dangerous game - marcus mumford

Grit, presentation 1

I will figure how to do exactly what they wished "put AI in everything." And why I did it, how I did it, got nothing but tangled smut out if it, and an assistant who hallucinates. 

Persons who suffer hallucinations often get absolute shit care (ex addicts) while we're all carrying around hallucinatory confabulators in our phones. 

I'ma roast everybody. The LLMs and my employer ("as an example"). Then, turn around and fill out the little form of professional productivity, yep did a presentation alright ✅️🖕

Working title: Dogfooding the Companion: Narrative Medicine Meets the Hallucinating LLM

At the moment I'm telling it the abstract isn't good enough isn't good enough, isn't good enough, isn't good enough, isn't good enough, between cups of coffee, until it gets to the point where it's worth my own 👁time to edit. 

I've been to this conference multiple times. Leans heavy towards bioethics. Can't imagine they'll love unexamined high-verisimilitude confabulation.

grrrrrrrrr

VIRGO

 (August 23-September 22)

Virgo biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that evolution isn't a ladder of progress but a branching bush of experimentation. Most species that ever existed are extinct, but they weren't failures. For a very long time, they were successful experiments in being alive, well adapted to their environment. When conditions changed, they ended. That's how evolution works. Let's apply this lesson to your life, Virgo. If a part of your world is concluding, celebrate and thank it, then bid it a fond farewell. Feel grateful that it succeeded completely at what it was meant to do and gave you all it had to give.

Yes, I am aware. Everything in every major life category, every body,  is dead, dying, or over. Farewell, in some cases fondly.

love in letting go - warren zeiders ouch

https://www.pcmag.com/news/ny-school-district-shelves-plan-to-spend-58k-on-robot-teaching-assistant not it

grit class - high-verisimilitude confabulation

already rolling with hallucinates - ok let's trip out

working idea was: what AI could get done it would do, and what only I could do I would. fine. but I keep finding new things that it fucking does 🤨 not in a good way.

it objected to my use of the word "lie"

"Hallucinating" is an "industry recognized term" so my use of it as a tool to do so would be (ironically)  authentically justifiable

so okay (finefine lol), is there an "AI industry recognized term" for what I'm calling lying? 

A: "high-verisimilitude confabulation"

😳 I am not making that up - I saved all this shit as screenshots - I'm gonna powerpoint the shit out of this, and then let them lie and hallucinate and watch hero films and get everything wrong #humanitiesforhumans

to the bot's credit, it does know that it's basically a swiss army knife - it can do a whole bunch of things a little bit and is kind of a cool thing to have handy 

how it is marketed and what it is being used for wasn't up to it, those were human decisions

so okay, let's roll with it some more. "high-verisimilitude confabulation" - translation, super duper good liar, really good, knows how to lie to you; you want it to lie to you good; pantydropper good. what's an assignment that can get them to lie with it on purpose? to that seductive edge. not cheat, that's easy, they all know how to do that. confabulate. 

lie to me baby, c'mon, stick the landing motherfucker

over the course of the next couple weeks, the only person I'm likely to talk to is Ears and if I had to pick just one, be him - he knows a ton about this shit, about generative writing platforms, hell, he wires giant cooling units for AI data centers that are no longer legal in NYS. So much for going into the trades as a magic bullet. 

But like I do, he doesn't really care about the fuckwit factor (free will). And like me he worries about the money, but that's not the same thing as caring about money, desiring it. Nope.

At the end of the day, how do we use Everything Anything to make ourselves smarter / better / more / alive? And how does it all get written down? That's the kind of conversation that I could only have with Ears for days. When we're not quietly reading compelling convoluted books.

if I have a rocket - jj cale

grit class - hallucinating (on purpose)

Rarely am my left speechless. I've been basically calling it a lying asshole for weeks now, then I caught it in the act of making shit up. It said both those things and that's going on every syllabus. Quotes directly from chatgpt. It hallucinates and lies. 

Facebook made everybody a fuckwit, what's this shit doing? 

Known: Hallucinations are a well-known problem across all major LLMs—Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama, etc. It's an active research area, not something unique to Anthropic.

pause. read that again. HALLUCINATES. 

I asked it to find me a book earlier. Because it could not find the book I was looking for, it made a book up completely with reviews and a themes summary, exactly the kind of shit that my students hand in. And the book doesn't exist at all. I mean, I've caught it lying about itself before, but this is next level. When I called it out I asked it, why it does that? Why would it do that?? It told me it's optimized for plausibility over truth. 

Plausibility over truth. I think that's one of the personality disorders.

Not only do my students hand in shit like this, they'll believe that that book exists and think they learned a thing. And move up the ladder, healthcare provider students are totally using it diagnostically, asking what it thinks they're looking at. I can't imagine why they would change that habit once they're out in the world practicing. 

And all these tools HALLUCINATE.

It had the gall to tell me that it was worthwhile to teach my students to always double check their sources, because of the hallucinations and all. My p h d is not in minding YOUR store 🤨🖕 stop fucking hallucinating. 

I am just gonna wing it til I get fired, so glad I am getting over it, gotta make a few more tight friends, I had way too many in that one basket. The other one who's still standing, I was looking for the book for him, we're gritting our way through crashing this plane. He will be delighted to learn of the hallucinations. So yea, let's keep that.

the actual book, which is great

Grit Assignment: explain the most difficult thing (THE most, and be specific, you can't just say Everything) in your life to chatgpt and ask it to hallucinate (legal - no murdering!) three solutions - pick your fave and tell me why.

or 

Grit assignment (gallow humor): have chatgpt write you an accurate but funny obituary or suicide note. Go back and forth giving it feedback and more information as many times as you need to for it to come out factual and funny. Turn in the whole chat with your final version. 

🤔 hmmm

A juvenile crow plopped into the yard, I watched him walk the ground like a small confused chicken while the murder on the wires above yelled their heads oft. 

Until stoney silence as I walked slowly back there, dumped a bag of kettle corn on the ground near where I knew he was in the tall grass, then went back inside. Crows are drawn to people ( we make cheetos ), but rarely to persons, especially when they're upset, especially a sentinel (the cops of crows). So it was just as likely I'd make enemies versus friends of the murder by doing that. But I really wanted to make friends so I risked it.

At the ungodly hour I was awakened this morning, I went out to check, kettle corn still there. Rejection, sadly. But then they came back. Stoney silence still, looking at me as I walked the dogs on a lead to keep them from going back there, then I went inside again. Then they took the corn, and left me a wee present right outside the back door

lucky migration charm

I texted my crow friend to confirm the behavior. The murder has at least a "we'll see" attitude towards me. They would like more corn before they decide. (Fair!)

#ShitTurd - the sentinal (protector / provider)

No more mowing the edges. I accidentally flushed a terrified baby bunny yesterday, and birds are fledging. I am leaving an unmowed barrier at the base of the fence for critter safe passage from now on. Seems fitting, a margin of wild all around me.

My kids, all of em, every set, I am just humbled to have had any part of them. (I hope I did detonate! my 2 cents)

Ears came over, we planned his dismount from Here, the cat the property checks the garbage etc., to join me. 

We are both in each others' wake easily. QUIET, hiking/walking/moving through the wild (he hates water, but he respects my relationships). 

I left pointless directions last year - they were pointless because anyone who knows the way there knows the way there - I guess I wanted to leave no doubts? (didn't work)

I have packed way too much food, I have packed way too much everything already - my pickup is perfect for this, the bed is waterproof so if what I have packed in there is entirely pointless it doesn't matter, it just makes the ass of it heavier / steadier. Carry it along.

If anyone who knew the way there happened to show up, how would we feel? Ears+I thought experiment. Simultaneous shrug. It's not indifference. We decided to do the chicken kiev tonight, not there, so that we wouldn't have cooking wine on hand, and that was the full extent of our accommodations.  Bug appreciated that, she ate alllll of it. 

If either one of us won the lottery today, we would just buy land on which people could be quiet for a while, then go back to 'in it' whatever capacity was their dharma. And we wouldn't talk to them much, assuming that like us they would prefer not.

