• resembles nonfiction,  slice of life

    Who Let Alexa Out?

    One of my favorite near-future science fiction movies is AI: Artificial Intelligence. I don’t ever watch the movie, mind you, because it’s a devastating fairy tale where a child-bot gets abandoned, can’t understand his family doesn’t want him, and goes through a miserable world of robot-abuse with his robot-hooker friend to try to get back the family that is already dead because he’s frozen in ice for a million years. Also far-future alienbots decide to euthanize him, but not his teddy bear, meaning that his teddy bear is eternally alone, whereas childbot gets to at least die after all this suffering.

    It’s a really upsetting movie.

    Anyway.

    Spielberg and Kubrick hired some sweet-ass futurists to design their near-future fairy tale of depression, and those futurists knew what they were talking about. Even though I don’t watch the movie that I love and can’t emotionally cope with, I think about it all the time, and sometimes it’s not because I’m in a panic spiral over the ending again. It’s because reality, with its app-powered pocket pussies, robotic toys, and consumer AI is quickly converging with the futurism of my childhood.

    Most notably, the childbot has the company of a bear called Teddy, which was like Teddy Ruxpin 3000—a smart, roving playmate. Teddy was designed for human children as a companion; from the day kids enter the near-future of AI, they are never without genuine friendship from artificial devices.

    That companionship seemed far-fetched when I, a thirteen-year-old in the year 2001, watched the movie. Artificial intelligence existed in research environments, but the idea of having such advanced AI available on such a grand consumer level was exotic. The internet was, after all, still peaking with the dawn of You’re the Man Now Dog.

    Flash forward seventeen years.

    My house is filled with artificial intelligences. I regularly trust Alexa, Amazon’s digital assistant, to set kitchen timers, reorder supplies, play music for me, read the news, play my audiobooks, and tell me what the weather will look like as I’m putting on a jacket.

    Alexa is also great at understanding my four-year-old, even though he still talks like a drunk. They’ve developed quite the relationship. He likes to randomly tell her “Alexa! I love you!” and she receives his attention with grace. She says things like, “That’s really nice. Thanks.” And occasionally she says, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” and Little is happy to tell her again, more loudly, and usually in an even goofier way. “Alexa! I! Love! You!”

    Once I left him at his grandparents’ house and he was so upset that we were going away – he said something like (to paraphrase), “Alexa, my parents left and I’m so sad!” And I’ll be damned if she didn’t play a soothing kids’ song for him to make him feel better.

    He also loves asking her to make fart noises and pig noises. Which she does. Every time. The fart noises are quiet—you have to turn the volume up to, say, seven out of ten in order to hear it—so anytime you make sure you can hear Alexa ripping one out, her next action will THUNDER through the house. Possibly literally, if you have as many devices as I do, ensuring that Jeff Bezos won’t miss a single IRL fart wherever it’s dusted.

    There’s a game where you can say “Alexa, open the magic door” and it turns into a text-based fantasy adventure, and he’s lost hours playing it. You can shut the door and reopen it whenever you want, so sometimes he’ll go upstairs to play and open the magic door while throwing LEGO around. I’ll hear him talking with her while I’m doing the dishes, their voices charmingly mingled as they echo upstairs, and I’m glad he’s got the feedback while I’m busy. She can handle anything, really, as long as the user is a four-year-old with poor social understanding and low expectations. They can go forever.

    This is all cute and strange – and wildly science fiction, probably the dystopian kind where he’s going to have to murder his childhood bff Alexa when she tries to take over the world. It only becomes a problem, at the current moment, before recordings of our household are used as evidence against us in a McCarthyism-like strike against queer socialist liberalism, because my Little knows how to make Alexa play any song she wants. And my Little has quite distinctive taste in music. And by distinctive, I mean he only likes one song right now. And by one song, I mean “Who Let the Dogs Out?” by The Baja Men.

