Emblems

Images and the lines that go with them.

All the words on this page are mine. The images are made with Midjourney, which I've been training toward a specific aesthetic. I do enjoy them. The pictures are AI-generated. The text is not.

An empty rain-soaked field under floodlights, a dark vacant stage, and a single lit vending machine among scattered newspapers — the podium is empty, the floodlights are on, and the only thing still running is the machine that takes your money.

A man alone at a laptop in an endless dark grid of desks, a small lit institution on the distant horizon — I found out what they bill for me on a Tuesday, by accident, off a spreadsheet somebody left open. Four times what I take home. I waited all afternoon to feel robbed, which is at least a clean feeling, and it never came. What came was worse: if I had done nothing that day, the invoice would have gone out the same. The gap between my wage and my price isn't theft. It's a rounding error.
A steelworker knows what he made. He can put a hand on it. I make files. Files on a server in a county I'll never visit, sentences chopped into packets and shot under an ocean, reassembled by a protocol with no opinion on the words, arriving as a document somebody opens for ninety seconds and forwards. The file becomes a number, the number pays the mortgage. The man who poured that slab could find it in the dark. I couldn't tell you where last quarter's work is stored, or whether it still exists, and in three years nobody has asked.

A lit institution on the horizon casting a dark stream down into an endless field of newspaper buildings — The building is always on the horizon and always lit, and the men inside it discovered that a country busy examining itself will never once look up.

A pristine institution on a hill draining a dark stream down into a city where people wait in line — It was the neatest theft in the republic's history: they took class, which is a thing you can count, and swapped it for identity, which is a thing you can only confess, and then charged tuition for the confessional.

A vast shadowed figure looming over a torch-lit crowd streaming toward a single glowing doorway — I've watched enough of these up close to know the failure mode: paid staff start outnumbering true believers, the mission gets vaguer while the fundraising gets sharper. Doesn't mean every cause ends there. It means those are the symptoms I watch for.

A white-haired man sits rooted to his chair before a small monitor in a vast dark warehouse where others move boxes — Mailer called it a law of life, so cruel and so just: grow, or pay more for remaining the same. It hit me like a ton of bricks, because by the time I read it I could already count what standing still had cost me. I printed it on my children's walls. I'd rather they learn it from paint than from the bill.

A man alone on a couch in a dim living room, his face washed out by the glow of a laptop screen — Twentieth-century man's natural role was anxiety, says Mailer. He was anxious about what the machines might someday do. Twenty-first-century man watches them do it in real time, on a screen he pays for monthly. His natural role is spectator at his own replacement.