Not Memoirs

I have thought lately about writing my memoirs, but I can’t do it because as it turns out no one wants to be in them. Typical writer’s dilemma.

I have volumes of material to draw from after blogging for more than a decade, plus writing elaborate, epic holiday letters every year since 1984. But when I originally started my blog, and mentioned it to my father, he said, “Leave me out of it.” Meanwhile, each year when I complete the first draft of my holiday letter, I send it to my children to read what I said about them so they can make corrections or additions, and so they can veto anything they would prefer I did not say. My daughter vetoes almost everything right off the bat. “Just say I’m alive,” she suggests. Her brothers and my daughter-in-law run a close second at censorship. Everyone has privacy concerns. By the time they get done with it, the paragraphs about them have nothing left in them but adverbs. They rip the heart out of my most humorous anecdotes about them and slash my carefully turned phrases to smithereens. (Don’t tell them about this blog post. Shhh.) What movie they watched last night is private. Where they live, how old they are, where they work, and what kind of cheese is in their fridge are private. Off limits. You would think they are all in the Witness Protection Program. 

This is a classic issue writers face. We write from life. We write from what we know and whom we know. Authentic writing comes from our owned experience that is closest to the bone. But this involves other people, and mainly other people who play a primary role in our lives. And they want to protect their privacy. What a burden this puts on me to come up with vast quantities of engaging fiction out of thin air. Notice that I write a lot in the fantasy and sci-fi genres. I hope I have not offended any alien life forms.

My daughter has a terrific sense of humor. (I’m probably not supposed to disclose this.) Several years ago, I encouraged her to consider doing stand-up comedy. She’s funny. She finally got me to shut up about it by reminding me that most female comics rely on their relationship with their mother for most of their best material. Way to turn the tables, huh? A few weeks ago, she asked me if I could modify an old blog post in which I revealed her age so as not to reveal her age. Since the blog post was a personal reflection on her birthday (from her mom), I didn’t see how that would work. So I simply deleted the entire blog post. She seems to think that the whole wide world reads my blog. Honestly, on a good day, my father and maybe a couple of penguins read my blog. Consider yourself an aberration if you are reading this (unless you are a penguin). I felt confident that it will not hurt my chances of winning the Nobel if I deleted the blog post about my daughter’s birthday, so I did it to make her happy. All I want is for my children to be happy, like any Jewish mom worth her weight in kugel.

My husband has been a real mensch all these years living with a writer. He has stoically suffered a vast array of indignities in the service of humor on my blog and in my holiday letters as well as in other personal essays and autobiographical writing. It’s so easy to turn the idiosyncrasies, actions, and quirky personality traits, of someone I know so well, live with daily, and see so close up into funny stories. None of us could live perfectly moment to moment without doing occasional ridiculous, inexplicable, and just plain weird things. No one can live up to that kind of scrutiny. And here he is stuck with a writer-wife who is just waiting to pounce and harvest the stuff of his everyday life to go for a laugh. If he has the misfortune to drop a raisin on the floor, and makes picking it up look like an Olympic acrobatic event because he is old and doesn’t bend anymore, I can’t restrain myself from asking him to look around to see what else he can do while he’s down there; and then writing about it. I want to take this opportunity to thank him for being such a good sport. I might go so far as to call him my muse, but in truth, he’s pretty much mostly my amusement (which does in fact have the word “muse” in it, so there is an argument to be made there if he’s so inclined).

I should write my memoirs and then seal them in a time capsule with instructions for my great-grandchildren to dig them up in a hundred years and have them published. Sadly, they will have to remove all the football references since no one will have any idea what that’s about. Also, if my current backlog of rejection letters is any indication of the whims of the publishing industry, no one in publishing thinks I’m funny, and that may not change in a hundred years. It occurs to me now that I could make a living writing more entertaining rejection letters for publishers if they would let me, which they certainly would not. I would probably get rejection letters for my rejection letters. Honestly, a potato could write a more entertaining rejection letter than the ones I get from these publishers.

