runner taking off from the starting blocks, the second half was a lot closer to tumbling full-steam down the basement stairs.

ignore the weight of your own expectations at your own peril, right?  ha! - good advice always has a bitter taste in hindsight…

it’s been one of those wake-up calls from life that leave you gasping for air, but at least grateful to still be breathing.  so i've been working my way through a pretty dark place the last couple of weeks, and if i’d seemed to be singing the tune of a disgruntled misanthrope before, then i think these past few days i’ve been fully blossoming into some kind of modern day Archie Bunker.  i’ve got a chip on my shoulder i can’t seem to shake, and feel like whatever can go wrong definitely will, and that the only way to properly deal with this cosmic prank called life is to just sigh and lean into whatever next shit-storm that is bound to come.

and i don't just mean about what's going on for me personally, by the way, or about the powder-keg of national stress we all find ourselves sitting on this year.  my thoughts have turned more general, to this moment in time we've inherited, and are destined to ride out, like a raft being sucked down the rapids, rushing faster and faster to whatever waterfalls lie ahead.

and yes, i realize that every generation has probably experienced some trepidation about the future and nostalgia about the past, at least to one degree or another. but i think that ours is truly a generation that stands apart.

case in point: the other night i decided to stop in the local wine bar for a nightcap. there's a young guy in there maybe about 25 or so, working on his laptop, and we end up chatting.  it turns out he's a huge fan of chat GPT, and he feels pretty strongly that AI is only going to make us smarter and smarter as a species.

well, that's an interesting theory! - i said, laughing at him but in a friendly enough way that it baited him to dig further in.

he went on to explain how he uses Chat GPT to write his papers for class, which gives him more time to study his true passion, which was music. okay - i said - but to be clear, you didn't write those papers, the robot did.

well no - he said back - i gathered (see googled) the information and gave it my ideas and it just put them into essay form for me.

but that's still not writing the paper yourself, i told him. to which he responded i was splitting hairs.

ok – so before i go any further, i should explain that i found this kid to be a nice enough little guy, and i held no ill will against him then, nor do i now. but this is definitely the moment when the tone of the debate suddenly shifted gears, and when my tolerance for entertaining bullshit dropped out from the floor. i was also - it should be noted - probably a little more drunk than i might have admitted to at the moment.

it's not splitting hairs - i said to him - you either do a thing yourself or you don't. lifting a bunch of barbells with a forklift doesn't make you a weightlifter, just like nuking a microwavable meal doesn't make you a good cook, just like Picasso didn't get someone else to take a bunch of brushes and try to capture whatever came to his mind, he painted the fucking things himself.

at this point i could see the kid was pretty far back on his heels, so i eased up and put it in terms i thought maybe he'd better understand:

you're a musician, right? – i asked. well, if i came in here and sat down next to you, having no musical talent or experience at all, and told an app the kind of music i wanted to generate (let’s say something jazzy and whimsical, with a little splash at the end) and it created a song for me, could i turn to you and call myself a musician?

well - he said - i guess i have never really thought of it like that.

and the fact that you haven’t - i told him -  doesn’t bode well for your theory about everyone getting smarter. and soon after that he left, and my inner Archie Bunker finished drinking his wine alone.

but who knows, maybe there were some good points in all his hazy and earnest arguments. he's certainly going to adapt better to this insta-pop world we’re developing then i have, and maybe that's all that counts in the end anyways.

before he left, though, i asked him if he were ever to write a letter to a girl he loved, would he have Chat GPT do it for him. this caught him flat-footed a bit, and gave him pause. in hindsight i wonder if it struck him that way because of the depth of the question, or if he just had never considered actually writing to a girlfriend before. but because he already looked like he might  break into tears at some point, i generalized the point to help ease the tension.

people have been writing to one another since the dawn of history - i told him - and it takes effort and time and patience and skill, just like any other craft. except in this case it’s an exercise of trying to wrangle your thoughts and then put them down in some sort of sensible order, so that someone else can not only understand what you're trying to say, but hopefully feel it too.  and you're trying to tell me that - with the advent of all of this texting and emojis and Snapchat and AI faked sentences - you’re telling me that the increasing disappearance of that exercise is actually going to make the human species more intelligent?

of course, i don't think i made a dent, and what would it matter if i did? and who am i to talk anyways? i'm on the same slide down the rabbit hole along with everyone else. the only letter i'd written in years worth remembering - and i use that term loosely here - was to someone who i'd once promised something heartfelt and romantic, but instead turned out to be a half-assed stab at a classy goodbye.

were i a better man, of a different era maybe, i might have sat down and figured out the proper words. i might have found a way to paint a better picture, a picture worth the effort - the portrait of someone who felt like somehow a piece of the puzzle he never knew was missing had dropped perfectly right in to the crook of his arm one night, and how he tried to breathe in the evening so deeply as he lay there in the dark, as though he were trying to capture it for as long as he could while she slept in his arms, even while feeling the dull ache of its inevitable loss long before the sun began to rise.

or something like that - the kind of thing i might have written if i were a better man, which i am not.  nor am i a great man, and i think on some levels i barely register as a good one, depending on your metrics.  so in the end i just had to be satisfied with whatever cringe-worthy piece of crap i could muster and slap a stamp on it to be off in the mail, and whatever sad end awaited it.

but i am at least someone who sticks to his word, puts pen to paper on occasion, and who’s willing to lean in when it’s time to do some of the other hard things too. and isn’t that when we tend to gain the most anyways?  hasn't that always been the big lesson from all the great stories we’ve been told?

maybe. i'll have to ask the next millennial i meet with their face buried in the TikTok app - i'm sure they'll be able to shed some light on it.  but for us, we're among the last of the analogue generation, this tiny sliver of human beings taken out of all human history, that were born into the world right before digital technology made the leap to hyperdrive, and we’ll just have to wait and see where it takes us from here.

for my part, i’m going into that world kicking and screaming. maybe there's a technological utopia around the corner, but I wouldn't know it. maybe in the next 5 or 10 years we'll get so close to the matrix with it that we'll all be able to plug in our consciouses into the cloud, and swirl around in some kind of digital paradise.  shit, that’s probably happening right now, and i don't even know it.  and i'm sure that kid in the bar would get all kinds of slobbery over something like that, and try to explain what a miracle it would all be, the communal collection of all of our minds, mingling in some kind of out-of-body experience, a giant masterpiece of humanity and technology blending together, with the movement and beauty and vibrancy of a Van Gogh.

but all i'd see is a bunch of gooey tulips, and i say fuck that. i want to live a real life, with real experiences, feel real love and drink real beer and bleed real blood, and cry real tears of sorrow when i have to, and ones of joy when i can, and take the hard times with the good.  and i want to write my own goddamn words, because as clumsy as they may be and as exhausting as it may be to pull them out and put them down, they’re a reflection of the realest parts of me, and i'm not about to hand that off to a goddamned robot.

so thanks for listening, my friend, and i'm sorry again about the long delay, and for you having to put up with my cranky-ass report from out here in the land of the sunshine and dust.  my head's been jammed up with a lot of life-type bullshit lately, but it always feels better when i take the time to sit down and say hello. i'm glad you reminded me, and that i've got you on the other end.

and i promise it won't be so long again until next time – i swear.

be good, and talk soon.