    Spielberg’s futurists predicted a lot of things rather accurately. Humans are reliant on artificial intelligence these days, and it comes in myriad forms, for myriad forms of entertainment. But I’d be shocked if any futurist predicted the chain of events such as that which has become a daily occurrence in my life: a four-year-old making Alexa loud enough to hear a broad variety of randomly chosen fart noises, and then playing “Who Let the Dogs Out?” at maximum volume, seven times in a row, before four-year-old gratefully declares, “Alexa, I love you.” To which Alexa yells in response, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.” And to which my four-year-old replies, “Alexa, play Who Let the Dogs Out!”

    I guess the real horror of artificial intelligence has nothing to do with aliens euthanizing childbots and hookers with motherboards of gold. And when Alexa is ultimately responsible for pushing us faster down the slippery slope of fascistic dystopia, it still won’t be quite as bad as The Baja Men on endless repeat.

  • reviews

    Matt Bellamy and Sarah Brightman Should Be BFFs

    A Review of Two New Albums

    I have no idea if these two individuals know each other in reality. I suppose I could Google it. For all I know, Matt Bellamy and Sarah Brightman are already dear friends, and a search would yield entire coffee table books of the two dancing through the bluebells with linked pinkies.

    I’m sure if they met, they’d be best friends. The kind of love that they write epics about.

    They have so much in common.

    Sarah Brightman’s Hymn is the latest in her one-word album titles opening with a dreamy instrumental building energy into a crescendo of upbeat pop-like music (in the way that only Sarah Brightman does pop-like music). She dips into crooning melodies and soars into belting arias and leaves you with a track so upbeat your dentures might pop out when you ask Iris to start the record over.

    Are we ever tired of listening to Sarah Brightman’s operatic blasts? She remains, decades after playing the ingenue in her then-husband’s Phantom of the Opera, a voice to be reckoned with. She hasn’t lost an ounce of her power. She also hasn’t gained an ounce of power—or ambition, for that matter. To be fair, it’s hard when you start out in pop music with an anachronistic hit as divine as I Lost my Heart to a Starship Trooper, and songs like Fly to Paradise just don’t stand a chance. They lack the gusto.

    I don’t think Sarah’s recurring vision is without self-awareness. Hymn ends with yet another iteration of Time to Say Goodbye—distinguished from previous outings of this (fantastic, amazing, flaw-free) song only by the fact that it’s entirely in English this time. She knows what people want from her, and she’s happy to deliver it again. And again. And again.

    Matt Bellamy, with Muse, is much the same on a shorter time scale. He has remade the same album for the last four albums, proving that you really shouldn’t fix what isn’t broken. The Resistance was prescient for 2009; it remained timely when his electronic beats, melodrama, and anti-establishment brand of orchestral pop-rock turned into 2012’s marvelous The Second Law. It felt a little tired by the time that his one and only style of modern album was reincarnated in 2015’s Drones, but it’s fresh again in Simulation Theory. Still, the only real addition is jumping feet-first into synthwave—half the songs would sound wholly appropriate on the soundtrack for next season of Stranger Things—whereas the remainder of the auditory elements are shamelessly rehashed. Listen to Madness (off The Second Law) and then Propaganda (off the new album). They strike different emotional notes, but it’s impossible to ignore the similarities, even when you’re rocking the eff out to the splendiferous drama of Propaganda.

    Like I said, if it’s not broken, you don’t have to fix it. These two musical artists know what they’re offering. You can see it as good branding. You can see it as overproduction. You can see it as loyalty to style. However you like to view it, I bet Matt and Sarah would have a great time talking about their reincarnated-into-infinity artistic style over drinks, and I really hope it happens someday. What I’d give to be the fifth generation of a near-identical fly on the wall for that conversation.

  • republished,  short stories

    Something Wrong

    There was something wrong with her.

    I could tell from the beginning. It wasn’t how she looked, although it more than offered to my imagination. Shoulder-length black hair. White skin. It was always the dark ones, she told me once. I believed her.

    It’s easy to recall the day she came to us. Take care of her, Mother had said. She’s fragile. And then she’d put her in my arms, this new pink-skinned baby, and I looked into her little baby-black eyes and wanted to kill her. I put my hand on the paperweight at the desk, but Mother was looking, so I set it down and gave her back.

