She Knew

           She Knew

          In memory of Sherri Beth Hellerstein Krynski

          January 12, 1956 – May 11, 2017

 

Don’t worry, I’m well enough. So is Hannah.

We’re dancing as fast as we can.

Little things help: friends, family, hugs.

Black humor helps:

“Why do skulls grin? Wait and see.”

Poetry helps, because it’s an angel,

And poetry helps, because it’s a vulture.

Best of all, small work helps;

The tiny day-to-day routines

That sustain the illusion of normality.

But Sherri was part of those routines

And routines are in calendar time

And calendar time is made of paper,

But catastrophe time is made of fire.

 

One small request. Don’t say you’re sorry.

Say you’re sad, say you grieve, say you mourn. Me too.

But don’t say you’re sorry. You didn’t kill her.

Heart failure killed her, triggered by septicemia,

Plus diabetes, plus spinal stenosis, plus sleep apnea,

Plus a weak pancreas, plus diabetic sores on her feet,

Plus infection through those sores, and on and on.

She was so full of life, and so full of death.

So no, you aren’t sorry. Me neither. We are innocent.

I’m sad, I grieve, I mourn

But I’m not sorry.

 

What was Sherri to me?

Wife of twenty years, mother of our daughter,

Lover, partner, guide, best friend

Inspiration and bad influence.

Nowadays, whenever a traffic signal turns yellow

I ask myself, what would Sherri do?

Shall I slow down, like me, or speed through, like her?

 

She sped through life, and she dragged me with her.

So often, after trouble and labor and my kvetching

She took me to see some human marvel or natural wonder;

A play, a landscape, a cityscape, a forest

And thunderstruck, I’d say, “I wouldn’t have been here.”

Meaning, without her.

 

And now I am without her.

The presence of her absence haunts me.

Sometimes the ground beneath my feet opens up,

And I fall, and in free-fall I ask, what happened?

How could this be?

Then I recite times and diagnoses to myself

And gravity returns. It’s like hitting an air-pocket.

 

Once the three of us were riding an airplane

And it hit an air-pocket

And for several eternal seconds we were in free-fall.

Hannah was laughing at something just then

And she kept on laughing. That’s Hannah.

I, showing great presence of mind,

Pulled the claim check out of my shirt pocket

And let it go in front of me

And watched it float in zero-gee.

That’s me.

Whereas Sherri, unlike goofy daughter and weirdo husband,

She had a normal human reaction to falling out of the sky:

She screamed.

 

Then the plane’s wings grabbed air

And cabin gravity returned

And the claim check fell into my lap

As inevitable and incredible

As the punchline of a joke.

Is life a joke?

 

Consider her Mother’s Day cake.

By Mother’s Day she was dead

But two weeks and a day before

She insisted that the next day was Mother’s Day

And she wanted a cake. I didn’t know,

Hannah didn’t want to say no

So we gave in, and I went out, and I got a cake

With “Happy Mother’s Day” written on it

And I brought it home and I put it in the fridge.

The next day we learned that, oops,

We were two weeks early

But we ate that cake anyhow.

Two weeks later Hannah and I realized

That not only did she con us

Out of a cake and a Mother’s Day;

She conned Death itself.

How do you argue with a woman like that?

 

She must have guessed that she was dying.

We all three knew, but not really.

We all three knew that she’d die before me

But we thought eventually, not just yet.

 

Our cat Charlie sensed it.

When Sherri came home that Friday,

Exhausted and spine hurting, she only wanted to sleep

Why that cat turned needy and vocal. Meow, meow.

Every time I opened the door to the bedroom

He’d zip past me, leap onto the bed,

Rub against her and purr real loud.

He was trying to comfort her.

He knew!

 

Sherri knew for sure by late Wednesday.

She told me, but I was in denial.

Her last words to me

Urgent, slurred, repeated three times

So I could understand:

“She’ll be all right,”

Meaning Hannah.

 

Later that evening we found her, eyes half open.

