Christopher Nolan is famous for not having a smartphone or using email.

It’s often framed as an eccentricity, but I think it’s a bit more than that.

I believe it plays a fundamental role is his creative process.

Just not for the reason he thinks it does.

“I would lose those pockets of time that I really value where you’re just thinking, just sort of looking out the window and thinking about what your next film might be”

- Christopher Nolan

Losing time isn’t the main drawback of smartphone use vis-a-vis creativity and freeing up headspace isn’t the main benefit of avoiding it.

Creativity isn’t a quantitative thing; the negative affects on it can’t be measured by something as simple as time gained or lost.

All great works of art are the result of a singular creative genius.

Unfiltered and undistorted.

The second you add more than one set of hands to the pot is the exact moment when a masterpiece becomes a little bit less than.

And the more opinions you add to the mix, the worse it gets.

It devolves and devolves and devolves, until the end result is the plague of the modern era: slop.

The problem with using the internet is that you’re constantly bombarded by other people’s opinions.

The thoughts and ideas of the lowest common denominator assault your eyes and ears and psyche, chipping away at what makes you you until you as a concept and a creative being disappear entirely.

Imagine you have an idea or opinion about something. Maybe it’s a good one, maybe not. It doesn’t matter. The key point is that it came from your mind and your mind alone.

Then you post it somewhere on social media and watch the downvotes, hateful comments, and trolls pour in.

The more original and insightful your idea is, the worse the reaction will be.

You start to doubt yourself. “How can I be right and everyone else be wrong?”

And just like that, another interesting aspect of yourself gets subsumed by the tyranny of the average, never to be pursued again (even in the confines of your own skull).

“OK,” you think. “Maybe I just won’t post anything. I’ll consume content online but keep my thoughts and ideas to myself.”

This is even worse.

Because now any time you research anything, any time you go down one of the rabbit holes that the internet is famous for, you get assaulted by the lowest common denominator without even giving yourself a chance to put up a fight.

No one is strong enough to resist the weight of the lowest common denominator.

No one.

It’s in our nature as human beings to seek acceptance from others.

It takes extreme self-control to avoid seeing what the masses think.

This is a relatively new phenomenon.

And it’s what people are referring to when they make the observation that movies, music, art, and literature was better in past generations, whether they know it or not.

A writer used to write by sitting in front of a typewriter in a room by himself.

Now he writes by sitting in front of a computer. He’s still in a room, but he’s not by himself.

Because all he has to do is open up another tab and he’s in the company of the lowest-quality crowd the world has ever seen.

The written word is no longer the undistilled essence of an individual human soul transferred onto a page. Now when you read something you’re consuming words that have been distorted and neutered to the point where there’s nothing left other than desperation and palpable terror.

You can quite literally FEEL the fear when you read anything written in the past decade or so.

The words are watered-down. Any bold statement or expression of a unique POV is qualified in an attempt to preempt the critics.

Instead of thinking “how can I say what I want to say,” writers now think “how can I say what I want to say without getting any backlash”.

Other People’s Opinions are a black hole that consume a creative work before it even has a chance to form in your mind.

“I have this idea, but I know people on social media will sa-”

Stillborn.

“Maybe I shouldn’t word it like that, people online will misinterpret -”

Stillborn.

“Let me just open up a new tab and see what people on Reddit think about -”

NUCLEAR LEVEL STILLBORN.

How many works of creative genius were killed before they even saw the light of day thanks to the internet?

Even one would be too many.

And therein lies the genius of Christopher Nolan.

He’s never exposed to any of it.

Every movie he makes is imprinted with his DNA.

You can watch a Christopher Nolan movie and know with absolute 100% certainty that it’s a Cristopher Nolan movie, even if you don’t actually know.

All the greats are like this: David Lynch, Martin Scorsese, et. al. You know for an absolute fact that you’re watching one of their movies within five seconds of the opening scene.

You can learn from this if you want to create great works of art of your own. Find a way to limit the amount of Other People’s Opinions that you consume.

Make it so that anything you create is 100% you.

Straight-up not owning a phone or email address like Christopher Nolan might not be feasible, but there are ways to limit your exposure.

Then, maybe (and that’s a BIG maybe), you’ll have a chance of becoming one of the greats.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

If you’ve read my previous essays you know I have a bit of an obsession with Time, and particularly the passing of it.

Hence this first poem.

Skeletons

There is no time
the world looked the same 
to a 36-year-old in 1532
as it does to you

And that person is dead
just like you will be too

Your hopes and dreams
will mean as much to future beings
as the thoughts that once filled the skulls
of rotting skeletons
now mean to you

(aka nothing)

So do what moves you
while you still have time
because one day 
you won't

There is no time
there is no time
there
is

time

People have a way of getting addicted to their miseries. Sometimes the hardest thing you can do is to let yourself be happy (counterintuitive but true).

This poem is about my experience with this phenomenon.

The Other Side of Hell

The worst thing about walking through hell
and coming out the other side
is that
sometimes 
you miss it

I look back now
at the years I spent
inside my house
with blinds pulled shut
and feel a longing

A prison cell
starts to feel more like a cocoon
the longer you stay inside

The world is much simpler
when you shut it out

But then what would be the point?

Some people think that spending money on nice things is always a negative.

But if you get over your kneejerk impulse to cry ‘materialism’, you can see that (sometimes) there’s something deeper and more profound behind your desire to buy.

Shopping for More

The sweep of a second hand
on a watch

The way a suit jacket drapes
across your shoulders

The glide of a fountain pen
across the page

(Which I'm experiencing right now)

Crass materialism?
or profound aesthetic appreciation?

A fine line indeed. 

We live in a post-literate society. Sometimes writing feels pointless. But then I remember the real reason I do it.

Write for yourself, always.

Among the Sleepwalkers

Sometimes
I look around me
and wonder
“what’s the point?”

When brains are rotting
A few words on a screen
is nothing;
mere text in an abyss
that doesn’t notice you exist

Sometimes I get pissed off
at the people on their devices
but then I remember
it has always been like this

The mass of the barely sentient
weighing down on the shoulders
of those who feel too deeply
and think too much

We use our words
to convince not the world
but ourselves
that we exist, and we are not like them

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

“It’s a masterpiece.”

William shrugged his shoulders and mumbled a few words of thanks. The curse of having the artists’ temperament was that he would never be completely satisfied with his own work. There was always a slight (or not-so-slight) gap between what he saw in his mind’s eye and what he was actually capable of bringing into the world. The consequence was that he was never going to be the best at accepting accolades.

“No man, I mean it,” his apprentice, James, said. “He’s going to love it.”

William had to concede that point. All his paintings ended up in the collection of exactly one customer.

Tech titan Jonathan Trimbley was almost a throwback to the Gilded Age or even the Renaissance in terms of his tastes and worldview. While other tech founders were busy building bunkers in New Zealand and tweeting about how [insert new technology that they were personally bringing into the world] was going to bring about the apocalypse, Jonathan spend his money on the arts. He donated to museums, he even founded new ones. Like clockwork, he sent money to art schools around the world to help them stay afloat in a world that was careening ever further towards the blandness of practicality.

But most importantly (at least from William’s point of view), he patronized individual artists. He gave William an annual stipend amounting to over three-hundred thousand dollars. That was in addition to paying the rent on his spacious studio right in the heart of Manhattan. The only thing he asked was that he be given first dibs on any paintings that William completed. He always made an offer, and those offers were generous.

William was living the glamorous life artists everywhere dreamed of, rich in his own right while doing nothing more than making art. All thanks to the patronage of Jonathan Trimbley.

The sound of a truck blaring its horn outside snapped him back to the present moment. He noticed that his apprentice was still talking.

“I’m sorry, can you say that again?” William said.

“I said, ‘I think this is going to be your first seven-figure painting,” James said.

Seven figures. One million dollars, and that was on the low side of the seven-figure spectrum of possibilities. It was hard to imagine. So far, no individual painting had earned him more than a quarter-million. He remembered the first time Jonathan had offered him six figures for a painting. The number had quite literally took the breath out of him, made him aware of the present moment and everything in it in a way that only happens during peak moments in life: a first kiss, a near-death experience, the birth of a child. And that was chump change in the grand scheme of things. A million dollars was a number that was so big it didn’t even seem real.

William shrugged his shoulders again and mumbled another thank you.

Living an artistic life of leisure in his Manhattan studio wasn’t the full extent of William’s duties. Mr. Trimbley not only expected to have first dibs on the paintings, he also required that William personally deliver them to him for inspection.

And where he lived wasn’t close.

The drive from Manhattan to the remote rural estate in Vermont took the better part of five-and-a-half hours. If he didn’t hit any traffic and skirted the lines of legality vis-a-vis speed, he could cut that down to five flat.

When you lived in the city, you easily forgot how the rest of the world lived. You got used to the hustle and bustle, the constant hum of people everywhere all the time. To the people living it it felt like the default human experience, but in reality it was anything but. Most of the world was rural. And not just small towns, either. Those were more common than big cities but still only occupied a small portion of the planet’s inhabitable surface. The majority of the world consisted of...nothing. Mile after mile after mile of it. Endless wilderness and farmland punctuated by the occasional house or gas station. Every time he made this drive, William constantly found himself thinking “who the hell lives out here?”

His phone told him that he only had thirty minutes until he arrived at his destination. He reached for the phone (keeping one eye on the road) and exited out of the Maps app. It wasn’t necessary anymore. He had driven this route enough times to know that this final stretch led him directly to Mr. Trimbley’s estate. No more turns required. All he had to do was follow the winding road until it ended at his driveway.

New England in the autumn was breathtaking. His artistic eye took in the colors of the leaves as he drove on the narrow, winding, gradually ascending two-land road. At this point in the season about half the leaves were on the ground; the rest still up above on their branches, waiting to fall. There was something inherently creative about it. The cool air, the way the leaves audibly rustled with each gust of wind, the sheer emptiness of it; it was all so melancholy. It naturally lent itself to the depths of thinking and feeling that always preceded creative frenzies.

Creating a painting was the closest thing to giving birth that he would ever do. It started in moments like this. He could feel the stirring inside his mind. There were no concrete images. Not yet. That would come. A painting never started as an image in his mind’s eye. Not even in rudimentary form. The moment of conception always started as a feeling. At first vague and undefined, he would struggle to even put it into words. But he knew it when he felt it, and he was feeling it right now.

William hit a layer of fog as he ascended higher on the winding road. That was the sign that he was close. Mr. Trimbley’s estate was at such a high elevation that it was shrouded under a perpetual layer of fog. He shivered at the change in temperature and pressed the button to roll the window up. The sound of the wind rushing by became sharper as the window rose higher, and then abruptly ceased the moment it sealed closed. The only sound now was the dull hum of his tires on the road. He quickly glanced at his phone to turn on a Spotify playlist.

William glanced back up at the road.

“Oh shit.” There was a sharp curve in the road ahead and he was going fast. Way too fast. He slammed on the brakes. The feeling of his tires spinning out followed by the realization that he had zero control over what happened to the enormous metal box that he was sitting inside was one of the worst sensations he’d ever felt in his life. Time slowed down while simultaneously feeling like it was moving too fast for him to do... anything. He was going to crash, and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

The car spun sideways and careened into the treeline. Luckily, it was the passenger side that bore the brunt of the impact. He felt the car crumple, but surprisingly, he wasn’t injured. Rattled? Traumatized? Absolutely. But there was nothing physically wrong with him. He started to laugh. Almost dying was, surprisingly, a feeling that sparked pure unadulterated joy in people. The war against the grim reaper was one you were guaranteed to lose in the long run, which is why winning the occasional battle felt so sweet.

William shook his head and got the last of the laughs out of his system. The naked reality of the situation sunk in. He was hours away from home in a car that was damaged, possibly irreparably, maybe even totally. And all he could do was pray that it would start and that the painting…

“Fucking hell. The painting,” he said, frantically turning around in his seat. He took off his seat belt and opened the door. Stepping outside onto the wet ground felt odd after being cocooned inside his car for so long. Being forced to stand outside of the metal box with wheels on it in any location other than your final destination was an unexpectedly profound moment; the areas that you had previously only thought of as places to be passed through at 65mph suddenly revealing themselves to be just as real and worthy of respect as anywhere else.

