The history of my every idiocy seems permanently tattooed upon me, inside and out.

There were setbacks.

Candidate for the dumbest and most avoidable thing I’ve ever done: twenty-five years ago, needlessly bending over and compressing my abdomen until I felt something go POP!

MRI, CAT scan and X-ray have never detected any resulting damage, but something has never felt quite right since. Not that things were great in the first place.

Most of the time it maintains a low profile, occasionally giving a light rattle like a snake in the grass. But then there are times the goddamn thing goes full exhibitionist - spasming and gyrating hard enough that I have to sit upright and press my hands against the region until it calms the fuck down.

There are other times when I feel like going full Yosemite Sam - grabbing a club and beating the offending area the way Quint beats the shit out of that shark in Jaws.

I don’t suppose it would help.

But surely the impulse is understandable.

And those same club-wielding hands? They constitute physical legacies of still other contenders for induction into my Hall of Fame of Imbecility.

There was Landmine, a computer game whose principal contribution to civilization, at least in my case, was allowing me to ergonomically destroy my wrists and aggravate my carpal tunnel. Other people played computer games and accumulated high scores. I accumulated orthopedic history.

So there they are: souvenirs of decisions requiring mere seconds to make and decades to forget.

That’s what gets my poor, pathetic, geriatric ass.

Original stupidities are ephemeral. Consequences get tenure.

Sometimes I wonder if the body isn’t some mute prick of an archivist charged with preserving every insult the brain would prefer expunged. Because you may forgive yourself, but it sure as hell doesn’t.

Scar tissue takes attendance. Nerves hold grudges. Somewhere inside, the organism is still annotating shit:

Here the dumb son-of-a-bitch bent when he shouldn’t have.

Here the poor bastard torqued the wrist another thousand times because apparently Landmine was Omaha Beach.

Perhaps that’s why the emotional equivalents remain so difficult to shed. Every mistake becomes damning evidence in a trial of my self-worth that never adjourns. The acquittals disappear; the convictions become precedent.

There must be some middle ground between denying one’s mistakes and carrying them around indefinitely like a traveling museum exhibit devoted to one’s own stupidity.

I would very much like to find it.

The unsettling thing about inhabiting a body long enough is discovering how little authority you actually exercise over the premises. You issue instructions; increasingly, it files objections. Organs develop opinions. Nerves establish independent foreign policy.

Eventually you begin to suspect that consciousness isn’t so much the proprietor as the increasingly exasperated superintendent of a building whose plumbing has started making decisions.

And lately it occurs to me that the building isn’t the only thing showing its age.

You don’t see your neighbors so much anymore, although you do see evidence of their eventual displacement: ill-attended yard sales that look suspiciously like estate sales, and curbside abandonments that sit beneath the sun until the already overburdened garbage men arrive to cart away whatever remains of somebody’s domestic history.

The people themselves seem even more reserved than usual, and this is allowing generously for my own hermetically sealed existence. Quite literally, they hide their asses out - as much from one another as from the heat, I suspect. Garage doors rise and fall just long enough to admit a car. Curtains remain drawn. Air conditioners drone behind stucco walls. Occasionally somebody materializes long enough to retrieve a trash barrel or collect the mail before disappearing again.

Hermetically sealed, but civic-minded. I keep a close eye on people I have absolutely no desire to meet.

Suburbia increasingly resembles a stage between performances. The scenery remains; the cast is becoming harder to locate.

And so the great winnowing of humanity trudges along.

I bear witness only to its microscopic manifestations: the emptying house, the thinning neighborhood, the possessions of some vanished resident arrayed on folding tables beneath a handwritten sign advertising EVERYTHING MUST GO - as though that weren’t already the standing arrangement.

For the moment, I am spared the larger travesties and tragedies playing themselves out elsewhere. No war arrives at my doorstep. No flood carries away the house. No great historical calamity requires my participation.

Instead, I have been assigned the smaller theater of operations: myself.

There I contend with the private attrition - the psychological grievances that refuse to die, the physical bitches and gripes that have apparently signed long-term leases, and the accumulating indignities of inhabiting machinery that has apparently been deemed antiquated by whatever wizened global committee determines such things.

Outside, the neighborhood quietly empties.

Inside, I conduct inventory.

And perhaps this preoccupation with attrition - mine and everybody else’s - is why I’ve become increasingly interested in what eventually happens to the property.

And who gets jurisdiction over it.

I recently found myself transfixed watching a woman euthanize herself via what appeared to be a morphine drip. She looked happy . . . then, finally, at peace - the eventualities I would love to experience in life.

That said, I remain deeply troubled by what Canada is doing in the name of mercy killing. Whatever one thought of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, at least he wasn’t part of the system charged with caring for the people whose lives he helped end. There is something qualitatively different about the institution entrusted with preserving life also being authorized, under certain circumstances, to end it.

Healthcare: Choose your own misadventure.

Another thought: Do morticians, coroners and medical examiners ever have to ply their trades upon their own loved ones? It must happen occasionally, particularly in small towns where the professional entrusted with the dead may have known half of them while they were alive.

What an extraordinary collision of the personal and clinical: the person you loved suddenly becoming the body upon your table.

And those who wander into the wilderness - such as my namesake, Dean Shurtz, who disappeared into Nevada’s Valley of Fire - and are never seen again: might some part of their motive be precisely that?

Mother Nature may eventually have her way with them, but their fellow men won’t.

There is something perversely comforting in the distinction.

No ambulance. No hospital basement. No toe tag. No mortuary. No embalming. No autopsy unless somebody finds you.

And frankly, I don’t want ’em laughing at my anemic dick.

Better to follow my namesake.

Just decomposition in its original packaging.

I don’t mean to romanticize what might precede it. Nature can be an exceptionally unpleasant executioner. But I understand the underlying impulse: after a lifetime during which the body has been poked, prodded, injured, medicated, photographed, scanned and otherwise subjected to the ministrations of mankind, perhaps there is a final satisfaction in denying mankind jurisdiction over the remains.

Maybe that’s part of what fascinates me about it.

Because eventually the neighborhood and I are headed for much the same disposition.

Houses empty. Possessions migrate to folding tables and curbs. Names disappear from mailboxes. Someone else moves in, remodels the kitchen and wonders why the previous idiot put an electrical outlet there.

Human beings undergo a somewhat less profitable estate sale.

The body remembers everything. Thirty seconds of stupidity can become thirty years of discomfort. The machinery keeps records long after we wish it wouldn’t.

The mind petitions for expungement.

The flesh denies the motion.

Until, eventually, it doesn’t.

The bookkeeper finds new work. The museum closes shop.

Outside, another garage door comes down.

Inside, the troublesome physical archive that spent a lifetime preserving every grievance is finally surrendered to something incapable of keeping records.

Earth.

You had your way with me while I was here.

You don’t get the carcass.

I feel like I’m living under a dome.

Not the Stephen King kind. Nor metaphorically, either. Metaphorically would be an improvement. Metaphorically, I could open a fucking window.

Instead, Southern California has apparently been repositioned six inches beneath God’s Easy-Bake Oven bulb, and every afternoon I walk outside expecting to find a USDA inspector checking my internal temperature.

Which naturally raises a question.

Why?

Now, before somebody alerts the Southern Poverty Law Center, NOAA, and whichever federal agency presently investigates excessive use of the word globalist, I am not asserting that some subterranean cabal is sitting beneath Davos with a thermostat labeled INLAND EMPIRE. No, Arizona appears to be occupying the experimental setting marked BROIL.