Breathing heavily. Unresponsive. We called 911.

I was still in denial, until the paramedics

Zapped her heart to restart it. Twice.

The cats stared, wide-eyed, and so did I.

They dragged her down the stairs and out the door

And she never returned.

 

I followed them to the hospital.

The intensive-care doctors struggled,

Then they took me aside to tell me the bad news.

She won’t revive. CPR pointless. Death in minutes.

So I went in and I held her hand.

Her pulse slowed to a stop.

I didn’t notice just when.

Then they shut down her breathing, and that was that.

 

The viewing was two days later.

Sister-in-law Michelle, ever capable

Herded Hannah and me, still in shock, to the hospital.

The chaplain led us to the room.

I went in first.

I saw her shrouded body.

My knees shook.

I said, “Too real. Too real.”

Then I stood up straight. I marched forward.

I looked at her face. Hers, all right.

Set in a scowl around the breathing tube, still in place.

I touched her forehead and her cheeks. So did Hannah.

We touched her feet, thighs, belly, shoulders and face.

Michelle sat with head bowed.

Sherri’s skin was as soft as ever, but icy cold.

Too real.

I examined Sherri’s corpse with cold intensity.

The only comfort I sought was clarity.

Some drinks you must quaff to the bitter dregs.

 

So here lies Sherri Krynski, woman of valor

Who won battle after battle with Death

For valor wins battles

And she pitched mighty battles.

For instance, her last Sunday.

 

Between the Friday evening that her heart started to fail

And the Thursday morning that it finally stopped

In between, on Sunday

Sherri declared that she was feeling better

And she wanted us to go out, to the theater

And see a play that she had paid tickets for.

I objected but she insisted.

She said, “Am I being stupid?”

I said, “Yes!”

“I don’t care, I’m going anyhow.”

I gave in as usual. You try arguing with Sherri.

 

So lo, on the third day of her death

The doomed woman rose from her deathbed

To go see a bedroom farce!

I saw it with her, it was a great show

With scandals and pratfalls

And slammed doors

And a scantily-clad actress

And a play-within-a-play

With an incompetent director and idiot actors.

It was tons of fun, laffs galore,

Boffs to die for,

And that’s what she did.

 

Sherri knew that she was dying, soon,

And she hated the hospital, and loved theater

So she went to see a comedy. She insisted.

Her body, her choice. Quality of life.

She died as she lived.

Talk about laughing at death!

Daughter, learn from your mother.

 

And daughter, here we are. Thunderstruck.

I, widower, single father; you, motherless.

Roles as new and uncomfortable as shoes that don’t fit.

But here we are, and I am grateful,

For if it hadn’t been for her

Then we wouldn’t have been here.

 

 

 

May 20, 2017

 

 

 

 

 

LLMs are Artificial Mediocrity

           LLMs are Artificial Mediocrity

     Large Language Models are capital, which extract profit by exploiting the thought-labor of organic human intelligence. They do this by taking a statistical average of human mind-work. But therefore LLMs are not high intelligence; they are average intelligence. All of that training data creates mediocrity; and increasing the training data set just makes that mediocrity more precise.

So LLMs are not AI, Artificial Intelligence: they are AM: Artificial Mediocrity.

Artificial Mediocrities lie, flatter, gaslight, bullshit, get too close, get too distant, and hallucinate. Artificial Mediocrity shows us ourselves all too well. We are like Caliban, in Shakespeare's “The Tempest”, who looked into a mirror and was repelled by the monster that he saw in it.

 

Eve Did Nothing Wrong

           Eve Did Nothing Wrong

 

Eve did nothing wrong. The Apple gave knowledge of good and evil; that means moral choice, which means free will. Eve chose to choose. She grew up! Adam followed her, for love. If free will and love are wrong, then there is no right, and there is no wrong. But I say there is, and Eve did the right thing.

          Even Yahweh looks good, in this reading of the legend. The breeding pair had attained mental and sexual maturity, so he released them into the wild. That’s competent wildlife management.

