A search engine in a trench coat.

I am not a Luddite. I don’t dislike technology – in fact, almost every dollar I have earned since 2003 or so has been made possible by the Internet, and you glorious people who inhabit it.

I have a Google Pixel phone. A Lenovo ThinkPad. Fiber Internet service. I manage several websites. I have a newsletter that goes out by email to three continents.

I am not afraid of technology.

But I absolutely hate Chat GPT and it’s ilk. It’s not intelligent – it’s a search engine in a trenchcoat, but without the attribution. It’s a job thief. It’s a plagiarism machine.

I was in a meeting the other day, and the need for a communication plan for this organization came up. They’ve needed one for quite a while, but they don’t have a communication person, so since nobody was responsible for it, nobody had done it.

“We don’t have to pay anyone for that,” one of their officers said. “ChatGPT can write one for us in 30 seconds.”

Then, to prove his point, a minute later he dropped the results in the meeting chat.

How successful would such a plan be? How much thought went into it, how much concern for the recipients? How much empathy was involved for the audience? How aligned with the mission of this organization could this robot* possibly be?

And how invested can the organization be in the outcome?

And how many people did not earn a living because of the seconds spent creating a “marketing plan” this way? What is the environmental cost of that computation? What harm to the thinking processes of the person entering it into the robot?

And perhaps most critically to the organization- if it is really that easy, why did nobody do that before?

“My wish simply is to live my life as fully as I can. In both our work and our leisure, I think, we should be so employed. And in our time this means that we must save ourselves from the products that we are asked to buy in order, ultimately, to replace ourselves.”

― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

Not writing.

Type, type type… delete. Type, type type… delete. Type, type type… delete.

For the last hour.

I’ve been working on some negotiations the last few days that have been whipsawing back and forth, and as a result has dramatically affected my mood. As a result, my sleep has been awful.

It’s a heat index of 103 outside.

My wife is ill. She’ll be fine – it’s not dangerous, but right now, it sucks.

Our country is being ran by an insane person, but he is being supported and enabled by very sane people who are manipulating him for their ends.

I’ve been on the road a lot over the last month, and that always hoses my routine. I desperately need a routine to be at my best.

And I sit down to write, and it’s type, type type… delete. Type, type type… delete. Type, type type… delete.

A strange fate

In The Bitter Southerner, Silas House nails the strange fate of being a progressive Southerner (we’ll not quibble over whether Kentucky is the “real” south), where people love you but not people like you., where the people who taught you to love can be less than loving, and where it takes disaster for us to live up to our best ideals.

I also love, love, love this:

The culture of my homeplace taught me to love others without judgment, a tenet that many of the loudest voices in the public arena do not want us to practice because we are more easily controlled when we are divided. I will not let them take my love away any more than I will let them take my joy. I will be no one’s doormat and I will never make myself unsafe but I will give everyone grace, even those who deny it to me and so many others. I will fight back. I will resist, but I will refuse to hate anyone. I will look for the open arms of acceptance, and they will be there, somewhere in the crowd, waiting for me. 

Being done.

I was talking to some friends tonight, and told them I was thinking about what it would be like to be done. Then I gave them this example.

I own some cast iron cookware. But it’s to use – I’m not a collector. There are four skillets – sized 6, 8, 10, and 12 inch – on my wall where I store my cast iron cookware. I have a small, medium, and large Dutch oven, some of them enameled. Two corn stick pans, because my corn stick recipe makes two pans worth, and can’t be easily halved. And a cast iron griddle, for when I need to make lots of pancakes or tortillas.

I will probably never purchase another piece of cast iron cookware in my life. Because I don’t need any more. I don’t have use cases for other cast iron cookware. And it won’t wear out – the cast iron cookware I have will last for generations.

Also, there isn’t a viable upgrade path. There are cast iron skillets in the marketplace that cost more than mine, and that have a prettier finish, or longer handles, or whatever, but they are not better at cooking than mine is. There are reasons someone might want to purchase them, but they are not improvements on what I have.