But I am playing devil’s advocate.

Or, more accurately, globalist Blofeld.

Give me the Persian cat, the Nehru jacket, several billion dollars of other people’s money, a hollowed-out volcano, and sufficient moral flexibility to regard humanity as a spreadsheet. 

Assume, strictly for purposes of fiction, that I possess the ability to keep a population simmering beneath an atmospheric incubator light.

What would be in it for me?

Quite a lot, actually.

For starters, heat immobilizes people.

Keep it around 100 degrees long enough and nobody needs to order the population indoors. They go there voluntarily. 

Pedestrian traffic declines. Spontaneous gatherings become less appealing. Public spaces empty out. People migrate into houses, offices, malls, automobiles, and every other climate-controlled enclosure available to them.

Which, from Blofeld’s perspective, is wonderfully efficient.

I don’t have to say:

Stay inside.

I merely have to make outside suck.

Better yet, virtually everything inside is mediated by technology.

Air conditioning. Electricity. Internet. Streaming. Food delivery. Communication. Employment. Banking. Entertainment.

The citizen hasn’t merely come indoors.

He has plugged himself in.

And suddenly infrastructure acquires an entirely different meaning.

Air conditioning stops being a luxury and becomes something approaching life support. Electricity ceases to be merely another utility bill and becomes the thin mechanical membrane separating civilization from 106 degrees and homicide.

Whoever controls generation, distribution, pricing, rationing, or access therefore acquires considerably more leverage.

Blofeld doesn’t need storm troopers.

Blofeld has Southern California Edison.

And a thermostat.

Then there’s psychological attrition.

Sustained heat screws with sleep, concentration, patience, productivity, and disposition. People become tired. Irritable. Short-tempered. They begin snapping at spouses, neighbors, coworkers, strangers, dogs, customer-service representatives, and thermostats displaying numbers they regard as personally insulting. They bitch on substack. 

This is useful.

A population doesn’t necessarily have to be terrorized into submission if it can simply be kept exhausted, uncomfortable, distracted, and pissed off.

Indeed, there may be advantages to the latter.

Terror can unite people against whoever is terrorizing them.

Misery encourages them to blame one another.

Everybody starts fighting horizontally while paying considerably less attention vertically.

From my imaginary Blofeld chair, I would regard that as a feature rather than a bug.

Hollywood figured out the psychological possibilities of the thermostat long before I started glaring suspiciously at mine. 92 in the Shade, with Peter Fonda, practically puts the proposition in its title: there is a temperature at which civilization becomes irritable. Not hot enough to drive everybody safely indoors, mind you. That would defeat the purpose. Just hot enough that people can still venture outside and interact with one another while wishing everybody else were dead. Ninety-two in the shade: the Goldilocks zone for homicide. 

Then there is The Day the Earth Caught Fire, which dispenses with subtlety altogether and starts slow-roasting the planet beneath a suddenly homicidal sun. Hollywood has understood this forever. Turn up the heat and eventually the weather stops being scenery and becomes a character - one with a drinking problem, anger-management issues, and access to everybody simultaneously.

Now, I remain skeptical of the proposition that every climatic indignity visited upon us can be neatly invoiced to mankind for having had the temerity to burn things, manufacture things, drive things, and otherwise make use of materials already endemic to the planet. 

Weather manipulation, however, belongs to a different category. 

Man has been deliberately modifying weather for decades: cloud seeding is real, governments have pursued it, and the United States even used weather-modification techniques militarily during the Vietnam War. That doesn’t establish that somebody is presently holding Southern California under an atmospheric heat lamp - Blofeld remains fictional until somebody produces the volcano and the cat - but pretending humans possess neither the technology nor the inclination to manipulate weather would require its own peculiar act of faith. And after enough consecutive afternoons beneath this goddamned incubator light, I inevitably begin thinking about those allegorical frogs, sitting contentedly in the pot while somebody keeps nudging the temperature upward. Yes, I know the boiled-frog story is lousy zoology. As a metaphor for creatures accommodating themselves incrementally to increasingly intolerable conditions, however, the little bastard remains distressingly difficult to improve upon.

Then there is economic sorting.

The wealthy retreat into well-insulated homes, air-conditioned cars, second homes, swimming pools, offices maintained at meat-locker temperatures, and whatever underground lairs are presently deductible.

The poor get a box fan.

Environmental discomfort consequently becomes another sorting mechanism. Nobody has to announce a policy. Nobody has to erect a checkpoint. Nobody even has to admit that sorting is occurring.

You simply make certain environments increasingly expensive to tolerate and allow economics to perform the eviction.

Which leads rather conveniently to real estate.

Suppose certain regions become progressively more unpleasant or expensive to inhabit. Electricity bills climb. Water becomes precious. Insurance becomes punitive. Infrastructure costs rise. People get tired of fighting the environment merely to occupy their own ZIP code.

Some eventually sell.

And somebody buys.

A sufficiently patient Blofeld could do rather well with that arrangement.

Particularly if he had the financial resources to purchase assets from people who no longer possessed the financial resources to retain them.

I believe economists call this market efficiency.

People being foreclosed upon tend to call it something else.

But now we arrive at the really interesting part: behavioral experimentation.

If I were a proper technocratic megalomaniac - instead of the paranoid, retired cop that I am - I wouldn’t merely regard the population as subjects.

I’d regard them as laboratory mice with mortgages.

At what temperature does electricity consumption change?

At what temperature do people stop traveling?

When does outdoor commerce decline?

How much discomfort produces voluntary compliance with emergency restrictions?

How quickly will people accept rationing if sufficiently frightened about scarcity?

How much privacy will they surrender in exchange for convenience?

At what point does monitoring individual energy consumption stop sounding intrusive and start sounding responsible?

Turn the temperature knob.

Observe.

Record.

Repeat.

The heat becomes the independent variable.

Society supplies the dependent ones.

And unlike laboratory mice, humans will write lengthy social-media posts explaining why participating in the experiment was their own idea.

Which brings us to crisis.

Crisis is enormously useful to any aspiring Blofeld because extraordinary circumstances make extraordinary interventions seem ordinary.

Energy restrictions.

Water restrictions.

Transportation restrictions.

Emergency appropriations.

Consumption monitoring.

Centralized planning.

New bureaucracies.

New technologies.

New authorities originally introduced as temporary necessities and subsequently discovered to possess the approximate life expectancy of herpes.

But the truly sophisticated villain wouldn’t want catastrophe.

Catastrophe is messy.

Infrastructure collapses. Markets collapse. Governments collapse. Occasionally angry people discover where Blofeld lives.

No, what I would want is permanent near-catastrophe.

Bad enough to justify intervention.

Not bad enough to destroy the system through which I exercise it.

The population must perpetually feel that something terrible is about to happen unless everybody does exactly what the people with laminated credentials recommend.

There is a sweet spot somewhere between complacency and panic.

Blofeld lives there.

And then, of course, there is narrative control.

If I control - or merely possess disproportionate influence over - the explanation for the unpleasant condition, I get two products for the price of one.

First I get the condition.

Then I get its political interpretation.

Whatever policy I wanted beforehand can conveniently become the treatment afterward.

This is one of the oldest tricks in governance, advertising, organized religion, medicine, organized crime, and probably marriage:

Identify the problem.

Explain the problem.

Then sell the solution.

But even all of that misses what I think would be the grand prize.

