Camp, Camps, Camping

I prepare for family vacation. I pack sweats and bathing suits. I pack books I don’t read. I think about what I will say to my brother: I put half a million tokens into a super intelligent computer, but it couldn’t return a response to why he voted for someone who is trying to kill me—damn AI. I also bring a puzzle and a game we do not play.

This year we thought we would be in tents. Now before you say no, tents have come a long way. Some tents pop up in minutes, whole domes complete with screen houses. You can get a tent for 2, 4, 6 ,even hundreds. The tents big enough for hundreds come with cages inside so you can section your group into 33 people per cage. The smaller 2 and 4 person tents even come with skylights. There are no windows in the tents at Alligator Alcatraz.

Blood Sunset

Nico says joy and suffering are linked together. The evidence is everywhere for this beautiful and terrible truth. The sunset tonight is an impossible shade of pink and neon purple. Whose AI made this? This glowing orb is a wonder to behold, balanced on the trees, dancing beside me as I drive through the forest. A forest somewhere else burns down, and the smoke gives me this gift. I see a deer by the road, and somewhere in Canada, a deer flees the flames, but here, there is no drama. The deer retreats into the green. I stop and admire the smoke from someone else’s suffering. Maybe joy and suffering are the same thing. A matter of distance, of time. Of every dimension you cannot control. And then I wonder about my own smoke. My own joy, my own suffering. Whose sky do I color? What gentle fawn colored this blood sunset just for me to enjoy on this quiet drive through a verdant forest?

Camp at Night

To start a fire, you need some kindling: tiny sticks trees won’t miss, immigrants who remain nameless. They burn bright and hot and fast, but not for long. You will need more fuel for a fire that will last. We start with pine but get finally to hardwood—old trees you have to sneak up on with an ax, but they go down just the same. My brother stacks more than we need. We have so much now we have to get through it all. We watch it burn, shoving wood into the flames just for the pleasure of it.

The night is full of cries. The yipping and barking of feral children full of ice cream racing in the dark playing cops and robbers. No parents patrol the paths winding around camp, tucked instead next to fires with hard seltzers and ZZ Top playing. They are not worried that the pretend cops running beneath an orange moon will take their children and throw them in a van or drag them to a camp. well, another kind camp where every activity on the program is cruelty.

“This is going to be the best summer ever!” The camp director barks into a megaphone, the tinny sound ricochets around the game field, down past the trees and the tiny cops roar like so many little Spartans . A small boy clutching a flashlight comes to join in, tentative until an older boy pulls him in by the shoulder

“Come on, we just started, we’re robbers!”

“I would tend to be a cop,” the little one says.

“You can be whatever you want!” the big boy assures him. Oh, the humanity. Camp is for kids.

I sit next to a fire too, not immune to the delight of the warmth. Not immune to delight that comes always now with a dusting of guilt. Changes in latitude, changes in attitude—I haven’t lost that right yet.

Spotting Deer

There is a deer, sweet in the setting sun eating yellow flowers just outside the embrace of pine barrens.

There is a deer dead on the side on the road. When we pass by again people are huddled around —doing what? The deer is already dead and they are only now considering its body.

Another deer, also dead but this corpse has its head cut off.

“Why would you cut off just the head?”

“You take the head for the antlers. But if you didn’t kill the deer that’s wrong.” The disappointment for immoral hunting practices fills the car.

I open the window and look for the hills. The decapitated deer. The deer they’re sitting shiva for on the side of the road, the deer eating and alive. Which one am I today?

Preparing Meat

My mother's memory escapes her. She forgets birthdays, passwords, events. She asks what time we are going to dinner. She asks what the great-grandchild’s name is. She asks why no one has assassinated the president when clearly it would save us all from destruction. Her morals are intact.

My father says Trump will die soon. He points to the president's own dementia. His poor health habits, the inevitability of time. My father will die soon. He is in great health, but at 87, no one lasts forever. I tell him I am worried I might die soon. That they are building concentration camps across the country.

“Well, at least you will lose some more weight in the concentration camp.”

“I know; I shouldn’t have taken Ozempic so I could go in fat.”

The joke is dark, and darker still, the number of times last year I thought about how much meat I had on my bones and what I would need to survive a Trump administration. My brother goes to start the grill. Tonight, it’s chicken.

One for the Road

I tell him I journeyed to find a way I could help to build a new world. I show him what I found. He’s excited. This could help him be more productive. Everyone is excited to be more productive. I tell him I want AI that can help us have better relationships, to make the world a better place. He asks if I have considered using Salesforce’s AI.

We do not get to building his agent. Camp is over for the year. At the end of camp, children sing the good-bye song: it only takes a spark to get a fire glowing…”

When I get home, I make him an agent, productivity .6, empathy 1.2. This is a live protocol, this is an experiment. I look forward to the fire next time.