So, since I have all my needs met, and they will last the rest of my life, and there is no real upgrade path, then I’m done buying cast iron. When it comes to my life, there is no way for anyone to make money from me if their job is to sell cast iron. As regards to cast iron cookware, I have opted out of capitalism altogether.

Now I just want to do that with every other part of my life.

Love as an ingredient.

Not far from my house is a restaurant. It’s sort of a deli, and they have sandwiches there, as well as pizza and salads.

I first ate there with my parents, when we moved to Jackson. Dad wanted to share it with us – he had to come to Jackson regularly, and it was one of his favorite places to eat.

More than the food, he liked how they ran the business. He told me a story of one of their employees, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and was soon unable to work. But they kept her on the payroll until she died, so her health insurance remained intact. That story endeared them to Dad. The food was almost secondary.

We still go there, some 7 years later. A couple of times a month, we eat supper there, and I probably have lunch meetings there at least that often. It hots lots of places for me; cost, quality, and of course, that story, and how it affected Dad. That Dad loved that place is also a huge consideration.

The staff is always a delight when we go there. They are smiling, and welcoming, and the service is always fast, and they have never once messed up my order.

A few weeks ago, I stopped by around 2PM to get a late lunch, and there was no one at the counter. And on the counter, beside the registers, was a giant self-serve tablet, like they have at McDonalds. You scroll through a menu, add items to your order, and customize each item by adding pickles, or extra mayo.

I hate these things with a passion. They cannot be clean, with everyone touching them all day. They are not fast – they are actually much slower than telling a person. They are not intuitive – it’s like getting a brand new cell phone whose settings you don’t understand. And often the ones at McDonalds do not work.

This one did not either. Ultimately, after messing with it for at least 5 minutes, an employee came to the counter to rescue me.

I get that it probably saves payroll. But it felt off-brand for this company. Out of character. It was jarring, in the same way it would be jarring to go to a steakhouse and be served surf and turf on paper plates.

And what’s worse, it ruined that story I know about them – the one where they prioritize their employees. Because the decision to replace people with a machine is not the act of love for the employees.

I’ve only been back once. The food tastes different to me now. It’s in my head, I know. But once I had believed they loved their employees. And food always tastes better when love is an ingredient.

Introversion at conferences

I used to spend a fair amount of my life at conferences. Back when I was regularly asked to speak or, more often, lead breakout sessions, I would be at maybe ten of these things a year.

But then I quit speaking about faith and homelessness and I moved to a new city and then COVID happened and suddenly it had been five years since I had been to much of anything like the conference I am at this week, put on by my denomination, Mennonite Church USA.

I don’t know how many people are here – they come and go, and other than the plenary sessions, you never see everyone at once, but maybe a few thousand?

Over the years, I adopted a series of practices to keep me sane at events like this. Mostly they were adopted in self defense, and were not planned. But this week I realized now they are muscle memory.

  • Most things like this love to offer communal meals, where you are expected to sit next to absolute strangers. I will only do one of those during the conference. If I need to eat, I try to latch onto someone I know, so at least the energy expenditure is low.
  • I always stay at the conference hotel, if it’s at all feasible. Being able to hide in your hotel room when you have 20 minutes of downtime is priceless.
  • I try to schedule one on one meals with people I want to talk to, or catch up with. It takes much less energy to have a one on one coffee or meal than it does to chat with a bunch of folks.
  • Grab snacks like individual yogurts, those water bottle juice powders, and some trail mix, and keep them in your room for when you need topping up. This also gives you an excuse to go back your room.
  • I accept I won’t go to everything I could. I have no FOMO.
  • I run on my home time zone – now Central Time. I’m currently in Eastern Time, but I’m waking up and going to bed based on CST. If the trip is less than a week, I just refuse to adjust.
  • Take advantage of serendipity. Tonight, my supper meeting cancelled, so I skipped the evening session and went to CookOut and had a strawberry milkshake and a chilidog for supper. Only God can judge me.