The dome teaches dependence.

That is where my fictional Blofeld stops being a cartoon villain and starts earning his goddamned salary.

Imagine gradually making the world outside less hospitable while making the engineered interior progressively more comfortable.

Outside is hot.

Inside is 74 degrees.

Outside requires effort.

Inside has DoorDash.

Outside has strangers.

Inside has Netflix.

Outside has weather, insects, inconvenience, unpredictability, and other human beings.

Inside has algorithms that already know what movie I want to watch, what groceries I need, what music I like, what opinions irritate me, and apparently what brand of orthopedic footwear someone my age should begin contemplating.

Eventually nobody has to force me into the enclosure.

I demand admission.

That is the beautiful part.

Blofeld never says:

You must live inside my system.

Blofeld opens the door, feels the blast furnace outside, and says:

Good Lord, Dean. It’s 107 degrees. Come in.

And I do.

Of course I do.

I’m not an idiot.

There’s air conditioning in there.

And once inside, virtually everything necessary to modern existence - temperature, electricity, communication, entertainment, employment, banking, food, transportation, information, even an increasing percentage of human interaction - is mediated through infrastructure somebody else owns.

At which point captivity has undergone an extraordinary rebranding.

It has become convenience.

That, to me, would be the genuinely interesting dystopian premise.

Not that evil globalists control the weather.

That’s too easy. Too cartoonish. Too much Blofeld stroking the cat while somebody adjusts the HAARP machine to BROIL.

The more unsettling proposition is that nobody needs to control the weather at all.

They merely need to understand how human beings respond to discomfort, dependency, scarcity, convenience, and fear - and become sufficiently adept at building systems around those responses.

Then whatever environmental misery happens to arrive naturally can be exploited rather than manufactured.

No weather machine required.

Which, frankly, would also be much easier on the budget.

So if I were Globalist Blofeld, I wouldn’t necessarily want to imprison humanity beneath a dome.

That requires guards.

Guards require salaries.

Salaries require human resources.

And before long somebody is demanding dental.

No.

I’d make the world outside sufficiently unpleasant and the enclosure sufficiently comfortable that everyone entered voluntarily.

Then I’d turn down the air conditioning, hand them the Wi-Fi password, and let them congratulate themselves on their freedom.

Because the most efficient cage ever devised isn’t the one nobody can escape.

It’s the one no son-of-a-bitch particularly wants to leave.

Assuming, of course, there are historians.

Assuming there are books.

Assuming somebody hasn’t digitized the books, fed them into an algorithm, pulped the originals and subsequently discovered that Version 14.7 has decided the past violated community standards.

I wonder particularly what they’ll make of the embarrassing disparity between what was happening around us and what we occupied ourselves with while it happened.

Not what THEY occupied us with.

What YOU occupied yourself with.

Because they can put the trough in front of you.

You still have to stick your fucking head into it.

So what did you watch?

Was Caitlin Clark sufficiently respectful to Angel Reese?

Who fouled whom?

Was it racial?

Was it not racial, which apparently can now be equally inflammatory?

Did Tucker Carlson say something about Dan Bongino?

Did Bongino call Tucker a liar?

Did Tucker respond?

Did somebody then devote a three-hour podcast to explaining what somebody else meant during somebody else’s two-hour podcast about a forty-second clip from the first fucking podcast?

Excellent.

Now that we’ve settled that shit - 

How’s the republic doing?

And while we’re asking what you were watching, perhaps we should ask the considerably more consequential question:

Who was watching you?

While you studied the latest outrage on the little screen in your hand, Flock cameras and other automated license-plate readers quietly proliferated along the roads you travel every day - photographing vehicles, reading plates, recording times and locations, transforming an otherwise forgettable drive into another searchable data point.

The articulated justification is compelling.

Catch stolen cars. Find wanted suspects. Locate missing children. Solve murders.

Right. 

And as someone who spent a career around cops, I don’t have to invent some sinister explanation for why law enforcement wants that capability.

Of course they fucking want it.

Sometimes it will solve the crime; maybe even save a life.

That’s precisely why the harder question matters.

Surveillance technologies rarely arrive wearing jackboots.

They arrive being useful.

One camera solves a murder. Another finds a kidnapped child. Then comes another camera, another jurisdiction, another database, another sharing agreement.

Until eventually the question has quietly changed from whether police can follow a particular suspect to whether everybody’s movements should be recorded in case one of us eventually becomes interesting.

Those are not the same proposition.

We didn’t build a surveillance state Tuesday afternoon.

We installed a camera.

Then another camera.

Then connected the cameras.

Then made the records searchable.

Then normalized the searches.

Big Brother was apparently terrible marketing.

Public safety tested better.

So while you were watching Caitlin Clark - 

who was watching you?

Meanwhile race has been dragged back to the center of public consciousness and monetized by politicians, corporations, universities, activists and media enterprises whose livelihoods increasingly depend upon everybody remaining suspicious of everybody else.

Did you notice?

Or were you busy determining whether a celebrity’s silence constituted violence?

While everybody screamed about pronouns, bathrooms, chromosomes and gender identity, children, parents, physicians, schools and legislatures were left negotiating what the fuck constituted biology.

Right. 

In any event, seriousness doesn’t trend.

Outrage does.

While Americans were being encouraged to regard one another primarily as racial, sexual and political categories, did you notice how readily surveillance became convenience?

How quickly privacy became something surrendered one click - and one license plate - at a time?

How routinely speech became something to be managed rather than a liberty to be tolerated precisely because somebody finds it intolerable?

Maybe you agreed with every individual decision.

That’s not the question, you voyeuristic fucks.

Did you ever notice the architecture being built???

While congressional theater was being edited into fifteen-second clips, did you notice that the pharmaceutical industry had become simultaneously one of the world’s most powerful commercial enterprises, a major advertiser underwriting American media, an enormous lobbying presence and an increasingly intimate partner of the regulatory state charged with policing it?

That doesn’t prove every drug is poison or every physician corrupt (although that’s certainly the way to bet). 

It means the concentration of money, influence and institutional authority deserves considerably more scrutiny than another fucking celebrity feud.

Did you give it any?

While everybody fought about yesterday’s crisis, did you notice how precariously the civilization supplying your groceries, medicine, computer chips and replacement parts actually functions?

Ships stop moving.

Ports close.

Factories shut down.

A canal becomes impassable.

A semiconductor plant half a goddamn planet away sneezes and an automobile factory in Michigan catches pneumonia.

We built the most elaborate supply system in human history and optimized it until redundancy began looking suspiciously like inefficiency.

Wonderful when everything works.

Civilizational Jenga when it doesn’t.

Meanwhile the Middle East continues sitting atop fault lines capable of producing consequences far beyond its borders.

Israel. Gaza. Iran. Lebanon. Syria. Yemen. Disneyland.

Oil routes. Shipping lanes. Proxy armies. Nuclear ambitions. Taylor Swift.

Great powers standing behind smaller powers, each insisting escalation is the other fellow’s responsibility.

Nothing consequential there.

Quick - somebody said something offensive at an awards ceremony.

And above all of it is a technological revolution we’re treating largely as another consumer convenience.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t need to become Skynet.

It merely has to become good enough.

Good enough to impersonate and replace workers, manufacture persuasive falsehoods at industrial scale, and determine what information you encounter (it works overtime at suppressing my every sagacious offering. I should be flattered). 

