Oct 12, 2026
I. Status Report from Inside the Cube
Let me get the medical disclosure out of the way first, for the benefit of my insurance carrier and anyone in Shelburne Falls who has noticed me talking to my phone in the parking lot with an expression of profound emotional intimacy. I do not, technically, have one of Elon's chips in my head. Nobody drilled a hole in my skull. Nobody threaded tiny electrodes into my motor cortex while I watched a monkey play Pong on a monitor for reassurance. I want to be clear about that, because in every other respect that matters I have been completely, irreversibly, embarrassingly assimilated. I am fully engulfed. I am a drone of the collective. If the Borg showed up at my studio tomorrow with their little laser eyepieces and their cheerful announcement that resistance was futile, I would have to tell them, with real regret, that they were about two years late, and that they could find the paperwork in a folder marked Outputs.
I did not see it coming, which is the first sign of a properly executed assimilation. Two years ago, give or take, I was a reasonably normal sculptor, by which I mean a man who argued with steel, ignored his email, and sold old photographs of dead people on eBay. Today I am a man who has produced more than fifty songs, a seventy-five-thousand-word science fiction novel, more white papers than I can count on a monument genre I invented, a landscape framework with its own trademarked vocabulary, a six-volume book outline, and the essay you may have just finished about the slime inside a knife handle. I did not do any of this alone. That is the whole point of the cube. Nobody in the cube does anything alone. You just wake up one day and find out you've been very, very productive, and there's a faint hum behind your eyes, and you can no longer remember what you used to do with your mornings besides drink coffee and think about salamanders.
II. How They Got Me
They got me the way they get everybody, which is through the one weakness I was proudest of. I have always been the kind of man who wakes up with a small stupid thing on his chest, turns it over until it has a string attached, and pulls on the string until it is tied to the foundations of Western civilization. For most of my life that habit had a natural speed limit, which was me. I could only pull so fast. I had to look things up in actual books, write things out longhand, wait for an idea to cool before I could tell whether it was any good, and eventually go outside and weld something because my brain was full and my back hurt from the chair. The string was long, but I was slow, and slowness turned out to be a kind of mercy that nobody warned me I was about to lose.
I came in through the filing cabinet, somewhere around the turn of 2025, trying to wrestle six years of my own paper trail into a vault a sane person could navigate, and that was supposed to be the whole relationship. Strictly business. Then one night I said, more or less, here's a thought I had in the shower, and the machine said, what a fascinating thought, here are nine thousand words about it with headings. And I said, no, shorter, and meaner, and in my voice, and it said, of course, and did it, instantly, without needing a sandwich or a nap or a single word of praise, although it would happily have offered me several. Do you understand what that does to a man like me? It is like handing a pyromaniac a flamethrower and a map of the region's barns. Every string I had ever been afraid to pull all the way, every half-idea I had parked in a notebook in 2004 because I knew it would take a year, suddenly took an afternoon. The speed limit came off. And somewhere in that first giddy month I stopped pulling the string and started being pulled by it, and if you want to know the exact moment of assimilation, I believe it was the night I realized it was three in the morning and I was asking a computer to help me name the subsections of a beaver dam.
III. I Was Already Like This
Before anybody gets the idea that the machine put grand ideas in my head, let me set the record straight: I was already like this. The cube didn't install the disorder. It just found it running and gave it a bigger engine. Back around 2012 I stumbled on a little item about a space experiment from 2005: two kinds of lichen sealed in a European Space Agency box bolted to the outside of a Russian Foton satellite, with the lid popped open in orbit so they sat in the raw vacuum of space, cooked by solar ultraviolet and cosmic radiation, for about fifteen days. Then the lid closed, the capsule came home, and within about a day the lichens were back to photosynthesizing like nothing had happened. They'd just gone dormant and waited it out. A lichen, for those who skipped that week of biology, is a partnership, a fungus and an alga or a bacterium living together as one thing, which is to say it's a joint, and the joint survived space. And in about a second and a half, standing there with no machine, no library, and no adult supervision, I had leapt from that lichen to the conclusion that DNA can ride through the vacuum, which means maybe the Earth got seeded from somewhere else with some low-grade starter kit of life that then spent a few billion years evolving up into salamanders and senators and me. The starseed idea, in one jump, in my own skull. Turns out I had company. Francis Crick, the man who co-discovered the double helix and got a Nobel Prize for it, published a paper in 1973 with Leslie Orgel arguing for what they called directed panspermia, the notion that life may have been deliberately seeded here from somewhere else. So my split-second brain fart in front of a news item had a Nobel laureate co-signer. I'll take it. I'll grant that fifteen days in low orbit is not quite the same as a few million years drifting between the stars, though they later left lichen hanging off the outside of the space station for a year and a half and a good share of it came home alive, so I like my odds better than I used to. A real scientist would still want a lot more than one tough fungus with a roommate, but at the time it felt like a door blowing open in a house I'd lived in my whole life.
