“The cards don’t lie,” she said, shuffling the deck.

I confessed to a passing curiousity about tarot and she gave me a deck from her collection; she had several she’d acquired over the years.”Leave it in your vacation rental if you don’t like it,” she said. “I don’t need it back.”

The cards came with a sort of dictionary that defines what each card means and a series of diagrams showing you how to lay out your spread. There were guidelines around what to ask, what question to hold in your mind, as you read the cards. No yes-or-no questions, the cards are not a Magic Eight Ball.

That deck stayed behind, it lives in Moab, Utah. I found the art both too realistic and too Ren Fair fantasy at the same time. But my curiousity was not quite satisfied. I liked the structured thinking reading the cards requires and I believed the right deck would find me.

Months later I was walking Harley the Dog and we came across a little free library housing a like new deck of tarot cards — the whole kit, the book, the box, a nice little satin bag in which to store your cards. I took that home and tried to work with it for a while but it had been sanitized too much. It was all woodland creatures and wholesome faeries and anything sharp had been dulled. It was cute but real life has sharp edges. After a few weeks, I packed it up and put it in another little free library in my neighborhood.

In the interim I’d mentioned to another friend that I’d been sort of learning to read the cards. Turns out he, too, reads the cards from time to time. He sent me the deck he uses — the 1909 Rider-Waite deck. I’ve been using that deck for about a year now. I immediately liked it much better than any of the remixed decks I had my hands on.

No shade to the remixed deck — some of them are stunning and the artist in me understands why you’d want to make a deck of your own. Those later decks, though, they have an additional layer of interpretation applied to them and I didn’t want that.

The more time I spend with the Rider-Waite deck, the more it feels too New Testament for this Jewish atheist. The devil made me do it. I had pulled the card with the devil on it and thought, “We… don’t do the devil in Judaism.” Which is why I recently acquired another deck, the Tarot of Marseille, a northern Italian deck created some time in the 14th century.

The 1400’s were not great for the Jews — to put it mildly — and the Marseille deck has been interpreted as holding deeply encoded Jewish theology. Perhaps it provided a way to learn about Judaism in a covert way in a time when anyone who was not Christian had three options: flee, convert, or die. Whether I believe in Jewish theology or not is irrelevant, what this specific interpretation provides is a vocabulary more aligned with mine.

This is all a lot of set up and diversion to answering the question I imagine many of you have: What are you even doing? You consider yourself such a logical thinker, what are you doing when you let a random card shuffle shape your decision making processes!? Fair question. After all, the other deck I consult on the regular is Your Logical Fallacy Is so hey, you’re right, it’s seems contrary to how I approach the world.

It’s all in the interpretation, man. I don’t go to the cards looking for divination or fortune telling or answers of any kind. I look for grounding questions. The hive of bees in my brain will puzzle an issue relentlessly and it can be maddening.

The cards are simply a focal point. I interpret them as asking things like what unfinished business is keeping that one bee from taking a nap? What thread is preventing that one bee from heading to new meadows? Does that other bee just need some reassuring, “You got this,” language before getting to work on something hard? The cards give me a singular lens through which to consider whatever problem I can’t stop working and to get on with my day. (Oh, look, of course there’s a bee tarot.)

The last five years — or is it seven — have been fucking disruptive. People I care about died. I got divorced. I got fired and then, when I finally found decent work, it didn’t last. My sweet old dog got very, very ill and I thought I might lose him. For a while, the main arterial in and out of my neighborhood was closed — how’s that for a heavy handed metaphor — and we had a deadly pandemic that killed at least seven million people. And there’s the fascism, too. Is it any wonder I can’t think straight?

The cards don’t lie — my friend was right — because I don’t expect them to provide declarative truths. Every time I pull a card, it asks me the same baseline question: What if you looked at it differently? I find that helpful. There could very well be a better view just a few steps that way.

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In June 2025, I got what seems to have been my last real paycheck. I have done a bit of freelance work since, but that June check was the last one of significance. Since then, I have been a shop assistant at a small business, a dog walker, a content marketer (one small project), a freelance reporter (another small project), and a content strategist (part-time, short term). I also started a volunteer gig as a narrator at the local library for the blind, but that’s been frequently interrupted by a run of bad (and expensive) luck in the dental department.  

My year-to-date income for 2026 is 2500 dollars.  

Before I go any further, I should say that I’m okay. I got an inheritance when my mom died and it has saved me.  

