This One’s About Memory, Dreams, Artificial Intelligence … And Milkmen

These days, my brain is about as reliable as Fox News — and probably just as full of prejudices and fulminations masquerading as knowledge or expertise.

Trying to fetch up names or beautiful things from my past, beyond the usual anecdotes, is a bit like dropping a fishing line into a black hole of a lake and hoping I’ll get a bite. 

Too often, my hook will get snagged on some obscure flashback, that just might have something to do with what I am looking for. 

It all reminds me of the way my dad used to stuff all sorts of junk into his sagging sports jacket pockets by day — and unload it all onto his bedside locker every night. 

“It might be useful,” he’d say about some old warped spanner, or roll of grimy duct tape he’d pick up along the day and stick in his pocket.

And now I jam all sorts of TV, radio and Netflix junk into my head, on top of all the other stuff. Is it any wonder my sagging brain feels so clogged sometimes? And no bedside locker to deposit it all on. Ah, sure, some of it might be useful …

Not just that, it feels a bit contaminated in here, a bit fake news. So much stuff I’m taking in — or can’t keep out — that I don’t trust or struggle to believe. Or it all just overwhelms me. 

Like, all those horror stories from Gaza and the Ukraine. The holocausts from history we thought would never be repeated. And one of them seemingly being perpetrated by the victims of the greatest one of all …

Or the very idea that enough Americans might yet vote Donald Trump back as US President, in the face of all the court cases, the proven lies, the pout-lipped narcissistic whining — and the piss-poor English. 

Joe Biden is just too bloody old, though, isn’t he?

I have to stir myself sometimes to remember the beauty out there too, the strutting music, the heart-rending films and the wonderful everyday. And do my best to get over lousy lunkheads parking in disabled spots, or monkey people who still let their dogs shit everywhere … instead of them, I suppose.

But beauty ought never be a mere distraction, The truth that beauty speaks, from that lexicon of love and transformation, of hope and glorious possibility, the crack in the darkness that lets everything in, as Leonard Cohen kind of put it  … 

Oh, the humility that great art brings, making you feel small yet magnificent, like when I find my eyes welling again at that bit in Letter To An Old Poet, the final song on Boygenius’s sublime The Record album, as Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus meld their pristine voices in a concerted cry to the heavens: ‘I Want To be Happy’.

The cry of a generation … the cry of a civilisation.

Yes, we want to be happy. But just how do you do that, allow yourself to feel hope, when it hurts like a betrayal to feel optimism as so many suffer? 

I was deep in these thoughts just this morning out with the two dogs, who were happy just to sniff and piddle in the glorious now, when I glanced by chance to the sky, and caught a transcendent chiffon swirl of back-lit pinkish cloud sashaying slowly across a rose and cobalt blue horizon. A brief moment of rapture. I was surprised by joy, as Wordsworth put it.

Not fifteen minutes later, when I was putting out the bins, the sky was a nondescript blue-grey again.

If I hadn’t witnessed that magic cloud, would it ever have existed? And already the memory of it was dissolving. Has dissolved. Like a self-destructing dream image.

In fairness, the good stuff in my head too can be whimsical and fun too, like when an old song lyric, maybe, makes me forget I am even fishing. 

Sure I’m even thinking now of that great auld old Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong duet, Gone Fishin’.

But heaven knows, it is getting harder to tell fact from fiction these days. Even in my own head. 

Facts used be something we associated with newspapers, or the news on TV and radio. Serious-suited news anchors weighing in with Moon landings and IRA bombings and George Best’s goals and philanderings, The Berlin Wall fall and Nelson Mandela walking tall from prison to unite South Africa for longer than a moment. 

They told us about good guy US presidents and evil Russian dictators on black and white TV. And then came colour TV and Tricky Nixon and good old Gorby and Glasnost. And we had to start thinking for ourselves.

Nostalgia, eh?

“Re-mem-mem

Re-mem-mem-mem-ber

Re-mem-mem

Re-mem-mem-mem-ber

Re-mem-mem

Re-mem-mem-mem-ber

Then, then, remember then

Whoa, oh, oh…

Remember Then‘

A long-time journalist, I’m still clinging on in the newspaper game. But it’s been hard as they turn more and more into opinion sheets, or gossip stations. And you’ve got the libel lawyers on standby in case some rich bastard takes offence, or just tries to scare you, or put you off the scent.

Some journalists eventually give up the ghost and join PR companies or become government advisors.

Or turn to fiction altogether, or at least embellish things a bit. And the embellishing itself often turns out to be the good stuff, or the stuff that sells anyway. They call these opinion columns.

I am terrible for remembering dreams, but I suppose that’s probably necessary. If we stayed in that loose dream state wouldn’t fact, fiction, past, present, living, dead … everything … be indistinguishable? 

Fake news would be fact, and fact would be fake news. And only dictators would arbitrarily determine the difference. Real ones like Vladimir Putin or aspiring ones like Trump. 

As my old history teacher, good old Martin Ryan, used to say, “If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a big one …” 

Talking of Trump and fake news and all that, as a journalist, and union member, I worry more than some about newspapers. Sales tumble and the very notions of proper reporting, of unslanted facts and objectivity, seem almost quaint.

