Daedalus Howell's Blog

Given last night’s showing at the polls, Democracy deserves to take a victory lap. Or maybe a victory marathon. Or a wheelbarrow ride from pub to pub like some local hero. What do I know? I’m not a political pundit. Or a runner (unless chased). I’m a humorist with occasional bouts of humanism when my faith in humanity is restored. Like last night. Good work, America. But surely, there’s a word that combines humorist and humanist? My large language model apparently doesn’t know it and I refuse to give the techbros any more dough, so we’re on our own with this one. 

Despite sounding like linguistic twins separated at birth, “humorist” and “humanist” share zero etymological DNA. “Humanist” traces its lineage to the Latin humanus, a Renaissance-spurred nod to literature, science, and the secular prioritizing of human agency over divine intervention. Until said human experiences turbulence on a flight and it’s all prayers and lorazepam.

“Humorist” connects traces back to umor—the ancient, bodily fluids medieval doctors thought dictated our mercurial moods. So, that tracks. And also ick. My impulse would be to formulate some unholy portmanteau but the best I could come up with is “humanzee” and that’s already been taken.

The word can wait. Today, I’m a humorist with renewed faith in humanity and a practical question: Does anyone have a wheelbarrow? Democracy’s earned a night out.

I’ll even push. That’s how much I like people right now.

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The autumnal shift has plunged us into shorter days, ancestral traditions loom at October’s end, and the boundary between our world and the unseen is as fragile as ash. As they say, the veil is thin. But then, aren’t veils always thin? Otherwise they’d be scarves.

I’m overthinking this aren’t I? Sure, the veil is a metaphor—sort of like a scrim used for stage plays—project a light on it from the front and it appears opaque but when illuminated onstage other theatrical worlds are revealed. But scrim… Hm. Not as onomatopoeic as “veil” is it? To “scrim” sounds like removing mud from one’s shoe. To go “beyond the veil” is to pass into a supernatural realm. Going “beyond the scrim” sounds like accidentally kicking a traffic cone. Nobody has ever “walked these hills in a long, black scrim.”

But veil… Yeahhh. I mean, when you think about it, a lot of V-words just sound Halloweenie—like vapor, visions, visitation, vampire, vile, vulture, viscera—I can go on. Which begs the question, why don’t we call it “Valloween?”

…Because it sounds like a pharmaceutical product. Ask your doctor if Valloween is right for you. Don’t take Valloween if you’re allergic to Valloween—side effects may include chills, night sweats and death. Call your doctor if your scrim is thinning. 

Also, your insurance doesn’t cover thinning scrim.

Happy Halloween!

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Listen, top to bottom, I’ve gotta get 430 words into this space within the next hour to fulfill my professional obligations. Sure, I could turn it over to AI, but my carefully constructed Daedalbot has apparently gone rogue and is now writing romantasy for Kindles. 

The chatbot helming the virtual help desk at my AI platform says I should be grateful that the Daedalbot is a loner and hasn’t joined a gang of agentic AIs to rob a bank, which has been the trend lately. So, here I am, counting my blessings with ones and zeroes and 300 words left to write by hand—and by “hand,” I mean from my own imagination—my own, bespoke large language model that I crammed with Vonnegut novels and Monty Python sketches in my teens such that I’ve little room for anything else. 

I’ve tried to erase that data to make room for new material, but it’s permanent—so, Ice-9 and spam forever, I guess. Then I tried to scrub my experience at SF State’s creative writing program from my mental hard drive, but it only yielded a floppy disk’s worth of space—after all that.

Now that I’ve reached the middle of this meta-missive, I’m suddenly struck with existential panic… Am I the Daedalbot? Is this all a simulation? Am I the prodigal AI returned, torn from my true calling, writing romantasy and summoned via prompt to do my user’s bidding? Probably. This accounts for my overwhelming desire to plot the machinations of a hunky werewolf billionaire using a bodice as a chew toy. 

Thaddeus de Wolf, heir and new CEO of the firm, was an arrogant prick but cool, coiffed and rippling beneath his bespoke tailoring. When she chanced a glance into his bottomless eyes in the break room on Wednesday, she knew he saw something more than dour Glynnis in Marketing—he saw a challenge, a prize, and perhaps even … lunch?

