That was the forecast for the first day of fall: rain, and plenty of it, starting around noon.
Perfect, I thought. I usually run on Tuesdays anyway, so I’d have plenty of time to do the morning chores, then bang out an unimpressive 5K on the trails, and be safely indoors before Thor started taking batting practice.
But as the morning unfolded the skies actually seemed to be clearing. So I thought, hmmm: First day of fall, cyclocross season with actual cyclocross weather … maybe push the run to Wednesday, when the forecast is even less velo-friendly, and take a quick spin on a Steelman today.
Bingo.
About 45 minutes in, which in cool weather is when most of the bits of me have finally reported for duty, I slalomed off a trail in the Elena Gallegos Open Space and into a parking lot to see a friend wrapping up a walk with his dogs, and we took five for a chat about Irish literature and Japanese automobiles.
Then … drip … drop. ...
“Feels like it’s starting to sprinkle,” I said.
He had a squint at the windshield of his Honda Element, which like my Subaru Forester — and, if we’re speaking frankly here, like the two of us, and many a character in Irish literature — has more than a few hard miles on it.
“So it is,” he confirmed.
Well. A fine soft day on tap and here I am, miles from home and dressed for another class of party altogether. Caught with my knickers not only down, but in a drawer, with the rest of my foul-weather kit. I said my goodbyes and took off, hoping to get home before droplets turned to deluge. Skip the lovely trails, they’re already awash in eejits with earbuds and the rain will bring out the snakes. St. Patrick I am not. Ask anyone.
But as I barreled down Simms Road toward Tramway once again the weather shifted gears on me. I caught a few fat drops in the gob on the descent and then nada. Niente. Bupkis.
Well, then. I’d been hoping for a quick hour, but if the gods were leaning on their shovels with hoses coiled I’d stay out for a while longer. The 20-mile, mixed-terrain ride is the foundation of my “training program,” such as it is, and I was halfway there as I passed Comanche headed south. Onward.
I generally log more mileage north of Comanche, but the south has its attractions as well. I stuck to the Tramway bike path for a while, Tramway itself seeming to have more traffic than normal, probably hoarders hellbent on cornering the chips, bean dip, and buttwipe markets before the Apocalypse struck. I needed to do some of that myself. But not until I got my 20 in.
Every time I got a dampish puck in the gob I swung north and east, toward home. If it was more of a love tap than a lashing, I turned south and west, one eye on the cyclometer. Bike paths, low-traffic foothills streets, a bit of dirt as it presented itself, and hey presto! I got my 20. 20.3 miles, to be precise, and 1,481 feet of vertical gain. Not bad for a rain day.
Which it was not, still.
The fuck? I thought. Must have the A.I. on the job down to the National Weather Service. More of a focus on mass murder than meteorology? If it fights as well as it forecasts we’ll all of us live to a ripe old age so. “Terminator” me bollocks.
So I ate the last of a pot of Pierre Franey’s turkey chili, jumped into the Subie, and rattled off to the grocery to collect a few delicacies. Herself is in Tennessee with her sisters, at a celebration of life for our late brother-in-law, William F. White Jr., so I was seizing the opportunity to minimize cooking and cleaning up afterward.
From non-soon to monsoon.
And so it was that I was sprawled comfortably on the couch, nibbling on shrimp, fresh bread with butter, and a green salad, watching a bit of standup on Netflix (Joe DeRosa, “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” not bad), when it finally started raining. At around 6 p.m.
But man — did it ever make up for lost time. It still hasn’t stopped and I just finished breakfast on Wednesday morning. A quarter inch since 4 this morning and 0.64 inch total.
Maybe I better take back some of that shit I said about A.I. Like me, it may be slow, but it gets there eventually.
Is the pen the writer? The brush the painter? The motor the cyclist?
