I don’t know what to do about AI.

Humanoid robots. Automated cars. Augmented reality smart-glasses. Smart dishwashers. Robotic surgeons. And what about the weird AI images all over my newsfeed? Where are these freaky AI pictures coming from?

A masterfully crocheted wedding dress that can’t be real. A sand castle the size of a YMCA. A portrait of Jesus made entirely from broccoli, captioned: “Squint your eyes and see the Risen Savior!”

Frankly, I think AI dropped the ball with the Broccoli Jesus caption. Humans could think up MUCH better captions for such an image. (“Broccoli take the wheel!”)

Likewise, my newsfeed features dozens of phony AI images of mothers cradling disabled children, captioned, “Nobody will wish my baby a happy birthday.” This, accompanied with ba-zillions of birthday wishes in the comments.

Or the AI image of a 121-year-old woman blowing out birthday candles, captioned: “Nobody will wish me a happy birthday.” This is followed by a throng of comments.

What the hell is going on?

What’s the point of these pictures? We beat

Russia to the moon and now we’re using our hottest technology to make portraits of religious figureheads out of cruciferous vegetables? (Broccoli is my co-pilot!)

AI is also taking over the field of writing. News articles, for example. I have a friend who works for a prominent news outlet. I asked why news items read so bizarrely nowadays.

“AI of course,” he says.

I’ll explain. In olden times, writing an article was a lengthy process. First, a journalist would think up an idea. Then, journalists physically left their desks for gumshoe research. After which, journalists would tap out a godawful rough draft which usually had the same literary value as, say, poo.

After the rough draft, journalists would THEN be forced to mercilessly retype, reword, restructure, reorganize, rethink, and re-edit their work until the article finally resembled well-thought-out, well-informed, passable poo. This was how the American…

I found old photographs in the attic. I rifled through hundreds of old Polaroids. Most were infant pictures of me naked.

I was a fat baby. People were concerned about me as a newborn. “Have you seen Sue’s baby?” people would say. Then they would inflate their cheeks and do an imitation of the Pillsbury spokesperson.

My hair was the color of a carrot. My belly looked like a No. 9 bowling ball.

In one photo, I was taking a bath in the kitchen sink. My parents made no attempt to hide my butt from the camera. In fact, I found many pictures wherein my fundaments were actually the focal point.

My mother took these pictures.

I know this because my mother was obsessed with my butt. She was always showing these pictures to company.

“Can I refill your tea?” my mother would ask people. “Would you like to see a picture of my son without pants?”

There are various photographs of me standing with my rear facing the camera. In these pictures

I’m wearing a ten-gallon hat, holding a little pistol, and my unmentionables are showing.

“Sean was very chilly that day,” my mother would explain.

There are photos from my first day of school. I was with my school friends, holding a huge sack lunch in a supermarket paper bag. Thank God I had my pants on.

I was holding a bag-lunch, likely, because my old man was extremely frugal. I can specifically remember my father used to insist on meeting pizza deliverymen halfway.

Also, my father used to cut my hair on the porch to save money. My dad was not a trained aesthetician, but used the Eyeball Method. He would shave one side, then the other. He pronounced the haircut finished when I looked like Uncle Fester.

The Little League pictures. Those are hard to look at. I was a chubby first baseman. My uniform fit…

She was 9. And obsessed with animals. How could she not be? She was the daughter of a farmer, animals were life.

She especially loved the baby animals. They were so fuzzy, so adorable, she simply could not put them down. She was always rolling in the dirt with various baby pigs, or tiny goats, or anything that was even remotely cute.

One day, the old ewe gave birth. The sounds of maternal distress came from the barn. At the time, she was helping her dad do chores. But she quickly became distracted by the sheep in labor.

The baby lamb was sickly. Frail and underweight. And it turns out that sheep aren’t the world’s greatest moms. The mama sheep rejected her own baby and walked away.

Her dad said the lamb would die without its mother. Just part of the great circle of life, he said. Nothing anyone could do about it.

The little girl pleaded with her father. “Please let me

keep it!”

Tears streamed down her little cheeks. A little girl with tear-stained cheeks is pretty hard to ignore.

Her dad gave in. But keeping the lamb was a bad idea, he reminded her. It would surely die. After all, the lamb couldn’t even stand up on its own. Usually, a lamb can stand upright a few minutes after birth.

The little girl scooped up the tiny creature. She cradled the lamb. And my sources say the lamb even slept with her that night, unbeknownst to her parents.

The next morning, a glimmer of hope.

When the girl awoke, the lamb was standing on its own legs, looking right at her. And he was even able to drink milk.

After that, the girl was never seen without the lamb. She bottle fed it. She took it everywhere. Wherever she went, the lamb followed.

One day,…

Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Even though this name has been so misused, misapplied, and misappropriated throughout history.

