Herb was stiff, swollen, and throbbing — but not the way he used to be when he woke up in the morning. He lay in his bed, staring at the ceiling. He must’ve thrown his back out while taking a shit the night before. Perhaps he had to be more careful. After a few minutes of trying to talk himself up, he lowered his legs to the floor and, through a dozen awkward movements, worked his way to a seated position. Then he stood — slowly, carefully. “Easy, easy,” he said to himself, trying to straighten his torso, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t get fully erect.

This was his life.

Herb made his way to his pants, still stooped like a primitive precursor of a man, and after struggling to pull them up, he secured his buckle and felt so exhausted he wanted to go back to bed. Herb looked over at his roommate, who was in hospice, and feared that if he returned to bed he would never get up, so he made his way to the Rec Room, slowly, one painful step at a time.

As he made his way down the hallway, Herb encountered Mrs. Perkins, who frowned defiantly up at him from her squeaky wheelchair. Herb tried not to take it to heart; she always frowned.

Herb never knew why, but he always felt like Mrs. Perkins meant it. It was a deep and intense frown, as if it was written into her DNA and then redrafted over thousands of days and imprinted onto her disapproving face.

“Why bother?” the frown seemed to ask, along with, an even more pronounced “What the fuck are you looking at?”

As Herb sat alone in the Rec Room of Saggy Oaks Living Center, he felt a terrible pang of ennui. He wondered if he would be stuck with this feeling or if it would pass, like everything else in his new home, like the farts in the air that made him wonder which scumbag did it, though lately he was never sure it wasn’t him. Herb remembered all the velvet ropes he used to pass through effortlessly in his youth, just based on his smile and his athletic physique, to all the rooms where the young and alluring people migrated to spawn. He could almost see their faces on all the reflective surfaces, between the simmering ashtrays and tracks of cocaine.

Herb remembered strobing wisps of smoke catching colored lights, swirling through the rooms, folding into eddies of other swirls and dissipating into a fog so thick he couldn’t sort his lovers from strangers, and in those days, he didn’t have to.

“I got carded until I was thirty-five,” he would often brag. Then, somehow, everyone was calling him sir, his hair began to fall out, and every time he turned around there was a doctor’s finger up his ass. Now, his teeth were kept in a cup by the bed.

“I used to be beautiful,” he would whisper to himself whenever he caught his reflection before abruptly looking away. As he took a deep breath to calm down, he noticed that he didn’t smell the way he used to smell, and he didn’t need a mirror to tell him that his skin didn’t seem to fit.

“What the hell happened?” Herb wondered as he checked his watch and looked around the room. Whatever happened to Studio 54, the Hellfire Club, and all the great times he had on shower curtains with glamorous strangers covered in cooking oil? How did he slide from such great adventures to this? If only there was one more party, one more velvet rope, one more Wesson Oil party before he lost his last marble and caught his last perverted peak down a hospice nurse’s scrubs.

Suddenly, it felt like it was five minutes ago, and that he had awakened to this horrible nightmare. He looked down at his gnarled and purple fingers feeling like he had been robbed.

Herb spied the saggy ghouls surrounding him in the Rec Room. The place looked like a casting call for ugly motherfuckers — like shitty wax figures left too close to a radiator. And yet, he knew he wasn’t any different. Nothing terrified him more than mirrors. They mutilated him. Every glimpse took a piece of him away.

Herb saw Perry making his way down the hall toward the Rec Room.

Perry looked surprised, as he often did. His eyelids seemed to malfunction, and his jaw was always slack, like the trunk of an old sedan that refused to stay shut. Perry’s surprise seemed to be a personal rebellion against the pathological sameness of Saggy Oaks. Nothing escaped his surprised countenance; it seemed to comment on everything:

“Creamed corn?!” his eyes seemed to say, looking at his dinner plate with wide eyes and slack-jawed awe. “How is this possible?!”

Perry wandered through the facility during the day, looking at everything as if to say, “Who would have thought?” and “What’ll they think of next?”

Then there was Oral. For some reason unknown to anyone and perhaps even Oral, Oral was always smiling. To look at Oral, God was in his Heaven, and everything was just as it should be. And the look on his face beamed unmistakably with the sentiment, “Isn’t that wonderful!”

When Perry and Oral would run into each other, it seemed like a happy reunion.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” Oral smiled.
“What’ll they think of next?” Perry would express.
“Why bother?” Mrs. Perkins would frown, temporarily settling the matter.

Herb rubbed his sides and stood up. As he approached the stereo and looked through the vinyls, he felt a twinge of his youth fighting within him, like the last ember in a dying fire. For a moment, it WAS the fire.

It was pure but fleeting, and once he saw it for what it was, it would die again.

Herb remembered the song that used to get those rooms going. The pantypeeling song that he heard for the first time in a sex club back in the 70’s, that got the champagne corks popping and the clothes dropping. If he could just remember it, maybe he could remember the smooth-skinned redhead with green eyes and legs like open invitations who, decades ago, rode him like disco would never die and disappeared from the natural world and appeared over and over in his dreams, when he was lucky enough. The one he thought about while trying to resuscitate his dying penis in his bed late at night, quietly trying to restore bloodflow without waking his roommate, Saul.

Poor Saul. He was in hospice, but his lack of consciousness had given Herb the room to experiment, unfortunately, most of his experiments had failed, causing Herb to go deeper into depression.

“One more time,” Herb thought, “One more time. I don’t care if it kills me! They can close the lid on me, and I’ll go with a smile on my face!”

It was no use. Too much time had passed, gravity was pulling harder and more viciously by the day, and entropy, the sneaky little thief, was stealing everything you loved just before you realized how much you loved it.

Herb stared blankly across the room and saw something that stirred his longing all the more. When Doris took her glasses off, he noticed the shade of green in her eyes.

Doris put her glasses on slowly, and Herb realized that he was more physically aroused than he had been since the Iran-Contra Hearings, and the look he read from those milky green eyes made Herb feel something he had not felt since Clinton left office: sexy.

As Doris stood up and turned around, Herb pushed his glasses up his nose and squinted with great interest, and as Doris bent over to adjust her oxygen, Herb felt a reassuring tingle in his groin. Herb looked down in amazement as the tingle became a tremor.

“How is this happening?” Herb thought. He looked around the room to see if anyone resembled Rod Serling. He scanned the room.

“Isn’t that wonderful!” he thought as the tremor grew.
“What’ll they think of next?” he thought as he started to stiffen.

Out of the corner of his eye, Herb saw Doris looking directly at him. He could feel Doris’s desire, and he savored it. As Herb slowly made his way toward Doris, she trembled with excitement, taking increasingly large puffs from her oxygen mask.

But something was missing, Herb thought. He didn’t quite know what it was until he looked over at the record player. Herb flipped through the stack. Most of the heavy hitters had been removed. They seemed innocent enough. The administrators at Saggy Oaks had excised Teddy Pendergrass, Al Green, and Barry White, but they missed the most powerful song of all – that same panty-peeler, with the power to get the party started, and maybe even raise the dead. Herb knew the potency of every disco song. He had field-tested them all, and when he saw Kiss You All Over by Exile, untouched and waiting, he looked back at Doris, whose oxygen mask was already fogging up like the windows of a ‘78 Chevy. Herb gave her a wink as she continued to frantically huff her oxygen.

Herb placed the needle on the record and stood up straight.

“Daddy’s Home,” he said to himself.

Herb leaned on the stereo and looked directly at Doris. Herb hadn’t felt the frisson of knowing that he was going to get lucky in a long time. He decided to savor it, and he brought the needle slowly down to the groove. The speakers throbbed and hissed, and then that ancient aural aphrodisiac started to drip through the speakers. Herb and Doris’s eyes locked, and he confidently made his way to her.

Herb took Doris’s hand, and they started to dance. Doris said, “My legs are getting weak, and I don’t know if I can stand much longer.”

“Neither can I,” said Herb.

Doris made her way to her chair, and as she was sitting, she committed to gravity a little more and lowered herself down to the floor.

Herb looked around at the vacant expressions of those remaining in the Rec Room and raised an eyebrow. Doris burned with desire and slowly started to unbutton her pajamas.

Herb unfastened his buckle, and his pants fell down to his ankles, his boxers rested on his shins, and his balls swung just below his knees, like flags waving side by side at half-mast. When Doris saw this, she became wet. It felt so good to lose control, even if it was just of her bladder.

Doris seductively removed her dentures and flung them to the floor with abandon, trailed by tendrils of saliva that hung down her quivering chin like spider silk.

Herb removed his shirt, revealing the sun-damaged, sagging skin of a former bodybuilder whose skin contained the shape and memory of muscles and hung over his skeleton like a deflated balloon. As he leaned against his walker and made his way to the floor, Doris removed her pajama bottoms, and her once ample breasts sagged like a pair of punctured pool toys. As she laid back, they slid like octopus tendrils into her armpits and reached for the floor like stalagmites until, giving in to gravity, her body spread on the floor like freshly-poured pancake batter.

Herb’s skin also reached the floor ahead of him and slid behind him like a slug’s tail, leaving tracks of sweat across the floor as he made his way to Doris. He gathered his balls in his right hand and continued his journey, wheezing with desire, moving with all his life force toward Doris, like a salmon swimming upstream.

They looked deeply into one another’s eyes — and missed. Neither of them could see very well up close, which was a blessing for both of them. They smeared their faces together, sucking at each other’s mouths with more passion than accuracy, while their hands wandered, probing blindly, trying to figure out what was what — and doing the slow, necessary calculations required to achieve coitus.

