I’m a patient guy

 Saw you calling for an end to Woke on a post about AI.

Blogger won’t link directly to Rumble. Their best use of AI.

Click on the graphic to see my Rumble post that shows, not tells.

I’ve written more good stuff about AI than anyone. Because I’m better qualified. This time, you can just look at some of my artwork and hear an AI voice crying in the wilderness.

I’ll be back by and by. Ignoring me won’t stop me. I’m used to talking to myself. There’s no more fit company to converse with…

For Safekeeping

The Ascendant World of Threadbare Consciousness.

Just got an unasked for upgrade of my iPad operating system. A big one. Still trying to figure out to use my own damn device. Increases paranoia about how much is out of my control.

Thought I’d send my latest big post, end of year thoughts for 2025. I do it very year anymore. Thought I’d send you the link, if you’ve a mind to, you can print it out on paper at some point. I don’t have a printer.

End of Year Thoughts for 2025 — The Big Picture Stuff 

Thanks.

R.

The Big Squeeze

Kept thinking, What should be next? Haven’t really answered the why, have I? Not expecting much specific from this site. Thought I needed an ear, I guess. My wife’s ear is failing, literally and figuratively. She is losing her hearing by degrees and is often faking having heard what I said. But she’s also losing her short term memory at an alarming rate. We have reached the point where she will read the same news headline to me three times in as many hours, as if she’s just discovered it, and obviously has no memory that I told her about the story behind the headline yesterday.

It isn’t a new process for me. Went through it with one of my grandmothers and again with my mother, the long loss and the changes in behavior and personality that go with it. This time the difficulty is figuring out how I can best help her through it. There is the desire to slow the process with reminders, stimulating activities, and modest nagging about hearing aids and memory-specific over-the-counter dietary supplements. Unfortunately these all tend to make her mad, and her temper is quicker first thing in the morning and then in the evening, when body aches and pains spike, and when the Sundowning (a real thing) occurs. The alternative is becoming a kind of keeper, an odious and false role that pretends you haven’t heard the exact same thing three times already today. But that’s where it’s trending now. I worry about her driving, which thankfully she doesn’t do much of, just a weekly trip to the chiropractor and incidental errands she can’t be dissuaded from. But I’m not terribly mobile myself, and she has a lifelong penchant for fussing about this and that, up and down the stairs with cats and the dog, the sullen daughter who lives downstairs and isn’t much help, and the administrivia of a household falling gradually into disrepair.

This isn’t a bitch session. This isn’t something that is happening to me. This is the “in sickness and in health” part, and I love her as much as ever. She’s 82. I’m the right person to be with her. 

But it’s part of the sum. I’m getting squeezed from every direction. If you do as much writing as I do, the AI additions to AutoCorrect are not just an irritation; they are a plague that’s becoming a predatory (and highly unintelligent) monster. That’s a day-to-day, hour-to-hour squeeze on my patience and productivity.

There are much larger squeeze factors at work too. The following list is not meant to force you into depth reading but only exploratory scanning and sampling visits. Everything on the list is under some form of immediate threat from the “nobody answers the phone” rulers of the Internet:

Spilt Ink: (More about the problems here in some future post)

https://thespiltinkfiles.blogspot.com

Shuteye Town 1999:

https://shuteyetown1999.blogspot.com

This is my most endangered work, not trivially because it is as big and important in its way as The Boomer Bible. I built it in two years against the deadline of January 1, 2000, putting in many hours a day, seven days a week, including the day of my father’s funeral. It is gigantic, somewhere between 3,500 and 3,800 custom graphic files that are simultaneously a work of fiction, a video game, and a time capsule recording the state of the nation in the final minute of the 20th Century. 

ST99 also has two spin-off books and separately available sample texts from its bookstore..

It’s a time capsule in which you the player write your own narrative by the choices you make in where and when you travel perpendicular to the ticks of the clock. You’re always at 11:59 PM, but you can be in any place you want, and even if you’re killed in the city you can continue. Each entry to Shuteye Town is a test though. When you hit a dead end you can’t back out of , you have finished writing the story you had in you this time and must start all over again from scratch. 

At the very least, ST99 is an historical artifact unlike any other. It does sit precisely on the line between 1999 and 2000. Worthy of investigation on that basis alone. What has changed and what is the same in this newer, even angrier century?

At its best it is a telling portrait of the cultural baggage all of us 20th century folks carried from that century to this one. It knows that we’re headed for trouble. Amazing how much it still knows about who and what we’ve become.

Like The Boomer Bible, ST99 includes a premonition specifically suggestive of 9/11. TBB’s three testaments contain exactly 2001 chapters. Not by design. A fact discovered after the towers fell. Speaking of the towers, though, here is one of few renderings of Shuteye Town viewed from the air by a predator:

The twin towers of Shuteye bracket the city.

