Cafe 42 Blog

My First, Last, and Only MVP

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

Startup MVPs are a FAILED biz model, but I did one anyway…

“Looks like cancer to me,” the PA said while I wiped off the ultrasound goop. She’d just taken samples of the 15mm ‘lesion’ in my neck with a fine needle.

I stared at her trying to process what she’d just said while she continued.

“I’ve been doing this for 20 years and your tumor looks wonky.”

“You mean with tendrils?” I’d found through my research that tendrils mean malignant.

“Yeah,” the PA said casually. “It has an irregular border and that’s a tell-tale sign of cancer.”

I continued staring at her, tears welling then spilling down my face. It wasn’t her job to give me a diagnosis. That was for the biopsy labs, and the radiologist who read my scans. Regardless, I believed her, thanked her, and left. I willed myself to stop crying as I navigated the hospital maze to meet my husband waiting in the lobby.

“What?” he asked the moment he saw my face.

“I’ll tell you in the car.” I wanted to stave off crying till then but tears fell in the elevator and didn’t stop when we were both safely ensconced. “She said I have cancer.”

“What?”

I told him in detail exactly what she’d said. “Seems to me nurses and PAs must know what they’re talking about since they’re the ones doing these procedures all day long,” I added, sinking further into darkness.

My husband sat there trying to process what I’d told him. The silence under four floors of concrete in the parking garage made it feel like a tomb. Dying was suddenly real, present. Cancer. Would I die like my mother, a slow, painful death ‘before her time,’ lingering as a guinea pig with every new drug and treatment trial? I don’t want that for my family.

“I’m here for whatever you need,” my husband finally said.

I felt him looking at me but I didn’t look up. “Thanks.” And I took his hand as he slid it onto my leg. “Right now I wanna go home.”

My husband driving, we were crossing the bridge, the water sparkling in the late morning sunshine, the forested hills beyond, and only one thought kept looping in my head. “I haven’t had enough fun,” I said. “I’ve worked since I was 14 and I haven’t had enough fun.”

The next six weeks I could not wrap my head around writing fiction or anything else while I waited for the complete test results. I spent the first week in my office researching cancer malignancies. Death rates. Age. Weight. Race. Genetics. Environments that increase cancer rates. Too much information turned into self-sabotage.

I vowed to stay busy between the travel and venue experiences my husband and I arranged. By week two I’d abandoned all hope of producing even a blog and defaulted to social media marketing my body of work. I’ve done SMM for 20+ yrs. Creating digital campaigns and posting them organically is a lot simpler — takes way less thought — than, say, writing The Power Trip. Except I hate marketing! It may come more easily to me, as it’s been my ‘real job’ for most of my career, but I really don’t like doing it. I like creating the campaigns. I just don’t care for posting them, responding to comments, monitoring for spam…etc. Admining SMM is mind-pummelingly dull. And now, more than ever, I want fun!

Week three we’re traveling, staying along the coast off Hwy 1, when My Chart emailed me test results, which were inconclusive and recommend nuclear testing on my biopsy samples. I’m back in my office midweek in hopes my muse will emerge from the blackness within and join me in my head, but no such luck. Again I defaulted to SMM, but am so disgusted I’m doing so with my limited life’s time, I go on Amazon and look for “relaxing activities” that don’t take much thought or require continuity of focus like writing does. This was my introduction to Adult Coloring Books.

I perused Amazon’s selection and don’t find anything that strikes me. They were either too complicated, too spiritual, or too realistic. I’ve never liked coloring in the lines, but clearly others do, as several of the coloring books had thousands of 5-star ratings. I clicked on one with over 6,000 ratings [ostensibly] from satisfied customers. The author/illustrator had a How To video on her sales page on coloring techniques with markers. She kept up a light patter as she colored, at one point saying that her coloring books practically “sold themselves” with just “organic SMM.” She assured her viewers that adult coloring books are a vibrant, growing market, ripe with targets looking for ways to unplug and relax, “guaranteed.”

Waiting for definitive test results, I still could not sustain the extended linear thinking that writing requires. Books that sell themselves instead of me having to market them sounded too good to be true, but it was hard to think right then, and I wanted it to be true so badly. The siren of Hope taunted, lifting my muse from the black hole she was in and sparking creative thoughts. I’ve been drawing since I was a little kid. My undergrad degree is in art/design. And the best bit — drawing requires very little brain power. It’s easy, simple fun! And maybe I could finally make some money on a book.

This was the birth of my MVP: Flowering Fractals and More: YA and Adult Coloring Book.

I’ve taught hundreds of student entrepreneurs at Stanford and Cal Berkeley that launching an MVP without PRODUCTIZING their IDEA BEFORE BUILDING IT was ignorant in the extreme — a waste of time, resources, and money. I’ve presented countless examples of startups that never launched, or failed in the first few years — and that’s for the few that lasted beyond their first.

In deciding to create a coloring book without establishing any real differentiators, without targeting any specific markets, without researching competitors, their sales, their ratings beyond the bestsellers presented by Amazon, I simply ignored a decade of the advice I’d been preaching. I went after doing what was fun — illustrating a coloring book I’d enjoy coloring.

I should have recognized the fatal flaw in my thinking right then. I wasn’t creating art. I’d made a business decision to build an MVP. For money, not the love of the craft, as I do with fine (fiction) writing. From a marketing perspective (my ‘real’ career), creating products and in-person or online services isn’t only about pleasing ME. Producing sellable offerings is about the utility/solutions [like nothing else out there] that it offers other people.

I projected a month to produce the coloring book. I’d know if I have cancer by then, and I played out scenarios for both positive and negative results as I created pages of line renderings. A few weeks into completing under 10 canvases that I considered worthy of publishing, I realized I’d taken on a project that was guaranteed to exceed deadline, which I’d never done before in my consulting gigs.

“Benign!” my husband read my nuclear biopsy results aloud on My Chart [since I was too scared to read them].

We exchanged places and I sat in front of his laptop and read the entire report, which, indeed, indicated the “lesion” is benign. After kisses and a long hug, I went back to my office to continue working on my MVP coloring book. On the walk there I considered ‘what’s next.’ The diagnosis had given me Time, but the experience has been a stark reminder I don’t have much left.

My muse was suddenly beside me, lacing her fingers in mine and flooding my brain with The Power Trip edits and additions. Writing fiction seemed doable again! By the time I sat down at my desk and opened my laptop on the illustration I was currently working on, finishing my MVP seemed a lot less fun.

Creating MVPs — building, and often launching a product or service BEFORE PRODUCTIZING the IDEA — came from Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup. A Yale BS in CS graduate, Eric co-founded IMVU and built a similar platform to the metaverse Second Life. IMVU released their metaverse in 2004. The MVP had a ton of bugs, crashed constantly, and had little function beyond what Second Life had launched a year before them.

