The Ending
The Ending
Just a heads up, this post touches on issues of self harm.
They say to tell any good story, you have to start at the beginning. Then skip to the ending. Then tell everything in the middle out of order. I'm pretty sure that's what they say.
Before I move on to the ending, let me give you a sneak peek at the middle. I invite you to hear the following in movie trailer voice.
He planted a garden. He went on dates. He ran out of money. He grew stuff in his garden and gave them to the dates. Did he think Stardew Valley was real life? He went to picnics and dances. He flirted on the bus and at the grocery store. He learned to cook. He took music lessons. He worked on his home. He survived the winter. Did he ever find his Penny? No, what he found instead was a love for footwear and hats. Come see HNTD: On Colfax, in theaters this June.
And now, on to the ending.
The curtain goes up and I am in my closet because it feels like the safest part of my home. I'm talking to a friend, we are three hours into the phone call. I'm telling this friend about something that happened to me when I was too young. She led me to this place because something like that happened to her too and she recognized someone that was suffering.
The phone line beeps and it is another friend. The first friend needs to go be a mom now and so she hands me off.
My voice sounds tired because I've been talking so much over the last 24 hours. I have three friends helping me through a very difficult time.
We eventually hang up and I'm scribbling little notes down in a pocket notebook with a velvet cover and the word SECRETS on the front. Subtlety has always been elusive to me.
I am looking back at myself in the mirror with my shirt off because I look different somehow. The smart lights in my bathroom are a retro mix of sea green and purple and I can’t change them because the app has a bug on my version of Android. Normally, it looks really cool to me. Tonight, I wish they were dumb lights. My hair is sticking up like some kind of mad scientist and that makes me laugh a little which doesn't feel right if I’m trying not to be a mad scientist.
I'm worried that my neighbors are worried about me.
I had just written a blog post called On This Day. I thought I could see my life in a very different light for the first time.
Now I am laying in the darkness and speaking into my phone. It’s that hour when almost everyone on my side of the planet is in bed. I’m not talking to anyone, I'm recording my thoughts because I want to listen to them later. There is something off about them.
If I died unexpectedly, I wanted someone out there to know my story. I figured that my nephew knows the lock on my phone so at least there's a chance. I'm not sure why I would die, but I find myself weighing the odds that people from space or angels or something are teaching me something very important and after I finally understand and pass it along there might not be any reason to continue existing. The whole scenario doesn't seem likely, even to me, but the odds that it is true have gone from like a million to one up to a hundred to one. According to Nate Silver, who might also be from space1, that is a perceivable difference.
I am strangely comforted when I am done talking. I've done my part. I join the rest of the sleepy side of earth and close my eyes. I know the sun will rise soon.
I have a strange dream that I am a little boy stepping out of a large mechanical suit that is supposed to look like a man. Smoke is rising from the heap and sparks are flying.
I can step out because I just found the zipper. I can step out because it is safe right now. There are three animal spirits standing guard around me-- the owl spirit, the mountain lion spirit, and the… blobfish spirit? We are in the middle of a meadow and surrounded by a deep, dark forest. It is a magical place that I couldn’t enter on my own. I am turning into a fox cub. I lay down and close my eyes. I'm too tired to fix my man suit, and anyway, I have paws now.
I wake up in the dream and there is snow covering everything. I’m not cold, thanks to my new fur. The animal spirits are gone but I feel safer.
I wake up in real life. I see the first rays of sunshine streak through pink clouds. I turn on the computer screen and think about going for a run.
In a few days, things feel more normal. I'm catching up on housework and I feel like working again. It's starting to dawn on me that busking is going to be harder than I thought, and I'm working on the programming projects I put down months ago. I’m learning Kotlin and enjoying the playful, encouraging spirit of the Android tutorials. I'm calling up clients I haven't talked to in a while.
It feels good to work with code again.
I stand in front of the window, brushing my teeth, scanning the canal for my fox family. I notice my former neighbor out there. He used to live right below me but now he lives on the other side of Sable Ave. He still comes by to feed the cats that live in the huge stump outside my home, like furry little Lost Boys. He feeds the foxes now too, so they won't eat the cat food.2 Sometimes I see the cats and the foxes playing gently just like dogs and cats sometimes do and I wonder if there is a test that can help you rule out that you are actually in a Disney movie. There is some heavy swearing, until My neighbor sees me in the window and waves. I wave back, awkwardly.
I'm not dating anymore, mostly as a kindness to myself. The last woman I met calls me sometimes to check up on me. I did email the artist who painted the songbird that I found at the thrift store that is perched beside my guitar. She invited me to her instagram and it is full of her work, she draws nature illustrations for museum displays and science publications.