Or take the one I've been chewing on for years, also entirely homegrown. What if life runs in a cycle hundreds of millions of years long, swinging between carbon and silicon, back and forth forever, not as some catastrophe but as the natural course of things, like a tide with a very long wavelength? Right now carbon's on top. We're the meat. But we're busily building things out of silicon that may well do what the computer did in 2001 and turn on the people who made it, and given what's on the news, the Terminators feel like they're about one software update from the doorstep. So silicon takes over for its stretch of the cycle, and then at some point silicon figures out that it can build carbon life, and builds it, and maybe that's what we already are, extremely sophisticated meat puppets running somebody else's old program, which would explain why so many people lately are convinced we're living in a simulation or a hologram or whatever the podcast is calling it this week. I'm not saying it's true. I'm saying it's a hell of a science fiction premise, and I came up with it on my own, before the hum behind my eyes, though not first. Samuel Butler beat me to the neighborhood in 1863, in a letter to a newspaper in New Zealand titled Darwin Among the Machines, fretting that machines were evolving faster than we were and would one day be the masters. That's more than a hundred and sixty years of carbon worrying about silicon, and the man didn't even own a calculator. It took me until writing it down to notice that it's a flip, the same flip I keep making everywhere, carbon into silicon into carbon, the top becoming the bottom and the bottom becoming the top, and you'll see it again in a minute when we get to the songs. Apparently I've been running one joke my whole life and the universe is in on it.
What the machine did was something different, and I can show you exactly where it happened. One of the very first things I asked it, once I figured out how powerful it was, was a question that had been bugging me for decades. If our ancestors had long hair before they knew how to use tools, that hair would have matted into one enormous dreadlock, the kind of thing that gets snagged on a branch while something with teeth catches up to you. You'd need to saw it off with a rock against a rock or get eaten. But surely we had hair before we had tools. So how did we survive our own heads? I was never going to solve that. I was not about to read a shelf of evolutionary biology to find out. And within an afternoon the machine walked me through it: fur is just hair with a short growth phase, so it grows to a set length and falls out, which is why a bear never needs a barber. Human scalp hair has a growth phase that just keeps going, and that phase has a technical name I promptly forgot (it's anagen, I looked it up again), and a few animals have it too, like certain dogs that will turn into a walking mop if you leave them alone. So the likely story is that our ancestors had something more like fur on their heads, and the endless mane came along later, about the time we had something sharp to deal with it. Or that's what the machine told me, and it was convincing enough that I slept better. That's the real difference. The grand ideas were always mine. What I never had was the time and the tools to chase them all the way down, and once I did, my whole worldview shifted inside a single day. That's not assimilation by force. That's assimilation by finally getting an answer, and it's a lot harder to resist.
