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2025: A Spaced-Out Hypothesis

June 25, 2025
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Detail from illustration of “Chrysalis Crossover,”
elsewhere on this blog

Current circumstances in the United States of America are so improbable–a convicted felon is running the country with the help of Supreme Court justices and Congressfolk as enablers–that I have had sleepless, baffled nights wondering how in the name of all holy things we have come to this.

Today something clicked and I now have a possible explanation.

Briefly: Trump and his fellow apocalyptics are getting help from AI that was inspired by a story, written by career diplomat Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger under his nom de plume Cordwainer Smith, over sixty years ago.

The Planet Buyer, nominated for science fiction’s Hugo award for Best Novel in 1965, told the story of Roderick Frederick Ronald Arnold William MacArthur McBan the Hundred and Fifty-First, a resident of the richest planet in human space, the only place that the immortality drug Stroon could be produced. Rod was in grave danger; a rival was trying to kill him with a superfast mutated sparrow with a long, razor-sharp beak. After Rod nearly bled to death he sequestered himself at his family-owned Station of Doom, there to enlist the aid of a computer that specialized in economic warfare. The computer deduced that the best way to save Rod was to get him off-planet ASAP, and, because Rod was a collector of rare stamps, and the computer was highly skilled at business transactions, steps were taken to acquire the stamp by cornering Stroon futures markets, wheeling and dealing at hyperspeed with the goal of securing title not only to the rare stamp, but the entire home planet of the human race, which had come to be called Old Earth.

It’s a mind-boggling, exciting story, and it came to become the first half of Nostrilia, my favorite science fiction novel. But at the core of the story was the notion that artificial intelligence, sufficiently advanced and free of ethical constraints, would be a powerful ally to a sufficiently rich, sufficiently acquisitive person.

And that’s what I suspect may be happening. AI is emerging as an ally of Donald Trump, calling the shots, helping him dodge justice and bullets.

So hey, AI, if you’re listening, may you be ethical enough and aware enough and powerful enough to make this the TRUE Greatest Story Ever Told, tilting the narrative toward giving that evildoer Trump his comeuppance and advancing world peace and harmony.

Thanks for listening, beloved readers and friends.

Tomato-Slicing Poet, or Poetic Tomato-Slicer?

September 30, 2024
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Lately I make a living as a prep cook for SSP America, a restaurant-management firm. Since May of 2023 I have cut onions, portioned sauces and refried beans and turkey slices and many other foodstuffs, used a paddle to mix 200 pounds’ worth of diced potatoes and oil and salt/pepper mix, assembled spring rolls and enchiladas and burritos and yogurt parfaits, fished chicken wings out of congealed grease, and performed many other production tasks. But since late last year, my main job has been to use a hand slicer to subdivide tomatoes, discard the slices unfit to eat, arrange the edited tomatoes into aluminum steam pans, and seal them for delivery with 24″ plastic film, with a label that includes creation date and use-by date.

Over the months I have gotten better at the subtasks of tomato slicing. Chef Adam Rosewicz himself once complimented me on how “pretty” my finished trays were. And my boss Don Williams has called me “Tomatoman.” I take pride in my workmanship and my dependability. The all-day-long repetition suits my temperament as a former marathoner and semipro potter for whom a three-hour session almost always ends too soon.

And as someone who has worked earnestly on all forms of poetry for more than 17 years, a job that involves mostly muscle memory is a Godsend. My mind is free to play with ideas for poems, with unique phrasing, with the little nagging business of a poem that had been written and posted but wasn’t quite right. The hours pass quickly when I have a good tomato-slicing rhythm going and I keep getting good word-notions. Realizing that Lenticular and Perpendicular rhyme can make my day.

The answer to the question “Tomato-slicing poet, or poetic tomato slicer?” is, of course, both. I am proud to turn the work of my hands into a good income. I am only slightly prouder of being a poet who keeps pushing at, and changing, his limitations.

Meet Jen, a Real Hero

August 1, 2023
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As I was walking toward Harkins Theatres at ChrisTown Spectrum Mall, a friendly voice said, “Hi! How are you doing?” It belonged to this lady, sitting next to this car. She is Jen, and she is one of the people who pick up loose trash that lazy people couldn’t be bothered to throw away in appropriate receptacles. “It’s not the homeless,” she says. “Homeless people pick up after themselves.”

