With access to all of your data, contacts, images, emails, and messages across devices …

With the ability to peep your screen for contextual awareness …

With a push towards reading, synthesizing, and composing all of your personal and business correspondence …

Making your appointments and travel arrangements …

Editing your photos …

Organizing your web browsing habits …

Utilizing both on-device and “private cloud” resources …

Maybe I’m missing the plot, but it seems to me like Apple isn’t doing a good job of reading the room right now. While I am not an AI dooms-dayer by any means, I am skeptical of the cost-to-benefit ratio of so much on-device and data-center driven compute being directly marketed at the general public. Doesn’t it feel at least a little dystopian? Doesn’t it feel at least a little irreverent of environmental concerns? Doesn’t it seem at least a little blind to its own personal and societal implications?

How much actual personal computing will we be doing in this brave new world of AI agents doing everything for us?

How much of the process must we strip away before we are satisfied with the end result?

Since when was outsourcing everything suddenly such a desirable pursuit?

How much more productivity and efficiency do we still require?

How much more productivity and efficiency can we reliably count on from agentic AI right now?

And to what end does this insatiable pursuit go on?

Remember when we used to know how to write letters? Research topics and critically analyze information for ourselves? When we allowed ourselves to stumble forward, learning new, difficult skills, taking the time to do for ourselves and for others, to make mistakes, and to try, try, and try again?

What if the parts of life we keep automating are the very parts that help us create? That create us?

Artificial intelligence may well be the new calculator, the new GPS, the new internet—the next exciting, terrifying technology at the bleeding edge of Information Age humanity. It most likely has the potential to provide salvation on more fronts than we can presently predict. It also likely holds more peril in more ways than we might admit.

What has been the result of automating arithmetic? Navigation? Dissemination of information? What might be the result when we fully automate judgement, communication, creativity, planning, memory, and interpersonal interaction?

Apple is neither the sole transgressor in the AI arms race nor is it the worst of the bunch. But today’s keynote was the camel that broke my inarticulate anxiety over the topic of our ongoing evolution alongside artificial intelligence …

How much of ourselves are we willing to surrender for the sake of convenience?

It seems to me that the real, painful, existential question that an author must face isn’t whether or not the work will ever matter. It isn’t whether or not you’ll ever achieve bestseller status. Rockstar author riches. Literary darling.

The price of authorship is never really knowing whether or not it matters. Whether or not we matter. Accepting that the question of significance remains beyond our best pages, ink, and inspiration. The pursuits of impact, resonance, and relevance—much less virality—are all ultimately beyond the author’s reach. But we must keep negotiating with flashing cursors. Pressing thoughts into metaphors. Meaning into language.

Meaning being the struggle itself.

The defiant push.

The page.

And—if we’re lucky—we never leave the work the same as we came to it. Our belief that we are making something fades into the realization that, all along, the work has been making something of us, too.

It is a 
brave,  
damn difficult 
decision 
to be happy. 
To keep breathing 
these days. 
But what else 
is there 
to do? 

To do? 
To be? 
To try? 

The pleasure 
the pain 
the privilege— 
the price 
of admission?

Six years of chronic illness;
no forcing of experience
just an attempt
to record it
in clipped breaths.

SURVIVAL
isn’t really
like the movies
is it?
Where is
my triumph
my applause
my
happily
ever
after?

—

ALL BUT
INVISIBLE
my illness
makes
me.

—

BOUGHT
ON BORROWED TIME.
In the infamy
	infirmary
INFIRMITY
OF 3 AM,
it is somehow easier
to ignore my body’s pleas.
	Signals.
Screams.
THIS
is when I write.

—

PRO-TIP:
Boring
is best
at any
doctor’s office.

—

SIX YEARS.
Inspiration
sans energy …

Pain
sans body …

Time
sans
time …

—

BROCHURE COPY.
An all-day
everyday
heart-racing
out-of-body
out-of-mind
psychedelic
experience
that will take your breath away,
leaving you
in a
smash
	boom
		crash
drunken
soaring
	sans
		altitude
soberly hungover
haze
where everything hits
well after you’re down,
	drooling
for just how damned exhausted
you never knew you could be—
even when you’re seeing straight
you’re seeing double …
GUARANTEED!
					GUARANTEED!
(Wait—
what were we talking about?)

—

IF LIFE
is like riding a bike—
CHRONIC ILLNESS
is falling
and falling
and
falling
off.
Every.
Damn.
Day.

—

BEDTIME
daytime
nighttime
every time
I try to do
anything.

—

THE BLESSING
and
THE CURSE
of
LONG COVID:
it ain’t terminal.
(At least not yet.)

—

SURVIVAL 
is not 
the absence 
of suffering. 
SURVIVAL 
is the 
insistence
	the
		obsession 
the 
	imperative
to persevere 
in spite of 
its worst.

—

KEEP
BREATHING.
Even
and
especially
when it
cannot
	will not
does not
come
easily.

—

HOPE
is not
denial
of reality.
HOPE
is the
recognition
of its
impermanence.

—

SUFFERING—
the birthright
we’re all dying
to escape
(as if
it were not
life
itself) …

—

	(Time
for
BED.)

beneath my pulse—

my head rushing forward

while my body

falls behind.

in the space

between breaths—

fleeing from the last …

praying for the next.

are the silent rot

of the soul;

no one ever skimmed their way

to enlightenment

or

salvation.

(Sorry if that’s not the best sales pitch. Marketing’s never been my strong suit.)

I’m a dramatist by training, a novelist by necessity. Chronically ill by fate—long COVID survivor, sick since the first wave in 2020—but persevering by sheer will. With this Substack, I guess I intend to fail. Publicly. Hopefully forward. To gasp (poetically?) between gulps of truth, fear, hope, and what-the-fuck.

If that’s not your speed, no worries—I wouldn’t date me either.

Newsletter?! Shit—you’ll be lucky to get an email from me once in a blue moon. I get maybe an hour a day of solid, semi-decent thinking—where I sort of pass for a real boy—so don’t expect me to be up your ass with content. Ain’t nobody got time for that shit. Chronic illness doesn’t care much for calendars, so I won’t be posting on a schedule.

This is a rehearsal space.

An arena for reckoning.

A slow-motion scribble under inalienable conditions: illness, self-doubt, delusions of grandeur, and a desperate belief that all this bullshit we obsess about in the modern era—branding, narrative, truth, story—it all might still mean something bigger. You know?

(Yeah. Me neither.)

I’m writing a novel that attempts to adapt the experience of long COVID through a darkly comic love letter to insecurity, mortality, and every myth we might still make to stay afloat. It’s a two-hander stream-of-consciousness narration: one voice doesn’t believe in the story; the other can’t stop telling it.

When I do share here—whether it’s a paragraph from the novel, some stupid reflection on being unwell, or some other insanity about some other insanity—you’ll know it’s something that, bless my heart, I just couldn’t help but say out loud. In type. Whatever. (And bless my medicated heart—typos, incessant ambling, non sequiturs, and all.)

So if you happen to like amateur hour, sophomoronic prose that nibbles more than it bites, falters more than it floats, and cringes as it tries to philosophize—

Won’t you be my reader?