What Have I Been Thinking?

I think AI has something against my mother and me.  When I upload other people's pictures and ask for a transformation into one or another painterly fashion, they don't look like themselves, but they don't look any worse.  And usually, the image turns out somewhat better.  But when I put a photo of me or of my mother, it always accentuates the worst features.  I want it to turn me into a Renaissance Romeo but I always end up looking like Shylock.  

Weird.  

Just more of the voodoo, perhaps.  Yesterday, I picked up a hand mirror in my bathroom at home, and it simply flew out of my hand.  I watched it fly through the air as if in a movie, the thing twirling in slow motion, me thinking "maybe it won't break" as it descended to the bathroom floor tiles.  

It broke.  

Holy shit . . . I don't need anymore bad luck.  What to do?  

I went to the internet, of course.  

"How do you avoid seven years bad luck after breaking a mirror?"

It is very complicated.  You must gather all the pieces and grind them into dust.  Then you need to burry them at night.  The idea is to keep the mirror from making any reflections ever again.  You can use flames to blacken the shards and you should burry them in a box or a piece of cloth.  

Or you could throw salt over your left shoulder.  That sounded much easier.  

But what was it that made the mirror fly from my hand?  It wasn't natural.  

I'm just saying.  

I did take my mother to get her cortisone injection yesterday.  It took maybe ten minutes.  She said it didn't hurt.  When I brought her back to her house, it was still early, so I made us breakfast.  After that, she went back to bed.  

Then I did, too.  

When I got up just before noon, she was still sleeping.  I got dressed for the gym, put together her afternoon pills, and went in to tell her I'd be back. 

When I got back at five, she was still in bed.  Or, as it turned out, in bed again.  I made dinner, but she didn't get up.  At eight, I gave her her pills and a glass of water.  She took them and went back to sleep.  This morning when I got up, she was still sleeping.  Only just now she got up.  

"You slept for about twenty-four hours," I said.   

"Seems like it."

You can imagine the thoughts that have been running through my head.  

The rain continues.  

Every day now, I wonder if I should stop writing this blog.  I have no life, no experiences to write about other than the most mundane things--cooking, taking care of my mother, and the problems of maintaining two houses.  Were I a Proust or a Flaubert, I might make the mundane more profound, but I am not.  In truth, I've never enjoyed reading either writer.  I've had to, of course, but I felt it a chore.  I can't be sure I am writing to anyone here any longer anyway.  All I can see is that for the past month or so, I have been getting a thousand hits to the blog a day.  I am certain these are not readers or lovers of art.  They are bots scraping my blog to teach A.I. how not to write.  They are stealing my photos, I am certain, to use in their vast A.I. libraries.  

My first post here was September 9, 2007.  Over eighteen years of writing here now.  6,735 posts to date.  What if I wanted to print them all to hard copy?  How long would that take?  Let's say I printed ten a day.  It would take me, what. . . two years?  WTF have I been thinking? 

Oh, you know.  It's all here.  

The journals of a faux-author.  Isn't that a hoot?  If you just started as a reader and began with the first post and read ten posts a day. . . . 

It is unfathomable.