Even Cows Are Curious

let’s hang on to the existence part of this thing

Photo by me, at the salt plains in Oklahoma, looking at cows looking at me.

Tuesday, January 6, 2026

Dear Readers,

What are you thinking about?

No, seriously, talk to me. What are you reading? What are you writing? I would go to your social media to find out, but I can’t find you under all the slop.

I am currently reading a couple books at once: In the afternoon I read a little Kin, a memoir by fellow Eastern Kentuckian Shawna Kay Rodenberg.

Then in bed at night I read Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? a stunning biography of the Carter Family by Mark Zwonitzer and Charles Hirshberg.

How do you read?

I’m trying to re-establish regular habits that fit my life. I don’t usually have large blocks of time to do much of anything. My day’s basically an earthworm with 100 segments all articulating together. Just trying to get through this dirt.

When I normally get the urge to scroll the ole light box o’ doom, I pick up a book instead. I think it’s better for my brain even if it’s just a matter of reducing blue light. Something about ink on paper, and sentences crafted with care.

Writing-wise, I finished a draft of my next novel, a very voice-y, somewhat southern gothic family story set in Eastern Kentucky. It’s got a lot of devils and a lot of dogs and a lot of early 1990s heart and soul.

Since then I’ve been transcribing poems and journaling from last year. Also working on our next album; songs are also writing. I keep two paper journals going at once, one mostly for songwriting and another for notetaking while I’m out and about.

Poems have long legs, so they kind of walk between the two books. Like daddy longlegs crawling all over everything. Poems go where they want.

So, where y’all at these days?

I do update my social media, mainly because I love taking pictures. I just recently got a new camera – like, not on a phone! – but I haven’t uploaded anything new yet.

I’ve heard-tell of the “dead internet” conspiracy/theory for a while now, and tucked it in the pocket of my brain where I put a lot of things I can’t do much with or about. One more little wad of chewed gum wrapped up in its foil – not to completely forget about, because I don’t want to let that sucker go into the wash – but not to ever chew again.

That pocket’s also full of broken shells that looked glorious when I picked them up wet, knowing full well they’d turn drab and disintegrate in my care.

I have a lot of sand in my seams. That’s really all you need to know to know about me.

The internet. Shew.

Have you noticed? I’m sure you have. I don’t think it’s “dead internet.”

I’ll tell you what it is. It’s TV in a rural area. You only get a few channels on a good day, and between them, there are only a few shows worth watching. When it’s windy out, you get less.

Go outside. Walk around to the viney side of the house, and turn the long pole that runs up along the chimney rock. You’ll scare off the doves that nest there; that’s okay, they’ll be back. It’s something they’re used to. You come out there and turn the antenna when you can’t get one of the stations from the city to the north. There’s a lot going on, atmospherically, to interrupt the signal, the birds understand that. They do a lot of navigating to signals you don’t pick up on.

There are times you just can’t get what you’re looking for. Sometimes you want to watch TV anyway. It’s part of the routine, or it makes you feel warm to slump in the plaid couch where the frame’s broken and the cushions swallow you. It’s comfort. You click through the four channels that give you a picture, and if you squint, you can make the colors come together through the static and waves. You know the colors already; your brain paints out the peppery places.

You could watch some of the infomercials on mute and play back the audio, too. But you don’t watch on mute, you turn it up to hear the tinny mics and too-loud overdubs of the call-to-action. Man, I love these BluBlockers.

Don’t wait, order now! $19.95 plus shipping-and-handling. Sorry, no C.O.D.

Sorry, no cash on delivery. Sorry, doves.

Whither discourse? Withered, dis course.

This headline’s tacked up in my mind since the day it was written: “I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers.” Thank you, Rebecca Shaw.

The “powerful men” in question are, of course, the ones in control of the major social media platforms so many millions of us have built our connections, communities, and careers around for the past two decades. Not that it was ever perfect – algorithmic fuckery’s always been a thing, for example, and creepy spying targeted ads – but funny how much worse it’s gotten with the billionaires falling into marching lockstep with fascism, huh. No, not funny – curious.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t separate the drive to AI-ification with the drive to everything else going on right now in the world. Genocide, wars, out-and-out lawless kidnapping of immigrants and even foreign heads of state, sending democratic forms of rule right through the old paper shredder; why not also unleash AI into every single cranny of existence, just to obliterate our basic sense of humanity and reality?