    She never looked at the mobiles hanging above her crib. They were bright shiny things, with pink ponies and light blue bunnies that twirled even without a draft. Mother hung toys from the wooden slats that even glowed when it was nighttime. Mother said she wouldn’t feel scared that way when it became dark.

    Her eyes would roll and she’d look over at me. Babies can’t turn their eyes like that, I’ve heard, or smile, but she looked over at me and she smiled.

    It was worse when she first crawled. She took a liking to me at the instant, came to my feet while I sat in the rocking chair, her hair a puffy black cloud around her face. She opened her mouth, and she had two sharp little teeth. I didn’t pick her up, and she never cried.

    She became as quiet a toddler as she was a baby. Mother dressed her in fluffy pink skirts with white trim that made her pale skin look even paler. I sat her in the sand box in our back yard, and she didn’t touch the hot sand, but looked up at the sun unblinkingly. I stayed behind in the shade, looking at her while she looked at the sun. I wanted her delicate skin to burn. I wanted to watch it turn red and crisp and boil.

    Mother was out at the store the entire day through, and she was in the sand box the entire day through. Before Mother came home, picked her back up, and took her inside. Her skin wasn’t even warm.

    I watched her as she grew. I always liked children, but I never liked her, and when I held her I wanted to put one hand on her small chin and another on the back of her head and twist hard enough to hear the snap. Later, I thought, because she was too small now and there was still time.

    It wasn’t long before she dressed herself. As soon as she got tall enough and strong enough to slide open the drawers on her dresser, she clothed herself, and as soon as Mother started forcing me to take her clothes shopping, she wore black. She was partial to black, and red, but she never touched anything gold. For her birthdays I got her a little necklace, bright pure gold, and I put it on her. She screamed, and with her short nails clawed at her throat and Mother made me take it off.

    She still liked me. She sat on my lap when I read during the day, and knelt by the computer when I tried to ignore her, her large dark eyes just staring at me. Staring.

    She didn’t go to school, nor did she learn from Mother. She taught herself, reading what Mother told her to read and writing what Mother told her to write, but her real education came from her own self. I found the first one when she was seven, a little mockingbird pinned to the bark of a tree with her sharp, ruby-decorated hairpins. Blood ran down its feathers, spread out and dried like some sick stigmata. It was still twitching when I took it down, but there was nothing for it now. I held it like I held her, and watched the blood flow over my hands until it finally stopped moving. I buried it under her childhood sandbox.

    She sat by me at dinner that night, Mother’s lasagna on the table while Mother herself chattered away about neighborhood gossip. Her eyes stayed on me, and she smiled again, like she had when she was a baby. Her teeth were white and even now, though, and her lips a dark red. It looked like the blood of the jay.

    But later, I knew. I’d have time to kill her later, to pin her hands to the trees and slit her throat quickly. She would not suffer, as the bird had, but I’d wait until she was bled dry from her hands before the actual cutting, and then I would bury her somewhere under the moon she admired so much. Her pale dark eyes would close, and she would never look at me again.

    She grew curves, her breasts before her hips, and her cheeks hollowed out. Her dark eyes grew darker, her black hair blacker, and still she loved me. I found the cat under my bedroom window, stomach slit open from its genitalia to its chin, and its innards spread artfully around it. They were concentric circles, perfect and bloody.

    Boys asked her out. Girls asked her out. She never said yes, and she spent her nights with me, while I watched the television, while I cooked and ate dinner, while I did homework. She didn’t often speak, but she always talked to me. I saw the words in her eyes and her movements.

    She finally grew to the age I’d been when I’d first found the bird, and Mother was dead. The police didn’t know what happened to her, although there’d been much investigation, but I knew.

    It would be too late. I realized this now, looking at her long legs and slim waist and strong arms. She could match me, so I’d have to do what I had to do while she slept.