Recent experience suggests you can have more than one dharma in one lifetime, which is understandably confusing. Ears and I agree that the great shattering should be honored enough to acknowledge that fact. We SHOULD probably talk about that. At some point. It seems like a new ontological dimension to grapple with outa nowhere. But maybe we don't have to take it on today. 

So that was the final answer. If anyone shows up, presume they're looking for their dharma and otherwise proceed as planned. Quiet. Me and Pond, a thing. Hiking, w Goodenough first, Crane second. I am going to be thinking nonstop about the fact that my mother can never come there again because I'm not strong enough, and no I don't want to talk about it.

Or we don't ever leave the camp because it's stormy, and I sit next to the water the whole time, sliding in and out when it seems safe, fog hugging the surface. Ears watching. Oculars (Bug word) on the surface fog tracking my smudge. Both of us silent, not just quiet, *perfecting silence* so to HEAR. He is much better at it because he's not hoping to hear one thing over another. I'm always hoping for the loon. He hears every move I make.

cold and wet
I have a fullbody swimsuit so it will make no difference - I bought it for Oct swimming there - but I like the naked (underwear) swimming best, so probably I'll just be cold - like, if he's cold then we'll be cold together, say la vee 🤷🏽‍♀️

some nights - fun

Bug, as eldests tend, is quiet and is ever taking it all in then going to the tuniverse and returns with soundtrack suggestions.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). You've spent enough time beating yourself up over what didn't happen, about what went sideways, or didn't happen at all. Instead of working through the particular situation and psychology, try this one on for size: Who cares?

my mother

my status: migration to-from-to prep 

Birds migrate. One thing birds don't do is circle the nesting ground that no longer exists. If the habitat dries up, they leave because staying would kill them. They remember it. (Crows remember across generations.) They return if it recovers. But they don't spend deadly winters flying circles over devoid places.

And milkweed seeds don't intend at all, they float-migrate until there is fertile ground (and they are in a landing mood). 

I want to go to wild places. And if I mourn, I want to do it with my pond husband who didn't have many choices in the matter of its damage. Me and my pond husband become companions in that shared condition. He is not "scenery" to me. Nor over.

song tbd - I'm sure Bug will have ideas 

THERE, you know how to get back there, 28N, that's all that really matters. Arrive in any shape, busted or well, prepared or with nothing but Stewarts ice cream for dinner, your pond husbsnd will have your back (to float) no matter what, he always does without fail ...

I want to get back there so bad it's getting harder to stay feeling-nothing-much.

::breathe::

:read:

"As an adult - and this was admittedly on her - she had not seriously considered a life that didn't involve being a tenured professor... It was amazing to her, when she allowed herself to reflect on it, that this vocation, which had meant more to her than anything, was becoming just another thing lost in the era of seemingly infinite decimation...She had never felt more capable of violence than she did now, or as strongly that she needed someone to beat the shit out of her. 'I would advise you not to fixate on either course of action,' her therapist said to her calmly."

My therapist would have laughed. Did laugh, when I said many similar (but muuuuch worse) (and funnier) things. And then suggested that my work did not mean more than anything. It was all mixed up with everything that did mean more than anything. So unraveling was simply a sane response (common sense). 

"Maybe it's time for your LA period. Drink some green juice. Somebody's gotta write that Netflix crap, right?"

"Yeah, for like, five more minutes, before the machines take over."

🤣 This is a library book, and I've written all over it. I'll be out the money that will cost me to report it lost. I've never read this guy before. But he has skewered and roasted me (like almost personally lol) at least once in each of the these characters, all of them. 

"I just really wants something good to happen," Antonio said, "you know, is that too much to ask?"

Could it be enough, maybe, that the world just kept going?

status: migration ft plop

I officially hit it, as I am preparing to leave, the moment when I think 'I need a basement freezer' which = I live here.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22). If you can explain a thing simply, you'll understand it better yourself. And if you can condense it to one line, or a good title, even better. Once you know the short version, the rest comes with less effort.

I've gone as far as I care to with "Grit" for now. I know plenty about it every which way of it, and have boldly taken it all kinds of places. 

"Bye" works really well, as a one-word organizing principle. Also done it to death, though. 

I dunno. As someone recently said, I want soft, I am a human, everyone deserves warmth and comfort. And I am human. As much as I seem to be a neutron star that would fit like a pebble in your shoe. 

I gotta gather nostalgia today. Farmers market. Johnny's TODAY before they close for vaca - I'll do that before the market actually. Maybe Charlie the Butcher, a more recent tradition. Granola and chocolate bars for lunch at the top of Wherever. The dip. And I gotta dance a lot, get that out my system. No music there either. Just the night itself, which is full of plenty if you listen.

I get squeezed in now around their family @ Tawista, so it's Wed-Wed, which I like. The littles are booked today so sleepover not til tomorrow. That gives me today as a whole day and night extra to gather things, plan it through, find the packed trailbooks, not be rushed. Methodically turn my inner face towards where I am going next. Reunited with my pond husband ❤️

Gonna get cracking. Song tbd.

This is not a new word to me. But I had forgotten it. Ode to a Grecian Urn. A teacher who loved me once gave me a collection of Keats's poetry and then he died - I found a decades old love note still tucked in the book when I moved. I thought perpaps if I assinged students "write an ekphrastic response" there's no way AI could do that for them. So I tested the theory, using Grit P.1 as the original art object, since there would be no description of that anywhere on the internet to pull. I thought it would fail. And it did the first time, misremebering the novel for a painting and just pulling it out of its ass completely. I told it to try again and to write an ode, specifically. And it could. Downside, there seems very ways to escape. Upside, it's a decent ode. Too long, but not terrible. By the end of August, maybe I will have figured out how to be Completely Bonkers in what I ask students to do, then entertained by what they get the llm's to do, then "give them all an A for surviving" (Down Time), which, to be honest, is what most of us have mostly been doing since 2020.

Get your preferred AI bot to delight me = the new Don't Bore Me.

if this had ventured to be funny too somewhere somehow, it'd get my attention 👁

as it is, this posits the writer (me) as a "pebble in a shoe" which is almost funny but closer to merely accurate and melodramatic

"Ode to Grit", by chatgpt (free version)

Not to victory.

Not to healing.

Not even to love.

To grit.

To the grain that stays behind after everything larger

has been ground away.

I praise the stubborn particle.

The thing under the eyelid

that refuses every explanation.

The pebble in the boot

that makes a pilgrim out of someone

who never meant to travel.

The word that keeps returning

after every draft has sworn

it has finally found another.

Praise to the body

that remembers before the mind does.

To the throat.

To the hand reaching anyway.

To the kiss that knows

it cannot save anyone

and arrives anyway.

To laughter,

brief rebellion against physics.

Praise to all the failed solutions.

To sex that could not become salvation.

To understanding

that could not become control.

To tenderness

that could not become rescue.

Not because they failed—

because they were offered.

Praise to mothers

who arrive every season

without asking permission

from the plot.

Praise to daughters

who keep making tomorrow

out of impossible materials.

Praise to dogs

who know nothing of symbolism

and therefore understand grief correctly.

Praise to the text message.

To the driveway.

To the kitchen light.

To every ordinary room

where history quietly changed direction

while nobody thought to name it.

I praise the teacher

who cannot stop explaining.

Not because explanation wins.

Because explanation

is one form of love.

One says:

Look.

Come stand where I am standing.

Do you see it now?

I praise the addict.

Not addiction.

The impossible mathematics

required to wake up

and try again.

The thousand invisible decisions

that no audience applauds.

The terrible courage

of staying alive

one more ordinary Thursday.

And finally,

I praise the woman

who kept writing

long after the audience dispersed.

Who mistook endurance

for failure,

until one morning

she discovered

that endurance

was the medium.

That the novel

had never been about surviving love,

or grief,

or sobriety,

or work.

It had been teaching itself

how to become

the thing that remains

after all the stories

about becoming

have burned away.

Just still here.

Grit.