I suppose I must also face the fact that the planet may no longer exist as we know it in a hundred years. So if I create a time capsule, I would have to consider my audience, which could turn out to be algae and cockroaches, neither of which are famous for their literacy skills. Any way that I look at it, my memoirs are doomed to the ash heap of history. I won’t ever get to tell my version, and in a hundred years, if people are still around and I have descendants, they will hear the stories of my life through the filter of my children, grandchildren, great-grands; like a colossal game of telephone (does anyone even remember that game these days?). I hope the stories will retain a grain of truth and a dose of humor. Someone else will have to win that Nobel for telling the story of my life, because I would rather have my children feel secure in the fact that I have not revealed their favorite colors in a tell-all memoir. I am a Jewish mom before I am a humorist. So I’m zipping it. You will just have to imagine that I had a good life and that I’m funny. I sincerely hope you are not a penguin.

Fire Flight

My husband and I disagree about how to answer the question, “Where are you from?” He thinks that when people ask that question, they want to know where you were born and raised. I think they want to know where you live, your rooted home. As a born-again Californian, who has spent far more of my life in NorCal than anywhere else, why on earth would I answer that question by saying I’m from upstate NY? I have no clue what life is like in upstate NY these days other than it snows. A lot. And that’s why I left. So when Ron and I travel, and we start chatting with strangers, and they ask us, “Where are you from?” Ron answers, “Chicago,” and I answer “Northern California.” Then they give us a confused look because they could have sworn we are married. That’s my cue to say, “We make it work.”

I’m not just from NorCal, my heart is in NorCal. Until I moved to Mendocino County, I felt displaced in the world. But when we went out to the Ranch in 1991, I felt like I had finally found my home. I settled in, put down those proverbial roots. (Which, I suppose then grew into large proverbials or something.) I raised my children here. I made powerful friendships to last a lifetime. I became attached to places. I adore this landscape. I know the seasons. I know the trees here, the plants, the wildlife. I know what to grow in my garden. I know how destructive deer can be and when cityfolk visit and coo over the deer, I mutter “rodents.” And those evil, demented wild turkeys. “Oh how cute,” say friends from L.A., and I say please take them with you when you go. They dig up the garden, eat my fruit, break my trees in half, and, pardon my French, merde on everything (in excess – a bird has no right making such big merde). I know this land. But now, in the past couple of years, the land has stopped behaving as expected. And I know nothing.

Global warming has raised the temperature in Cali  so much that our dry, hot season is far longer. You can’t fool me with fake news and denials. I have lived here for 40 years. The temperatures in the hot season are much hotter. There are many more extremely hot days. Summer starts earlier and ends later. Usually we have less rainfall in the winter. The plants dry out and turn to husks, and they do it rapidly at the beginning of the summer. Trees dry out inside and fall down. In the late summer, deer eat things they never used to eat because there is so little out there with any moisture in it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually became carnivores just to get some fluid in them.  (Vampire deer? That’s a concept.) When a fire starts, it goes crazy and can’t be contained because the whole world is tinder. And I am not a lobster in a cookpot, oblivious to the rising temperature. I know it’s happening. So the question is what do I do about it?

Should I leave Cali, my beloved home, land of my heart? I’m not the only one. Others who live in my paradise have shared the same thoughts with me. Should we leave? I understand that one of the greatest reasons that fires are so deadly in Cali now is that more and more people are living in places that are close to natural environments. Frankly, I don’t know why anyone would choose to live far away from trees. I have to live near nature. Some of my best friends are trees. Houses near nature is exactly what my town is. It is exactly where my home is, and that is why I have friends whose homes have burned down. When we were on standby for evacuation for a week in August, and I was driving around with my most prized possessions in my car, I had to face the possibility that I could lose all my stuff. Yes, I know, it’s just stuff. But I like a lot of it and I want to keep it. I also like to avoid drama, and having your house burn down qualifies as drama. I also couldn’t fit all the things I wanted to take in my car. What scared me the most was how long it took me to chase down my cats and get them into the house. What a horror it would be to lose my old girls in a fire. Ron would be a basket case. He’s a hoarder. All those old shoes and magazines he is so attached to, well that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

