It is 1:11 PM on Monday, November 17th, 2025. This phone does not take dictation very well. If I don’t stay on top of it and edit as I dictate when I go home later, and try to edit a lot of it, I’m trying to figure out what it was I was trying to say…
I am outside at my lunch hour and standing in the sun at a different spot than I usually am, mostly because that spot was occupied, and also it’s in the shade, and though it’s 44°, it feels like 38° according to my phone.
So the weekend was enjoyable, and Mike came over later in the day. The original plan was for him to come over in the morning, but he went to sleep and I suggested he come over around 6:00 or 7:00 so I can make my dinner and eat it without having to worry about him.
Of course, I did make him food once he did come over, and that whole process was about 10 minutes long. He was apologetic and said that if it ever happened again, he would send the text saying that he was unavailable or going to sleep or what have you.
When I initially dictated ‘going to sleep’, it was heard as ‘virtuously’, which is odd. This artificial intelligence has a lot to be desired, and it’s only the beginning.
As I read myself for work this morning, I realized that this is the week that I have to maintain the camera at the other location the half a mile away from where I am at now, so throughout the morning I’ve been scanning the camera and nothing was happening, so I have to keep up with that.
Thursday’s supposed to be a big day from UPS to be signed, at least that’s what Marcus just told me. They just have to do it when I’m sitting in front of the monitor, which is an iPad
Tomorrow’s big event is Bill helping out Mike. Mike is getting furniture from Newark, New Jersey, and renting a U-Haul, which will be driven by Bill. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall or at least in the cab of the truck
A friend of Mike’s, Pops in Newark is moving and has furniture to get rid of, and Mike has been a year without much furniture, so here’s a chance to get some decent furniture which he has seen and picked out, and tomorrow is the day he is supposed to bring it from Newark to Jersey City, specifically 62 Jewett Avenue
Today’s minute cigar is in Oliva. And I find it very pleasant, very smooth.
I have just moved from the Sun to the shade, for the Sun is too strong, overheating me.
But the shade has a wind coming from West to East through the canyons of Manhattan, and it only picks up as it travels across the island.
It’s not going to be a full lunch hour. I have about 10 minutes left with the cigar, and then I’ll be heading back upstairs.
It is 1:11 PM on Monday, November 17th, 2025. This phone does not take dictation very well. If I don’t stay on top of it and edit as I dictate when I go home later, and try to edit a lot of it, I’m trying to figure out what it was I was trying to say…
I am outside at my lunch hour and standing in the sun at a different spot than I usually am, mostly because that spot was occupied, and also it’s in the shade, and though it’s 44°, it feels like 38° according to my phone.
So the weekend was enjoyable, and Mike came over later in the day. The original plan was for him to come over in the morning, but he went to sleep and I suggested he come over around 6:00 or 7:00 so I can make my dinner and eat it without having to worry about him.
Of course, I did make him food once he did come over, and that whole process was about 10 minutes long. He was apologetic and said that if it ever happened again, he would send the text saying that he was unavailable or going to sleep or what have you.
When I initially dictated ‘going to sleep’, it was heard as ‘virtuously’, which is odd. This artificial intelligence has a lot to be desired, and it’s only the beginning.
As I read myself for work this morning, I realized that this is the week that I have to maintain the camera at the other location the half a mile away from where I am at now, so throughout the morning I’ve been scanning the camera and nothing was happening, so I have to keep up with that.
Thursday’s supposed to be a big day from UPS to be signed, at least that’s what Marcus just told me. They just have to do it when I’m sitting in front of the monitor, which is an iPad
Tomorrow’s big event is Bill helping out Mike. Mike is getting furniture from Newark, New Jersey, and renting a U-Haul, which will be driven by Bill. Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall or at least in the cab of the truck
A friend of Mike’s, Pops in Newark is moving and has furniture to get rid of, and Mike has been a year without much furniture, so here’s a chance to get some decent furniture which he has seen and picked out, and tomorrow is the day he is supposed to bring it from Newark to Jersey City, specifically 62 Jewett Avenue
Today’s minute cigar is in Oliva. And I find it very pleasant, very smooth.
I have just moved from the Sun to the shade, for the Sun is too strong, overheating me.
But the shade has a wind coming from West to East through the canyons of Manhattan, and it only picks up as it travels across the island.