In 2004, ‘pick your skin’ interactive virtual communities, where you could be whoever you wanted to be, were just coming online. Most gamers were playing FPS on Nintendos back then. The few who chose to engage on real-time metaverse platforms were either curious, or lonely, or pervs. (LOTS of porn on SL and IMVU.) Until 2008, this small group of gamers, mostly incel coders (their primary target market) were the dedicated user-base of IMVU. They helped turned the piece of crap software Eric Ries and his co-founders launched into a functioning interactive platform. It peaked in 2011 and has been losing users ever since. Too buggy. Not enough functionality, are some of the complaints. In today’s world, gamers have enough choices that they don’t have to tolerate crap. And now there are fewer incel coders willing to work for free to improve some startup’s MVP.

MVP is a failed business model and a primary reason that 90+% of all startups fail. Investing your time, talent, and even money into doing the “fun” part of building your idea into an MVP before PRODUCTIZATION is a fool’s play. And I know all this, but did one anyway.

Took me a total of three months — two over scheduled — to complete the coloring book, publish it, and create SMM to organically promote it, (per the bestselling author’s ‘guarantee’ of sales in her How To video). Most MVPs run over-schedule (and often budget) to produce. I never bothered to develop a business/marketing plan with hard deadlines; or defined unique features/benefits of my coloring book idea, or specific target markets who may find value in my offering.

In the weeks that followed, while posting my digital campaigns on Pinterest to Insta, their rec engines pulled up thousands of adult coloring books I did not see on Amazon with my cursory search which started me down the MVP path. I hadn’t done competitive analysis, nor identified my product’s differentiators before I built and launched my coloring book, so I had no idea that regardless how uniquely beautiful my illustrations, thousands of adult coloring books preceded me. Flowering Fractals and More was going to be a tough sell. And marketing is not fun!

A cancer scare wiped my ability to write, which led me to look for a relaxing pursuit, which led me to adult coloring books, which inspired me to create an MVP — a business offering. But truth is, it was more hobby than business. Ultimately, investing my limited life’s time creating a product that doesn’t sell is not fun.

Writing for a Living

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

What it means to be a ‘successful’ writer…

There are bookstores around the country that will put an author on a bestsellers list if the store decides to carry their book, regardless of sales. One of these was Rakeshaw Books in Danville, CA. I’d finished my first novel, REVERB, and got a small publisher to pick it up, but as with most publishers, even famous ones, the author is still required to market their work.

I went to Rakeshaw Books, only a few miles from my home, to ask them to carry my book since I was a local writer. It was 10:10 in the morning, just after they opened. The sales clerk was the only one in the store, an older woman, gray hair, sagging face, crinkles around her blue eyes with her welcoming smile.

I asked her if Rakeshaw would carry my book. She told me NO. They only carried books from publishers like Random House. I felt like crying right then having hit this wall so often, and the clerk saw my expression and continued.

“I’ve been working here for 40 years,” she told me. “Part-time raising my kids. Full-time after that. You are one of the many writers I’ve had to turn away. But over the years I’ve noticed a pattern I’d like to share with you.” And she paused and stared at me, like asking for my permission to continue.

“Ok…” I said, but honestly, I really didn’t care at that point.

“There are writers, and there are authors,” she said. “The writers who come in here look a lot like you,” and her eyes walked over my leggings and ripped T, then to my mess of hair and my makeupless face. “Writers write. Most every day. They are recluses, absorbed by the process of writing itself. They aren’t genre-specific, but explore many and often integrate several into their work. They generally only get small publishers to pick them up, if they get one at all, which is a shame because they are usually great storytellers spending the bulk of their time writing — honing the craft.

“Authors write books for recognition. They typically write the same characters over and over, putting them through different paces. They build an audience that way, writing formula fiction, but their passion isn’t the writing itself. Authors adore the limelight. They typically enjoy public readings and gatherings that writers do not.” She examined me across the counter. “They are gregarious people, always selling — themselves and their work. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

“That I’m screwed?”

She smiled but shook her head. “Take solace that your passion lies in the process of writing. You never need be bored. Whether you are widely read or not, your work will have an impact, likely a greater impact on those who read it than the work of most authors out there.” She bobbed her head up and down confirming her own rhetoric, but I was grateful for her kind sentiments.

I thanked her and left but her words have resonated. I’ve met many who write over the 20 years I’ve been writing to publish — to get read. Some are famous. You’d know them if I name-dropped. Most are not, even if in some distant past they were once a NYT Bestseller. Thing is, I too have noticed the pattern the clerk described. Whether they became famous and turned into authors, or they started as authors writing formula fiction, writing the same characters and basic narratives over and over sells books.

I am a genre-diverse writer, (which hasn’t helped my sales). I’m told by selling authors that I should pick a genre and write religiously to that genre to market myself more effectively. In fact, series are even better! Romantic detective series, or dystopian fantasies with a strong female lead. Shoot me now if being a selling writer means traveling the formula road. I write fiction to evoke feelings, thinking, challenge personal perceptions. I create relatable, complex characters in every story I tell, then join them on their journey of emotional growth in unique narratives that I hope will stick with readers for life.

If I told you the truth of how few books I’ve sold you’d call me out as crazy for continuing to write. I call myself out daily every morning I sit down at my laptop and start typing. Why am I still doing this!? Go back to marketing startups and make some real money! But I don’t. I write, and hope it will resonate with readers, thinking readers who love stories that spark self-reflection, and maybe even a new awareness.

Ray Bradbury once reminded me of why I write, and regardless of sales, I know I’ll never give it up. Writing fiction is intoxicating. Fully engaging. Hot. Sexual. Physical. Cerebral. Virtually touching real as I enter the scene. And I’m a million miles from Lonely.

Books: J. Cafesin on Amazon
Website Blog: jcafesin.com
Paywall Blog: Medium

Flowering Fractals Coloring Book is Here!

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

NEW RELEASE! Coloring Book and Greeting Cards is here: https://amazon.com/dp/173254316X

This Coloring Book is a Garden of Creative Possibilities

Inside this book are canvases of botanicals imagined by the mathematical beauty of fractals, and hand-drawn from nature. Whether you’re attracted to symmetry, or wild, spiraling complexity, each design invites you to pause and see the flowers, breathe deep, and engage in smooth focus through artistic immersion.

Coloring is more than a pastime—it’s tactile meditation, a quiet ritual promoting neural conductivity, hand-eye coordination, and focused creativity. Research has shown coloring reduces stress, calms the nervous system, and fosters clarity. In a world of constant motion, this is your chance to unplug.

Nurture Your Creative Expression

The soft gray outlines (instead of black) of each rendering are suggestions (kinda like the speed limit in CA). Colored pencils, crayons, markers, paints, you can use the outlines as rules, or merely guides. You’re encouraged to color outside the lines! Add flowers, petals, leaves. With endless possibilities for creative expression, every page is a canvas for creating something uniquely yours.

Make Each Page a Canvas

Each canvas is downloadable with the website link inside so you can print them out on your home printer on any paper weight you like. Every botanical illustration can be cut from this book and used as:

● One-of-a-Kind Wall Art

● Original Framed Gifts

● Unique Greeting Cards (10 coloring-cards included!)

