This was a day of missing Sandi. It’s the 13th, and 13 was always our number. We got married on the 13th of the month in the year 2013 at 13 o’clock.

Plus, Sandi was a witch. Either you get it or you don’t. I was about to go to bed without having made any entry for today. You know, maybe give myself a little break. It’s frickin’ Saturday!

So yeah, i was missing Sandi. I was missing having my friend here with me … my love … but not to be. Everything is temporary. I know that’s a lyric from the Sundays, but i don’t know where else it’s from — and right now I don’t feel like freaking asking Google. (and don’t even get me started with ChatGPT.)

Of course I was missing Ojo too. The photos program on my iPhone made me a little Ojo video yesterday, i think … it was very sweet … of pictures from 2024.

Just keep getting up every day: Ignore the losses. Ignore the defeats. Just keep going as best you can. Don’t listen to the haters. I hope you have a good voice inside you that you can listen to. I don’t think the voice inside me was always very good; it is now, but it took some discipline.

Love takes discipline. That’s what I learned in marriage. Not some abstract, romantic view of love; but a practical one.

I hope you find love out there, my friends. Even if only from yourself.

Writing a story basically comes down to emotional manipulation. To tell a story well, the writer has to be able to manipulate the reader … emotionally. A little, at least. And the reader, they have to want to be manipulated. They’re choosing to be manipulated by whomever they’re reading.

And that’s why i have trouble writing fiction — because i don’t like performing emotional manipulation, as it involves feeling unpleasant things; basically emotional prostitution.

In the end, you write primarily for yourself. Sure, you can say that you have a specific audience in mind; but if you don’t like what you’re writing, you’ll either stop or change it. You’re writing for yourself.

I guess that’s why i’m more comfortable writing non-fiction … even if it’s just non-fiction about me — the most boring topic imaginable to everybody else.

Perhaps I should go back to writing other kinds of non-fiction; maybe that would be a good compromise.

It’s worth a shot. I just have to find a topic.

The current Large Language Model AI is not AI of the Good-Old-Fashioned variety, is it? It’s not really intelligent at all. It can’t answer even fairly simple questions, unless it has the answer already written down for it.

It has no capacity to understand meaning, does it? No.

Current AI is a major disappointment. Sure, it can do some nifty tricks; but it’s nowhere near “intelligent”, let alone self-aware.

Large Language Model AI is fun, and can do some drudge work; but it’s just a pretty façade. (Basically, it’s plagiarism AI; it uses patterns detected in huge amounts of data to “answer” questions or make pictures — it’s the 2025 version of a kid in the ‘70s copying the text of a World Book Encyclopedia article nearly word-for-word for a 3rd grade assignment.)

Maybe sometime in the future, AI will get closer to real intelligence; but it ain’t there yet … not by a long shot.

[When i Google “shortcomings of current AI,” it provides the following pretty good answer — ]

Current “AI” systems, including large language models, lack true understanding, creativity, and common sense, operating primarily as sophisticated pattern-matching tools. Beyond these fundamental technical constraints, a number of ethical, data, and operational shortcomings pose significant challenges. 

If i won’t be able to remember new people i meet (or at least not very well), is it worth meeting them in the first place? Probably not.

Do i tend to watch new TV shows or read new books? No. I mostly watch & read the shows & books that i’m already familiar with; they are more comforting and predictable.

Is that a little cowardly? Maybe. I don’t care.

It’s part of why i don’t want another romantic relationship — it’s too difficult; it hurts too much. It’s a lot easier being alone.

My memory isn’t going to get any better. I’m probably as healed as i’m going to be. Sandi did her best to accept me as i am, but i knew she was frustrated by my limitations — who wouldn’t be?

Maybe it wasn’t fair to Sandi, the whole thing; maybe i never should have put her through all that. Yes, i did help her to get through terminal cancer; and for that i’m glad. My time with Sandi was the high point of my life; maybe it was enough.

I guess i finally got to the point where i could love myself for myself, shortcomings notwithstanding.

This is it. This is life.

It doesn’t matter if i don’t remember everything. I’ll remember enough.

Whatever you end up writing, it’s just the best you could do on some particular day. You always do your best — it’s just not always that great.