It’s been a 20-year uphill fight to keep Shuteye Town alive and accessible since its initial release on CD in January 2000. Written and drawn in Word97, Word2000 eliminated the app’s backward compatibility, which required a conversion of the whole thing to html. A brilliant man named Guy Tellefsen performed this monumental feat as a labor of love. What could not come through unscathed was the text and sound files. The html version was uploaded as an Internet site with some usage assists and background info in the early 2000s. The sponsoring app went out of business after requiring hefty monthly fees for the first time subsequent to an acquisition. The current version is still in the process of reconstruction, but it is hanging onto life by a thread thanks to the arbitrary negligence of both Wordpress and Google. In fact, ST99 is the only surviving, accessible content of the blog the files were stored in, and every time I open the Google site I don’t know if the files will still be there. (I still have html files on my wife’s computer, which is easily 15 years old now, unsupported by Microsoft, and afflicted with e-mail problems that make file transfers problematic at best.) Enough about all that for now.

Shuteye Nation:

https://shuteyenation.blogspot.com

Just as The Boomer Bible has its own independently accessible companion work (Punk City), ST99 has a companion work called Shuteye Nation, completed early in 2002. The work has suffered through its own pilgrimage from one web home to another and hangs to life by the same Wordpress thread as ST99. The current restoration is still in an early stage. There is much other background and video material that’s intact and available for integration in the new site, but the biggest squeeze of all is my available time for what needs to be done.

The Instapunk Blogs:

2,000+ posts at Instapunk.com (The Internet Archive, only intermittently available at present)

600+ posts at  Instapunk Rules

700+ posts at  Instapunk Returns

Some possibly helpful links:

The World According to Instapunk

This Interruption Brought to You by TruePunk

The Modern Archive is a problem because they are now rationing the number of times you can access your own work in some unspecified increment of time. I suspect upping your monthly ‘donation” can alleviate this restriction but AI haven’t broken the code on how to give them more money without going through PayPal. Wordpress problems already described. Google is the home of all my current blogsites (20 some) and they are a jealous God. They won’t display a video linked from Rumble. And they are also hinting about the possibility of converting from free to paid sites. In recent months, I feel the wrist slap of Blogger’s refusal to post an image file on the first attempt. It takes three consecutive attempts until some unspecified session milestone is reached and a first attempt will finally work. They make it slyly clear that I am out of the free blog business whenever they choose.

Facebook:

https://instapunkreturns.blogspot.com/2025/11/a-big-missing-piece.html

The biggest pig in my poke that can’t be accurately quantified. 10 years worth of posts and videos that can’t be counted or freely accessed except by specific dates. It’s a huge volume of work all told. 

I’ll leave the squeeze discussion at that for now. I told you I figured I needed an ear. It helps me to write this down. It would be nice to know that you’ve looked at what I’m sending you, but I think you can see I’m making no requests or demands. Maybe you’d be comfortable regarding all this as ‘things he can no longer discuss with his wife.’ 

I appreciate any time you do give it.

P.S. Just so you don’t think I’m completely down at the heels, this is still pretty much how it feels to be me when I’m working on something I care about…. From Quantum 19 (July 2920)

Why This, Why You, Why Here, Why Now

 

It’s time I spoke to one person. It’s good we’ve never met. I have a sense of you being fair to a fault, more patient than I am with opposing views. I trust your intelligence as far as I have been witness to it, principally on divisive political topics. I know you have read some of my work. This medium of expression is the best substitute for a conversation that should remain at one remove. It’s far from an ideal medium because it is so chronologically deterministic, committed to preserving the order in which posts are written, last first, which is an enormous obstacle to content that requires some first-things-first order at times. I’ve picked it because it has capabilities and tools in terms of linking that can at least partially offset its principal structural flaw. 

What do I have in mind? My real résumé as a writer and a person. Which simply cannot be done in the form of a straightforward memoir. Why? Because I have always been a distortion factor in every environment I have inhabited or worked in. My life has been an extraordinary adventure, and it simply can’t be critiqued by ordinary means. When my first wife told me she was done with the marriage and I asked her why, she said, “You’re just too much. Too much of everything.”

She was not trying to be kind. She didn’t want any more of me. I understood and accepted what she meant. Over the years, good friends have expressed similar sentiments. As you read this, you may come to dislike me for various reasons, but I'm not writing to be liked. I am trying to provide a basis for understanding my work, which is vast and far beyond any reductionist dismissal. But I have lived through a succession of extreme experiences, immersions really, and I have learned from them, written about them, and continue doing so even now, at the age of 72 going on 150+.

Writing this a day after the message I posted in your Facebook page. Here’s the text of the letter I had begun to you before that:

Dear Jeffrey,

 

I am writing because I am facing some milestones and am trying to do what can be done.

 

I am 72 and still writing between 6 and 12 hours a day. My wife is 82, and she can no longer serve as my manuscript publisher for Amazon/Kindle. The curtain is descending on her, more rapidly all the time.

 

I need an agent to help me preserve my work against Internet oblivion. I am not very mobile at all, I have no money to speak of, and I am sitting on what could be a fortune for some innovative combination of agent and publisher(s).

 

Sorry for all the “I”’s, but that’s what it comes down to. I am unique, but I am old and I still have a gift to give my profession and the generations who will have to rebuild literature and philosophy in years to come. I am sitting on a mountain of product that needs to be packaged and sold into the marketplace.

