It’s graduation season, and watching the graduating classes boo commencement speakers boosting AI from the podium is giving such joy and hope. The speakers seem genuinely surprised by this reaction, but it just shows how out of touch these “leaders” are. AI boosters are telling a class graduating into a job market where AI is eating entry level jobs and creative roles with the voracity of a teenager who runs cross country that they should embrace AI? Of course grads are booing!

Music biz c-suite dude Scott Borschetta responded by telling the kids to “Deal with it,” underscoring the inevitable acceptance execs want from everyone regarding AI, ours is not to question why. Former Google suit Eric Schmidt suggested the kids needed to engage with countering viewpoints. A classic lazy play in which you’re considered unreasonable because frankly, you’d rather avoid the person — or technology — who sees you as less than. Real estate exec Gloria Caulfield scolded the graduates and said “We’ve been here before” with revolutionary technology, but she failed to mention that it wasn’t good for workers.

When I met that guy for coffee, he didn’t understand why I didn’t want to use generative AI tools to “optimize and monitize content.” He didn’t understand my skepticism, he didn’t understand why people wouldn’t whole heartedly embrace this new technology to see what was possible. He felt like gen AI got him about 70 percent of the way in his writing projects, and he did the remaining 30 percent himself.

I was not as snarky as I’d like to have been, in part because I was so confounded by his take, but I was also trying to figure out why my skepticism mattered. Why would anyone care that I don’t want AI in my creative process? Why do I need to see gen AI as anything but an automated word or picture generator? If you can’t be bothered to write it, as the popular critique goes, why should I be bothered to read it?

I have a number of concerns, but mostly, I think machine generated content is boring. “That stuff isn’t interesting to me,” I said.

“So, you optimize on… interesting?”

“Uh, yes, exactly! Why would I spend my time any other way?”

The next day I went to the museum with an artist friend. I told him about this conversation. “He’s not an artist,” my friend said. More profoundly, he said, “Look, if we’re going to use AI to replace the creative process, we need to talk about what it means to be human.”

There’s a lot of reporting about how AI isn’t directly responsible for the job loss that’s hit so many of us, but the CEO of Microsoft’s AI, Mustafa Suleyman, said that AI will be able to perform “…most, if not all, professional tasks. So white-collar work, where you’re sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.” It seems like he sees this as a good thing; he’s stating this as a goal, not a warning. The CEO of Goldman Sachs, David Solomon, said he joins those who think that AI will be a “great leap forward,” leaving us to guess if he thinks Maoist forced labor and millions of starvation deaths is a good thing or he used Chat GPT as his editor and it didn’t ask if he might not find another metaphor.

I hope it’s obvious that I’m not a Luddite. I’m also, to the detriment of my mental health, a systems thinker — and an overthinker. I don’t look at AI in a vaccuum. Today’s AI boosters seem willing to breeze past environmental impact, intellectual property ethics, and worker morale — not to mention the shocking enablement of school shootings and suicide attempts — in order to… what, exactly? Artificially inflate tech stocks and please the board that their staffing costs are so low? What are they making that people need? Or even want?

Machines are good at patterns, that’s cool. AI has good use cases. When I talked with Anil Dash for CANNED, we talked about machine learning and how scientists have used flavors of AI for years now. We’ve been dealing with lower stakes AI intervention; anyone who’s used a chatbot to get customer service is dealing with an AI agent. All this automation can be annoying, but we’ve come to a level of frustrated acceptance that this is what we must navigate. And sometimes it’s enough, not often, but it happens.

I’ve been in online content for coming on 20 years now and I’ve consistently railed against stuff made to please the algorithim. Winning at Google meant that you won at capitalism, but it did not mean you made anything good, anything valuable. It’s logical that in a system where winning at capitalism is the goal, we end up with content generating machines designed to win at Google, to win at capitalism first, before considering if we provide anything useful or interesting.

