The Pit

I wrote about grief and death (and "AI") in this morning's Second Breakfast newsletter. Living and dying have been on my mind a lot this past week (the latter probably always is) as Tuesday was Isaiah's birthday. He would have been 32 -- as impossible to imagine as is that I've lived five June 11ths without him here to celebrate.

My great aunt Pearl would always remark upon the birthdays of deceased family members -- “Mother would have been 107 today” -- and my dad would always mutter something disparaging in response. As a kid, I didn’t understand Pearl’s memorializing. Grandma King (“Mother” in the sentence above) died when she was 99 -- she was always already unfathomably old, and it made no sense to me to keep counting the years of someone’s life they were no longer living. But now I get it. I mean, you think of the dead every day. But birthdays and deathdays are the days you get to say something out loud. Fuck my dad for being mean to Pearl about that. Damn.

Kin and I do something to honor Isaiah’s life every year, and we will until we die. For the first two years after his passing, we re-did some of the Drone Recovery hikes that he and Kin had done in southern Oregon / northern California. Last year, we went clothes shopping at Ralph Lauren. (Isaiah loved fashion.)

This year, we went out for Thai food, to BKK New York, a new restaurant in the neighborhood. He loved Thai food -- the spicier the better -- and he would mock my pathetic attempts to recreate the flavors at home. While BKK New York offers the usual noodles and curries, but also features some NYC “classics,” re-imagined Thai-style. And those are what Kin and I ordered: a hot dog and a brisket sandwich dip, as well as some “doughnuts.” The hot dog was a Chiang Mai sausage on a brioche bun; the sandwich -- spicy mayo and American cheese -- was served with this incredibly rich lemongrass au jus broth. The “doughnuts” (air quotes, for sure) -- ground shrimp, pork and chicken, shaped in circles and fried ’til crispy -- were that perfect bite of salty, fatty, savory, mushy, crunchy. I think there was salted egg yolk sprinkled on top, which honestly I’d sprinkle over almost anything. The food was very good. (No dessert because rice pudding is poison.) But the restaurant was clearly catering to the "young and hip" scene, and Kin and I are now firmly outside of either category. Funny thing though, we joked that if he were with us, at age 32, Isaiah would also be right on the cusp of rolling his eyes at the loud music and young kids meeting up for after-work drinks and appetizers.

This weekend, Kin and I watched the two-episode documentary Pee-Wee As Himself, which was very very good -- highly recommended. Making the film was obviously such a struggle for both the filmmaker Matt Wolf and for Paul Reubens. (And the former didn't even know that Reubens had cancer?! WTF.) I have always always loved Pee Wee Herman -- a celebrity whose alleged monstrosity I never accepted.

We also started watching The Pitt (we're just a few episodes in), and Noah Wylie's character Dr. "Robby" seems to be suffering from the COVID-related grief and trauma that I pointed to in today's newsletter -- trauma that I think is very much bound up in the industry push for and some people's embrace of "AI." We don't want to think about death -- others', our own -- but it's gnawing away at us, bubbling up in the most tragic and self-/socially-destructive ways possible.

I had to face my fears about my own death this week too -- a COVID booster on Thursday, for starters, which had me feeling weak and puny. (Funny how America can't seem to do jack shit about guns, but RFK Jr. can snap his fingers and make vaccines hard to come by.) Then out of the blue, I received a call from the radiology department at the hospital. When I'd scheduled my annual mammogram, there weren't any available spots for months and months and months -- such a brilliant health care system we have here (as The Pitt makes abundantly clear). And while I don't like the delay, frankly I was sort of happy to wait until after the NYC Marathon to worry about my boobs. (The anticipation of tests can be as bad as the waiting can be as bad as the results can be as bad as the treatment -- you know that chain of reasoning.) But the office called out of the blue to say they could fit me in at noon on a weekend -- and that seemed like such odd timing that I figured it was "a sign" that I needed to think about my boobs now. They're "heterogeneously dense," doctors have reported in the past, "which may obscure small masses." So not only do I get a mammogram, I get an ultrasound as well. The clinician who performed the latter kept apologizing as she repeated ran the wand over my right breast: "I am so sorry about the pressure." And I had to tell her, "I've just had a mammogram. You could literally sit on my chest and it would be less pressure." But as she spent what seemed like ages on the right breast, I had a feeling that something was awry. "We'll get back to you in 24 hours with next steps," were her ominous-AF parting words.

So when, several hours later while Kin and I were watching TV, I got the push notification on my iPhone that I had a new health record, I scrambled to read the report. (Doctors always say, "Do not read the reports until I have done so, so I can help you understand the results." But I listen to my phone, not the professional -- come on.) Thankfully, everything appeared "benign."

Every doctor's visit always feels like impending doom, like one of these times I know it’s going to happen: some terminal diagnosis. I mean, I know it's coming. I'm going to die. We all die. (Even you, Bryan Johnson.)

There's something about the health technologies that undermines health -- we’re supposed to think that instantaneous test results are great, but I am not sure they are. It's all certainly part of this ridiculous push for "individualization." A devaluation of expertise. A maniacal adherence to data and a belief that the data collection is useful and actionable and worth surveilling ourselves (letting ourselves be surveilled).

Tom Scocca asked this week, "Are Sleep Trackers Making Us Ontologically Insecure?" I do think that there is so much psychological manipulation going on -- across the board -- with technologies, and the health and fitness tech is no exception. I mean, I started Second Breakfast to write about this stuff, and I seem to be focused so much more on AI and education (and lately, fascism) instead. But I still think about the ways in which we are being asked to surrender our bodies as well as our minds to this scripted and engineered worldview. And the technology does not work! It does not work! It does not work!

And even if it did, my god, why do you want to be controlled by an algorithm?!?! It's bad enough we have gods and masters, and now we want to be governed by machines as well? No Kings, right?!

Funny, the Zapatistas are probably the thing that made me think that the Internet — friggin’ email — could be used for good, not evil. Weird weird world.

Yours in struggle,

~Audrey