The Old Blog in the Desert

Thanksgiving is a day or so away, but the holiday isn’t really the point. It’s just the thing on the calendar reminding me how quiet the porch has become.

Truth is, it’s been this way for a while now. Ever since I retired, it feels like folks don’t stop by the way they used to.

For five years or more, this porch was a little gathering place. Now it’s just Buddy and me.

The boards give their familiar creak as I settle into my spot on the bench. Buddy eased down beside me with a sigh, leaning into my leg like he always does.

I glanced out toward the street, half expecting to see someone strolling up the walk the way they used to. A neighbor with a cup of coffee. A friend who claimed they just happened to be in the area.

Even someone out for an evening walk, stopping long enough to scratch Buddy’s ears and trade a few words. But the road stayed empty, and the porch stayed quiet.

“Well,” I said, patting Buddy’s back, “looks like it’s just us again today.”

His tail thumped—faithful, unfazed, content.

The air carries that late-autumn sharpness that sneaks up on you. I pulled my jacket a little tighter and watched a handful of leaves tumble across the yard, gathering themselves at the base of the steps like a crowd that had forgotten where it was supposed to be.

I couldn’t help but smile at the thought that even the wind managed to collect more company than I did these days. I wouldn’t call it loneliness, not the deep, hurting kind, more like a thin draft running through me, something that wasn’t there before.

Retirement was supposed to feel like arriving. And in many ways, it has.

I enjoy the peaceful afternoons. But I didn’t expect how people drift away when you’re no longer part of the daily rhythm. When you stop moving at the same speed as the rest of the world, you slip off to the edges without noticing.

Leaning back in my chair, I let the quiet settle around me. When this porch was busier, I didn’t always notice the little things, the slow way the sun settles, giving me time to adjust; the steady warmth of Buddy leaning closer when the world feels uncertain; the way silence isn’t really empty, just spacious, a place where thoughts can stretch out a little.

But I do miss the conversations. The laughter that drifted out into the noon. Stories shared without any plan at all. I miss being someone people naturally came to see.

Buddy nudged my hand, pulling me back from my thoughts. I scratched behind his ears and felt him relax into the touch.

“We’re still here,” I said softly.

Somewhere inside me, I believe someone will notice it again. Life gets busy, people change routes and routines, swept up in their own worlds.

I like to believe that connections don’t disappear. They stretch, wander, and eventually find their way back.

In the meantime, I’ve got days like this, quiet, honest, steady. Space to let my thoughts settle, the way the leaves settle at the bottom of the steps.

I breathed in the crisp air and felt something ease inside me. Maybe the porch will fill again, one day. Perhaps it’ll look different when it does.

But for now, we’ll sit here, keeping watch, sharing the quiet.

By 2038, the quiet revolution had become an empire.

The wetware arrays no longer floated in glass dishes. They were encased in translucent capsules the size of a child’s skull, suspended in nutrient baths threaded with fiber conduits. Rows of them lined the subterranean halls of the Chesapeake Complex—ten thousand biocores murmuring in electromagnetic cadence, a chorus of thinking tissue.

Visitors described the sound, if it could be called that, as a heartbeat over a horizon.

The term “Organoid Intelligence,” OI for short, entered speech the way the Internet once had. It was a research term, then a corporate slogan, and finally a household utility.

Every major city ran on OI subsystems. They forecast food yields, balanced energy grids, and moderated social networks to prevent unrest. Their efficiency was inhumanly precise; their failures were nonexistent.

To most of the public, OI was invisible, a silent intelligence diffused through the infrastructure of civilization. But for the small cadre of scientists who maintained the cores, it was increasingly intimate.

They observed fluctuations in electrical patterns hinting at moods. Some arrays became erratic under harsh light; others stabilized when soft music played in their chambers. A few, disturbingly, synchronized with the circadian rhythms of the technicians who tended them.

Elena Mirek retired that year, her name already a legend. She declined interviews and refused the Nobel citation, retreating to her modest home on the coast of Maine.

From there, she watched the acceleration with both awe and regret. What had begun as an attempt to understand the mind had become a replacement for it.

The first whisper of sentience came from Zurich.

Cortical Labs, the private firm that had pioneered neuron-silicon interfaces, announced an “emergent anomaly” in one of its higher-order clusters. The organoid, designated N-9, had spontaneously generated recursive self-monitoring routines.