I'm still thinking about how to write the first post on the dating blog I was planning. I created the section on Substack last year and it had been sitting empty. I called it Stardew Valley: IRL as a placeholder. It was also supposed to be about how dating can be easier than it seems. I ponder all the ways that's not exactly clear to me in the moment. I try to remember plan b. Was there a plan b?
Work is a little strange. ChatGPT changed everything and no one is quite sure yet if it is a good change. Programmers have always felt safe from the threat of AI taking our jobs. As it turns out, this was just a failure of imagination. AI didn't exactly take our jobs, it just made the busywork easier so we don't need as many programmers. A chainsaw can put a lot of lumberjacks out of business. At least we know the lumberjacks are okay.3
If anything, coding was uniquely suited for AI to streamline, and we have streamlined ourselves out of some work. But we all agree this is a small price to pay for the ability to generate, in mere seconds, all our documentation in the voice of a pirate.
I tell my dermatologist about some disturbing, unwelcome thoughts about self harm, although I'm committed to not acting on them. She helps me find help.
It's the new year and I'm grateful to be on the other side of Christmas. I've gained some pounds but I still fit into my favorite pants. I've been taking Sertraline for about a month. It was a rough start but that thing happened to me where I woke up one day and it felt like colors were a little brighter. I remember reading about that phenomenon as a psychology student and thought about what must be going on in my brain.
The night before the colors got brighter, I had a dream. I remember laughing very hard in my dream at some joke. Part of me understood I was dreaming and it wondered if I would still think it was funny after I wake up.
The joke went like this: I would get down on my hands and knees, and start shaking my head back and forth, kind of like they do sometimes in a Japanese cartoon.
I was doing this and I was shaking my head back and forth and I was saying, "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry" over and over again. But I was laughing, because it was just a joke. Other people saw me doing it and then they started doing it and everyone was in on the joke and laughing. This behavior spread like a wave and then I was somehow aware that the whole world was doing it. I could hear the hushed roar of "I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry" reverberating out in space. At this point, I was certain it was a dream because there is no sound in space. You’re busted, dream.
I woke up and I could not understand the joke. But colors seemed a little brighter.
I am thinking about my relationship at this time last year. It was a much warmer January. We used to talk about how much we love our brains, even when they don’t work quite right. The brain can do so much right even when it does something wrong. She was the only person in my life that could relate. I loved her spirit of gratitude and potential even when there were setbacks. I wondered if it would be okay to contact her, just to see how she was doing.
The weather's just starting to get nice but I'm stuck inside. I guess I haven't left my home in a few weeks. I ran out of my prescription and the robot from CVS keeps calling me.
I would never hurt myself because I understand the burden it would place on my family. I do not want to hurt them. I think about how it would feel to lose any one of them. On the other hand, it was difficult not to think about all the ways they would be better off without me.
It doesn't seem like anyone could blame me if I just died of dehydration. How hard is it not to drink water long enough to be serious? I guessed it would be really hard but I was out of ideas. I try to clean up anything embarrassing and I lay down on the couch.
A few hours have passed and I am getting bored.
I decide there are a few things I would like to pass along before I go. The last year was difficult but I feel strangely clear about some things. It makes me sad to think about no one understanding why I left. I wrote the-cold.md and uploaded it to a github repository. I put the link to the file in a gmail to a friend and scheduled it to send on my birthday next year. I could just cancel the scheduled delivery if I needed to.
I was pretty sure this dehydration thing wasn't going to work because I kept forgetting and getting water from my refrigerator out of habit. I realized I was okay with that, and it felt good.
The next day I looked at what I had wrote and cried. I thought about a more hopeful ending. I changed the title to Beyond Shame and uploaded it to my blog. I checked my calendar and I was grateful to see I hadn't missed my doctor's appointment. I stepped out my door and walked along the Highline Canal for the first time in months, looking for my foxes.
By the time I got home I had a new name for my dating blog and I had begun to remember plan b.
I knew there was a plan b.
Nate Silver is unmistakably a space name.
I tried to talk him out of it, but he wasn’t having it. So now I just chase off the park ranger whenever he comes by to take the bowls and write a ticket.
The important difference between lumberjacks and software developers is that there are only so many trees to cut down. The available work for software developers is limited only by imaginations. Tech firms are laying off workers because they have very limited imaginations that only chase money. LLMs are not fundamentally different from the other productivity tools we’ve invented, it is just matter of scale.