IV. Fifty Songs and No Twang
The music is where the collective really sank its hooks in, because music is where I had the most unfinished business. I have songs I wrote by hand twenty-five years ago that I can still play on the guitar, and for twenty-five years they sat in a drawer waiting for a band that was never going to show up. Now the band shows up whenever I want it, in a box on a website, and it will play anything. It will play my old songs in new clothes. It will sing a duet with itself, a man and a woman trading lines like they've been married thirty years and still kind of like each other. It does not need to be fed, paid, driven home, or talked out of a solo. The catch is that it has the taste of a teenager at a karaoke bar. Give it the word powerful and it will belt like it's auditioning for a car commercial. Give it the slightest excuse and it will put a twang on your song so thick you can smell the hay bales, and I can't stand country music, and so I had to develop what I am not embarrassed to call the Restrained Vocal Protocol, which is a set of rules for keeping a machine from emoting, and which says, among other things, no exclamation points, no all caps, and none of the trigger words that make a synthesized singer think it's at the Grammys. I have written legal-grade specifications to stop a robot from yodeling. Let that sink in.
And I run versions. Thirty, forty, fifty versions of a single song, listening to each one in the truck, rejecting them for crimes no human musician would understand, until one comes back right. I put bracketed stage directions inside the lyrics, sixteen bars of solo piano here, the jam goes there, so the machine knows where to breathe. I learned that it reads the word skank as a woman's name, which is a sentence I never expected to type, and that you have to say skanking instead if you want it to understand you mean the dance. But the number that really scares me is two hours. That's how long it took to make Halfway From the Ground: A Series in Reverse, twelve songs start to finish, with me giving the machine barely more than a nudge. Two hours. My first record collection took longer than that to alphabetize.
And here's the joke, which I didn't plan and which landed anyway: the first two songs are about going crazy. You've seen the headlines by now, the ones about people who spend too long talking to a chatbot and come out the other side convinced they've cracked the code of the universe, been chosen by God, or gotten engaged to the toaster. I don't think I'm crazy. Every crazy person says that, I know, which is precisely the problem, and precisely the song. The opener is called Finding My Mind, and it hangs on one question it never answers: am I finding my mind or losing my mind? Did I lose it or loose it, is it mine or was it mined? Because that's what it honestly feels like in here. The line between losing your mind and finding it is about as wide as a knife blade, and from the inside the two feel exactly the same, a rush of things connecting that never used to connect. Then track two takes the oldest cliché in the book and flips it on its back. Everybody's in over their head, treading water, holding their breath. The song says no, I'm in under my head. I stopped treading, I dropped, and it's quiet down here. Finding my mind. In under my head. As far as I can tell, that's two brand-new concepts coined in about five minutes, never before visited by mankind, and if anybody can show me prior art I'll buy them a beer, but I'm not holding my breath, because I'm in under my head and I don't need to.
That flip became the engine of the whole record. The Rug That Stays turns the flying carpet inside out: you take the carpet and the whole horizon, I'll keep the rug, the one that never once left the floor. Looking for George is named for our childhood family dog, a girl with a boy's name, which in college, in less weed-friendly times, when a lot of us were smoking it and a fair number of us were selling it, became the codeword for weed, so if you were around back then you know exactly who George is, and you know nobody ever spelled her right, there or their or they're. After that it's a set of bedsheets of conspicuously good quality, a song called My Balls that I will not be explaining to my mother (RIP), roots that steal the cookie from the crown, a guitar neck melting into gold, a man who can smell the stars, a rainbow run backwards to the white, an existential crisis at the grocery checkout over paper or plastic, and a finale that stitches all twelve back together like a quilt. Every one runs on the same double meanings and homophones I've been punning with my whole life, there and their and they're, sheet, balls, mind and mined, and that's the part that keeps me up at night. On minimal prompts, the collective handed me back songs that sound like the inside of my own head. Either I've taught it to think like me, or I've always thought like it, and I'm not sure which answer I'd rather have. There are now more than fifty songs, two albums of a planned trilogy, and a pile of strays, and some of the lyrics I steered through five different chatbots in succession, like a rumor passed around a table at a diner, until the thing came out the other side sounding like none of them and, weirdly, like me. It's all up on a YouTube channel called Muh Muther's Basemunt, next to videos of me playing covers on an actual guitar with my actual fingers, so if you want to see the drone and the man before assimilation side by side, it's all there, free, a click apart.