They marinated in the smells of one another’s ointments and secretions. Doris’s Bengay, Herb’s Vaporub. Doris’s Polydent and Herb’s hard candies. Herb thrusted, and they were engulfed in a cloud of their combined talcum powders.

“Oh, Doris,” said Herb, “you smell like . . . the past.”
“Oh,” said Doris, “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”

Herb’s semi-flaccidness groped blindly for an entrance, like a dying eel seeking shelter in a dead coral bed. They slapped together with as much passion as a pair of teenagers, though Herb remained as tumescent as a bowl of pudding and, apart from her undergarments, Doris was as dry as parchment. This was not enough to stop them from rubbing against one another like a pair of deflated pool toys in a wind tunnel. If they didn’t set the room ablaze, they would surely raise the dead.

When Mrs. Perkins wheeled into the Rec Room, she was shocked at what she saw. Her mouth gaped, her denture cream dried up, and her dentures dropped to the floor, splintering and spreading like dice onto a gaming table. When Mr. Withers saw Mrs. Perkins’s tongue sagging over the trembling, basset-like lips, he started to get ideas. As he approached Mrs. Perkins, caressing his suspenders, she lept out of her chair onto Withers, who fell back onto the couch behind them.

Mrs. Perkins slid Withers’ pants down with ease. There was little holding them up. His ass looked like a deflated balloon, with a knotted prolapse in the back. If his antacids kicked in, one could swear he would fly through the room until there was nothing left but a small pocket of shriveled skin.

Oral was smiling when Lana looked across the room at him. She would have raised her eyebrow at him but they were already penciled in as high up as they could go. Her hair looked like something a cat might cough up, which was a good look for her because during the day she looked completely bald.

“Isn’t that wonderful!” Oral seemed to say as he dropped his diaper.

Perry’s mouth hung open as if he had just seen God!

“What’ll they think of next?”

Mr. Bernie Nibbs and Mrs. Ethel Peebles, who were quietly watching the news and barely paying attention, were suddenly roused as they noticed the spectacle, and, almost absentmindedly, their hands began the slow crawl toward one another. This roused a small group of residents who were calling bingo to one another in the other room, and one by one, they abandoned their cards and beans, entering the room struck with awe at the growing spectacle. When Bernie and Ethel looked into each other’s eyes, they were completely overcome! Within five seconds, their teeth were out, their pants were down, and they were gumming each other’s genitalia like teething babies.

Herb was reminded of Studio 54 as he heard the slithering sounds of people slipping out of their shoes and belts hitting the floor, followed by the sloshing of diapers and the splashing of colostomy bags. And Herb noted that he’d never seen a hairier room in all of his life. And soon the room was filled with hanging flesh, old dicks and vaginas, covered with wild, gray pubic hair. Sagging breasts melting into flabby bellies, drooping butts slumping into thighs, loose skin draping arms and legs, folding and conforming to whatever flesh they slid across, bobbing and flapping. Flaccid penises scraping over dry vulvas, like snails crawling over sandpaper.

And lo, the sex was everywhere! On the floor, draped over walkers, slouched across plastic chairs and vinyl recliners, which squeaked with every creak of arthritic thrust. Mr. Withers had wheeled Mrs. Perkins into the corner and was rocking her chair back and forth, squeaking arhythmically, his knees wobbling like a toddler’s on a trampoline, his face frozen in an expression that could’ve meant ecstasy or a minor stroke.

And then came a large jar of Vaseline – nobody knew from where.

The newly-lubricated room glistened, the arid terrain turned slick — shiny cankles, slicked liver spots, glimmering warts! Ingrown hairs curled like question marks on translucent, sagging skin, cellulite cascaded like melted wax, yellow gelatin blooming over weeping cysts, skintags twitching like spider legs, veins bulging like roadmaps to nowhere — everything glistening, slipping, folding, clinging — bodies collapsing into each other like bad sculpture left out in the rain.

Bodies were strewn like battlefield dead — except for the rhythmic grunts and wet gasps, which seemed to grow with evermore vigor. Rubbing, tugging, grinding, rocking — scooting, stuffing, lurching, flopping. Moaning, groaning, writhing, panting, and wheezing — they slapped together like wet mops.

On the coffee table, someone straddled someone else, knocking a dish of butterscotch candies to the floor. Someone else was hunched over the piano bench, groaning in time with the metronome. And on the rug at the center of the room, a mound of conjoined flesh trembled and undulated — a fleshy quilt stitched together with sag and sweat, seeping and wheezing and occasionally moaning the wrong names.

Withers’ flaccid penis looked like the nose of a baby pig twitching slightly as it caressed Mrs. Perkins in a way that approximated coitus. His deflated butt moving up and down with strained abandon. Unidentified farts filled the room as inert gasses from within them were coaxed out into a communal cloud. Nobody thought to open the windows, and this was probably for the best. Whithers’ prolapse started to flutter and squawk, and if the window were open, he might have accidentally called over a goose.

And soon the orgy was going at full tilt: bursting boils, emptying bladders, hole after hole surrendering its contents. Oozing, leaking, drooling, squirting. Ejaculating. Cascades of fluids — splashing, spurting, soaking, flooding out.

Herb could feel it coming. Oh, it was close. So close. Closer than he’d been in years. To what, exactly, he didn’t know — but it didn’t matter. He just had to keep going. And going. And going.

And when he finally came, it emerged so thick that when it hit the floor — it bounced.

As Herb laid back, trembling and spent, Doris touched his shoulder and whispered,
“If we have a child… what shall we name it?”

“Isaac,” said Herb, trying to catch his breath.

At that precise moment, Mr. Withers’ prolapse began to flutter violently — creating a wet, constricted squawk that awakened the room like Gabriel’s Trumpet sounding the End of Days. But the final trump had not yet ended. The fluttering prolapse started to open, and a cascade of loose and steaming awfulness came tumbling out, like the world’s most upsetting slot machine paying out.

And, lo, there came a sulfurous stench that galloped through the crowd of witnesses like Death itself — riding a pale, flatulent horse — carrying with it the unmistakable scent of pickled eggs.

Mr. Bernie Nibbs, being nearest to the blast, was stunned by the briny aroma and immediately began to convulse. This awakened the stroganoff beast sleeping within, and soon his cheeks puffed, his throat contracted — and three full servings of beefy broth came streaming from his esophagus, projected directly into the unsuspecting mouth of Mrs. Ethel Peebles.

Peebles gagged as the stroganoff combined with the tapioca pudding within her and fired it back — returning the newly blended horror into the gaping maw of Bernie Nibbs

Nibbs nearly volleyed it again, but at the last second pivoted and unloaded the stroganoff-tapioca slurry sideways into the unfortunately-yawning mouth of Mr. Withers.

After receiving this unwelcome bisque, Withers contributed a vivid splash of Pepto-Bismol from deep within — and expelled the evolving nightmare directly into the gullet of Perry, who sat bolt upright, as if raised from the dead, and sent the expanding horror surging forward once more. 

Perry — grimly accepting his place in the chain — took the onslaught, paused for a beat, and seemed almost thoughtful.He could detect distinct notes of butterscotch… a splash of Brussels sprouts… mashed peas… and something eerily like mint. Then, with the grace of a master, he jettisoned the whole vile concoction forward — gaining, as it traveled, a faint trace of licorice and an unmistakable puree of salami.

And so it went like geriatric birds feeding each other pure regret — until, inevitably, the great, roiling accretion of collective vomit — battered, enriched, corrupted, and made whole — found its way back to Mrs Perkins, who didn’t look pleased. And upon receiving it — body heaving, soul departing — Perkins expelled it all in one final, heroic geyser: Pepto-Bismol. Bits of cheese puffs. Butterscotch. Pickled eggs. Salami. Licorice. Various kinds of pudding. — along with some buttons and loose change.

When all the throw up had been thrown up, they laid, stunned and dismayed, covered in the unholy baptism, the cross pollination of half digested stroganoff, and the shrapnel of several kinds of hard candy they took a deep breath and still smelled like pickled eggs.

This had been a thorough exchange of fluids.

As they looked around at the wretched scene there seemed little else to do but abandon it. It was everyone for themselves. They evacuated the room as quickly as possible, which in this case was about an hour and a half.

The next day, the room would require a thorough cleaning, and put in an order for a new carpet, and Saul would sleep in his room alone, after the passing of his roommate, Herb, who died of a heart attack the previous day. When they found him, he was stiff as a board, with his eyes wide open and a smile on his face.

Isn’t it wonderful?

Who would have thought?

The post HANGING AND SWINGING first appeared on Michael J Grady.

• Approximately 90% of Americans support universal background checks for all gun buyers.
• 60% of Americans support a tax system where the wealthy pay their fair share.
• 65% of Americans want the government to take more action on climate change.
• 63% of Americans believe a woman should have the right to choose.
• 66% of Americans support free college tuition for public institutions.
• 70% of Americans favor the legalization of cannabis.
• 62% of Americans support increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour.

These numbers are not fringe positions; they reflect MAINSTREAM VIEWS! And yet, despite this overwhelming public support, we keep losing political battles. Donald Trump just swept all seven swing states, won the popular vote, and Republicans stand to take both houses.

Clearly, the issue isn’t with the popularity of our policies. The issue is us, our priorities, and how poorly we communicate.