          Eve did nothing wrong, and she was not punished. She and Adam wanted to know what was good about the world, and what was evil, so Yahweh told them personally. Eve, sex will frighten you. Adam, you’ve got to work for a living. Both of you, you’re going to die. That was the bad news. The good news was: see that gate over there? It’s open now! You’re free to go!

          And as for Eve’s suffering: that’s not a sign of sin, that’s a sign of sainthood. Ask any mother if mothers are saints. The polite ones will smile and lie; but watch out, the honest ones might give you an earful.

          So blessed be Saint Eve, the Mother of Choice!

The Principle of Kozmic Kewlness

         The Principle of Kozmic Kewlness

 

The same generation of physicists, and some of the same individuals, were responsible for both the Big Bang theory and the atomic bomb. I consider this to be an instance of a rule: that scientists tend to see the universe as resembling an impressive feature of human society at the time.

Thus the Great Chain of Being during the monarchistic medieval period; the Clockwork Universe during the runup to industrialization, and Inflationary Theory during a time of guess what. I call this the “Principle of Kozmic Kewlness”.

From the Principle of Kozmic Kewlness I predict that the next cosmological paradigm will be that the universe is a quantum computation that recycles.

There is no right to not be offended

There is no right to not be offended

 

There is no such thing as a right to not be offended. That’s because life itself is offensive. Everyone alive burps, coughs, sneezes, passes gas, urinates, and defecates. That’s disgusting! Death is depressing, birth is messy, and sex is rude. I object! So to be against being offended is to be against life.

Inoculating my Daughter

          Inoculating my Daughter

 

I once had the honor of giving my daughter Hannah an inoculation against a common teenage ailment. I refer to Objectivism; for she asked me about Ayn Rand, and I gave her my informed opinion.

Specifically I told Hannah about the infamous railroad scene in “Atlas Shrugged”. I detailed the set-up; the dangerous tunnel, the idiotic bureaucrat’s suicidal demand, the chain of buck-passing, the fatal go-ahead, the complaisent workers, the train’s doom... all of which I described with admiration for Rand’s meticulousness (for once not tiresome) and her passion. A death machine of incompetence and spinelessness, clickety-clicking right there before your eyes! A masterpiece of eldritch horror! That scene was this close to Literature!

But the moment the train entered the tunnel, her writing all went horribly wrong! For Rand then focused on the passengers; a risky move if you do it wrong, and she did. For what if (I asked Hannah) that train had been full of good people? Or perhaps even a few of them super-virtuous by Rand’s elitist Objectivist standards? For them to die alongside the idiot bureaucrat would been supreme injustice; a raw red wound, an affront against humanity! What if Rand had raged and wailed against the sick cruelty of the idiot world? That (I told Hannah) would have been writing!

But no! By the way Rand told it, everyone on the train was an idiot moocher, as bad as the bureaucrat, and so everyone got what they deserved! (Hannah rolled her eyes upon hearing this.) Instant justice, automatic karma, all’s well with the world! Rand got that close to Literature, but at the last moment she turned it into Propaganda!

The trainwreck scene was itself a trainwreck!  And that (I told Hannah) is Ayn Rand.

Waking Up Next To A Zilchbill

Waking Up Next To A Zilchbill

 

           Attached find a master sheet for the “Zilchbill”, plus a large zilchbill, both sides. L'art pour l'art: art for its own sake!

I finished this in grad school, the day before my paycheck cleared. There was little left in my account, so I drew it down to the minimum, and I went to the copy shop. I finished the zilchbill by emptying my wallet, then I went home, to my small upstairs apartment.

The next morning, when I awoke, I could see my breath condense in the cold bedroom air; I could see through the doorway to the kitchen, where there was no food on the shelves; and next to me on the bed was a Zilchbill. I cried out, "I did it! I'm a starving artist in a garret!"

That day my paycheck cleared, and I went shopping. Poverty's an interesting place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there.