The Book Of The Couch Surfer

I’m starting to see AI everywhere now. Even in places where I don’t expect to see it. Most especially in places where I don’t expect to see it. And when I see it and it’s right in front of me it can be quite bewitching. Does the allure of illusion ever stop? Does the border between the real and the movie reel ever truly get sorted out? Getting old confers special privileges. One of them is keener perception. Perceptions we swallow in tugs are novels waiting to happen. Perceptions we share at night are enchanting. Perceptions we chop into hyphens compound our bewilderment. Perceptions hatched out of vertigo write themselves into personalities. Some of which appear on TV. Some of which grow uncannily intuitive. Some of which rock back and forth in boats. Some of which marry aging rock stars in Helsinki. Some of which plaster walls, hear the music of the spheres, pogo slow and easy on the Tahiti tarmac, and stuff cantos in paper jars. Now tell me: is this an X-ray of Wyoming? or AI? Is I an AI? Can AI jump like a monkey into real life and wrestle its way to meaning and fulfillment like the rest of us have been doing? Until we found AI. And let AI do it for us.

Shared reality is collapsing. And yet here I am, attempting to share my reality. Because I’m an arrogant bastard. Language trembles with its spiders. Language loves making webs. Connecting things. Dots, ideas, theories, symmetries, asymmetries, scoundrels, scrotums, and calliopes. The universe is held together by dark matter, driven by dark energy, bonbons and duende. Prepositions are critical. It’s good to know up from down, but when there is no up or down, and the world starts looking arbitrary and cluttered with e-bikes, I recommend Navajo. It has a unique animacy hierarchy that classifies nouns, making it descriptive, polysynthetic, and churning with glottalized consonants. English is polyglot. Which is good. A good thing. It’s not always easy to keep the light on. Especially in one’s head, where the wiring is far more complicated. It’s why we have art. And a basic understanding of lucidity, which is reflected in our conception of heaven. And hell. And everything between.

It’s a hell of a thing to connect with a place. Like I once did in Minneapolis. When I was ten and knee-deep in snow, 15℉ and waiting for the bus on a Saturday morning, take me downtown to the YMCA, swimming, woodworking, and a full-length movie. I left the Y before they set the projector up and went to see A Farewell To Arms instead, at the Orpheum, and went home angry that Catherine Barkley dies at the end, hemorrhaging after a painful delivery, and Frederic Henry is left alone, walking back to his hotel in the rain, dumbfounded, devastated, and got in big trouble for being so late. It was my first taste of adult life and the tragedy and joy of it surprised me. Life became more intense in adulthood, since you were no longer invested in Peter Pan and Tinkerbell’s delusional enchantments. Age 12, life starts to get raw. Lonely as motel curtains. Age 15, life gets curious, hormones flourish, music gets far more interesting, Eric Burdon, House of the Rising Sun, and a job washing dishes in the Tea Garden, a Chinese restaurant, affords me a Zündapp motorcycle. By age 30 I was well-schooled in the art of navigation. I knew exactly what to avoid, what not to avoid, and the high price of wisdom, which cost Odin an eye. And rebellion. Don’t forget rebellion. It’s a blessing in so many ways. And also a burden, because when you find independence, you’ve got to make decisions. What path to take, what career to choose. The burden of guiding and directing your personal mythology is difficult. Because you can’t get up from a cushy theater seat and let the emotions dissipate outside, where there’s just snow and ice and traffic. No Harry Potter wand. No seven-league boots. Just you, and whatever resources you bring to the table. Radical acceptance. Roll of the dice. And the only thing a gambler needs is a suitcase and a trunk. And the only time he's satisfied is when he's on a drunk.

My first experience of Seattle was the waterfront, the smell of old wooden docks and sea salt and rain. A sad place. With large gray overtones. I never did get used to the place. It was always changing. It was funky and weird circa 1959, taverns with nets and fishing balls hanging from the ceiling, sad wet streets, the feeling and aroma of earthworms in rich black dirt, dandelion lawns, rockeries festooned in sword ferns and creeping thyme, city lights reflections glaring hard with the energy of spun turbines at the Masonry Dam on the Cedar River. The joyful red letters of Grandma’s Cookies seen while traveling north on the Aurora Bridge at night. She’s Not There. 1964. Seattle ceased to matter. I was living in the England in my head. Sexy babes in sophisticated circumstances, heady enigmas and haphazard lures. 1979 Seattle turns Microsoft. 2025 Seattle has solved its homeless population. By what means, I don’t know. And it bothers me. Seattle bothers me. Humanity bothers me. WTF is going on, world? “Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things.” Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena. Not much comfort there, Art. But I get it. It’s a dilemma. It’s a question of subtleties. Things wink in and of existence all the time. Pay attention. Sink your fingers into the dirt, and find a world.

What is it saves us from confusion, and its ludicrous consequence: conjecture. The conjecture is clear. And based on excretion. They say there’s an asteroid headed our way. They say the moon landing was fake. But AI is real. That one day a giant plaid Doberman will land in Central Park and offer to further our understanding of Dave’s birthday. Who’s Dave? Be My Baby, which reached number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the U.S. in October 1963, is sample of all relations, and the sum and substance of its moment in supplication. No, I’m not a robot. Or a crash test dummy. I’m the last of a tribe of couch surfers. Marooned in an index at the back of the book. The Book of Couch Surfers. Written by William Pillow. Altogether fed up. And deep asleep.