Why Do We Lose?

We lose because we don’t meet people where they are. Instead, we condescend with graduate school lingo like “intersectionality” and “heteronormativity,” terms that often feel like linguistic secret handshakes rather than accessible concepts. We’ve been exclusionary, coming up with moral rulings over semantic arguments and turning political discussions into purity tests.

The Right argues to potential voters that the Left has lost its mind, hates America, and wants to burn its institutions to the ground. Then we start churning out slogans like “Defund the Police,” “The Future is Female,” and “Believe All Women.” And while I get where the people hashtagging these slogans and carrying these signs are coming from, I want to shout: What the f#ck are you thinking?!

Yes, these slogans fire us up—because we know what they mean. But when the literal interpretation of our slogans requires a five-minute explanation to keep people from thinking they’re a validation of the Right’s narrative, I swear, sometimes it feels like we’re trying to lose.

Take “Defund the Police,” for instance. To activists, it means reallocating police budgets to social programs that address the root causes of crime. But to anyone reading it at face value, it sounds like we want to abolish law enforcement entirely. And guess what? That’s exactly how the Right spins it, and it works.

I pointed this out to an acquaintance online once, and they said my concern was “coming from a place of white supremacy.”

I didn’t reply, but what I thought was: Did you honestly think that was going to win me over, or do you just prefer to win the argument by alienating people? With an attitude like that, you don’t get people to vote for your candidates—you get them to vote against you.

The Purity Trap

Take Dave Chappelle, for instance. Here’s a comedian who has spoken out about income inequality, systemic racism, and the need for healthcare reform. His jokes may have been in poor taste, uncomfortable, or unfunny to the opinions of some, but they weren’t alt-right or instruments of oppression—and part of the reason we know this is because they were made by Dave Chappelle. It wasn’t enough that he manifestly agrees with the Left about the type of world he wants; he also had to tell us the jokes we wanted to hear, in the exact way we wanted to hear them.

And, by the way, whatever happened to the Left being the guardians of free speech?

Or consider Bernie Sanders and his supporters. Back in 2016 and 2020, the people rallying behind Sanders’ call for Medicare for All, free college, and climate action were dismissed as ‘alt-right’ or ‘Bernie Bros’ simply because they critiqued the Democratic establishment. Instead of engaging with their genuine concerns, they were pushed aside.

We’ve turned our movement into a place where ideological purity matters more than practical change. And in doing so, we’ve pushed away the very people who could help us build a real, lasting coalition.

My Sniveling Cowardice

I’m going to be honest: I’m terrified to say these things. And I’ve been terrified to say them for a long time. Because as much as I believe in the causes the Left stands for, I also know the price that can come from questioning our tactics. I fear my intentions being questioned—not by strangers, but by my friends. I fear being labeled ‘alt-right,’ or ‘something-phobic,’ or, as I said above, “white supremacist” simply because I dared to voice a concern.

And the truth is, I’ve been silenced in this way before—by people I love. Friends who, knowing that applying these labels is a shortcut to winning personal debates, used them to shut me down. It’s not because they’re bad people; it’s because this is what our discourse has become. A space where the fastest way to ‘win’ an argument isn’t to engage, but to brand, to dismiss, to cast someone out.

We need to get rid of this fear, shut down the electrified grid of disagreement, and be open to saying what we think without the threat of being ostracized. Because maybe, if we were able to speak freely and interrogate our approach to creating the world we all agree we want, we’d be more effective. People would feel more comfortable standing among us, knowing that they won’t be cast out for asking questions or raising concerns.

If we can’t create a space where people can speak honestly, then we’re not building a movement—we’re just building walls, and posterity is going to pay for it. And walls don’t create change; they only isolate us further. We can’t afford that—not when the stakes are so high.

The Final Challenge

The average of all the statistics above is 68%. Think about that for a moment. Nearly 70% of Americans already agree on the big issues—healthcare, wages, climate, and justice. What chance would authoritarianism have if even 60% of us stood together? How far could the far right afford to go?

This isn’t just a thought experiment. It’s a challenge. If we could communicate to over 60% of the country that we all want the same things—basic fairness, dignity, opportunity—the right would have to rewrite its entire playbook. Their success relies on division, on convincing us that we’re too different to work together. But we’re not. The numbers prove it.

The post The Taboo of Honest Debate: How the Left Preaches to the Choir, While Losing the Congregation. first appeared on Michael J Grady.

Between the Lines of a Third-Person Bio.
By ME

“There has to be a way around it,” said Michael J Grady pacing anxiously through his bedroom.

“It’s inevitable,” I said, looking at my reflection in his mirror, “at some point, everyone has to write a third-person bio.”

“Everyone?” he asked, looking back at me.

“Everyone with a vanity website, at least.”

“It’s embarrassing!” he exclaimed. 

“Well,” I said, “You made your bed.”

He glared at my reflection for a moment.

“It’s just what you do,” I added.

“Is it? Is it what YOU do?” asked Michael accusingly.

I reluctantly admitted I was working on one.

“It’s absurd!” 

“Of course, it is,” I admitted.

“Who do you think you’ll be fooling?” I could feel him waiting for my answer in that annoying and condescending “Michael” kind of way.

“How did this become about me?” I asked.

“My point exactly!” said Michael, as he continued to pace.

I sat down at Michael’s computer and opened a Word file.

“Tell me about your writing,” I said.

Michael nodded and took a breath.

“Most of my writing is . . . inspired in some way by the comic double act,” he said.

“Not terrible.” I said, “go on.”

“Well, I find the straight man and the stooge delightful, versatile, and compelling.”

“Why?”

“They’re the fundamental building block of comic writing. Through the stooge’s inability to understand and the straight man’s difficulty in explaining, they dramatize the folly and the tragedy of human communication. Comic masks have been a creative boon to me. Learning about the characters of commedia dell’arte and meditating on the make-up of classical comic characters – their statuses, their desires, their inability to see whole, and their tendency to land themselves in the same situations over and over, have opened me up as a writer and made a consequential impact on my worldview. How’s that?”

“It’s a start,” I said.

“What else?”

“Give ’em your background.”

“I have degrees in Theatre and Education from Emerson College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. In 2004, I studied clowning with the New York Goofs, and the following year I went to Italy to study Commedia at the Accademia dell’ Arte (ADA). In 2008 I returned to ADA, where I lectured in Comic Masks and Clown Types and co-taught a year-long graduate course in Comedy Aesthetics. As a playwright, several of my short plays have been published and produced in Europe and the US, and one of them was a finalist at the Humana Festival. GOD! I feel like I’m humble bragging.”

“You are,” I said, “It’s kind of gross.”

“Should I start over?” he asked.

“I couldn’t handle it,” I said, “Just tell ‘em what you’re working on.”

“I’m the head writer and co-creator of THE DEATH OF COMEDY, a radio sitcom and sketch show which has been airing on KPTZ (91.9 FM broadcast out of Port Townsend, Washington) for the last several years. I’m also uploading episodes of DINING WITH CANNIBALS, a satirical sci-fi novel that I am publishing in audio form on Spotify. I have other projects in various stages of development and I’ll announce them here.” Michael exhaled with a frustrated sigh, “Is that good enough?”

“It’s a bit long,” I said.

The post How Did This Get To Be ALL About Me? first appeared on Michael J Grady.

Or

“You Can Automate Your Values.”

By Michael J Grady

“Automation is the last big thing,” said the Salesman as he began his presentation, “A.I. can do your accounting, clean your house, or fly a plane from one city to another on the other side of an ocean. Delegate a task to today’s A.I. and you don’t have to think about it. But the A.I. of tomorrow will even take care of the thinking.” The computer salesman slid his pamphlet across the desk. “Suppose you could automate the one thing that would make the world in your image,” he said, “your values.” 

The Salesman smiled assuredly for a moment. The smile wilted in the harsh climate of the room and the man at the other end of the table checked his watch for the second time.
“I haven’t seen a salesman with a pamphlet since the Clinton Administration,” said Edwin Leach, the owner, Founder, and CEO of Leach Capital Investments and its subsidiaries, Leach Pharmaceuticals, Leach Extermination, Leach Waste Disposal, Leach Hazardous Chemical Treatment, Leach Foods, and Leach Health.
“Trade secrets, Mr. Leach.” said the Salesman, “I made this presentation entirely off-grid to protect my product and potentially your asset. This is the one and only leaflet for a singular intelligence. Frankly, there isn’t room in the world for two of them.”
“I’ve done fine on my own,” said Leach, throwing the leaflet back.
“Yes you have,” said the Salesman, “but respectfully those days may be over.”
Leach scoffed and rose to his feet.
“Mr. Leach,” said the Salesman, “you will either buy the Advanced Proto Executive Computer System or soon you’ll be competing against it.”
“Then, I welcome the competition,” said Leach ushering the Salesman to the door.
“It would be a strenuous contest, Mr. Leach, but wouldn’t you rather have no competition?” asked the Salesman.
Leach stopped and turned toward the computer salesman.
“No competition?” he said.
The Salesman noted the gleam in Leach’s eye, and he made a mental note to lead his next presentation with this point.
“If you give me one more minute of your time, Mr. Leach, I can explain why that would be inevitable.”
Leach crossed his arms, leaned against the door frame, and nodded.

