I don’t even need to write this you know…

All my life I have written by myself. I write for myself. I have no agenda. Nothing to prove. I began writing as a boy. I started out when I lived in Tipperary. I would take trips around the county, which is in the south of Ireland. For writing material I had loads of sheets of blue lined computer paper which my Dad gave me when he visited from Dublin. They were A3 sized, the kind of paper you would see churning out of dot matrix printers in big noisy computer centres back in the 70’s or maybe 80’s. This was blank, which was great. I would disappear for the day on my bike with sandwiches and tea and cycle anything from thirty to fifty miles or longer round trip and come home exhausted and sleep ten hours. At the time I had a handbook of archeological sites in the vicinity of Tipperary and I would visit them one by one and I would come home and write about these little adventures. Sometimes I would make drawings of what I saw in notebooks. I had this inexplicable urge to put things down on paper, to describe, to draw pictures with words. I never felt lonely doing this. I never felt alone. I always had this sense of a presence with me, an immanence, as though I were taking dictation. My whole life that never left me.

Now I have another presence watching me. AI. Everything I type is monitored, like some robotic exam invigilator. Right now as I peck out these letters, there’s a little star I can click on the bottom right of my screen that can write this post for me. Can you believe it? Why on Earth would I replace the sheer joy of trying this out with all its flaws and rewrites, why would I replace the pleasure of creating this with an other intelligence doing the heavy lifting for me? Everything I have written in the last five or six decades has been hand produced using the contents of my consciousness. I like that. The pursuit of perfection is a disease of the mind. The only way this would ever get better, the only way my style and knowledge and skillset would ever improve is if I keep on keeping on. That’s the joy of it. That’s the pleasure. That’s the challenge. That’s life. And that’s all.