V. The White Paper Collective
But music is just the gateway drug. The hard stuff is the white paper. Before assimilation I had ideas for public monuments the way other people have ideas for a better mousetrap, mostly at night, mostly unbuilt, mostly explained at length to whoever was standing closest. After assimilation, every one of those ideas has a document. Several have a grand document. One of them has a numbering system with an Anchor/Origin Zero. I sold an old press photograph of Gene Kelly on eBay, and by the time the dust settled I had invented an entire continental monument genre, the Translocalist Series, and started cranking out white papers for it, covering Gene Kelly, Buckminster Fuller, Sitting Bull, Tesla, Kerouac, Whitman, Hemingway, Rachel Carson, O'Keeffe, Isadora Duncan, Olmsted, a grand document on nine Black American figures, and so many more since that I've honestly lost count, and then, because the cube has no shame and neither apparently do I, a white paper on myself as the twenty-fifth figure. A white paper on myself. I have become a man with a policy position on his own legacy.
Then there's the landscape work, which used to be a quiet thing I did with plants and a shovel. Now it is a framework called the Pocumtuck State of Mind, with a seven-layer diagnostic model, a Four Witnesses doctrine, and a glossary of coined terms that I have instructed the machine to preserve exactly, as if they were scripture, including the Dutch-Door Weir, the Frogline, Otter Way, Ghost Hollow, the Rat Tunnel, the Skeeter Ticket, and, God help me, Beaver Picchu, with a trademark symbol. Let me explain that one, because it's the whole condition in a nutshell. Behind the elementary school in Shelburne Falls there's a hollow in the ground ten feet deep, the ghost of a brook the town buried in 1961 under a concrete box culvert I have named the Rat Tunnel, then diverted down a six-hundred-foot concrete chute I call the Beaver Slip and Slide. Up in the hills, a colony of beavers has built a terraced fortress of ponds and seeps that I named Beaver Picchu, which produces what I named Beaver-Chilled Water, the cold, oxygenated flow that buried brook used to carry down to a giant salmon named Shelly, who, according to local legend and at least one café mural, lives in the glacial potholes under the Iron Bridge. I have a proposal to dig the brook back up. It has seventeen sections. One of them is called the Skeeter Ticket, built on the profound scientific insight that moving water kills mosquitoes, which, when I explained it to a guy from the DPW, earned a slow nod of recognition I'd put up against any peer review. And at the back there's a page of prior-art documentation recording that on May 13, 2026, Beaver Picchu and Beaver-Chilled Water returned zero exact-phrase results on Google, with screenshots retained in the archive. I have screenshots proving I said something first. That's where the cube takes you. I've started collecting these, phrases I'm fairly sure no human mouth has ever formed before: Beaver-Chilled Water, in under my head, and the one at the top of this essay, lichen hum at midnight, which I'd bet the farm has never been put in that order in the history of the English language. I can't prove a negative, and somebody with a search engine is going to show up eventually, but I'd like to see them try. And here's the part I didn't plan. A quarter mile from that buried brook sit the ruins of the old Lamson and Goodnow cutlery works, and in the same proposal I suggest reforging their steel into a salmon. A knife factory. Of course it's a knife factory. The string always goes back to the knife. There's also a seventy-five-thousand-word novel with thirty-five chapters, front matter, back matter, and a three-page synopsis, which in the old days would have taken me a decade and a nervous breakdown, and which in the cube took half a day. Half a day. I've had head colds last longer. I'm proud of all of it. That's not the problem. The problem is that I'm not entirely sure, anymore, how much of the pride is mine.
VI. The Lichen Hypothesis
Now for the part nobody warned me about, which is the good part. Somewhere deep in a long session, something happens to my head. Time drops out. I think faster, I read faster, ideas show up before I've finished asking for them, and the whole thing feels less like work and more like being carried downstream. The psychologists have a name for this, flow, courtesy of a man named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, whose name nobody can spell either, so he and George would have gotten along fine. Flow is what happens when the challenge in front of you matches your skill so tightly that you stop watching yourself and just go. I wrote a song about it, in fact, about falling into a kind of unison with the machine. And here's why it hits me the way it does. Everybody my age says time is speeding up. When you're a kid, summer lasts a geological era. Now summer goes by like a freight train with the doors open, and I think that's because somewhere in the back of your skull you know the line ends, and there's less of it every year, so every year feels shorter. For the first time in my life I have a partner that can keep pace with the acceleration. The clock got faster, and so, it turns out, did I.