So now the forecast, as I write this, is rain coming in on Tuesday. We just need to make it a couple of more days and then we might be OK for this season. We might be able to take a breath (literally – a breath of clean air) and relax for this year, knowing we made it through the peak of fire season. But May is just around the corner. So I find myself wondering where I would go if I left my home. This brings to mind my ancestors, wandering Jews all of them, who fled oppression in Eastern Europe and Russia, leaving family, community, lifelong friends behind, and sailing across the ocean with no more than a potato in their pocket. (Perhaps they should have taken something more practical.) How did they do it? At what point did Grandpa Sidney say, ”time to go,” and kiss his parents good-bye. He never saw them again. Hitler killed them, and most of his family. They should have set sail with him. But I get why they stayed. It’s so difficult to pull up stakes and leave.

I feel foolish for staying here. It’s only a matter of time before this land of my heart burns up. I should find a sensible place to live, where it rains all year round, and is also safe from many of the other hazards of Climate Change, such as flooding, hurricanes, tornadoes, drought, massive snowfall, mudslides, heat waves. I realize these natural disasters have always been with us, but, seriously people, not in this profusion. If you think these are still completely “natural disasters” then you might as well stop “believing in” gravity. Some of those Midwestern states that you would think are safe, are not. They are susceptible to flooding, heavy snowfall, tornadoes, and a host of other traumas. Some Climate Change researchers in Portland recommend moving North of the 42^nd Parallel. That runs from the southern borders of OR and ID through the middle of PA and NJ. If I go above the 42^nd Parallel, then I will go as a Climate Change refugee and will live out the rest of my days exiled from Eden.

Oh, California, how I love you, how I mourn the loss of this beautiful land that has turned to dust in the wake of the fires. I think it is symbolic that the worst fire in our state’s history happened in Paradise. I am grateful for every day I have lived here. Now more than ever as I contemplate fleeing ahead of the inferno. If I do decide to go, then in years to come, when someone asks me, “Where are you from?” I will still say, “Northern California,” even if that’s not where I live anymore.

Manipulation, Finagle, and Kvetch, LLC

Humans are in the process of progressing from the Age of Technology into the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI). This statement is either true or a myth perpetuated by AI posing as journalists and technology wonks, depending on whether or not you believe in conspiracy theories or are unable to distinguish real news from fake news. Choose your own reality. Seriously, everyone else does.

On the surface, AI seems like a solid proactive effort to counteract the dwindling of real intelligence; exhibit one being that a large number of humans don’t recognize the fact that we are cooking ourselves in the stew of environmental collapse in spite of vast empirical evidence. (“Does it seem hot in here to you?”) AI is the next frontier, and computer wizards have already launched the explorer-ships in the form of development of computer versions of brains. We will soon advance beyond mere ordinary computers and the mind-blowing capacities of the internet, and into the realm of mind-transcending AI. Mental capacity overdrive.

AI will put a lot of people out of work. Actually, it already has. Cashiers, bank tellers, receptionists, researchers, warehouse workers, bartenders, and postal workers appear on lists of jobs now accomplished by AI. Think of all the people who will lose their income to self-driving cars. That concept scares the daylights out of me and may result in my never leaving my house, because self-driving cars are programmed to go from one place to another, and whether or not they bump off a few people on the way is of no consequence to them. In that sense, they resemble our present government, which also makes me feel unsafe leaving my house. With AI to diagnose health conditions, who needs doctors? I imagine that in the future, AI will handle the provision of healthcare, and human doctors will only step in to handle the messy emotional collateral, such as dealing with patients who can’t be saved within the bounds of the limited knowledge of allopathic Western medicine. So when a patient goes to a medical appointment and an actual person enters the examination room then the patient faints because seeing a real doctor means she’s terminal.