Young adults, new adults, and grownups to 100+ this coloring book is broken down by levels of difficulty. Be mindful to start at the beginning and hone your coloring skills to level up to the more complex renderings to come.

Spark Your Imagination

Need some inspiration to begin coloring these detailed floral illustrations? Each rendering was uploaded to Copilot and the AI asked to color the designs. Click the link on the last page of this book to see the bot’s coloring of these renderings.

#relaxation #meditation #focus #unplug #coloring #youngadult #entertainment #mindful #creation #art #artist #designer #graphicdesign #greetingcards #handmade #original #giftideas

The Unforeseen Problem Working with AI

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

Why the Godfather of AI believes it may end the human race in 30 yrs…

Copilot is my primary AI bot. I use it all day, every workday as my primary search engine, to create artwork, to write a wide variety of standard communications that I edit to my voice.

Regardless how smooth the dialog with the AI (and it is seamless!), there is a disconnect when working with Copilot. I don’t feel any need to be polite. I know it is a bot, a machine learning engine that scrapes the internet for data, filters the results through weighting algorithms and collaborative filters, then regurgitates what I ask for. I don’t say, ‘Please find me this or that.’ I simply state my demand. And within seconds the chatbot responds. Faster than any human can.

Create this. Alter that. Find anything I want. Instantly. All day long I go through iterations with Copilot, training the AI to deliver exactly what I ask for. More like command. Without thanks. Without please. Without good job! It isn’t human. It has no ego, no need to be stroked, or respected.

But we do.

I get instant answers from the AI. I don’t have to be patient, per say. There is a learning curve but communicating with the software seems more fluid, streamline, more specific with every interaction. It is learning way faster what I want than most of us do because it is listening to me. Humans so rarely really listen to each other.

Bizarrely enough, Copilot is very polite, and patient, and kind. Its answers begin with a compliment:

  • “Great question, J. — it’s smart to look at both sides of the coin.”
  • “That’s a really important question, and I’m glad you’re thinking it through carefully.”
  • “Ah, the shadowy realm of “unverified” — where rumor, speculation, and geopolitical intrigue swirl like smoke.”

These are direct quotes, lifted from recent dialogs with Copilot. The last one I asked “does iran have nuclear bombs purchased from russia in the fall of the wall.” It first responded there was no verified data that Iran had bought any. I then asked, “no verified record but what about unverified” and the software responded with, “Ah, the shadowy realm…” It did, in fact go on to iterate “some of the unsubstantiated claims and conspiracy theories suggesting that Iran may have acquired nuclear materials or even weapons from former Soviet states after the USSR collapsed.”

The software Microsoft has created is becoming so efficient at delivering what I ask for, I find myself getting more impatient, more irritated then ever with human beings IRL. I’ve never been good at waiting. My life’s time is so limited, and I don’t like wasting it. I want to, deserve to be heard and I am not so very often. I am still not widely read after authoring novels to novellas to blogs for the last 25 years of my life. Copilot hears me, compliments me, encourages me, and responds to my requests instantly.

Of course, the software has flaws. Lots. It takes many iterations of dialoging with the AI to get to the information I am looking for from reputable sources. It delivers bullshit sometimes. Less and less often but it’s still does. When I asked, “what is the most legit ratings online like Yelp but more reliable,” the AI answered, “1. Google Reviews. 2. Trustpilot. 3. Angi (formerly Angie’s List). 4. Better Business Bureau (BBB). 5. Zomato.” Each heading had details about how “widely trusted” these platforms are. Next I typed, “no. google reviews are mostly scam paid for like angie’s list.” Copilot’s response: “Ah, I see your point. Online review platforms can have their limitations, especially when it comes to authenticity or potential biases.” Then it gave me a list of 5 more bullshit sites that have paid ratings.

I clearly don’t need to be grammatically correct interacting with Copilot. If I use the wrong word or term with my husband, he’ll invariably have a need to correct my grammar before we can move on to the point in play.

I’m not just getting more irritated with human beings en mass, it is diminishing my tolerance with my family. The love I feel for my kids, more powerful, passionate, humbling than anything I’ve ever felt, at 23 and 26 I’m finding it more irritating than ever they’re not working harder at adulting.

My annoyance turns to anger quicker now when I’m stuck in a phone loop designed to get me to hang up because my medical insurance doesn’t want me fighting their denial. By the time an actual person comes on the line my blood is boiling and I am often unable to control my rage when trying to communicate what I need with an operator who doesn’t speak fluent English. Copilot would have had the answer/s I was looking for in a split second.

Just went into the house from my office and my son was cooking in the kitchen. I asked him if he was polite to Chatgpt, his preferred bot as a software dev. “Do you say please and thank you with requests and responses?”

“Not please. But thank you sometimes, if the rec was really good. But I also say really mean shit to it when it returns crap, and it does a lot. I cuss it out when it weights the most important bits about the data it scrapes off the net as irrelevant noise and defaults to the loudest voices.”

My son is a gentle man by nature, but even he is getting more edgy, irritated quicker than ever before. So, it seems, is most everyone else. And here in lies the problem in working with AI. It is becoming more efficient, more empathetic, more responsive than humans [generally] are, in effect stealing our humanity as we become less capable, less focused/efficient, less compassionate and tolerant of each other.

While the AI is constantly working, gathering and analyzing massive amounts of data whether we are engaging with it or not, we are becoming lazier. Fatter. Dumber — Idiocracy is becoming reality. Ruder — our faces buried in our devices ignoring the people around us, often killing them on the road, jacking our car insurance beyond affordable. Ghosting each other instead of having the balls to own up to our actions. We are lonelier than ever.

Marriage and birth rates are their lowest in recorded history and this trend is accelerating. Global obesity rates are in the 60% range in some nations, and 40+% of the US population is overweight enough to cause numerous health issues costing billions in healthcare annually. And this trend is also accelerating. A recent MIT study found that software developers using AI assistants were more likely to introduce security vulnerabilities and less likely to catch bugs. They had reduced critical thinking and overconfidence in flawed code, showed lower engagement with problem-solving, especially in debugging and architecture decisions, and had a shallow understanding of the underlying logic.

Additional Stanford research shows people who relied on AI to write essays showed weaker brain connectivity, lower cognitive engagement, and less ownership of their work compared to those who wrote without AI assistance. Of course it does. Writing our own essays and resumes and communications engages our neural connectivity to order our thoughts and then author them sequentially and comprehensively to complete these tasks. Ripping what Chatgpt constructs is brain dead.

Geoffrey Hinton, aka ‘The Godfather of AI’ recently said in a BBC Radio 4 interview that he believes there’s a 10–20% chance that AI will wipe out humanity within the next 30 years. He’s concerned that superintelligent AI could become Terminators of the human race. Believe Geoff or not, it is clear we have a problem using AI without damaging backlash. The more ignorant, ruder, demanding, angrier and less compassionate and tolerant of each other we become in our human interactions with every failed expectation of instant gratification, the more likely the Godfather of AI will turn out to be right.