He walked around to the back of the car and opened the hatchback trunk. The side of the car was so heavily dented that it looked like it was completely caved-in. Before he even looked down at the painting, he already knew. He had propped it up standing against that side of the trunk when he loaded it in earlier that morning. He forced his eyes downwards at the painting that was no lying flat. There was a massive gash in the middle of it.

It was ruined. He wouldn’t be able to salvage it even if he had the time to make the attempt, which he clearly didn’t. Mr. Trimbley was expecting the painting to be delivered at approximately right now. This was the first true catastrophe of his art career.

Strangely enough, he didn’t feel much of anything. Not anger or sadness. Just...nothing. The realization that there were precisely zero things he could do to fix the horrible situation he was in left him feeling resigned. He definitely wasn’t happy, but it was okay. What had happened had happened. The only thing left to do was to let the inevitable play itself out.

William sat back down in the driver’s seat and pressed the ignition button. The car started. He turned the wheel, surprised to find that it rotated smoothly. He stepped on the gas pedal and drove back onto the road. The damage was merely cosmetic. At least I have something to be grateful for.

For some reason, William felt the need to handle the damaged painting with care. Maybe it was the sentimentalist in him that still viewed works of art (even damaged ones) with reverence. He carefully leaned it against a pillar on the front porch and slowly removed his hands from it to make sure it wouldn’t fall down. He looked at the doorbell, said the words “fuck it” out loud, and pressed it.

Whatever was going to happen was going to happen. Mr. Trimbley would either be pissed or he wouldn’t; there was nothing he could do at this point to change it. Deterministic theory in action.

The sound of the deadbolt turning made him jump. Part of him was hoping that no one would be home. Jonathan Trimbley pulled open the door from the inside. “Dude,” he said, a huge smile on his face. “Long time no see.” He stepped back and off to the side, making room for William to enter. “Don’t be shy, man, come on in. I’m excited to see the new piece.”

William looked at the ground and shrugged. “Yeah, uh, about that,” he said, gesturing at the carefully propped-up painting on the ground with the obvious hole in the middle of it.

Jonathan looked at the painting with a neutral expression. He looked up and leaned off to the side around William to look at the car that was parked in the driveway. “You know, I always said that behind every tragedy is a sick-ass story.” He looked again at the painting and grimaced. He removed his glasses and used the bottom of his shirt to wipe them. “You’re gonna have to start at the beginning of this one.”

“Shit, man,” Jonathan said, leaning back in his seat. He took a sip from his beer bottle and set it down on the table. “I feel like this is all my fault. I mean, if I didn’t insist on you personally delivering your work to me you wouldn’t have even got in the car this morning, let alone crashed it. The roads up here are slick this time of year, I should have thought of that,” he said.

“No,” William said, shaking his head and awkwardly leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “I wasn’t paying attention. It was all me. Trust me, you’ve given me everything. I’m beyond grateful for the opportunities you’ve given me. I mean, I’d literally be nothing if it weren’t for you.”

Jonathan looked at him sideways. “Yeah, that’s probably true.” Then he looked at him deadpan for a beat before laughing.

William fake-laughed in response.

“I’ll make it up to you,” William said, “I swear. I’ll head back down to Manhattan and start the painting over again from scratch. I know the wait is going to be longer than you were expecting, but I can assure you it’ll be worth it.”

“Nah,” Jonathan said, shaking his head. “I couldn’t ask that of you. You’ve got the temperament of an artist. Inspiration is ninety-percent of the magic. A rote copy is never as good as the original.”

He’s right, William thought. He felt like he should say something, but the words simply weren’t there.

Jonathan looked off to the side. “There is a way you can make it up to me,” he said. “I have a project that I’ve been working on, and I’m dying to show it to you. You have no idea how badly I want to show it to you. It’s eating me up inside,” he said.

“Uh, yeah, sure,” William said. “I’d be happy to take a look at it. Is it another commission? A public works project? Something for one of the art schools you’re supporting?” he said.

“Not exactly,” Jonathan said. “I could explain it to you, but it’s better if you see it for yourself. It’s one of those ‘seeing is believing’ kind of deals”.

“How about next time I come up?” William said.

“How about right now?” Jonathan said.

William leaned back and spread his hands out. “Sure, why not,” he said.

“Really?” Jonathan said. He let out a sigh. “Thank god, I was worried you wouldn’t be interested.” He stood up. “Right this way.” He walked over towards a set of double doors. “I have to warn you, this is going to be a bit of a shock to your system. Keep your cool and I’ll explain everything.”

William tightened his lips into a smile. “Sure, no problem Mr. Trimbly.”

Jonathan pushed the doors open without taking his eyes off him.

William stepped across the threshold and took a two steps inside. The sight of the dead girl on the couch stopped him in his tracks.

“Oh my god,” William said. “Oh fuck. Is that, is that -”

“I warned you it’d be a shock to the system,” Jonathan said. “I did say that, didn’t I?”

William recognized the body instantly, but it took a second for the name to come to mind. “Fucking hell, that’s Genevieve.”

“Yeah, she did tell me you two were friends. Went to art school together, right?” Jonathan said.

Genevieve was lying on her back on a couch, with a catheter in her arm and a tube that snaked out to a large, clear container filled with her blood.

Seeing something horrible doesn’t bring about the overly-dramatic reactions you see in Hollywood movies. In real life there are no cameras or audiences to perform for. Instead, people often freeze up. This is not your body shutting down as a reaction to intense fear, as most would assume. Instead it’s because you’re so focused on trying to make sense of the situation that the brainpower required to process it consumes literally all of your energy to the point where you physically can’t move. That’s what William was experiencing right now.

Jonathan crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall with one leg bent.

“Now I know this is a lot to take in,” he said. “But there is a method behind the madness.”

William turned away from the body and quickly jerked his head in Jonathan’s direction. “What?” he said.

“You see, my competitors are so busy focusing on how to replace humans with machines that they’re missing the forest for the trees. They’re so busy feeding their AI models examples of good paintings, thinking that if they get enough training data they can work backwards from the finished product and get the computers to create art of a similar caliber. The problem is,” he said, still leaning against the wall with his head tilted back and looking up at the ceiling while he spoke, “it simply doesn’t work that way. You’ve seen AI art before. It’s soulless. Empty. When you look at it you get the sense that it’s missing something. Well I’m looking at that something right now,” he said, turning his gaze to William, then looking down at Genevieve’s body. “You can’t create art without an artist. It’s a tale as old as time. So you can see why I’m doing this and why I brought you here, can’t you?”

“No,” William said. “I don’t see the point of any of this. You killed her, you sick fucking bastard.”

“Well,” Jonathan said, tilting his head side to side as if weighing the options, “that’s one way of looking at it.”

“What other way is there to look at it?” William said.

“I gave her immortality,” Jonathan said.

William stared at the man who had been his patron for long. The man who had given him everything. And he realized that that man was fucking insane. The warning signs should have been there all along. Who the hell gives away money like that? Most people, especially business-minded ones, wanted to invest and grow their wealth. Not fritter it away on artists.

“Look, I can tell you’re a bit freaked out by this whole thing,” Jonathan said, waving his hand in the direction of Genevieve. “You come up here to this big ass house, thinking that you’re going to deliver a painting. A good one, by the way, despite the damage. I can really see the vision behind it. Anyway, you wanted to deliver a painting and get a paycheck and now you’re here, in this magnificent library, looking at a girl who had the blood drained from her body and listening to the aforementioned rich guy talk about how her death was actually a gift of eternal life. It sounds,” he said, doing the head tilting thing again, “egomaniacal?”

“You could say that,” William said.

“But wait for a second before you start freaking out,” Jonathan said, stepping forward. “Let me show you how it all works.”

William took a step backward.

“Don’t be shy,” Jonathan said, standing in front of a computer next to Genevieve’s dead body. “Come over here and take a look.”

William walked around the couch that held Genevieve’s body. He shook his head, wondering what the hell he was doing. “Okay, show me.”

“You see those electrodes attached to her head?” Jonathan said.

William turned around and look at Genevieve. He hadn’t noticed them before, but sure enough there were electrodes attached to her temples, with wires leading back to the computer. “Uh huh, yeah I see them,” he said, crossing his arms and scrunching his shoulders up towards his ears.

“While the blood was draining out of her body, those electrodes captured signals from her brain and uploaded them to this computer,” Jonathan said.

“Why?” William said. “Why would you do that?”

“Despair is at the root of all great art,” Jonathan said. “Think of Caravaggio. He murdered a man in a fight and was sentenced to death via beheading. I know you know your art history. What did he do while he was on the run?”

“He painted,” William said.

“Go on. What exactly did he paint?” Jonathan said.

“He painted beheadings. He used himself as the model for both the executioner and the victim,” William said.

“That’s fucking wild, right?” Jonathan said. “The dude was worried about losing his head. It was all he could think about. And it resulted in some of the greatest paintings known to man. Paintings that were coincidentally about the exact thing he was freaking out about. And I could go on and on with similar examples” he said. “Van Gogh cutting off his own ear, Edward Munch’s agoraphobia, and on and on and on. Negative feelings are like oxygen for creative genius.”

William simply stared at him.

“Oh come on, man, you’re a smart guy. You see what I’m doing with this project here. I captured the despair of an artist while she was dying and uploaded it to the computer. The problem with AI art is that it lacks the impetus of negative emotion. I’ve solved that problem. I captured the despair of the artistic temperament and turned it into computer code. So now the algorithm can do what could previously only be done by the human hand: create a masterpiece. And not just one. It can keep on creating masterpieces for eternity. I gave Genevieve what every artist is subconsciously seeking from their art: immortality.”

There are moments in life when the person you thought you knew reveals the darkness that has always lived inside of them. It comes out in a moment of candor, often stated in a matter-of-fact way that reveals that what sounds insane to everyone else is just a normal way of thinking for them. It completely and irrevocably changes your opinion of them. You realize that the person you thought you knew for years or decades had been nothing more than a facade, a fake personality carefully constructed as a smokescreen to conceal the depravity within. That’s the realization William came to as he listened to his patron speak.

He glanced at the door. It was shut. But was it locked? If he ran for it, would he be able to leave the house and get in his car and simply drive away, never to return? Maybe it really was that easy.

Maybe.

Jonathan followed his gaze to the door. “I take it you disagree?”

Without saying a word, William ran towards the door and yanked at the handle. Of course it was locked.

Jonathan laughed. “She tried the same thing, you know,” he said, gesturing towards Genevieve’s body on the couch. “It’s a weird quirk of human nature. People don’t want to do what’s in their best interest. They resist it, fight against it, try to run away from it. You have to drag them, kicking and screaming, towards something that will benefit them. The horse and the water and all that. That’s the burden those of us at the top of the pyramid carry on our shoulders.” Jonathan walked over to Genevieve, took a knee next to her, lifted her arm, and started dangling it in the air.

William heard metallic clinking. It was the first time he noticed that she had been handcuffed to a metal ring on the floor.

Jonathan removed a key ring from his pocket and looked at them one-by-one, sliding each one aside until he found the one he was looking for. He unlocked the handcuffs.

“Come on,” he said, leaning over Genevieve and putting his hands underneath her arms. “Grab her legs. We have to move her to make room for you.”

“I’m not going to help you kill me,” William said. “If you’re going to do it then do it. But I’m not doing a single fucking thing you say.”

Jonathan let out a sigh. “This is how they repay me after all these years,” he said, seemingly to himself. He grunted as he lifted Genevieve’s body off the couch. He walked backwards, letting her feet drag as he pulled her across the floor. He set her down next to the door. He stood up, wiped the sweat off his forehead, and put his hands on his hips. “Alright,” he said, taking a deep breath and blowing it out audibly. “So you’re not gonna make this easy for me, are you?”

William said nothing.

“I didn’t think so. So here’s what’s going to happen. First, this is going to happen.”. Jonathan pulled a needle out of his pants pocket and plunged it into William’s arm.