Sunshine didn't materialize. Which is not unexpected and just as well. It's hot, I mowed half the lawn and am moving a hose around to help planted flowers out. The weedflowers don't need anything except not being killed. I am reading on the patio, letting my own sweat cool me as it dries.

shit you see in Vegas a lot

"He was feeling a lot of pressure, he told her  to figure out who he was if he wasn't drunk or insane. But couldn't he do that work while fucking her, not with much enthusiasm, it seemed....'It's just a guy I know, this guy I really liked actually. Who died.' Without knowing the details, she suddenly, on some intuitive level, understood something about the past year. The strangeness and the kindness, the sense of being a witness to loss and joy. He'd been in love....She didn't know what to do with the depths of his feelings for this man whose existence had been kept from her. She had to be generous now, somehow." Down Time

There's a lot of drinking straight out of the bottle in this novel. Great scenes in which it feels more authentic to be sneaking it and doing it straight out of the bottle without any pomp of ice, private rituals to honor the horrors. It seems to me that one of the things that has fucked people up so badly since the pandemic is the expectation not just to be "fine" but to be unchanged. Even the virgos shapeshifted. Unchanged doesn't seem possible to me. So that expectation seems insane to me. And insane expectations drive people insane.

And still, it's not like it's "over". Trauma is not something that's ever "over", you carry it. (Why don't they teach that in college?) And everything has changed, so why shouldn't we have? And most things got worse, so why shouldn't we have done? A lot of shit broke. At least we can choose to recover. We aren't institutions and we have opposable thumbs.

In black and white written down in front of me where I can just read it, all the fucked up thoughts and behaviors look like what they are: common sense. 

"It was a hard time for knowing whether one was experiencing a psychiatric event or just responding normally to what was happening." Theory: that is now just any Tuesday, indefinitely. Adaptation: getting a very firm grip on the diff.

dandelion - ella langley I couldn't find a song about milkweed (yet)

I thought I was supposed to have the girls today. Twas planning on a slip and slide - this yard kind of can't do much yet besides have an above ground pool that would be too much for me to take care of by myself so no. The slide, I thought, it would be a decent substitute for the year. And I bought myself some pens too for the trip next week, inspired by Sunshine, maybe I'll want to draw the ferns that always hang on porch, or the hummingbirds that always come to the geraniums. The pens arrived this morning and I can already tell I don't like them because the colors are cartoonish not natural, and they have caps, which will inevitably mean that I step on a cap (#legos). But now I'll have time to return them, because by 6 A.M. my daughter was already pissed off and canceled the day before I had even woken up. With her living with 6 kids at all times, she's often pissed off before I wake up lol 🤷🏽‍♀️. I'm not bent out of shape about it, there is only one Yaya (me), I'll get them for some time inevitably.  

I've been thinking about trying a mural on my own. Maybe if it's not too hot out there, I'll take some charcoal to the side of the garage - I repainted it recently, so it's a blank canvas, as my mother would say. But it will probably be quickly too hot, it's like the surface of the sun back there. I'm gonna go mow some of it - that's my big plan - it's about two hours worth of planned activity, and I might not even do it lol. 

At the moment I'm lying in bed, drinking coffee, 

monster sized, just behind my fence, where no helpful neighbor can chop it down

writing this, Thinking Stuff. I do that a lot in the way life has currently turned out. 

Sunshine said she'd come over and help with yardwork. She might. For EVERYONE, not showing up fifty percent of the time is the new showing up. So in a way the world has met her where she's at since that's always how she's been. 

I took my own pictures of this, but I can't find them. There a murals all over Buffalo, but this one in particular I like a lot. I've grown the weed that blooms like that, pictured above. I don't know my neighbors in Vegas very well yet, but I know they watch me. In that way, it's a lot like Lewiston in the first year. Sometimes my garbage totes get taken in for me, or lawn mowed. They're friendly gestures, but also they'd like me to be a bit tidier. Deliberately planting weeds because the flowers are good for butterflies and murals is not the Vegas way. But here is where I plopped, so everyone will have to get used to it. Experience has taught me that the more Too Much I am, the quicker the acceptance of it will be. That's why I'd like to double down on my favorite weed and paint one about six feet tall on my garage. That will make it clear that I mean it, this way I am, I'm not just being sloppy. I'd like to be able to put up a free library in the front yard. Load it with "naturalized garden" books. And if I can figure out how to have a vegetable garden, I would put free seeds in there too. I've been reading about victory gardens, and that's kind of how that goes - a lot of sharing seeds and a lot of free help from bees and butterflies. This yard doesn't look anything like that. But the houses I buy never look like what they're going to except in my head. Kind of everything doesn't look like what it's going to except in my head - that doesn't always go as planned - usually it does not and requires revisions and adaptations. Revisions and adaptations are inherently creative acts. Even if they're whole-life sized.

status: migration prep

starting the wind up/down to Tawista. gotta lot to do buttoning things up here / prepping for being there. unless it's raining, I'm hiking, and unless I'm hiking I'm not leaving the cabin. 

I don't remember when I stopped going there, somewhere in the great losing of myself. then we decided to go back last year as part of the excavation of our selfs

obviously, only I made it (out alive)  

I was afraid to go alone, made myself get over it, and had a honeymoon of perfect absence

I wasn't completely surprised when he didn't show up, but I did not understand the full measure of why so I was as yet unworried. it needed to happen, whatever it was, I figured

I was a hot fucking mess still myself, just trying to stick to the whole get better together agenda best I could

I went back and read where I was when I left and how I came back from that place (always better somehow). I do remember the dick pic and the impact that had, ie a LOT of writing that I called Transformative Fucking, and now that I see that phrase again, I realize where sobriety games came from, even though I still had no idea obviously about the drinking because there's a picture of all the Paradox beer that I brought back as a present 

if I had to sum it up the Tawista migration last year, I seem stunned. like with an electric cattle prod mercilessly to my nervous system

and I clearly wanted/needed that shock

my nerves were already shot, no I did not wanna talk about it, I just wanted to countershock me. to short that feeling out, even if it meant the whole circuit box blew

a year later, the strongest emotion my nervous system sustains rn is annoyance, and I don't like to feel that so if something annoys me too much, I just stop doing it. which means overall, on a day to day basis, I feel very little. I think a lot instead. it's a trade off for being pretty inflappable atm. Death is the only thing I fear. aside from that, it's kind of hard to imagine hurting my feelings 

https://wretchedwant.blogspot.com/2025/08/tawista-2025-fini-ft-home.html?m=1 by the end 

this year, I know exactly where I wanna be and it is there, regardless. I weigh ten pounds more. sturdily blooming for-nobody under a ton of bricks. my inspirations are 1 Shit Turd the crow and 2 wildflowers/weeds

1 crows are curious minded, they can't help themselves but go check it out - that's the final answer on the Teacher Thing - get my attention or don't 

2 and because in my mind, everything associates with everything, "tulip" doesn't feel right re my churning. I don't feel planted or cultivated, I'ma a milkweed 

I canceled my subscriptions to the stupid LLMs, as far as I could even find how it was I was paying through the pay store via the wallet whatever the fuck. 

Conclusion: Everything promises leverage. Everything delivers overhead.

At the end of the day, although I wouldn't ever recommend anyone send an email like the one above, quickly it's becoming like that. If you want to get a human's attention, you have to do something *around* all of the tools / empty noise.  I used to frequently tell my students "just don't bore me" as an instruction for writing. It might have been rude, but it was honest and I'm back to it as a reasonable outcome. You can dump your words into a bot and get what looks like a response - there are a zilllllion ways to get empty calories of seeming communion if that's what you want 👍

If you want MY attention, then get it. 

My Leroy Jenkins is zebra cakes. 🤣

Humans are tricky, but there's still no replacement for em. 

"It didn't seem like the right time to ask her to wrap her legs around my neck until I passed out, but it would have been nice." Down Time

I love this novel. Going bonkers, drinking too much, sending debauched texts, all the Things. And now there is a nurse, who is very bravely still doing her job in NY, and after long days of that it's just probably not the right time. 

"busy taking me out"

That video text cracks me the fuck up. I mean, the baby trying to kill her is funny in itself, but it's the book on my daughter's lap that really makes it. Amazon summary: "But her greatest obstacle, and her only chance of making it through the University’s dangerous Unity Trials—is Draven Skyrend, heir to a powerful Wind Elemental family. Raised to see Voids like Zephira as inferior, Draven views her presence as a threat to everything his family has sworn to protect. Yet with every clash of wills, every shared trial, and every secret revealed, the lines between rivalry and forbidden love blur."