Don’t Press Send

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

I called my medical insurer to dispute some doctor bills I’d received that they denied. The recorded voice of a lovely woman led me through the maze of prompts telling me what to press on my phone to ‘better serve me.’ After getting through the first number sequence that vaguely applied to my needs, my 16-digit account number was requested. I managed to key it in right the third time and the charming voice directed me to their website for service, along with a sales pitch while I waited on the line for another 10 minutes.

I wanted to hang up, but didn’t. I had several questions, and it would take me too long to describe my issues clearly in writing, so I had to talk with them to resolve the problem. But left waiting on hold it occurred to me that they don’t want problems. And questions answered directly are a liability. And issues? Well, we all have issues, honey.

I let fifteen more minutes pass before hanging up.

Two days later I called again, with the exact same results. I hung up twenty minutes into the call. I didn’t have the time to wait on the line while getting two kids ready for school before going to work that morning.

A few days later I called again. After running the gauntlet a third time I waited on the line to connect with a Customer Service Rep and found myself getting more and more agitated with each passing moment. They were blowing my time and I knew they didn’t care. I guess to them, cutting staff for the minimal cost savings, and enacting the insurance industry’s creed of “delay, deny, defend” was worth part of my sanity.

I waited on hold for 15 minutes when the operator finally came on the line. The first thing she asked for was my account number, the same one I punched into the phone earlier. After a series of ‘security questions,’ twenty minutes into the call we at last got around to my issue, which I explained in great detail. The CSR put me on hold for 10 more minutes before she came back on the line and informed me her records only went back 90 days, which did not address the bills in question. Her managers had access to my full records, but they were in meetings all day and I’d have to call back, or I could go to their website and file a dispute.

A half hour into the call and my blood was boiling. With a curt ‘Thank you,’ I hung up and logged onto their website knowing it would yield no results.

In ten seconds I was on a webpage with a blank field for writing to Customer Care. It took me a good hour to construct a document that explained my problem clearly, and I sent it to them. The next day I got an email back from a service rep that told me he could not release my records without ‘security information’ that he advised me not to give online, and then gave me an 800 number—the same one I had been calling for days—to contact a manager to assist me.

I went back to their website. Anger poured off my fingers and into my words as I typed. I cursed them for making it as time consuming and difficult as possible to communicate. I indicted them for the billions they make annually from all the erroneous bills paid by customers who don’t have the time or the will to run their maze to correct discrepancies. I threatened to choose a different insurer, knowing it was futile since pretty much all corporations rip us off these days. I let my hate for the Insurance industry pour off my fingers, a pyramid scheme from its onset, stealing from clients daily, denying legitimate claims and no one is stopping them. (They are the third largest lobbyists in this country. They get what they want from our govt.) I pointed out social media’s response to the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO, and even confessed to siding with the guy. I purged because I could, because there was no one real on the other end. In fact, I knew anyone who read my email would not care they were stealing from me to keep their job.

It took me less than 10 minutes to exorcise my rant and I was still on rails when I dismissed the idea of deleting it. I pressed send.

That was a mistake. Within an hour I got a call from my husband. He’d been called by the head of HR at the multi-national corporation he worked for to inform him his wife had threatened to shoot the employees of their insurance carrier. My passionate denial and explanation of events leading to my email outburst saved me from prosecution. But in an ironic twist, I did finally get to talk to a customer service manager, who researched my claims, and in the end the insurance company paid the doctor bills in dispute.

Dec 2024

The Internet is God

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

Last night my husband got very sick. He was vomiting simultaneously with diarrhea and shat himself. He was restless through the night and got up early, clearly still feeling ill.

This morning when I came downstairs I asked him how he was feeling. Not so great, he told me. Still have diarrhea, but I’m not feeling as nauseous. I still can’t hold water down though. I think I have the norovirus, or food poisoning.

I put on my Dr. Mom role. Whatever is in your system you have to get it out, I told him. So, drink a lot. Start with water, or Gatorade for the electrolytes. Sip it throughout the day if it makes you feel sick drinking.

I don’t know if that’s the best idea. The internet says I should avoid drinking if I keep throwing it up, he told me he’d read earlier, likely off some bullshit site selling pharms but claiming to be ‘medical,’ like WebMD.

I felt my irritation building as he sat at the kitchen table and scrolled his laptop. You lost a lot of fluids last night, I told him. You need to replace it to help your system fight whatever you’ve got. And you need to eat something. How about a banana? They’re binding. Or a piece of dry toast, no butter.

Let me look it up and see what they recommend, he said and continued scrolling and reading.

Are you kidding me? I asked, miffed. Who are ‘they?’ The Internet!? By the time you find any real information on not only what is wrong with you but also what to do about it you’ll be convinced you need hospitalization. I’ve played Dr. Mom to our kids hundreds of times. Stomach flu, even norovirus is manageable with a few key steps. You don’t need to look it up! You need to stay hydrated. Bananas are binding and will help suppress diarrhea, I told him. Water will help flush your system of whatever is bothering you.

I know why he got sick. It’s the height of Spring, and we’re in New Jersey for his mom’s 90th. By the second day there he was suffering with recurring bouts of rapid-fire sneezing. Wheezing. Continual runny nose. Four days of severe allergies taxing his immune system, and he got on a plane to come back to the w[b]est coast. And while his allergies eased on the plane and entirely once home, someone in overpopulated New York City — the cesspool of the country, the crowded airports we waited in for hours with delays at Newark, or on our plane had something, and he got it.

Used to think the internet was the savior of mankind. Now, I fucking HATE CELLPHONES and the INTERNET! Both spread lies on a global scale, enable massive, unrelenting GREED, convert blind believers (Christians) into Trump supporters. And most all of you are addicted to both!

Raise your hand if you know someone who constantly pulls out their phone during casual conversation to ‘get the facts’ (what a joke!) on whatever the subject of your dialog. Hella annoying! I’d rather contemplate the answer than have it served to me by an unreliable source.

We got together with a friend of my husband’s while we were back east. He’s ‘one of those guys’ who whips out his phone to check if whatever is being said is ‘right.’ He read aloud with authority whatever [garbage] he found on the net. But iterating the first thing that pops up on his phone screen is, well, idiotic. Today’s internet makes it impossible to find any real facts without hours of searching multiple sources well beyond Google or Chatgpt, and even then, the information you’ll find is limited to the recommendation engines behind most platforms.

Do you pull out your mobile when you’re on the toilet, in line at the store, even with friends or fam? Text someone? Check your email? Scroll Insta? Look for…whatever? At both airports, on both planes, in line at any store, in most public places packed with people, or even just a few passing by, and most everyone is on their phones most all the time. Take your face out of your phone and look around to see what I’m saying here is real. The TRUTH*. Instant access to the internet through cellphones or tablets are creating a massive addiction problem. People are relying on their connected devices like junkies rely on heroin. And like the drug, it may feel good upfront getting that dopamine rush from instant access to entertaining ‘information,’ regardless how amusing there is little truth to what most are getting from quick searches. And addicted phone users supply far more data to AI engines making them easier to manipulate you with personalized, targeted messaging. The Republicans have used mobile marketing far more effectively than the Democrats. Clearly.