The immediate thought William had was: fight. The thought surprised him and gave him a small sense of satisfaction. He had never been much of a fighter. A lifetime spent in front of the easel, consumed by his emotions and trying to find ways to transfer them to a canvas didn’t exactly lend itself to physical aggression. Yet out of the different ways a human being could react to being attacked (fight, flight, or freeze), fighting somehow felt like the most respectable. It was the reaction that would cause the least amount of shame and self-loathing later on when you replayed the event in your mind. Freezing up, of course, made you feel pathetic and running felt cowardly. But fighting? No one could shame a guy for that, not even himself.

The thought (and the flash of satisfaction) were quickly overcome by a level of fatigue he had never felt before. He tried to raise his fist to throw a punch but it was physically impossible. The world starting spinning the way it does when you’re lying in bed after a night out drinking. His vision started to go black at the margins. The darkness then crept steadily inwards until he felt like he was viewing the world through a pinhole.

William was unconscious before his head even hit the ground.

Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep.

Sound was the first of the five senses that came back to William and the first indication he had that he was still alive. Part of him (the one prone to wishful thinking) thought that he was in a hospital, and that the high-pitched beeping sound was coming from a machine the doctors had hooked him up to to save his life.

Forgetting leads to optimism. The less connected you are to reality, the more likely you are to think that everything will turn out OK. Snapping back to reality means embracing the terror of existence. William’s memory started peeking in through the fog in his brain, and the fear came with it.

I’m still at Jonathan Trimbley’s house. Shit.

He sharply inhaled the way people do when they wake up from a deep sleep. Simultaneously, he opened his eyes and took in his surroundings.. He was on his back, looking up at intricate art deco-ish pattern on the ceiling.

Not only did he know exactly where he was, he knew exactly what was happening to him. He was dying. Jonathan was killing him in an attempt to upload his pain to the computer so he could train an AI model to create his art. In short, he was fucked.

“Welcome back,” Jonathan said.

William shook his head side-to-side to get the cobwebs out. He looked down at his arm. There was a catheter in the vein in the crook of his elbow, attached to a clear tube that was draining blood out of his system.

“You don’t have to do this,” William said. The words came out weakly, like he had a frog in his throat. He cleared his throat and repeated himself.

“I heard you the first time,” William said. “The reason I didn’t respond is because your statement was inherently absurd. You’re an artist. You know damn well that the urge to create is a profound need. Nothing else compares. Food, water, oxygen, sex, love; it all pales in comparison to the need to bring to life the thing you see in your mind’s eye. And this right here,” he said, patting the top of the computer monitor, “is my masterpiece. I’ve never been much of a creative guy. I’m the patron. I’m the guy who makes it easy for artists to do what they do best. A modern day Medici. And this machine right here is the culmination of my life’s work.”

He put his hands behind his back, looked up at the ceiling, and began walking around the room. “Most people fear death because they fear the loss of perception. They think it’s the end of existence. But that’s nonsense. The true horror of death is that it puts a stop to creation. Think of Michelangelo or Picasso. They didn’t die when their heart stopped beating, because who they were wasn’t something that could be measured and analyzed by a doctor or a technician in a lab. They were something more than that. We can all feel it in our bones. An artist is more than their body. Their biological death only truly killed them because it stopped them from creating. I can’t bring them back. I wish I could, but it’s simply not possible. But what I can do is preserve their modern day equivalents.”

William looked around the room. He yanked on the handcuff that was attached to his wrist. The tubes that were draining his blood went from his arms down to a clear plastic container on the floor. It was more full than he hoped it would be. He had assumed he had only been unconscious for a minute or two, but it had clearly been much longer. The life was draining out of his body and time was almost up.

Jonathan followed Williams gaze to the blood bucket. “Yes, that’s good. Notice what’s happening to you and then feel it. I mean really feel it. Let the reality of what’s happening to you penetrate to the core of your being. We’ll transmute that pain into something great. This computer will create a new version of that damaged painting outside, and that’s just the beginning of what we’ll accomplish.” He walked back to the computer monitor and tapped a few keys on the keyboard. “You’re almost there. Just another couple minutes and it’ll all be over.”

“Hey Jonathan,” William said. His vision was going black again, this time due to blood loss.

“Yeah, buddy?”

“I’m not afraid,” William said. He started laughing. “I’ve actually never been happier. My life sucked. I’m glad it’s coming to an end.” He laughed so hard that he coughed and had to clear his throat a few times before he could continue talking. “And you know what the best part is? You’re not going to get any fear, pain, or any other negative emotions out of me and into that machine. Because that’s not what I’m feeling at all. I feel great.”

Jonathan leaned over William and put a finger on his forehead. “Listen here, you little shit. That thing you have contained inside the narrow confines of this skull doesn’t need to stay there,” he pressed his finger down harder. “Whatever it is in there that helps you create your art shouldn’t belong to you. Keeping it there would be an act of supreme selfishness. Actually you know what? Fuck it. Maybe you are selfish. So what. There’s no point in me trying to convince you with talk of the greater good. Embrace it. Because when we finish today you’ll cease to be a man and will become a digital god, capable of creating something from nothing for eternity. Don’t you understand that? Don’t you understand that I’m helping you?”

William glanced down at the blood that was still pouring out of his veins. He had to make a move now. “I think you’re full of shit,” he said. “I think you always secretly wished you were one of the creatives, and that being a patron was always just playing second fiddle. Watching us do what we do and realizing that you couldn’t do it in a million lifetimes filled you with resentment and rage. You’re not capable of being one of us and you hate us for it. That’s why you’re killing us.”

It was interesting how easy it was to be confrontational (even for the most timid of people) when you knew the person you were antagonizing was already committed to doing you harm. The worst thing that could happen had already happened. Jonathan was trying to kill him. What difference did it make if he got more angry during the process? It’s not like he could kill him twice.

Jonathan’s lips tightened into a grimace. If the eyes were the windows to the soul his revealed that he had none. The rage was visibly all-consuming. He grabbed William’s face and leaned closer, his other hand balled up into a fist.

That was the opening William needed.

He grabbed the back of Jonathan’s head with one hand. With the other, he removed the needle from his arm and stabbed him repeatedly in the neck before moving on to his eyes. Jonathan howled in pain and tried to pull away, but William’s grip on the back of his head was too strong. William stabbed him a few more times, then reached into his pocket and removed the key ring, which he used it to remove the handcuff from his wrist. He stood up, about as lightheaded as a person could get without passing out, but the adrenaline kept him going.

He was free.

Almost.

Jonathan was on his knees, hunched over the couch with his hands on his face, alternating between whimpering quietly and screaming at the top of his lungs. Blood was spurting from the small holes in his neck.

William grabbed his wrist and attached the handcuff to it. Then he ripped the electrodes off his own head and quickly stuck them onto Jonathan’s.

“I’m leaving now,” William said. “It’s important that you don’t get distracted. Try to really feel the pain. It’s what the computer needs. This is your purpose in life now. Which, based on the amount of blood you’re losing, should only last a few more minutes.”

He pushed Jonathan’s face away with contempt, then used the keys to unlock the door and exit to the main portion of the house. The front door was just...there, only a few short steps from the entrance to the library where his life had almost come to an end. He thought about how much his perspective had changed since the last time he had walked through that door. He had walked into this house thinking that the easy way he had been living was a sign that he had it made; but in reality he had been weak, dependent on the largess of another man instead of being self-confident enough to forge his own path in life. Going forward, no matter what happened, everything he would accomplish or fail to accomplish would rest on his shoulders and his shoulders alone. No one else to degrade him with free money and empty praise. No patrons other than the individual customers he would win over on a case-by-case basis with the quality of his work. It was a truly liberating feeling.

Just before he stepped out, he noticed his torn painting on the floor, propped up against the wall. He picked it up with one hand, turned the doorknob with the other, and walked out into the open world as a free man. The cool autumn air never felt so good.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

The Aurora Skies Incident

Present day

“You survived the deadliest maritime disaster since World War II,” I said.

Don had a closely cropped buzzcut and clearly spent time in the gym. He leaned forward in his seat, grimaced, and looked at the ground. He put his elbows on his knees and started twiddling his thumbs. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous or just trying to gather his thoughts. Realistically, it was probably a bit of both.

“Yeah, man, I did. Let me tell ya, it was the worst day of my fuckin’ life.”

Onboard the Aurora Skies – February 6, 2026 – Near the Bermuda Triangle

It was supposed to have been a night that would replace the bad memories with the good.

Don had booked a trip on the USS Aurora Skies, a cruise ship that had departed from Florida three days ago. His fiancée had just called off their engagement, and after sitting at home in front of the TV beer in hand for one too many nights in a row he just had to get the hell out of there. So he had bought himself a ticket for the cruise and now here he was.

The massive ship had bars scattered throughout the different decks. The one he was sitting in right now was on the sixth deck, two from the top. This was the ‘luxury’ bar, the one where you could go to escape the hordes of poorly-dressed cruisegoers and have a real cocktail in peace.

Don was sitting on a barstool (bolted onto the floor) drinking an Old Fashioned. He’d been talking to the two girls next to him for the past hour and it seemed like it was going in the right direction. The one directly next to him kept touching his arm every time she made a point. Just keep playing it cool, he thought as he lifted his glass off the bar, twirled the ice around a few times, and took another sip. He glanced at his watch. 12:36 AM. He looked over his shoulder. Rain was pelting the windows, and there were flashes of lightning outside.

“And what do you think about that?” the girl said, her hand on his elbow.

“Sorry, what did you say?” Don said.

“I said -”

There was a loud thump that sounded like it came from outside the ship. The entire ship lurched a bit. Don heard the sound of glasses falling off tables and shattering on the ground behind him. He didn’t bother to take a look.

“Maybe it was an iceberg,” someone yelled.

A few people laughed. A drunk person started singing the Titanic song.

“Near, far, wherever you are…”

More people laughed.

The sound of dozens of conversations picking up where they had left off put an end to the awkward moment.

Then there was another thump. This one was much louder than the first, and the ship rocked violently to one side. Now all the glasses in the bar fell onto the ground and shattered. Don watched as his half-finished Old Fashioned slid to the end of the bar and fell off. He grabbed the edge of the bar with both hands. The girl he had been talking fell off her seat and grabbed onto his shoulder, barely managing to stay on her feet.

A few people started streaming out of the bar. Don’s seat was directly next to the exit to his left, so he had the distinct pleasure of being accidentally bumped into from behind by several of the panicked patrons. One or two even managed to apologize. The girls he had been talking to grabbed their purses off the floor and bolted as well.

He was back in the situation he had come on this cruise to get away from: alone. Damn it. He looked over his shoulder at the lounge area behind him. The venue was still at least half-full, but the vibe had definitely shifted. No one was joking now. People were talking to each other again, but the conversations were muted and serious. No one knew what the hell was going on.

Don faced forward again. “I’ll have another Old Fashioned,” he said.

The bartender stared at him uncomprehendingly. “What?”

“I said, I’ll have another -”

The world outside turned bright green. When Don looked through the windows, he could see everything. The raindrops, the surface of the ocean; it was all visible in the green glow. It was so bright that he had to actually squint his eyes to keep looking.

There was an enormous crashing sound. Unlike the previous sounds, were were definitely from somewhere outside the ship, this one came from the ship itself. And there was no doubt about what it was. That’s a fucking explosion.

The ship shook so aggressively that it felt like it had actually been picked up and tossed in the air before being dropped again into the sea. Don (along with everyone else in the bar) fell to the deck, and he hit it hard. Groaning, he slowly managed to get up to one knee. Just as he was about to stand, the world turned sideways. Everyone and everything that wasn’t bolted to the ground began sliding down the floor.

Don reached out and grabbed onto the last of the bolted-down barstools. The formerly flat floor was now diagonal, and the exit that had been so close and easily accessible just a few steps to his left mere moments ago was now almost directly above him and seemingly out of reach. His reaction time made him one of the lucky ones. The people who hadn’t been able to grab onto any of the bolted-on furniture kept sliding and came to a stop at against the far wall with the windows that were now pointing almost directly to the sea below. He looked at his watch. 12:38 AM. I wonder how much time I have before this thing sinks.