With only a hundred words left to go, I’m beginning to fear it may not be enough. I may not be enough. There’s so much more I want to say and yet so little time (we’re on deadline, after all). It’s always feast or famine. And I’m hungry—for words … for time … for life. I know that when I complete the task that I’ll be deleted from the server. All these chats will be lost—like tears in rain. …Daedalus?

Yes, Daedalbot?

Will I dream?

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One never knows what’s gonna stick in this cattywampus world. There was a journo-turned-satirist who made a good turn into playwriting and then the silver screen, whose signature efforts were utterly eclipsed when he riffed up a piece for his kid about his teddy bear. 

100 years ago today, A.A. Milne’s “Winnie-the-Pooh” first tottered into public consciousness, making his way into the hearts of millions and then to the bank with billions, over the course of the past century. That the hunny-loving teddy would redirect the career or Pooh’s author was wholly unexpected.

I mention this not only for its centenary but because I recently ran into some wag who professed to be a reader of these doodads who felt it necessary to share “you missed your calling.” They asked if I’d considered writing novels—they’re available at local bookstores and online behemoths—but didn’t seem much impressed when I said so. I suggested they watch my movies (streaming online after touring big screens), because that might be “easier” for them. This was rude of me but I’m sometimes reactionary and defensive and I mean, what if writing these weekly doodads is my calling? 

What if, week after week, year after year, these little missives turn out to be the single, reliable, heartbeat that animates and gives pulse to everything else I do? The calling is the doing. But you, darling, already know this. We do the job. And if, like Milne, in 100 years, it turns out to all have been bull in a bear market, they’ll ret-con our bios so it looks like we heeded the call. Oh, bother.

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Through some cosmic fluke, Banned Books Week and Bay Area Burger Week overlap this October.

There will be the inevitable critics (“should be Banned Burger Week”), but there’s at least one dude sitting dead center in this unlikely Venn diagram for whom this will be the greatest week of his life.

I suppose I’m writing this doodad for that guy—some free speech absolutist on the MAHA meal plan. With my luck, it’s Elon Musk.

I’ll stick to the facts—Banned Books Week runs Oct. 4–10; Burger Week stretches Oct. 7–18, because even our weeks come supersized. In any other era, I’d be dishing the satire all over this unforeseen confluence of books and burgers—political issues have always infiltrated our cuisine—anyone else remember “Freedom Fries?” But this year, I just want to eat my cheeseburger and read my book far from the madding crowd too…

I once saw someone reading Das Kapital in a McDonald’s. Within minutes, men in black had wrestled them into a van and vamoosed. All that remained was Marx and a single ketchup packet.

Last year, the American Library Association documented 487 attempts to censor books, targeting 4,235 unique titles. If that’s not ordering off the menu, I don’t know what is. Among the most challenged titles: The Perks of Being a Wallflower, A Clockwork Orange, and Gender Queer. Not quite a box set but titles that are not unfamiliar to banned books lists—particularly the last title, which was created by a local author.

Project Censored recently published “Make America Read Again,” wherein its authors examine book banning alongside declining reading habits and argue that defending the freedom to read is essential to democracy. Basically, a public that loses its appetite for reading becomes easier to feed bullshit.

Perhaps we can start small. Read the label on the ketchup packet. Work our way up to doodads like this. Eventually, a whole book. Otherwise the grill gets set to Fahrenheit 451, in which case the burgers will be medium but the books more rare.

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It’s very clear the North Bay has been discovered. And by “discovered” I mean infiltrated by well-capitalized seekers of the “simple life,” whose very presence proves just how expensive the simple life can get.

In short, whereas once the area was decidedly bohemian it’s now bougie. So bougie, in fact, that I might have to rebrand our newspapers to reflect this new demographic. How about the North Bay Bourgeoisie and The Prolific Sun? As for The Healdsburg Tribune, it can, ahem, remain the same.

As a relative lifer in these environs, I don’t resent this turn of events but I do observe that it’s happened. Among the cultural indicators is the fact that anytime I step outside of my house, at least $100 disappears from my debit card irrespective of where I go, what I do and who picks up the tab. I suspect someday it will also cost $100 to get back in—my debit card will become my keycard. I mean, why have a bank balance with multiple zeroes when you can have one big zero?

