Old Coffee and Regret

I remember being nine years old, hunched over a Big Chief writing tablet, chewing the eraser off a yellow number two pencil as if that somehow helped the words come out better. I’d just decided I was going to be a writer.

Not just any writer, either, the kind whose name people dropped in casual conversation, whose words mattered. At twelve, I wrote in big block letters across the front of my umpteenth tablet: “I live to write and write to live.”

It felt profound then. Still does, in a way, though now it sounds more like a plea than a declaration.

Fifty-six years later, here I am, staring at a blinking cursor like it’s mocking me. The silence between blinks feels louder than ever.

Somewhere along the line, all that big talk turned into quiet regret. Rejection slips pile up like autumn leaves, crisp reminders that the world keeps moving, whether I keep writing or not.

The funny thing is, I used to think persistence was enough. Just keep showing up.

Keep typing. Keep pitching.

Someone would notice. Somebody had to, no?

But lately, the only one noticing is me, and not in a good way. Every day, I see another reminder of how small my words seem compared to the noise out there.

A friend emailed me the other day, bragging about how he used AI and a steady diet of cigarettes and Red Bull to bang out a 300-page novel in two days. Two effing days.

I couldn’t decide whether to be impressed or nauseated. Maybe both.

He’s proud, of course, and good for him. Really.

I can’t help feeling deflated, though. It’s like someone poked a hole in what little air was keeping me afloat.

Then there’s broadcasting, nearly fifty years of it. Fifty years of early mornings, bad coffee, lonely studios, and the occasional spark of magic when a segment landed just right.

You’d think that would count for something. But lately, it feels like I’ve been talking into the void.

My morning show’s unrated. My podcast barely makes a ripple.

Meanwhile, I watch people half my age shoot up the charts for saying less, doing less, being less. It’s enough to make a person wonder if effort even matters anymore.

I stopped reading novels a while back. Not because I don’t love words, I do, but because I can see it now. The hand of AI, brushing through the sentences like a ghost editor, smoothing out the texture until everything reads the same.

Every story has that “smell of old coffee and regret,” only it’s not real coffee, not really regret. It’s just a copy of both, an echo of Mickey Spillane, perhaps, that the programmer read and remembered.

You can tell by the punctuation, too. No em-dashes, no tilde marks, no rhythm that breathes between thoughts. The little quirks that make a sentence human are vanishing, stripped clean in the name of clarity or optimization or whatever new word they’re using to hide what’s happening.

I used to love stumbling over a sentence that felt awkward but true. One that forced me to pause, reread, and feel the weight of what the writer was really saying.

But now everything’s too neat. Every paragraph lands the way it’s supposed to, every metaphor polished until it gleams like a showroom floor. It’s all perfect, and that’s what’s wrong with it.

Perfect.

Even the newspapers and online stories, things I used to rely on for the pulse of the world, have that same hollow hum. It’s like someone took a human voice, ran it through a filter, and left the echo.

We’re reading to ghosts now, and they’re writing back.

I saw a short video the other day, some guy talking about the “power of storytelling.” His delivery was flawless, every beat hitting just where an algorithm said it should.

And yet, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching an imitation of feeling, not feeling itself. The eyes blinked right, the smile landed, but nothing lived in it.

We’ve gotten so good at the tricks before we’ve learned the trade. Everyone’s teaching “how to go viral,” “how to write like a pro,” “how to build an audience.”

Nobody’s talking about how to say something. Nobody’s teaching how to sit with a blank page and hurt a little, how to wrestle with a thought until it becomes something worth sharing.

There’s that saying floating around, “Learn to use AI before it learns to use you.” Too late for that, I think.

It’s already writing our songs, our scripts, our novels. It’s learned our turns of phrase, our patterns, our shortcuts. It has also learned our impatience, too, the way we scroll past what doesn’t grab us in five seconds.

The worst part is, it has made us doubt ourselves. I see it in writers I know, artists, musicians, people who used to breathe creation like air. Now they hesitate before picking up a pen, wondering if it even matters.

Can something made in sweat and silence stand up against a machine that never sleeps? I tell myself it does, and I want to believe it does.

That somewhere in the cracks of the overproduced and overpolished world, there’s still room for something raw. For the kind of writing that bleeds a little on the page.

Maybe that’s why I keep scribbling, even when it feels pointless. I want to leave something behind that doesn’t sound like everything else.

A line, a story, a moment that feels human. Perhaps “inadequate” isn’t the most accurate term; maybe “failure” is a better fit.

That one sticks in the throat like a splinter you can’t quite dig out. I’ve spent a lifetime stringing words together, but I can’t find the right ones to make sense of this moment.

Tonight, I can’t bring myself to open my journal. That was my safe space, just me and the page, no expectations, and no judgment.

But now, even that feels heavy. The pen sits there on the desk, waiting.

It’s patient, cruelly so.