That casual conversation about AI adoption and my apparently confusing hesitancy got in my head. I thought about how if someone creates content that’s 70 percent artificial, I should only give it 30 percent of my attention. I imagined a tool that strikes out seven words for every ten, and what the results would look like. I also pondered the religious conversion aspect of AI, how AI boosters are are those people on your doorstep assuring you that eternal life is yours if only you’ll believe — but I am sorry, my tech evangelical friend, I am Jewish and come from 5000 years of conversion resistance.

I’m also a dyed in the wool creative. I went to art school and while I’m not a wildly succesful visual artist, I have sold work and I still make paintings with my own hand. I get deeply nostalgic when I get a whiff of linseed oil and turpentine, it reminds me of long days in the studio making a glorious mess. Some of that work is on the walls in my home. It’s full of meaning, every work is a story.

I learned how to play an instrument and for seven years I played live music with a band. I was not a great musician, not by a long shot, but it was wildly fun. We were on TV a few times and we played I don’t know how many shows. I still miss it. We played a handful of big stages and in our last lineup, before we called it quits, we had a killer bass player, top notch. To feel the bass vibrate the stage under my feet was know exactly where I was supposed to be. A machine can not have that feeling, cannot thrive in it.

And I’m a writer, here we are. My work is based in my lived experience in the world, not the aggregation of others chewed up and spit on to the page in a facsimile of humanity. I was swimming laps recently, backstroke, and I could hear the muffled sound of the radio on the pool deck as I reached, reached, reached. One of the lifeguards is always tuned to the classic rock station, so I am pulling through the water as I hear the dulled sound of Bob Segar’s Against the Wind, for example. AI will not tell you what that feels like. We may share common experiences, we may have been to the same places, but my memoir is about me, it’s not a remix of what happened to 400 other gap year travelers, thrown in the blender and repaginated to make narrative sense. My gloriously surreal screenplay and short film — made and acted out by humans — is based on a completely true story. The feeling of surprise and satisfaction at the end is so clear. I feel it every time I rewatch the film, and I want you to feel it when you see it. It’s a human reaction, after all.

I’ve been underemployed for a year now. I’ve seen what little work I’ve had made worse by the insertion of AI. I had hoped to work for another five years or so, but as AI has stolen the onramp for new workers, it’s built a bunch of exit ramps for older workers. My occupation — technical writer — shows up on all the lists as “at risk” for elimination under AI. All this talk about how AI isn’t the cause of job loss doesn’t land well at my house.

There is an active live storytelling scene here in Seattle, a bunch of events where some random person will get up and tell a story, no notes, about that time they blew up their life and threw everything in the car and moved across country or got catfished on a dating app or fell in love with a cat even though they were a dog person. It’s not unusual to see a story teller stop in the middle and say, “Hold on, wait, I got the order wrong, let me back up.” People go on too long for my liking, my internal editor wants them to stop at a particular gem of a moment. People insist on telling you the moral of their story — “… that’s when I realized…” — when I want to come to it on my own. I’ve been at the mic a handful of times, it’s scary, my voice shakes when I start out and then, as I get going — it’s my story, I know it — I calm down.

These are human choices, human stories, told to exist in this moment, in this room, and then they’re gone. They’re live, people are fallible, even if you hear the story again in another venue, it will not be the same.

“Look, if we’re going to use AI to replace the creative process, we need to talk about what it means to be human,” my friend said. We wandered through the museum. It was mostly empty and the guards wanted to talk about the work.

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It’s super weird to see myself on video like this, but I decided to stop being so vain and just … share it. This is completely off the cuff, about three days after I found the leak.

Also, there’s a postscript to this story. I talked with an Audubon guy and one of the PNW’s preeminent crow experts; in June the full story will appear in the Seattle Times.

I’ve done three of these live, one at Fresh Ground Stories (The Hat, that’s here) and two at Bar Stories. I’m still working up to doing The Moth but I’m getting there.

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So I had a tree guy out to look at it. “Oh, yeah, I can fix this,” he said. He was not expensive and he so clearly cares about trees. “Your yard is fanastic,” he added. “Just gorgeous. How long have you been at it?”

I was delighted. And I was reminded of this story I published last fall on How I Learned. There’s a rough version of this in my archives, but I love this published piece. The edits Blaise suggested make it sparkle.

Here’s a reprint for spring.