I stopped applying for jobs about six months ago. It wasn’t because I didn’t want work, no, it was because it felt so pointless. I have had one job interview in the last 14 months. The person I talked with told me they had thousands of applicants. I was amazed to have got the call though to be fair; it was a near perfect match with my skills. That was not enough.  I did not make it past the initial screening round.  

Even if I had made it, I was interviewing to be someone they would call when the hiring agency had work. They did government projects and were looking for someone who’d be ready to go when — if — their contract was renewed. I answered a lot of those “tell me about a time” questions in hopes I’d have the possibility of work sometime in the unspecified future.  

When I learned how to cross country ski, I was struck by how many olds were on the trails. I’m a swimmer and a cyclist, two other pursuits that have lots of olds. My work as a tech writer was the same; as I settled into that occupation, I noticed a lot of older women in this role. I was psyched – it felt like something I could do for a long time. Which I guess was true. I had my first gig at Microsoft in 1998. My last paycheck came indirectly from T-Mobile in 2025. That’s almost 30 years. A good career.  

Then AI ate my job and ghost jobs became a thing and maybe ageism caught up with me and I don’t know. The result is that I’ve gone more than a year without consistent work or income.  

For the first six months or so, I thought things would turn around. I made it through two big recessions – the dot com burst and the financial collapse in 2007. COVID hit me not at all, go figure; I had a good job the whole time. But I don’t think the market will recover in time for me to go back to work. I’m willing to be surprised, but I think I’m probably done.  

I’ve spent the last year and change trying to figure out what to do next.  

Last year I tried to sell a book based on CANNED, my podcast about getting fired, but I could not land an agent. I decided not to self publish not because I think it’s a bad idea, but because the numbers don’t make sense for me. I don’t mind investing the time, but I don’t want to put in money that I won’t get back.  

For a while I considered getting back into the studio and making art, but every time I go into my basement I confront two decades worth of paintings and collages and other visual things. I do not need more creations cluttering up the joint. It’s paralyzing. I have directed that same energy into my garden – which will stay with the house when I sell it and plus, I grow a fair bit of food. It’s good to make stuff you can eat. I have come to enjoy the garden tremendously but it doesn’t drive me.

My appetite for travel is severely diminished. There are two reasons for this. The first is my aging companion, Harley the Dog. For a small dog he has a lot of big feelings. There are only a few places I’m comfortable leaving him for an overnight or two. He’s got some health issues and requires a special diet, too. I’ve flown with him once and he did okay but I don’t want to put him through that again. If he can’t come along, I need someone to stay in my home with him – and honestly, if he can’t come along, I don’t want to go.  

I’ve also developed a lot of ambivalence about participating in an activity that has such a negative effect on our planet and its people. This is my pandemic scar; I can’t unsee how much our climate improved when we stopped traveling for that year. I loved to travel and it’s probably easier for me, a person who has done a fair bit of it, to opt out. And also, the notion of jetting off to Indonesia for ten days just doesn’t call me like it used to. I might feel differently after Harley moves on to his next existence, but I might not, too.  

For the longest time I thought that when this day came, I would pull up stakes and move to Europe. I had residency through marriage but getting divorced put an end to that plan. I am resourceful and tenacious, and should I want to move to the continent I could research getting my residency restored, but the idea doesn’t hold the luster it had while I was married. I got to fulfill my fantasy of living and working abroad – how great is that? – but the idea of doing it on my own has zero appeal.  

Here I am. Unemployed, single, wanderlust no longer lusting, creative spark no long lighting fires. Anchored by my sweet old dog but not mad about it. Secure enough, thank god, to not be freaking out but not so well off that I’m buying a beach house.  

I’m fully aware of the first world problems nature of this, how privileged I am. And also, what a weird situation.

I’ve spent a year in this directionless state, trying to figure out what I want to do, and getting shot down whenever I go after something. New job or long term gig? No. Book deal? No. Some third thing? No.

I think I finally have a plan: Go back to school. 

There is no downside. I have rolled this idea around in my brain for months now, and I can find absolutely nothing to discourage me. Check it out. 

1. It’s convenient. The community college campus is about four miles from my house. It’s an easy bike ride or a ten-minute drive.   

2. It’s cheap. At my advanced age, I qualify for a tuition waiver – it’s five bucks a class. It’s space available only and I don’t get credit, but should I decide to continue, I already have a bachelor’s degree and won’t need those credits, anyway.  

