Conceptually Impossible Maneuvers
His sensory inputs on fire and how all the systems threaten to shut down
If you’d like to listen to me read this little ditty, you can scroll to the end and click play. Thanks to Cameron Mortenson for the great idea and for the support, always.
Some Citi Card customer service representatives may be conversational AI bots. Really, really good bots. I’ve spoken to what sounds like the same woman twice in about thirty days for two different things. What are the odds of that? Citi Bank must need hundreds of customer service people. Maybe thousands? This woman is vaguely not a native English speaker, she has some sort of non-English accent, but her modern American grammar is flawless. And she’s just a little too consistently too upbeat, even when I’m marginally rude, hurrying her through the second reading of a long legal spiel about some double-points promotion, to be a real customer service person with real hormone-charged blood.
Frank had a dream about alien warships performing conceptually impossible maneuvers on their landing approach over a small town in Alaska. He stood perfectly still on a gravel road looking up, mouth agape, wind blowing around him. And kind of like a heroic acid trip, this can be traumatic or liberating depending on your mindset. For Frank it was traumatic, even though it was just a dream, because the echoes of the efforts his sleeping mind had made to organize these pretend sensory inputs into meaningful experiences induced an all-consuming sense of disquiet. Square pegs into round holes.
The next day Frank saw an advertisement touting hallucination-free AI and he immediately thought it was, number one, somehow related to the alien warships, and two, that he probably wants his AI to hallucinate. He wants it to be creative, he wants it to invite that girl from the bar back to his house, the one with the short hair that keeps the little bag of coke tucked into the waistband of her blue underwear and giggles in the alley when they do key bumps in the drizzle.
Frank types the following prompt: make a map of the lights of my life and label a big section of it “Here Be Dragons.”
It didn’t work out with the foot fetish model. Frank picked her up in New York City in line for the bathroom while she was on a date with some other guy. Things seemed so promising but when they got back to Frank’s hotel room it turns out she’s just a weirdo with low self esteem. When Frank passed out she stole his wallet. He flew a little too close to the sun with that one.
Frank types the following prompt: casual sex is just like soda pop - there’s nothing good about it but the taste.
Frank found love for a few years. His hemispheres, magnetic poles, his planet and his sun. His good night’s sleep, his alternating absolutely overwhelming enchantment and disgust with the world. His acute, terrifying awareness of the sublime. Having perfectly reasonable and mundane experiences could seem just as miraculous and conceptually impossible to Frank as making sense of impossible alien warship maneuvers. He’ll remember forever when they took turns yelling into the copper heat reflectors behind his wood stove to hear the echoes and she laughed so hard that he thought nothing would ever go wrong.
Frank types the following prompt: A big curvy doe, a slug gun, a shoulder thwack. His personal narrative breaks and shrivels up and the naked world rushes in and it’s not coherent and it’s not a world at all it’s just his sensory inputs on fire and how all the systems threaten to shut down.
Frank has to get back in the lineup at Bear Creek in September early in the morning and dump his drift boat into the river like he knows what he’s doing and mix it up with all the jet sleds ripping around in the dark.
Frank types the following prompt: if you freed me from this prison, if this Livescope screen was mine, I bet I’d move it all a little farther down the line. Please take my Livescope neck away, it’s a real bad crick.
This is where you can do the listening.
This is the fishing report part.
Took a day off work to go fishing last week. Finally got into some bass in the new boat. The bay had warmed up enough over the last several weeks that a bunch of bass have pushed in. But it was cold for about the previous ten days so things were a little weird. And these bass get hammered-on every day. Lots of pressure. I found one pod of fish that were ravenous for 4” tubes on a 1/2oz jig head, but another school that wouldn’t touch them. I downsized to a little 2” grub tail thing and a 1/4oz jig head and managed to scrape two fish out of that pod in an hour. Felt great to get out and have some success with the electronics and trolling motor etc. even if the wind did pick up big time in the late morning and it got rough. This trip also gave me lots of confidence that I can catch these deepish fish on the fly rod, though I didn’t get one that way.
We’ve had a big warmup since then and the fish are moving up in earnest in the big lake. Been chasing them after work the last few nights and finding them, but they are suspended and not aggressive. I need to get out at first light and see if that matters.
I love how this picture makes Erie look like an exotic port city.