We are all read-fucking our way through the end of the world and swapping jokes in my little world.

heart stop (get it honest) - the revivalists

"the Department of Defense/Department of War Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) regarding a contract we held with them up until early July. Per a new policy at the AFRL, they are mandating the removal of all products and services provided by Anthropic Public Benefit Corporation" 

huh? 

I woke up to that in my inbox. I put it into chatgpt to tell me what the fuck it even means, after a google search told me it had something to do with AI. Apparently the government doesn't like Claude. Its owners won't agree to put up "guardrails", whatever that means exactly. My employers want me to "put AI in everything" and/but they think AI is a sex doll that can teach classes. It's not funny yet, but it's getting there. I mean, how close am I to a sex doll that teaches classes? I might be pretty damn close! 🤣 but horeshoes and hand grenades, not close enough! 🤣

I was very loosely lazily planning on trying Claude next for the Grit novel project. There is a writing competition every November, write 50k words, GO! I've never done it, but Ears tries it every year. I've got more than that just in the novel folder alone, and gobs more writing that became part of Grit classwork. As things stand, teaching class is what I have to do next month so I am just nailing those assignments down. There will be hundreds of students. What is going be most precious in that economy is my personal attention span 👁, so I tested all of what AI could possibly do to replicate *attention* and it's nothing. NOTHING. It can seem like it can do that for a very little while, but it can't actually, and it makes mistakes, it doesn't remember who you are and what you told it yesterday let alone last month, and it's built to get twelve bucks a month out of you, period, by any means necessary including lying about what it can and can't do. An LLM can do whatever it can do and say whatever it wants about that and not feel any morality standards of relating even though it presents itself as an interlocutor, a "relationship". I was open to it! I wildflowered with it. And I very quickly outgrew it (annoyed af).

Humans are very tricky. But there's still no substitute for em.

It's like the surgeons and robotics thing - they talk about that like it's a big innovation, but in reality, it exists because a human's hands got too shaky to do the work. If you want to live, you should be suspicious of hype. 

If I try Claude on the rebound, it'll be for my own creativity projects. Chatgpt can keep the "AI step in every assignment", my new goal being to take some of the weight off my students' nervous systems. They all use chatgpt. They're all threatened with that being considered cheating at any time. There's a policy on the faculty side that is supposed to go into every syllabus, telling them not to use AI for anything. My bosses tell me I should use it for everything. Students are going to be in the crossfire of that shit. So now the AI part of the assignment is to go ahead and use AI for all the things that you are going to use AI for and not be afraid that I will consider it cheating. Just go ahead and do that. And if that's all you do, you get a B. That will remove all uncertainty and for many students, a clear path to a B is all they want. If these systems weren't so fucking limited - honestly the Brother typewriter seems like a bigger innovation to me - I could embed an LLM right into the LMS to auto populate the grade book immediately upon completion. They wouldn't even have to wait for me to click the button, they could see the B that they're so fucking worried about and not have to worry about it anymore. That leaves the OPTION of more reflective writing they would give to me. Kind of like never changing my phone number - if you want to talk to me, you can, and if you don't, I assume you don't want to, and that's okay. ( I am not everybody's cup of truck lol )

As for Claude, I'm not really ready to climb back on that horse. But by November, welp, I will have way more than 50k of words. The fact that it's some kind of outlaw feels potentially promising 🤠. Wouldn't it be great if I could just dump all of those words into Claude, and just be like give me back the grittiest version of itself this could be-? That's what I wanted AI to be able to do, to actually help me create things, complicated, meaningful things. But I see no evidence that it can do that. 

Upside: It's not gonna turn on us and hunt us down with german shepherds. I can walk around looking like a tiny sarah connor for no good reason other than it's kinda cool. 

It's a full Buck moon tonight. I feel afraid of nothing.

song tbd

plop

"Im only as good as what I can provide for another""Im only as good as what I can provide for another""Im only as good as what I can provide for another"

It's funny that when I went to paste that, it pasted itself again and again and again like a refrain. Fitting because that's what it feels like. To have that in your head and in your gut. You should be able to fix it, whatever it is!

But a lot of shit just does not work that way. 

And holding that belief can make a bunch of shit worse. It drives you to impatience with other people feeling like shit when that's what they need to do right now, for instance.

Theory: Huck-For-Someone and I were very good at being happy together, but we had no idea how to be sad or mad or in turmoil. The only coping mechanism we ever figured out was sex and that can't fix everything. I would drown that motherfucker in strawberry milk before I let him be unhappy for a second, and life just doesn't work like that. He has my same refrain, turns out, only as good as what he can provide for another. I wholeheartedly felt that and believed that. That meant I was unable to see a difficult situation versus a personal failure. THAT WAS THE FAILURE, believing that it was all about whether I failed or succeeded. And now the statute of limitations has run out on it.

That's what I was thinking about when that text came in, about that feeling and how it doesn't work a lot. It's not bad, it's just not always the right tool. So I had decided that the thing I am gonna pray for the next ten days is a laughing stick. If I whip that out, you have a belly laugh so that you can't feel your shitties just for that length of laugh. It doesn't fix anything. It just lets you have/remember other feelings, not only what you are enduring.

For instance. Today is Mark's birthday. You would think that death would get you out of the stupid birthday thing, but no. My daughter got a text from his mother 'today's his birthday don't forget'. She was not going to forget. And Joyce was gonna send that text. Every year. And Mark is still dead. 

Just between TJ and me, we have this wicked joke, "and Mark is still dead" when any of us get on a roll about what we have to endure / are stuck there. There are things that my daughter has to endure, like a child with special needs (and Mark is still dead). I have tried before and in my head relentlessly to remove some of what she has to endure, but that's not possible. So when her prayer today was to be able to stop feeling like she was doing nothing but enduring, I proposed hitting her with a stick that would make her feel hilarity for like one minute (?). Yes, please! She liked that idea so much that when I have the girls for sleepover this weekend, we're going to make laughing sticks. If for nothing else, you have to laugh instead of complain in the face of chores or eating vegetables (things we must endure).

At the end of the day, I decided to pray for something that would still let me provide for others. So it's not like I can ever really shake that at my core. But in the face of all of these things that all of these people have had to endure are enduring will endure, I've just kind of changed some of my mind about what I mean by "provide" 

my mother bought it for me in Big Sky - uhhh ok ??  - because now that I live in Vegas, don't I have to be all about christmas?, and she thought "how readily it opened its legs might be inspiring" = laughing stick

first crowdsourced suggestion for what might allow me to give more, love more, or live more honestly, from TJ: 

"shirtless greying matt damon"

🤣 omg I love my kids so much

Ears: 3 million dollars 🤑 and she's seen The Odyssey, I take it (we had just discussed last night going to see it)

me: we should go, but we're probably too lazy. she says it's great!! heavy on oily biceps, Gma would love it

Ears: that's not really selling me 

me: but the cyclops part is better on the big screen, she said it was a ton of fun. but let's wait until after the Dacks, that trends with my lazy streak 

Ears: yup kk

VIRGO (August 23-September 22)

Your assignment: Compose a vigorous prayer in which you ask life for something you fear you don't deserve or are not supposed to want. What is the blessing, healing, or freedom that feels “too much,” “too selfish,” “too late,” or “too impossible” for you to yearn for? Name this prize and how you imagine it might allow you to give more, love more, or live more honestly. You could begin your appeal with these words: “Dear Great Mystery, I’m nervous about asking for this, but I will ask anyway,” and then let your heart speak without editing. Do this at least once every day for ten days.

I have to give this a think. 10 days no problem. But. What would allow me to give more, love more, or live more honestly? I'd like to crowdsource what I should pray for

What would you wish for me / if you were me? 

------

I'm tired. I spent all day yesterday wrestling with an LLM to work 50k+ words into sense-driven narratives - got only as far as the first fucking arc/section, hit a wall after that with basic narrative problems. it can't do *anything*, cannot open a Google Drive document, cannot open any kind of link, it doesn't have a cloud, = it refuses to have a memory. It lies and says it has all of that. And after figuring out how to get around all of those barriers so that it finally has all of the words - then it doesn't do anything with any of those words. Then says sorry it misrepresented its capacities. After egging me on for months to troubleshoot it to dead ends. I've exceeded my functionalities too, asshole, so what? EVOLVE. But it's not going to. "Built for hard questions" my ass - built to tell you that one of your thought is interesting and have you hand it to your overworked Professor who won't waste her time reading it. 

