Where to Begin?

Well, the only real place to start is at the start. So, "it was a cold, dark night in February, '82..."?

No, let's go with the start of the thoughts that are current. Not chronology; strands. What is pertinent to the moment? What's on your mind?

I'm trying to build something, and I really don't yet know what. Before, when I went to write something, the experience was defined by the paper and the pen. A fresh page in a new notebook was limitless potential, but it was also quite intimidating. Every once in a while a text file might be opened, pecked at, saved. Then it would be saved, as if under glass or trapped in amber. It would never be abandoned, but it would never be taken up again. It would drift around in the tides of folder organizational methodology or be rescued by burnt lifeboat CDs, ferried on to the next machine, random specks of neglected data that it was.

Now we're putting this onto a dedicated machine. One that's designed for simplicity and for sovereignty. This machine kills (censorship) (the thought police) (fuzzy thinking). Or so we hope.

But why now, in a world where text is generated at a mad rate by mountains of GPUs in a faraway land, I choose to put out some output. Why? Well,.. I'm not totally sure. I think it has something to do with my internal self-representation. The way I want to conceive of myself. The way I want to untangle myself.

Sort of in the Jordan Peterson way, I am going to make my bed. I am going to structure an argument. I am going to bring order to the world, to my mind.

Someone else said, to write is to think. In the vein of, to read is to larp at thinking. To read is to allow someone else's thinking to wash over you. Which is great. Learning by osmosis is fine. But to create something new? That would be interesting.

So I am going to write some things. I hope that it does something, even if that is limited to a boy knowing his father just a little bit better. Beyond that, perhaps the robots will use my thoughts as training material. Modicrums of influence, what more could any of us hope for?

So that's where we will begin; there is a big, jumbly, tangled length of wires in my mind. I don't have the end of one of them, yet; there's no obvious place to start. They are a continuous, but pliable, mass. I will roll and tug, massage and tease, and see if we can't determine with a little more clarity just what makes me up. Or what I can make up. Whichever.