writing is sorrow; having had written is sublime
It isn’t always easy doing the things we have to do.
Unless it’s one of those happy occasions, as rare as they may be,
when the thing we have to do, is something we want to do.
But whether we want to or not, we do these things anyway.
Because we have to.
That’s just the way life is.
And the way life is…
And it has gotten extremely bad lately…
I guess there is some comfort to be found in knowing…
That it could always get worse.
Yeah…
Not sure if I have the imaginative capacity, or fortitude, to imagine how.
Hope I don’t.
But, still, here we are, despite it all, moving forward…
Even if it’s just at the most timid and extremely infinitesimal pace.
Because we must.
And we shall.
So yeah, in the midst of all this, all this being our latest global nightmare of ___________ [fill in the blank]*, I finally managed to do something I have been wanting to do pretty much since the onset of the past global nightmare of ___________ [fill in the blank].
Rest forever, hero, in the peace and comfort you and your music has provided to so many…
The following article was originally published in November 2014.
Most of what little refinement I have can be attributed to my lovely and loving wife.
I would say all of it could be attributed to her, but I do have a pretty good three-object juggling technique that I’ve worked hard on over the years to perfect.
Metaphorically speaking, the wife can juggle just about anything thrown her way; non-metaphorically speaking, however, she’s not a juggler by any stretch of the imagination.
But other than my juggling skills, just about anything else refined about me — especially anything artistic or intellectual — more than likely has its foundation somewhere within in my wife’s lovely and loving intellectual and artistic brain.
I don’t know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense.
#meditate
And no matter how many times I’ve filed them (I’m old so a lot), and no matter how sophisticated and whizbang the tax software gets, I always get a bad feeling when I’m done, that I haven’t done them correctly.
It could have something to do with my lifelong fear of any number greater than a single digit, I suppose.
Mostly that bad feeling is to no avail and everything works out fine. At least the feds haven’t come down on me yet.
But this time that bad feeling was spot on because seconds, seriously, mere seconds, after submitting my return I got an email from the tax filing service stating that my return had been rejected by the IRS.
The rejection turned out to be for a silly, easy to fix reason, but the experience left me wondering, if the IRS already knows the math, why do we have to bother to solve for the solution…
I mean, why in this whizbang day and age do I even have to do my taxes?
Is it really just so I have some skin in the game, as the silly mostly right-leaning politicians like to say?
Okay, I can understand large corporations and extremely high earners having to be obliged to keep intricate records and be in close communication with the feds…
But why must a poor swine like myself? Surely, it must cost the government more money than it makes to track the anemic, trickling cash flow of someone in my tax bracket.
And while we’re on the topic, doesn’t it seem a little immoral and against the laws of nature to tax the fruits of one’s labor?
I mean, I’m not against taxes, I understand their need, but it just doesn’t seem right getting taxed/penalized for what we earn to make our living, for our efforts to be constructive citizens.
Why not tax the hell out of us for what we consume like most of the states do? I’m all for a sales/consumption tax, provided it’s not for the purchase of basic needs that people smarter than me would have to determine what would qualify as a need, basic and/or otherwise. And for sure tax the complete hell, every speck of it, out of luxury items.
Again, I’m no numbers guy and I’m not saying an income tax isn’t the best way to fund our federal needs, and I know there’s the whole thing about taxes needing to be progressive and all that, I’m just saying an income tax just seems such an unnatural, immoral way to fund our societal needs, that’s all I’m saying.
Anyway…
Until next year.*
*Sure hope I don’t end up getting audited for this. And speaking of income, don’t forget all my books are free today! I need the reviews, yo!
I’ve always wanted to write and illustrate a graphic novel.
But that would be a lot of work.
Too much for someone as uninspired and unartistic as yours truly.
So I figured why not give one of the AI machines a shot at illustrating some of my writing since they seem to be all the rage lately…
Which also seems to be making all the human artists rage lately as well.
But hey, if you can’t beat ’em might as well join ’em, right?
I mean, hey, better take advantage of the tech now before it takes complete advantage of us as our AI Overlords, right?
Right?
Anyway, I fed some of the characteristics of Rich and Miko, the two main characters of my novel Rainy Season, into the AI engine Midjourney, and this is a little taste of what it came up with…
I must say, I’m pretty impressed. Just the vibe I was going for when writing the novel. There are other cool renditions of the troubled couple, as well as some beautiful renderings of a rainy Tokyo night filled with the hazy glow of neon, just like the story’s setting calls for.*
Pretty nifty.
And a little scary.
But hey, maybe the awakening tech might just allow me to release an illustrated edition of the novel.
Sure would be a lot easier than having/trying to draw all those illustrations myself.
I guess if I’m going to do it, I better hurry before the AI becomes fully aware…
And finds itself less interested in rendering unto us silly pictures from silly stories…
And more interested in having us render unto it our complete and total carbon-filled, mushy-hearted fealty.
Yeah.
*I tried using the same defining terms with the DALL-E AI machine and the images it rendered were lame compared to Midjourney’s.
