Words

June 14, 2026

It’s hard to restart anything after a long break. And if it is something like a blog it feels like it must be something meaningful, but when the meaning of the word meaning itself is unclear, that feels impossible to do. 

And I also am aware that I no longer want to write — a blog, or perhaps anything. Yet I remember that a blog has helped get through dense times when meaning, focus, memory, joy, all haver floundered and drowned in icy water under think ice. 

I don’t know how it happened. I guess slowly, like a frog being boiled in cold water? I still felt those ups, those moments, those flashes when some of the above remained. Until one day they were gone and at first, I didn’t even know and then I knew. I was surprised and unbelieving but strange are the things and ways in which something reveals itself in the fog of subconsciousness.

It was last week or it could have been the week before, that I felt how leached I was. Blank, void, white on white, dark, empty, speechless, blank… 

It came when I enrolled in a class which was supposed to be about writing non-human as in AI characters. Or so I thought it was about that and I was so excited. And the first articles I read for the class, and the short stories were wonderful and ‘opening’. The Limitation Game or was it The Imitation Game about the kinds of narratives science fiction has written up about robots and other AI that we can’t help use as models to relate to AI. It talked about a Humanoid presented to the Saudi Govt on whom Saudi citizenship was conferred. It talked about the first films we watched about artificially created creatures — Blade Runner and the Turing Test and West World. And it may have spoken about Terminator and Skynet or I may have just imagined that as well as I Robot and all the very first books I read about AI. Many of them that used AI to explore what it means to be human.

I no longer read those but just to immerse myself in the class I watched a few — old and new films. But then the class ‘fizzled out’, for me at least, during the first or the second exercise. About writing about my avatar. Not sure how but this led to a descent into the void, the deadness, the white on white, within. And all that I thought I still was unravelled. 

It didn’t help that I woke every morning and reached for my ipad to find out what was going on in Iran and spent the first half or whole hour of every day watching some podcast or the other about it. 

And both my avatar and me had a crisis of purpose and I did have to find a way to help my avatar Orion, a dragon find his purpose and re-find myself — don’t really care about my purpose yet. And I turned to AI to do it. And what I am discovering is fascinating me.

A Blog has helped me make sense of meaningless periods. It functions differently from journals, so I am turning to it for help. This is all for today. All my brain-fogged self can type. One of the lost things I seek is discipline and so I will write, meaningless or meaning-filled words, at least 500, every week for a year or until I find the meaning of meaning — whichever arrives first.