Please Use AI

Be sure to use AI when makingyour next, I don’t know, meal plan,for example. Definitely do not callyour friend who loves to cook and ask herfor her favorite recipes or tips or ways to save time making meals, because you will endup talking for longer than you had hoped,hearing, perhaps, about her father’s cancer diagnosis or how lonely she’s been or evenwhat she’s planted in her spring garden and then lost with the early frost.And be sure to use AI when planning that nextcamping trip, the last one you will takewith this particular child. Definitely do not text your friend who has fly-fished every river in Pennsylvania and biked every backwoods trail, because you might end up texting back and forth for the rest of the dayor even meeting up late for a beer and hearinghow he has ended each recent night black-out drunk, or perhaps you’ll hear how hiscousin is an idiot on Facebook or maybe justthat he repaired his own washing machineand is pretty damn proud of that.And be sure to use AI when your next childgets married, so that you can write themthe perfect toast or poem or speech or songbecause no one wants to hear your words, the actual poorly written words of a parent (you) who changedhundreds of diapers for said child or fed them in the middle of the night from your actual body. Or cried when they were late home because you were positive they were dead. We don't want those words—we’d prefer the sterile words of a machine that never lived, never had an original thought, never felt the pain of miscarriage or brokenrelationships or the joy of a friendship restoredor of seeing spring’s first robin dancing on frost. And be sure to use AI when working on your nextbook or essay or piece of art or photography,and then smile or even laugh at your owncleverness when you see how good it is, and how easy, because who the hell has timeto work at something, to give time to craft, tocreate with their own minds, to spend years being mediocre.

Why do that whenmastery, or at least competency is so simpleonly a good prompt away?How magnificent the funeral song our children or contemporarieswill write for us, a song they will make by taking our obituary and Facebook posts,plus random quotes from our algorithm,and feeding them into Chat or Gemini or Claude. The tears that will fall in the face of suchsanitary sweetness!Be sure to use AIand while you do I’ll be over here in my 50thyear, my youngest daughter asleep on my chest,my arm falling asleep because I dare not movelest I scare away this moment, lying here melancholy about my older children moving out and my middlechildren no longer needing me, at leastnot like they used to, weary about this bodythat fails me now in ever increasing ways that will never be restored. Sighing over stories I tried to write but never hit the page the way they felt in my mind.But isn’t that, my flesh-and-blood friend, the natural order of things?the longing for something that could always bea bit betteror the way that anythingworth doing feels a bit clumsy and painful, especially at firstor hearing another human voice and somehowrealizing the beauty of life is found in all of thesesubtle imperfections No posts