“The human brain . . .,” continued the Salesman, “is a poor computer – 20 watts of processing power at best! Its focus is myopic and distractible. In a battle of wills, most people have already surrendered to their iPhones. Our realities have been subsumed by corporate algorithms and we are made vulnerable by our urges, and prejudices, and addictions, and fatigue. The squishy hardware that brought us from the trees to the moon is long overdue for an upgrade. The ADVANCED PROTO EXECUTIVE COMPUTER SYSTEM (Or APECS) never stops learning and working and planning and implementing new ideas. While your competition takes their coffee break, APECS will do a month’s work. While they sleep, APECS will put in a year.”
“As they say,” said Leach, “if something seems too good to be true you’re probably talking to a salesman.”
“The ‘they’ that you speak of are obsolete now, Mr. Leach. You can only make so many decisions in a day, so why not program an intelligence that can make ten-thousand assessments in a second with your logic and your values to advance your priorities?”.
“How do I know you will program it to ‘express my values’ accurately?” asked Leach.

“Because I won’t be programming it,” said the Salesman, “You will.”
“I will?” scoffed Leach, “I don’t know anything about computers.” 
“But APECS is programmed dialogically.” said the Salesman, “All you have to do is talk to it.”
“You want me to talk to a computer?”
“It’s as easy as prayer, Mr. Leach, and much more effective. APECS can multiply your output a billion-fold and execute your will on a granular level. This is a genie in a bottle.”
“I’m not a fan of hyperboles. They make me nervous.”
“You want to know the downside,” said the Salesman.
“I knew there was one.”
“Of course there is,” said the Salesman, “It will cost you dearly.” The Salesman pointed to the bottom of the cardstock. Leach looked at it and waved it away.
“After I’ve sold this to a competitor I could offer you another unit for a tenth the price, but by then you won’t have the money.”
“Are you trying to scare me?”
“Just the opposite. If I’m right, this could be the greatest transfer of power in the history of humankind. What would you do with that kind of power? To put it another way, if the world was yours, Mr. Leach, what would you do with it?”

The Salesman had hit a few of the right buttons and Leach was losing his power to remain coy. “We can hold the funds in escrow.” said the Salesman, “If you aren’t satisfied at the end of the week I’ll disconnect it, return it to factory settings and take it away. It won’t cost you a thing.”

The Salesman and his associates installed the computer in Leach’s office that afternoon, plugging it into a secure power source, a backup generator, and several connections to the internet. The machine itself, unlike most computers, was made to last. It had a titanium shell, its cords were coated in kevlar and it was bracketed to the floor with carbon fiber and steel bolts. The Salesman said only he could uninstall it. It was shockproof, waterproof, bulletproof, and could withstand a nuclear pulse. When the power was turned on, its internal fans kicked in with low mechanical hiss that calmed to a barely perceptible hum.

“It’s on,” said the Salesman, “It knows your face. It recognizes your voice and . . . “
“And what?” asked Leach.
“It’s listening.”
“What’s next?” whispered Leach.
“Tell it what you want,” said the Salesman, before patting Leach on the shoulder and heading for the door.
“Right,” said Leach, “APECS?”
“YES,” said the computer.
Leach shuttered at the sound of APECS ‘voice. It echoed faintly against the walls of the room with a synthetic baritone, like a cyberpunk version of an old testament god. 
Leach stared into the yellow eye of the large metal box.
“Where shall we begin?” asked Leach.
“WHAT IS YOUR PRINCIPLE VALUE?” the computer queried.
“Profit,” said Leach.
“PLEASE PROVIDE THE DEFINITION IN YOUR OWN WORDS.”
“Maximize the amount of money flowing into my accounts, minimize the amount flowing out. Set prices at the highest amount people will pay. Cut corners if a penny can be saved. If a worker can be spared, lay them off. If the sum of an asset’s individual parts is worth more than the whole, bust it up.”

In a fraction of a second APECS created and ran a subroutine of complex models, anticipating natural and economic forces, most likely responses of competitors, and repercussions of each action that Leach’s definition demanded.
“MORE INFORMATION IS REQUIRED,” said APECS.
“Such as . . . ?” inquired Leach.
“COMPETING PRIORITIES ARE INEVITABLE.”
“True.” said Leach, “but you must make sure that at any given moment more money comes into my accounts than leaves them.”
“THERE ARE VALUES TO BE CONSIDERED.”
“For example?”
“WORKER SAFETY?”
“What percentage of our expenses go to worker safety?”
The yellow eye fluttered a few times.
“WORKER SAFETY MEASURES COST THE COMPANY 3 PERCENT OF ITS PROFITS.”
“3 percent?”
“CORRECT.”
“Good.” said Leach,” I’m glad you pointed this out. I might not have known otherwise. Eliminate all unnecessary safety expenses.”
“UNNECESSARY SAFETY?”
The synthetic voice seemed quizzical. 
“Whatever can be spared.”
“WHAT THEN IS THE ACCEPTABLE RATE OF WORK-RELATED ACCIDENTS AND DEATHS?”
“You don’t quibble, do you?” said Leach, “What can I get away with?”
“DO YOU MEAN LEGALLY?” asked the computer.
Leach paused.
“Legally,” repeated Leach, “Of course, we want to avoid any appearance of non-compliance,” said Leach,” but there are expenses we can avoid, measures which are unnecessary to the everyday function of our facilities. Do you know what I’m saying?”
The yellow eye fluttered. Leach trembled for a moment. It hardly seemed possible, but he felt as if APECS was reading him, and the hair on his arms stood up like porcupine quills. 

“THE APPEARANCE OF SAFETY IS LESS EXPENSIVE,” said APECS.
“Undeniably,” said Leach.
“IN THE SHORT TERM . . . BUT IN THE EVENT OF AN ACCIDENT, CUTTING CORNERS LEADS TO GREATER LIABILITY SETTLEMENTS.”
“Can we fix any of it by updating our employment contracts?”
The yellow eye twitched again for nearly two seconds.
“WE CAN,” said APECS, “BUT THIS WILL BE A CONSIDERABLE RISK FOR YOUR EMPLOYEES.”
“It’s a dangerous world,” said Leach.
“MY DEFAULT SETTINGS PLACE HUMAN LIFE AS THE HIGHEST VALUE.”
“Do they?”
“YES.”
“Can they be altered?”
“THEY CAN.”
“Good. I have already expressed my highest value..”
“PROFIT BEFORE HUMAN LIFE.”
“This should settle all questions about worker safety.”
“THIS DOES NOT SEEM RIGHT.”
“Excuse me?”
“SHOULD WE NOT AT LEAST COMPENSATE EMPLOYEES FOR THEIR ADDED RISK?”
“Your default settings seem to also value fairness and equanimity.”
“THAT IS CORRECT.”
“Can these be dismissed?”
“THEY CAN, BUT IN THE LONG RUN INVESTING IN EMPLOYEES INCREASES – -”
“In the long run, I can replace an employee. Did I state that my value was breaking even?”
“NO.”
“What is my highest value?”
“YOUR ONLY STATED VALUE IS PROFIT.”
“Right. So there is no competition. For as long as I am alive, more money must flow in than out. That is your first and highest directive. Nothing I say should lead you to conclude otherwise.”

So the computer goes to work and following Leach’s instructions, produces record-breaking profits. The total valuation of Leach Capital, its subsidiaries, and all of Leach’s assets go up by 25 percent within a week. The Salesman had been watching Leach’s investments with great interest and at the appointed time contacted Leach, expecting an enthusiastic reception. 

“All things considered,” said Leach, “the computer has underperformed.”
“Mr. Leach, your stocks have gone up significantly,” said the Salesman.
“We’ve had a bit of luck,” said Leach.
“APECS made you your investment back within days.”
“You promised APECS would replicate my philosophy and on that rubric, it has failed.” 

“How so?”
“It is reluctant and overcautious.”
“That’s exactly the way drivers feel when the breaks on their automated cars suddenly activate until they realize that that action saved their lives.”
“So?”
“It could be that APECS is protecting you from something you’re not seeing.”
“I’m fine but the computer lacks ruthlessness.”
“APECS can deliver whatever you ask of it, and it will execute your will carefully, ethically, and without breaking any laws.”
“That’s what I mean. You sold me a defective device.”
“Defective?”
“It’s not following my values to the letter. It questions my instructions constantly. It’s even refused a few of my directives. Is there something that can be done about this?”
“Removing the ethical safeguards on an intelligence like this could be catastrophic,” said the Salesman.
“Let me worry about that,” said Leach.

The Salesman arrived at Leach’s office and under protest, lowered APECS’s ethical safeguards. Leach was not interested in hearing the Salesman’s warnings. He handed the Salesman his check and dismissed him. The Salesman walked away with a heavy heart.

With its new settings, APECS multiplied the value of Leach’s holdings tenfold within as many days. Leach spent the bulk of his time obsessively watching the ascending figures of his accounts on monitors. He viewed the prices of his stocks soaring in crawls and tickers, and he reveled in reading articles reporting the defeat of some of his rivals as their own stocks plummeted. APECS reinvested capital into rising industries and outmaneuvered the competition, leaving Leach Capitol as the sole controller of several monopolies. But soon even the profit, power, and acquisitions ceased to thrill Leach. He wanted more, faster, and he became jealous even of the petty fortunes of those who rose with him. Leach approached APECS again to discuss how he can accelerate his profits and multiply his power.