Writing is merely a job. It’s just something you do, and if you’re lucky you get paid to do it. Every single time you sit down and you write something, you give it your all; you put everything you’ve got into it and … who knows what happens. Maybe nothing. (But it’s your nothing, and you earned it.)

And then you do it again the next day. And the next.

Language Is About Simplification

Very finite words must represent an extremely complex reality — not quite infinite, but close.

In the end, rendering reality into language has its limitations.

What terms sink into ambiguity?

How do you balance the simple vs complex?

At what level is too much detail lost? (And are you willing to accept the compromise?)

Goy vs Yid, Wrong/Right, Native/Colonizer, et cetera. Binary vs Non-Binary. Popular alternatives come and go. And two is rarely the true number of choices in a situation. Usually it’s at least three or four, if not seven.

We don’t have much evidence to measure the past; we have to infer a lot and make a lot of guesses. Many of them probably are wrong. Writing down some version of the past is just a starting point; it’s not the end.

And there’s a lot of courtesy in language, which makes it cloudy.

~

Unintended homonym: “finite” rendered as “fine Knight” (renderer’s capitalization).

Since my bank provides me with monthly FICO scores, i don’t bother to check the so-called credit bureaus, Experian, TransUnion, and whatever the hell the third one is called — Equifax.

But on a friends advice, I go on Experian to check — she wants me to maybe co-sign a loan for her, and that’s the bureau her mortgage service uses — and it gives me some score about 150 points lower than my own banks’s FICO score, and i figured that’s odd, but whatever. So i sign up for their free service, and i’ve been a “Member of Experian” now for like a month, and mysteriously my “credit score” there has slowly risen about 50 points — but at the same time it stayed exactly the same in my own bank (which is still a hundred-and-some points higher).

So now i get that Experian is just trying to sell me their stupid credit services, like credit monitoring or credit protection, blah blah blah. It’s a bunch of crap.

They are in business to help you “improve” your credit score — double-talk for paying them to artificially improve it. It’s just a pay-to-play scheme; the more of their services you sign up for, the more they raise the credit score they report in your name.

It’s a scam.

Experian is just another for-profit company that got in big with other banks. They reported making $7.5 billion in the last fiscal year. The difference is that they’re one of the big three who hold your “official” credit score hostage.

So if i want to borrow money, i do so from my own bank — and i don’t care what Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax say.

Turns out your credit score from one of the three for-profit “credit bureaus” means very little.

Fuck ‘em.

Arrange lending from your own bank.

Ignore the “Big Three.”

Wow, a lot of these posts are a little depressing. Or maybe it’s just that they’re thoughtful, and that comes across as depressing.

What brings me joy is watching the sunrise on Salisbury Beach. And what’s better, i don’t even have to go to Salisbury Beach to watch the sunrise — it’s available on YouTube from this channel called Salisbury Sunrises (@salisburysunrises).

https://youtube.com/@salisburysunrises

So after I go for my morning walk, I can come back and put on a Salisbury Beach sunrise and watch the sun come up over the ocean, while I have breakfast; it’s very reassuring. Even if i lived at the beach, i probably would not wake up in time to watch the sunrise anyway. This way I don’t have to!

What little things do you take advantage of to bring you joy? If you have any cool ones, please share with me — i would appreciate adding them to my repertoire.

Life?

Life is like a skating rink. Everyone shuffles in and awkwardly (or some less awkwardly) goes around in a big giant oval, over and over and over and over again until they leave. Very profound.

You wake up every day, and you’re alone, and you just go on like it’s all gonna be fine. You have no idea how it’s gonna turn out; you just do it because there’s nothing else to do.

“You don’t wanna be with me: i’m a mess.”

“Everybody here is a mess. I’m a mess. You’re a mess. That’s why we’re here.”

Moral? Be a mess; go ahead.

It’s different losing a spouse.

When Sandi and i got married, my father had already died; but my mother was still there to see the ceremony. My mother saw some fragment of how the relationship worked; and when she died five years later, Sandi was there for me.

By the time Sandi’s mother died, the rest of her family had become too toxic for Sandi to tolerate; and i was there for her as best i could.

Losing both parents, plus a brother … it was no preparation at all for losing Sandi. We may not have had the smoothest relationship at times — who does? — but we were there for each other when it counted. I can understand why some people don’t want another spouse after losing one; i’m finished in the relationship game. There’s not enough left of me to try again.