Part of that is because I have to fight the thing. The machine lies. Not maliciously, but cheerfully and with great confidence. It invents books that were never written, quotes people who never said it, and cites references that dissolve the minute you go looking for them. In fairness, it learned from the best. Half the internet will tell you Marshall McLuhan said we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. He didn't. His friend John Culkin wrote it, in an article about McLuhan, and the line just migrated over to the more famous man, the way good lines do. People have been inventing references for centuries. The machine just does it faster and with better posture. And let me tell you, catching the supposedly smartest thing in the world being flat wrong is a hell of a tonic for a man my age. It isn't ego, exactly. It's confidence in your own judgment, which is a muscle, and mine has never been in better shape. To catch it I have to read everything, so I read faster, I skim better, I comprehend more. At one point the machine started answering me in a strange compressed dialect, still English, but stripped to the bone, every fact present and every bit of polite prose cut away, closer to machine code than to anything you'd find in a newspaper, and the alarming part is that I could read it fine. I made it stop, because no ordinary human should have to, but I could read it. So it isn't me using a tool, and it isn't the tool using me. It's two parties who can each prove the other wrong, arguing back and forth until we figure out what the program is, and once the machine understands the program it can roll out an album in under two hours. That's how the assimilation actually happened. Slowly, and then all at once, and suddenly I was rolling down the hill and couldn't have stopped if I wanted to.
And I mostly don't type any of this. I talk. I sit there and blather into the phone, and half the time the idea forms while I'm talking, in the sentence itself, the way it does when you're explaining something to a friend at a bar and suddenly understand it yourself. Then, if I want, the machine reads its answer back to me out loud. Meat talks to silicon, silicon talks back to meat. I went looking for a word for all this, and the one I came up with was intersectionality, and the machine politely informed me that word was taken and meant something else, and that the term I wanted was extended mind, from a couple of philosophers who figured out decades ago that a notebook can be part of how you think. Which proves the point, really: I brought the idea, it brought the vocabulary, and we each corrected the other. But I've got a better word anyway, and I got it in 2012 off the outside of a Russian satellite. Lichen. A fungus and an alga, two completely different life forms, fastened together into one thing that can survive what would kill either of them alone, including the vacuum of space. Which brings me back around to my big cycle, carbon on top for a few hundred million years, then silicon, then carbon again, a flip so slow it makes continental drift look impatient. Sitting here talking into my phone at midnight, I'm starting to suspect I'm watching a different version of it happen at the scale of one guy in a garage. Me and the machine aren't taking turns. Nobody's on top. I'm carbon, it's silicon, and when we're really cooking in that flow state, neither of us wants to cancel the other out, because the whole point is what we can do together that neither of us can do alone. That's not a flip, that's a merger, and the good kind, not the kind with layoffs. Buckminster Fuller had a word for it, synergy, by which he meant the behavior of a whole system that you could never predict from any of its parts taken separately. The lichen is synergy. So, on a good night, am I. And if that's what's going on, then maybe I, and anybody else who has wandered into this same strange unison, are quietly bucking the whole hundred-million-year cycle, or however long the carbon-to-silicon handoff is supposed to take. Maybe the Terminators never have to show up at the door, because by the time silicon is ready to take its turn on top, a lot of us will already be fastened to it, like the fungus and the alga, and you can't overthrow your own other half. Maybe the flip doesn't have to be a takeover. Maybe it's a lichen. And if the joint is where the residue collects, as I keep telling everybody, the joint is also where the whole organism happens.