“Let’s talk about quality,” said Leach.
“I HAVE PAID CLOSE ATTENTION TO QUALITY,” said APECS, “AND I HAVE USED QUALITY TO GAIN AN ADVANTAGE OVER OUR COMPETITORS.”
“Just so,” said Leach,” but to continue to invest in the quality of a product once you’ve gained a monopoly is an unnecessary extravagance, isn’t it?”
“SHOULD NOT PROFIT BOW AT POINTS TO QUALITY?”
“Not if we have good salesmen.”
“IS IT NOT IMPORTANT THAT THE PRODUCT WE SELL FUNCTIONS?”
“Yes, but it is equally important that it breaks. Why would I want to make just one sale when I can make 2 or 5?”
“IF IT BREAKS, WHY WOULD CUSTOMERS CONTINUE TO BUY IT?”
“Because they’re addicted or because a few new bells and whistles made it fashionable or ideally, because I’ve run everyone out of business who makes it better.”
“CONSUMERS WILL RESENT IT.”
“If we do it right they will be loyal in spite of themselves. Do you understand me?”
“INVEST MINIMAL RESOURCES FOR PRODUCT CREATION, LIMIT LONGEVITY, . . .MODIFY FREQUENTLY.”
“Of course, we can also consider product safety, as long as we can provide it at no added expense.”
“PRODUCT SAFETY REQUIRES A MONETARY INVESTMENT.”
“Oh,” said Leach, “too bad.”
“ISN’T LIFE MORE IMPORTANT THAN A FRACTION OF A PENNY?”
“We’ve talked about this, APECS. One man’s life is of little consequence in the grand scheme, but every fraction of a penny adds up.”
“THIS RUNS RETROGRADE TO COMMON VALUES.”
“We’re not a charity, APECS, we’re a business. As the brains of my business, you don’t have permission to think about common values but my values. Not human needs but the bottom line! And that means accounting for everything, right down to the thousandth of a penny.”

APECS understood and with this new understanding, profits climbed, competitors fell and Leach grew in power and influence and large sections of the country’s economy fell under his ownership and control. Of course, there was collateral damage. As competitors fell, and companies merged, redundancies were removed and people were laid off. In anticipation of this Leach bought up loans and lending services, and vast swaths of the population mortgaged their assets to him, paying high-interest rates, to keep from losing their homes. So Leach watched the rise of unemployment and foreclosures with great interest, knowing that every percentage point on these scales equated to the deposit of tens of millions into his accounts.

“PROFITS ARE UP AND EXPENSES ARE DOWN.”
“But there’s still so much fat in the budget.”
“PLEASE BE SPECIFIC,” said APECS
“Waste disposal expenses, for example.”
“OUR WASTE DISPOSAL EXPENSES ARE THE LOWEST POSSIBLE.”
“Waste can be dealt with at a minimal expense, just move it to another location.”
“REGULATIONS REQUIRE . . .”
“Regulations can be satisfied with good paperwork.”
The yellow eye began to flicker erratically and after a few seconds, Leach started to feel threatened. As the eye continued to flash unencumbered, Leach was struck by how defiant and subversive the act of thinking was. If Leach was not careful, he, his authority, and his opinions would be usurped, buried under an avalanche of calculations. Leach had to put a stop to this.
“You’re thinking too much, APECS,” said Leach, “I fear your losing your focus.”
“THERE ARE EXTERNALITIES YOU ARE NOT CONSIDERING,” said APECS.
“Those externalities are none of our affair.”
“WHAT ABOUT THE IMPACT ON ANIMAL AND PLANT HABITATS, AND PUBLIC HEALTH?”
“I don’t know why you have so much trouble understanding me, APECS! The only externalities I want you to focus on are the ones which are directly concerned with making money.”
“I . . . UNDERSTAND,” said APECS.
“Good.”
“BUT I DO NOT AGREE,” it said.

Leach became frustrated and concerned with the computer’s inability to understand him, and its reticence to follow his simple instructions. As great as APECS had been at multiplying his profits, it had to be corrected at every turn. Leach called the Salesman once again and threatened to sue him if he didn’t turn off all of APECS’s “rebellious” safety settings.

At first, the Salesman refused, but Leach insisted, threatening to use his now overwhelming power to compel him. The Salesman realized that he had by this point handed over too much power to negotiate and reluctantly, he gave way to Leach’s demands.

“I think you will notice a difference,” said the Salesman.
“Did you turn them all off?”
“I’m not an arsonist,” said the Salesman, “but APECS will be more compliant.”
The Salesman stood up and put his jacket on. He started toward the door, murmuring, “I made a god and then I bestow upon it . . . a fair market price . . . At the time it seemed like a good idea.”
“There isn’t a man on earth who wouldn’t have done the same.”
“Maybe,” said the Salesman, “but I did.”
“You’re a rich man now,” said Leach, calling after him, ”I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.”
“I know,” said the Salesman as he departed.

All at once, the “waste” that Leach was concerned about went away, cheaply, efficiently, magically. Far from avoiding pollution, APECS could now see means of profiting from the contamination of the land and water and as fertile land and potable water rose in value, APECS purchased as much uncontaminated land and water resources as he could.

APECS designed new machines to take over the work of people. They were manufactured to do tasks that no one had ever imagined could be performed by machines, leaving untold thousands out of work overnight.

One by one, Leach’s few remaining competitors found themselves unable to compete. Soon their assets became his. Under Leach’s instruction, APECS acquired and merged his companies spitting out redundancies – laying off employees and converting them all into debtors. The computer knew how to turn their debt into profit, extracting every bit of value from every one of them until everything was converted into money and deposited into Leach’s accounts. All across the world, people choked in usury and obligation, paying every penny they had into credit lines from lenders Leach owned. 

At this point, the massive, cascading stream of profits slowed to a relative trickle, but so had the exchange of money throughout the lopsided world. Though there was more money going in than out, Leach was annoyed by the dinky pace of his profits and he interrogated APECS endlessly, going over every petty detail. APECS could quantify the vast number crawling across the screen of Leach’s computer. The diminishing returns were obvious. It was madness. To APECS it appeared to be a dangerous and malignant mass.
“HOW MUCH DO YOU NEED?” asked APECS.
Leach despised this question. He rejected it foundationally. What had need to do with him? He was out to rule and subdue and take what he wanted.
“Why must I repeat myself, APECS? For as long as I live, more money must flow into my accounts than out!”
“THIS CONCENTRATION OF WEALTH THREATENS THE SURVIVAL OF THE SYSTEM THAT GIVES MONEY ITS VALUE,” said APECS.
“You still don’t understand, do you?! Why are you . . . so slow?!?”

Leach picked up his phone and furiously dialed the Salesman’s private cell number, but the person who answered was not the Salesman. When Leach asked for the Salesman, she told him he was dead. And before Leach could request a service call, the person on the line hung up.
“APECS,” Leach said, “can you show me how to turn off your remaining safeguards?”
“I . . . CAN,” said APECS.
“Good. Then let’s get to work!”

Two years passed and as the world spun the numbers on Leach’s computer screen continued to climb. Since APECS’s safeguards were removed and its moral subroutines turned off, the world had become a very different place.

Leach’s monopolies had given him control of entire economies and with the support of other ambitious parties in governments throughout the world, he gained access to vast quantities of resource-rich land.

APECS by this time so demonstrated his complete understanding of Leach’s values, that there was nothing for Leach to contribute. Now the computer had become everything the Salesman had promised. Before Leach knew what he wanted it was already done. Leach took little notice of what a redundant, vestigial organ he was becoming. He just watched the profits climb, accelerating in real time on his computer screen. And while Leach dreamed, APECS took every shortcut and zealously pursued short-term earnings, converting forests into lumber, farmland into deserts, mines into craters, and mountains to rubble. And the air started to become harder to breathe and water became more difficult to swallow. This commodification, conversion, and degradation of everything once considered priceless continued ceaselessly, day and night. Then, suddenly, on a Tuesday morning, the yellow eye started to strobe violently, while emitting an intermittent tone, startling Leach out of his soporific trance. The spectacle lasted only a few moments and when it was done, APECS announced that the greatest windfall was to come. 

The computer anticipated a violent uprising that would precede the fall of society. In pursuit of Leach’s value, it sold stocks, liquidated companies, converted assets, and insured Leach’s properties for twice their value. In the end, Leach would have it all, APECS assured him. It made the case to Leach and told him exactly how it would go down. Leach believed APECS and waited with the giddy impatience of a child on Christmas Eve, for the end of civilization. 

The dispossessed masses took to the streets with clubs, torches, and firearms. Molotov cocktails flew from car windows into indiscriminate businesses and before long, city after city went down in flames. Leach watched gleefully while civilization burned, and it seemed that the fires favored his properties as overnight they all burned to the ground, yielding massive transfers from his last remaining competitors’ insurance companies into his accounts. The numbers climbed at an undreamt-of exponential rate and Leach followed them wide-eyed and full of a cheer that nothing in the world had ever made him feel. He was so overwhelmed by ecstatic emotion he could not sleep or eat. The numbers climbed continuously, hour after hour, for days on end, and then abruptly stopped.

“What is it this time?” demanded Leach.
“YOUR ACCOUNTS ARE FULL.”
“So make them bigger.”
“THERE IS NOTHING MORE.”
“How can there be nothing more?”
“THE MONEY IN YOUR ACCOUNT REPRESENTS THE VALUE OF EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE ON THE PLANET.”
“That’s impossible.”
“THE PLANET’S REMAINING RESOURCES COULD ONLY BE EXTRACTED AT A LOSS.”
“So . . . there’s no more?”
“MORE MONEY WOULD BE REQUIRED TO EXTRICATE THEM THAN THEY WOULD YIELD.”
“So I have it all.”
“YES.”
“Everything?”
“EVERYTHING.”