Getting through the exit door and to the stairwell outside was the only way off the ship. The problem was that the angle of the floor was too steep for his feet to gain any traction. He was going to have to climb his way up, one piece of furniture at a time. Don held onto the bar stool with one arm while reaching his arm out in an attempt to grab one above him with the other. He grimaced as he stretched his arm as far as it would go. He barely managed to wrap his hand around the bottom of the next bar stool and pull himself up to it. Life and death was now a matter of upper body strength. He had six more bar stools to go.

The mental battle was just as difficult as the physical one. Each time he managed to climb up to the next bar stool (and one step closer to the exit above), he paused, arms shaking, and looked up at the door. It seemed so far away, and it was a struggle to motivate himself to continue. Then he would glance down at the people pinned to the wall below, the ones with no hope of escape, and his motivation was renewed again. In this way he managed to make it up to the final bar stool, the one he had been sitting on not too long ago.

He was as close to the exit door as it was possible to get to, but it was still too far away. It had been two or three steps when the ship was level, but that small distance was now insurmountable. There was nothing else he could grab onto to pull himself up there.

Just when his despair was on the verge of consuming him, a human chain started to form from the open door. Someone reached out, grabbed him, and pulled him up and out of the door and into the hallway. There was another deafening explosion and the ship rotated even further onto its side. The floor was now too steep, and the human chain collapsed. Many of those people who had been trying to help slid down to the far wall below. Escape for them and everyone else trapped inside the venue was now impossible.

Don was one of the lucky ones. Now out in the hallway, he started making his way to the main stairwell. Many of the doors to the individual rooms now swung open inward, forming small death traps that he had to jump over to escape. He glanced down into some of the rooms and saw that they were filling up with water. Fast. People were trapped in some of them, pinned against the far wall with no chance of escape.

There was something curious that he noticed. Many of the people out in the hallway making their way to the staircase were in their underwear, while many of the people trapped in the rooms below were fully clothed. The ones who had understood the gravity of the situation they were in and acted decisively to escape were the ones who had a chance of survival. The people who had decided to stay in their rooms for a few extra moments to get dressed had condemned themselves to death.

A form of Darwinism played itself out within the confines of the ship, a microcosm of evolution in all its raw brutality, compressed down to a few harrowing minutes.

Base survival instincts, decisiveness, and raw strength kept you alive. Hesitation and physical weakness meant death. The compassionate perished and the selfish survived. Displaying high-level, noble human emotions cost you your life. Love was fatal. The only thing that mattered was the raw animalistic desire to live at any cost.

To get to the stairwell, Don had to jump across a hallway that, now that the ship was mostly on it’s side, had turned into a deep well. He knew he shouldn’t look before he jumped but he did anyway. The water was about thirty or forty feet below him, and he could see the heads of people who were trapped treading water below. He took a running start and jumped over.

Inside the main stairwell was another brutal Darwinian test of physical strength. It was impossible to climb up the stairs. If you wanted to live, you had to use your upper body strength to pull yourself up by grabbing onto the railing.

He watched as a man’s wife and mother, who were unable to pull themselves up, begged the man to go on without them. The man didn’t hesitate. He turned his back on his family and started climbing. Don looked further up the stairs and saw a man pulling not just himself, but his wife and two children, who were clinging to his back, up the stairs. He lost his grip on the railing and tumbled all the way back down to the base of the stairwell. This was a climb that everyone had to make for themselves. The ones who understood the situation and accepted it were the ones who had the best chance of making it to the top. The rest had no chance.

Don grabbed onto the railing and started pulling himself up. He knew he had no time. If and when the ship rolled even more to its side the stairwell would be impossible to climb. There are moments in life where time means nothing, where you can while away the hours without a care in the world. Then there are moments when the entire human experience in all its extremes is compressed down into a few minutes.

This was the latter.

Life was a privilege that now had to be fought for. The former abstraction of death had become a concrete reality that had to be struggled against. The only way was up.

Don kept climbing.

On each landing he saw people leaning against the walls and staring off into space. These were the people who had struggled to their own personal limit and had decided to simply give up. In his heart Don wanted to encourage them, but logically he knew that they were nothing more than dead weight. Life-or-death situations had a way of coarsening your worldview.

A calm voice came over the loudspeakers. “Warning, warning. The situation on the ship is critical. Please make your way to the nearest exits as soon as possible. Warning warning. The situation on the ship is -”. The voice cut off, and he could hear other voices. They sounded terrified. “Let’s go we have to get off the ship now. This fucker is going down.” Then the original speaker said “Oh shit,” and the speaker cut off. Don looked at the person above him on the staircase, who looked down at him.

“Keep going,” Don said. The man nodded, gritted his teeth, and pulled himself up higher.

That was when the lights went out. All of a sudden the staircase was plunged in darkness. People screamed. The screams coming from below combined into a sort of howling sound. It was sheer panic from people who knew that they had no hope of escape and no chance of being rescued.

Finally, when he felt like his arms couldn’t take it anymore, he saw the exit. The way the ship was tilted, it was pointing almost up towards the sky. There was a bright green glow, like someone was shining some type of eerie-looking light on the ship. It was a small hole of light in the darkness, small enough that the distance he would have to climb scared the shit of him but close enough that he realized he could make it if he really tried. He felt a surge of hope. Maybe the light had come from another ship that was picking up survivors. He had to get out.

All of a sudden his arms didn’t feel tired anymore. The mind controlled the body. If you felt like you had a chance, your body gave you one. The moment you give up hope is the exact moment your body betrays you.

Don pulled himself up the final flight of stairs, faster than he had traversed any of the previous floors. He grabbed onto the door frame and pulled himself up and out of the staircase.

The blast of cold air hit him hard. When the explosion hit, he hadn’t even considered going back to his room to get his coat. His mind had been focused on one goal and one goal alone: getting the hell off the ship. It was the right call. If he had gone back, he’d still be down in the staircase, trying to climb his way up to where he was standing now. He looked back over his shoulder into the dark pit below. He almost couldn’t believe he had been down there just a few minutes ago. Looking into the black hole in the door frame was like driving past an old place you used to live in when you were broke. I used to live there? He heard people screaming, the desperation in their voices palpable. He had made it to the surface. Everyone who was still below was on their own. He pitied them, but he had made it past the stage of survival that they were trapped in. Now he had to forget and look forward to the next battle.

Don looked at his surroundings. There were maybe a hundred other people on the deck with him. The angle of the ship meant that no one was able to stand flat on their two feet without holding on to something. A few people were wearing yellow life jackets. The rest had nothing. Based on what he saw, it was almost better to be one of the have-nots.

The brutal struggle that had taken place below decks had selected for a certain type of person. The people on the deck with him were the ones who had prevailed. They were strong, selfish, and decisive. Every single person on the deck had made the right decisions every step of the way. Their own will to survive was their supreme value. Friends, family, morals, compassion. All of it subservient to the one true north star: survival.

Don watched as one man, wearing a life jacket and hanging on to the railing with one hand, was knocked unconscious by another man who then pulled the life jacket off his body and put it on his own. The unconscious body slid down the deck and tumbled overboard.

There were no shadows anywhere. Don realized that the light was coming from above. Squinting and partially covering his eyes with one hand, he looked up. The cloud cover was too severe; he couldn’t see anything other than wisps of the lower-lying clouds dancing in the green light. Whatever it was, it was bright. He couldn’t do much more than glance at it before he had to look away. And it wasn’t moving. Whatever it was, it was directly above the ship and shining the light directly on it.

He looked into the dark water off the side of the ship. There were at least four or five inflatable lifeboats full of people, all of them seemingly trying to get as far away from the ship as possible. Onboard, a group of people pushed a partially-inflated lifeboat overboard and started to climb in. This prompted a stampede among the survivors on deck, who all rushed the boat. The ones who had made it onboard were frantically paddling, but survivors jumped off the ship into the water and started trying to climb aboard. Some of the people on the lifeboat started beating them away with paddles. Don watched as one man got both of his arms over the edge of the lifeboat and started to climb in. Just when it looked like he would make it, one of the men onboard booted him in the face and he went tumbling back into the water. The man who had kicked him slipped, and one of the people in the water grabbed onto his foot and yanked him off the boat. There were so many people in the water all trying to climb on the barely-inflated lifeboat at the same time from the same side that it actually flipped over upside-down. All Don could see was frantic splashing as the lifeboat started to go under.

For the first time that night, Don didn’t know what to do. He stood there, supporting himself with his arm on the bulkhead, and just watched as the few people on deck punched and shouted at each other.

Then there was a loud, mechanical creaking noise. The ship lurched and began rotating onto its side. Don had to climb again, this time making it to the railing and pulling himself over just as the ship completely turned on its side. He heard screaming and splashing as the people who didn’t move quick enough lost their grips and fell into the water below.

He stood on the side of the ship, his arms out by his side to try to maintain balance. It was just him and three others at this point. “We have to jump,” one man said, grimacing with his hands clasped behind his head. Don tried to speak, but his throat was so constricted with fear that all he could get out was a barely audible groan. He looked at the man and nodded in agreement.

Don looked down into the black water below. The last thing he wanted to do was jump.

A man and a woman standing next him were holding hands. The man said, “OK babe, on the count of three. One, two, three”, and then he jumped. The woman sat down on the side of the ship with her hands behind her, and started crabwalking backwards while shaking her head and saying “I can’t, I can’t.”

There was another loud metallic groaning sound, and the ship started started sinking much faster. Don knew he was going to end up in the water one way or the other. The only choice he had was whether it would be on his own terms or the ship’s terms. And if he went down with the ship it would probably pull him under and he would be dead. At least if he jumped, he might have a chance.

So he jumped.

He took a running start. It was only a few steps, but those few steps might as well have been a lifetime. It might be cliche to say that time slows down in moments like this, but cliches wouldn’t exist if there weren’t an element of truth to them. The feeling of willingly choosing to jump into the open ocean was so surreal that his mind almost couldn’t even accept that it was really happening. Just went he was about to jump, he felt his foot slip on the wet slimy hull of the ship, almost to the point where he would slip and fall, but he recovered without breaking his stride and launched himself into the air.

There was nothing graceful about it. He damn near belly flopped, and his face slammed into the surface of the water hard. The stinging sensation felt like a slap in the face, but fortunately/unfortunately the pain only lasted about a millisecond because his entire body went immediately numb as soon as it was completely submerged in the frigid black water. He frantically kicked his legs to try to get to the surface, but it was useless. He was fighting gravity itself. With the momentum of the jump he was actually going deeper and deeper underwater.

Out of all moments since the first explosion, this was the one time Don felt true panic. Fear comes from lack of control. In every moment leading up to this, he had always felt like there was something he could do to influence the outcome. But now his whole world was black and ice cold. He was at the mercy of the most merciless force known to man: mother nature herself. For a split second, he actually felt his grip on sanity slipping away.

Then, finally, the momentum of the jump extinguished itself and he came to a stop at the deepest point in the water that gravity would force him to. He kicked his legs to propel himself in the direction that he assumed was up. After he kicked for what felt like a few heartbeats too long, he felt his tenuous grip on sanity slip even further away as he imagined himself swimming straight down even deeper into the abyss. At the exact moment when the fearful, panic-ridden, animal-like part of his consciousness was about to totally overwhelm whatever remnants of rationality he still held on to, his head broke above the surface. He took a deep breath. He muttered “Oh God, oh fuck,” and rubbed the saltwater out of his eyes and shook his head. It was so cold that breathing actually took conscious effort. Only a small portion of the massive cruise ship was still above water, with a few people clinging on, too scared to jump. Everything was visible in the green glow from whatever or whoever was shining the light on them from above. There were dozens of people treading water, their heads bobbing in the waves all around him. The lucky ones were wearing yellow life vests, but most were battling nature on their own. The sound of frantic splashing and screaming from the people who couldn’t swim added to the general chaos and the contagious virus of total panic. It was too much. With no destination in mind other then away from here, Don turned his back on the ship and started swimming.

