Thoughts of the day.

 I don't have a traditional workweek. I'm also 71, so some weeks, the days just morph into one, Monday being no different from Saturday. There are daily routines but no planning. Yet today is a Sunday, and Sundays are 'the last days standing' in terms of traditions.  I slept late this morning (9:30), had coffee and a bite to eat, sat around the breakfast table with my partner, and had our morning talk about the woes of the world and things that were on our minds, thoughts on the family, and reminding ourselves we still have some planning to do regarding our summer vacation.  We noticed the hydrometer read 34, which is pretty dry, with 40 being roughly optimal, and decided to open all the windows, turn off the heat, put the kettle on for additional dampness and see what happens; we reached 36 and decided to just say 'f**k it and go outside for a walk, on this freezing but sunny day.  I'm no expert, but walking is the best medicine. Better than jogging or working ...

  It isn't busy in the coffee shop today, not yet anyway. I'm a little earlier than usual, and the lunchtime rush is yet to come. There are enough tables to choose from, and there are no 'table-hugging' laptop users in the place.   I find a place near the window, and from here, I can do some people-watching while writing some notes in the black moleskine (lookalike, I can't afford the real thing.) I ordered a 'pain chocolate' and a Dubbel Americano to get my brain running. The waitress is new, a student by the looks of it. She took my order without uttering a word; she could be my neighbour's daughter, I chuckle to myself. I remembered ordering a double Americano in some other Coffee shop a while ago. The young girl there brought me two small cups of strong coffee, which I thought was hilarious. From the window, I can see how quiet it is on the usually busy street. Something may have happened that I'm not aware of. Is Trump dead? Musk? Has the King o...

Getting on. I’m stuck between the confusion of our times, trying to find meaning where there is none, if there is meaning it’s just the fact that we are born, we live, we don’t want to die, and yet we know that it one day will be.   So I stumble on, from one trend to the other, from one mood to the other. Half reading books, the books that someone said had to be on all our bookshelves, so I bought it and put it there, now what?   I heard a rumour that all cool people will be at that demo, the demo where you had to be, it was in a square with that nice looking little coffee bar, with laptop warriors and baristas with art school backgrounds.   The demo went well, we all shouted what the problem was with that ‘thing’ it was about, then we rounded it off with a fair trade Latté served by a spotted minimum wager, in the bar where the wifi is perfect.   The anarchists had a good turn-out I felt, some old commie with hammer and sickle badge was selling ‘class war’ coasters,...

The world has changed; it will never be the same again.  But isn’t that how it has always been? Yes, but now it seems more fundamental; it’s more of a ‘throw everything out that you thought you knew about the world, and start again’. The coming of AI and its taking over everything from government to creativity and most of our daily activities will change the world and eventually create a new type of human. I’m not a tech person, and I’m not even that well educated, so I panic easily when confronted with change on this scale. Sorry, ‘tech bros,’ but I don’t see the upside.  All I know is that we seem to have sleepwalked into a world that is topsy-turvy, to say the least. It’s a mirror reflection. Nothing is certain, nothing is how we knew it, and we are all as confused as one another. There are no truths or lies anymore, just ‘alternative facts’ (what we used to call lies). Many people get their ‘awareness’ from a handheld device that feeds them what they want to hear; they liv...