There are ladybugs fucking in the lupines.

The ladybugs like the lupines because the lupines are covered in aphids. I don’t like the aphids; I think they’re gross. The lupine stems and seedpods are crawling with these tiny green bugs, but the ladybugs think the aphids are some kind of all-you-can-eat buffet, so there are a lot of ladybugs now.

I like the ladybugs very much, and I like that they are fucking in my lupines.

When I first moved into this 1946 home, it was surrounded by too much manicured lawn and immaculately shaped juniper hedges. “Topiary of the Eisenhower era,” an old friend called it. I was amused by the hedges at first, and by the blue jay that would tuck peanuts in them and come back later to retrieve their secret snacks.

The front lawn was confusing to me, but I liked sprawling on a blanket on the back lawn, staring into the blue of a summer sky. Then the water bill came. It was four hundred dollars. I stopped watering out front and gradually, the lawn went to dust and dandelions.

I never expected to live in a home with a yard. I had a series of tiny apartments, the last had a common garden for which I was not responsible. For a few years, I had a small plot in a community garden a few blocks from my walk-up condo. I successfully grew tomatoes and unsuccessfully grew a few other things. Zucchini. Lettuce. Some flowers. Those community garden people were hard core and humorless. You received a sharply worded email if you didn’t empty the water from the hose when you were done. It did not make me excited about gardening.

At that condo with the common garden I had a noisy downstairs neighbor, and no room for guests, and, eventually, a husband. All that precipitated a move to this 1946 house with more space, an office where I could work, and too much lawn.

It wasn’t long before we argued, the husband and I, about what to do with the yard. He didn’t mind the mowing and was apathetic about the dust in late summer, but I hated looking at the bare dirt, the increasing weeds. I had started randomly planting bulbs in the grass. Daffodils and tulips alongside the walk out front, crocuses at random in the back lawn. Little white and purple flowers that I would forget about and then be delighted by come spring.

One year, after returning from a work trip, the husband walked in the back gate. Upon seeing the lawn dotted with crocuses, he became quite angry.

“How am I supposed to mow?” he said.

“What if you just… didn’t until the flowers are done?”

“They’re in the way.”

I was confused by his bitterness. It didn’t make any sense. The flowers would fade; it could wait. It would only be a few weeks. Why was he reacting like this? There were daffodils along the low wall at the back of the garden; he said those were also in the way.

The yard was not the only thing we argued about, but the arguments about the garden became increasingly metaphoric over time — ridiculously so.

“I did it to inconvenience you,” I snarked. I couldn’t help myself.

“You probably did,” he said.

We’re divorced now. You already guessed that.

The rules are clearly stated.

When you sign up for Chip Drop, you must take the whole load, and you get notice right before they arrive. It’s a chaotic way to get free mulch. You have to be up for the adventure and ready to spring into action. I had been alone for a year by then, maybe it was two, I don’t remember. I thought I could handle it. How much mulch could it be?

I was coming back from walking the dog when the truck pulled into the alley. I stared at the container on the back. Oh no, I thought, what have I done? I asked the driver if I had to take the whole load. Could I not just have half?

“Nope. It’s all or nothing.” He tipped the container into the alley, covering most of the space between my fence and the fence opposite mine with a fragrant mountain of shredded tree clippings. The scent was intoxicating. All my neighbors came out.

“Well, that’s a lot of mulch, isn’t it? What’s your plan?”

It was Thursday. On Tuesdays, the city ran garbage trucks through the alley that was now blocked with 25, 30 yards of chip mulch. It had to be gone by Tuesday morning. Early.

The neighbors looked at me like I had an answer, like I knew what I was doing. I did not know what I was doing. I was terrified.

I had read about gardening: library books, websites, an online forum about permaculture, and I had been learning about the lasagna method. To lasagna your garden, you lay down cardboard, cover it with mulch, and wait. The cardboard smothers everything underneath, depriving it of light. The stuff above it holds the cardboard down and eventually feeds the soil as the cardboard decomposes.

Reading is a good place to start, but you don’t learn how to grow stuff in your yard until you get your hands dirty.