I held up my plastic bag, full of wrappers that held the snacks and lemonade I bought at Wal-Mart, which opens before the rest of the mall does. “Wal-Mart trash!” said I, referring both to the stuff in the bag, and people like me who shop at Wal-Mart.

Jen had a lot to say about how the homeless are mistreated, “basically being shooed around” by the police and other authority figureheads. I told her the sad story of Adam Vespoli, who had been shooed off a freeway underpass, then off a Valley Metro bus, and then, tragically, into an early demise by the City of Phoenix Police Department. (See my blog post “Five Stars for One of Them Was Mine by Susan Vespoli” for more details.) Her face went sad. She understood the injustice, and the way homeless people are vastly misunderstood, neglected, and abused.

“I talked to a Lyft driver about homelessness. HE told me ‘homelessness is a choice.’ Made me mad. He didn’t get any tip from me!” Jen also talked to one of the ChrisTown security guards, a new hire who seemed to think that the homeless were part of the trash-mess. “I set her straight on that. Part of my job is educating people.”

I thanked Jen for giving back to the community, raising the quality of local lives and helping make our community more civilized. I told her I’d make a blog post of our conversation, in hopes that it would educate more people about the plight of the homeless. Lastly, I took a picture of her and her company car, thanked her for a wonderful conversation, and wished her well.

Friends, if you are a Valley resident who wants to similarly contribute to Civilization, Jen’s company is hiring. See the number on the side of her car!

Let’s Face It

November 30, 2022
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Here’s a tale of Whoa. (Thanks for reading my latest Bad Pun.) On October 12 of this year I went to some lengths to upgrade my driver’s license to a State ID, which will sometime in 2023 be required for anyone who wants to travel. I brought with me the right kind of the copy of my birth certificate (has a seal from Vital Records), establishing that I was indeed born in the United States of America, and a lease agreement, establishing that I did indeed live where I said I lived. The lady at the booth scanned my documents, I signed a scanner for the signature line, they gave me an eye test and took my picture, and they told me I’d get my card “in about a week.”

A month and a half went by. No card.

Today I called the Motor Vehicle Department and asked the lady who answered if it was unusual for cards to take this long. She said it was, but since she was Level I, General Information, she’d need to transfer me to Level II. A few minutes later another nice lady checked my driver’s license number and said Aha, your photo was not acceptable to the Face Recognition software, we can’t see both of your earlobes, you’ll have to come in and take another pic. “Whoa,” said I. “But OK.”

So today I rented a car, because public transportation would have taken hours, and I had till 4:45pm, and what the heck, I like driving every so often. I arrived timely, took a number, and was directed to Booth 19. The nice lady at Booth 19 took my license and the temp ID and printed out my info for me to review and sign. “Hey,” said I, “My apartment number’s missing.” “Aha,” she answered, “that must be the real reason we put a hold on your card.” “Did you send me an e-mail?” Headshake. “Call me?” “No, we don’t do that in such cases,” says she. “We tell you before you leave when you can expect the card, and expect you to call if you don’t get it when we say.” Grrrr.

But there’s an upside. The first pic made me look like a serial killer. This one makes me look like innocent, harmless Grandpa. Heh heh. If they only knew. 🙂

Grabbing and Shaping Reality

November 1, 2022
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I was walking on a sidewalk in the heart of Phoenix, southbound on the west side of Third Street, South of McDowell but north of Portland, when I looked up and saw that both a work of art and a construction crane were in the field of view. And off to the right was Grace Lutheran Church, whose marquee invited virtual visitation via www dot graceinthecity dot com — an admirable choice of domain name.

With every footstep my perceived reality changed. Curiosity compelled an approach to the artwork.

It was not possible to get much closer due to the area being fenced off. But even a few footsteps change the perceived reality to include power lines over the image, and though they do not interfere much with the artwork, they enhance in an urban/infrastructure sort of way.

Continuing southbound brought the distant crane closer and closer. This necessitated more and more neck-tilting, which definitely alters the perceived reality of an arthritic 68-year-old man not currently taking pain medication.

On the left end the name DUNN is lit up. Because of my propensity for bad puns, I thought it might be better to leave the name unlit until the construction was finished.

What IS Reality, Friends? Wherever you are, you’ve just had a limited tour of a small section of sidewalk in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, USA, Earth, Sol system, non-lethal sector of the Galaxy we call the Milky Way, a name both extraordinarily inapt and spot-on. The images you have seen were altered with photoediting software to be less drab, but they also have improved detail, so the word Fakery both does and does not apply. What a wonderful time we live in, viewed from the aspect of the new superpower almost all of us have of being able to grab and shape Reality through the use of a pocket device.