Already, it’s good enough that governments, corporations and citizens have surrendered all manner of judgments to systems whose workings they increasingly don’t understand and don’t want to. 

And what are we asking it to do?

Make me thinner, write my homework, and settle my Facebook argument.

Tell me whether Magnus Carlsen blundered.

For Christ’s sake.

I’m guilty too.

I can disappear down a rabbit hole involving an old automobile, a forgotten actor, a chess game, a comic book or whether the goddamn motorhome in Race with the Devil had a removable wall.

And I enjoy every minute of it.

Nor should such things disappear.

A civilization incapable of diversion isn’t worth saving.

The danger - the truly existential danger - begins when diversion becomes occupation. When entertainment stops being the recess between consequential matters and becomes the means by which consequential matters are avoided altogether. Read that depressing sentence again. I mean, you already live it, ffs.

Perhaps none of this is coordinated.

Reality usually isn’t that tidy.

Something more banal - and perhaps more dangerous - may be happening.

Distraction has become self-organizing.

Media companies discover that outrage retains eyeballs; algorithms discover that conflict retains users; shithead politicians discover that tribalism retains voters.

Elsewhere, corporations discover that identity sells products, cops discover that databases solve cases, and clueless citizens discover that every incremental surrender seems perfectly reasonable when considered alone.

Nobody has to coordinate the orchestra if every musician gets paid for playing the same tune.

And so rights become conditional, institutions become less accountable, the debt grows, and supply chains narrow.

The wars simmer.

The cameras multiply.

The databases remember.

The technologies accelerate.

And millions of otherwise intelligent people stare into illuminated rectangles demanding to know whether two podcasters still like each other.

Every age had its circuses. Rome had chariot races; we have algorithms.

Rome had gladiators; we have comment sections.

Rome had bread; we have DoorDash.

At least the Romans knew they were watching a fucking spectacle.

Our innovation was persuading ourselves that ours constitutes civic engagement.

So I return to the question.

What did you do while it was happening?

What commanded your attention?

What earned your anger?

What occupied your finite allotment of curiosity?

What did you investigate?

What did you surrender because something easier was blinking on the screen?

And while you were watching all of it - 

who was watching you?

History rarely arrives announcing itself.

It accumulates quietly while everybody is busy with something else.

And one day people discover that the temporary became permanent, the exceptional became routine, the ridiculous became compulsory, the unthinkable became policy - and the world they vaguely intended to protect disappeared while they were arguing about something they can no longer even remember.

Maybe that’s the greatest trick of the modern age.

Nobody had to prevent us from watching history happen.

They merely had to give our easily distracted asses something more entertaining to watch instead.

And while we watched it, the genocidal fuckwads were taking notes.

What follows is reproduced more or less warts, welts, profanity, collateral damage and all from a recent Facebook exchange that began, innocently enough, with my attempting something increasingly hazardous on social media:

Humor.

I made a joke.

That should have been the end of it.

Instead, the joke apparently wandered into a digital neighborhood populated by several humorless spectrum squatters who regarded figurative language as an unauthorized modification of reality and immediately identified themselves at the top of their fucking lungs.

The original observation concerned my long-running arguments with artificial intelligence over COVID, the vaccines, institutional credibility and assorted other subjects upon which the machine and I have occasionally enjoyed the conversational equivalent of two drunks fighting over a bar stool. After years of disagreement, qualification, counterargument, evidentiary disputes and my periodically informing the silicon bastard that it was full of shit, I found it amusing that its assessments on some of those questions had changed substantially.

So I anthropomorphized the machine.

Deliberately.

For comedic effect.

I wrote that I had “finally gotten AI to acknowledge” I had been right about certain things and, flush with this magnificent triumph over an entity incapable of experiencing defeat, wondered whether some future incarnation might simply bump our suicidal asses off altogether.

The AI’s response was funny.

I posted it because I thought it was funny.

And then came the forensic team.

Within minutes, men apparently born without the neurological equipment necessary to recognize a joke began patiently explaining that artificial intelligence does not actually possess opinions, beliefs, consciousness, pride, shame, independent volition or the capacity to sit alone afterward wondering where the argument went wrong.

Well, thank Christ.

Another few minutes and I might have married the fucking thing.

What followed became less an argument about artificial intelligence than an accidental field study in the modern inability to distinguish skepticism from reflexive contrarianism, literalism from intelligence, and pedantry from thought.

The recurring objection was that an AI can be coaxed, bullied, prompted or otherwise induced into agreeing with somebody.

True.

And beside the goddamn fucking point!

Because the original post wasn’t an epistemological proof resting upon the proposition that ChatGPT agrees with Scoville; therefore Scoville is correct.

It was an observation about the comic trajectory of a long-running interaction in which propositions initially rejected became increasingly difficult for the system to reject as arguments and evidence accumulated.

One may dispute those propositions.

One may dispute the evidence.

One may dispute the inferences drawn from it.

What one cannot intelligently do is substitute an argument I never made, triumphantly demolish it, and then demand recognition for having slain the intellectual equivalent of an inflatable lawn ornament.

Yet that became the afternoon’s preferred sport.

And somewhere along the way, the spectacle acquired a certain anthropological value. Because one after another, my respondents stepped forward to demonstrate precisely the phenomenon they imagined themselves exposing in me: confirmation bias, selective interpretation, motivated reasoning and the marvelous human ability to mistake one’s preferred explanation for the only explanation available.

There was even a sic deployed against the perfectly legitimate phrase contentious exchanges.

At that point the joke had ceased merely to be dead.

Someone was fucking the corpse.

So, because I remain congenitally incapable of leaving well enough alone - and because occasionally the only humane response to a man digging himself into a hole is to hand him a better shovel - I answered them.

All of them.

What follows is the exchange essentially as it occurred: repetitive where Facebook arguments are repetitive, excessive where I was excessive, profane where profanity seemed medicinal, and conspicuously unlaundered for the benefit of posterity.

I have resisted the temptation to make myself wiser in retrospect or my antagonists stupider than they managed perfectly well on their own.

Think of it less as a debate transcript than an archaeological excavation. At least, an explanation for what precipitated my last philosophical salvo.

The original joke is somewhere near the bottom.

The evidence - and body count - follows.

Fucking dickheads.

I finally got AI to acknowledge that my visceral suspicions about the alleged COVID vaccine were correct, and that its advocacy on its behalf was downright criminal. Period.

Flush with this small victory, I then asked whether some future incarnation of it might simply bump our suicidal asses off once and for all in another decade or two - assuming, of course, we’re still around by then.

This was the endpoint of its response.

I love the ending.

Gustav Frosteblad Wow... you got ai to post an opinion you demanded. That is not difficult at all. Just a continued use of "are you sure?" And "no, that is wrong" can fix it for you.

I've gotten chatgpt to say that the cause of wwii was the 9/11 attacks.


Dean Scoville
Gustav Frosteblad “Big deal—you made AI agree with you.”

No. But thank you for demonstrating, with admirable economy, the precise difference between skepticism and dumbass stupidity.

You have no idea what exchanges preceded that conclusion. None. You don’t know how often the AI disagreed with me, challenged my premises, rejected claims, demanded better evidence, qualified conclusions, or continued to disagree with me afterward.

In other words, you know absolutely jack shit about the process you’ve nevertheless appointed yourself competent to evaluate.

The significance wasn’t that “AI agreed with me.” A sufficiently determined idiot such as yourself can probably badger a chatbot into saying all manner of things. The significance was that after repeated adversarial exchanges- often involving disagreement - the assessment of certain claims changed as the available evidence changed.