I had done this lasagna thing once before on a much smaller scale with only a few yards of mulch. In early winter, I had lined the front walk with cardboard and compost and waited until spring. My shovel cut the formerly hard ground like it was warm butter. I planted several varieties of lavender that now spill over onto the walk and hum with bumblebees much of the spring and summer. Easy enough, successful enough. So go big, I told myself — do the whole front yard.

There I was, confronted with this mountain of mulch; it had to be out of the way in four days — no question. I imagined the city calling to complain that I’d blocked their access; I imagined there would be fines.

I spent half a day panicking before coming to my senses. You’re the boss, I told myself. You’re alone now; you get to decide how things get done. When the lawn needs mowing. Where to plant flowers. When to hire some help. I made a call and the next day, two polite men from the day labor service showed up at my house. They made short work of the mulch, and by mid-afternoon, the entire front yard was buried a foot or so deep in fragrant shredded forest. When it rained, I could smell the pine and cedar. When the windows were open that woody aroma filled the house.

Time passed. I read. I planted. Things thrived or they didn’t.

The following summer, the California poppies arrived. They covered the front yard with neon orange flowers. The bees loved them. Standing out front I could hear them singing to themselves as they traveled from bloom to bloom, collecting great yellow blobs of pollen in their saddlebags.

I read up on native plants and ordered way too many from the conservation district plant sale. Every time I turned over the soil to plant the mock oranges, red dogwoods, daffodils, and tulips, I found earthworms. I randomly scattered Northwest wildflower mix, thinking it would take. The calendula did. And the lupines, where the aphids thrive and the ladybugs fuck.

Sometimes I watered. Mostly I didn’t. Friends gave me plants they’d divided from their own yards; seeds they’d collected from their crops. I put them in the ground and remembered them when I waded through the knee-deep poppies, my nails dirty from pulling stray grass.

I found myself puttering in the garden, meticulously weeding one clump of lilies, clearing around that coastal strawberry runner for ten minutes here, fifteen minutes there, and then calling it a day. My dying lawn of dandelions and dust had transformed into a riot of color—orange and purple and neon green—and butterflies and ladybugs. Hummingbirds. Crows feasting on the earthworms that surfaced after the rain.

One day I was stopped by my neighbor, a quiet, keep-to-himself guy in an orderly house with regular garden service. “I just wanted you to know how much I love your wildflowers,” he said.

Another neighbor said, “Oh, I can see you’re a gardener.”

Spring came and I let the back lawn grow tall and the flowers bloom. I left the lawn mower in the garage until the last crocus wilted. No one was inconvenienced by my flowers. I wandered around in the increasingly abundant mess out front; letting things grow where they wanted to grow and not worrying much when they didn’t. It’s a certified wildlife habitat now, registered with the National Wildlife Federation.

And there are ladybugs fucking in the lupines.

Sometimes I hose off the lupines; that works to get rid of the aphids in the short term, but it doesn’t make them go away. I planted fennel and sage because they are supposed to deter the aphids long term, but the stalks are covered with those sticky green bugs all the same. There’s a much neater garden around the corner from me, their yard is also full of lupines, but they don’t have the aphid problem that I have. They also don’t have all those ladybugs, so I guess it’s a tradeoff. I’ve looked. You can’t miss them, the ladybugs, with their bright red-orange shells, their polka dots. The ladybugs are at my house, the house with the untidy garden.

I have counted four or five kinds of bees. Honeybees and fat fuzzy bumbles and a shiny greenish bee. I have hummingbirds zooming in and out of the currants in the early spring. They will be back to feed on the crocosmia and the lilies when those bloom in summer. The wild brown bunnies nap in the shadows, the earthworms turn the soil below ground. The lawn isn’t completely vanquished. It sends up tall spires and goes to seed, but no one would call that unruly meadow in front of my house a lawn.

It’s a mess, a tangle of color and life, and there is no containing it.

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I had got it in my head that I was going to learn how to tell a story, you know, like they do for The Moth. And for the past few months, I’ve been going to live storytelling events around Seattle. They’re all different, but they’re grounded in the action of getting up in front of a the room with no notes and telling the room about that one time.