 

But “I” is the problem. My life story is epically American. I am an archetype of the Baby Boom generation and so obviously symbolically American that the facts of the matter would sound fictitious if you made them up. In other words, I am my own best story, and autobiography is an odious — and wrong — approach to the packaging of me. I, I, I, I, I… Not necessary, given that I have written a great deal of it down. My total output in words alone is well north of 6 million. I have been a constant examiner of my own life and the America I have experienced for close to 60 years now. The older I get, the more it seems that my life has been an arranged thing, with necessary components timed deliberately out of order, for the purpose of ensuring my acquaintance with the broadest possible experience of both good times and bad, rich and poor, and always somehow in the center of whatever battle was being fought for truth, justice, and the American Way.

 

I was born in 1953, the first fear of the Eisenhower administration (also the year of the H-bomb), in one of the cradles of the American Revolution, Greenwich Twp NJ, which had its own tea-burning party in 1775, and spent a major part of my early years in nearby Salem County, where the Quaker John Fenwick signed a treaty with the Leni Lenape in 1675 under an historical oak tree that only fell to earth in 2018. My Scottish ancestors came to America in the 1740s, fleeing from retribution for supporting Bonnie Prince Charlie, and Lairds fought in the Revolution, the Civil War (both sides), and my father was a fighter pilot in WW2. My mother’s father was a captain of infantry under MacArthur in WWI, and his wife was a member of the D.A.R. I grew up in a country house that exemplified the American story, the original structure built in the 1730s, a large addition dated to 1815, and a frame structure that long served as our kitchen was built in the 1860s. The property also had a three-bay carriage shed with corncribs and an attic, as well as a huge crumbling barn with hand-hewn beams, and frame icehouse about the same age as the kitchen.

 

I was the third Robert Fisher Laird. My grandfather and namesake, R. F. Laird Sr., lived in Salem as did his wife and the other two grandparents, all of whom played different and crucial roles in bringing up me and my sister. I was the closest of his six grandchildren to my Grandfather Laird, who was my hero and mentor from childhood to the present day. My sister had an eye condition that required doctor visits in Philadelphia, and I spent hundreds of hours in his company. He was a great man and likely a saint. He, my parents, and a Greenwich millionaire organized the private elementary school my sister and I attended till it was time to go away to boarding school. During those elementary years, Boppa (as we called Laird Sr) served as Chairman of the board of Trustees of St. John’s Day School and St. John’s Episcopal Church, the original sponsoring organization. He died during my first year away at Mercersburg Academy, where my dad had gone before me, and Boppa came to me in my room after his funeral service. I promised him out loud that I would try to be a good boy, as he had taught me.

 

I tell you all these basics because they remain important. I spent four years at Mercersburg, three at Harvard (graduated early at 19), and another year and a half at Cornell Business School, and in all that time I never met anyone who had a childhood as culturally diverse as mine.

In the 200 acres immediately surrounding the house where I grew up (on 6 acres), the neighbors included a struggling third generation farmer, a glorified shack for his seasonal migrant help, a Communist water colorist and his wife, a spinster osteopath, one of the heirs of the Coca Cola fortune with his Soviet wife and five children, the Executive Director of the World Wildlife Fund and his frosty live-in housekeeper, a retired accountant and published mystery writer married to a delightful Canadian eccentric, a black hired hand caring for a mentally handicapped son, a Native American housemaid and her Moor husband, a shift worker at a local glass plant and his hard wife and two sons, and an insurance executive who spent weekdays in Connecticut and returned home Friday nights to his white-haired femme fatale wife. All of these people were part of our routine daily lives in this rural patch outside historic Greenwich (pronounced ‘Green-witch’ by residents of long lineage).

The two county area in which my sister and I grew up represented the same kind of melting pot ambiance traceable to the unique histories of principal towns. Cumberland County’s Bridgeton was Industrial Revolution all the way, large and small manufacturing plants built by WASP, Catholic, and Jewish entrepreneurs, whose children were my classmates at St. John’s Day School. Beyond Bridgeton there was Millville built mostly by immigrants from Eastern Europe, Poles, Slavs, etc. Another town nearby was Vineland, overwhelmingly Italian in my youth, with grand ambitions that were never fully achieved. The South Jersey Rainbow, all located below Exit 1 of the New Jersey Turnpike along with the shore of cape May County….

This is as far as I had gotten when I wrote the message on your page. I had been about to tell you something of the personal me who lived in these environs. I was going to show you the place Isent to be alone when I was just a kid, a patch woods called “Little Egypt” behind our house, about a quarter of a mile up a dirt farm track. 

Didn’t find it right away. Thought maybe I’d stashed it in a website I’ve kept mostly to myself. Went looking and realized Afterpunk 19 was the real necessary introduction to this site. Everything I’d have compressed here was already there in one form or another. A good place to start:

Thoughts on Afterpunk 19

Or just start at the beginning and read. I like the first post a lot:

Afterpunk 19

It’s all relevant. Reading in order is fine.

Also, a site not much hinted at in the Instapunk universe:

Quantum 19 (Scan and cherry-pick…)

I’ll obviously discuss other matters later on. All of my sites are in peril. All of my work. Why I’m reaching out.