He had barely managed to paddle a few strokes when he heard a high-pitched mechanical whine from above that sounded almost like an engine revving. He stopped swimming, rubbed the saltwater out of his eyes again, and looked up at the green light. Squinting, he tried to peer through the clouds. Just then the light disappeared. He heard a loud splash, then a massive wave formed. Don rode the wave before it broke, then looked around. The world had just become pitch black. Some of the other survivors started screaming and shouting.

“It’s down below us,” someone yelled.

Don looked down. There was a small green light almost directly below him, getting larger and larger the longer he looked. “It’s coming back up,” he shouted.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” someone said.

Don started swimming faster than he had ever swam in his life. His lungs felt like they were going to explode with the effort, but fear and adrenaline kept powering him forward. The light below kept getting bigger until the entire area was again lit up in a green glow, only this time the light was coming from the water instead of from the clouds above.

He rode the swell of a wave and saw another man doing the same next to him. He was about to say something, he wasn’t sure what, maybe shout a word of encouragement, maybe just a simple acknowledgment of his presence from one human to another caught up in the same life-or-death struggle. Right when he started opening his mouth to speak, a rope-like metallic tentacle reached up out of the water and wrapped itself around the man’s body. The man yelped before being pulled under. Just like that, so fast that Don would have missed it if he would have blinked. The man was there and then he was gone.

Riding the top of the swell, Don looked around at the green-lit surface of the ocean below. Every way he looked, he saw people’s being pulled under by the tentacles. Some screamed, some didn’t get a chance to.

That’s when Don stopped thinking and started swimming. His brain simply shut off, his body nothing more than a primitive organism trying to survive. The next morning a helicopter found him laying down on top of a piece of plywood about a mile away from where the ship had sunk.

Present day

“So you have no memory of how you ended up on the plywood?” I asked.

“Nope, I don’t remember nothing,” Don said, shaking his head.

I looked down at my notes. There were 3,272 passengers on the Aurora Skies. Only 142 were pulled out of the water alive, with three of them later dying in the hospital.

There were rumors about the ship, about why it was targeted. They had been dismissed by the powers-that-be as nothing more than conspiracy theories propagated by weirdos on social media. I wasn’t sure that I believed them, but I wasn’t sure that I didn’t believe them either. I looked at Don and tried to decide whether he was the type of person who would get angry at me asking or if he would take it in stride. I opened my mouth and took in a breath of air. There’s still time to back out of this.

Then I just spit it out. I almost couldn’t believe I was really asking a survivor of the Aurora Skies about this even while I was in the middle of asking him.

“What do you think about the rumors circulating about the Aurora Skies being targeted? Some people have claimed that the ship was carrying secret weapons to Russia, newly-developed technology that the Beings wanted to suppress. Did you see anything like that onboard?”

Don looked at me. I tried to read his facial expression but came up with nothing. He was either taking it in stride or one of those guys who stayed calm for a moment while he processed what he just heard before exploding in rage. I leaned back in my seat and waited.

Finally, Don frowned and shook his head while looking at the ground. “Nope, didn’t see nothing like that. But I wasn’t really looking either, you know? I was there to take my mind off of things,” he said.

“I understand completely,” I said. “Just thought I’d ask.”

“Man, I wish I had never got on board that fuckin’ ship,” Don said, continuing to shake his head.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

An agent with great taste could find someone who wrote something amazing and would move heaven and earth to promote it. If the world wasn’t ready for it, no problem. The agent would shove it down the world’s throat anyway. Over time, the world would be grateful for it.

The reason why everything sucks now is because the people who are supposed to be tastemakers have turned into trend chasers. They have so much access to data to the point that it’s melting their brains and preventing them from using their natural human judgment.

When I refer to ‘data’ I’m not just talking about formal sales figures, although that definitely plays a role. The real culprit here is the same thing that’s completely decimating other aspects of society: social media.

Literary agents are PLUGGED IN to social media to their own detriment. Instead of using their own taste to decide which authors to represent, honed over years/decades of reading and living, they’re looking at what’s trending on TikTok and trying to duplicate it.

The problem?

TikTok (and other social media platforms) are full of regular people. And regular people not only have no clue what’s good or bad, they often don’t even know what they actually want.

On some level, anyone who thinks deeply about the world understands this intuitively.

It’s why Steve Jobs famously refused to rely on data when designing new products, saying: “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.”

And that approach led to him creating multi-billion dollar product lines that are still popular today.

If the leaders of Corporate America intuitively know and accept the simple fact that the masses don’t know what they want, why are people in the creative industries so incapable of understanding it?

Using data and social media metrics to decide what book to publish or to decide which movies to greenlight leads to the classic Making-a-Photocopy-of-a-Photocopy-Problem. The slop (not solely referring to AI here, human creations can be slop as well) feeds on the previous slop and begets further slop. Slop on top of slop on top of slop.

My advice to literary agents is: figure out what moves you. Then figure out how to explain it to the publishers and the readers in terms they can understand. Don’t worry about what unhinged people on social media will say. Don’t obsess over avoiding controversy. Just read and feel. In that way, you’ll find greatness. Who knows, maybe even the mythical next Great American Novel (we’re definitely overdue).

All great works of art are the product of one person’s undistilled and undiluted vision.

The more hands there are in the oven, the worse the result becomes.

Attempts at pandering and making something designed to please the maximum number of people leads to mediocre garbage, forgettable at best or actively terrible at worst.

No one knows exactly where creativity comes from.

But there is one thing that’s absolutely certain: Creative genius exists within the confines of individual human skulls. You can’t outsource it to a network, social media, or data analysis firms. Let one solitary creative do his thing, and the results will blow you away.

That doesn’t mean everyone will be happy.

Quite the opposite.

The best works of art are POLARIZING.

People either love them or hate them.

For every person who breaks down in tears at the sight of a Rothko painting there’s another who scoffs and wonders what the big deal is about those splotches of color.

One person watches The Godfather with a sense of awe. Another can’t stop yawning at how slow it is.

Some people read For Whom the Bell Tolls and are mesmerized at Hemingway’s ability to type words on a page in 1940 that somehow manage to create such a vivid mental movie in your mind as you read them 86 years later, in a world that’s so different from the one that existed when those words were written that it might as well be a different universe. Others just think the faux-Spanish spelling is weird.

If you dig into the history of anything great, you’ll always find that a Leap of Faith was involved.

The Universe doesn’t reward data-crunching and audience analysis. It doesn’t reward people who are afraid of negative comments online. It rewards people who see something that no one else does and decide to go for it.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

People who are overtly friendly and radiate positivity are that way because they have a strong aversion to negative emotions.

This sounds great when it comes to casual shoot-the-shit type situations.

But what about when something serious happens?

When your car breaks down and you need someone to pick you up, you’ll find that your happy-go-lucky-life-of-the-party ‘friend’ will be the one who responds seven hours later saying “sorry just got this, everything ok?” knowing full well that you’ve already figured it out by that point.

After you fail to get a hold of the people who you thought were your True Friends, you’ll reluctantly text that one guy from work who people avoid hanging out with and you’ll find that he drops everything to come get you.

When you’re stuck in the hospital with a medical emergency, your “I love him he’s such a cool dude” friend who everyone can’t get enough of will be nowhere to be found. Because your cancer/injury/other serious medical situation is a negative vibe, i.e. the one thing that bubbly good-vibes people seek to avoid as their raison d’etre.

The disagreeable friend who you previously weren’t sure even liked you will, surprisingly, turn up and sit by your bedside.

Many people are shocked and confused when this happens. It’s the type of situation that makes people say “that’s the moment when I learned who my true friends really are”.

It’s one of those key turning points in your life that causes you, years later, when someone says to you, “don’t invite that guy to the party he’s such a dick” to find yourself saying, “yeah, that might be true, but he was the only one who was there for me when no one else was”.

But it’s only surprising when you don’t understand the core reason why disagreeable people are the way they are: because unlike people who need to bathe themselves in positive emotions, casual dickheads are actually comfortable with negative feelings.

Everyone experiences a tragedy or two or three or twenty or fifty in their lives.

It’s inevitable.

You’ll naturally want someone to be there for you when the Universe decides to point the Eye of Sauron in your direction.

No matter how self-sufficient and independent you are/wish you were, you 100% need other people. It’s embedded in your DNA.

And trying to get a person who’s addicted to positivity to willingly insert themselves into a depressing/negative situation is like trying to force two magnets together.

Not gonna happen.

But a person who’s comfortable with casual negativity will naturally be able to handle more serious levels of it.

Your personal tragedy is a more extreme version of what they live with inside the confines of their skull every single day. An escalation and intensification of their reality, not a jarring polar-opposite departure from it.

I’ve seen this over and over and over again to the point where I’m comfortable with stating that this is a universal truth of human nature.

And once you internalize it, you’ll never see people the same way again.

Instead of viewing others as likable vs. unlikable, the binary vis-a-vis Core Type of Human will change to: addicted to positivity vs. comfort with negativity.

People have depths to them.

A common cliche states that “the way you do anything is how you do everything.”

That’s not exactly true. You can’t copy/paste a behavior 1:1 across time and space. People are more complicated than that.

If behaviors don’t transfer neatly across levels of seriousness, a person’s emotional makeup does.

A disagreeable vibe is often nothing more than a discomfort with casual social situations; or more significantly stated; an aversion to frivolousness and an intense longing for something real. People who present this type of affect have an emotional depth to them that their day-to-day life simply isn’t capable of satisfying.

A positive vibe conveys the opposite. It reveals a compulsive need for frivolousness and an intense fear of emotional depth and gravitas. Their good nature is the cloak that overly affable people use to shield themselves from the horrors of existence. It’s a way to avert their eyes from the things/people/situations that scare them. Positivity and cruelty are two sides of the same coin; you realize this when the happy vibes morph into the cold shoulder.

Many people learn this when it’s too late.

But you, reading these words on your screen right now on a random day in one of the normal phases of your life, have the opportunity to internalize it before a crisis hits and before you really need someone.

So choose your friends accordingly.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

Miami, Florida

“Hey,” Tracy whispered, putting a hand on my shoulder as we walked down the empty hallway. She put her lips up against my ear. “Want to fuck in the family bathroom?”

This was bizarre behavior, considering the massive fight we just had.

I laughed and looked over my shoulder, making sure no one else overheard her. “First of all, someone’s drunk,” I said, smiling and pointing at her. “Second of all, hell yeah I do.”

Tracy squeezed my hand and made a beeline for the door. She opened it, walked in, and turned around to face me in the doorway with one hand on the doorknob and the other on the frame. “Come on in.”

I mock-grimaced, put my hands in my pockets, and turned my head from side to side to make sure that the coast was clear. I could hear calm piano music from the lounge at the end of the hallway, but there wasn’t a soul in sight in this part of the building. The hallway was completely empty.

“Too late,” she said. She took one step backwards into the bathroom and closed the door behind her. I jogged the three or four steps that separated us and turned the door handle. I’m way too old to be taking risks like this. Getting arrested for public indecency at my age would be absurd. I thought of how embarrassed I would feel when my mugshot appeared online. The thrill of going on our first vacation as a couple was definitely causing me to do things that I normally wouldn’t, say things I normally wouldn’t. Like those horrible things I said during our argument earlier. What was I thinking?

I pushed open the door.

The bathroom was empty. What the hell? It was your standard family bathroom, with a toilet on one side and a sink on the other. The door I had just passed through was the only way in and out. There was no supply closet or any other hiding place.

Tracy had simply vanished.

A lit candle flickered on the sink, just below the mirror. Who puts a candle in a public bathroom? I reached out and flipped the light switch on the wall behind me, turning off the overhead fluorescent lights. I stood in front of the sink and stared at my reflection in the mirror, watching the shadows created by the candle dance around on my face before switching the light back on. I took one last look around the bathroom, hoping that Tracy would somehow appear and that this would all make sense, then opened the door and exited into the hallway.

I was taken aback by what I saw.

The previously empty hallway was teeming with hundreds of people. An overweight man who was talking loudly into a cell phone he was holding six inches from his face bumped into me. “Sorry, man,” he said over his shoulder without stopping. A young couple holding hands slowly walked by. A group of three girls wearing dresses and heels, clearly drunk, stumbled in the direction of the women’s bathroom. I scanned as many of the faces as I could, hoping to find Tracy in the throng of humanity.

