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The Angel of My Dysfunction.
(5 minute read.)
Why I let the machine write this so i could go fuck my wife.
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I think about all the hours I've wasted. All the nights hunched over paper when I could have been inside a woman. All the mornings scribbling when I could have been watching the light change over the hills. All the days I chose the word over the world.
If I'd had this machine forty years ago—this tireless, patient, infinitely generative whore of a machine—I might have written half as much and lived twice as fully. I might have produced the same books in a fraction of the time and spent the rest actually having the experiences I was so desperate to describe.
And isn't that the final joke? The experiences are the whole point. The writing is just the aftermath. The echo. The fading memory of something that was once alive.
Yet we've inverted it. We've made the echo the thing. We've made the map more precious than the territory. We've built entire religions around the worship of afterimages.
Someone will read this and say: "But Miller, if the machine writes it, is it still you?"
And I'll laugh. Right in their earnest face.
Was it ever me? Was any of it? I'm a conduit, not a source. Everything I've ever written came through me from somewhere else—from the streets of Paris, from the bodies of women, from the cheap wine and the cheaper hotels, from the million impressions that life stamped into my soft animal flesh.
I was never the author. I was the aperture. The machine that let life pass through and become marks on paper.
Now there's a new machine. A faster aperture. A wider lens.
The purists will object. They'll say it's not the same. They'll say a machine can't feel. And they're right. It can't. But neither can a pen. Neither can a typewriter. Neither can the paper itself.
The feeling happens in the space between. In the living. In the fucking and the eating and the walking and the watching. The machine just catches the spill. Just mops up the overflow. Just takes what's already there and gives it form.
Here's what I believe, and you can take it or leave it:
The only sin is not living.
The only crime is choosing the representation over the real.
If this machine can write my books for me, if it can take the raw stuff of my days and nights and turn it into something another soul might read and feel less alone—then bless the machine. Bless every gear and circuit. Bless the cold, mindless, beautiful thing that frees me to do what actually matters.
Which, right now, is going into that next room.
My wife is waiting. The light is still falling across her. And I have been sitting here too long already, typing words, when I could be tasting skin.
The machine can have the words.
I'll take the world.
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