It is the end of another long day. Tuesday. As Charlie Brown would lament, “Memorial Day has come and gone until next year.” I‘m tempted to say time is accelerating, but it sounds cliched. Oh, how time flies, and all of that rot. Nonetheless, my dear readers, I am dead certain Old Father Time is somewhere checking his cosmic watch and saying, “Let’s speed things up a bit.”

I am not saying this because I am getting older. After all, I’m younger than Brad Pitt. But he has me beat on the bank account front. Yeah, and his best movie was Inglorious Bastards, but that is a subject for another long-winded blog. So, where was I? Oh yeah. Time. You can’t get it back. Decisions that seemed right at the time may come back and chomp down on your ass hard when you least expect it. I moved to Texas. The jury is still out on that one. We will see …

What else can we talk about?

The Hollywood Writers strike marches onward. I really want these talented men and women to get what they deserve.

In other news (like that segue?), large segments of the planet’s preeminent bipedal denizens seem hellbent on WW3, fooling themselves into the insane belief that they will somehow survive the inevitable fallout that befalls their enemies. Madness. I think Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove should be required viewing for every living soul from Moscow to Kyiv to DC, with a detour to Beijing. The film ranks in my all-time top-ten favorite movies. Peter Sellers‘ schizophrenic multiple characters and Slim Pickens flying that wayward B-52 proved cinematic genius-level storytelling. And the end credits with actual nuclear explosions to the tune of We’ll Meet Again. What a perfect movie. Nuclear war is a permanent downer. Who needs it? Like the Seinfeld where Elaine is convinced that the original title of War and Peace was War, what’s it good for? Absolutely nuthin’.

I know; let us lighten the mood with an entirely different subject. I am a graphic artist by trade, which I have been doing for quite a long time. There’s that word again. Want to know just how long I have been plying my creative spark in front of screens burning through the backs of my retinas? Well, I will tell you. My first gig goes back to the late 80s. I was the in-house production artist at a marcom agency that did indeed handle the initial rollout of the Mazda Miata, which was kind of cool. (It did not start out as a chick’s car.)

The job of the lowly production artist was more surgeon than artist in practice. I manipulated razor-sharp X-acto knives, cutting and splicing type galleys onto pasted-up boards per scribbled layouts with placeholder Xeroxed images, acetate overlays, and other fun stuff, trying to burnish down intricate cut lines so they did not fall off halfway to the print house—loads of fun. You have no idea. Then along came the computer. One day, my boss, a rail-thin, 2-packs-a-day lady named Diane, ushered me into an empty office where an enigmatic thing called a Macintosh computer sat alone atop an unused desk. With the processing speed and capabilities of a basic calculator, it mocked us with flying toasters morphing across its 256-color CPU. But the lowercase powers that be who paid an exorbitant sum for the primitive setup made the purchase with me in mind, knowing I had passed a prestigious course on computer graphics at a school called Platt College. (Go Meerkats!)

Diane said, “Make it work.” And so I did.

In those halcyon early days, the Mac—as I affectionately called it—was little more than a glorified typesetting machine at best and dust collecting conversation piece at worst. However, within a few short years, the desktop computer took over the world through pitched battles between heavyweights Jobs and Gates, plus masterminds behind programs like Pagemaker, Freehand, and Quark Xpress. Soon Adobe swallowed up the world and resigned everybody to the cloud. It’s nice in the cloud. But coming from the old school, it is hard to shake the uneasy feeling that I do not have that bookshelf full of disks in case things go off the rails and I have to reinstall the internet. Speaking of the World Wide Web—triple dub, for short—yeah, I was there for the inception of that too. I worked with people who grabbed ahold of the web’s nascent coattails and never let go. I guess they are all living on private islands by now. At the time, I thought they were nuts. Nostradamus, I am not.

Full circle, here it comes …

And that, boys and girls brings us to today’s modern and sophisticated world. Among other stellar advancements, like autonomous poop scoopers patrolling erstwhile city streets, we have reached the zenith of tech and pixels with the latest thing I affectionately refer to as Artificial Intelligence. AI for short. I know people have more colorful names for this latest in nightmare tech, but man, it might be listening. Do you really want to piss it off?

Let’s do that full circle thing and end this before I get in trouble: It’s well over three decades hence. I am sitting at the same desk, in that same seat, all over again … I see Dall-e, Chat GPT, Firefly, and all of their pixellated friends mocking my very existence like the world’s scariest flying toasters. Meanwhile, something wicked hovers just out of sight, with an ominous threatening tinge to its robotic voice, saying, “Make it work.”

Is there still time to go back to that nuclear war thing?

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