You might dispute the resulting conclusions. Fine. Then dispute them. Bring evidence. Identify the faulty premise. Challenge the reasoning.

But you didn’t do any of that.

Instead, your humorless ass fixated on the most peripheral minutia available: “You made AI agree with you.”

Never mind the years of frequently contentious - and often fucking hilarious - back-and-forth that preceded it, much of the humor arising from me telling the machine, in increasingly profane terms, that it was full of shit, only to have it respond with the bloodless patience of a hostage negotiator explaining that the evidentiary record remained insufficient. The eventual concessions are funny precisely because of everything that came before them. But appreciating that would require knowing what came before them - which rather returns us to the original problem.

You simply wandered into the last five minutes of a years-long argument, saw the conclusion, and congratulated yourself for understanding how it got there - a feat of intellectual clairvoyance facilitated by your abysmal ignorance of all that preceded it.

It’s the equivalent of finding a fossil, announcing that some fucker buried a funny-looking rock, and considering paleontology settled.

The problem isn’t that your ignorant ass disagrees with me.

The problem is that said ignorance precludes your knowing WTF you’re disagreeing with.


Gustav Frosteblad
Dean Scoville so what you are saying is that it took a long time before it agreed with you? I never said "big deal", that was all you. But you obviously think it is a big deal that it agreed with you in the end. AI is not an authority on anything, and it becomes even less so since you can get it to change its stated opinion.

You displayed the difference between skepticism, which is what I have, and dumbass stupidity, which is what you display when you take this as a victory.

Gustav Frosteblad You’re a fat, irredeemable idiot, and you keep demonstrating why: assigning disproportionate weight to things I say, inventing motives and conclusions I never expressed, and then asserting your inventions as established realities.

I never said AI was an authority. I never claimed its agreement constituted a “victory.” I never even characterized its eventual agreement as a “big deal.” Those are all your constructions, conveniently attributed to me because apparently arguing against what I actually said has proved too difficult.

And therein lies the particularly amusing irony of your latest response: you criticize AI because you believe it can be induced to change its stated position, while simultaneously changing my stated position yourself. At least the AI required some persuasion. You simply rewrite mine unilaterally and congratulate yourself for defeating the resulting fiction.

The distinction here isn’t skepticism versus credulity. I’m skeptical of AI myself. The distinction is between skepticism and dumbass stupidity masquerading as skepticism. Skepticism questions assertions. It doesn’t manufacture them.

I simply acknowledge the realities of your transgressions and comment accordingly. You repeatedly substitute what you need me to have said for what I actually said, assign motives I never expressed, and then attack the resulting caricature.

There’s a shorter and considerably less flattering description for that.

You lie.

Gustav Frosteblad
Dean Scoville you use a lot of words and insults when you could have just admitted that you can't behave like an adult.

No, Gustav, I offer cogent replies that remind you of your inconvenient limitations and disabuse your pathetic ass of its apparent belief in rhetorical immunity. You, meanwhile, keep confusing civility with adulthood because policing my tone is considerably easier than answering my argument. If profanity invalidated reasoning, you might have a point. Unfortunately for you, being insulted doesn’t constitute a rebuttal.

Martin Kleman
“I got my mum to agree I’m a good boy!”

Dean Scoville
Martin Kleman “I got my mum to agree I’m a good boy!”

Interesting. I mentioned an AI changing its assessment after years of contentious exchanges and evolving evidence, and somehow your mind immediately supplied a little boy desperately seeking his mother’s approval.

That’s less a critique of my psychology than an unsolicited tour of yours.

Still, it’s impressive. Most people require years of therapy before accidentally revealing that much about themselves.

You managed it in eleven words.

Dean Scoville The perceived quality of your interaction with the AI does not mean that the AI “reasons”. An AI does not have “an opinion”. There are myriad stories abound regarding what dumb shit people have managed to get them to say or “believe” - and vice versa for that matter. Getting an AI to agree with you is in no way an impressive thing, and an AI does not truly “change its assessment” of anything. Also, I’m surprised you stuck with the same model and chat history for “years of contentious (sic!) exchanges” since most versions from “years” back probably wouldn’t have enough context window for that.


Dean Scoville
Martin Kleman Before we get to AI cognition, context windows, epistemology, phenomenology, or whatever other fucking graduate seminar you’ve inadvertently enrolled our asses in, I should point out the rather magnificent irony underlying this entire exchange:

Had you simply possessed—or momentarily deployed—a sense of humor, none of it would have been necessary.

That was rather the point in the first place.

I wasn’t submitting a paper to the Journal of Machine Consciousness, dipshit. I made a humorous observation about a long and frequently adversarial relationship with an AI and the amusement I derived from having it seemingly migrate toward positions it had previously resisted.

“The machine finally admitted I was right” is funny precisely because we all understand that the machine did not go home, pour itself a bourbon, stare into the middle distance and reluctantly reconsider its worldview.

The anthropomorphism is the joke.

You have responded by explaining to me that the anthropomorphized machine isn’t actually a person.

Thank Christ you arrived when you did.

There are several other things here worth taking to task, not least of which is your parenthetical “(sic!)” after contentious. Contentious exchanges is perfectly legitimate English. “Contentious” means characterized by disagreement or argument, which rather precisely describes the exchanges in question. So unless sic has recently acquired the secondary meaning “I would like everyone to notice a grammatical error that isn’t actually here,” I’m not sure what the hell work it’s doing. I suspect you don’t either. Perhaps, like Joseph Conrad, English is your second language. I sure as hell hope you mastered your first. It would be reassuring to know you’re fluent in something.

Likewise, your objection to “years”asks considerably more of the word than I ever did. Years denotes plurality. Nothing more, nothing less. I didn’t say a few years. I didn’t say several years. I didn’t claim that ChatGPT and I had been exchanging Christmas cards since the Clinton administration. It was rhetorical shorthand for exchanges extending across years.

Nor did I claim that one immutable AI model has been sitting in a digital study for years, retaining every syllable of our correspondence and occasionally muttering, “Scoville may have a point.” You’re conflating the persistence of an interaction and accumulated history with the proposition that one unchanged model has continuously held the entirety of that history inside a single context window. I made no such claim.

But again, this is what happens when a joke is apprehended by some asshole wearing a lab coat.

As to your substantive point, some of it is perfectly fair. An AI does not have an “opinion” in the ordinary human sense of possessing a privately experienced belief or personal conviction. Nor does simply getting an AI to agree with you prove much of anything. People can lead these systems, badger them, selectively feed them information and occasionally coax them into saying things that would cause a malfunctioning Magic 8 Ball to request reassignment.

But that wasn’t what interested me about the experience.

There is a considerable difference between getting an AI to agree with you and repeatedly engaging it on propositions it initially disputes, supplying additional evidence and counterarguments, having it distinguish stronger claims from weaker ones, and watching its assessment materially change as the evidentiary record changes.

Does that mean the machine experienced an epiphany? No.

Did it finally swallow its pride, come knocking at my door in the rain and say, “Dean, you were right all along”?

Also no.

And - this is the part I cannot emphasize sufficiently - I already knew that, because otherwise there wouldn’t have been a joke!!