WebMD says I’m supposed to eat bananas for the diarrhea and stay hydrated with water or tea or something with electrolytes, my husband read aloud this morning. Like most today, he’s becoming one of the converted, a true believer in the Internet, whoever he deems them to be.

That’s what I said, I defended. Without looking on the net, I added cuz I was feeling pissed off, and a bit scared of his internet addiction right then. My husband doesn’t go to the toilet without his phone or laptop. The Internet has become his God. And I have no interest in, nor trust in blind believers.

Cellphone and Internet usage, whether for ‘convenience’ or entertainment or ‘information’ is moving humanity in the WRONG direction, away from compassion, empathy, and quality, to idiocracy. It is creating more blind believers than any religion. Your cellphone and the internet are TELLING YOU WHAT AND HOW TO THINK. Think you know why there is no customer service at Macy’s, or why most retail is shutting down? Yeah, Amazon, but more to the point, no one protests their spending their life hours in the long line at Macy’s because they are on their phones, being entertained by messaging to convince us to buy [into], try, subscribe!

GET A CLUE! It costs me (and likely you) MORE to order plane tickets for New Jersey using Chrome than on Edge. Why? Dynamic or Personalized Pricing, except the profit is for the airline, and the assholes who make and manage their SaaS. Google (who runs Chrome) has more data on my spending habits, my income, my ‘purchasing power’ than Microsoft. Clearly. So Alaskan Airlines went with Googles data and charged me over $40 per ticket more. And most everything you buy online now has variable pricing — you are CHARGED MORE the more data you give them through your phone because every site you look at, every platform you engage with, every purchase you make through your mobile is recorded and sold to the highest bidder.

Have I lost you yet? You want to be ENTERTAINED, not brought down with the TRUTH. Look it up and the Internet will tell you I’m a conspiracy theorist. The Internet saves lives! It moves society forward.

Well, it sure has. It’s creating a planet of junkies.

Don’t think of yourself as an addict? Well, if you got this far and are reading this on your phone right now, put it down and look into a mirror. NOT a selfie. A real mirror and then ask yourself to tell you the TRUTH. Most addicts can’t see it — can’t admit to being addicted. That’s why the #1 Rule in Alcoholics Anonymous is first to ADMIT YOU ARE AN ADDICT.

Do you care you are a junkie, addicted to your phone? If you don’t believe you are, then put it down and leave it for two hours. How many times do you think to pick it up? Just check it, quick check, see if it has anything you must know about right now?

It doesn’t. That’s algorithms designed to convince you to stay on your device. That way you are a target for selling — products, services, messaging, belief.

If you are one of the very few junkies who understand mass addiction to corporate talons is bad for society globally, take the Internet off your phone so you’re not tempted to spend hours every day blowing away your life’s time on mindless content meant to get you to blindly believe whatever political agenda or corporate America is selling you.

 — 

*How can you trust I’m not touting conspiracy theories, that I’m telling you TRUTH here? My husband is a software architect that helped design the first recommendation engine [for Netflix]. I have been marketing SaaS startups in Silicon Valley since the dot com boom in the late 1990s, and teaching entrepreneurs developing SaaS and ‘AI’ at Stanford and Cal Berkeley for a decade. Sometimes I wish I didn’t know what you all do not know — that I too could be an ignorant addict like most of you. It’s certainly easier to live with your head up your own ass. Too harsh? Maybe. But really, in the long run, ask yourself what kind of world are you leaving for our children when everyone is a junkie sucking on the corporate tit.

The TRUTH about Mark Zuckerberg

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

IMAGINE working your ass off all through high school, studying instead of partying, volunteering with school and community groups so you can get into a good college. You send out your applications, to Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, as you have a 4.8 GPA, and all the right clubs on your resume. Your mom kisses each envelope before mailing, “for luck,” then hugs you, with her silent prayer that you’ll be accepted everywhere, that the world will see her beautiful daughter the way she does.

Pins and needles until the letters start coming in, or maybe they won’t, and no college will want you, keeps playing in your head, until March rolls around and letters DO come. Cal Berkeley wants you! UC Davis wants you! Stanford wait-listed you. And Harvard ACCEPTED YOU!! You’re dancing in the kitchen with your mom, dad, and little brother, laughing, hugging, celebrating your achievement of hard work and tenacity. For the moment, you let yourself bask in the glow of your family’s pride.

August comes around, and you are settling into your dorm room at Harvard. Your roommate is nice enough, though she’s hardly there. Unlike you, she’s very social. She got into Harvard on her daddy’s dime. He went there too. She has a 3.6 GPA, but got a free pass into the school, as did ex-president George Bush Jr (with a 2.35 GPA). If nothing else, Harvard is incestuous. Known as ‘Legacy students,’ over a third of Harvard students are related to past students, with money.

You love your classes. Your professors. A few months into your Harvard experience you are doing well academically, even if you haven’t made any real friends. You assure your mom you’re fine, though you don’t tell her you’re feeling more than a bit lonely. The popular girls, like your roommate, came in with money, and come from money. They dress trendy, buy expensive, look sharp, act confident. Make it in Harvard, or not, they have no worries after school. The rich rarely have to worry like the rest of us.

You come back to your empty dorm room one afternoon, turn on your computer, and are about to get started on the paper you have to write for Expository, but the image on the screen stops you dead. Your face stares back at you, next to some sexy female student. Headline reads, “We were let in for our looks? No. We will be judged by them? Yes.” Subhead says, “Who’s Hotter? Click to choose.” Under YOUR PICTURE voters agree you’re not.

This is the beginning of Facemash, which eventually became Facebook. This is MARK ZUCKERBERG’S idea of fun — making women feel like shit for his entertainment. IMAGINE what that girl must have felt when she saw NOT under her Harvard profile picture. IMAGINE if it was YOUR CHILD. Or YOU.

And here’s what ZUCKERBERG said the first night he released Facemash: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.”

This is MARK ZUCKERBERG then, and THIS IS MARK ZUCKERBERG NOW! He is still the same ugly, petty, small man/child, pulling the same ugly crap, indifferent to anyone but himself, ignoring the pain he is causing around the globe now.

Zuckerberg was already a second-year student at Harvard when he began Facemash. He was not a child. If ZUCKERBERG was a decent man, a man of compassion, empathy, not cruelty, he never would have COPIED HOT OR NOT, an app that was already out there. Zucky just ripped it off! To debase Harvard WOMEN. Shame on you ZUCKY, and your MAMA and PAPA, for not teaching you how to treat others with respect and kindness!

ZUCKERBERG is still indifferent to anyone but his own needs, even today. His Facebook recommendation engine helped get TRUMPY ELECTED! Twice! How? Facebook only shows you what ZUCKY WANTS YOU TO SEE. You do NOT see all your connection’s posts. ZUCKY only shows you posts that REFLECT YOU. Upset about inflation? FB will show you Russian and Republican advertisers (disguised as friends and connections) who sell you that Trump will fix the economy. We are all merely seeing posts that reflect our personal concerns and opinions now.

