Everyone is talking about Artificial Intelligence. I like to think that much of the grey matter in my brain is highly artificial, but they are talking about programs such as ChatGPT. Here you have a program that can compose music, write a play or a fairy tale, answer test questions, and even write poetry or song lyrics.

Yeah sure, but can it dance?

Seriously. Proponents of A.I. believe it will be a great asset for outsourcing the scutwork that has to be done every day. It’s already ubiquitous in such applications as Siri and Alexa, web ads, drones, facial recognition, spam filtering, translation apps, and self-driving cars. So what’s the big deal?

The dealbreaker for me is that we may end up with a lot of stuff that has no soul or sense of humor, and yet people will ooh and ah over the marvel of the technology. As a writer, my most valued commodity is my voice. When I discovered that I had a distinctive voice, it was one of the bigger aha! moments in my life. Whether it’s a good voice or bad voice may be up for debate, but I know that it’s what makes my prose unique. How can or will ChatGPT match that?

Will anyone be raving about how A.I. is so creative and imaginative? I doubt it. Humans do that. Everyday. Have been doing it for centuries. Whether it’s a painting, a play or a novel, if you remove the voice or the creative seed, what are you really left with? Answer: Something artificial. Instead of a seed you may only have the pits.

We’ve already accepted the fact that we cannot speak to a real person when we try to resolve a banking problem or book an airplane flight. We obediently toddle off to the chat feature to converse (that’s a stretch) with an A.I. bot that wants to know the nature of our problem (as if they are sentient enough to care). More and more of our daily interactions are going to be with the artificial intelligentsia.

Maybe they have the right name for A.I. after all. It is artificial. You might even say it’s synthetic. I prefer natural fibers.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

I was invited by one of the women in my golf group to participate in a series of beginner bridge lessons in her home, and I thought why not? They say this complex card game is especially good for the aging brain. It seems to me anything that might help us dodge dementia is a good thing. I’m retired. I’ve got the time.

Today was my first lesson, and that’s an hour and a half I’ll never get back.

Perhaps I should have known. When I told Dale, he reminded me math was involved. While it’s true I picked journalism as a major because it was about the only degree that didn’t require even the most rudimentary of math skills, I thought, well, it’s a card game. How hard can it be?

Many of you probably know this already, but it’s damned hard. I won’t even go into the complexities I tried to absorb during this first lesson, but it reminded me of high school geometry, when the teacher spent an entire semester saying, “Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Because that’s what it sounded like to me.

I’m 67, reasonably intelligent and in excellent health. However, I don’t think I have enough time left to understand this game.

Even without the card counting and all that, there are all kinds of weird things including where you sit and what cards you play – north, south, east and west. What’s so wrong about left and right?

Sometimes your partner will show all their cards, and you play those, too. Like one hand wasn’t enough. And all these little codes to signal your partner how you want to bid. If everyone subscribes to the same convention, why not just say it in plain English? I have five spades!

I didn’t want to disappoint my friends, but I also didn’t want to pretend I’d come back when I knew it was a lost cause. While I acknowledge some stress is good for you, this is the kind of stress that makes me miserable. Rather than drag it out, I just laid it out for them. They were gracious, but now they have to find a replacement, which sucks for them.

When I got home, I told Dale he was right. Numbers gone wild! Crazy stuff! And all my Thursdays eaten up just to learn the basics? I’m pretty sure I would start dreading Thursdays, finding excuses to stay in bed, when in fact it’s a rather pleasant day of the week that has done me no previous harm.

He said, “So, you’re saying it was a bridge too far?”

The man’s still got it.

All this is good news for those of you who enjoy reading my blog. I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks, and I had been thinking, maybe I’ll just quit writing. But that’s looking like a bad strategy now that I know bridge isn’t going to save me.

I promised the bridge gods I would work harder at writing if they would just leave me alone.

Donna Pekar is an aging badass (for real) who lives in California and writes Retirement Confidential.

A familiar sight, my grandchild absorbed in his ‘screens.’ Focused on a small rectangle of light and magic, absorbed in animated conflicts, he is cocooned within the world around him. Like a writer subsumed by his concentration, he startles and remonstrates if someone barges into the room with real-life presence and demands.

As I age, I can be present to my family, my grandkids, as happened recently on a trip to my childhood neighborhood. I would point out landmarks—a now empty lot where our house once stood, my grade school, my best buddy’s home, the ricotta store. Acting like a tour guide, I passed along footnotes on the passing scene. But all the time, I was running a movie behind my eyes, screening flashbacks and backstories. Us guys throwing snowballs from across the street at the O in Roman Cleanser sign still visible on the sidewall of Wajo’s grocery store and the spitting contests where I was the acknowledged champ…could clear four sidewalk squares with just the right booger. But I couldn’t stop to relay all that. Not in real time. I would be using up their lifetimes to relive mine. And they still wouldn’t be able to know it the way I did, the way I experienced that time and place.