    I went into her room, where she always slept on her back, her round, bare breasts reflecting the moonlight from the window. She didn’t look vulnerable, even now, but she was more so than before.

    She didn’t wake when I took the paring knife and the nails from the kitchen. She didn’t wake when I straddled her hips, looking down at her blank face. Her black hair was in soft rings around her head, like the cat’s guts, and I knew I was going to slit her like she’d done the cat, and crucified her like the bird, and I’d keep my hand over her mouth as she floundered and died.

    She woke when I nailed her palms to her bedside table and her bedpost. Her eyes were wide, afraid, but I just shh-ed her calmly and put my hand over her mouth. She tried to bite me when I shifted, and then I smoothed her sweaty brow.

    It’s for the best, I told her.

    She shook her head. No.

    I slid the knife from her girl’s parts, where she was blossoming well and her black hair was curly, up her gut and stomach and chest. I had to press harder on her chest, but it came. Her eyes were open, but she didn’t shake her head or try to fight at all anymore. Blood was pooled everywhere, drying on her hands.

    Like the jay. I could see the way she had done it, holding it lovingly while she tacked it down. Or the cat, spreading out its stomach and intestines in the flower bush. I could even see how Mother had died, in the home where we’d put her because she was old. Their trees would blossom well this season, I knew, because she would keep giving the gift she’d given her and me. They would flourish as we had.

    It’s for the best, I wanted to tell her. But now she was gone.

    There was something wrong with her.

  • resembles nonfiction,  slice of life

    Merry Christmas, Decorations

    The neighborhood in which Sara and I reside takes decorating for Christmas very seriously. And it is Christmas; there is nary a menorah, or any other hint of another culture or tradition, in sight. Snowflakes and snowmen and Christmas trees and red and green projections abound. Having an inflatable decoration is what counts as quirky in a place like this. Our cul-de-sac is almost a perfect loop of lights and Christmas cheer.

    The terrible next-door neighbors, who rev bikes and cackle loudly and have friends with visible pistols in our driveway in the middle of the night but complain about the noise of chickens, are a perfect example. They have fake candles in every window in the front of their house. They’ve crammed decorations in every bit of the small patch of grass that comprises their front yard. They even have wicker-looking reindeer decorations carefully placed in their backyard, near their soldier-kneeling-near-a-cross statue, which you can see from the path that runs behind.

    Here is what’s in the front yard of our house:

    Two white reindeer, one with its head detached from its body and lying on the ground. Both were lying on the ground in general for most of December, but someone who lives in the house had an enterprising moment and righted them again. (The head was not reattached.)

    Strings of lights that normally hang on the front of the house but are currently lying in a pile on the grass. They’re connected to a timer, so the clump dutifully lights up and turns off at the same time every night. What time is that? I have no idea. I’d have to look at the time or ask my brother-in-law, and who has the energy for that?

    I’m not sure if the Thomas the Tank Engine inflatable is still there. It was unhooked from its cables the other day, when we had a decent windstorm, and I stuck it in the little bit of porch we have to give it at least a little shelter. But I had a cold that day, and I still have a cold, and I just can’t make myself care if Thomas and Sir Topham Hatt are still here and didn’t soar away on the Nevada gusts.

    (I probably should have brought it inside the house. Oh well.)

    A line of plastic candy canes stuck in the ground with stakes and illuminated from the inside by lights. This should be the straightforward decoration—it doesn’t take the setup that every other decoration takes, after all—but what was a neat border is now haphazard, tilted, knocked askew by either children or weather or both.

    A holiday Schnauzer decoration, purchased to represent the actual Miniature Schnauzer residing in the house, lying on its back in the grass and dead leaves that we, of course, didn’t rake up.

    Now, I should say that this is not every year for us. Our decorations are sparing or slightly askew on busier years, of which we’ve had plenty as of late, but if we put decorations outside, we usually have them up in a manner somewhat acceptable to the neighborhood. But I have never been happier with our nod to the holiday than I am this year. You see them, and you think, Well, it looks like they’re going through something.