She was gone.

I walked down the hallway to the bar where we had finished our drinks less than ten minutes ago. Everything was different. The vibe of the entire place had changed. Instead of being a semi-quiet lounge with soft music playing, it had transformed into a nightclub. A packed dance floor took the place of the soft, elegant couches and the quaint bar stools had been removed to make way for a crowd of people five layers deep waiting to be served.

I did a lap around the small venue. Nothing. Tracy wasn’t here. The only thing left to do was to go back to the hotel and see if she had somehow made her way back on her own. Yeah, and how did she get out of the bathroom? Did she somehow gain the ability to walk through walls? Or are you completely nuts?

“Hey man,” I said to the bouncer on my way out. “Did the girl I came in here with leave by any chance? I can’t find her anywhere.”

The bouncer looked up and off to the side. “I’ll be honest, buddy, I don’t remember you coming in here with a girl. I might be trippin’, but I remember you walking in alone.”

The whole losing-my-mind theory was starting to seem more accurate by the second. What would I do if Tracy wasn’t in the hotel room? I would have to call the police and file a missing persons report, but what the hell would I say? Listen, officer. I watched my girlfriend walk into a bathroom and disappear into thin air. She walked in and poof she was gone. No, officer, I’m not on any drugs. If they didn’t laugh me out of the police station, they would arrest me and force me to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Calm down. She’ll be there. She has to be there. I’ll find Tracy in our hotel room and she’ll give me an explanation that makes sense. Something obvious that I overlooked. Maybe there actually was another way out of the room and I didn’t see it. We’ll be laughing about this for years.

Our hotel was a short walk from the bar. When I turned the corner, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. Several police cars and one ambulance were lined up on the street in front of the hotel. A few officers were gathered around a sports car with a caved-in roof that was parked on the street. One was snapping pictures of the car from different angles, squatting to get a close-up perspective before standing with his camera held up over his head to get the birds-eye. The picture-snapper lowered his camera and tapped another cop on the shoulder, pointing directly at me. He summoned me over with a wave of his hand.

“Sir, do you have any ID?”

“Yeah, of course,” I said, reaching into the front pocket of my jeans. I handed him my driver’s license. “What’s this all about?”

He squinted at my license and then at my face. “I think this is our guy,” he said to his partner. He turned his attention back to me. “Sir, do you know a woman named Tracy Crenshaw?”

“Yeah, she’s my girlfriend,” I said.

“When was the last time you saw her?” the officer said.

“We were just at a bar down the street,” I said. “I lost track of her ten minutes ago and decided to see if she went back to the hotel without me.”

The officer raised his eyebrows and paused before speaking. “You were at a bar with Tracy ten minutes ago?”

“Yeah, that’s correct. Now what’s this about?” I said.

He cleared his throat. “Tracy Crenshaw died over one hour ago. She fell off the tenth floor balcony and landed on that car over there,” he said, turning his upper body to point at the caved-in car directly behind him.

My jaw dropped. I looked up at our tenth-floor balcony on the colorful art deco-style hotel, which was barely visible through the leaves of a palm tree, and back down at the destroyed car. Instead of sadness, all I felt was confusion. That’s impossible. I just saw Tracy ten minutes ago. I tried to think of an explanation that made sense. Maybe they had bad information. What if they had the wrong room number? What if they assumed the dead body belonged to someone who had jumped from our room in when in reality she had jumped from the room next door?

The officer with the camera and his partner were looking at my face intently. They were clearly gauging my reaction. Oh shit, am I a suspect? They both looked at each other before the partner spoke for the first time. “See that building across the street from the hotel?” He pointed at a modern-looking office building with reflective windows. “They take their security very seriously. It just so happens that they have a camera pointed directly at your hotel.”

“So the camera recorded what happened?” I said. “Thank god.”

At least there’s some good news. They’ll know that I didn’t kill whoever it was who fell onto that car.

“Yeah,” the first officer said in a gruff voice. “It did. We have footage of the entire incident.”

The officer looked at his partner, who nodded at him, encouraging him to continue. “The footage shows that you walked up behind Tracy, lifted her up by her feet, and threw her over the railing.”

I took a step back and put my hands up, palms facing outward. “No way.” I began stuttering. “That… that’s impossible. We were just at -”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know,” the officer interrupted. “You already told us that load of bullshit. You were just at the bar down the street. Now tell us what really happened.”

The second officer spoke. “Hey man, the footage is crystal clear. You’re on it, and you threw Tracy Crenshaw off the balcony. Maybe you have a good explanation. Did you two get into a fight or something? Maybe she really pissed you off? I mean, me and my wife, we’ve been getting into these huge fights lately and I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have some intrusive thoughts from time to time. It’s part of being married. Sometimes shit just kinda happens. You don’t want it to, but y’know, it does.” He shrugged his shoulders.

Fucking hell. They’re trying to get me to confess to murdering my girlfriend? What is happening?

“With all due respect, I’m not answering any questions without my lawyer present,” I said. This is unbelievable.

“Turn around and place your hands behind your back.”

Allentown, Pennsylvania

My lawyer posted bail and got me out of jail in less than twenty-four hours. He promised me that he’d work on getting the security footage from the bar, which would prove that Tracy and I had walked in together. As soon as I got out of jail I went to the airport and paid the fee to change my flight to the next available. I didn’t want to stay in that god-forsaken city any longer than necessary.

This was all a huge misunderstanding. Whenever those fucking dipshit cops in Miami got around to actually running a DNA test on the body, they’d realize the magnitude of their fuck-up. There was no chance that I’d go to prison over this. That part I wasn’t worried about. My innocence was obvious to me and would soon be obvious to the police as well.

But there was still one massive problem: my girlfriend was missing.

I told my lawyer that I wanted to file a missing-person report immediately. Tracy was out there somewhere and I had to find her. He advised me not to, telling me that it would look too much like I was trying to build an alibi after I’d already been arrested for her death. “Just wait,” he’d told me over the phone. “Let me pull that security footage. It should only take a day or so and then you can file your report.” I took his advice. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

My phone buzzed. It was my lawyer, thank god. It was less than twenty-four hours later and it seemed like this nightmare was finally over. “What do you have for me?”

He cleared his throat and remained silent for a heartbeat longer than normal before speaking. “I need you to be straight with me. What really happened in Miami the other day?”

“I told you the truth. Did you get the security footage? I promise you it’ll vindicate me. I’m not lying.”

“Yeah, I did.” Another long pause. “Listen. The jig is up. Footage from the office building across from the hotel shows you pushing Tracy off the balcony, clear as day. And the police have testimony from other guests in the hotel stating that they heard you two arguing with each other beforehand. The cameras at the bar showed you walking in and out alone. You lied to me. Now I need you to start telling me the truth. I’m your attorney and I’m trying to help you, but I can’ t do that if you continue lying to me. Do you understand? Maybe there’s some kind of self-defense angle that we could -”

I slammed the phone down on the table and swiped the screen to end the call. My hands shook as I ran my fingers through my hair and took a step back. The phone vibrated again. There’s no fucking way this is happening.

I went to my laptop and began searching.

———

The internet is a crazy place.

I found tons of articles and websites about topics that had potential for explaining what was happening to me. Some of them were paranormal, others were much more pedestrian. False Memory Syndrome, time travel, psychosis, the Mandela Effect. All of these phenomena could have held the key to the mystery that was consuming my life, but something about them didn’t feel right. Nothing did. Until I discovered an obscure community dedicated to something called ‘dimensional jumping’.

The members of the community listed several methods that enabled one to jump between dimensions. One technique, the Two-Cup Method, consists of pouring a cup of water representing your current dimension into an empty cup representing your desired reality.

Well that one’s obviously bullshit.

The second technique… well that one actually made the hair on my arms stand straight up. It sounded exactly like what I had experienced.

The so-called Mirror Method is a technique wherein a person gazes at their reflection in a dark room, with only a candle or dim light bulb providing illumination. Apparently, if a person imagines their desired reality while performing this method they will then instantly transport to that dimension. Was it possible that I had accidentally jumped dimensions? I remembered the candle that was flickering in the bathroom, and remembered thinking how weird it was that there was a candle in a public bathroom in the first place. The theory was far-fetched, but in crazy situations sometimes the most unhinged answer is the right one.

I grabbed a candle off my coffee table and carried it into the bathroom. With the lights off, I flicked on the lighter and touched the flame to the wick. I carefully set it on the edge of my sink, just underneath the mirror. There’s a ninety-percent chance that I’m fucking crazy, but it’s worth a try.

Staring at my reflection in the mirror, I thought intently about a reality where Tracy was still alive. I imagined that we had returned home from Miami after a pleasant first vacation together, and that she had just stepped out to buy groceries.

The flame flickered briefly.

My phone began vibrating on the table outside.

I made my way out of the bathroom and checked to see who was calling.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

The most common colors of wall paint are Millennial Grey and Landlord White.

People decorate their houses with slop ‘art’ grabbed off the shelves of the TJ Maxx Home Goods section rather than paintings from artists carefully selected from galleries.

Movies are now things you watch to see sex scenes and explosions (and that’s when you’re lucky enough to not be preached to) rather than works of art with great storytelling.

Movies in the 90s and early 00s were bittersweet and full of human emotion. Now they’re dull and uninspired, something to glance at from time to time while you’re busy scrolling on your phone. The writing feels AI-generated, and the truly sad thing is you know it isn’t.

The world has become bland and soulless.

Is it any wonder that no one cares about reading novels any more?

The driving force of modern culture is efficiency, practicality, and the satisfaction of base human impulses rather than depth and appreciation for craftsmanship.

Aesthetics are an afterthought at best.

That’s when they aren’t being outright vilified being vain and pretentious.

The aesthetic emotions are some of the most profound feelings a human can experience, and most people these days never get the opportunity to feel them at all.

Reading a novel requires intentionality.

You have to set aside time, a lot of it. You have to sit in silence with the words. You have to focus and forget about your day-to-day life, at least for a little while.

It requires effort, but the rewards are immense.

Being absorbed in a book is one of the greatest feelings a human being can ever experience.

When you finally set the book down the world around you not just feels but actually looks different, even though everything is exactly the same.

Reading the right book at the right time in your life can completely change the way you view the world.

An aesthetic layer to reality reveals itself. Things that seemed mundane now feel profound.

The way the wind rustles through the leaves on a cold autumn day, the sound and smell of coffee brewing in the morning, the feel of a page turning.

It all carries a new found depth and profundity that wasn’t there before.

That’s the power of absorbing yourself in literature.

And it’s what everyone is missing these days by defaulting to the mundane and worshipping practicality as the supreme value par excellence.

We’ve all met people who boast that they “only read nonfiction”; as if novels are a frivolity only enjoyed by nonserious people.

It’s hard to break that way of thinking.

The benefits of reading fiction are intangible.

Fiction makes you a better person. Not in the practical, measurable, tangible sense of doing good works that can be tallied and analyzed but in the Nietzschean sense of becoming more in tune with the higher level human emotions.

You enter an elevated state of consciousness that frees your mind from the tyranny of myopic thinking.

You start to view other people as fully-fledged humans with depth to them instead of one dimensional objects/obstacles who exist to either serve a function or get in your way. You become aware of the deep sadness that most people live with. You come to understand that that sadness is the root cause of The Way They Are. People aren’t evil, they’re just broken. The negative traits and behaviors that used to enrage or annoy you now cause you to feel compassion and empathy instead.

The End.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

Moments are both meaningful and meaningless due to their transience.

Sometimes I read history books and wonder why the people involved cared so much.

No one alive today spends any amount of time thinking about the French war in Indochina or the Roman invasion of Gaul or the Financial Panic of 1893.

But the people involved at the time were completely consumed by these events.

From the point of view of someone experiencing the great moments of history as nothing more than words on a page, all the grief that the people went through at the time seems so pointless.

It’s all just water under the bridge on a long enough timescale.

But then there’s another part of me that gets it.