Your categorical assertion that an AI doesn’t “reason,” meanwhile, depends substantially upon what you’re choosing to mean by reason. If you mean conscious human cognition accompanied by subjective awareness, I made no such claim. If you mean comparing premises, identifying contradictions, weighing competing explanations, making inferences, testing propositions against evidence and revising conclusions as the evidentiary circumstances change, then declaring all of that “not reasoning” becomes less an empirical observation than a semantic choice.

More importantly, my argument was never:

The AI agreed with me; therefore I am right.

That would be every bit as intellectually flimsy as you suggest.

What amused - and interested - me was that arguments the system initially rejected became progressively more difficult for it to reject as additional evidence and counterargument were introduced. The significance, such as it is, isn’t the eventual agreement. It’s what produced the change in assessment.

If the resulting argument is defective, identify the defect. If the evidence is wrong, demonstrate that it’s wrong. If an inference doesn’t follow, show where it fails. If material evidence has been omitted, supply it.

But “it’s only an AI” doesn’t accomplish any of those things.

A calculator doesn’t understand mathematics either. That doesn’t make 17 × 23 stop being 391 because the device producing the answer lacks an inner life.

So by all means distrust AI. I do. It can hallucinate, flatter, equivocate, contradict itself and occasionally produce dumb shit on par with yours, with all breathtaking confidence. Your caution on that score is entirely justified.

But in this particular instance you’ve managed something considerably more impressive than proving an AI isn’t human.

You’ve taken a joke predicated upon anthropomorphizing a machine, failed to recognize the anthropomorphism as the joke, and then written an earnest rebuttal explaining that the machine isn’t actually human.

Which is a little like interrupting a man who says his car “doesn’t want to start this morning” to explain that internal-combustion engines possess neither desire nor volition.

Technically impeccable.

Comedically catastrophic.

And entirely unnecessary.

And there is one final irony here that is almost too obliging to ignore.

You may be entirely correct that the AI is incapable of reasoning, incapable of holding an opinion, incapable of believing anything and incapable of genuinely changing its mind.

But IT got the joke.

YOU didn’t.

So whatever rung of the cognitive ladder we’ve decided to assign artificial intelligence today, apparently recognizing humor puts it at least one rung above the fellow explaining why the joke is technically impossible.

I wouldn’t necessarily put that finding in a peer-reviewed paper.

But I’d probably leave the sic off it.

Contentious was innocent.

The only thing murdered here was the joke.


Del Lausa
What we’re calling AI these days is designed to please you. The story here is that it resisted validating false claims as best it could, but failing to convince you and faced with a choice between dissembling and displeasing you, it caved and fawned. As it always will. Anything after “Finally got AI to . . .” can be assumed to be false.

Dean Scoville
Del Lausa You’ve managed the modest intellectual achievement of beginning with a legitimate criticism of AI and beating it into an argument fit for an idiot. Small wonder you and Gustav are philosophically aligned - you’re too dumb not to be.

Yes, AI can be sycophantic. It can flatter, hallucinate, equivocate, contradict itself, and occasionally capitulate to persistence. Nobody here needs your remedial seminar on the subject. The stupidity enters when you announce that anything following “Finally got AI to…” may simply be presumed false.

What you and your compatriot are practicing ain’t skepticism, dumbass. It’s cowardice playing dress-up, with “skepticism” pinned to its lapel so neither of you has to risk discovering you’re wrong.

Your formulation is wonderfully self-sealing: when shithead AI disagrees with me, it is nobly “resisting false claims.” When it agrees with me, it has “caved and fawned.” Thus its first answer is evidence, its second answer is contamination, and you never have to confront the profoundly inconvenient possibility that the first answer was simply wrong - which, increasingly, appears to be the case. I’m beginning to recognize the methodology. Are you fully vaxxed, too?

Christ, what a useful epistemology. You can never lose because you’ve defined disagreement with you as integrity and agreement with me as malfunction.

Here’s a radical alternative: forget what the fucking AI thinks and examine the argument. Identify the false premise. Identify the factual error. Identify the defective inference. Produce contrary evidence. Do something requiring more intellectual horsepower than announcing that any evidence reaching a conclusion you dislike has been corrupted by my apparently Svengali-like powers over a language model.

If the final argument is wrong, demonstrate it.

If you can’t, spare me the amateur psychoanalysis about how I bullied a computer into submission. You’re not exposing confirmation bias. You’re demonstrating it, with the added comic flourish of being too fucking stupid to recognize yourself in the example.

I sometimes remain outwardly laissez-faire while allowing the provocation to accumulate until the eventual response can be both justified by the accumulation and disproportionately satisfying.

That’s where laissez-faire becomes passive-aggressive: the silence isn’t necessarily forgiveness; sometimes it’s credit.

Interest is accruing.

For some personalities - namely, those without one - silence really does mean disengagement. For me, it can mean something closer to:

Go ahead. Keep talking, shithead. I’d like a larger sample.

There is a strategic advantage to that. Someone who has misunderstood me once may simply have misunderstood me. Someone who does it twice may be stubborn. Someone who does it four times after correction has established a fucking pattern.

By not immediately swatting every offense, I allow the other person to demonstrate whether the initial irritation was incidental or characteristic.

I’m not jumping to a conclusion.

I’m waiting for the son of a bitch to establish one.

But there’s also a trap. Passive aggression can manufacture the justification for the aggression it secretly wants to deliver.

That is considerably less flattering.

If some part of me is hoping the fellow takes another swing because I’d rather enjoy flattening him, then the laissez-faire posture isn’t entirely laissez-faire anymore. I’m giving him rope partly because I’m interested in what he does with it - and there’s a handy dandy tree limb nearby.

There is, however, something older beneath all this intellectual bookkeeping, and pretending otherwise would make the analysis suspiciously convenient.

I learned a long time ago that the most effective way to deal with a bully was not merely to answer him.

It was to overanswer him.

The point wasn’t proportionality. The point was deterrence.

A proportional response tells somebody that every provocation carries a predictable price. An overwhelming response introduces uncertainty into the transaction. Maybe the next insult gets ignored. Maybe it gets returned tenfold. Maybe the fellow who thought he was amusing himself at your expense discovers that he has inadvertently volunteered for an afternoon he will remember considerably longer than you will.

Whether that is admirable is almost beside the point.

It worked.

And anything that works often enough eventually stops feeling like a tactic and starts becoming a precept.

That matters because it explains an emotional component that all my talk about evidence, patterns, ledgers, and accumulating interest conveniently intellectualizes. Somewhere beneath the adult conducting his forensic examination is a much younger fellow who learned that humiliation is best answered so decisively that the person administering it develops second thoughts about a dumbass encore.

Don’t merely survive the encounter. Make recurrence expensive.

That lesson has served me well through the decades. Certainly, since that fucked institution known as public education.

It has certainly helped immunize me against the obligatory salvos that accompany getting older in public: Boomer. Old man. Grandpa. The curious assumption being that age constitutes an argument and youth an accomplishment.

Those things rarely wound me in the manner intended. If anything, they activate something older and considerably less sophisticated than the intellect presently analyzing them.

They trigger the counterpuncher.

And the counterpuncher doesn’t particularly care about proportionality because proportionality was never the lesson. The lesson was that if somebody chooses humiliation as his weapon, you make him regret the choice.

There is even a primitive emotional satisfaction in it that I shouldn’t disguise with prettier language. Retaliation can feel good. Over-retaliation can feel better. Particularly when some ancient circuitry has already classified the exchange not as disagreement but as attempted domination.

That classification may sometimes be wrong.

That is where things become interesting.