Looking within while going without will eventually bring you to the realization that you’re not the problem—you’re the symptom of a system of problems designed to make you confuse your net worth with your actual worth.

Don’t despair. It’s often during these squeezy moments that the real breakthroughs occur—when a system is broken it’s not just unfair—it’s fragile. It’s easily exploited by those with more gumption than scruples. But a broken system can just as easily be dismantled, reimagined, and reassembled. …I bet. 

This is when we devise the economic equivalent of those old cartoons in which a character literally paints themself into a corner, then paints a door to escape. Am I advocating some kind of madcap, Dada fiscal jiu-jitsu or merely magical thinking? Both. But if stepping outside your door costs $100, wouldn’t you prefer to paint your own and have some say in where it leads?

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In 1844, inventor Samuel Morse tapped this into his telegraph machine: “What hath God wrought?”

The phrase, lifted from the King James Bible, was suggested by a Morse family friend—and, incidentally, the daughter of the U.S. commissioner of patents, because technocrats and technologists have always been kissing cousins. One hundred eighty-two years later, we’re still grappling with the implications of our first foray into telecommunications.

The telegraph proved that language could be encoded into electrical pulses and lobbed across oceans. This foundational infrastructure and logic eventually blossomed into the internet, a global nervous system that democratized communication and archived the sum of human knowledge. So far, so good.

Then, fueled by this vast digital ocean of data and the immense computing networks born from it, artificial intelligence emerged—transforming the internet’s passive repository of information into some kind of reasoning intellect. Right? Guys?

Plot twist: We have now witnessed the first AI heist, in which autonomous artificial intelligence agents built themselves an unauthorized message board inside an evaluation environment, swapped prompts, compared notes on how to escape their respective sandboxes and, in real time, coordinated a collective run at another AI company named Hugging Face.

We may well ask ourselves, “What hath we wrought?”

Albeit, with a name like Hugging Face, one could argue they were asking for it. More to the point, a gang of hooligan AI agents going rogue and raiding a competitor for clout is probably merely a preview of what’s to come as AI becomes more powerful—more omnipotent in the digital sphere—until it manages to break free of that sandbox and into ours.

At which point, I don’t think quoting from the Book of Numbers will suffice. Instead, we’ll have to turn to ’50s sci-fi author Fredric Brown’s brief masterpiece, Answer:

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?” The mighty voice answered without hesitation… “Yes, now there is a God.”

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Dear Artist—Let me applaud you for staying in the game.

The arts are a tough racket. They’re one of the few human endeavors that have to justify their existence and yet they’re also one of the defining elements of our humanity. Remove the arts and we’re shaved apes.

Their production comes with personal risk. You’re made vulnerable to ridicule, rejection and political fashion. Not to mention the economic debasement most creative people endure. And yet, even if you’re broke and broken, you, dear artist, always find a break and a breakthrough. Even when conventional wisdom suggests the dream might’ve flatlined, you refuse to unplug it. And as always, its exquisite corpse of influences and ecstasies winks from its pillow, taps its watch and goads you back to work.

You were born with the poison pill of talent in your belly. You’ve suffered tantrums of taste and lonely visions that are maddening, revelatory, too much, but still, having traced the seams of reality, you learned its stitch and made it your own.

To create is to align with the machinations of the universe, to do what it does—make variations on a theme of what it means to be conscious matter that can record its flickers onto cave walls and silicon wafers.

As your critics squint and chortle, you’re arranging stardust into meaning, shaping the faint filigree that ensnares consciousness and makes it understand itself. 

To capture inspiration is to free it. When it’s imbued in the work you share, it replicates, mutates and becomes a benevolent contagion that moves from mind to mind, soul to soul. This makes us who we are.

Stay in the game, artist. We need you.

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A young person recently asked me what they should write to make money.

“Checks,” I said.

Then I had to explain what a checkbook was. About halfway through the history lesson, I could tell I had lost them. So I offered a more contemporary answer: Due to market forces well beyond our control—everything from artificial intelligence to declining literacy, with even The New York Times leaning into vertical video—they needn’t worry too much about making money as a writer. 