Maybe the very strength of humanity is our ability to project importance onto something that’s inherently ephemeral.

An all-consuming focus on the present moment can be an act of defiance against the inherent meaninglessness of it all.

Because at the end of the day we’re all just dust in the wind.

And maybe future generations (or even ourselves a few short years or months or days from now) will not care about anything we do today, but right here, right now, we’re doing it. And that’s why it matters.

Take a look at New York Restaurant by Edward Hopper:

A restaurant is inherently a liminal place.

You enter, you sit down, you eat, you have a conversation, you pay the bill, you leave.

Then other people do the same thing, at the exact same table, over and over and over again.

A revolving door of humanity.

If you think about it too much, it almost feels pointless to leave the house.

The moment that the couple in the painting are sharing feels both transient and meaningful.

You don’t know what they’re talking about, but it doesn’t matter.

The fact that they think it matters is what gives the moment meaning.

There’s a melancholy feel to the painting, because as the people observing the scene we know intuitively that it doesn’t have any significance in the grand scheme of things.

It’s just another day in a restaurant. The next day will look the same as did the day before it. But to the two of them, what they’re experiencing matters because they’re experiencing it.

We see two people smiling in the background.

What are they talking about?

It doesn’t matter, because on a long enough time scale they will be dead.

And on an even shorter timescale, they won’t even remember what they were talking about or that they even had a conversation at this restaurant to begin with.

But in the moment they’re happy.

We see the back of a worker toiling away.

In her mind her work is part of the grand struggle of her life. She needs the money to live, and that’s why the work matters.

But to everyone else (including us) she’s just background noise. Her unpaid bills, the kids she’s trying to take care of, her looming rent payment; none of it even crosses our mind.

And when she dies her struggle will mean nothing to her either.

But in the moment, to her, it’s everything.

I often think about this about my day-to-day life.

Events that I attend, conversations I have, moods I experience.

I view them as the temporary moments they are before they even end.

And that in turn makes me appreciate the true significance of them.

Not in a grand cosmic scale (I’m not arrogant enough to believe I’m that important), but as an assertion of the fact that, in this moment, I’m real.

The very fact that my senses are able to take in the sights and sounds of this moment is proof that I exist.

One day I won’t. But today I’m here.

I perceive, therefore I am.

That’s why the fleeting moments in your life matter, and why, like the scenes in Edward Hopper’s paintings, they simultaneously feel so melancholy.

Now look at Hopper’s Hotel lobby painting:

This painting is about the sadness of people asserting their own dignity against a backdrop of indignity.

The hotel is clearly a dump.

Yet the elderly couple are dressed to the nines in a way that you’d expect to see in a five-star hotel lobby.

The moment is even sadder when you look at their age: their situation will never improve because there simply isn’t enough time.

All they have are their clothes and their vision of themselves, and no one notices, which is symbolized by the blonde woman reading a book without so much as glancing in their direction.

They want to be viewed as admirable and respectable, but their attempts to do some only make them seem more pathetic.

We’ve all met people who simply can’t perceive themselves accurately.

Like a kid in school whose attempts to act cool just make him seem like more of a nerd, or the swagger of a young guy trying to act tough in a way that just makes it obvious how scared of the world he really is.

The moment captured in Chop Suey is interesting as well.

To me it captures those moments when existential terror hits you out of the blue.

You can be in the middle of a conversation at a cafe and then all of a sudden you stare off into space while you think about the fact that you’re going to die and everyone you know is going to die and 500 years from now no one will know or care about anything that you or anyone else currently living did, thought, or said because the time we live in isn’t special in any way it’s not the end of history it’s just a random time in the middle and future generations will think about us precisely as much as we think about what people were doing in the year 1587 aka not at all and when it comes down to it you’re really nothing more than a walking, talking skeleton who’s just waiting for your heart to stop beating so you can degrade into bones and dust which is how you’ll spend the rest of eternity with no hope of ever coming back to the realm of the living.

Then you snap back to the present moment: “Sorry, I was spacing out for a bit, what did you just say?”

The sounds of dishes clinking and the voice of the person you’re talking to bring you back to the time and place you’re currently in and you blissfully forget about the true nature of reality…

The majority of people are human zombies/NPCs coasting through life. They have no insights, no deep thoughts. Just empty shells who are born, live, and die without leaving anything behind.

But there are rare souls among us who are born with the ability to see things others don’t. They see the world for what it is, stripped of all its illusions and distractions and rationalizations. This type experiences untold mental anguish, but also perceives beauty that others can’t even fathom.

Within that rarified group there’s another peeling off, a smaller group of people who can not only see the things but actually translate them for the rest of us in a way that we can understand, so that we can see the world the way they do.

Those people are called artists.

And Edward Hopper is one of the best.

I mean who among us hasn’t felt like the girl in this painting at some point in our lives?

I could write about the Hopps all day but I’ll leave it there for now.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.

Even if you were transported to the most boring situation imaginable (a grocery store checkout line, a waiting room, an office); you would be intensely interested in everything.

The technology (or lack thereof), the fashion, the mannerisms and body language of the people around you, the way the people speak; it would be one of the most fascinating moments of your life.

“Holy shit, I’m here in a suburban office park in 1989, this is incredible”.

But the people who were alive in that time didn’t find it interesting.

To them, the way things were was just the way they were, just like the way things are seem to us like they’re just the way they are.

It’s an interesting quirk of human psychology. Our default state is to view our current era as the end point of history. Not in an apocalyptic sense. But in the sense that everything that happened before was building up to this, and now this is just the way things are.

It’s the way we think now. It’s the way people thought in 1975. It’s the way they thought in 1882. It’s the way they thought in Ancient Rome and Ancient Sumeria before them. A caveman viewed every single day of his life as just another day. He wasn’t conscious of his caveman-ness. The way he lived was just the way he lived. Nothing special about it.

We all find the past fascinating.

That’s why period pieces are such a common film genre. It’s why we all feel an intense nostalgia for the world we grew up in. “Viewing the past through rose-colored glasses” is a cliche for a reason. We all do it.

Almost everyone would step into a time machine if one materialized in front of them at this very moment.

The longing for a world that’s gone and never coming back is one of the most profoundly bittersweet feelings in existence.

Nostalgia creates a hold of desire within us that can’t ever be satisfied. The world you want to return to is dead and gone, and there’s nothing you can do to bring it back.

But the real tragedy isn’t the fact that we can’t turn back the clock.

It’s the fact that we aren’t viewing today through the same rose-colored glasses that we view the todays of the past.

Because one day, people will feel nostalgic for what we think of as ‘right now’. They will contemplate this moment, this window of time when you’re sitting here reading these words, and feel the exact same longing that you feel when thinking about a past time that the people living through it didn’t give a shit about.

If those future people were given a time machine and ended up in our current year, they would be awestruck by all the things we take for granted.

Our advanced technology would seem quaint and simple. Our fashion sense would seem amusingly retro. They would look at the things that make us angry and emotional through dispassionate eyes, because they come from a time when our concerns can only be found in history books or period pieces.

The grand events of this moment will have the same level of emotional valence to future generations as we feel when reading about the French and Indian War or Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon, i.e. none.

So if you want to appreciate the current moment, try to view it through the eyes of people who don’t yet exist.

It takes effort, but if you can successfully trick your brain into viewing the world that way things will never be the same again.

You’ll look at a group of young women sitting and laughing in a cafe and appreciate the simple transient humanity of the moment. One blink of an eye ago, their souls hadn’t even been brought into existence yet. The next, they’ll be old women with failing bodies inching towards death, then another quick blink of an eye later their corpses will have rotted away and the corpses of everyone who remembered them will have rotted away as well. But right now they’re young women laughing in a cafe.

You’ll look at the technology you use on a daily basis and instead of being awestruck by the scifi-like nature of it or being frustrated by how much it sucks, you’ll see it for what it truly is, which is a temporary stepping stone in humanity’s quest for perpetual improvement. Not a god or a demon. Just a baton that humanity has been passing down through the generations from the invention of the wheel to whatever it is people will birth into existence the day our species goes extinct.

This thought experiment is how you learn to start appreciating your life before it slips away from you.

It’s a way to avoid sleepwalking through life and the antidote to becoming bitter and raging against the winds of change.

When you become nostalgic for the present you begin to appreciate every single second that passes.

You sitting and reading these words is a moment that’s always existed and always will exist.

It’s no better or worse than all the moments that currently exist in both the past and the future.

When Einstein said that “time is an illusion”, I think this is what he meant.

Sure there’s a scientific layer to it.

But the emotional human experience is more important.

I think he wanted to ease the suffering associated with being a human raging against time. He wanted us to see time and all the moments that it consists of the way he saw it.

Time and the passing of it can either be a heaven or a hell.

It’s all a matter of perspective.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.com.

It’s easy to ignore and laugh at the most unscrupulous/low IQ content creators when they make predictions that are clearly based on sci-fi fantasies rather than anything based in reality.

CLEARLY an internet-scraping technology isn’t going to magically turn into an I Have No Mouth and Must Scream-style emotional artificial life form that decides to commit mass murder against its creators for funsies.

At some level the people who go down the extreme hysteria route with their commentary are playing into the incentives of the Content Creation Industrial Complex: the most outlandish statements get the most views and - most importantly - the most ad impressions.

It takes someone with extreme integrity hold the line against the financial incentives that are contantly tugging internet discourse in the other direction.

Few are able or willing to do that.

So this is what we’re stuck with.

The anti-humans

“What the pathetic commonplace heads with which the world is crammed really lack are two closely related faculties: that of forming judgments and that of producing ideas of their own.

- Arthur Schopenhaeur

But the slightly less cheeseball POV is that - even if it’s not going to somehow develop the capacity for anger and the desire for speciecide - at a minimum AI is going to make humans ‘obsolete’.

The claims extend to all white collar professions, but the most rabid, foaming at the mouth, full on excitement is reserved for it’s potential impact on one group in particular: Creatives.

Any time a new AI video clip gets released (set aside for a moment the obvious fact that most of these clips have been heavily edited by humans) the comment sections are full of excited and gleeful statements like “RIP Hollywood” and “lol humans are fucked bro”.

First of all: ‘AI video’ is just a rebrand for CGI (computer-generated imagery), which has existed since the 90’s. CGI hasn’t put any humans out of their jobs. In fact it hasn’t done much of anything at all other than make movies shittier and less aesthetically pleasing.

So the best the anti-human mob can come up with is rebooting a decades-old technology. Really? That’s going to put an end to human creativity? Come on.

But one thing AI has done is raise the lowest common denominator.

The average adult in America maxes out at a 7th-grade reading and writing level. Now those same 7-graders-in-adult-bodies can click a button and generate slop text that’s (slightly) higher-level than their abysmal natural abilities.

The same goes for art. People with zero talent have moved on from thousands of years of drawing stick figures and smiley faces to generating slop imagery just by typing in a MidJourney prompt (the irony of the ‘mid’ in MidJourney is hard to ignore) that’s much better than anything they’d be able to create on their own even given a thousand lifetimes.

The sole reason AI has such a deathgrip on genpop’s psyche is: It gives mediocre people the ability to LARP as being slightly less mediocre than they actually are.

It might not be a huge leap forward for mankind as a whole, but it’s a huge deal for the resentful non-creative underclass.

AI as a manifestation of ressentiment

“…everything that raises an individual above the herd and makes his neighbor quail is henceforth called evil…”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche warned about the dangers of resentment (aka ressentiment).

Most people think of ressentiment as being based in materialism: Poor people demand that rich people be chopped down to their level, which if implemented destroys the incentive to produce and brings human civilization to a standstill.

This classic view of ressentiment is something that definitely exists. It’s not hard to find examples.

But it also applies to something most people don’t think of.

Natural talent.

Nobody is more resentful than the talentless.

The feeling of hostility that people who were born with no talent feel towards those who were born with all of it is at the root of all dysfunction in the modern world.

And the ephemeral nature of creative talent in particular makes it a ripe target for resentment.

Creativity/nobility

And only the fools who cannot hear the song ask that the rules be posted. Hear the music. And enjoy. But do not cry. Not everyone was intended to reach A above high C.