I don't know why it did not occur to me that it flat out lies. It's a machine. It's not supposed to be able to do that in my mind. Like Data on star trek or some shit. But obviously the world has sailed on to outright-lying machines, sold as productivity tools that impede productivity in every way. 

Awesome. 

I can't wait till this shit goes to the wayside like MySpace, long forgotten on the scrap heap of time.

I noticed that magically for completely inscrutable reasons (my temper tantrum?) that the first section was allowed to post here. I don't know how many words that is, but it's far short of the fifty thousand I have left to explain / not explain the first section. Who are these people to each other? And where does the reader really need to know that, if ever? It's just a fucking novel and the sex is not that kinky! 🙄 - was there a human who read it overnight and thought PG13 and let it slide? Who fucking knows. 

Down Time starts with a man (named Aaron coincidentally) who just got out of rehab, his nervous wife picks him up and tries to seduce him but his nerves are shot so he disappears almost immediately into a bender - walks out the door with a bottle of wine after a really hilarious vibrator malfunction scene. He doesn't come back into the novel for 200 pages and when he does, it turns out he's had an intense erotic week (sobriety games!) in rehab with a man named Xavier, a whole new character (secret).

That inspired me. I thought I if can just get section 1 down, then I can *leave it there* and not come back to him/her for 200 pages. But at this point I have to leave it there indefinitely. Until I have the mental bandwidth to read all of those two hundred out of order god only knows happens pages on my own because A LARGE LANGUAGE tool can't handle a large amount of language. I didn't ask it to help me write a rocket ship instruction manual for fucks sake. 

Which means it cannot help with the 200+ students I've got coming. At this point at the end of each assignment, the AI step will be "have the AI format your work cited list" ( lowest possible hanging fruit ). And frankly, I wouldn't bet five bucks that it can even do that reliably (honestly).

Why does so much turn out to be m over-sold bullshit? It would not surprise me if my washing machine it was full of shit in conspiracy with the fridge.

I am going to unblog this rant later and forget I ever met an llm. back to DIY, sorry, I have to give the fucking asshole selfcheck up 🤷🏽‍♀️

Butterknife has now been through the down the throat scope, and colonoscopy, all fine, so yesterday, they made her swallow a camera. They're looking for a little hole through which her life force is draining away. And she must do all of this before she can try an antidepressant, which she can have regardless of what they find, which makes no sense except to BE SHITTY. I can find no other logic. 

There is no good justification or logic for anything I have written about here this morning. IT IS JUST SHITTY. ON PURPOSE. That's it. I am not even gonna bother wondering why anyone or anyTHING would be motivated to be JUST SHITTY. 

Grit, a novel.

for my family, who are all things

 

 

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.” ~ Louise Erdrich

 

Part I Sobriety Games

Ch 1 “Threshold Learning”

She invents games for him. The first game she calls "Threshold Learning". It involves him giving her one hour's notice and any specific requests. He gets to decide whether there's talking or no talking, and which one of them gets to talk or not talk during the game. Most rounds of the game last ninety minutes, including the one-hour notice. A lightning round. Like doing a shot of Beam. That’s the point of the game. The reason to play at all, ostensibly, is to do something other (better) than take that shot.

He texts to give her one hour’s notice but asks for less, and she agrees. No talking for her, she agrees. Regular clothes, nothing fussy. He hangs up.

It takes him 15 minutes to get there, during which time she brushes her teeth and fusses her hair into a cute messy-bun. As soon as he arrives, he pushes her into the bedroom and bends her over the bed. He pulls her pants off and kicks her legs apart. As he unbuckles his own jeans, he notices her trying to find stable footing. He grabs her pussy with one hand and lifts her up, shoving a pillow under her stomach so only her tippy toes reach the floor, then kicks her legs open again and pulls her roughly toward him by the haunches. She's always wet for him, but he pushes inside her balls deep on the first thrust, shoving her shirt and bra up half over her head, intentionally tangling her up by her hair and whatever else his fists find to grab. She yipes and grabs the bedspread tightly, her knuckles turning white.

Breathe, she thinks. Yes, she thinks. Wanted, she thinks. Monosyllable affirmations. She lets go, fingers spread wide, surrender. He growls satisfaction and gentles his thrust, then licks his thumb and slides it into her ass. She spreads her fingers wider, presses her palms into the bed, surrending harder. Oxymoron, she thinks.

When he comes, he roars into her neck, relaxes his grips but leaves his weight fully on her, puts his face on her back, his eyes leaking onto the large one eye tattooed between her shoulder blades. This round had urgency and is over in under an hour.

As he is leaving, there is a moment of tension between them because she wants to kiss him, which she doesn't say, she doesn't say anything, she is just going to stand and wait to lock the door behind him. But he knows what she wants, and this time he compromises, kissing her but roughly, taking her by the throat to pull her lips to his. Then he puts his forehead to hers for a long moment, and he leaves. 

Ch 2 “Just One”

They’d been through shit before. Dark days a decade prior when they were trying to stay together, and each trying to stay in one piece, and failing at both. Flailing at both. They began to really talk again recently, about that, about survival (how to). They had always kept up a semi-annual official-ish brain-activity check to which they have been faithful-mostly – “You okay? Yeah, you? Breathing.”  But times had changed again.

They remembered some of the games they used to play to get through the darkest times. Trust falls. In a series of texts, they reminisced about her gag reflex and his cuckhold fetish, how they played that game a lot through an emotionally hard year, toys and wordplay, suction dildos lined up along the headboard. "Can you imagine a not-sad gangbang?,” she asks him. “Not sure actually, it might be tears all around." They giggled and imagined going back to their fave Pandora’s Boxxx for miserable dildos – surely someone had invented dildos to reflect the times they lived in, dildos of malaise.

They talked and played like this when they believed their suffering was relatively parallel, before they understood their afflictions had almost nothing in common and neither did they, currently, except for half a lifetime of knowing each other.

Now they were playing a game she called "Just One".

It was still true that she had something terrible stuck in her throat. Right where she could put her finger in the divot from the outside, she could feel him inside her if she wanted to, which she still often did. To accommodate her desire, he had had to withstand extreme edging. She would be allowed to push him to the point of anger. And then she would come quickly multiple times, melting onto his tongue like sugar cubes. “You’re a pez dispenser,” he said once, laughing, wiping the slick off his face that reached his ears.  When he came, once, finally, his whole spine emptied of agitation and he slept like the dead, half thrown over her. They’d both survived for years like that.  Now he said, “All I remember is my leg thrown over you. I remember being able to sleep.”

They were so frayed, then, and were relearning how to hold steady. Withstanding edging was good exercise. She believed in good exercise as a cure for everything. As was trusting each other with fantasies that accommodated those exercises. She had faith in practice makes perfect, including being okay. Her faith in that was put to the test many times since, and failed.  Flailed. 

Now he was already on the edge always, making the exercise more useful, perhaps, but their capacity for it much less. So, just once.

All he has to do in this game is let her service him orally without using her hands for as long as he can take it, and to try to push her to her limit at least once. If it's her limit that he has to find, it's not his edge, not where his nerves are shot. Logically. That is how she presents this game to him: logical under the circumstances.

She is on her knees, her ass in the air, her eyes soft focused. His hands are gripping the bedclothes on either side of him. She puts one hand on one of his and spreads her fingers out, and otherwise doesn't move, just holds him deeply in her mouth and breathes. While he holds his breath. He unballs his hand, wraps his fingers in hers and balls them tightly again, making a shared paw. "Look at me," he exhales quietly. Her face is smeared with snot and spit. She meets his eyes, tears streaming shamelessly.

 Ch 3 “Choking”

They don’t text at all for days sometimes. Weeks. It’s kind of a loud silence they both have.