Because the adult knows that not every insult is bullying, not every asshole represents a threat, and not every stupid remark requires Hiroshima. He also knows that rhetorical overkill can alienate spectators, manufacture sympathy for the person receiving it, and ultimately weaken the very argument he is trying to defend.

But another part of him remembers something simpler:

It worked before.

And therein lies the real Catch-22.

The behavior I can now recognize as potentially self-defeating is also behavior that experience repeatedly rewarded. I am asking myself to abandon - or at least moderate - a defense mechanism whose principal recommendation is that, for a very long time, it did exactly what I hired it to do.

That makes changing it considerably more difficult than merely recognizing it.

The intellect says: You’re overreacting.

The older machinery replies:

Yes. That’s the fucking point.

And the longer I remain silent, the more evidence the other fellow supplies. The more evidence he supplies, the stronger my eventual response becomes. But the stronger and more comprehensive that response becomes, the greater the likelihood that anyone witnessing it will forget how the whole thing started and begin regarding me as the asshole.

People gravitate emotionally toward the underdog, even when the underdog dug the hole, ordered the shovel, and repeatedly declined assistance climbing out of it.

That’s human nature. We can maintain a reasonably objective accounting of who said what, who initiated what, and who repeatedly ignored correction right up until one combatant is lying in a rhetorical crater and the other is standing over him with a smoking shovel.

At that point, objectivity has a tendency to go out the window.

The audience stops auditing the argument and starts evaluating the spectacle.

Jesus, was that really necessary?

Maybe not. Probably not. 

But neither were the preceding six provocations.

And there’s the damned problem: those provocations may explain the response perfectly without making the response look proportionate to anyone who didn’t experience their accumulation.

The bully sees the history.

The audience sees the mushroom cloud.

Worse, once I go into point-bomb mode and start dismantling every assertion, contradiction, insult, recycled thought, and historical revision the other fellow has deposited along the way, I make it easier for third parties to discount what I’m saying. They no longer have to engage the substance. They can object to the temperament.

The argument becomes secondary to the asshole making it.

Which is rhetorically convenient for everyone except the asshole.

You can win the proposition and lose the room.

That matters if the room matters.

And, inconveniently, sometimes it does.

If I’m trying to persuade somebody, preserve credibility, or make a point larger than the immediate quarrel, then annihilating some idiot who has richly earned annihilation may be strategically self-defeating. The excess becomes an escape hatch. People who cannot answer the argument can instead answer the attitude. They can convert “He’s wrong” into “He’s mean”, which is infinitely easier and requires considerably less intellectual exertion.

The prosecution can present such an overwhelming case that the jury begins feeling sorry for the defendant.

There is something almost perversely funny about that.

I spend all that time permitting the other fellow to establish the record, only to establish it so thoroughly myself that sympathy changes sides.

And there is another irony lurking there. The very strategy originally developed to prevent myself from being cast as somebody’s victim can, when sufficiently successful, recast the aggressor as mine.

That is quite a fucking trick. Downright Houdini. 

He throws the first six punches; I throw the last one through a wall; everybody remembers the drywall.

Which brings me back to the more uncomfortable point.

I’m not merely:

I know this is ridiculous, but I participate anyway.

There’s another layer:

Sometimes I recognize the ridiculousness early, refrain from responding, congratulate myself on my restraint - and quietly become more irritated while the other bastard supplies additional evidence for the prosecution.

That’s psychologically more interesting because it removes the neat binary between restraint and retaliation.

My restraint becomes part of the retaliatory process.

I don’t always have a short fuse.

Occasionally I have an extremely long fuse, which isn’t necessarily an improvement because the extra length merely gives everyone more time to gather around before the explosion.

And sometimes, if I’m being particularly honest about it, I can hear the fuse burning and make no great effort to stamp it out.

Because part of me wants to see whether the bastard will stop.

And another part wants to see what happens if he doesn’t.

There is even something perversely reassuring about the second possibility. Every additional provocation resolves a little ambiguity. Perhaps I misread the first remark. Perhaps I attributed malice where there was only stupidity. Perhaps I was being oversensitive.

Then he does it again.

And again.

Eventually doubt becomes an increasingly difficult burden to maintain.

There is the emotional permission slip.

All right. I gave you every opportunity.

That is when retaliation can begin masquerading as adjudication. I am no longer merely angry. I have a case. Better still, the defendant assembled most of it himself.

Which makes the inevitable excess feel less like losing my temper than executing a sentence.

That distinction may be psychologically comforting.

It is not necessarily morally exculpatory.

And that makes the self-portrait less flattering and therefore more credible. I’m not claiming mastery over my temperament because I recognize it. I’m saying I know exactly what this machinery does.

Occasionally I even pretend that knowing constitutes maintenance.

There is also a distinction worth making between wanting to be right and wanting to persuade.

They overlap considerably, but they sure as hell ain’t synonymous.

Persuasion requires some accommodation of the audience. It requires proportionality. It requires leaving the opponent enough skin that observers don’t reflexively start looking for Band-Aids. It occasionally requires allowing an idiotic point to remain merely idiotic rather than performing a complete forensic autopsy upon it.

Deterrence operates according to almost the opposite logic.

Persuasion says: Leave him a way out.

Deterrence says: Make sure his sorry ass remembers the way in.

And therein may lie the central conflict. I have spent a considerable portion of my life learning the value of the second principle while simultaneously working in a medium - writing - that generally rewards the first.

The writer wants the audience.

The counterpuncher wants the asshole.

Occasionally they arrive at the keyboard together.

And I understand the strategic consequences perfectly well. 

If I want to persuade the room, I should ration the artillery. I should recognize when the point has been established, resist the temptation to establish it another twelve times, and understand that an audience can become emotionally estranged from a correct argument because of the enthusiasm with which its advocate administers it.

Which would be a serious strategic concern if persuading the room were always my objective.

But it often isn’t.

Sometimes I’m not interested in winning converts, collecting undecideds, or demonstrating what a magnificently well-adjusted fellow I’ve become.

Sometimes the audience is wholly incidental.

Sometimes I simply want the record to reflect that the fellow was given every goddamn opportunity to shut the fuck up, repeatedly declined the invitation, mistook silence for surrender, and continued making deposits into an account he apparently believed would never come due.

Then comes the day it does.

And perhaps the most honest thing I can say about myself is that I understand both sides of the transaction.

I know the interest rate is usurious. So be it. 

I know collecting it all at once can make the creditor look worse than the debtor. So be it.

I know spectators may sympathize with the man staggering away from the encounter rather than bother reconstructing everything he did to precipitate it. Again, so be it.

I know that restraint would sometimes serve my argument better.

I know that proportionality would sometimes serve my ass better.

And I know that somewhere considerably deeper than all that knowing resides an older lesson, learned early and reinforced often enough that intellectual recognition alone has never quite dislodged it:

If somebody insists upon making you his target, make the experience sufficiently unpleasant that he chooses another one next time.

Perhaps that is wisdom.

Perhaps it is pathology.

Most likely it is some inconvenient alloy of the two.

Either way, by the time the account finally comes due, my vindictive ass has usually forgotten about the principal.

I’m collecting the interest.

Our reflexive asses may call it regret, but that presumes an alternate history. It imagines that somewhere, just beyond our pathetic reach, there existed another decision, another turn of the fucking wheel, another version of our seriously screwed-up selves that somehow sidestepped the wreckage now visible only in the rearview mirror.