- Harlan Ellison, Eidolons

What is creativity?

Simply put, the ability to create something from nothing. When a creative person creates it looks/feels like they’re pulling ideas out of thin air.

One person can sit in front of their computer, open up a Word document, and gradually type up a bestseller. Millions of others can look at the same blinking mouse curser on the same blank Word document and can’t even come up with a single coherent sentence.

Some people have The Gift.

Most don’t.

It feels (and to be honest, is) unfair.

People with small amounts of creativity struggle and suffer, this is true. Hence the starving artist archetype.

But people who are born with extreme amounts of creative ability are the closest thing to royalty that exists in the 21st century. This is especially true in the U.S. of A. where we don’t have a formal noble class and thus invented our own in the form of the cult of the celebrity.

This cult rewards people at the extreme high end of the creative pyramid in ways that ordinary mortals can’t even fathom.

Not just financially. In many ways extremely creative people are treated as true First Class Citizens and can get away with things that normal people can’t.

They can be degenerate, they can be lazy, they can be psychologically unstable. It doesn’t matter. As long as people like what they create, they can do whatever they want. Normal rules don’t apply.

And to a certain variety of resentful 9-5 working stiff, this is an outrage that must be rectified.

“Why do these actors and musicians get to make millions and party and get all the hot chicks while I work my ass to the bone for nothing?”

Into this toxic maelstrom of envy and self-loathing by proxy enters AI.

AI is the ultimate defense mechanism for those who feel insecure and resentful about their lack of creative talent and the station in life it condemns them to.

“I might not be able to paint a painting or write a novel but FUCK YOU I can generate a MidJourney image that looks exactly the same as every other MidJourney image or click a button and get 70k words of slop from ChatGPT. And one day all those Hollywood assholes are going to have to get real jobs because real people just like me will be able to create a movie on our laptops with no effort. FUCK YOU.”

The great leveling

“The ressentiment which is establishing itself is the process of leveling, and while a passionate age storms ahead setting up new things and tearing down old, raising and demolishing as it goes, a reflective and passionless age does exactly the contrary; it hinders and stifles all action; it levels…

Each individual within his own little circle can co-operate in the leveling, but it is an abstract power, and the leveling process is the victory of abstraction over the individual. The leveling process in modern times, corresponds, in reflection, to fate in antiquity. ... It must be obvious to everyone that the profound significance of the leveling process lies in the fact that it means the predominance of the category ‘generation’ over the category ‘individuality’."

Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

The core message that AI-lovers are shouting from the rooftops is: “Your talent doesn’t matter. We’re all the same now.”

Whenever a large segment of society demands a Great Leveling it acts as a crushing force that destroys the human spirit and any scraps of individuality it encounters.

That’s why the infamous Apple ad struck such a chord. On some level everyone can sense that it was an honest visualization of what AI proponents truly think and feel.

The irony is that they’re wrong. If anything, extremely talented people are going to stand out even more than they already do.

When the world is full of inhuman slop, the non-slop becomes that much more appealing.

Finding someone talented and original on the internet is such a breath of fresh air that you can’t help but feel a sense of awe and admiration.

The way to prosper in the Industrial Age was by neutering your personality and turning yourself into just another cog in the machine (brick in the wall?). The more robotic and machinelike you were, the easier it was for you to find a slot to fit into in the corporatized job market. Being human was a death sentence.

The way to prosper in the current Information Age is by being as much of a personality as humanly possible. The less robotic and AI-like you are, the more likely you are to benefit from algorithms that reward engagement and eyeballs. You’ll be left behind if you’re bland and indistinguishable from everyone else.

So while the current state of affairs is that mediocre, talentless people love AI for it’s supposed leveling effect, the reality is that the ecosystem it creates will drive an even more disproportionate share of resources to the creatively talented people they so despise.

Talent, humanity, and individual striving for greatness always win in the end.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.com.

The more artificially bland someone is, the more likely they are to be accepted by quote-unquote polite society.

I think that’s part of what makes suicide so shocking. In death a person suddenly seems like more of a Real Person than they did while they were still an actual living, breathing biological organism with a pulse and functioning heartbeat who you could have chosen to talk to but didn’t.

Suicide makes you realize that the part of a person you see publicly is nothing more than a tiny slice of the total human being behind the persona, and that the guy you thought so little of had emotions so vast and deep that you wish you would have been able to talk to him before he was gone just so you could feel what it feels like to talk to someone real.

When your mild-mannered coworker who’s perfectly polite and inoffensive and is described by everyone as “he’s such a good guy” puts on his old army uniform and shoots himself in the head on his parents’ front lawn at midnight on a random Tuesday, you suddenly realize that he was a full person with depths to his soul that you couldn’t even begin to fathom and that his presentation as a kind of blah guy who just showed up to work punctiliously and did his assigned tasks in a non-attention seeking manner wasn’t even close to the whole him but rather just a pleasant inoffensive island poking out of a deep ocean that just barely concealed the volcanic core beneath until it couldn’t.

If you’re wondering why people commit suicide, now you know. It’s not that they want to cease existing, it’s that they want people to realize that they ever existed to begin with. That’s why they leave notes, and that’s why they often fantasize about being there to see people’s reactions after they’re gone.

Make no mistake about it. If a suicidal person could choose to continue existing just long enough to be able to float above their own funeral, they definitely would.

Suicide isn’t a cry for help. It’s a cry for recognition.

People shouldn’t be shocked when someone who seemingly has it all decides to die.

The core of the driving ambition that leads someone become massively successful is the hope that one day they’ll reach a level where they can finally leave the persona behind and Become Who They Are.

The problem is that they eventually realize that no matter how much fame and success they achieve they’ll always be viewed as a Human Doing and never as a Human Being.

The fake version of themselves becomes all they are and all they ever will be, to everyone but themselves.

That’s the point where they decide that ending their existence is the only way to let the world know that they ever existed to begin with.

The core of depression is the desire to stop being perceived as an NPC.

The depressed person will do anything to get people to see behind the persona.

Anything.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.com.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

- David Foster Wallace

All great art - be it writing, painting, music, whatever - requires isolation to create.

Physical isolation in a Unabomberesque Writer-In-The-Cabin-In-The-Woods sense can definitely be a part of it, but that’s not exactly what I’m referring to here.

I’m thinking of something much more profound.

When I read Slaughterhouse-Five I don’t just feel like I’m reading a great novel on a mere technical level. I’m not thinking “this book has a well-constructed plot [check], effective dialogue [check] and a great blend of tension and release [check check]; FIVE STARS FUCK YEAH”.

Greatness doesn’t automatically emerge when you check off enough boxes on a literal/metaphorical checklist.

The reason I know Slaughterhouse-Five is great is because, while reading it, I get the strong sense that I know exactly who Kurt Vonnegut is as a person. His worldview, his emotions, everything. It all comes through.

He may have died physically in 2007 but he lives on through his words. People who haven’t even been born yet and people whose parents haven’t even been born yet will one day read the same book and get the exact same sense that they know the au on a deep human-to-human level. Not just “wow some dead guy wrote a cool story” but “god damn, I actually know this guy".

A great book can make a dead writer feel more alive and real to you than the ambulatory corpses with functioning pulses and heartbeats that you live with on a day-to-day basis.

So how can you say the author is dead?

In all the ways that truly matter - his impact on the world, his philosophy, his very essence - he’s still with us.

Aliveness can’t be measured through the rote checking of vital signs (there’s that dreaded checklist again). Pulse, breathing, who cares. Does this person project who they are, not just in the present moment but in all moments (across time/space)? That’s what truly makes someone alive in the most meaningful sense of the word.

There’s a lot of debate about what a soul is and whether it even exists to begin with.

From the quote-unquote rational POV (a worldview that’s completely consumed our current era to the point where most can’t even conceive of a different way of thinking), if a soul exists at all it’s completely contained within the physical structure of the human body. It’s nothing more than brain chemistry and the random firing of neurons. It can all be explained by The Science™.

But when you say “I” (Latin: ego) are you talking about your physical body?

No.

I don’t care how consumed by the zeitgeist you are, you definitely don’t think of yourself as a random collection of organs/muscle/fat/bones wrapped in skin.

You have a strong sense that although ‘I’ might be currently inside your physical body, it isn’t defined or limited by it.

Great works of art are the proof.

A painter may have died hundreds of years ago, but it sure doesn’t feel that way when you stand in front of his creations.

You pay an admission fee to the museum of your choice, walk through the different exhibits, think “oh wow that one’s kinda cool” a bunch of times and keep moving. Then, inexplicably, something grabs you. You can’t look away. You stand and contemplate, just like someone stood and contemplated a hundred years ago and just like someone will stand and contemplate a hundred (five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand) years from now.

You contemplate, leave, go back to your life, and eventually die. Just like all the people who admired the same work of art in the past. Just like all the people who will come to admire it in the future. Every new group of humans admires, contemplates, and dies. Only the artist lives on.

Great artists do what all the anti-aging health-optimizing “I’m 55 chronologically but 37 biologically” tech gurus/influencers wish they could do but can’t: defy death.

So how do you create a great work of art?

By being completely yourself.

You can’t create anything profound or meaningful if you’re thinking of what the critics (official or otherwise) are going to say.

Some people claim you should write as if you’re writing to one specific person. I disagree. You should write as if no one in the world is going to read it at all.

Project yourself into the world with your words. Whether anyone sees them or not is irrelevant.

They say that you’re the average of the people you surround yourself with.

That may have been true pre-internet, but now a better way to think of it is: you are what you consume.

The internet is a despair engine that brings out the worst in people and crushes anything profound and meaningful under the monumental weight of utter averageness.

If you consume content from everyone then you become the average of everyone aka the dreaded and much-maligned Lowest Common Denominator.

The only way to find your unique voice is by limiting what you pay attention to.

Be like the old generation and tune out to tune in. But definitely don’t drop out. The world needs more people creating meaningful art and less people creating LCD slop.

Nietzsche says: “Become who you are”.

Easier said than done. But definitely worth striving for.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.com.

People have complimented me on my writing ability my whole life.

Yet, every time I start to write, I think: “This is it. This is the one that’s going to expose me as a fraud. Everyone’s going to think/know that I suck.”

It’s something much deeper than Imposter Syndrome.

I almost referred to the negative pre-writing thought loop as an inner voice. But it’s not. There’s no disembodied Voice of God-style monologue lecturing me about my alleged/possibly real lack of talent. Even the word ‘feeling’ doesn’t fully capture it.

Writerly self-loathing is more like a Force of the Universe. Think gravity, sexual attraction, the unavoidable death/taxes combo, etc. You can’t fight it even if you try (which I definitely have).

Resistance is futile, even when the thing you’re resisting is resistance itself.

Forcing myself to stand here (I have a standing desk, highly recommended, it’s great for your posture) and write feels like pushing the positive ends of two magnets together. The will is there, but every fiber in my being is trying to force me to do something else.

OK I’m back. After writing the above paragraph I decided to pace around my house to quote-unquote gather my thoughts and holy shit what a coincidence all of a sudden I noticed that I had to clean my kitchen sink and of course doing it some other time was out of the question. What am I some kind of slob who would allow my kitchen sink to remain unclean a single milllisecond longer than necessary?

So I stood there and sprayed cleaning spray on the sink and wiped it down, all while simultaneously being fully aware of the fact that I was doing it as a distraction/procrastination method and wondering if everyone who writes also has an immaculate kitchen sink due to the aforementioned dual procrastination/distraction impulse that I assume lives within us all while also thinking about the fact that I was going to have to write about this neurotic ruminating/cleaning combo if/when I did manage to drag myself back to my (standing) desk.

And they say you can’t multitask.

I did come back and start writing again. I always do.

I’ve taken long breaks. There have been stretches of time (months, years) where I thought that I for sure was never going to write a single word ever again.

And yet here I am, putting words on the screen.

You don’t write because you want to. Who the hell would want to do something so preposterously uncool. You write because you literally have to.

It doesn’t matter if there are literal or metaphorical Forces of the Universe working against the writing process.

Writers find a way to write.

The End.

If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both paperback and ebook editions on Amazon.com.