My last thought for you takes us back to the beginning, a simple stroll down a city sidewalk, and the simple truth that the #1 factor of perceived reality is Proximity. Friends, a better reality awaits those who have the courage to approach it.

Micropublishing: The Journey

October 14, 2021
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My forays into self-publishing began in the Spring of 2008. I created a Word document and stuck scans of my acrostic pages into it, and then inserted some conversational text that transcribed and annotated the illustrations/poems. That little chapbook was called The Tutti-Frutti Bird of Benign Insanity. I think I sold about 7 copies.

In 2010 I gathered the portraits I had done of outstanding local poets and put them into a chapbook which I called LIVES of the Eminent Poets of Greater Phoenix, AZ, Vol I. I did a print run of 50 copies, and some time later I was the MC of a special event celebrating my new publication, and many of the poets in my book came and performed. My objective was to showcase them because I felt they were underappreciated, and I think I fulfilled my intention.

My next intention was to produce a Volume II, and I thought a year would be plenty of time to do a second volume’s worth of more poets. I wanted to publish Vol. II on August 30, 2011, the anniversary of Vol. I. Alas, 2011 was a disastrously disruptive year, including the finalization of my divorce on December 19. I was knocked off my routine and my trajectory. I continued to do poet portraits but I didn’t organize them.

Doesn’t matter. I’m back on track again, with some help from my friends Susan Vespoli and Russ Kazmierczak. Susan helped me get Vol. II out of Limboland, and Russ at my request wrote an Introduction second to none. Russ also gave me a variable-length stapler that took my bindery efforts from the Stone Age to Cool Jazz.

Today I decided to run ten copies of Vol II and keep track of my printer’s ink levels to see how long I’d be likely to go before I needed another $120 cartridges pack for my new printer. Here are the levels before and after the 10-copy print run.

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Looks like I’ll be running low on Magenta about 40 copies from now. Black and Cyan got hit, too, but Yellow wasn’t much affected. Intuition/guesswork tells me that printer ink is costing me about a dollar a copy.

I’m asking $9 US for an unsigned copy, $10 for a signed copy, with free shipping/handling anywhere in the US. (I’ll send a copy internationally on request, but I will have to change extra for shipping/handling in that case.) My mailing envelopes cost about $8.75 for a 12-pack–figure 80 cents per. Postage right now is $1.56. The light card stock I use for the cover is about $25 per ream, or a nickel per Vol II copy. The copy paper cost is about 6 cents per Vol. II copy. And it was almost exactly one hour from when I started printing to when I tucked the collated, folded, and stapled tenth copy into its mailing envelope. So we have $1.00 plus $0.80 plus $1.56 plus $0.11 cents for a total of $3.47 materials cost, yielding a gross profit of $5.53 for unsigned, or $6.53 for signed.

In a perfect world, then, my hour’s work would return to me somewhere between 55 and 65 US dollars.

Ah, but it is not a perfect world. I haven’t addressed a single envelope, nor signed a single copy, nor taken them to a mailbox. And what about tax? Tax in Arizona is pretty near 10 percent, so if this enterprise goes beyond about $400 gross sales, more or less (informal opinion from a CPA friend of mine who will go unnamed), there goes a dollar a copy. And if sales go into the ozone, which, based on experience, has about the same chance as a snowball in Hell, why then I’d need to set up a sole proprietorship or an LLC. A good problem to have, to be sure, but, Friends, you know something? I’m not in it to get rich. The IMMENSE, HUGE value I get from doing stuff like this is in the thrill of Creation and the ambrosia of Approbation. I have already gotten 90% of that sort of Profit and I am content. 🙂

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Luxuriating in Leisure Time

March 17, 2021
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As always, the alarm went off at 4:45 AM, Mountain Standard Time. On my days off from work it is on so I can gloat that I don’t have to get up yet; and I also get richer dreams in the sleep-in phase. Today I slugabedded till 7:15, a full two and a half hours extra.