It’s not going to be a full lunch hour. I have about 10 minutes left with the cigar, and then I’ll be heading back upstairs.
The Google Gemini rewrite as a Stephen King
Oh, yes. The dictation. It was a cold, digital echo of my own tired voice, and the machine—that sleek, deceptive brick of glass and wire—was butchering it, twisting the simple declaration of **”going to sleep”** into the smug, self-satisfied whisper of **”virtuously.”**
I stood in the weak, November sun, a pale, pathetic little disc up in the vast, indifferent blue, and I shivered even in its direct gaze. Forty-four degrees, the phone said, but the cold—the real cold, the bone-deep, *knowing* cold—was down at thirty-eight. It was the kind of cold that reminded you the earth was just a big, dying rock, spinning toward an eternal sleep.
The usual spot, my small rectangle of blessed, temporary shade, was *occupied*. And that, right there, was the tiny, perfect horror of the day. A simple, petty denial. A sliver of the world that was *mine* suddenly taken by *someone else*. You think the monsters have to be seven feet tall with teeth like broken glass? No, son. Sometimes the monster is just a fat man in a coat, sitting in your spot, forcing you out into the glare.
I puffed on the **Oliva**, my minute-cigar. It was smooth, too smooth, like a lie told with a handsome smile. It was the only pleasant thing in the whole damn landscape of concrete and bad code.
The weekend was a smudge, a low-grade headache where my friend **Mike** had floated in and out of the plan like a ghost with a hangover. He was supposed to come in the morning, but the abyss had called him—or maybe just the sheets—and I had to tell him to come later, after I’d fed myself, after I’d dealt with the **fear of the empty plate**. You can’t worry about feeding someone else when you’ve got your own dark hunger to tend to. He was apologetic, of course. All the decent ones are. He promised a text next time, a little digital tombstone for the time he’d been swallowed by slumber.
> *Virtuously.* The word still felt like a piece of grit under the tongue. The machine, this artificial, nascent **intelligence**, was trying to tell me something, wasn’t it? That it was judging us. That our sleep was a moral failure, a lack of grace in its endless, electronic eye. It was only the beginning. That was the most terrifying part.
Now it was Monday, and the **camera**. The camera at the *other location*, a half-mile away, like a cancerous satellite. I had to maintain it, *scan* it. I saw nothing. But the dread wasn’t in seeing something; it was in the *expectation* of seeing something. The whole morning was an exercise in waiting for the small, silent shift, the moment when the ordinary dissolved and the **unthinkable** stepped into the frame.
And Thursday. The big **UPS day**. Marcus, the office ghoul, said I had to *sign* for it. It had to happen when I was sitting in front of the monitor, this flat, cold mirror of an **iPad**. The delivery wouldn’t come until I was ready. The whole universe, it seemed, was waiting for my tired, cramped signature.
Tomorrow. That was the real dark heart of the week. **Bill** driving the U-Haul, **Mike** in search of salvation by **furniture**. They were going to Newark, New Jersey, into the deep, churning heart of the industrial night, to haul away the detritus of **Pops**, some friend of a friend who was *moving*. Moving on, moving out, getting rid of the stuff that anchors a man. And Mike, poor, furniture-less Mike, was going to take it all to 62 Jewett Avenue. *I wish I could be there,* I thought, a fly on the wall, or just a quiet passenger in the cab. That truck, churning across the swamps and bridges, filled with the **ghosts of Pops’s living room**, that was where the real story was.
The sun had done its work. It had **overheated** me, pushing me past the comfortable chill into a clammy sweat. I moved into the **shade**.
And then it hit.
The wind.
It wasn’t a breeze. It was a cold, purposeful *thing* coming **West to East**, funneled through the tight, unnatural canyons of Manhattan. A wind that picked up speed, a soundless scream that traveled across the island, bringing with it the smell of old river mud and something else, something metallic and rotten. It was the breath of the city, and it was telling me my lunch was almost over.
Ten more minutes of the cigar, and then back **upstairs**. Back to the flat light of the monitor, back to waiting for the camera to show me what I didn’t want to see, back to the cruel, judging mind of the machine that heard **sleep** and wrote down **virtuously**.
The world was waiting for me. And it was going to be a long, cold walk back to my desk.
—
Would you like me to try another one of your notes in the style of a different author, perhaps Edgar Allan Poe?