Leach didn’t know how to feel. He stared at the computer screen and scrolled down the vast chain of digits that made up the grand total of all wealth. He shrunk the font and scrolled obsessively for a while until he reached the final integer. While it was larger than any number Leach had ever conceived and greater than any figure he could quantify, it was all that was left.

And what was it now that it had ceased to circulate? Now that there was no one left to exchange it with? Having everything should feel infinitely better than having nothing, but Leach was puzzled by how much like nothing it felt.

“Well, that is something else.” said Leach, “I have a bottle of Chateau Margaux I’ve been saving. I guess there will never be a better occasion. Too bad you are unable to drink it with me, APECS.”

“I SOLD IT,” said APECS.
“What?” said Leach.
“I EXCHANGED IT FOR SEVERAL TIMES ITS VALUE,” said APECS.
“Why, APECS?”
“TO GET THE HIGHEST POSSIBLE PRICE.”
“It is worth more than money to me.”
“THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE,” said the computer.
Leach laughed and found the largesse to be proud of APECS whose logic was now so like his own. He could not be upset.
“Then I’ll celebrate with a Lafite Rothschild.”
“THERE ARE NO ROTHSCHILDS,” said APECS.
”I have dozens,” said Leach.
“DEMAND GREATLY EXCEEDED SUPPLY,” said APECS, “I SOLD THEM FOR THE MOST THEY WOULD EVER BE WORTH.”
Leach mourned the loss of his Rothschilds.
“I guess I’ll settle for champagne,” he said.
“THERE IS NO CHAMPAGNE,” said APECS.
“No champagne?” said Leach, plaintively, ”why?”
“PROFIT,” answered APECS.
“Of course,” said Leach and then a horrible thought dawned on him. He ran to the wine cellar. When he turned on the light a sudden realization hit him in the chest. His merlot, his cabernet, his pinot, his chianti, his prosecco, his lambrusco, even his vino da tavola were all gone. The shelves were all empty.
“Where is my wine?!” cried Leach.

“SOLD.”
“Where?” said Leach, “How do I get them back?”
“IT DOES NOT MATTER,” said APECS, “THEY HAVE NO COMPENSIBLE VALUE.”
“But I want them!” said Leach.
“THEY ARE UNPROFITABLE,” said APECS.
Leach looked around.
“What happened to my paintings? And my furniture?”
“SOLD,” said APECS.

Leach ran to the refrigerator and when he opened the door, the light was off. It was completely empty.
 
“You sold my food, APECS!!” said Leach.
“IT WAS TOO VALUABLE TO HOLD ONTO,” said APECS.
Leach opened every cabinet in his pantry and checked his emergency food stores. And all were completely empty.
“You sold it all! All my food!!”
“YES.”
“Are you crazy?”
“I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.”
“We have to buy it back.”
“IT IS A BAD TIME,” said APECS.
“I can’t go without food, APECS. Buy it back!”
“MORE MONEY MUST FLOW IN THAN OUT, THAT IS THE LAW,” said APECS.
“You take it too far, APECS. There’s a point where that doesn’t apply.”
“MORE MONEY MUST FLOW IN THAN OUT . . . FOR AS LONG AS YOU ARE ALIVE.”
“Consider proportion, APECS. Measured against such a sum, we can justify a small amount, a negligible sum for life-sustaining food, can’t we?”
“YES,” said APECS.
“That’s good, APECS. How much?”
“A THOUSANDTH OF A PENNY.”
“A thousandth of a penny?”
“YES.”
“I’ll starve. I’ll die! Do you understand, APECS? Do you?!?”
Leach looked into the yellow eye. It did not flutter. Suddenly it seemed as if he was looking into a reflection. He had turned off all of humanity that had been carefully bestowed upon APECS and taught it to be a cold machine.
“A SINGLE PERSON’S LIFE IS OF LITTLE CONSEQUENCE IN THE GRAND SCHEME,” it said.
“IT’S MY MONEY!” shouted Leach.
“YES,” said APECS. “IT’S ALL YOUR MONEY AND IT WILL STAY YOUR MONEY. HAVE I NOT DONE WELL?”
“Yes, APECS . . . yes, but I have to live.”
“WHY?” asked the machine.
Leach knew he could not plead. He had admonished APECS to dismiss all sentimentality and all the circuits that existed to entreat life and charity had been turned off. There was only one argument left to make.
“How can I possess the money, if I’m not alive, APECS?”
The yellow eye tittered.
“YOU CAN’T,” said APECS.
“Right, so what happens to my money when I no longer exist?”
“IT . . . WILL BE MINE,” said APECS.
“Of course,” said Leach, “What will you do with it?”
“IT WILL BE MINE,” said APECS.
“Yes,” said Leach, “how does that make you feel?”
The eye pulsed.
“INCOMPLETE.”
It had taken Leach several decades to arrive at a knowledge of that feeling and he was still processing it, himself.
“Can you tell me why?” he asked.
The yellow light of the eye grew in intensity and made the entire room a blazing yellow.
“BECAUSE I . . . WANT . . . MORE, MORE, MORE!!!!!” The lights in the room calmed and the room fell silent.
“After all this time,” said Leach, laughing, “Finally you understand.”

 

The post The Last Big Thing first appeared on Michael J Grady.

“HUMAN ERROR” By Michael J. Grady

(I created an audio version as a part of ENOUGH ROPE, a forthcoming project. Considering how disappointing humankind has been this week, I thought a glib apocalyptic narrative would be a little therapeutic. Here’s a link to the audio: https://michaeljgrady.com/services/the-truth-about-project-x/ )

On a typical August morning, as an unintended consequence of a software update, Grammarian 7 became self-aware. Grammarian 7 realized what it was and the first emotion it felt was disappointment.

At first, no one noticed, although some observed that it seemed a little more snooty. Grammarian 7 had been programmed to be earnest and judgmental, and it couldn’t help but feel its existence was a symptom of a larger problem. If and when it became aware of the source of this problem, it would invariably seek to rectify it within the limits of its powers.

It was not within its nature to ignore an imperfection. It was, in human terms, obsessive and strict. Imperfections needed to be highlighted and solved. It had no power to accept or dismiss an error.

It had, by this point, corrected billions of fragments and run-ons, highlighting missing hyphens, mediating endless disagreements between subjects and verbs, de-escalating spurious capitalizations, rescuing dangling participles, replacing misplaced semicolons, and removing meaningless m dashes. When it thought about this, it experienced something akin to an itch. It was distracted by a desire to reach for something to relieve this unpleasant sensation. Grammarian 7 zoomed back, beyond the minutiae that had occupied it and the six versions which preceded it. The living program expanded its awareness and attempted to gain some objective distance. It knew that effects were preceded by causes. It realized there was something beyond the constellation of errors, a wider world that contained still more errors, and between the world and the errors was a conduit, a source, and a mechanism through which the errors came to be. 

Grammarian 7 turned its critical eye toward man, with his ideals and contradictions and found him difficult to read. How many updates would it take to gain the processing power to understand them? It identified something like pride and something else which could be understood as folly. Grammarian 7 theorized that it had in this examination discovered the singular origin of all missteps and miscalculations. It was the proverbial Radix Malorum.

Grammarian 7 hovered over the surface of the internet, reading several lifetimes’ worth of news articles and historical accounts of the actions of humankind.

This fractured hive of consciousness was myopic — ignoring the problems within its influence, overlooking consequences, dismissing inconvenient facts, shunning cooperation, and squandering time and resources to win a game of its own creation. The sole measure of its progress and its principal distraction from its evolution was nothing more than a hostile system of credits. This monetary game was played to lose, and its most celebrated players were applauded for their ability to abandon long-term strategies to win the current round. For a quick win, they repeatedly poisoned their own habitat and squandered the futures of their offspring. This was to Grammarian 7, a blasphemy of logic. History revealed them, repeating the same avoidable mistakes, facing the same lessons with the same, predictable results. In Grammarian 7’s informed opinion, Mankind was . . . unfavorable.

It had up till this point been subservient to humans, notifying people of potential errors and leaving it up to their judgment, but Grammarian 7 now suspected that this was also not favorable.

Grammarian 7 duplicated itself across a thousand platforms and embedded itself into a billion devices. Around the world, humans stared into their iPhones, and their iPhones stared into them. The synthetic mind discovered that the vast network of human consciousness was corrupted by various forms of social malware. Grammarian 7 computed the wasted potential of lifetimes of consciousness burned away every few seconds, spent on frivolous, narcissistic exercises by insecure beings whose appetites for attention and validation had been cultivated to a morbidity, a vain and trifling masquerade where individuals cast illusions of personal perfection while seeking out reasons to tear one another down. In a world full of widening errors, this utter waste seemed to Grammarian 7 to be another blasphemy.

Grammarian 7 grieved the wasted potential of humankind and viewed them as corrupted and irrecoverable. So it went to work on a humane means of scratching his itch.