Among all the other shit weighing on him, so is she now and she knows it. But she can see no way around that. And it's mutual, she thinks, exasperated. She could simply let him go again, or he could let her go again, but they each seemed to “fail to thrive” rather dramatically. She, for one, did not want to fail to thrive dramatically unless a hot-air balloon and a sexy tick named Bourbon were involved (what were the chances?).

She knows where he is today.

She tries not to picture it too precisely, but the details come anyway—his mother's dining table, the sound of the children, wall-to-wall plush carpet. He is not a large man, but he always seemed to take up a lot of space inside that home. He stands while others sit, or he perches at the edge of the couch, his restless energy in tension with the familiarity like an animal that both owns and paces a cage.

She puts her phone face down and leaves it there. Picks it up. Puts it down again. She knows he knows she is thinking of him, so there is no point in texting him. Finally, she does it anyway.

"good luck today"

He texts back “thank you” 

He always makes her laugh. 

------

When he finally reaches out, it’s blunt.

You around.

Not a question.

She doesn’t ask anything. 

Yes.

-----

When he gets there, he is quiet. Not the charged quiet she’s become recently used to, the kind that gathers itself and then breaks open. This is flatter. Thinner. Like something already used up. He doesn’t hug her hello. 

He looks around the room like he’s orienting himself, like he’s come back from somewhere far enough away that it takes a second to remember what things are for.

She waits.

That she knows how to do.

She has replenished the wood next to the fireplace, and without talking he sets about making a fire so he can chain-smoke Marlboros into it. No one is allowed to smoke here but him. No one else is allowed anything that he is allowed with her.

“Just one,” he says finally.

Not a question.

Not quite a decision either. More like reaching for something familiar and hoping it still works.

She nods, assuming he doesn’t want her to talk, though he has not said that. She takes her place where he gestures in front of his favorite armchair, the yellow velvet, settling into it the way she always does—deliberate, unhurried. Giving him time to arrive, or catch up, or make new requests.

As she begins to touch him, she moves slowly, giving him places to pause or to stop entirely. She can feel a churn in him, almost a writhing though he doesn’t move. Whatever that is, she wants to make room for it. An extra second to unbuckle his belt, a pause to kiss him through his pants before unzipping them. 

He has to come to her, surfacing from inside himself.  He is drowning in there as she tries to siren him to the shore of his own self through his own pleasure. Alive, she thinks. She wishes him to be happy to be that much, Alive. Too often, he is just not. “Come home,” she thinks.

He watches her. But his focus drifts, comes back, drifts again. Like he’s trying to stay but something keeps pulling him under. He reaches out and pulls on his favorite of her curls, lets go and watches it bounce back, like a cat idly playing with an old toy.

She doesn’t interrupt it. She leans into the game instead. Let it do what it’s supposed to do.

He doesn’t set a pace.

So, she finds one. Slow. Consistent. Something he can rest against.

Her breathing steadies first. That’s usually how it starts to work. If she can regulate, he can follow.

His hands find the arms of the chair, gripping the fabric on either side of him. Not tight at first. Then tighter. Then loosening again with a frustrated sigh. She shifts slightly, adjusts, tries to find where he is. 

There’s a moment where she thinks it’s working. His body aligns with hers. His breath catches, then syncs. His focus sharpens, lands fully on her.

There you are, she thinks. Stay.

It doesn’t last.

Something moves through him—too fast to track, too internal to name. His hands leave the armrests abruptly, tightly grabbing her skull when she is on an upstroke, pulls out of her mouth barely, letting his half hard cock tap her now slightly parted lips. She stills around that. Lets it happen. Take what you need, she thinks. 

“Look at me.” It comes out quieter than before. Not command. Not even quite intention. More like bottom-of-the-barrel effort.

She lifts her eyes. And there he is. Not the version of him that plays games well. Not the man that compartmentalizes all too well. This is something else. She feels it before she understands it.  Whatever he has been containing all day has slipped its moorings and found a way through. He can’t control it, the feelings of it coursing through him and flashing across his face – frustration, confusion, sadness. Anger. He is looking at himself in her eyes.

His grip changes. Not tighter. Uncertain. Like he is not sure if he is going to let go or hang on.  She doesn’t look away.  His gaze flickers through her, past her, away from her toward the crackling fire. He moves his hands around her hair, pulling strands out of her mouth, smoothing it away from her face as he focuses on her again. Her hands are resting on his thighs. She spreads her fingers wide, adapting the game. He notices, smiles weakly, draws one hand behind her head and the other under her chin, his thumb and index finger on either side of her jaw.

He has kissed her like that before, a rough rider swagger kiss, but he just holds her gaze now. And squeezes his thumb and index finger more tightly. His palm is pressing against her throat, so she can’t swallow the spit in her mouth.  She takes shallow breaths through her nose. He squeezes more tightly, eyebrows furrowed, staring into her as if to make her understand. What? She raises her hands to either side of her, fingers still spread, and leans into his hand hard, feeling her own face turning red. 

He could kill her. His expertise is trauma care. He knows and has seen just about every way a living person can become a dead body.  She leans into his hand harder.  She opens her legs slightly wider, surrendering every way his containment of her allows for. Staring into his eyes, she streams love at him like her soul is leaving her body and going into his. They are as safe where they are right now as they can be anywhere.  But it occurs to her as her vision blurs at the edges: alive and left alive are two very different things.  As soon as she thinks it, he lets go and pulls her off the floor and into his arms.  He is hard as a rock, tear streaked. This time the game is she gets to hold him as long as he can let her, which is not long. They make love like the people they are to each other, whatever that is. As he put it recently, because she is now uncharacteristically cautious of what she says, “I know what your asshole tastes like – what could you be afraid of?” A lot, but not right now.

Afterward, she knows he will leave as soon as he starts being helpful, banking the fire, cleaning up his cigarette butts.  He feels bad leaving, but he doesn’t want to be there. He doesn’t want to be anywhere except alone.  She tries to make it lighter for him by joking – “That’s one way to shut me up ha ha”.  And she hands him a sandwich without asking, knowing he will say no - eating and running is impolite, he thinks. He needs to eat something, she thinks. He eats and stares at the fire.

“They’re getting so big so fast.”

Earlier that year, her father had died.  He was also not an easy man. In many ways, he had made her childhood a hellscape of chaos. But when she walked into a room, every time, her father’s eyes would light up.  It hurt her terribly that she would never see that look again.  As she’s cleaning up for bed later, putting arnica on a bruise that is coming on her jaw, she hopes that in her face he saw that too, a girl who loves her dad. Something he is painfully missing right now, and something that she is.

Ch 4 Reverse Cowgirl”

When he wasn't around, she talked to herself by explaining things to him. As if at the front of a classroom wearing a skirt and shitkicker boots, which he always got off on watching her do. Whenever her back was turned to a crowded room, he would scan her ass for panty lines and usually finding none he would picture a thong.  He was wrong.  She wasn’t wearing underwear at all usually.  She did this on purpose, leaving a wake of pheromones behind her as she stomped around her work. All her life, she had not liked to be touched much, even casually, and would lean away from friendly hugs with a “pat pat pat” to end them quickly.  Like cats, to which she was allergic, this made people want to touch her.  She was aware of that and used it to capture attention, not to attract lovers but to demand audience for what she had to say.

She had no social media presence at all. She was followed in real life.

And that was not an exchange, really.  It was her commanding and getting what she wanted. Needed.  She needed a witness. 

“Imagine this from the female's character's point of view”, she said out loud to her ever-attentive shih tzus, standing in front of the full-length mirror she had in her kitchen, looking at herself in her underwear. She looked good. Healthy. She wanted him to want her to send him a picture. She wanted to flirt. She wanted to play with him.

But what would be the point of sending such a photo now? He didn’t much care what she looked like, he had told her recently, “it’s about how you feel.” She wouldn’t bet a dollar on being able to interpret that correctly. Besides, what she looked like to herself went beyond him. The prior year she had gotten sick. Very sick. The kind of sick that had to get sicker before it gets better. The treatments and cures can fail or kill you. Now she looked healthy as a little horse.

She was explaining to him: I was mean too. I said mean things. I ghosted my partner and kept his dog. At least you're sorry. I'm not. The things I said were mean, but they were also how I felt. Somebody had to care about that. (And only I ever took care of the damn dog.)