Grumbling over coffee about the lack of interesting reading material online — just about any old thing that wasn’t about fascists, eejits, or fascist eejits— I stumbled first across a piece about artificial intelligence worming its way into the handmade world of ’zines, and then another about bearing your own burdens from the deep, deep well that is Mike Ferrentino.
Lo’s letta.
I appreciate ’zines, with their homemade artsy feel. In January our friend Lo sent us a tiny one she’d made, about the size of a hang tag, that was miles above the tired old “What we’ve been up to” family newsletter.
The niche seems to share some DNA with the underground newspapers I enjoyed Back in the Day®. I did a little cartooning for a few of those, and even helped start a short-lived one while wrapping up that B.A. in journalism from the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.
This may have followed my ouster as cartoonist for the college newspaper following a series of mildly vile attempts to bring Bay Area Rip Off Press-style hijinks to Weld County. My derivative bullshit failed to dollar up on the hoof in cattle country.
And the new venture somehow managed in short order to crawl right up the arse of some student-government numbnuts who threatened a lawsuit over a bit of unpleasantness we’d published.
“Good luck with that,” I said, referring him to our paper’s masthead, in which my dog Jojo was listed as editor. “Not only are you a public figure for the purposes of this story, but my dog is the editor. You’re the only person I can think of who is taking us seriously.”
Still, one longs to be taken seriously. Or at least laughed at for the right reasons. Also, paid. The Revolution was not only untelevised, it was underfunded.
So I left handmade hellraising for “straight” journalism, overstayed my welcome there, and now, here I am, a half century later, comfortably underground again and still waiting on the Revolution.
• • •
Blogging the way I do it has some ’zine-like qualities, I think. But what once was called a “weblog” actually has its roots in “journaling,” another handmade, offline sort of pasatiempo that’s enjoying a comeback of sorts. Though like everything else you can take it digital if you must — your iPhone has had a “Journal” app since 2023.
George suggested I start keeping a journal, and Lord, have I ever kept ’em.
I started keeping a journal in 1974, at the urging of George Gladney, then a reporter at the Colorado Springs Sun. In the Year of Our Lard 2026 I have 15 pounds of them, a cardboard box overflowing with old-school composition books defaced with ballpoint graffiti. And what a ’zine they would make, if anyone could decipher my scribbling (cursive early on, block lettering afterward).
The cops could clear many a cold case on the evidence therein.
“Honey, you’re making a scene!” Herself would exclaim as the John Laws burst through the door.
“No, I’m making a ’zine,” I would quip as the cuffs went on and the flashbulbs popped.
Those bracelets would come off again, and quickly, too, thanks to various statutes of limitations and a general unavailability of surviving/credible witnesses.
And then I could forget about ’zines and get back to the blogging, which I’ve been beavering away at since the Nineties, shortly after I abandoned newspapers for freelancing — basically trading one boss and regular paychecks for several bosses and “It’s in the mail. …” — and thought it might be fun to be my own underground, unpaid, hands-on publisher again, if only as a sideline.
Sadly, my editor Jojo was long gone, and his daughter Fuerte had no interest in journalism.
• • •
In the Nineties scribblers didn’t have to worry about A.I., unless they’d read a lot of science fiction. Some of us were short on intelligence of any sort, artificial or innate. My comp books and Bics got demoted from deep thought to training logs as I acquired a series of Macs, modems, and text editors. I taught myself some basic HTML, paid a rural hosting outfit to house my monstrosity in one of their cages from which it could screech and throw shit at passers-by, and hey presto! A blog.
The rest, as they say, is history, and quite a bit of it. My earliest efforts are lost in cyberspace, but the Archives contain about a quarter-century’s worth of bloggery in various states of decomposition.
What I brought to my little peepshow in the virtual carnival was decades of experience in newspapers and magazines as a reporter, editor, and cartoonist. I turned pro in the journalism racket just as newspapers were stumbling through the transition from hot type — for-reals hot, lines cast in lead by a clanking Linotype machine — to cold type, which meant computers. The times they were a-changin’.