What’s real and what’s not? Where AI doesn’t totally convince, it antagonizes, conceals, confuses, and conspiratorializes (yes I made that word up because I can because I’m alive), and tell me how any of those options are a bad thing for the “powerful men”? We’re living in a world where even the losses are wins for these people.

The destruction of entire ways of life, of creating, of communicating – that’s always been the point of it. That’s empire. That’s colonialism. That’s capitalism. Destroying and digesting everything for itself, even if it’s eating its own tail.

Artists who “dabble” in AI make me sick at heart.

I’ve seen some writers and musicians apparently not realize they’re stepping backward onto a goddamned slip-and-slide on the canyon rim.

They think they’re being edgy, maybe. And maybe they are! They just don’t understand what kind of edge it is. They’re lining up to go right on over the cliff.

And the mean part of me, the old lady with a toothache chewing on a clove on the porch part of me, is watching them go with a stoicism verging on good riddance. I’ll italicize that because it’s not quite said out loud. It’s an old-fashioned thought.

Remember them things?

The writers who dabble in AI always start by saying things like, “Well… the industry wants me to do all this marketing and writing query letters and summaries and those things are just busywork and I can’t waste all my time and energy and miraculous creative brainpower doing that stuff so I’ll let the computer bot buddy do that and then I’ll have all that precious bodily fluid to use for my great American novel about a lady who was mean to me one time!”

And if that’s not bad enough – that’s bad enough, really – before long that AI tingle’s reaching all the way into the drafting process of their novel. Why not let Bot Bud handle the monotonous labor of making an outline and figuring out a plot! That stuff’s for the birds! Nobody really needs to waste all their precious meat drip on stuff like storytelling. Brain gravy’s too precious for curiosity.

Musicians, too, are slip-sliding into the abyss. “What if I just try a prompt and then take one verse if it’s good? What if it’s a good song and then I take the parts and play them myself? It will save me time from learning how to play a keyboard to just have the computer do it and I could write a whole album in a day and then I could write 12,000 other songs and put them all on Spotify and make 0.003 cents per stream in royalties!”

I’m not exaggerating nearly as much as I wish I was. Maybe you’ve seen this happening, too. Maybe it’s happening to you.

And if that’s the case, I am really sorry. Addiction is a scary thing. I’ve seen way too many people I love die and debilitate themselves, hand over all their pleasure and even their children, sacrifice their artistic talents and potential, in the process robbing their families and neighbors of the things they cherish, too.

And in feeding the beast, they get nothing back. They invited the beast in, and now it lives in the place they used to be. There’s not much room inside your braincase for a squatter, especially when the squatter is bigger than your braincase.

Fuck AI

I need to “waste” time on a cross-stitch of that phrase to hang in my kitchen. Cute cursive lettering and a couple dogwood flowers. I’m dunking some Lipton, inspecting the cobweb chandeliering the ceiling fan.

Boom, Fuck AI. Anytime I need a little pep talk in the voice of my grandmother.

Honestly, would you trust the tech-bros with your newborn baby? How about repairing an episiotomy?

They have total access to government funding, control of the law, they’re steering the economy and the climate and the fates of billions of people. They must be good at something, right? They seem to be better at failing than I am at succeeding.

I wouldn’t let DOGE organize my extremely disorganized pantry. I wouldn’t let “don’t die” guy near my medicine cabinet. I don’t even think Zuck could clean the dog shit off my kid’s shoe better than they could with a stick and a bucket of hose water.

Could any of them catch a spider without hurting them? Do any of those people even care about spiders?

You know what I bet? I bet they don’t even have sand in the seams of their pockets. Fuck those guys.

Okay, that’s probably the most cussing I’ve ever spilled into a newsletter. And I’m sorry.

Or you’re welcome.

How are you dealing with all this?

Happy Brave New Year,

Edie