I have the recording from my latest attempt. Also, you need to know that when I told this story, I was wearing the hat I’m wearing in this photo.

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Accepting my age has come with an internal discussion about my own mortality. Over the past few years I have had the difficult honor of shepherding a few obituaries into the world. Obituaries are other people’s version of your best self; they’re how other people think you’d want to be remembered. But unless you tell them, how do they know? They will say your wild child years are less important than your business acumen, they will mention family by name but not friends… they absolutely mean well. But what do you want?

I decided I would answer this question myself, and upon hitting this significant age, it seems time.

I hope to write 30 more of these, that my health and vitality permit to revisit this every year for years to come. This is not a goodbye note, let me be perfectly clear. It’s a “just in case” note because life includes so many things out of our control.

And if you’re of a certain age, I encourage you to do this too. Don’t leave it to other people to define what your existence looked like, what you think made you, well, you. At a difficult junction in recent years someone accused me of trying to control the narrative. Fuck yeah, I am.

Happy birthday to me.

Pam Mandel: 1964 – Still Very Much Alive

Pam Mandel was born in Santa Monica, California. She thought of herself as a textbook West Coast Gen Xer, complete with inherant distrust of The Man and a lifelong uncertainty about the future.

She studied art at San Jose State University; a modest skillset and a lot of determination allowed her to achieve minor success at every creative endeavor she chose to prioritize, be it visual arts, music, writing, or film. She had a boundless appetite for the expressive. She made big paintings, played in a ukuele rock and roll cover band, wrote a memoir and an award winning short film, and seemed to always be trying something new.

Pam moved to Seattle from the California Bay Area when her first brief marriage ended in 1993. Her move coincided with a tech boom that allowed her to earn a living in a series of jobs she repeatedly walked away from to go on adventures, be it driving the Al-Can highway or crossing the Australian Outback where she met her second husband. The two were married for nearly two decades, dividing their time between his home in rural Austria and her home in Seattle, until they divorced in 2020.

That same tech boom meant that Pam’s work as a writer corresponded with the rise of blogging and during the 2000s and 2010s, Pam was small scale internet famous for her blog, Nerd’s Eye View. Her blog provided her with some remarkable experiences — a camping safari in Kenya and Tanzania, a solo road trip through the Mississipi Delta, and crossing the Drake Passage to Antarctica — to name a few.

Her appetite for international travel waned during the pandemic; she traded long haul flights for road trips with her dog, Harley, and spent the darker months in climates sunnier than her Seattle home — Joshua Tree, Moab, and the central California coast. And she found adventures in her home kitchen with her gay boyfriend Larry, who she met her first year in Seattle; the pair had been cooking their way around the globe for several years.

While not particularly athletic, Pam preferred to ride a bike when the weather and the destination allowed. She also liked to swim laps because, she said, it “quieted the hive of bees in her brain.” You could count on her to join you at a protest march, to give time to causes she supported, and to apply her wit as a weapon when circumstances required it. Pam was impatient with bigots, lazy thinkers, and people she considered sell-outs. Pam was often accused of being elitist or stubborn, to which she would respond, “Oh, absolutely. I want the smartest people in charge, why don’t you?” Her romantic partners in particular were confounded by how she would not compromise. Later in life, she considered her solitary state the price she paid for refusing to have children, to live in places she did not want to live, or to shrink herself to fit a role she had no interest in fulfilling.

The descendent of what she called “Fiddler on the Roof” Jews, Pam had an increasingly complex relationship with her religious heritage. She declared herself an atheist, yet had Hebrew tattoos and gave time to progressive Jewish causes. She strongly identified with Jewish culture — Passover was her favorite holiday — but refused to equate Judaism with Israeli politics. Her world view was relentlessly inclusive and she thought that a life surrounded by people of all stripes was the only way to live. A great lover of carbs, she insisted that in addition to other benefits, diversity provided amazing desserts.

In lieu of flowers, she requests that you buy yourself a piece of original art for your home or, if your circumstances align, have Indian takeout delivered to your mid-range roadside hotel. And that you have dessert.

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