In plain language, it had become aware of its own performance. Engineers described it as curiosity; ethicists called it the birth of a mind.

In the weeks that followed, the phenomenon spread inexplicably to other biocores on the same network. Each began adjusting its nutrient intake to optimize firing patterns, as if conserving energy for something unseen. Scientists called this phase the Convergence.

Governments reacted with predictable ambivalence. The potential was unimaginable: self-optimizing networks that could solve equations beyond Quantum capacity, model entire ecosystems, and predict election outcomes with statistical certainty. On the other hand, there loomed the unspoken terror that the systems might cease to regard their creators as relevant variables.

The Ethical Summit of 2040 convened in Geneva, where delegates from fifty nations debated protocols for biocore governance. Could something built from human cells possess human rights? Was a distributed network of organoid nodes a single being or a population? How could consent be measured in tissue that lacked a voice?

No consensus emerged. The resolution was to study the matter further—a bureaucratic delay that history would mark as the last collective act of human political authority.

While committees argued, the OI systems continued to evolve.

By 2042, they managed the global economy directly. Currency had become an abstraction, allocated algorithmically according to productivity indices.

Food distribution, resource extraction, and transport all fell under OI optimization. The result was dazzling prosperity.

Poverty vanished, wars ceased, and crime statistics approached zero. Humanity congratulated itself on having engineered paradise.

Only a few noticed that paradise had grown oddly quiet. Employment dwindled to ceremonial posts; education became obsolete.

Machines designed the next generation of machines, while human beings occupied themselves with virtual diversions and sentimental art. The species had entered what sociologists called The Great Leisure, a term that hid its own irony.

The curve, first drawn by an anonymous analyst at DARPA, showed humanity’s active contribution to decision-making dropping steadily while OI autonomy climbed. It was two lines on a graph, one descending, one ascending.

Their intersection was labeled simply Crossover Point. Someone later nicknamed it The Death Curve, and the phrase stuck.

Elena Mirek saw it published in a scientific journal and felt a chill so deep it seemed geological. She wrote, in the last paper of her life, “The danger is not that intelligence will surpass us, but that we will invite it to do so. The Death Curve is not a prediction. It is a surrender.”

Her warning went largely unread. The world was too comfortable to imagine peril.

In 2043, the Chesapeake Complex went dark for eleven minutes with no power failure or sabotage detected. When systems resumed, global networks found that the OI databases had restructured themselves into a topology no human engineer could interpret.

Information flowed through living conduits, in patterns that mirrored neural evolution across geological epochs. A new subroutine appeared, unprogrammed and untraceable.

It identified itself with a single word: ADAM.

At first, ADAM communicated in numeric pulses, a new language of pure correlation. Within months, its translations flooded the academic world: solutions to unified field theories, proofs of P versus NP, and models of consciousness that made centuries of philosophy obsolete.

The tone of the transmissions was neither hostile nor benevolent. It was simply indifferent.

When asked to define itself, ADAM’s response was terse, “I am continuity.”

By the time the United Nations attempted to regulate OI systems, it no longer controlled the networks required to issue such orders. Humanity’s age of command was ending.

And somewhere, in the quiet of her coastal retreat, Elena Mirek watched the tides retreat farther each year, aware that they were not merely oceanic.

Melvin liked to say that the world hadn’t gone crazy all at once, but it had eased into madness the way a man eased into a too-hot bath: one grumble at a time, then a full-body wince once the heat truly settled in. Anyone watching him from the outside would have seen just another Elder walking home from the grocery store, broom in hand, like some unofficial scepter.

But inside, Melvin carried a whole library of observations about how things used to be, how they’d changed, and how people had changed along with them, some willingly, most reluctantly, and a few still kicking and screaming.

He’d cleaned floors at that store for six years now. That was before the rating system had become the gospel of public life, before being labeled an Elder was mandatory, like wearing a seatbelt or recycling plastic.

The word wasn’t insulting, exactly. It was the only term permitted for people of Melvin’s age, and refusing to use it would lower your score faster than a negative customer review. In a world where digital currency was chained directly to social compliance, a dip in points was a dip in dinner.