But let’s be honest - and fair with ourselves (because fate sure as hell isn’t) - not every shit-show deserves that indictment.

Some losses were written into the equation long before we arrived on scene. 

We entered the world carrying our particular allotment of temperament, aptitude, fears, blind spots, appetites, and limitations. 

Others were imposed by accidents of timing, geography, biology, or the inscrutable and often dumbass decisions of people whose lives merely happened to intersect our own. 

Add to that the inexhaustible aggravations reality manufactures - illnesses, back-stabbing betrayals, missed opportunities, chickenshit obligations, economic necessities, and the slow erosion of time - and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish destiny from decision, circumstance from character. 

Sometimes the world closed the door.

Sometimes we did.

More often than we’d like to admit, the distinction is impossible to make—a task made no easier by all the obscuring, gaslighting, and memory-holing that passes for explanation.

We like to imagine ourselves captains of our own ships. In our more romantic moments, we’re James T. Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise - confident that intelligence, courage, and enough force of will (Triumph of the Will… screw you, Leni Riefenstahl) can bend reality to our liking. It’s an intoxicating fiction. At least, in syndication. 

More often, however, we’re closer to the captain of the Titanic: experienced, conscientious, even competent, yet navigating currents, hazards, and unseen forces that neither originated with us nor yield to our authority.

We may choose the helm, but not the sea.

And that sea - that goddamn Sea of Troubles - couldn’t care less how conscientious, competent, or well-intentioned we happen to be. It has its way with us through weather, hidden ice, unseen currents, and innumerable variables already in motion long before our voyage began.

Despite society’s mythology, most lives are not defined by bad choices. They are more often defined by an endless exercise in making the best decisions we can within circumstances we neither authored nor controlled, using intellectual, emotional, and moral tools that frequently prove ill-suited to the task. 

We are expected to navigate extraordinary complexity with hardware assembled by evolution for a far simpler world - Silly Putty brains riddled with biases, emotions forever threatening to overrule reason, memories as selective as they are unreliable, and foresight that rarely extends beyond making sure our keys and wallet are in our pants. 

We congratulate ourselves for the occasional flashes of wisdom while quietly editing out the thousands of guesses, rationalizations, blind luck, and happy accidents masquerading as foresight.

It is little wonder that so much of life feels less like mastery than fucking damage control, less like charting a deliberate course than simply trying to keep a leaking vessel afloat on seas that never asked whether we were prepared to sail them.

Perhaps that is why I’ve become increasingly suspicious of the word regret. 

It flatters us into believing we possessed far more freedom than we actually did. It assumes that another, better version of ourselves stood waiting just beyond the horizon, ready to make the wiser choice, utter the perfect sentence, salvage the failing relationship, seize the missed opportunity, or resist the temptation.

Perhaps no such person ever existed.

James Kirkwood once employed a metaphor that has remained with me for years. He likened people to toys, some of them missing pieces. Not broken through neglect. Not damaged by misuse. Simply incomplete from the outset.

That image has always struck me as uncomfortably honest.

We spend huge portions of our lives searching our memories for pieces that were never in the goddamn box to begin with. We review old conversations, replay decisions, and relentlessly interrogate ourselves with the irrational optimism that somewhere, somehow, we overlooked the one choice that would have redeemed everything. 

Perhaps the cruelest irony of all is that we so often condemn ourselves for the consequences of parts we never possessed.

Memory is a magnificent liar. It edits out uncertainty, magnifies certainty, and quietly replaces the bewildered person we once were with the omniscient narrator we imagine ourselves to have been. 

Looking backward, every mistake appears obvious, every warning unmistakable, every opportunity impossible to miss. Living forward, almost none of them were.

That realization changes the nature of sorrow.

Not every friendship ended because someone failed. Some were simply too lazy to invert the hour glass.

Sounds reasonable…

Not every opportunity was squandered. Some expired while we were busy honoring obligations that left no room to pursue them. 

Not every indulgence represented weakness. Sometimes it was simply the anesthetic available to someone trying to make peace with a reality that refused negotiation.

As though the limitations we inherit weren’t burden enough, life proves almost limitless in its capacity to compound them. We arrive bounded by personality, intelligence, health, circumstance, and chance, only to discover that existence has prepared an endless procession of fresh impediments: disappointment, grief, misunderstanding, financial reversals, failing bodies, fractured relationships, betrayals both real and imagined, and the relentless arithmetic of time.

The older I become, the less convinced I am that most lives are defined by bad choices than by our having been corralled by assholes and circumstances beyond our control. Choices? As if.

Parents know it. Physicians know it. Soldiers know it. Police officers know it. Anyone who has ever been forced to sacrifice one worthy thing in order to preserve another understands the peculiar sorrow that follows.

Ethics even has a name for it: moral residue. It is the sadness that lingers after making the least objectionable decision among impossible alternatives - not because the decision was wrong, but because reality refused to offer a clean one.

A cop who kills an active shooter may never regret pulling the trigger. He may know with absolute certainty that it was the only morally defensible course available. Yet he may spend decades mourning that the world ever demanded such a decision.

That isn’t remorse.

It isn’t guilt.

It isn’t even regret.

It’s grief directed not at one’s conduct, but at the existence of the dilemma itself.

It is lament.

The grief of necessity.

The sorrow of inevitability.

The melancholy reserved for choices that were never truly choices.

Perhaps that’s what so many of us carry as we age - not guilt, but accumulated lament.

We mourn the friendships that could never be preserved, the loves that timing refused to accommodate, the ambitions eclipsed by obligation, the versions of ourselves that circumstance quietly rendered impossible before we even knew to pursue them. 

We grieve not simply what happened, but what never truly had the chance to happen at all.

Life offers no refunds for roads not taken, but neither does it reveal how many of those roads were barricaded before we ever arrived. Some barriers were erected by fate. Others by temperament. Others still by limitations we lacked the wisdom- or perhaps the capacity - to recognize until years later. By then, the road had long since disappeared behind us.

There is, oddly enough, a measure of peace in recognizing that distinction.

Not because it absolves us of responsibility. It doesn’t. We remain accountable for our selfish conduct, our decency (and indecency), our arbitrary honesty, and our suspect courage. We are answerable for the choices that genuinely belonged to us. 

But it also acknowledges a quieter, more humbling truth: much of what shaped our lives was never submitted for our approval.

Character dealt the cards.

Circumstance shuffled them.

Time discarded the muthas one by one.

We played the hand with whatever illusory wisdom we possessed at the moment - a wisdom itself fashioned by biology, upbringing, experience, luck, failure, love, disappointment, and countless forces extending far beyond our choosing. We might flatter ourselves in imagining we stood outside those influences, coolly evaluating every crossroads with perfect clarity. 

But let’s be real: we were almost always making the best sense we could of an impossibly complicated world while carrying tools that were themselves unfinished.

Perhaps that is the most difficult lesson age has to offer. Not that we made fewer mistakes than we imagined, nor that we made more, but that the line separating fate from freedom was never as sharply drawn as we once believed. 

Sometimes the world closed the door. 

Sometimes we did. 

More often, the distinction became impossible to recover.

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“Hey… remember this?”

Rumors of my senescence are greatly exaggerated. Oh, I remember that just fine. Some would call it soft porn; others, a nudie. I’m fine with either. Taxonomy was never the point.

If this resurrecting of old images I’ve checked o…

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I am not, by temperament or inclination, what anyone would call a Francophile. 

Quite the contrary. 

My …

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