Mennonite on the move.

I’m in Greensboro, NC for the rest of the week for the bi-annual Mennonite Church USA convention, and I always feel a bit weird at things like this. I love my denomination, and I love what they stand for at their best. But it’s also always a bit surreal.

There are only three MC USA churches in my state. Our conference, the Gulf States Conference, is the smallest. It’s a pretty lonely place to be Mennonite, to tell you the truth. In the US, Mennonites are found in quantity in the Midwest and Northeast. And there are relatively none in the Southeast, especially the deep south. And I’m unapologetically Queer-affirming and am a Christian Humanist, and honestly, the denomination hasn’t always known what to do with somebody like me. 

And I’m an introvert, and in general, I don’t think introverts go to conferences and conventions.

But here I am. My role as pastor at Open Door Mennonite Church doesn’t require me to go, but it’s good if I can. So yesterday I drove 11 and a half hours to get here, and arrived around 7 last night. After checking in, I went to the exhibit hall and ran into a dozen or more folks I know from around the country, and a few more who only know me from social media. 

So today I shall fortify myself with coffee and sit in sessions and put my extrovert face on and hang out with my folks. And then tomorrow, get up and do it again.

I’m writing

Make the coffee, shuffle to the office, fire up the computer, because it is the morning, and that is when I write.

I don’t really know what I’m writing about, but I’m writing.

I’ve been on the road for four days, and my back aches and I’m undercaffeinated and I overslept this morning, but I’m writing.

The stack of mail on the table that waited for me to return reminds me that I have so many open loops I need to deal with – but I’m writing.

We won’t even speak of my overflowing email inbox, and the people I have let down because I am a chaos machine with poor executive functioning skills – but I’m writing.

It’s a Federal holiday, so the banks are closed and the mail won’t run and would anybody even notice if I didn’t write today, but I’m writing.

My cats missed me while I was away and are currently rubbing against my legs demanding to be cuddled, but I’m writing.

My country is collapsing and people I love are threatened and I don’t know what to do, so I’m writing.

Re: The Super Bowl and Whiteness

When examining art that confuses you, things to consider might include asking if you are the intended audience, or if this is a medium you understand. If it isn’t, perhaps ask people who do understand it to explain it to you.

Or, you can accept that not everything is for everyone, and that whole universes of art exist that are powerful and brilliant but were not made with you in mind.

Or, I guess, you could bitch that it was boring on Social Media.

One more thing for people who look like me:

The USA will be majority non-white in less than 20 years. More and more, pop culture will not feature you, prioritize your opinions, or solicit your favor. Markets will not swing based on what you want, and people who look like you will be less prominent in mass media.

You have a choice: You can see this as an opportunity to learn new things, to see art outside your gaze, to develop in understanding of the world around you, or you can complain, whine, and whither into hatred.

This is a cultural sea change the likes of which our country has never seen before. I hope we do not waste it.

The reference shelf

On a shelf over my desk, at eye level when I stand, are 8 reference books. They are mostly “How to write English good” books – a dictionary, a thesaurus, Strunk and White, Garner’s English Usage, etc. Because I preach and write occasionally about theological matters, I have an Oxford Annotated Bible there as well.

One can argue that Google is faster, and for some things it is. But my goal is not to be faster – it’s to be better.

The things that are wrong with my writing will not be improved by my doing it faster. And while the internet may contain a vast collection of information, sorting it is becoming harder and harder.

When I was a small boy in Mississippi, I would often use the word _ain’t _in speech. To which my aunt would reply, “Ain’t ain’t a word, because it ain’t in the dictionary”. It would frustrate me, but part of me really liked that there was a standard, a “right” way to do it.

That doesn’t mean I don’t break “the rules”. I do all the time. But if I do, I want it to be because I know I am breaking them, and not because I am ignorant of them.

A row of english reference books on a wooden shelf.