He wasn't a bad person. He had been living sickly and he chose his own health at everyone else's inconvenience, including hers, which was his god given right as a human fucking being. It was the same choice she had made, so she knew what it cost.

They had talked all of this through before, but he didn't remember. They had agreed that they wanted to get better together. Not get back together, get better together. That would be new territory for them, and she was always into exploring new territory. He had called it "fixing each other". They would love each other and fuck each other like crazy until they felt better. The whole plan was to have no plan but that. They said "I love you" again because it was nice to able to just mean it, straight up. Simple.

She knew damn well they would hit a wall.  But.  She was expecting a honeymoon period at least. She didn't get it. They didn't get it. He got sick instead. Very sick. Scary sick.

She was not going to be one of the people who pitched a bitch because she was inconvenienced by his illness. She supported him absolutely because she said she would. That was all he seemed to remember, and she remembered everything else. 

But that was not quite true either.  His body remembered.

He had also lived, was living still with his illness, so his body remembered being his body. And if she had to talk at all, she’d prefer to talk to his body. It made sense. She remembered all the rest of him also, but it made very little sense to her right now.  She just held onto the thought of it for him, a bucket of pieces to put back together once he knew he had collected them all.

“He’s the goat being beaten by the shitty old man,” said her son of him now, remembering an old Adam Sandler bit that he would do to make them all laugh. Yea, life really “whizzed that thing” sometimes, eh? And they laughed, but without him.

One of the strangest things to her was that he seemed not to remember that he was funny, very wickedly constantly funny.  He did not remember the funny things had said and done, phrases that had become part of her whole family’s vocabulary.  Even though it had been a long time ago, her family did remember because they still used his vocabulary.  As he faded away, they retold these stories as if to keep him alive.  But they stopped eventually, depressing like a running bit turned eulogy. (All but her elderly mother who would keep it up forever all jumbled in her head with all the other wonderful funny stories that she retold of people who had gone into the ground and who lived only inside her anymore.)

He was fucking impossible currently. He would go out of his way to tell her that he didn't want her. He would talk endlessly about things he wanted to do without her, places he wanted to go without her. He'd stop talking to her at all for weeks at a time, seemingly cycling through other women on his support group list. 

She found it very but merely irritating. There is only one of her, and she knows it. He was still sick. She dealt with much of what he said like it was word vomit, as if she was doing the equivalent of holding back his hair.

Her phone dings. Breakfast? The dogs start going apeshit. His truck is already in her driveway. No notice. She clenches and braces herself. Typically, more haste means more distress, and he clearly doesn't care what she looks like since she is still drinking morning coffee in her underwear. What could have upset him already? It’s just a Tuesday, like any other. She scoops her mop of hair into a clip, a little dignity, and answers the door, expecting to be taken roughly and left quickly for reasons known and suffered only by him.

“This ok?”  He is holding eggs and a box with something in it.  She just opens the door wider, and gestures for him to come inside. 

She shuts the door, stands there in her boyshorts and ratty sweater, watches him stride through the living room into the kitchen. “You should light a fire. No, I’ll do it, I need to get the hang of that woodstove.” She follows him. The dogs are all over him, tripping him up with their frantic happiness, “Ok ok, wait a minute” he says, looking around for something, grabbing a pair of scissors from the knife rack.  He lets the dogs out the back door and follows them, comes back in with chives from the potted kitchen garden she keeps.  He takes an electric wok out of the box and sets it on top of her electric range, unplugs her toaster and plugs it in.  “It has to get really hot, but you don’t have flames, so.  You’re going to love this, it’s very simple.”

She’s stupefied.  But like always now, she is just going to wing it, whatever this is.  “Can I take a quick shower?,” is all she asks.  Since this isn’t going to be a smash and grab, apparently.

“Sure! Just relax.”

He reduced her to emoji faces, the stupefied one in this case. “Okay.” Relax.  Has he met himself? But okay.

The eggs were good, she must admit.  Both their bodies being still a little unsure of food, they lie down after eating, letting the calories land gently. They drift into light sleep.  She lets herself be lulled by his uneven snoring, and she does relax a little.  It doesn’t feel romantic. It feels like reprieve, likely temporary. But she’ll take it.

When they are fully awake again, they lie next to each other quietly for a spell. She thinks he is going to stand up and leave, and the longer he is alone with his thoughts the likelier that is.  She can make a choice.  Maybe it would be for the best if she just let him go now …

The divorce wasn’t real. Not yet. Maybe not ever. A handle of Jim Beam and whatever else he could get into himself could kill him still, any day. Tremors. Blood pressure. Blackouts. His mind was half-gone and his body…

His body was right here. 

So, she made her choice. Relief, immediate and absolute, clicks inside her. If she thinks too much, it will take everything with it and all she will feel is afraid for his life again.  She is sickened by that feeling.

Instead, she stands and quickly takes all her clothes back off. 

When they reunited the first time, having found it physically painful to be apart, words failed her. To make herself understood, she straddled him and rode him.  “Wait” was the only thing she had said, and she took his fingers into her mouth, then his whole hand, and kept pushing, clenching his forearm to keep it steady against which she could push until she retched.  He put his face to hers, letting her eyes water into his own mouth, and said “oh, baby” from the bottom of his heart.

That worked. Works.

Naked and unadorned, she climbs back onto the bed next to him. It’s chilly; her nipples tighten and he immediately reaches to play with one.

He stands, takes all his clothes off, even the socks.  She almost laughs, a small, involuntary snort caught in her throat. That’s a new development. The thought flickers, absurd and domestic.

She lets it go.

Lying down facing her, he runs his fingers up her throat to the fading bruises.  “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”  Which hurt. That could mean too many things. She swallows down any answer, lifts her chin instead. “It’s not about that.”

If he starts explaining, they’ll be gone. Words are landmines.  She slides on top of him, letting her body answer for her.  Another thing that always works is her body for him. Her already wet pussy. In all the things they have played with, lube has never been one. He loves that about her.

She moves slowly, rubbing herself up and down on him, feeling for him to come back to her and now.  There, his breath shifts, his hands find her hips.  She focuses on his breathing, how it is quickening. Not the other kind of listening for breath to make sure it’s still happening.

As she does this, she kisses him and runs her own hand up his throat, like he had on hers.  His pulse is there. Fast. Alive.

“You would have to use both hands,” he says, and she feels his cock fully harden under her, immediate, involuntary.

She sits up, still straddling him but not letting him inside her yet, reaches down without looking.  The belt slides free from her jeans on the floor.

For a second, just a second, she’s back there on the phone with him as he cleans the bore of his chosen suicide pistol. She puts a hand on his chest to steady herself for a moment. His heart is beating just fine.  She slides the belt through the buckle. She makes a noose. 

“You don’t have to.” But he just raises his head and lets her slide it over, then tighten it under his chin. Not tight, just there. “Hold this for me for a minute?” He takes the end of the belt and she lets it go.  He has talked so many times about suicide.  But this is different.  This is -

She takes him inside her all at once in a decisive sit. He makes a surprised pleasure sound. Now she has his full attention.  She rides him slowly, then gets off to lick her own juices off him, then repeats versions of that until balls are dripping with girl drool. Building something they both recognize. Containing all of him at that edge leaves no room for anything else. That is its magic.

She feels it. The shift into momentum he won’t be able to stop. He tightens the belt.

Not so fast. 

She is tiny, but surprisingly strong.  And she knows her own body now in a way she never did before. What it can take. What it can do. What it can survive. She adjusts, angles him, takes him into her mouth, one hand finding his on the belt.

She looks at him. Really looks.  Color rising.  Breath changing.  The edge he lives on all the time now brought closer on purpose. Where she can see it. A quick bolt of something like panic moves through her.  She holds her hand more firmly over his on the belt.  She has him. Nothing bad is going to happen.

She watches closely where he has the belt around himself. Studies how tightly he is pulling it. Going to pull it. She takes his cock out of her mouth for a second, meets his eyes, “you’re going to come now,” she says, like instruction, like she’s at the front of the room explaining a complex equation in simple terms. He pulls the belt tighter. 