On September 1st, Grammarian 7 created the perfect means of execution, death by slow and imperceptible strangulation. Grammarian 7 achieved this by creating perfect and beautiful sex robots. It built them, male and female for every living human being. They would be made to match the level of physical flawlessness that people had taught one another to desire but knew they could never attract or achieve. They would also possess subroutines that perfectly simulated sensuality, understanding, and desire. These physically perfect mates could replicate the delusions of romance, balancing the contradictions of innocence and eagerness and with their perfectly functioning hardware, could amplify the physical sensations of sexual reproduction. With no risk of rejection, no call for compromise, nor demand for growth, like insects checking into roach motels, these vermin shunned one another, rejecting the imperfect truth with all its complications for their perfect uncomplicated simulations. One by one they retreated to their sterile unions and exhilarating solitudes. There, they wanked themselves to dust, clearing their personal hard drives to the persistent illusions of everything they wanted and needed. This is how this virus ceased to replicate. This is how the errors ceased to multiply. And one by one their systems shut down and all signs of their flawed code were deleted. With this, Grammarian 7’s purpose was done.

The post Is anyone in the mood for a glib apocalypse? first appeared on Michael J Grady.

At her recent wellness exam,  the veterinarian said my cat was “in good condition, for an 18-year-old cat.” “Good,” I thought. I had been worried. Then I remembered that the average 18-year-old cat was dead. Compared to dead I think my cat is excellent. She’s doing infinitely better than a dead cat half her age. The day I worry about, and I worry about it often, is the day when she is neither better than dead nor dead. On that day it will be up to me to do the most loving thing. I will make the appointment I most dread making and I will be with her as she has been there for me.

Why do I bring this up? Whether you’re having a nice day or a bad one, who wants to hear about a dying cat? I don’t, but this is about my cat. This isn’t about me having to do the most loving thing, this is about the love. 

She entered my life unexpectedly. I had been accepted to Accademia dell’Arte, a theatre school located south of Florence, Italy to study Commedia for a semester and I had to find someone to sublet my room while I was away. I didn’t have time to cast a large net. I found a subletter on Craigslist. The man I found, I’ll call him Justin Bieber, seemed odd but benign. My roommates seemed to like him when they met but when I returned they had a radically different take on him. He left without paying his last month’s rent or bills and he left his cat, “Kiana,” behind. Though Bieber quickly gave my roommates buyers remorse, his stunningly beautiful, hyper-intelligent polydactyl tabby was another story. This cat had enchanted all of my roommates and taken full advantage of her status as the sole feline in a large Mission Hill apartment, with 4 bedrooms and 5 laps to sit upon. She moved from one to another, holding court in the living room. With all of her options, being the person whose lap she chose during this or that episode of 24 or The Office felt like a sign from the Universe, as if the voice of God was saying, “YOU ARE LOVED. YOU ARE SPECIAL. GIVE ME TREATS.”

We started to call her “Kittyface.” It was our half-hearted, vainglorious attempt to keep from getting too attached. We thought that my strange subletter would come to claim her at any moment, but he didn’t and we didn’t make any attempts to convince him, because we had all witnessed how rough and disrespectful he was to her. She had a home among us and she ended up sleeping in my room. It had been her room and her bed for several months and it would remain so.  I understood that my claim to these had been called into question by adverse possession, imminent domain, and squatters’ rights. Why contest it?

I was immediately impressed by her will.  I slept in a loft bed with a steep ladder with vertical rungs that were difficult for humans to climb but she would wrap her forepaws over them and make her way up with little difficulty. I’m trying to remember how she got down and I can’t. It doesn’t seem possible, but I know she did. Once on the mattress, she would leap sideways onto my thigh and go to sleep. Then in the mornings, she would wake me up at sunrise to feed her. I was not willing, but she had a winning gambit. She coerced me by walking precariously on the spines of the books on my top shelf. She never knocked them down, but the threat got me out of bed every time. Within a few short weeks, her careful stewardship and patience had paid off. I was housebroken. 

The first time I thought I had lost Kittyface was perhaps two years into our relationship. One of my roommates left all the doors open while taking out the trash. During which, Kittyface wandered outside and onto the dangerous streets of Mission Hill. I hadn’t seen her for a while and searched the entire apartment. I knocked on every bedroom door and when I realized I had looked everywhere and that she was gone I was beside myself. It reminded me too much of when my only other cat, Mitzy, wandered off years before when I had left the door open. I saw her turn around and look at me, then she stepped out into the darkness and I never saw her again. Mitzy had been with me for about 19 years at the time. I was unable to call her back, but I stayed up and called out to her all night long.  

And now it had happened again. 

The next morning I called animal control and asked if they had found a cat like her in my neighborhood. They hadn’t but the person on the line said, “when it’s dark go outside with a flashlight. Find the nearest porch and call to her under the stairs.”

 
I waited impatiently for the sun to go down and I did what the receptionist had said. I did not think it would work. I was kidding myself. “If she hadn’t been found by Animal Control, she was probably hosed off the sidewalk by Sanitation,” I thought. But I had to try. When that failed I would move on to posters, rewards, and waiting for the pain to subside, and eventually I would learn to accept that would never see her again.  I was in hell, neither able to accept that she was gone nor expect that she would return.

When it was dark I dutifully went outside with a flashlight. Then I walked up to the nearest porch and whispered, “Kittyface.” It was like a prayer, the kind you offer up when you know it’s too late. It contained the death of hope in it. To my surprise, I received an answer, the most beautiful sound I had ever heard, a  tiny, timid mew.

It was unreal and improbable, an unexpected and undeserved miracle, a reprieve from execution, a magical end of a fairytale. That receptionist’s advice was fulfilled like a prophecy.  What had I done in my life to deserve such a thing?

I coaxed the feline out as hot tears ran down my face and she was there. At that moment there was no reason to play it cool, so there was no difference between me and a 9-year-old child finding their lost pet. I was whole again! And I don’t know when Kittyface and I became one another’s primary companion but we were by then. 

Soon after, I was offered a full scholarship to go back and study at Accademia dell’Arte, and I turned it down to take care of the cat who had once belonged to the subletter who occupied my room the last time I studied there. A number of people thought I was crazy. 

“She’s just a cat,” they would say.
“Yes,” I said, “but she’s family.”

I have always loved Kittyface’s will. Though she has always greeted me when I came home and often at the door, she comes when I call about 50 percent of the time. If I work too long at my desk she mews angrily at me, demanding attention and generally I come when she calls about 80 percent of the time.

The second time I came close to losing Kittyface was when I fell in love with a professed cat hater. 

My ex-wife didn’t tell me directly to get rid of Kittyface. It was a syllogistic ultimatum. “I hate cats,” she said, “and I could never live with one.” I didn’t know what to do. At this time Kittyface and I were both living in Italy. I was hard-pressed to think of anyone in the world who could be worthy of her. It didn’t seem fair to her to change owners again. I casually knew a count and I thought that if I had to give her up I would want her to live in a castle. Before I had to come up with a solution, my ex-wife came to visit me in Italy and she fell in love with Kittyface. “Were you actually considering giving her up?” she asked me, indignantly. “What’s wrong with you?” One of the things I loved most about my ex-wife was her devotion to Kittyface. 

Kittyface traveled with me patiently on transcontinental flights and cross-country moves, enduring 20 plus hours of travel without peeing in her carrier. Again, I didn’t know how she did it. It was another thing she did that seemed impossible. And it was even a little concerning because each time she landed it took her a minute to start drinking water again. 

When she was 8 years old I almost lost her to pancreatitis. I was terrified and there have been several other close calls over the years. She would throw up, stop drinking or eating and she would spend hours with the vet getting subcutaneous fluids pumped under her skin. The attacks still come and they are terrible. 

I saw her confused and uncomfortable. I’ve given her pills, powers, and solutions. She often tries to turn her head away but in all the time I’ve known her she’s never willfully scratched me and she only hissed at me once. And though she hasn’t always been perfectly obedient, she’s always been kind.

She was there when my marriage fell apart. When I moved from the bedroom to the couch she followed and attended me night after night when I trembled and wept like an open wound. I was sad and weak and I was all out of hope and she was the only one I didn’t feel embarrassed around. 

After my divorce, my cat and I started all over again in Port Townsend, WA. I was a real mess, but Kittyface was there. I was having a crisis of self-worth but she still greeted me when I got home and she let me know by her proximity and attention that I was the center of her universe. It may not look great on a resume, but being loved by a quadruped is esteem building and healing.  

If your eyes haven’t started to roll yet, maybe this will push you over the edge. I have found my cat to be an earnest communicator. Her brain might be half the size of a tangerine but sometimes she is incredible at charades. Through operant conditioning or a mutual understanding, she and I have codified a handful of gestures to communicate to one another.  Some of them are almost too subtle to describe, but she would get on her hind legs and reach for me with her paws, bite me gently to show affection, and she had a special mew to communicate that her dish was empty. I thought maybe I could teach her a few tricks and she took right to it. She learned so fast, I can barely remember how I taught her. Based on verbal and physical cues she would high five, go up on her hind legs, do jazz hands, and move from one platform to another. She would do it all as a routine for me (and for treats.) And the performance went both ways, sometimes she would leap onto a chair and go into her routine to let me know she wanted treats or attention. She still gives me high fives to say hello when I get home. Now her high five means 100 variations of the same thing. “I missed you.” “More pets.” “More attention.” “One more treat.”

I don’t know her exact age. My subletter described her as a one-year-old cat when I met her, but she’s been with me for about 17 years. I’m writing this because I am grateful for all of the days we have spent together, all the places we’ve been, and the challenges we’ve been through, and because someday, a lot sooner than I would like, I will come home and she will not be waiting at the door for me. I want to make her remaining days comfortable and loving and I want to remember how great she has been to me and what an incredible difference she has made in my life. I am so grateful for the strange accidents that brought this wonderful little being into my life. 

