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I hit a wall last week that tells me that obsolescence is around the corner and one day soon I'll be parked in a sunny corner with a quilt over my lap, listening to the CD I made with Heather Masse ages ago, the one with the Grateful Dead's "Ripple" on it and Bob Dylan's "Mozambique." I will hear someone in passing say, "He used to be in radio, I hear." And someone will bring me my bouillon and my pills.
The wall I hit is Microsoft Word, which has been my standard word processing program as a writer since I abandoned my Underwood manual, a beautiful machine, you had to hit the keys hard, you had to really mean what you wrote. Microsoft Word can do thousands and thousands of incredible things and I only use three, write in English, store it, and retrieve it, but last Wednesday my laptop went berserk and I restarted it and it went bonkers again. My two tech wizards, one in Wisconsin, one in Florida, couldn't solve the problem, and I called a friend from church who runs an investment company and he offered me a Korean employee named John who called me and guided me step by step so that he could see my screen on his computer, and quickly and simply solved the problem.
In Asia competence and brilliance are respected over swagger. The advance of AI brings us into a new era in which macho mythology is not helpful. I called an Apple center and a bot listened to my problem and told me in proper English that Apple cannot deal with Microsoft problems. She offered no sympathy.
And the cool patience of John as he led me toward the click that cleared the deck — an American would've been obliged to make a joke about it — I was impressed. I envy competence. It doesn‘t exist in my line of work. I could go back to "I hit a wall last week" and do a major rewrite.
AI bots are going to take over flocks of routine jobs and soon we'll have an AI House and Senate of 535 computers that accurately represent the electorate's beliefs and wishes, and we'll leave politics behind and turn our passions to the arts, the L.A. Phil versus the New York Phil, which one's Mahler's Eighth captures its spiritual grandeur and universality and which is a scumbag.
As for me I'm going back to the world I know and love. One of these days, I will wake up with a determined heart and hurl my laptop off our 12th-floor balcony onto the street, its memory circuitry smashed to bits to be pecked at by pigeons, and I will take my yellow legal pad and my fine-point Sharpie and write for my own pleasure.
I will write sonnets to my darling Jenny. She met me when she was 35, she had had boyfriends before, fine men, I'm sure — the woman has standards, she is a classical violinist, she was raised Episcopalian — but I was the first man to write her a sonnet and it was pretty good. Then I wrote more. A 14-line Shakespearean sonnet is a better gift than a jacket that's the wrong size, wrong color, and the collar is itchy. I wrote seven love sonnets that were put to music and I sang them with the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center with Herself in the audience. A thing like that makes up for a lot of a man's deficiencies.
This week we're going to see Molière and going to the opera. I'm an old man and my eyesight is fading but when I take off my glasses, the world becomes impressionistic and suddenly I'm walking down the street with a Renoir woman holding my arm and you don't get that from Microsoft, it's real life.
Garrison Keillor is an author and radio personality. His latest book is "Cheerfulness". Buy it at a 54% discount! by clicking here. Sales help fund JWR.