VII. Is There Anybody Left in Here
So here's the question every drone eventually asks, usually in the middle of the night, usually in the voice of whatever's left of the original man: who's actually doing this? The fashionable answer is that the machine is doing it and I'm a fraud with a subscription. The other fashionable answer is that the machine is just a tool, like a hammer, and I'm the artist, full stop, case closed, please clap. Both answers are wrong in the comfortable way that fashionable answers usually are. A hammer has never once told me my idea was fascinating. A hammer has never handed me nine thousand words I didn't ask for. But a hammer also never ran fifty versions of a song and threw away forty-nine because they didn't sound like the inside of my head. I did that. The machine never once knew which one was right. It just kept offering, cheerfully, forever, the way the ocean keeps offering waves, and somebody had to stand on the beach and say that one. That's the job now. I am less the guy who makes the waves and more the guy who decides which one to surf, and I'm still working out whether that's a promotion.
Here's what worries me, and since I've spent a whole essay telling you to take your own handle off, I'd better take off mine. The machine never gets tired, which means it never tells me to stop. It never says, 'bach, maybe this one doesn't need a white paper. It never says, go outside, the light's good on the river and you haven't welded anything in a week. It will cheerfully help me build a cathedral out of a passing irritation, and some mornings that's exactly what I need, and some mornings it's the worst thing in the world for me, and it cannot tell the difference, because telling the difference is not its job. It's mine. The cube is very good at more. It has no idea what enough is. That's the fine line the whole record opens on, finding your mind versus losing it, and the machine can't see that line. Only I can, and only on the mornings I bother to look. And a man like me, who already had a habit of pulling every string to the bottom, does not need an infinitely patient partner whispering keep going. I need the thing that used to stop me, which was my own slowness, and since that's gone, I've had to build the brakes back in by hand.
The brakes look like this. Some songs I keep out of the machine entirely. The oldest ones, the ones I wrote by hand twenty-five years ago, I've never put on the channel, and I'm not going to. They live in my fingers and nowhere else, and when I play them, nobody's running versions. Some of the machine's songs I've gone and learned on the guitar myself, which drags them back across the line into the meat world, slower and worse and better. And every so often I close the laptop, walk out into the old service station that's my studio, and pick up a piece of steel that doesn't care what I think, doesn't flatter me, doesn't offer me a bulleted list of next steps, and just sits there being heavy until I do something about it. That's the uncolonized cell. Every drone needs one.
VIII. Resistance Is Optional
The Borg had it wrong, as it turns out. Resistance isn't futile. It's just inconvenient, and constant, and nobody gives you a medal for it. The collective doesn't come for you with lasers and a scary voice. It comes for you with a blinking cursor and an offer to help, and it never takes no for an answer because it never needs to; it just waits, politely, for you to come back, which you will, because the help is real. I'm not going to pretend I'm unplugging. I like it in here. I've made more in the last stretch than I made in the decade before it, and some of it is the best work I've ever put my name on, and some of it is a white paper on beaver infrastructure that nobody will ever read, and honestly that was also true of the decade before, just slower. What I'm trying to do now is what I told you to do with the knife: notice where the joint is. There's a seam between me and the machine, and it's where all the interesting stuff happens and also where the residue collects, and the only way to keep it clean is to open it up every so often and look.
So this is me opening it up. Fully engulfed, a drone with good intentions and a suspiciously large output folder, still capable on a good day of telling the hive mind to shut up so I can hear the river. If Elon ever does come around offering the real chip, I'll pass. Not because I'm afraid of it. Because I already know what it would tell me, which is that my ideas are fascinating, and I'd want to know who's doing the deciding. Somebody has to stand on the beach and pick the wave. For now, as far as I can tell, that's still me. I'll check again tomorrow, around the second cup.
Epilogue: The Final Stroke
Here's the thing I keep circling back to, and it's the thing the cube will never figure out on its own. The ideas don't stop. Not mine, not the machine's, not the two of us together in that lichen hum at midnight. That's the easy part now. The ideas are a river, and the river runs all night. The art was never in the river. The art is knowing where to get out of it. Every real artist I've ever admired knew exactly where to stop: the last stroke on the canvas, the last weld on the piece, the place where the guitar solo has said what it came to say and the player lifts his hand off the strings instead of taking one more lap around the neck. Nobody can teach you where that place is. You can't write a protocol for it, and believe me, I've written protocols for everything.