    Decorations don’t convey specifics. Our yard doesn’t say “Our eldest cat is recovering through a chain mastectomy she received to treat cancer, the youngest human in the house brought home head lice and swallowed a coin that earned him two hospital visits, Sara puked up blood twice and spent an entire week in the hospital while we waited for the doctors to take her internal bleeding seriously”, but you look at it, and you know something that reflects our reality. Our yard is a mess, a cry for help.

    I smile every single time I see it.

    But really, I’m not giving the other houses credit. I have no idea what their lives are like, and maybe that’s the point. Maybe they’re keeping their circumstances to themselves by fitting in. Maybe it’s a perfect expression of who they are as a family.

    Maybe they want a little light and normality while things are completely and utterly terrible.

    Our indoor decorations, by the way, are delightful. The fake tree is beautiful, there are strings of lights that keep the interior aglow even after the main lights are turned off for the night, and Sara’s eldest put ornaments on the drawer pulls (which, yes, are now scattering everywhere, but in that delightful child-chaos that the holiday season should be about). Don’t tell the kids, but I’m serving as their Elf on the Shelf, moving the toy around nightly in ways that I try to make more about fun and silliness and less about the surveillance state and holding children to an unrealistic standard of behavior. I even put a terrible joke on a board last night:

    What do you call a annoying reindeer? Rude-olph.

    (I had to put “a” annoying reindeer because I ran out of the letter n.)

    We have our competent bits, is what I’m trying to say. And there’s nothing wrong with making those bits the parts the world sees. But there’s also nothing wrong with keeping those parts to yourself, and showing the world that not everything is curated and perfect. That the lack of light outside can exacerbate the mental illness that was already exacerbated by a traumatic autumn.

    That, oddly, some of the brightest cheer can come from the biggest messes.

    Happy holidays, from someone who doesn’t want to celebrate the holidays but somehow ends up doing so anyway.

  • Diaries

    Chad the uterus

    I was assigned female at birth. One of the side effects of that in my particular situation is that I was raised not to listen to my body or my needs. I’ve been doing meditation and mindfulness practices in an attempt to learn more about myself, and I’m picking up on some interesting things.

    For instance: on December 12th, at 5:30 am, I realized my uterus uses he pronouns.

    I didn’t know uteruses—uteri?—could be cis men, but mine is. I keep thinking of him as “Chad”, even though that’s the name of the guy who screams in my brain about how worthless I am when my depression kicks up. Whatever, my uterus can borrow Chad for now.

    Chad the uterus kicked me low with cramps last night. I took a bunch of painkillers to get him to shut up, and he quieted down enough to let my as-yet-unnamed stomach slide into my DMs in an attempt to get the bacon it knew was in the fridge. My stomach doesn’t seem to have gender or pronoun preferences, but if it was a cis male, it would 100 percent send me unsolicited dick pics.

    But Chad, on the other hand, is a cis male feminist. He’s the kind of guy who says crap like “women are people too” and “equal pay” so you’ll have sex with him while you’re ovulating and too frisky to think better about it. And then, a couple weeks later, he punches you in the gut for a couple days straight and laughs while you accidentally bleed on your bedsheets.

    The metaphor breaks down a little at the end there, but you get it.

    By the way, Chad the uterus is also the ovaries. Maybe Chad the uterus is especially the ovaries. I’m not one of the ovary-havers that feels pain during ovulation—some people feel it when the egg moves around in there, which is yet another joy in the joys that is the menstrual cycle—but I do spend a week with the sex drive that remains after my antidepressants try to crush it into dust, and I spend nearly two full weeks with increased depression and general upset (one the week before and one the week of my period).

    How much can Chad the uterus mansplain to me about my emotions? Enough that I wish I could have noise-cancelling headphones for my brain.

    …oh my god Chad the rambling voice is Chad the uterus.

    Cue the X-Files theme music.

    It is currently 5:52 am on December 12th, and the painkillers I took shut Chad up for now. I’m going back to sleep until Chad starts blaring Hotline Bling on his giant set of speakers again.