AI and Me For Now

Everybody who reads this blog knows by this time that I am never consistent with anything– “Change” is my middle name and I am a first cousin to “Experiment” and “Explore.” So you will never see this blog in the same format for very long at a time. (I think i smell pizza cooking in the kitchen….my friend, Jimmy, is out there cooking up something…I am guessing that whatever it is, it will include left overs from my more-than-magnificient culinary achievement of yesterday: “Swamp Potatoes with Smoked Sausage.”

Right now I am thinking that I am kind of grateful for the advance of artificial intelligence since my own intelligence is not what it once was …..the AI is good at suggesting things for me to write about when I get brain fog which is a far more than occasional happening at my new age of 88 years. (I am an official New Age Guy now. LOL.).

For the time being, I am controlling the AI and it is not yet controlling me although it is becoming a habit and I think I might get hooked after all. The thing is awfully smart and lightning quick with answers when I need answers which is not all that often because I have an unusually high intellectual level ….higher than most ordinaries, i would venture to say ….but it is always nice to get someone else’s opinion even if the “Someone Else” is only a string of electronic impulses separating millions of micro-second renditions of anomalies of algorithmic zeros and ones. I am told that the AI thing does little more than scrape the web for information and then parse that to individual order when asked by a user such as myself. I have no idea if that is true or not, but the damned thing is fascinating and i am loving it.

Like I said before, “I am now 88 years old” and I do not feel all that much different than i did when I was 40, 50, 60 and 70 — but I did notice some minor indicators of some kind of decline once I hit the 70 mark but they were so minor that I never paid much attention to them. One big change that I did notice was that all my friends are either dead or moved to climes unknown (as far as I can tell) — I do know that I am going to a lot more funerals these days than I had ever gone to before. In fact, I just went to a funeral yesterday for a friend of Jimmy’s. It was a somber affair. She was cremated so there was no open urn service. That was disappointing to me.

My birthday passed without much hoo-dee-do — it was just me and my partner/friend/companion/landlord/soul mate, Jimmy….. Graeter’s ice cream and cake, coffee and my afternoon nap … that was about it …. I did win One Hundred dollars from a Lottery scratch off ticket ….which I loved but which I do not need ….but it did remind me of a hobby that used to have ….I used to go around digging in garbage cans at convenience stores to find already-used lottery scratch off tickets. The reason? A lot of people either only half scratch their tickets or they miss seeing that they have a winner so they just throw them away. I have found hundreds of dollars in winners on these tickets that dumb asses have disposed of. I might start doing that again sometime … depending on how my wealth manager does with my little portfolio with the big insurance company’s private investment and banking system.

I think I just wrote something that some people might be able to use. I hope so.

Well, I am a father of three sons … two of which are now dead ….and one who rarely ever communicates with me because he is busy taking care of a family of his own …. an adopted family ….several kids … a houseful of permanent guests who are relatives of his wife….guests who just moved in on my son and his wife and never left …but he is fine with the situation because, as he claims, everybody pitches in to help. But, as nature would have it, he has very little time to devote to old dad here and so my investment in this relationship is very minimal except for me being the go-to source when money is needed for something or the other.

I decided to go out and buy a loaf of Ezekiel bread this morning because I wanted to find a bread that is closer to the 3.000-year-old recipe that people ate regularly in the times of Jesus. This one comes as close as any of the others that I have tried and I like it….and I am going to keep on using it as long as I can find it. It comes frozen because there is no flour in it; only “Spouts” of one kind of grain or another. No chemicals or preservatives either, I am told. I toasted two slices of it in my computer-driven bread toasting machine — a mechanical and technical marvel … a computer with a case around it and a heater and timer in it … makes perfect toast every time …any shade of toast a person could ever desire… I think the choices of shades on this toaster are totally and really unlimited.

I am so glad that I finally decided to downsize a couple of years ago now….all those rooms in that other place became challenging to me after retirement… I would walk around the place thinking to myself, “What in the hell do I need all this room for….it is just me and Jimmy and the houseboy and Mr. Butler…..and it started to feel like living inside of a luxurious cavern … the smell of old leather and polished oak beams and fresh paint….dry cleaner fluid scent from the massive drapes …everything just so…. everything with a place and everything in its place ….damn! I love to scatter shit and leave it — and in those days I had people to pick up after me ….and I used to delight in making their jobs hard on them …. but they never complained …. nobody who ever worked for me ever complained …. I was good to everybody except the ones i fired after they would get tired of my eccentric ways and tell me about it …..I would never tolerate insolence …even though I, myself, was often insolent as all hell. But I could afford it. Amazing the things you can do when you can afford it.

There are some things that never change though: I am still infatuated with Christian Dior’s fragrance called “Savauge Elixir.” I always buy the 5-ounce bottle. In fact, this month I bought two of them because they are relatively inexpensive at just a little over three hundred dollars each. But they are grand indeed and get me many compliments and, they make a statement whenever I enter a room …. which I do not do all that often anymore….except here at the downsized abode.