3. There are zero stakes. None. I fail math? So what? My dream job appears and I drop out to go do that? So what? I get three weeks in and decide I made a bad choice and don’t want to continue? So what?  

4. It’s part time. I benefit from a little bit of structure in my world, but I don’t like being eaten alive by a schedule. I can take one or two classes and call it good.  

5. It’s good for me. I can learn some stuff and get my brain firing in new ways. I can meet new people. I can be the weird old at the back of the room.  

6. The college mascot is the otter. Enough said. 

My application has been processed; I need to register for classes. I’m skipping summer school but in the fall, I hope to start the astronomy and physics track at South Seattle Community College. I chose astronomy and physics because my focus had to be something new and it had to be hard. I considered history for a hot minute, but I’m mad enough about the state of things; studying history wouldn’t help.  

I’ve been at loose ends for long enough. Hurling myself at the mysteries of the universe feels as good a solution as any.  

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That sounds like I left it on the bus, but nope, a big guy who looked like a boxing coach — “Just call me Joey” — freed it from my jaw in very little time. I was knocked out for the proceedure ($809); the anxiety beforehand was worse than the pain after. I have a pizza burn-esque patch on the roof of my mouth and some dull aching.

And I’m tired, very, very tired. The first day of that was probably a hangover from the stress and pain I’d been feeling from the broken chopper, plus, I had to cycle through the anesthesia. I am reminding myself that a guy took one of my bones ($481) and… that’s a whole thing, even if it’s a small bone. I haven’t needed the presciption painkillers which is great because that shit will fuck you up, but I have needed a lot of sleep.

I had a bone graft ($710) so I can get an implant; the graft takes an estimated six to nine months to heal. That mean more imaging ($140). Fingers crossed it sticks and I don’t need more surgery. The second proceedure ($5700) isn’t scheduled yet but it also has a long healing time. Assuming that goes well, I’ll still need a permanent crown.

The whole process could take a year and it will cost somewhere between $8000-$10,000 dollars. That’s before the $1200 I spent on the work that did not fix my chopper in the first place.

My insurance covers imaging, that’s about it. It’s anger about insurance and health care costs, not pain, causing me to grit my teeth through the recovery process.

The clinic suggested I could forego sedation if I wanted to reduce my costs. “Absolutely fucking not,” I thought. I would do full sedation for a standard cleaning were it an option. The other money saving option is to get a bridge — which isn’t as effective as an implant. Or I can just stay gap-toothed for the rest of my days and risk bone loss and other complications. Fantastic choices, no?

I’m so lucky to be in a place where the expense is not freaking me out, but that hasn’t spared me from being enraged all the same. I had a medically neccessary proceedure on a standard issue body part and none of it is covered by insurance.

Last fall I changed my health — not dental, the other stuff, the stuff that’s not teeth or eyes — insurance carrier because they didn’t cover my doctor anymore. I had a prescription refilled and when I went to the pharmacy to pick it up, they told me it would be $200.

“No, it won’t,” I said.

That pharmacy is not contracted with my new insurance provider, turns out. They do, however, have their own discount plan and once they put me on that, the prescription was $19.20. I won’t use that pharmacy again. There’s another one, a mile away, that is contracted with my plan. It all worked out, but what if I hadn’t balked, what if I’d just accepted the first price they gave me? Why didn’t they give me the discount price up front?

We know the answer to that question: It’s the capitalism.

Well meaning types will suggest I should jet off to Mexico or Romania or whatever to have the work done, it would save me some money and bonus, vacation in Mexico or Romania or whatever. I get it. I won’t detail the reasons that doesn’t work for me. It also doesn’t address a massive failure to provide affordable care to millions of Americans.

I have been self-employed most of my career. There was a time when it was not possible for me to get health insurance at all; no one was selling an individual plan and the state plan had a waiting list. Imagine that, a waiting list to get health insurance! I’m not yet old enough for Medicare — and even if I was, it wouldn’t cover dental or optical.

We already know that if you have money, you can get decent healthcare and if you don’t, welp, you’re on your own with your medical needs and debt, pal. If you have agency, you can fight the system to some degree and if you don’t, welp, that’s on you for not having the resources to navigate a hostile process.

Delta Dental’s Washington CEO got paid a $4.1 million salary in 2024, with an additional $500k in other compensation. I’d bet he never gives a second thought to what his own dental care costs.

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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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