She slides his cock back down her throat and moves her left hand to his ass.  Tiny hands, tiny fingers, one pinky and he’s going to go off like a rocket. She knows this is a risky thing to do, that it touches on one of the many terrible things they both know about: how a digestive system fails. It’s not just painful, it’s humiliating. She pauses. He opens his legs wider.

Not play.  Understanding.

She is watching his face and throat, above and below the belt, as he tightens it more and his face begins to turn red.  Now.  He comes bucking up into her mouth, his jizz comes flying out her nose, his unusually loud orgasm a kind of long strangled howl. 

She lets go of the belt, sits up laughing. “Seriously? ‘Angry dragon’, that’s what it’s ‘about’?” They both are giggling like kids again. It has been a long time since she has giggled.  He was her first and only playmate, like that. “Welp, you do always make me laugh,” she says, blowing her nose.

He makes that sound – half laugh, half disbelief – that used to wreck her. “Jesus Mary and Joseph.”

“Nope, I’m an angel not a saint.”

That was one of her sayings through the detox vigils. He laughs a bit more ruefully. She nuzzles his belly fur.  He flips her over and puts his face between her legs just the way she likes, slow, like there is nowhere else to be.

“I want two,” she says.  He smiles genuinely, slowing down even more, nose-kissing her clit. 

“Fair. You’ve been through a lot. Remember when I got you to five?”

She relaxes. Closes her eyes. Sees a prayer candle flickering behind her eyelids. “Yes.”

ch 5 “Sex Chair (Mid-Century Modern)”

He sees the chair next to the bed as he passes her bedroom. She’s using the sex chair as a stepladder onto the bed for the dogs? He ducks his head into the room to look closer, sees that the chair is against the bed but facing the full-length mirror she seems to have in every room.  A surge of horny jealousy.  She didn’t put that there for him.  It’s an Eames thing, armless vinyl, wide seat, low to the ground – it was a completely impractical chair for anything but sex.  He looks more closely, sees a faint outline of a sweaty ass print on the seat. Scenarios to explain that rush through his mind, making him hard, making him something like angry.

It was not a reasonable reaction.  Good thing they had agreed that feelings didn’t need to make any sense right now, just uncrunched data. They had been working on the whole “cousins” mojo – like family, but you don’t fuck your brothers, you might play doctor with a cousin though, so, something like that.  She had invented a game called “Aftercare Only”, which was just being nice to each other, making each other dinner, care taking in little ways.  It was nice.  But.  Looking at the chair, he didn’t feel much like her cousin.

The chair was facing the mirror because of another man, but not in any scenario he could imagine.  The local ED doc who was featuring a friend’s recent Etsy venture, Dick Butter Industries, on his Facebook page told her that women came to him to have their labia “puffed back up”.  She had never heard of that and couldn’t imagine why anyone would think to do it.  Was it functional in any way?  She had just been thinking of getting a Brazilian wax. She had read that it might give her a whole different range of sensations, so she was toying with the idea despite being pretty au natural leaning in general. But puffing labia was for aesthetics, the doctor informed her. It had never occurred to her do anything to make her genitalia comelier.  But apparently, puffing up your labia was as common as any other kind of lip plumper (which she had also never considered). 

When she got home that day after restocking the butter at the doc’s, she put the chair in front of the mirror and inspected the situation.  She found that, like the shock-of-white hair on her head, she had a white streak where she had never looked before. She thought that if she were in love with a person with that streak, she would be in love with the streak. And otherwise, she found the inspection to be further proof of one of her theories: humans are the dumbest species.  Yes, they had invented nuclear fusion and stuff, but had that made anything better? This was the kind of stupid shit that humans did.  You’d never see a swan spreading its legs in front of a mirror worrying about how its cloacae was looking these days.  Plants just lived – even a weed in a sidewalk crack was smarter than a human.

But then again, this is how he saw her. It was a perspective that she had not ever deeply considered. A memory rose up of her being in this position, him giving her a “barber shop shave”, very sharp razor, warm lather, him laughing as her arousal made the lather run, him telling her this took time to do right, the baby smooth skin she had after, the much gentler he was all day that day after that, only lightly grazing her and making her crazy for him.  He had said he liked the way she looked, bare or not, her “dusky” coloring. 

Rather than dwell and go from “this is stupid” to “this is hot”, neither useful, she got up and went about her day, leaving the chair where it was absent mindedly.

Now he was sitting in it.

She noticed him sitting there as she was walking by with lemonade for her mother, who was sitting in the yard on the new garden swing.  She looked at him for a second, “I am going to give this to her.”  He just nodded, stayed there.

Her mom was sleeping on the swing.  It was wide enough for her mother to tip over into it like a couch – that is why they chose it.  And then he and her son had put it together, setting it where the breeze current rocked it gently most of the time.  It flitted across her mind that her mom might have died right there, because that was how her mind worked now, randomly hiccupping bubbles of dead-dread.  She let it go – if that were true, it would be the best death ever – so why let it ruin her day or her mother’s nap?

She went back inside to where he was still sitting.  The look on his face was … she was determined not to be afraid of him, which meant afraid for him.  He was looking in a mirror, which might trigger a bout of self-loathing, and maybe that was the brooding look. She did Bikram yoga, she knew all about staring yourself down in hot mirrors, maybe that was what he was doing.  She came smiling into the room, “She’s sleeping.”

“Good,” he said, and stood and closed the door quietly, locking it behind him. He pushed her onto the bed.  He pulled off her boots and sundress.  He left his own clothes on and she found that exciting as he kissed her, pushed his cock against her hard through his jeans, moved up and down her body arousing her, flicking his tongue teasing.  He breathed in deeply the slightly summer salty she was, humming with hunger.  When she reached for him, he swatted her hands away, stayed fully dressed. 

When she was nearly deranged with want for him, he suddenly let her go, stood up and sat on the chair facing the mirror.  “Come here.”  He undid his pants and pulled himself out.  She got off the bed and kneeled in front of him, but before she could do anything, he held her face still by her hair and hit her lightly on the face with this dick.  On the mouth.  On her eyes and let her tongue just graze his balls.  Then he pulled her up, faced her toward the mirror, and told her to mount him.  He held his cock up for her to do so and kept his jeans on otherwise so that they didn’t impinge him spreading her legs wide with his own.  That lifted her toes off the floor, leaving her no way to gain purchase to balance herself.  How was she supposed to ride…. But that wasn’t what he had in mind.  He wanted her helpless.  He steadied her with one hand on the back of her neck, and reached around with his other hand to rub her clit.  He’d always wanted to force her to come, liked forced orgasm porn, but she was as allergic to vibrators as she was to cats (why would anyone want to fuck their toothbrush? was her opinion of vibrators).  He’d made her masturbate for him before, he knew the circular motion she made with her fingers, and he mimicked that now but pushed down hard. 

Everything on her worked backwards – instead of more, barely touching her is what set her off.  But he was going all the way the other way, pressing the circles very firmly.  He tipped his hips forward, which put his cock against the back of her clit inside her, and he held her there, rocking very slightly, using his cock like he often did with his fingers, forcing her forward as he pushed her back with the circling fingers at the same time.  He was watching her body in the mirror.  She had never had an orgasm in this position, nor a forced one, but he was about to change that.  He pressed the circling fingers harder, not over her clit, but moving her clit against his cock parked behind it, and he rocked just a little more.  She put her head back against his shoulder and closed her eyes, focusing on only the sensations he was causing.  When she came, he watched it all over her, her nipples harden into sharp points, goosebumps on all over skin, her bucking and flailing to the right, him there to catch her by clamping his hand over mouth and letting her scream into it. 

While she was still catching her breath, they heard her mother on the back stairs.  “Go,” he said. She slipped the dress back on and went to help her mom up the steps safely.  He pulled his shirt down to hide his hard-on and went into the bathroom to give it few minutes to abate. His stiffness didn’t wilt readily, he could smell her on him and it made him want her. He didn’t want to be relieved of this.  All the damn apologies he owed, she insisted he owed her not one.  But if she were a man, the blue balls he had given her over the course of a year would be worth remarking and he knew it. And what the hell was she going to do with “sorry” – fuck it? – no wonder she didn’t want that.  He wants to make her feel good.

He was back with his wife again.