And so, I startled over and over as we walked along whenever a child or grandchild broke into my throwback screen-time:

“So, how many corner stores were there on your way to school?”

“How come the school is closed?”

“Did you have Little League in those days?”

So, when I wonder if it’s healthy for a child to be so absorbed in computer games and social media, I have to realize that I can get lost in my own dramas, locked in my own memory vault. And if I can’t quite understand the appeal that screens have for my kids, I have to remind myself that not everything we experience and feel can cross the generation gap. And anyway, no one can experience what I went through. My story is my own and only the broadest outlines can be shared. Unless I were a very good story teller…and even then. As my wise father-in-law once said when asked to describe his experience as a sailor in WWII, “If you were there, I don’t have to tell you. If you weren’t, I don’t have the words.”

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles.

You’ve seen the lists on Facebook or some other online time-sucks. They are designed to tap into your nostalgia for the way things were when we were growing up. Live telephone operators, doctors selling cigarettes on TV, cursive writing, looking up things in an encyclopedia, milk delivery, phonebooks, payphones, drive-in movies, tie-dyed shirts, lava lamps and bell bottom jeans. The lists go on and on.

The compilers of these lists are people who are extremely nostalgic for the way things used to be and they want to entertain us with those memory associations. Or maybe they want to drag us back to those good old days because, well, why not?

Wait just a minute. Doctors telling us that cigarettes are OK and have great flavor? That was the good old days? Barbie dolls set a good example for adolescent girls? Riding motorcycles without helmets was safe? Trying to get decent TV reception with rabbit ears on top of the set? Penny candy that rotted your teeth? Chemistry sets that could blow us up along with the house? Cereals loaded with sugar? Candy cigarettes that we could suck on until we were ready for the real killers? Eating Swanson dinners that lacked any real nutrition (and now we know the Tucker Carlson connection)? BB guns that could take out an eye? Really. Sunbathing without sunscreen – holy melanoma! Lead paint everywhere at home and asbestos covered pipes in schools? No seatbelts or car seats for infants?

Are boomers being encouraged to fondly remember things that in retrospect should have scared the hell out of us if we really thought about it. Just revisionist thinking you might be saying. Granted, we survived, but maybe we should be a little bit more realistic about our nostalgia. Remember the benign but thank your lucky stars the other stuff didn’t maim or kill you.

My favorite mostly safe childhood activity? Attaching baseball cards to our bicycle spokes with clothes pins so that our bikes sounded like powerful sports cars when we peddled as fast as our little legs would go. Innocuous? We thought so. Still have all my fingers.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. You can also visit his author page here. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

 

He studied her across the table as she read the menu. He knew what he wanted. His favorite, the spaghetti carbonara. She finally looked up, head canted, her sidelong glance asking, ‘What?’ to his intense stare. He shrugged. What could he say? They had just spent forty minutes at the bar waiting for the table. Like old times, she had her usual Negroni. Talk was easy. It had been thirty years since they had last connected. Much to fill in. At this point they were actually free between divorce for her and widowhood for him. The waiter took her order: saltimbocca, salad, Chianti.

She held his eye and her tongue over a slow sip of ice water. It was his turn, this time to ask out loud, “What?”

She simply looked down.

They both felt it. Or rather didn’t feel it…the buzz. There was no tingle as they tried to pick up the fallen powerline of their past. Does hot leak out, he wondered? He could still see the girl in the woman he used to know when she giggled then spanned thumb and forefinger to the corners of her mouth. Familiar. But different now, her hand gaunt and heavy-veined.

Mirroring his scrutiny, she measured him as well. He could feel her tally his lank gray hair, pouched eyes drooping over scored laugh lines, middle finger pushing glasses up.

Was this too heavy a lift? Trying to revive feelings from half a lifetime ago? Sure, there could be fond recollections, like looking through a forgotten box of photographs. Their snatched time together. But just now, it felt like spinning the rasp on a cigarette lighter—waiting, hoping for a spark to catch, to burst into flame. Their flame.

They worked on their meals. Toasted each other. He forced an old joke. She shook her head, smiled indulgently. Finishing their tiramisu and espresso, he tried to imagine them snogging, maybe more. The image wouldn’t focus. The honey didn’t rise. Maybe he…they, were past it. Or maybe it was just her. Maybe with some other woman…starting fresh, not trying to stoke cold ashes…

“I’m not that throbbing hunk anymore,” just popped out.

She nodded. “As if…”

Under a tight grin, he handed the credit card to the waiter. He always liked her snarky side.

“My turn next time,” she said.

“’Kay,” he said.

Retired trainer, and writing instructor, Joe Novara lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Writings include novels, short stories, a memoir and various poems, plays, anthologies and articles. Read more at https://freefloatingstories.wordpress.com/