I mean, what even is your actual name? People in various countries call you different things. There have been wars over which is the correct name.

How many people have been slaughtered in, quote-unquote, “Your Name?” We humans are still fighting about what, exactly, that name is.

The American evangelicals, ironically, choose a Middle English translation of a Latinized version of a Greek iteration of a Hebrew nickname, that was officially sanctioned by King James I, who most historians believe was bisexual. I’ll bet the evangelicals love that.

Still, other people use other words for Your name. But the Jewish culture, in my humble opinion, gets it right. Because they won’t even say your name. It’s too holy. Plus, once you use someone’s name, you’ve already kind of boxed that someone in. But you can’t be boxed in.

Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in

heaven. Because heaven knows sometimes it sucks down here.

Even so, there’s got to be a plan to this mess we call life. There are all these coincidences happening. People call these instances different things: Grace, providence, karma, synchronicity, God winks. Whatever you call them, they happen. Every moment. And there seems to be a reason for it.

Give us this day our daily bread. Us. Not just me. Us. Collective. Personally, I have never known hunger, I was raised in a food secure household. But there are many other people included in “us.” People who are starving. People who don’t have what they need. And it’s not just bread.

There are people lying in hospitals, prisons, nursing homes, or crack houses. They are drunk, and homeless, living from dumpsters. They have needs. And it doesn’t seem fair that I sit on my duff, eating Fritos…

I miss the newspaper. Before the internet. I’m talking physical newspapers. The kind you unfold.

I miss the morning routine of it all. Walk to the end of the driveway, barefoot, pre-sunrise. Messy hair. Morning breath. Unsheath the newsprint from its plastic. Soy-based ink on your fingers. That low-grade, wood-pulpy newsprint smell.

Also, I miss the design of a newspaper. A newspaper is a work of organizational art. The broadsheet layout, headlines, dropheads, bylines, datelines, section numbers, and… (Continued on A3).

I miss shaking open the paper with a grand gesture, organizing each section on my table, reading pages in a specific order: Funnies first. Sports next. Then, senseless acts of politics.

I miss the corny car-dealership ads. And the ultra-serious advice columns, with headlines like: “Help, my daughter says I wear ‘granny panties,’ what should I do?”

I miss the Far Side.

I miss low-quality photography, op-ed columns written by the extremely self-righteous, crossword puzzles, the classified section, and the “errata” section—I doubt people even know what that is anymore.

I used to deliver newspapers

with my mother. Our lives revolved around newspapers. We have hurled—seriously—tens of thousands of papers in our lifetimes.

We serviced the majority of the continental United States in Mama’s little Nissan Altima with a heater that smelled like recently produced cat poop.

At two in the morning, sitting in her front seat, we rolled each copy into a giant enchilada, shoving each paper into a plastic wrapper, while drinking enough coffee to concern a cardiologist.

We delivered to expansive neighborhoods, subdivisions, business districts, apartment complexes, 2000-story beach condos, newspaper machines, hotels, you name it.

But do you know what my favorite part was?

My favorite part of the delivery process came toward the end of our shift. It would be sunrise. Old folks would be standing in driveways, awaiting delivery. The newspaper was THAT important to them.

Mister Oleson stood at his mailbox while…

The email came yesterday.

“Dear Sean, I am an atheist, I do not believe in God… Your God cannot be omnipotent and concomitantly allow evil, you can’t have it both ways… Remember the recent floods in Texas, where was your God then?

“...Sorry Sean, would love to believe in a higher power like the rest of you small-brains, but my heart and brain both say ‘HELL NO.’”

Dear Friend,

I’m no theologian. I’m not even a church guy, either—not unless it’s a pennant race. No, I’m more of a Pabst Blue Ribbon enthusiast.

Moreover, you’ve written to an uneducated man. I had to look up the word “concomitantly.” I’m still not sure how to use this adverb.

So I’m not exactly the person you should be sending these emails to. You’re much sharper than I am. Any response I write will make me look like I am full of bovine byproduct.

There is, however, one thing I know.

I once met a woman from Illinois who was born blind and deaf. Just like Helen Keller. She was remarkable. You would have

liked her.

The percentage of deaf-blind cases in America is low. So you’re looking at a population of about 11,000 in the U.S.

Moreover, 90 percent of deaf-blind people also have medical, physical, or cognitive disabilities. Back in the olden days, many parents put deaf-blind children up for adoption. They were sent off to state facilities until someone adopted them. Which—surprise—people rarely did.

That’s what happened to this deaf-blind girl. As a kid, she was tossed around. She didn’t learn how to truly communicate with other humans until her late teens.

Take a moment and think about that.

Her life was a long, arduous road. For her first half of existence, she had no concept of our world. She lived in darkness and perpetual silence. She did not know, for example, who her caregivers were. Heck, for that matter,…