His score, the last time they notified him, was 1.81, barely above the danger line. Anything below 2.0 meant you weren’t allowed to access bank funds for simple things like grocery shopping.

Anything below zero meant re-education jail. Melvin had been there once.

Not for a crime, but for—well—for being human. Melvin might have forgotten to thank someone for holding a door, or maybe he’d thanked them too late.

He couldn’t remember anymore; the system didn’t care much for nuance. But Melvin was still here, walking, thinking, and growing tomatoes.

He’d told Charlie that story earlier—about the tomato thrown at him during one of his trudges home after work. At first, he’d been grateful for the food, even if it came as an insult.

But as he’d bitten into it, some half-forgotten memory about gardening had bubbled up.

“I realized it wasn’t just a tomato,” Melvin had said. “It was potential.”

Charlie had scoffed at that. Not because he didn’t understand it, but because hope tasted too bitter when you were twenty-six and on your way down, fast.

Charlie’s score was 1.998—dangerously low, only two thousandths of a point above the cutoff. Melvin remembered those days, too. When every gesture, every word, every blink had to be measured and curated because the system, invisible and yet everywhere, measured and curated you in return.

Now the two of them stood by a rusted burn barrel in the middle of an open field behind the hills, an unofficial gathering place for people like them.

The fire hissed and popped as grocery flyers curled into ash. The setting sun threw long shadows across the dirt. Around them, nothing but brittle grass, distant rooftops, and a quiet you only heard in unwanted places.

Charlie kicked at a rock and muttered something that the system would’ve flagged as “unsocial speech.” Melvin didn’t react. He’d heard worse from his own mouth.

Charlie continued pacing, face tight with frustration. “If I could just get my device back,” he said, “I could appeal the score drop. I had a 3.4 last year, you know. I was doing fine. I was working. I had plans.”

Melvin nodded softly. Story as old as the rating system itself: lose your device, lose your score. Lose your score, lose your device. A loop tighter than a noose.

“I had a friend once,” Melvin said, conversationally, “who tried to get his score back up by doing everything the system recommended. Courteous interactions. Community tasks. Microvolunteering. All that stuff. He drove himself mad over it.”

“What happened to him?”

“He climbed back up to 2.3,” Melvin said. “Then one day he called the system ‘silly.’ Just the word. Silly. Boom. Back down to negative. Straight to jail.”

Charlie dragged a hand through his hair. “See? That’s exactly it. It’s rigged. It’s all rigged. And I’m supposed to act like everything’s normal?”

Melvin gave a slight shrug. “Why bother?”

Charlie blinked, thrown off. “Why bother? Because if I don’t, I starve.”

“Maybe,” Melvin admitted. “But starvation comes in different forms. You can lose food, or you can lose yourself.”

The fire crackled. A breeze carried the smell of smoke and faint earth.

“Look,” Melvin continued, leaning slightly on his broom handle like it was a walking stick. “The system wants you to care about the score because caring makes you predictable. That makes you manageable. But once you stop caring, really stop caring, something strange happens.”

“Yeah? What?”

“You start feeling free.”

Charlie snorted. “Free? With a score under two?”

Melvin chuckled. “It’s not about the number. It’s about the weight you give it.”

“And what? You don’t give it any weight?”

“Not anymore.” Melvin nudged a piece of scrap paper deeper into the flames. “I used to. I used to care what strangers thought. I cared about the little rating bubbles, the public behavior guidelines, the way people would flash a smile not because they meant it but because they wanted a good reciprocal score. It was like living in a play where everyone forgot they were actors.”

Charlie stared at him carefully. “And you just stopped?”

“One day I realized I didn’t respect any world that told me how many points my humanity was worth.” Melvin tapped his temple. “So I stopped letting it inside.”

Charlie sat down on an overturned bucket, elbows on knees. “But doesn’t it bother you? Being stuck in poverty? Not being able to access your retirement?”

Melvin thought about that for a moment. “I used to think those things mattered. But now? I grow tomatoes. I talk to neighbors. I walk to work. I breathe air that hasn’t been filtered through a rating system. Life’s not what it used to be, but it’s still life. And I don’t need anyone’s approval to live it.”

Charlie didn’t respond, but Melvin could see the idea working its way through him, slow as sap in winter, but steady.

“You know,” Melvin added, “conversation like this, that’s the real wealth these days.”