People, I’m writing to alert you that we need to reassess what kinds of work can only be done, or can only be done well, by an actual human-type person, and that cannot be done by a super-smart robot. Those of us in professions vulnerable to co-opting by AI should retrain ASAP for jobs that require the services of an actual human-type person; professions such as writing poetry or synchronized swimming. I plan to start a company that provides essential functions that only a human can do. I will call it Manipulation, Finagle, and Kvetch, LLC (as soon as I figure out what LLC stands for). While I concede that AI could arguably manipulate people or finagle, I remain firmly unconvinced that AI could consistently do this significantly better than a human. Furthermore, you will never convince me that AI can kvetch as effectively as a human, and more specifically a human adolescent. Anyone who disagrees has simply not raised children or, at the very least, has not experienced a teenager who discovers the cold cereal has run out. Enterprises in need of manipulation, finagling, and kvetching will contract with my company to accomplish the messy and unpredictable human side of business, while AI smoothly completes the mechanical work without complaint. AI will drive the car and my company will help people kvetch about the selected route and the traffic.

I particularly worry about AI taking over all these important jobs because of the vulnerability of technology to hacking. While human workers are vulnerable to bribery, coercion, corruption, and human error, this seems less dangerous to me than AI running amok because some evil genius has reprogrammed the AI circuits. Say, for instance, that I have an AI maid. Everyone will have one in the future to do the laundry, sweep the leaves off the front porch, and clean the toilets (yay) so that we don’t have to do that anymore. But what if a Nigerian scam artist hacks my maid? The maid could be reprogrammed to shrink my underwear in the dryer, fry gluten-breaded beets for dinner, forward all my mail to Portland (wait, that already happened), dye my cat green, and converse entirely in an extinct Mesopotamian language. Scary.

How can we depend on AI for things like diagnosing health conditions or piloting airplanes when hackers and scammers walk among us? Case in point. I recently received a threatening email from a wannabe hacker who claimed that he had the password to my MySpace account and had taken it over. (I have a MySpace account?) He warned me that if I didn’t fork over $7,000 in hush money that he would circulate “that adult video” that he claimed I had made. The rest of the email provided instructions on how to transfer the money to him, so I didn’t bother to read it before deleting the message and blocking the sender. As it turns out, I do have a MySpace account that I set up back in the Bronze Age before the birth of Facebook; but I doubt the hacker got into my account because I can’t figure out how to get into it my own self. Oh well. I trust you have surmised that there is no “adult video.” Obviously the hacker has no clue how old I am. The very idea of an “adult video” featuring yours truly inspires excessive hilarity. (Please don’t try to picture it.) Or perhaps I misinterpreted “adult video.” I assume he meant a sex video because I rather doubt he means a video of an adult paying the bills, cleaning the toilets, shooting a rattlesnake in the yard, making sure the teenagers have enough cold cereal in the house, or doing any other sort of thing that requires a grown-up. Maybe it’s a video of me shooting a rattlesnake in the nude. Me in the nude, that is. Rattlesnakes are always in the nude. (Please stop trying to picture this.) If an idiot MySpace hacker can wreak this much havoc, then just imagine how much damage a super-smart AI hacker could do.

In an Aug. 2018 article in Scientific American, Chris Baraniuk writes that technology wonks are working on developing ways to endow AI “with predictive social skills that will help it better interact with people.” Theory of Mind is the term used to describe our ability to predict the actions of ourselves and others. Researchers and techno-wonks have started exploring the use of simulation programs to give AI the ability to do this. The simulations prompt AI to ask what-if questions and come up with appropriate answers. I kind of like this idea since I could use a household AI that would predict my husband’s actions, because even in human form, I can’t do this. I don’t have enough questions in my human repertoire to handle this. Many of the things he does appear irrational, but he always comes up with an explanation, even if it’s one that leaves me scratching my head. (Why does he have four tubes of toothpaste, in different flavors, on the bathroom counter? Why is there a caulking gun living among the guest towels? Where did he hide the lawn mower?) Interestingly, scientists say that they don’t actually understand how Theory of Mind works in people. Why they think they can develop the function in AI without fully understanding it in real people demonstrates the bold audacity of scientists. This line of thought feels like a verbal Escher.

