Started out innocent enough. I’m watching Jon Stewart interviewing the godfather of AI who is a physics Nobel prize winning scientist out of Toronto—not a physicist—anyway over the next hour and a half. I get so mesmerized by their talk that I save it. Then after having considered various options, decide to send it to my older brother. I just want somebody to share it with. And that's a bit of a time commitment I will say I often listen to podcasts and what not but if I'm having a sandwich, I don't want to listen to something that lasts for an hour and a half. Usually 20 minutes, maybe. But long since finished chewing and I’m still watching and listening. In the quiet of my kitchen.

Next day waking up from an early, really solid nap, I go downstairs, get my empty hemp container with the full intention of having a nice walk, getting some more bulk hemp at the re-use store (hence the container) and then going about my business. Three hours later, I'm back home, like I said, all I wanted to do is share it. The whole subject of AI is so front and center right now it's for me a counterpoint to my recent disappointment with mindfulness and non-duality. And I did admit to somebody recently that—oh it was to Jan at lunch—that the fact that I can't go on my retreats anymore, they disappeared, is regretful, but it's none of my fucking business. If the guy doesn't wanna come all the way out to California, I mean that's a tiring trip from the UK, so too bad for me.

Sad, but a kind of a pickled ending for our community. I've got all these faces in my head of people that I knew over those six times over three years, walking around in the building and seeing them at the meetings or sitting on the couch. Staying up late and chattering away over what we’ve been Contemplating during the week. Now the guy’s got a new redesigned website and it's kind of clean and antiseptic and it's got a bunch of links. Something’s going on. But you know what I don't care, none of my fucking business. He wants to move on and kind of leave a scorched earth behind. But I digress.

Here I am back from three hours with my brothers. The younger is usually sitting out front of the antique store working on something so I was surprised my older brother was there as well; that's not typical especially on a Friday afternoon. Being all excited, I launch into what was upper most in my mind having gorged myself on AI and gotten this incipient heartburn. I needed somebody to be my Pepto-Bismol.

It didn't happen. Instead my older brother is obsessed with Gaza and my younger brother is more interested in just arguing about everything. Seriously anything and everything, especially if it is one of his pet peeves."people who don't take responsibility for their bad deeds." It can be anything from being an Air Force bomber during the Vietnam war, (my DIL’s dad) to disagreeing over refinishing vintage furniture protocols (the friend/owner of the shop.) He's a my way or the highway kind of guy. Somewhere in the middle there’s a little eruption of well I am French! Which he is not really, I mean he is technically since our mother was French, but he doesn't speak the language. He's only been there once, which he loved, but he has no desire to ever go back again, and if he was asked, wouldn't know a single arcane detail about the country. So that justification is a borrowed artifact. The whole thing of Latin temperament. It's an excuse. Or an homage to our mother. Take your pick.

Anyway, we’re trying to define boundaries essentially, since older brother being a vet has a bright red line across which younger brother cannot cross –"you don't have a ticket!"—so I agree. I got a free pass since I'm a woman and there was no draft for women. It was not possible for younger brother to have been at risk over his protestations, no, that was not a thing he could never have been drafted. We checked on our phones. The draft for the Vietnam war stopped in 1973. He was still in high school.

Once again we're in the thick of it. I maintain that if you want to be brutally honest, there are some times when you need to just shut the fuck up. Like, if you stumble into a group of women talking about abortion rights, or episiotomies or still-birth or miscarriages and you're a guy? Shut the fuck up. If you're white, you don't talk about blacks like you know a damn thing. You shut your pie hole unless asked. Not like you can't ask politely, but if told to shut your pie hole, do it. That's my opinion. True, there's a lot of reactivity going on these days so there's that. But I don't know I'm just feeling especially tender and wanting to consolidate some freaking power. And I feel like the best way to do that is to share information.

Like Jon Stewart and AI.