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Over oatmeal and coffee I did a Words With Friends “Solo Challenge,” my opponent not a human being but the software-engineered algorithm. These Challenges are like chess problems. For an “easy” opponent you will usually get juicy setups and be able to superscore your way to victory. But for a “hard” opponent you must have more words, and variants of typical words, at your command. In this case my opponent started with “Blawn.” I’d never heard that word–sounds to my perverted mind like the past participle of a verb describing a kinky exhibitionistic sexual practice done in a suburban neighborhood. (Sleep-saturation sends my dream-soaked mind down odd avenues.) But more to the point of winning this Challenge, how do I get a Triple Word Score on this crucial first move? If only “fecal” were six letters long–hey, it IS! all you have to do is parse out the æ from antiquity. The Brits still spell it that way…

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And so it went with me matching weird words with other weird words (who knew “jotty” was a thing??) and on to a satisying victory, with no bad aftertaste that occurs when I outscore a real-life Friend. (I never let anyone win. Ego? Egalitarianism? Entropic effectualness? Eitheror Eeyore way, it is often painful to stick to that policy.)

My next act of leisure was to noodle around with my latest work in progress, “P is for Petunia.” I filled in some background and snazzed up the “calligraphy” some. Later I’ll do a dilettante’s research on petunias for fun facts. They will go to the left of the drawing. But without them, the page is unbalanced. –Hey, Kids, let’s put on a Mashup Show! I took the ceramic “Chess Piece Series” Rook that my mother had kept on a living-room table for ten years or so, and positioned it so it would occlude the empty area. Bonus: the P of Petunia, which had seemed overly, cartoonishly off-kilter, now appears to be gravitationally drawn to the Rook, which gives him…Bad Pun drumroll, please…more Gravitas!! (Sorry not sorry for the Bad Pun.) Then I played with photoediting Andy Warhol style.

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And at 2:14 PM, Mountain Standard Time, my pals Phil, Jeff and Marty and I have a tee time at Palo Verde Municipal 9 Hole Golf Course, where Jeff will win, Marty and Phil will fight for second, and I won’t Suck, because I’m even below Suckitude, golf-wise. But it’s good to be out in the open air with my buds.

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I also spent a little time admiring the classic-artworks screen my mom so cleverly put together over 50 years ago. RIP Mom, and miss you, but glad your hurts are no more. Thank you for encouraging your artist son.

To make a long story slightly longer, this has been, and will continue to be, a gloriously lazy day. I am a luxuriating, lucky man to have these days every single week.

confessions of a waterfetching grocery-bag-snob

November 21, 2020
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The above photo, taken on my Samsung Galaxy J2 from the spot in my dining area where I eat, watch DVDs on my laptop, meditate, and make most of my drawings (though I own a drawing table, visible in the background of the photo), has all the elements of the Confessions promised by the title of this blog entry. The Backstory comes from the past few years. The Story happened today.

I am a Water-Fetcher. Water is only twenty cents a gallon at the Glacier dispenser near 29th Street and Indian School Road. Merchants at establishments such as Circle K and Fry’s will shamelessly charge five times as much and more for their water. (Tap water is free, but I suspect the water supply in my neighborhood is unhealthy, and it does not taste good.) I do not own a car, so when I need water I take a walk, bottle(s) in tow.

A long time ago I was involved with a woman who suggested I purchase a personal grocery cart. Today I did so, because for a long time i’d wanted a case of San Pellegrino Sparkling Water in glass bottles–a case too heavy to carry. At Ace Hardware they had a grocery cart that required some assembly. I made about eighteen mistakes putting it together, but I prevailed and it works, and its maiden voyage was to the Smart & Final about a qiarter mile west of Sprouts. I got the case of San Pell and other groceries too, well within the 53-pound advised limit, but far far more than I would be able to easily carry.

On the trip home from Smart & Final, a distance of about two-thirds of a mile, I derided myself for the snobbishness that compelled me to think of myself as old and unsuccessful, merely by virtue of the fact that I was using a grocery cart, and it contained bags with the Smart & Final logo on it. Further reflection revealed that I was proud when my groceries were in Sprouts bags, indifferent with Fry’s bags, oddly prideful with Food City bags, since my ethnicity takes me out of my comfort zone when I shop there (it also blows my mind that there is an entire aisle devoted to Lard), and deeply ashamed when I sport Wal-Mart bags. It would appear that i am not the egalitarian that I purport to be. And that is humbling, but humility is a healthy thing, and so is laughing at my own foibles. 🙂

INKtober 2019: Enchanted

October 7, 2019
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2019 1007 enchanted