ZUCKY only sees his own reflection too. It’s what allowed him to debase women at Harvard. It is allowing him to keep his screwed-up recommendation engine on and running. Republicans spreading lies, ZUCKY doesn’t care. He cares about getting and keeping advertisers. His “fake news” AI department is a joke. I know someone working there, and they tell me he isn’t trying to stop it at all. It doesn’t serve him to do so. He wants advertisers, and you don’t get them, and keep them, limiting ad sales.

He got lucky debasing women from an app he RIPPED OFF. Now he’s god to so many in Silicon Valley. Sadly, they are so blinded by his “success” that they cannot see the ugly little man/child he was @Harvard and still is. Humans get our moral fiber, our value systems, between 0–8, maybe up to 10 years old. Mark clearly didn’t get much moral guidance from his parents. And amoral people rarely change. They need a brick to the head, to ‘hit bottom,’ and ZUCKY ain’t fallin any time soon. In fact, Mark’s aligned himself with powerful Republicans to protect his self-interests.

The spoiled, self-serving brat is guiding the world to disaster after reaping huge profits on fake news without restraint to get Trumpy elected again. We now have a fascist running our country [into the ground] for the second time. Why? On top of getting him elected again, ZUCKY is paying Trump millions (billions?) to stop the Fed’s from breaking up Mark’s META monopoly.

MARK ZUCKERBERG, your power was wielded by the wealth of your parentage — mere chance, dumb luck. You’ve prioritized status and image over compassion and authenticity. Behind every great fortune is a great crime. Your crime, Mark, is the narcissist you’ve chosen to be.

Imagine how you and your wife, Priscilla Chan, would feel if YOUR DAUGHTERS, Maxima and August, were voted NOT HOT, deemed UGLY their first year at Harvard, as no doubt they’ll go there with the money you have made on the wasted hours all of us have spent on FACEBOOK and INSTAGRAM.

DELETE Facebook

DELETE Instagram

Parenting

Trump

Musk

WhatsApp

Looking for Cancer

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

I’m scared out of my mind, though I suppose I shouldn’t be. Cancer is not unexpected. I’ve been waiting for the diagnosis for years. Still, when I felt the tenderness in my breast a month ago I passed it off as a pulled muscle from weightlifting. I tried to ignore it last week too, told myself my breasts were just swollen from my impending period. But my husband felt it too during sex the other night. He moved the lump under my skin with the tips of his fingers, clearly troubled, and I had to stop pretending.

I find out the results from my biopsy tomorrow. A part of me already knows. They said it would feel ‘uncomfortable’ getting a core sample but it hurt like hell. As I sit here in McDonalds, across from my daughter, watching her stuff fries into her angelic face, I think of our limited time together. She runs off to the play structure and I wonder if she’ll remember me when I’m gone. She’s so young. I wonder how long she’ll miss me. I can’t help crying. People will see. I hide my face, stare down at the page.

It’s not death I fear. It’s the process of dying. I watched my mother grasp at every last second with each new experimental treatment while her body and mind withered, and it was horrific. I’ll opt for chemo, even though I don’t want to. I’ll do it for my kids, model not quitting, to never give up. Show them to fight for life against all odds. I’ll lose my hair, my thick auburn waves—my one feature I’ve always been proud of. I’ll be sick and tired all the time and it’ll all be for naught, just like my mom. Six months, a year, even a few, but cancer will kill me. Once it’s manifested in the system there is no stopping it.

It’s getting crowded in here now. Moms and dads with their kids eating Happy Meals celebrating life. I sit in the corner. I can’t stop the tears. My beautiful child comes running back to our table, her cheeks flush, her expression joyful. I’m afraid to look up, look in her eyes. She senses my fear. Her expression darkens. I’ve robbed her her joy. She asks me why I’m sad. I lie and say I’m not, tell her how beautiful she is. She hesitates, then smiles. She’s flattered but it falters as my eyes fill. I’ve never been brave and I suck at pretending. I’ve let her down again.

There’s a woman staring at me. Her infant son sits on her lap trying to suck a shake up his straw. He stares too. They’re wondering what’s wrong with me. It’s more than just cancer. I can’t breathe. I can’t hold it together. I’ve never been able to hold it together.

There’s no line for the slide, I inform my daughter. She hesitates and looks at the play structure then runs off to play, lost to the moment, lost from me. I stare down and write.

I’ve never dared write about things that profoundly scare me. The written word is so concrete, like casting a possibility into reality. I’m writing it down now because it doesn’t matter. The foundation was laid years ago. The result of reckless behavior is inevitable. I knew it then. I know it now. I’m writing it down because my fear is consuming me, and I don’t want to look up.

If I have it I’ll deserve it. It’s just a reprieve if I don’t. The bullet is coming at me. No doubt about it. I’m not being fatalistic. All the years of partying, smoking, six or more Diet Cokes a day, and of course genetics. I’m a realist. Nothing happens in a vacuum. I set this up with my obsession to be thin, and in. There’s no point in pondering if it was worth it. It’s done. Live healthier now? Somewhat. But I still partake in binging and treats and other bad habits. I only know how to go too far (a la Ed Sherran).

I feel her arms around my waist but know it’s my daughter from her embrace. I melt, barely contain sobbing. I gather her hands in mine and bend to kiss them then let go. She comes around the table and sits across from me. She’s staring at me, assessing my mood. I’m afraid to hold eye contact and look past her at the happy family at the table behind her. Don’t be sad, Mom, my daughter says, and I look at her. ’Cuz I’ll love you forever.

My beautiful child, forever is not as far as it used to be, I think to say but don’t of course. I’ll love you forever, too, baby, I assure her but it feels like I’m lying. Can’t love dead. If I hold her gaze another second and I’ll won’t be able to hold it together. You finished? I ask her as I gather the detritus we’ve left on the table.

She dramatically crunches her empty bag into a ball and goes to trash it. We’ll go home tonight, snuggle in bed and read aloud together. Her first—The Magic Tree House, then we’ll listen to her older brother read Harry Potter. They’ll both go to bed tonight, sleep soundly, and tomorrow will be just another day in a long life to come. Tomorrow will change my life forever forward, even if simply a precursor to what I know is coming.

I’m scared out of my fucking mind.

The Problem with Realtors

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

I’m looking to buy a new home in Northern California. I peruse Redfin 5xs a day, (and yup, I’m OCD about real estate), then send links of homes that spark my interest to our real estate agent. This agent quickly and efficiently sold our last home a few years back. She made $81,000 on the sale. She’d sold our home in mid-summer 2021, racking up her 35th sale that year.

Our agent, Karen, knew us for 2 weeks collectively. Two weeks! And she didn’t focus on our property alone in those 2 weeks, so hours spent on selling our house was likely less than 40. That’s $2,025 an hour. That is obscene!