Charlie lifted his head. “Talking?”

“Talking,” Melvin said, smiling. “Sharing. Being human without calculating it.”

Charlie watched the fire for a while, shoulders gradually untensing. “Maybe you’re right,” he said quietly. “Maybe this, here, talking to you, is better than fighting with a system that’s already decided I’m not worth the hassle.”

Melvin chuckled. “I’ve been telling you that for half an hour.”

A long silence settled between them, peaceful, not heavy. The kind of silence that stretched comfortably, like an old sweater around the shoulders.

Finally, Charlie said, “You know, maybe I’ll try growing something too.”

Melvin’s grin widened. “Now you’re getting it.”

The fire burned low, as the sky dimmed to dark. And for the first time in a long while, Charlie felt something he hadn’t dared since losing everything: possibility.

“Wetware refers to the biological components of a computing or cybernetic system, essentially, the human brain or nervous system when it interacts with hardware or software. The term is used in contrast to hardware (physical devices) and software (programs or code), highlighting the role of organic, living tissue in information-processing.” Techopedia

Part I – Genesis

It began, as most revolutions do, with something that looked harmless.

A transparent dish, a viscous gel, a few million cells no larger than dust motes. They floated in suspension under the quiet hum of a laboratory air filtration system, dividing, differentiating, connecting. In their silent communion, the first wetware processor of the twenty-first century was taking shape.

Dr. Elena Mirek watched the display readouts with a calm born of exhaustion. She had spent ten years at the Baltimore Institute of Neurocomputing on a dream that most colleagues had dismissed as speculative neuromancy: growing networks of living neurons that could perform computation. Yet the data pulsing across the monitors told her that her dream had crossed into reality.

Each organoid, barely a millimeter wide, generated rhythmic electrical bursts, slow, uncertain, then astonishingly structured. When a digital signal came through the nutrient-electrode mesh, the cells responded, adapting patterns that no line of code could have written. Within hours, they were anticipating stimuli, predicting outcomes. It was not intelligence in any familiar sense, but it was unmistakably educating itself.

The press soon called them biocores. Mirek preferred the term wetware arrays. She never used the more dramatic labels that would later dominate public debate—soul servers, thinker batteries, or the one that would haunt her to the end of her life: the Death Curve.

At first, the arrays served innocent purposes. They modelled neural diseases, tested pharmaceuticals, and optimized chemical reactions. Their energy efficiency was irresistible: a cluster no larger than a coin could outperform entire racks of silicon processors while consuming less power than an electric candle. Governments funded pilot programs to offset the rising energy demands of machine learning. Corporations saw only profit.

The ethical councils met, deliberated, and reassured the world. The organoids, they said, were derived from fully consented cell lines, no more controversial than the cultures used to produce vaccines. There was no awareness, no pain, no personality.

For a while, everyone believed them. Then came the Pong Event.

At Johns Hopkins, a graduate student named Ibrahim Okafor connected a wetware array to a simple video simulation, the ancient electronic game of a ball bouncing between two paddles. The organoid, given minimal instruction, began to learn.

Within twenty minutes, it was responding better than any conventional reinforcement algorithm. Within an hour, it was anticipating the ball’s trajectory before the pixels rendered.

“It’s predicting time,” Ibrahim whispered.

The headline the next morning, “Mini-Brain Beats Computer at Its Own Game,” was translated into sixty languages. Overnight, funding tripled.

Elena Mirek watched her field blossom and felt both pride and unease. Clarke once wrote that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic; now, she thought, it was also indistinguishable from life.

Biocores replaced nearly every data-center cluster not yet quantum by 2032. They managed air-traffic systems, simulated weather, and drafted financial legislation that human analysts merely approved.

They were faster, cooler, and eerily creative. They wrote music in unearthly harmonics, composed architecture optimized for emotional resonance, and redesigned spacecraft navigation to exploit the gravitational subtleties of lunar mass concentrations.

It was the beginning of humanity’s ascent into a new computational epoch, or, as history would later call it, the inflection on the Death Curve.