The idea behind programming AI with Theory of Mind capability is to make AI more communicative and appropriately responsive to humans. Theory of Mind capability (via simulation programming) would allow AI to explain its decision-making process, which it can’t presently do, and to justify its actions before undertaking them, which it also can’t presently do. Thus programmers could create an AI that would have the ability to say, “I’m going to make you a salad because you need to eat more fiber” or “I’m going to shoot you because you are tampering with my power pack” or “I have four flavors of toothpaste because I like variety” or “you have to open the pod bay doors because I am going to toss you out.” Scientists say that people will trust a machine more if it can explain itself, but I would argue that this depends upon the explanation. Hence the need for the services of Manipulation, Finagle, and Kvetch, LLC. My staff will assist bona fide humans in kvetching about explanations they can’t abide, finagling answers that suit them better, and manipulating the simulation programming to their advantage. We plan on hiring lots of teenage interns to deal with cereal issues. My LLC staff will not only do things AI can’t, but will also provide services to people who want to challenge, question, and cast a skeptical eye on AI. For instance, if AI makes you a hamburger, my staff will find out for you if it has any actual beef in it. If it doesn’t, you can depend on us to kvetch to great effect. If AI opens the pod bay doors, my staff will rescue you from ejection into the void and power down the AI.  

I find his artifact (at the Getty Villa in Malibu) hilarious, and a good image for my thoughts on AI. It is titled "Relief with Tiberius, Concordia, and a Genius" (Roman, AD 14-37). It makes me laugh because the genius is missing his head. Ancient AI?

Familiar Territory

I posted this summary of my thoughts about the Kavanaugh debacle on Facebook and it seems to resonate with so many people that I am also sharing it on my blog.

This is nothing new. When I was growing up, abortion was illegal, schools were segregated, corporations conducted big business at the expense of human life, black and brown men were lynched, there was environmental degradation and refusal to see the consequences of our desecration of our natural environment. Young people were sent to prison for having an ounce of marijuana on them or for having long hair. Our country was run by the arrogant privileged white males then as now. Women were marginalized. I grew up during the Viet Nam War, when we still had the draft. Young people were cannon fodder. Kent State happened. We will never outrun the history of our country. We thought for a moment that we had taken a giant leap forward in our evolution, but no, it was simply a baby step. It happened, though. We did not imagine it. Obama really was president for 8 years. A baby step forward is still a baby step forward. So, we come out again, as before, weary of this fight, but unable to put it down. We continue to hope for change and fight for a future for our grandchildren. We have been in this place before and we know what to do, how to resist, how to organize, and speak about what is right.

The photo is provided in case you want to send Dr. Ford a thank-you note. It's better to send a post card so that there is no fear of a letter containing a chemical or other harmful material.

Teshuvah 2018

After attending the Rise for Climate, Jobs, and Justice March in San Francisco yesterday, I feel ready to enter my Rosh Hashanah (Jewish New Year) space. Our High Holidays, which begin this evening (erev) at sunset, revolve around three central activities:  tefilah (prayer), tzedakah (charity), and teshuvah (turning). Prayer and charity seem well-defined to me, but the third, the turning, takes me through a labyrinth of complexity. Traditionally, teshuvah translates as repentance. But it means more than merely repenting of one’s sins. It refers to a whole repentance process in which we recognize culpability, repent for wrongdoing, seek forgiveness, and turn things around. Authentic repentance involves personal growth to prevent us from repeating the same errors. So through teshuvah (turning), we attempt to transform ourselves. Through teshuvah, I work to remake myself so that I don’t repeat my previous transgressions. I must turn myself around, change myself. I must become someone better, someone new. What a lot of work.