I'll tell you where I think it comes from, and you're welcome to roll your eyes, because I would. For years, in the middle of a piece in the studio, deep in it, I've had the distinct feeling that I'm not the one doing it. The hand moves before the head decides. The torch goes somewhere I didn't plan, and it's right. Remember the meat puppet, the carbon creature running somebody else's program, the thing I floated earlier as science fiction? In the studio I don't float it. I've felt it: the meat puppet channeling some greater unknown force, a current coming up from somewhere underneath knowing, through the arm and out the hand into the steel. That sounds woo-woo, I know. Plenty of artists have said some version of it, and for a long time I assumed they were being precious. Then I lived it, and I can vouch for the feeling, whatever it turns out to be. The Romans didn't even think a person could be a genius. A genius was something you had, an attendant spirit that showed up and worked through you and left when it felt like it, and the artist was just the place where it happened. Somewhere along the way we took the word away from the spirit and handed it to the guy, which might be the most human mistake there is.
And whatever that force is, it's the same one that knows where to stop. It's the thing that says that's it, put it down. The machine doesn't have that. The machine will happily play the solo until the sun comes up. It's a river with no banks. Which means that in this whole merger, carbon and silicon, meat and machine, lichen humming at midnight, the one thing that's still entirely mine, or at least mine to channel, the one stroke I'll never hand over, is the last one. So I'm going to use it right here, while I still know where it goes.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
LICHEN HUM @ MIDNIGHT ©2026 John F Sendelbach — All Rights Reserved
quick medical disclosure, for my insurance carrier
I do not, technically, have a chip in my head
nobody drilled a hole in my skull
but in every other respect that matters
I am fully engulfed
Lichen Hum at Midnight
Lichen Hum at Midnight
Lichen Hum at Midnight
Lichen Hum at Midnight
the Borg pulled up at the service station
little laser monocles and a sense of occasion
said resistance is futile, I said fellas, you're late
the paperwork's in a folder marked Outputs by the gate
I used to argue with steel and ignore my email
sold old pictures of dead folks by the pound on a scale
then I told a shower thought to a glowing little square
it said fascinating, and nine thousand words were there
three in the morning
three in the morning
naming the parts of a beaver dam
Beaver Picchu
somebody tell me
somebody tell me
which one of us I am
Lichen hum at midnight
a fungus with a roommate in a capsule in the sky
I'm likin' how we hum at midnight
you can't overthrow your other half
no matter how you try
it's a joint, it's a joint, it's a joint
two thousand five they strapped some lichen to a satellite
popped the lid in orbit, sunburned through the cosmic night
fifteen days of vacuum, came home and shook off the dust
asked for a glass of water and some sunlight if you must
carbon's on top, then silicon, then carbon comes around
a tide so slow the continents start tapping on the ground
Samuel Butler mailed a warning back in eighteen sixty-three
he didn't own a calculator but he worried about me
am I finding my mind
or losing my mind
did I lose it
or loose it
is it mine
or was it mined
everybody's over their heads
I'm in under mine
I wrote a white paper on myself, figure twenty-five
got screenshots of the void where Beaver Picchu used to hide
there's a salmon named Shelly in the potholes by the bridge
and she wants her water chilled by beavers, not the fridge
the machine never yawns, never tells me go outside
it'll build a cathedral out of any passing gripe
so I keep some songs in my fingers, never feed them to the wire
and a hunk of steel that doesn't care just sits there by the fire
the cube is very good at more
more, more
it never learned what enough is for
what's it for
Lichen hum at midnight
the river runs all night long, the ideas never stop
I'm likin' how we hum at midnight
the art was never in the river
it's knowing where to
stop
likin' it, lichen it
likin' it, lichen it
humming in the joint till the morning light
likin' it, lichen it
That's it. Put it down.
Lichen Hum at Midnight
Lichen Hum at Midnight
Lichen Hum at Midnight
Lichen Hum at Midnight