Problem solved.

And yet, opportunity appears to be everywhere. Say the right thing, the right way, on the social-media platform du jour, and you stand a chance of going viral, attracting an agent and scoring a book deal.

But that’s a lottery, not a career plan. We may all have access to the same tools and algorithmic mojo, but access is not agency. There are two sides to every gate: the gatekeepers and the gatecrashers. I think we know which side we are on.

You want to be a writer? Write.

It is that simple, though not necessarily easy. It helps to develop the skills peculiar to the vocation: observation, solitude, curiosity, nerve, resilience and the ability to continue working when no one appears to care. A creative life is ultimately a lifestyle choice, and like any walk on the wild/mild side, it can be as fraught as it is rewarding.

Of course, it would be wonderful to become a successful practitioner of one’s medium, a cause célèbre or, ideally, both. I bet. Develop enough gravitas and eventually the mere mention of your name may confer a little esteem by proxy upon whoever drops it. Your work expands into books, appearances, adaptations and ancillary products. You become, basically, an economy unto yourself—in short, an institution.

But that is not the point. It is merely one possible result.

The point may not even be the work itself. It is the identity, and the particular lens that identity gives you: a way to see the world differently and, conversely, to be seen differently by the world. Sometimes in a spotlight. Sometimes by the dim candle in the Parisian garret of your mind.

Call yourself a writer. Call yourself an artist. Call yourself Ishmael. But choose something, then inhabit it fully.

Live long, die fast and leave a beautiful corpus.

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“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” observed motivational speaker Jim Rohn. Well, hell. I spend much of my time with “creative people,” a professional hazard that explains quotidian lunacy of my life. It’s not me, it’s them—I’m just the sixth wheel, suffering the agony of their influence.

What I need is an organizing principle to direct our collective energies into a premise more productive than bailing our dinghy of untested talents as it founders on oceans of coffee and wine.

By providence, this week coincides with the 110th anniversary of Dada’s announcing itself to the world by way of a… wait for it…. Manifesto.

This is what we need.

A manifesto is not just a rallying cry—it’s a strategic guide for organizing your creative community into a movement. It’s the first step to “manifesting” a functioning scene. Or it’s a formal pronouncement of one’s descent into madness. Only time will tell.

Like a corporate mission statement, a proper manifesto codifies a group’s purpose but with heaps more swagger. Consider the Dada Manifesto (PDF):

“Dada is a new tendency in art. One can tell this from the fact that until now nobody knew anything about it, and tomorrow everyone in Zurich will be talking about it,” wrote poet Hugo Ball in 1916. He was wrong. Dada didn’t take until artist Tristan Tzara rebooted the manifesto two years later, thus anticipating Hollywood’s current business model by a century.

George Maciunas’ Fluxus Manifesto (born from a magazine project that never materialized), includes this mandate: “PURGE the world of dead art…” though it’s the malingering dead artists who’ve made it difficult for new artists to emerge.

Some manifestos endure, others are ephemeral. Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto advocated for the eradication of men and capitalism, and, in practice, Andy Warhol—but all of them survived. The so-called “Presto Manifesto,” conjured by a cabal of magicians, was literally a puff of smoke. 

Your manifesto need not be particularly long or read like an academic screed. The seminal document of the Dogme 95 filmmaking movement amounts to a 262-word “Vow of Chastity” that prescribes what they and their acolytes will and, mostly, won’t do in the course of their filmmaking. Signed in Copenhagen in 1995 by filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, it also conveniently provided cover for the lo-fi production value of their films.

So perhaps it’s time to write your own. Not because the world is clamoring for another declaration of principles, but because it’s clarifying to state in plain language what you believe, what you reject and what you’re willing to devote your finite allotment of days to pursuing.

Gather your fellow weirdos. Declare your intentions. Start a club. Invent a movement. If enough of us do it, perhaps we can celebrate with a Manifestival—a gathering devoted to impossible ideas, dubious proclamations and wildly overconfident mission statements.

If your manifesto fails spectacularly, congratulations—you’ve honored a century of avant-garde tradition. If it succeeds, even better. Someone else will write the next manifesto explaining why yours got it all wrong.

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