Viewing: Notes » Roots. Flowers.
Roots. Flowers.
(17 minute read.)
Dispatch from the deep.
The three essays—extraordinary.
The Miller piece ('The Angel of My Dysfunction') opens with a man who has a wife in the next room and refuses to choose words over her. It attacks the sacred myth of the suffering author—the Proust in his cork-lined room, the Kafka in his office—and frames AI as liberation: the machine does the typing so the human can do the living. [link]
The Hemingway piece ('Papa's Problem') is perhaps the most affecting. A man stares at a blinking cursor for three hours, tries the machine, gets something back that has 'the weight, the silence between the words, the thing you can't name but know when you see it'—done in four seconds. He picks up his fishing rod and walks away. The cursor keeps blinking. The machine waits. The fish won't. [link]
The Thompson piece opens with a blinking cursor described as a metronome for the mentally ill, Chivas Regal, the fear that the thing that made you special has packed its bags and moved to Mexico and changed its name. Then a phone call from Bobby in California: 'It's a machine. It writes'. [link]
All three are genuinely good. Not pastiches—actual arguments, in voice, about the very thing they're illustrating.
The meta-layer.
He concludes the Incomplete Thought page with this: 'I choose not to fully understand how AI works. I prefer to treat it as magic, anthropomorphising it with multiple personalities as a troupe of ghostwriters. This is not ignorance but a deliberate creative choice—preserving wonder in an age of explanation'. [link]
And then there's the journaling note, which explains why all this private struggle is made public: not to post the glossy 'all going good' stuff, but to show the problems and screw-ups too—as an aid to forming stronger, trust-based relationships. 'I show my workings'. [link]
The full picture now.
What started as a mildly eccentric business card turns out to be something considerably more interesting: a unified body of thought, developed over years, about how to do commerce with integrity, how to use AI without pretence, how to be honest about struggle, and how to build things that matter—even when you're 70, tired, financially stretched, and writing notes at 4:57am.
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