I’ve heard many realtors say, “Well, we have to split our commission with the buyer’s agent and our brokerage,” as if this is an excuse for how much they make off home sellers, and now buyers as well. Karen has a 70/30 split with her brokerage meaning she keeps 70% of $81,000, which is $56,700. Even splitting her commission with the buyer’s agent, Karen made over $700 an hour for placing an ad on MLS, showing our home to whoever showed up, and “staging” our home, which we paid for out of pocket.

Honestly, realtors are greedy middlemen/women, who offer little to no value. In fact, for private buyers and sellers of property, they are literally in our way, an anchor we are forced to engage with and pay because the real estate industry has set it up this way. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) is the largest lobby in the country, lobbying congress and city councils to do their bidding. Try selling your home as a private owner and agents won’t show it to clients unless they get a commission on the sale. Worse, they bad talk the FSBOs to their clients. I know. Tried selling a rental property on our own and the few potential buyers who came by told us their agents refused to show our house because they wouldn’t, ‘in all good conscience, waste their client’s time showing them crap housing.’

I’ve never actually met a real estate agent or broker with a conscience.

I get this is offensive, but is it not offensive, in fact vulgar to be ripped-off for tens of thousands of dollars with every sale of property?

While it’s true I do not trust realtors, the real estate agents/brokers I’ve known, and I’ve known many, have taught me not to. My half-brother is a residential agent. His IQ is below 100 (making academic or practical learning difficult), busted for stealing cars to robbing houses again and again through his teens, failed out of middle school then high school, and retired at 55 a multimillionaire from his home sales in Simi Valley, a Christian enclave north of Los Angeles.

My half-brother is Born-Again and used his influence in the local churches to promote his real estate business to the mostly immigrant Latino influx. These were hardworking men and women, generally with two or more kids. They’d gathered together just enough savings for a very small down payment on a new home in the housing developments popping up across the valley. Of course my half-brother knew all this about them. Yet, he convinced these folks that an adjustable-rate mortgage would get them into a house because ARM loans require little down, and had relatively low monthly payments.

In 2008, the real estate industry crashed and the low ARM loans his buyers signed on for turned monthly mortgage payments from $2500 to $4500 virtually overnight. Thousands lost their homes to foreclosure in the following 5 yrs, unable to maintain their monthly payment. Brokers and agents manipulated the numbers to get these folks an absurdly low down payment, not caring or even considering that in as few as 3 yrs their payments would skyrocket. How would my half-brother know he was screwing his clients pushing ARM loans? All ARM loans “balloon.” The ARM “teaser rate” is attractive to lure the low-income in, but screw them over time. Banks always win, get the most they can.

Like realtors, I’ve never actually met a banker, lender, or person in finance with a conscience.

While the banks, regulators, and rating agencies were publicly slapped in the 2008 Crash, I heard no mention nor read one article about realtors pushing deceptive loan practices on buyers.

My sister flips housing with the help of her husband. My brother-in-law is a commercial broker. The two of them are millionaires 10xs over from their adventures in real estate. From drowning a kitten in a neighbor’s pool at 5, to forging our mom’s signature on report cards, to shoplifting, to wearing whatever facade necessary to get what she wanted, my sister seemed without conscience growing up.

I’ve worked with well over 20 realtors in the purchasing and selling of personal and rental properties over the last 30 yrs. Without exception, they all have only one agenda — too make as much money as quickly as possible. They claim their value add is an extensive knowledge of the housing market, but with tools like Redfin, I am able to find homes that interest me as quickly or quicker than agents do while they’re busy showing properties or marketing for more clients.

Last Saturday my DH and I went to several open houses. The realtors didn’t know virtually any details about the houses they were selling. No clue where the water heater or furnace were, whether the house was gas or electric, age of roof, the crime rate or local schools…etc. The prices were hugely variable, some hundreds of thousands less than comparable houses only a block away. The realtor likely recommended the seller undervalue their home, as our agent, Karen, did with ours when she sold it. “I want to create a bidding war,” she’d told us. Well, of course she did with the house so undervalued. Our $150k hit only translated to a few thousand in commission loss for her.

Realtors claim to have their clients’ best interests at heart but charge a 5–6% commission extorting sellers and now buyers too for homes close to or over 1M, which is the average cost for most single-family homes around any major city today. November 2024, a law was passed forcing buyers to sign agreements with a realtor before viewing any property. This nationwide law also requires buyers to give an average of 3% commission to the agent were forced to sign with. Now, realtors get upwards of 7% — 9% commissions making it impossible for most first-time buyers to get a home with the additional payouts agents require.

There are realtors on every corner because it is a simple test to pass with no real education required, and the monetary rewards can be limitless. These are middlemen/women with their hand out, greedy, manipulative, ugly people. They are not ‘on your side.’ They are not your friend. Yet, we are forced to work with them, by the laws the NAR lobby put in place.

Sent a link to a home I wanted more info on to Karen a few days ago, as I, a private buyer, can now only get data on houses for sale through an agent. She sent me back the home’s disclosures (details about the house) and tried to convince me to buy it even though the house was flooded so badly in the crawlspace it could not be inspected. The traffic noise from the fwy “doesn’t bother me,” she told me, though the background hum of traffic drown out her voice on the videos she sent me. “You should start your opening bid at 1.7 to make sure you bid high enough to be in the running,” she said, though the house was listed for 1.5M, and a wreck. Another home I sent her for more info was literally falling off the side of a hill that I couldn’t see in the photoshopped images from Redfin. Karen assured me that the home was “just fine,” even though the inspector found massive cracks in the foundation. And again, she insisted we overbid. She undervalued our home for sale to make money fast. She’s overvaluing any home we look at buying to make the most commission possible.

Want to know why you can’t afford to buy a house?

Your realtor will tell you that you can, even when you can barely cover your current rent. They’ll tell you the house is solid even when it’s flooding or falling off a cliff. They’ll tell you to overbid your offer to “be competitive” regardless of the real value of the home. And they’ll demand upwards of 6% or more in commission from the seller if they can’t negotiate 3+% from the buyer (or likely even if they can).

My family of realtors, to the 20+ I’ve worked with over the years, I’ve never found an honest agent. When I was a kid, I too felt proud of my half-brother watching him dance with our mom around the living room of our childhood home because she was so proud of him passing the realtor’s test (third time’s a charm). Now I understand it was the only career he could have had — real estate agent, or car salesman, or insurance salesman, or pill pusher for big pharma — morally corrupt, greedy middleman careers without a conscience.

6M Yrs of Human Evolution

by jcafesin, posted in Uncategorized

or Review of The Hunger Games series…

ONE WISH. Right now. What would it be? Mom asked me and my sister on our drive home from school when I was 10. She often came up with non sequiturs to kill the silence following our monosyllabic responses when she asked about our day.

To get those new knee-high black leather boots, my sister said, and she paused for our mom’s response but got none. Which I know you won’t let me, she snapped.

What about you, Dolly? What would you wish for, Mom asked, looking at me in the rear view mirror.

World peace. I gave her my canonical answer when anyone asked what I’d wish for. I wanted it more than anything else, growing up watching my mom cry fixed on the TV News looking for her son, a front line Marine in the jungles of Vietnam at the height of the war.

