9.19.22

“Umm a bad cake cone, and you paid a lot of money for it, so it’s good but it was $9 bucks. You know the cake kind of cake cone where its soggy and it breaks down toward the end so it melts in your hand.” Isaac said and sat back a bit in his chair. 

It was Eleanor’s turn. She looked nervous. She looked around the group searching for an answer. We all nodded her on. Come on, you got it. Our eyes seemed to say in unison. Finally, as if she awoke from a dream, she said, “frozen yogurt. Tart plain. With fruit. Fruity.” 

I looked up at my forehead quizzically and then around the group at each face. Vanilla with sprinkles I thought. Good. Tart and fruity. Good. Dripping on your shirt and being expensive. Bad. “Uh, 9?” I said. 

Their faces fell and they said variations of darn and dang. It was a 4. 

More recently, sitting in another friend’s apartment, on a second story outdoor patio, Tyler said he had watched an interesting documentary about crows the other night. Called The Common Crow. “Crows are apparently the third smartest animal,” he said. “According to like three spectrums of science.” 

“They remember faces.” Another friend said. 

“They set up this whole elaborate obstacle course, between the crows and their food,” Tyler continued, “like the food is in this box and there’s a stick nearby, and so the crow has to figure out how to get the food. They dive down, no, and then see the stick and use the stick to get the food. They make tools.” Wow, we all nodded. Crows are truly amazing. I thought to myself. 

“I had a weird crow encounter.” I said suggestively. The chatter died down and my three friends looked at me and nodded. 

“One time when I was living on Greenfield, I woke up super early for no reason, like my body woke me up, it was 5am, and I walked outside, decided to walk around the block, then across the street I saw this old man that looked like, like too much like an old man, like perfect little beard, droopy eyes, a hat,” I acted out an old man face and hunched back in my chair, “old flannel and felt jacket, a jean jacket over, you know. And there was a crow perched on the telephone wire hanging across the road. The crow dropped a little object from its mouth and flew away and the old man walked into the street, bent down and took the object and walked away.” I raised my eyebrows, “then I walked up to the crosswalk and another crow flew to the telephone wire in the middle of the road, and I waited, and the crow dropped something into the road in front of me, I walked out and bent down and picked up a soft, smooth, round stone.”

I thought about the other day when I had spent the night at Slade’s sublet. We made congee and I looked in the cupboard for a bowl. I wanted a big deep bowl, good for soup. I asked Slade if she had a bowl for me, and she took me into her studio room and handed me a bowl wrapped in thick brown paper. It was the perfect bowl. When we got back to the kitchen, Slade’s new roommate Claire said, “You know you can use the bowls in the cupboard if you like.” And Slade and I said, “We have our special bowls,” at the same time. The three of us laughed. 

Tyler brought up this porno he had watched. “It’s called Edward Penis Hands,” We laughed. John shook his head, he had seen it also. I said that I had not seen it and I was very curious. “Does he wear like penis gloves? Or is it CGI?” I asked. 

“It’s prosthetics,” said John.

We all got up and went inside and Tyler played us a clip from Edward Penis Hands. The actor really looked like Johnny Depp and he had massive, pink, fleshy, erect, cocks as hands. Penis hands. He showed us a clip of Edward Penis Hands hitting something with his massive penis hands. It was hilarious. Then he showed us a clip of him jerking himself off, using his penis hands to jerk off his real, much smaller dick. Even funnier. We were cracking up in the hallway. 

Later that night in bed about an hour later, I Googled “Edward Penis Hands where to watch,” and clicked on the first result. I watched it with no sound, skipped to the good parts and “dithered” as the woman in Vox would say. Edward Penis Hands was like if DALL-E mini made a porn movie. It had that sort of grain of a mashed image, a residue of counterfeit. 

The funny thing about DALL-E mini, the thing that made me tick so much was that it worked the same way dreams did, or at least that’s what I thought. One of those facts that everybody hears at least once. Fact #3263: Your mind cannot create a face, so every face in your dreams is a face you’ve seen in your waking life. I think this goes for images too, so every image you see in your dreams is a fabrication from images you’ve consumed in the real world. 

DALL-E meshed images from the internet, or this specific data bank, and melded them together to make quirky images. DALL-E created internet dreamscapes and people were eating it up. Or so it felt like. 

The world went on like this for quite some time, and I trotted along with it, we all did, it wasn’t hard to go with the flow. I tried to use less plastic and steal more. I called my mother often, but not too much because I didn’t want the sound of her voice over the telephone to dominate my mind's eye image of her. Her face, the skin moving over the muscles in weird, contorted ways. She would scrunch up her nose, suck in a breath, bare her teeth, stretch her mouth open again forcefully and look up, cross her eyes, stick her tongue out. Then she would say “Doing this, moving your face around in weird ways for at least 10 minutes a day, it knocks 10 years of therapy off your life.” Fact #1019: Moving your face muscles around in unexpected ways, sends neural messages to your brain, creating new neural networks which can help with processing deep and complex emotions. 

I thought about how images created by DALL-E mini performed a certain amount of contortion to the muscles of the internet. DALL-E mini in a way provided the user with a healing experience between themselves and the internet. There was something redeeming about being able to string together a mix of words and get an image that somehow encapsulated the vibe of your words. 

The power of the internet was somehow reborn by allowing the user to create through search. There was also something about “image saturation”. We were so fed up with being bombarded with images constantly, too many images flowed into our field of visions at any given moment. DALL-E created an optimistic solution to the plethora of pointless images - make them infinitely combinable. Each image was now capable of being sourced and meshed with other images. As a user, I somehow felt some power was restored to me now that I was able to combine words and create new images. A method of search that involved a level of creativity and produced something novel and cool.