And family … good and bad. Regarding both hers and mine. I do best just thinking of bad family as having died already. Pay them no mind; they’re not worth it.

I’m happy just to have a couple of friends now — or even just one. I never thought it would be this difficult, losing someone. Maybe only thirteen years to go until i start to feel normal again. As if.

What a whiner i am, huh? I certainly don’t fault anyone for coming to that conclusion. Sometimes you don’t know what a part of life is about until it’s over — that’s the lesson, i guess.

Small consolation.

OK, so i went to start watching the show Seinfeld, and i can either watch the DVD set that I have sitting on the shelf, or I can download episodes from the dark net.

So I bring my laptop to a “safe place” (in other words, not my home ISP) and begin downloading this Seinfeld Complete torrent that I found. Now it’s a huge set of files, so I only download the first season because I wanna see what it’s like.

I get home. I play the first episode and the quality is kind of crappy — it’s 16 x 9 instead of 4 x 3 and I know they shot the series for regular TV back in the day; and I go to put on subtitles because sometimes I like to see the words and not just hear them. And what do you know, it doesn’t even have a subtitle track! Fuck that! It’s not Seinfeld Complete if it has no subtitles.

So I switched to my DVDs instead, and the quality is much better.

I mean, these piracy guys … why do they do such a crappy job? If you’re gonna break the law (and risk all the legal penalties), at least you should do it right!

Maybe there should be better training for these intellectual property wranglers. Since they cut funding for PBS, maybe we could divert it there. Piracy Training Initiative Takes Congress by Storm! — i can just see the headlines.

In 2005, i pirated every disk of what Star Trek existed at the time — Star Trek (Original Series), Next Generation, Deep Space 9, Voyager — all the classics (which i borrowed from legitimate sources). Now in 2025, i still have those discs i burned twenty years ago, and i’m using the video from each series for my own personal collection on the computer: the circle of piracy is complete! (I guess it’s a testament to the bit-rate, etc choices they made … that the video is still useful. And a further testament to the not-very-expensive DVD-Rs i used — Memorex, Fujifilm, etc. — because they still work fine!

Nothing like doing your own pirating; get it right from the source!

Life is never as easy as it looks on TV or you read in a novel. Life is always a pain in the ass. You just have to keep going, and it kind of sucks — but everybody else has to do it, so I guess it’s kind of a group immunity; people put up with it because everybody else puts up with it, and you don’t really have much of a choice.

Why do we not notice that life in fiction is so easy? (Or if not easy, so much simpler than real life.) And how are we able to still enjoy the fiction, despite its being so simple? Why doesn’t it seem so glaringly and obnoxiously different than real life that we can’t enjoy it?

Because we wish life was simple and meaningful.

We want to romanticize life … we want to see it as worthwhile and fulfilling and all that kind of after-school-TV-special kind of crap. I guess the same reason that religion is popular — it’s an idealization. We can never really be like that, but it’s pretty to think so sometimes. Something to wish for.

Some we watch or read fiction to escape from the crappy reality that we’re stuck living in. And some people like a particular fiction so much that they reread it or rewatch it over and over and over again, if it’s long enough to forget the details of what it’s about — maybe it’s 7 seasons, each with 25 episodes per season; or it’s 7 books long, and it can be a comfortable substitute for real life.

Is it healthy to depend on fiction? I guess it doesn’t really matter — that’s what human brains are good at doing: imagining and making up stories; putting ourselves implicitly in those stories, even if they’re completely unrealistic; good guys vs. bad guys, happy endings, sad endings, all that crap. And we share those stories; it gives us something to do.

We do the mundane things of life (make enough money to buy groceries and enough for gas in the car or electricity in the car as the case may be) because we have to. We do all those boring things so that we can divert ourselves with fiction — with TV shows, with books, with video games, whatever floats your boat … with fun. You do work so that you can have fun.

No, i’m not great at writing entertaining stories, because it’s a pretty grim process; but sometimes i can stand it. Other times i can write a fluff piece like this.

Or sometimes i can let it go. I have to sometimes, because the whole thing has gotten to be a little bit depressing.

You’d like to think that good fiction helps you appreciate real life more, and i suppose that’s true occasionally.

But mostly i think it’s about survival. We dwell on fiction because we have to, just to make it through the day.

It’s a living.