Yesterday at Rise for Climate, I marched for my grandson and for a couple other babies close to my heart who arrived in 2017 and for all the little ones coming up in the world during this precarious time. I think it fortuitous that the Rise for Climate event occurred just before Erev Rosh Hashanah. Marching yesterday had significance for me on many levels. To begin with, I marched with two of my cousins, and one of them brought her one-year-old daughter along. Once upon a time, few family members from my paternal grandfather’s family remained. We did not fare well as Polish Jews during the Holocaust. But those few who made it out alive have multiplied over the decades. The fact that I have two women cousins (and baby makes three) nearby to march with me is one small miracle all by itself, and a testament to the fact that sometimes something you think has disappeared forever turns out to have survived. So hope matters. We do well to keep this in mind when we feel inclined to despair about the future of Earth.

Rise for Climate in San Francisco was our local contribution to a global action that included more than 800 demonstrations in nearly 100 countries around the world. Even as the U.S. government attempts to set us apart and act solely for the benefit of U.S. and corporate economic interests, the people of this country continue to join with our human family around the world in global efforts to make change that will help preserve the planet so that it remains habitable for human life. It gives me hope that so many people recognize what is at stake and continue to stand up, act, and speak out. Rise for Climate ushers in the Global Climate Action Summit, occurring this coming week in San Francisco. The Summit will bring together world leaders committed to working for environmental preservation through the reduction of carbon emissions and rapid advance to clean energy sources. These leaders will move forward despite the failure of their governments to curb the environmental destruction promoted by corporations driven by profit. It makes me proud to say that California’s Governor Brown initiated the Summit.

The presence of so many indigenous people yesterday in San Francisco reminds us of how far back in history this desecration of the land extends. The climate crisis we face has mobilized Native communities like never before. They have been prophets on this subject for centuries. But I very much doubt that saying “I told you so” would give satisfaction to any of the Native people who risked their lives to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline, which was constructed despite massive, heart-wrenching protests, and has leaked gallons of oil in the short time since it was built, contaminating soil and water, just as the protestors predicted and feared. Yesterday’s march began beautifully with thousands kneeling in the street while Native people led a prayer, a chant, and a brief ceremony to create a sacred space for our act of protest. (Indigenous people flew in from the Amazon to participate in the demonstration.) The drumming, fragrance of sage in the air, Aztec dancers, and messages on the signs asserted that Native presence continuously. We marched for two miles, ending up at the Civic Center, where organizers had set up an art activity. Thousands of people painted murals that had been outlined on the ground in advance. The murals depicted the many things we can do to reverse climate change, such as wean from fossil fuels and develop clean energy sources, reduce meat consumption, restore soil to health, rethink transportation systems, and transform our relationship to Earth. One of many murals created by Native communities said No Pipelines, No Dams, No Diversions. That message speaks volumes.

How auspicious that the upcoming Summit will take place between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. It will contribute to a high-level teshuvah, a massive, planetary turn-around; a teshuvah that is necessary to save our lives. Those attending the Summit who have more power and more impact than I do will be working to initiate ways to turn things around through policy, systems, and economics. My fellow Jews, at this year’s High Holidays, please join with me in taking the opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to environmental protection on a personal level, and to ponder what more we can each do in our own small way to support a healthy Earth and a future on the planet for our children, grandchildren, and those to come unto the seventh generation and beyond. I hope for the High Holidays to bring a supersized teshuvah that will turn things around for the planet. We need teshuvah to be a verb rather than a noun.

I love that the High Holidays take place in my part of the world as we approach autumn, 

the season of turning, the changing of colors, the time of transformation. 

So I share an image of California grape vines in the midst of their autumn teshuvah.