Your Humble Narrator in the Mitchell High School Echelon‘s newsroom, circa 1971.
And once the Internet became A Thing, and those computers evolved from rumbling gods behind locked doors to perky little desktop numbers that anyone could own for the price of a decent used car, they were a-changin’ again. If you wanted to keep your head above water you had to go with the flow.
Which brings us back to the process of creation, and how — for me, at least — it’s changed since I submitted that first cartoon to the Mitchell High School Echelon back in 1971.
• • •
I had only ever been a cartoonist.
Self-taught, of course. A comics junkie from jump. Superman and Batman, Mad magazine, Bill Mauldin, Herblock. I learned that you draw in pencil so you can erase your mistakes, and then try very very hard not to make more mistakes when you finally ink the penciled sketch because then you have to start over. Add ink washes or sticky halftone film to achieve shades of gray; use watercolors or colored pencils to go full Disney.
Luck of the draw.
But mostly I stuck to pencil, eraser, and black ink on paper because (a) I fucked up a ton, and (2) anything that got published was going to be in black and white anyway. Simple.
So I was I. Lord, was I ever.
And one day I found myself hired as a copy boy at the Sun, stripping wire-service copy from the teletypes, walking photos to engraving and page proofs to the copy desk, and waiting to be recognized as the next Pat Oliphant, who was then at The Denver Post.
Shortly after I’d proved competent at the basics the city editor handed me a press release to rewrite.
“But I don’t know how to type.” I said.
“Better learn,” he replied while walking away.
So I learned. My typing style remains unique, three fingers on the left hand and two on the right. Oddly fast, but a thing of beauty it is not; “touch typing” in the sense that each of those five fingers will eventually touch a key. The endless rewrites ordered by the city and/or copy desks were heavy lifting for a rookie scribe who couldn’t even fucking type, pounding away at the keys of a manual typewriter that was probably past retirement age when Damon Runyon was learning the newspaper racket down south at the Pueblo Star.
Nevertheless, I persisted. Learned. And adapted.
• • •
A few years and one B.A. in journalism later I was at the other newspaper in town — not as a cartoonist, but as a reporter — and I was delighted to see computerization finally rear its ugly head. Instead of going 10 rounds with that typewriter I could do a brain-dump into the terminal, then root through the pile and pick out a few shiny objects that might amuse an assistant city editor. If they didn’t, the rewrite would be a lot faster. And they couldn’t wad up my copy and throw it at me anymore.
Some of the veteranos in the Gazette Telegraph newsroom were less gung-ho. They would pound out their reports as per usual, on their ancient typewriters, and then with hard copy in hand retype them into their computer terminals as smoke billowed from ears at the city desk. Eventually the typewriters were removed. Some of the typists, too.
Forty-nine years, five newspapers, and countless magazines later I have written and/or drawn on just about everything using whatever was handy: pencils, pens, crayons, and keyboards; comp books, reporter’s notepads, bar napkins, and hotel stationery; manual and electric typewriters, dumb terminals hooked to mainframes, Macs connected to the Internet, and iPhones. Even shithouse walls.
Writing is never easy, because I have read so much of it, by more talented people. But it has become easier, with the advent of computers, and especially the laptop, which liberates you from the desk. Tip over the cranium wherever you are, let its contents spill out onto that solid-state floor, then root around in the pile until you find what you need.
A 14-year-old hammer and chisel: My 2012 MacBook Air.
It should still feel a lot like work. Sweaty, irksome, a daylight-burning, down-the-rabbit-hole time-suck, just one goddamn thing after another. Michelangelo looked at a block of marble and saw David within. But he needed a hammer and chisel to get to him. Got his hands dirty.
I’m no Michelangelo. Just some fool with the brain farts in search of a few perverts who like the smell. Pull my finger! And I’ve tried to choose my tools wisely.
For instance, while I love me some laptop and text editor, I hate spellcheckers and grammar widgets. If I want something looking over my shoulder I’ll get a parrot. I do my own stunts, bub, and I work without a net. Now stand back and watch. Gimme room!