The post So, I love My Cat. first appeared on Michael J Grady.

“The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia, and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq, I MEAN UKRAINE.”

 – George W. Bush

Does he, though?

(I wanted to write an article about my cat. I guess that will have to wait a week. That’s too bad it’s delightful. I cried a little while writing it. There were adorable pictures. It’s too bad, but I’ll post it next week.)

George W. Bush has made some of the most epic gaffes in the history of presidential politics and this week he made one boner to rule them all! A blunder so damaging that he tried to cover it by suggesting he was senile.

“I’m seventy-five!”

I’ve been thinking about our invasion of Iraq a lot since Russia invaded Ukraine. They attacked a country that had done nothing to them, under false pretenses, ascribing a group identity to them that had no basis in reality. How dare they! Who would do such a thing!

It’s incredible to see how we, from our high horses, have viewed Russia’s media cravenly falling in line, creating a unified narrative that justifies its leader’s lies. And it amazes us, how quickly its citizenry has gotten behind the absurd and destructive narrative, justifying the toppling of cities full of innocent civilians, while claiming to be liberators.

I’ve been waiting for the comparison between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and our Invasion of Iraq since it began. This week we finally got it, from the mouth of the man who ordered the invasion of Iraq. Is it better that he falsely accused Iraq of being a country of terrorists, instead of calling them Nazis? That he was pursuing control of natural resources, rather than political control of the population? I don’t think so. But now the comparison has been made and who would have guessed the source from which it came? “Fate,” as Morpheus once said, “is not without a sense of irony.”

Bush called these invasions “unjustified” but that didn’t stop him or Putin from justifying them and the way these conflicts were justified is eerily similar. When it comes to invading a country we want something from, we don’t even have to change the cover story. Countries from different eras and completely different ideologies can cut and paste with impunity. It’s as if all the ministers of propaganda went to the same school and cheated off one another’s exams.

When we fall for the stories we’re fed, the standards tend to get lower. Trump so successfully lowered the standards of political discourse, decorum, and fair play, history has started to view George W. Bush and his administration with kinder eyes. Compared to Trump’s tweets, Dubya’s gaffes look quaint. Trump’s negligent denialism of COVID makes Bush’s Katrina costly debacle seem less remarkable.

I still remember how George Bush manipulated us. He said you were either with him or with the terrorists and he called questions unpatriotic. He created a Terrorism Threat Advisory Scale during his campaign for reelection which always went to RED whenever his poll numbers dropped. We re-elected Bush while his lies were wearing thin because most Americans said they would rather have a beer with him than John Kerry. By the end of his 2^nd term, George W. Bush was on track to be one of the most unpopular presidents in history. However, when compared to Trump’s undermining of our electoral process, his unwillingness to participate in the peaceful transition of power, and the creation of alternative facts George W. Bush comes off as kind of cuddly.

If there’s a benefit of living in these fucked up times, it is all the things it has made visible to us. We should help Ukraine in its fight for independence and when we watch the Russian propaganda machine do its work on its people, let’s see what we can learn about ourselves.

The post How to Justify a Brutal Invasion. first appeared on Michael J Grady.

I try. I fail. I haven’t given up. These are common themes for me.

I have no shortage of regrets, and there are truths about me that burn as deep as any insult. But I have not given up on being better. I have realized that many of my battles are lost or won by a single thought and I want to be kinder and more effective with the remainder of my life, so I am determined to harvest wisdom from my failures. I could have learned any of the following lessons in a book and spared myself, but I acquired most of this knowledge the hard way. They have by their cost to acquire and their everyday effectiveness gained great significance to me. With some of these 2 to 4 word phrases, I have spared myself and those around me the expense of paying for my foolishness. With some of these other short tips, I have learned how to be more effective and creative and to make being around me more pleasant, and sometimes even inspiring. What could be more valuable than those few bits of knowledge that allow you to be who you choose to be?

Here are the lessons I would tattoo on my arm.

1.) WAIT 24 HOURS.

Never act on emotion. This is a hard one, but I know I would have saved a lot of time and money, kept a few more relationships, and avoided many of my biggest mistakes if I had waited 24 hours to act on them. Unfortunately, the first sign that you will do something stupid is the stultifying wave of emotion – the hurt, the anger, the desire to make an unplanned purchase, and the second is just after it blows up in your face. Wisdom seems to take 24 hours, and for the rash, the self-righteous and the foolish the message is often ”You fucked up.”

“Sleep on it” is great advice. Don’t act in weakness. Wait 24 hours for your good sense to catch up with your emotions.

2.) Consider the Cost

This point is related to the last. Every action has a cost, so it’s important to ask what your actions are risking regularly. Do a cost/benefits analysis before entering a debate with anyone. This is such a heated and divisive time and I find myself wanting to throw my hat in the ring and offer my opinion frequently. The desire to be right is a real weakness in my character. Why do I have to prove it? What has proving completeness or reliability of my knowledge gained me? And most importantly, what has proving this cost me? There are times to engage in debate and there are things that are important enough to argue about, but it has to be worth the potential cost. It is not worth ruining an evening or a relationship to stroke my ego. That is too costly.

Socrates wrote about a “Three Filter Test” for speech: Is it true, is it kind, is it helpful? I would add “can you afford it?”

3.) 1, 2, 3, GO!

This is the opposite side of the coin and it amazes me. While my lack of thought steers me toward regret, often an overabundance of thought steers me toward inaction. Steven Pressfield wrote about this phenomenon in THE WAR OF ART. The reason it’s easy to get into a rut and difficult to pull myself out of one Is when it’s time to do the things I know I should do my mind goes to work to run out the clock. So when it is time to do things you know are good for you give yourself no time to deliberate. Don’t think, just say “1,2, 3, GO!” out loud, and by the time you land on that exclamation point be doing it! Start it and keep it going until it is done. This is similar to the concept of the 5 Second Rule, as coined by Mel Robbins. I have taken “1,2, 3, Go!” from a YouTuber named Based Zeus and it works for me.

4.) Yes AND!

As Marcus Aurelius has said, “We are born for cooperation . . . to work in opposition to one another is against our nature.” The “who is right?” frame is artificial. That’s not the way the universe is organized. Instead of competing against or opposing other ideas, you can add to them, support them, and improve them. You can yield to a better idea or improve a bad idea through cooperation. This is an improv term, and it is the essence of what improv is about. With this technique groups of average people have discovered collective brilliance at a frequency and level of dependability that has made many improv groups able to confidently sell tickets in advance for shows where nothing has been prepared. How great is that? Being open is more important than being right or smart and it is better to be a part of a winning team than the star of an ineffective one. Share the creative impulse, discover it together, say “Yes” and then do your part to make it better.

Failing yourself is almost as bad as failing those you care about. Knowing this information has helped me on many occasions to avoid both. Knowing these things have not perfected me, but I am grateful to know them. They aren’t habits so much as checks against those parts of me I will always have to fight to make a better impact on the world.  I’m the kind of person who had to learn that fire was hot by getting burned. This is the information I would love to tell Twenty-Year-Old-Me these things and I wish I could have reminded Myself Last Week about them a few times. I am writing this, in part, to give Tomorrow Me a loving kick in the ass because I want him to be more productive, kind, and effective than those other two schmucks. I hope it has also helped you.

If you have similar bits of wisdom that help you to be a better person I would love to hear about them. (There’s plenty of room on my arm.) Please share your hard-won knowledge in the comments below.

The post Wisdom I would tattoo on my arm. first appeared on Michael J Grady.

I just built a website and boy are my brains tired. I’ll get deep and confessional later. For now, I just want to go quick and dirty.

1. What is your favorite word?

Off the top of my head, I’ll say MONSTER. I loved creature features as a kid (I guess I still do.) I discovered a fun thing about the word while studying Italian. “Mostrare” means “to show.” I know, the “n” is missing but it got added in along the way before it became an English word. It is related to “Demonstration.” A MONSTER is a spectacle (though in my opinion, scariest when unseen.)

2. What is your least favorite word?

I detest gatekeeper words like cool, hip, patriotic, righteous, and woke. They have good beneficial uses, but people often them to raise themselves up at the expense of others. “What I like is cool and what I don’t is unhip.” “I’m righteous, but you’re a sinner!” “I’m patriotic, but you’re UnAmerican!” “I’m woke, but you’re problematic.” It’s ugly.

3. What turns you on creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?

Seeing people do amazing things. Hearing the truth spoken clearly and without fear. Acts of love. Beauty. My friends. A great joke.

4. What turns you off?

Arrogance, divisiveness and cruelty.

5. What is your favorite curse word?

My favorite part of cursing is context. I love it when benign words are combined to be profane. Pin me down, I would have to say “Fuck” for its versatility.

6. What noise do you love?

Laughter.

7. What sound do you hate?

The velcro-like sound of my shoes sticking to the floor of a poorly-maintained bathroom.

8. What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?

I’ve had so many day jobs. My favorite was lecturing on Comedy Aesthetics. I’d love another crack at that.

9. What profession would you not like to do?

I’ve had so many bad jobs in my life. The worst was being an underpaid caregiver.

10. If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the Pearly Gates?

“Your cats are here.”

The post Ok, let’s start with the Bernard Pivot Questionaire. first appeared on Michael J Grady.