10.09.2026
Hey Kid! You won’t remember, of course, but your Grand-Auntie Dana and I got to meet you on the Labor Day holiday. Do we still have those? I certainly hope so. Being in a union feels pretty important right now with everyone else under the hypnotic lure of the promise of Artificial Intelligence.
There are those that are convinced that white-collar jobs will be a thing of the past by the end of this decade. I have my doubts. There have already been cases of companies laying off staff in preparation for AI to take over their work, only to have to hire them back when it didn’t pan out like management hoped it would. I hope they all got big raises.
Just this morning the news paraded out a bunch of tech bros saying that AI might end up wiping out humanity in a few years, so if that happened, sorry. Seriously, it’s like these idiots never watched a single science fiction movie in their lives. Does Skynet ring a bell? Anything? If you aren’t already living in a post-humanist techno-hellscape, I do recommend the Terminator franchise, if for nothing else, for tips on fighting evil sentient robots.
For now, I don’t think that AI could actually do my job. Being able to sit in four meetings in row without wanting to murder everyone to death requires an ability to dissociate on a level only achieved by deep trauma. Let’s see a Large Language Model figure that one out.
Speaking of deep trauma, I promised that I would try to relate what it was like to live through our times, and with the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York tomorrow, it feels like a good time to talk about it. One strange thing I noticed was that that huge, world-changing events seem to cause ripples that manifest in all directions.
Let me explain: I was working in San Rafael at a music magazine publisher in 2001. Dana and I had moved to Marin the previous year when I left the newspaper business in the East Bay. I was still an avid news junkie, however, and religiously started my day by watching the morning broadcasts on television, as smart phones hadn’t been invented yet. Leading up to Tuesday the 11th, the news had already been terrible for a week. In retrospect, things can always get a lot worse, but it had gotten to the point that I didn’t turn on the TV that morning.
Blissfully unaware of what was happening on the other side of the country, I drove to work and found everyone in a state of mute horror. The boombox that we had in our design office, which usually would be blasting out Public Enemy or Bob Willis and His Texas Playboys (depending on who got to it first) was serving up the uninterrupted coverage that would be the only thing available anywhere for the next 93 hours.
The first thing we noticed when we walked outside, was the total lack of airplanes in the sky. San Rafael is on the high-altitude flight path for planes from Oakland and SFO and on any given day the air was crisscrossed by vapor trails. There was also a total lack of traffic on the street. Everyone was home glued to their TVs as we didn’t know if there were more attacks coming or what. Once we were all released, as no one was getting any work done, I was no different, watching the planes crash into the Twin Towers over and over in a most unhealthy way (the watching, not the crashing… although that’s obviously not good for one’s well-being either).
Dana and I had just adopted two kittens and as we grieved for our fellow country persons, they picked up on the vibe and were glued to the two of us in a most un-feline caring sort of way. (Cats are great, but they are also kind of self-involved jerks, which is also kind of why they’re great… that’s a whole ’nother letter.)
9/11* was Dana’s second day at her new job teaching at a preschool in Mill Valley. One thing she noticed after working that gig for 20 years was the children that had gone through the devastating attacks and their aftermath took much, much longer to assimilate into the classroom environment. It turns out that cats aren’t the only little cretins (is cretin too harsh?) that can show signs of empathy against type.
I sincerely hope that this sort of thing is in the rearview mirror and you find yourself in a bucolic utopian paradise where even cats and dogs live in harmony and mutual respect. We’ll do what we can. If there was one thing to be learned from this whole sorry episode, it would be; “Killing people is no way to stop anyone from killing people.”
Sleep tight, little angel,
Tio-avô Ray
*I really don’t care for the branding that almost immediately manifests around terrible events. It is a shortcut that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to use. If we had to say “The terrorist attacks on the United States by mostly Saudi hijackers which was planned and executed by Afghan ex-mujahideen “freedom fighters” who had further radicalized into Al-Qaeda and the Taliban,” we might give pause before engaging in the sort of Imperialist hijinks that leads to that sort of thing in the first place. Probably not, though.
Román Leão 
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