The cartooning got a little involved there for a while, once color became available. I needed a flatbed scanner and a lot of pig-ign’ant careening around in Adobe Photoshop to deliver 300-dpi CMYK images to the masses. But the ideas all came from the same old place (behind the increasingly powerful spectacles), and first sprang to hideous life using the same old tools (paper, pencil, pen, and ink).
My office in Bisbee, Ariz.
Between you and me, I think the march of progress developed a hitch in its gitalong a few years back. I work on a 14-inch 2024 M4 MacBook Pro now, but it’s no great improvement over my 11-inch MacBook Air, which dates to 2012. Better display, faster processor, yadda yadda yadda. I write a blog using a browser. I could do it with an iPhone from a tent. And I have.
So, if I ever run out of things worth saying, and interesting ways to say them, I won’t acquire some RoombaRite 9000® to hoover up all the words on the Internet and empty its bag into this blog. A.I.? N.O. It’d be like bolting a motor onto one of my Steelman Eurocrosses. Ferrentino and his father got it right: If you can’t lift it, don’t drive it.
No creative sort ever goes it completely alone, of course, unless they have a paper ranch, an ink well, a canvas farm, and a paint horse (har de har har). Find the lever and fulcrum that suit your needs and see if you can move the world. Without breaking it, if you please.
It doesn’t matter how you do the work as long as you do the work.
The question is “What will A.I. do to jobs?” And the answers come from right, left and center, from tech CEOs to academic economists to Steve Fucking Bannon — yes, that Steve Fucking Bannon.
It’s smartly reported and cleverly written and the accompanying graphics from Stephan Dybus are top notch.
You will probably not find the story comforting, as it considers the irksome human factor’s effects, if any, upon the Rise of the Machines. The long and the short of it is that where job security in Meatworld is considered, A.I. will either be just ducky or something like a pickleball dustup in Florida.
Susan Calvin was off when these two rolled off the line at U.S. Robots. From the September 2019 issue of BRAIN.
E-bikes present both opportunity and challenge for the IBD.
One more bike to sell to the base — the old white guy who already has 15 two-wheelers in the garage but may be slowing down a bit due to age or infirmity, and wants a little assist.
One more bike to lure new customers, who may have found old-fashioned cycling too difficult, or who have decided to replace a car with something greener.
One more bike to service, because the future requires more maintenance than the past.
Our heroes at BRAIN’s bike shop acquired an e-assistant to work on e-bikes, which raises another issue, one familiar to anyone who ever read Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream.”
Artificial intelligence will not come to us from U.S. Robots, complete with a full installation of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics and overseen by Susan Calvin, Greg Powell and Mike Donovan. It will come from Allied Mastercomputer via Ellison Wonderland, it will have ideas all its own, and it will not be our friend.
“They’re a cleaner better breed than we are,” Calvin said in an interview with The Interplanetary Press. Maybe so. in Asimov’s novels, anyway. But in real life our e-assistants will be made by us, in our image. Frightening.
You’ll want to keep them locked up at night, and not for fear of thieves.
Here’s a guess: the first serious use of AI in the newsroom will be to replace editors, not writers. Roughly speaking, AI will take reporters’ notes or rough copy—or even what we humans laughingly call finished copy—and turn it into great prose. We’ll still need someone around to nag us about issues of substance, but the robots will compose sentences and paragraphs better than us. What’s more, they’ll be able to churn out multiple versions of our writing instantly: the magazine version, the 6th-grade version, the TV script version, the Spanish version, the PowerPoint deck, etc. Just tell it what you need and you’ll get it.
Reporters will last a little longer, but just a little. I’m giving editors until, oh, 2035. I think that’s generous. Reporters will be out of business by 2040. Better get ready.
I’m totally ready. By 2035 I’ll be 81, which in O’Grady years is stone cold dead.