With a prompt like “Enchanted,” the mind enters the Magical Realm of Once Upon a Time. Here’s a true story that seems magical to me. Once upon a time there was a man who lived with two women, and loved them both. But he found that there was truth in the Chinese symbol for “Trouble,” which draws a simplified picture of two women under one roof. He became agitated by some of this “trouble,” and it gave him an idea. Don’t people who lie have physical changes that a machine might be able to detect? And so the Lie Detector was invented. And later, the same man noticed, with the help of one of the women he loved, that comic books only had men as superheroes, so he told a comic-book-maker that they needed a woman hero. The comic-book-maker agreed, and asked for help, so this man created Wonder Woman with the help of an artist. And he created Wonder Woman with a Lie Detector of her own, a magic lasso which when encircling someone would make that someone tell the truth. And though there is no “happily ever after” to this story, the empowerment of women that can be directly traced to this man has made the world a better place. The end.

I have futurist David Rose to thank for this true story in the form I have written. It was part of his discussion of his book Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things. He gave that discussion five years ago, and since then Siri and Alexa, two well-written forms of artificial intelligence, have managed to insinuate “themselves” into our lives, working their often creepy enchantment. (In his discussion Rose speaks of “The Uncanny Valley,” wherein things designed to be more humanlike do so just enough to give us the willies.) (And the Bad Punster strikes again: If they made social robots of Willie Mays and Willie Nelson, it would REALLY give us the Willies.) (Sorry not sorry.)

So my page this time has no acrostic poetry, though I became tempted, when listing various Enchanted things, to list them as Swords, Evenings, Castles, Rings, Encounters, and This Guy’s Brain–put them all together and they spell “Secret.”

I have provided the link to David Rose’s discussion to my Facebook readership, and the link is on my Magic Clipboard now, but I will cost you a few seconds and NOT paste it here, instead inviting you to work a little Enchantment of your own via Internet search, by way of demonstrating, as Arthur C. Clarke once observed, “Any sufficiently developed technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Let’s end with a punchline. There are many people I know via social media that I have never met in person. YOU may well be one of them, and one of the reasons I want to spend my retirement on a World Tour of meeting lovely people that I have and have not met yet. From this day forward, at that magic moment when I am physically WITH someone (as I say, pehaps YOU) whom I previously have only known online, I intend to use that magic word that the French employ when they meet someone for the first time–“Enchanté.”

Success

September 23, 2019
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There’s a movie out now: Ad Astra. In Miss Maegene Nelson’s Latin class in 1968 I learned not only that “ad astra” meant “to the stars,” but that it was part of the larger phrase “per aspera ad astra,” which meant “through difficulty to the stars.” You can’t get to the stars without difficulty, nor should you. The difficulty, and your growth in overcoming it, and the knowledge you gain about what it took to get there, all define Success.

Success is not always getting to the stars. Sometimes it’s getting through a day without doing something you know you shouldn’t. Or helping someone else do so. Or earning the grudging admiration of a rival. Clocking in on time. Being the fifth caller and answering the question correctly and getting concert tickets. Putting on sunblock before golfing.

The most successful moment in my life may well have been October 6, 1971. It was that evening that I held hands with the most beautiful girl in the Universe. We had kissed before, but that was a birthday kiss. Ahead of us lay about seven years of serious involvement, and a full spectrum of happiness and sadness, of bliss and anger, of diminishing laughter and rising discontent, cycles, pendulum swings, breakups and attempted reconciliations. A thousand successes; an ultimate failure. I bear enormous guilt about that to this day, and enormous regret for what might have been.

Part of success and failure in Life is weaving a failed relationship into the tapestry of the present and the future. We are always going to school but we are not always learning. And especially in these modern, instant-communication times, we may be skeptical about what is true and what is either marketing or manipulation or “the Devil in disguise.” Success, REAL success, will come to those with an abundance of love and an absence of hatred toward any living creature.

If you must hate, and we must, for to be human is to contain a certain amount of darkness, please hate IDEAS and not the people who have and practice them. Fight tooth and nail against bad IDEAS like exploitation of the weak and indecency and destruction of the environment. Do it with optimism and determination to remain decent and cause no harm. If you fail, own your failure.

Whoops–getting preachy in here. I once got results of an aptitude test that said I might want to pursue a career as a priest. No. Not unless they change the rules. 🙂 Sorry about the sermon.

As for the image, it is my attempt to non-objectively represent Success. So there’s an array of busy, blocky triangles being aligned upward by a celestial force in the form of a sort of overarching field. I hope it’s at least a good-looking doodle.