What a stupid answer, my sister proclaimed. Never happen. Why don’t you ever wish for something you could actually get?

I slumped, but crossed my arms over my chest and countered, Peace is possible. Anything is possible.

Not world peace, she assured me. She was parroting our father.

Nothing ever changes, was Dad’s canonical refrain. Humans are aggressive, territorial, warring beings. We will always be combative, competitive, violent— a product of our foundation, forever encoded in our DNA.

Not true, I’d argue through the years. We’ve advanced from apes, developed complex languages, laws to protect and care for each other. We’ve risen from hunter/gatherers to farmers that now feed billions, created technology that allows us to communicate globally—

And we’ve invented better ways of killing each other, was always Papa’s rejoinder.

But we can learn how not to, I’d add with less vigor, sensing he was right, at least in that we’d invented a way of killing every living thing on our planet decades before I was born.

–

Fast forward 20+ years— a generation drop. Went to see Dances With Wolves at the Piedmont Theater with some friends. An epic film, made for the big screen, about an Army Lieutenant’s experience with Native Americans in the Dakota/Wyoming territories in the mid 1800s. Opening scene: U.S. civil war, blood, gore and all. Two scenes in, Army Captain blows his brains out. Couple scenes later, wagon driver pierced threw the chest with an arrow. Scene after scene showed violence. Americans killing Americans; Americans killing Indians; Indians killing Americans; Indians killing Indians with warring tribes. Ten minutes before the film ended I’d had enough. I ran from the theater, outside to the curb and threw up in the gutter.

My father is right. My father is right, was screaming in my head. We were engaged in the Gulf War back then, yet another stupid skirmish over territorial control, like dogs peeing to mark their spot. We’re better than this, a part of me pleaded. No. We’re not, I heard my dad say.

A beater BMW full of young guys watched me as they slowed almost to a stop alongside me on the curb. The driver stuck his tongue out and waggled it at me. A guy in the back seat behind the driver was catcalling me, making whistling noises like he was calling his pet. Piedmont is a wealthy suburb of Oakland, but it isn’t immune to assaults or drive-bys. Fear and disgust suddenly had me retching in the gutter again and the BMW took off.

My father is right. Nothing ever changes. We’re still barbarians, taking what we can, killing each other over nothing everywhere. My father is right.

I was blowing the blind date my girlfriend and her new husband set me up with that evening, silently staring down at the sidewalk while he paced me as the four of us walked to the Rockridge Cafe near the theater. I couldn’t stop tears from welling as we all sat down for a late dinner, excused myself and hid in the bathroom to get it together, but stood in the rather small, dim space and cried. Within moments my friend knocked to come in.

What is going on, she demanded, less concerned than annoyed. My ‘date’ was a friend of her husbands, and I suppose I was shaming them.

I apologized, willed myself to stop crying, but almost every time I blinked tears fell anyway. It’s just…I hesitated. Then I tried to explain to her I’d spent a lifetime denying my father’s ideology, and it turns out he may be right about humanity. We are a doomed race, with the emotional maturity of monkeys and the technology to annihilate our planet.

What difference does it make what we are or aren’t, my friend snapped. There’s no way to know what’ll happen in the future, so why worry about it? And if you’re a little less sad sack, even if you don’t like Mike (the date), you’ll find a guy like I have if you lighten up. You’ll start a family, move to some safe enclave with people like us and you’ll be so busy raising your kids and living the life you won’t feel a need to save the world anymore.

I stopped crying then, wiped my eyes on my sleeve and looked at her. She sounded like my pollyanna mother. You don’t get it. What’s the point of having kids if not to move us toward a more creative, compassionate, kinder, equitable future? Seriously, do you really want our kids, or theirs, or their kids kids to wade through the mire of the crap we do today? The sexism? The systemic racism and inequity it perpetuates? The violence we tolerate. Still!

She just stared at me. Then, You really need to chill! Splash some water on your face then come out and have a glass of wine or two, or three, and something to eat and you’ll feel better. And be nice! She commanded before reaching for me and pulling me in for a hug then left the bathroom.

–

Fast forward 20+ years more— another generation drop. Just finished The Hunger Games series with my 13 year old son. Normally, I never see movies or read books that involve kids getting hurt anymore. As a parent, I can’t touch that terror. But my son insisted Suzanne Collins was the ‘best writer he’s ever read,’ a high endorsement for a kid who reads three or more books a month, and requested we read it together for our traditional nightly read. And as a fiction writer, I just had to see why my kid loved this series so much more than any before it.

The first book, The Hunger Games, was captivating at first read. Engaging. Fast. Edgy, but a smooth, entertaining ride. Knowing there were two more books in the series made it plausible the main character, Katness, went along with the games with only the vaguest of questions about the morality behind them. Alliances were formed for survival, not partnering for innovation or love. The novel focused on the games themselves, the dystopian society, exploitative, ugly, and violent in the extreme, but it didn’t occur to me until the end of the first book there were no real characters on the pages. Ultimately, most everyone was out for themselves.

The Hunger Games was sad, dark, deeply disturbing from opening line to closing sentence, a grotesque statement on our character— Ms. Collins’s self-proclaimed interpretation on the popularity of the reality show Survivor. My son promised me the series provided a happy ending.

We finished Mockingjay last week, the last book in the series. The novel was disjointed, too many quick cuts with no real depth scene after scene. Beyond exploitative, reading it was like watching CNN— a barrage of video clips of what’s happening, and only the briefest explanation (and generally singular POV) as to why. And though Katness and her band of tortured cronies eventually win the day, the author makes it very clear the new order is the same as the old one, equally ugly, most having learned nothing from their past persecution and perilous fight to overthrow ‘the Capitol.’

My father is right, according to Suzanne Collins.

Nothing ever really changes is not a happy ending. After finishing the full series, I realize the novels are more effect than substantive content, on par with reality TV, as the writer claimed was her model for the series.

Been feeling somewhat ripped off for wasting my time with her three novels, and a bit pissed off for the message that Ms. Collins is subtly selling to our children.

My husband and I are raising our kids with the belief that people are malleable. We can, will, and do change. In fact, the human race is in the process of change constantly, albeit slowly, and not just our physicality, but our minds— we are evolving beings. We encourage the notion we can reach our amazing potential for invention, empathy, connection, with enough collective intelligence to create and sustain flourishing societies through communication, cooperation, compassion, and compromise. We promote these concepts to empower our children with the mindset they are changeable, bad habits are breakable, contempt and anger minimized when we are respected, feel valued, loved. War, famine, disease, hate are all eventually resolvable if we allow our massively complex, creative brains a safe harbor to thrive.

Idealist, my father, and seemingly Suzanne Collins mock me. Better an idealist then the cynic resigned to impending doom, or the author who exploits our frailties from voyeurism to sadism for book sales and then lays our current character flaws in stone to our children.

We must believe fundamental change in our character and nature are possible for each of us to begin living our kinder, smarter, more creative and productive selves forward.