Looking at my children, I do worry that expensively assembled information has been exchanged for memes and posts based on the algorithms of their obsessions or preconceptions. Though I’m guilty of all that myself, reckoning that current affairs panellist who agrees with me is obviously right … 

Information itself, for those who seek it out and are prepared to pay, has been coloured by PR and marketing agencies, or spun through the web of spokesmen and commentators rather than coming straight from the real experts. 

And of course it’s opportunity in crisis time for media companies as they cut and slash through budgets and workforces.

Separating out the wheat is getting harder and harder too, as the presenter rushes on to the next topic, and gives the one with the recipe for flambéed ostrich feathers (gluten free) the same airtime and attention as the reporter who has just described the horrors of what is going on in Sudan.

Ultimately, I can’t help feeling my emotional responses have been numbed, or I’m just so overloaded, that it’s hard to think straight. Or care enough to do something, join something, change … anything. And my ‘liking’ one-minute videos on X or Facebook poking my perceived baddies doesn’t quite cut it.

And then what about the infiltration of artificial intelligence into the generation and presentation of news stories?

Newspaper chains I am familiar with have been using apps to actually put news stories together. Not good for reporters and writers — though maybe pay dirt for libel lawyers. 

Not only that, the overqualified, cost-generating journalist, is being reduced to feeding the original ‘story’ into a programme, or app, and out pop versions of the story, instant ‘rewrites’. These are used in different editions, or on sister websites. 

You know those websites — and the ‘stories’: short paragraphs infuriatingly scattered between all those ads and promos, at least one of which you will click into and lose the ‘story’ altogether, if not the plot …

The app-generated versions of the original story are ostensibly disparate enough to give no indication that they all came from the same source.

There’s even a ‘cool’ journo name for this rethreading articles business — ‘ripping’. Gives a whole new meaning to Ripping Yarns, the old Terry Jones and Michael Palin (Monty Python) TV comedy series, eh?

I have even read quotes from newspaper publishing company types claiming these new tools were designed to make reporters’ work easier. Now that’s fake news, I’d say. Or maybe these people aren’t real, only their quotes …

So here I am, with my flaky memory, wondering if it’s like what is going on in my brain: new stuff being fed into it all the time, mixing with the older stuff, and I just dip in and out comes … what, exactly? Sure if you can’t believe your own head, who can you believe?

Maybe it would be good to have some kind of bot thing implanted in my brain —  it’s happened already, no doubt, according to some true believers  — let it sift through my thoughts and bingo, out comes an instant memoir. Based on a true story, as they say.

Then, I might run it through the system again, using a few cool plot and romantic intrigue plugins, and I could have a fiction bestseller. 

If there are any paying readers left to buy into it, that is. 

So, folks, maybe reality as we used to know it is dead … it’s all in the eye of the beholder, your take is as good as mine … sure we’re all fake these days. 

And that’s a fact …

Or maybe we can turn it all on its head and suggest that all this stuff is what unites us, rather than divides us. 

We’re all in it together, memory, perception, dreams and AI just different parts of the same wave. We’re all drops in the existential ocean, all part of the one body of water. Swimming about in the collective unconscious.

Like that stuff you try to grasp about quantum mechanics on Wikipedia. Your brain begins to smoke three paragraphs in as you try to even ponder stuff like how would you like your matter, sir … wave or particle? Did you know time’s a curve?

Are we alive or dead, or like Schrödinger’s Cat, both? 

Is this all a dream … your alternative universe or mine?

Pause your thoughts there a moment, press unpause, and brain will go streaming off into a whole new channel or universe … like when your dog’s paw presses pause on the TV remote, or cuts you out of Netflix into ‘live’ TV … which has already been recorded 40 minutes before going out …

Is it any wonder you have people selling nostalgia by the tonne on TV or for political capital … dreams and market-researched visions of a simpler time that never existed. When we had one God, one Allah, one Vishnu and one milkman.

A time when we had real news stories, proper political leaders, mammy and daddy and permanent families, and boy meets girl  — and none of this cis-gender fluid horse feathers — discernible plots in books and movies, and we were all connected … 

Ah, the comforts and security of simpler, certain times … a golden twilight time before ambiguity and doubt, and existential angst. 

Just like it never was.

Is it any wonder we spend 99 per cent of our waking hours too distracted tor too tired or too whatever to even notice a transcendent chiffon swirl of back-lit pinkish cloud sashaying slowly across a rose and cobalt blue horizon?

Disconnected. From ourselves, not to mind the world. Alienated and alone.

But no, I say, this is actually why I keep on fishing, keep on trying to recapture memories and transcendent morning skies. Keep on separating fact from fake.  Especially in my own head. Engaging still in the hundred and one things that keep me awake, keep me connected, to family, to friends, to life. 

That keep me me.

In this I believe my weakness is my strength and in this strength is the grace to keep believing. What in, I’m not sure, but still believing, still feeling.

Continuing to say all these things, and risk sounding preachy, naive … stupid, even.

But it’s just too easy to just be critical, isn’t it? I’ve doing it since my teens and am caught now in the recycle of being a parent as my own teenagers criticise me, in their turn, turning on me as they must to make up their own minds, become their own people.

Could do with less rows, though. Even though they are becoming much less frequent. And vehement.

I want to be happy. 

I’ll leave the last word to Phoebe ‘sage of the age’ Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus:

“I’m not there yet, but I am waiting” 

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