Great, Actually. Yours?

In which The Jubilarian finally lives up to her name

You know, that’s not really fair. I’ve had a lot of good weeks. I just do much of my complaining here. Much of my venting of that feeling that rises up from your gut and lodges around your heart (I’m being literal, not poetic) and the only way to let it out is through language.

At least that’s the way I’m most confident and comfortable letting it out, by writing versus speaking. Writing lets me keep stopping and asking myself: Is that what I really mean? Is that true? Writing helps me see where that lodged emotion is coming from and how it’s affecting me.

I keep wanting to write, I’m terrified, and I keep stopping and saying to myself, Really? Why are you terrified? And then I remember, Oh right. That and that and also that. And then I become aware that the more terrified I feel, the harder and faster I work to repress it. The quicker I try to turn something into a TV show or a novel, for instance, the more terrified I know I am.

So I turn my life into fiction, as I’ve written about here, and I write fiction to tell me how I feel about my life. If I can turn me into “her”, I can have lots of things theoretically happen to her and then I’ll know what I want to happen to me. And I’ll have taken all these fictional practice runs.

That makes me wonder whether my writing draft after draft of The Matriarch over the past handful of years, continually changing my mind about what should happen to my heroine, and why, was really about my own life constantly changing and having to think about everything in a totally different way.

It was like forcing my old brain to do a somersault. Invigorating. But painful. But maybe I need that kind of shakeup! But does anybody really need that?

Ultimately, confusing. But invigorating!

All the astrologers are saying that Aries is supposed to saddle up and ride that ultimate fire horse into their brilliant future, and because I don’t believe in astrology, that’s what I tried to do.

I mean, I don’t want to be snarky, but wasn’t everybody’s last five years like this?

So last week, I pulled together two very different final scripts for Old Woman Naked. I hope to soon have news about a show date in LA, and beyond.

Our new Nameberry app got submitted to the app store, which fingers crossed means it will launch very soon. My Nameberry partner Hugh and I but mostly Hugh have been working on evolving versions of this for a year now, and it’s a completely new direction for baby-naming.

Let’s put it this way: It makes baby-naming a group activity. It goes back to my word of the year, now that I think of it: connection. That’s not accidental, though I can’t remember exactly how one sparked the other or even which sparked which. Brain somersaults.

Also, listen to this: I’m back together with my ex, AI, so you’re not allowed to say anything bad about them, at least not this week. After last week’s big anti-AI rant of mine, I wanted to analyze a volume of data too big for a human, and I was able to get AI to extract theoretically-useful or at least smart-sounding analysis and ideas. Who knows whether they’ll work, but you can pay a high-priced consultant and you don’t know whether their ideas are going to work either.

Now AI has given me some new ways to try to stay alive in this AI-riddled hellscape. I know, ironic, but it’s like Diane Keaton and Michael Corleone. I don’t condone the family, but I love my person.

I loved feeling more upbeat about AI, loved getting a little taste of its potential for someone with great ideas. How many people is that? I truly have no idea. I went to visit my old friend and Glamour writing partner Kim Bonnell and her lovely husband Michael Sukin in Joshua Tree last weekend, and Kim and I were saying that we were both surprised, as veterans of the ivory tower content creation monopoly, at how very many people are doing interesting and creative things online. When there was a handful of people interpreting the culture for everyone, we thought we were the only smart, cool, original ones.

So maybe it’s the same with AI. Maybe a lot of people are going to accomplish and at least attempt amazing things that simply have not been in our realm of possibility. And now I swear to God, I have that feeling in my heart again. I had to read to this point in the essay, and feel that feeling rise up three separate times for me to understand why:

The world is changing fundamentally.

For bad, of course, as I detailed last week and as we see in the world all around us. So AI has stolen my entire life’s work to learn how to replace me. Now that is fucking evil, and I’m at the front of what is likely to be a much larger phenomena.

But also for good, because if I have a business idea right now, maybe I don’t need to go to VCs and raise millions of dollars to hire all kinds of people to even test the waters. I don’t have to ask my lawyer and executive friends for free advice. I can just do it, and I’m sorry for all the people I’m putting out of work by doing that, but I’m happy for me.

I don’t know where that kind of capacity is going to take us, but if it’s anything like Instagram Reels, I predict an extremely fascinating future.

Kim and Michael and I watched the HBO version of Every Brilliant Thing, which Daniel Radcliffe just opened in on Broadway. It’s a one-hour one-person show, simple and brilliant, and my only disappointment came when I discovered that it isn’t true. But that didn’t happen until this morning, actually, so when I believed that was the performer’s actual story, it made me see everything around me in a more beautiful light.

Kim and I went for a sound bath to the Integraton, which I remembered with much pleasure from a handful of years ago. The building is very cool, hand-built by a man who believed he was communicating with Venusians. You climb up into this wooden dome which has amazing acoustical properties. You lie on the floor with your head facing a ring of crystal bowls….

Joke: What’s the difference between sound bathing and sound healing? Sound bathing is sound healing without the bullshit. I don’t even know if that’s true. I’m impuning the reputation of sound healing for a cheap joke.

As a ten-time veteran of Rancho La Puerta, I basically have a Ph.D. in sound bathing, and I have never, not once, taken a sound bath that I did not at least somewhat enjoy.

Until this one. I don’t know how to express what I heard, but I’ll tell you what Kim and I said after we walked out:

Kim— That was a little…dark.

Pam — Yes! I had such a negative feeling the whole time!

Kim — Me too. I kept thinking it had to get lighter and it didn’t. It was like the soundtrack to Apocalypse Now. There was this rhythmic hum like helicopter blades and then this low-pitched hum…(I’m laughing out loud remembering this.)

Pam — Exactly! It was the sound of doom.

Kim started referring to the place as the Dome of Doom. (Laughing again,)

Here’s the good news:

What we lost in sound bath euphoria we gained in after-sound bath laughter. We had more fun not having fun at the sound bath than we would have if we’d loved it.

Maybe that’s a little age-related. Snark is definitely not in among the young. Or among Californians. I learned that lesson the hard way when Owen’s pre-k teacher took me into a shed (and I don’t mean a metaphorical one) and excoriated (if that means yelled at) me for saying that she was half my age and got sick twice as often. She actually made me cry, but what can I say, It was California and I was fresh from New Jersey and I didn’t know I should have left my snark at Newark Airport.

Anyway, Kim and I celebrated our 46 years of East Coast-based friendship by having what felt like almost sinful fun being snarky, then we picked up Michael and went to dinner at an outdoor restaurant with the best sunsets, where we encountered a room full of people just begging to have a movie made about them. I mean, thank you, Jesus.

I drove back to LA without incident and I’m sitting in my pretty living room in my soft pants and last night I watched the Oscars with two of my three kids, so how lucky am I?

Really, I know it’s corny, but to be alive for one more day, and to have the perspective to appreciate it: that’s what it all comes down to. It’s true what they say about bad feelings coming from living in the future or the past. Right now, I’m more than fine.

Kim and I, aka Kam and Pim, celebrating 46 years of friendship by not dying, again.