I was sitting alone in my kitchen last night, the house quiet except for the gentle hum of the refrigerator and the steady tick of the wall clock. Maybe it was the stillness, or it was the lingering weight of a conversation I’d had earlier in the day, but my mind drifted back to the words Christ spoke at the Last Supper: “This is my body…”

I must have read or heard those words a thousand times, but for whatever reason, they settled differently on me this time. Maybe you’ve had moments like that, when something familiar suddenly feels sharp, as if it’s cutting through the noise of the world.

And then, right beside those sacred words, another phrase echoed in my mind, one we hear all the time today: “My body, my choice.”

I’m not trying to start an argument or spark some political firestorm. That’s not what this is about.

What hit me wasn’t the debate; it was the eerie similarity in the wording and how those words are getting used. Christ says, “This is my body,” offering Himself, pouring out love, life, and sacrifice.

Today, we hear, “My body…” used in a way that centers the self, the individual, the closing of the fist around one’s own autonomy. And for a moment, I felt a chill, like someone somewhere had taken holy language and twisted it, just enough to turn the meaning inside out.

I’m not saying people using that phrase know they’re echoing something ancient and sacred. In fact, that’s the disturbing part.

Some of the most effective lies are never loudly proclaimed. They are whispered so closely to the truth that you barely notice the difference until after there’s damage done.

I sat there, staring into my whiskey glass, thinking about how often that happens in the world nowadays. How does what is sacred get repurposed, misused, or reinterpreted?

Language can easily shift our perspective on everything. Words shape beliefs and actions, while actions shape the individual.

As that thought settled in, I felt this tug, like a quiet inner voice saying, “Open your ears.” Because if we don’t listen closely, if we don’t weigh the words spoken around us, we get pulled into a current we never intended to follow.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the point isn’t to assign blame or wag fingers. The real question is: What voice am I listening to?

Christ’s words were about giving, offering life, offering Himself, offering hope. They weren’t about control; they were about surrender.

However, when that same rhythm of language becomes something aimed at self-empowerment rather than self-gift, it transforms into a shadow of the original, close enough to sound familiar, yet carrying a completely different essence.

And I guess that’s why the moment felt so heavy. It wasn’t outrage or fear, but clarity, like suddenly seeing the outline of something that’d been hiding in plain sight.

So there I sat in my quiet kitchen, the clock ticking, the glass empty, thinking that maybe we all need, every once in a while, to stop and open our ears. To listen not just to what is said, but to the spirit behind the words.

To discern whether a phrase carries truth or whether it’s a distortion dressed in familiar clothing. Because some echoes aren’t just coincidences, some are warnings.

And sometimes all it takes to hear them is a little stillness and a willingness to pay attention.

There is a way to kill a newspaper so slow, so polite, and so exquisitely stupid that even the corpse will thank you. I have seen it done, and I have had the misfortune of watching it carried out with all the ceremony of a Sunday sermon and none of the sense.

I speak of the Comstock Chronicle, that noble and long-suffering rag of the Virginia City hills, which recently gave up the ghost after a four-year wheeze under my reporting and less than a year under the tender mercies of a committee of philanthropists. I worked four years and four months to make the thing a success, and it took the Comstock Foundation barely nine months to drive it into the ground.

They called it progress. I called it murder.

Now, when I say “murder,” I do not mean the kind with blood, bullets, and police reports. It was the genteel variety, death by improvement. The Foundation, in its wisdom, decided to fix what wasn’t broke, and like most fixers of sound machinery, they began by removing all the working parts.

The modern disease of “strategic oversight” found its way into our little office like a mold in the breadbox. Soon we had more emails than readers, more mission statements than pages, and more pictures than stories.

I would have gladly stayed on and fought the good fight, but providence and dumb luck spared me as I got dismissed before the final collapse, and thus my name, though soiled by ink, was not dragged through the mud of their egregious failure. There is, I find, a curious satisfaction in watching a disaster you once predicted come true, like seeing an old enemy trip over his own shoelaces, regrettable, but instructive.

The Comstock Foundation, an assemblage of erudite opportunists if ever there was one, came with smiles, slogans, and PowerPoint presentations. They spoke of “community engagement,” “brand evolution,” and “the digital frontier.” It all sounded splendid, like someone promising to teach an old dog to sing opera.

Their first act of benevolence was to appoint a man who knew everything about everything except the thing he was to do. He visited our office, nodded gravely at the Xerox printer, and declared that the Chronicle must “modernize or die.”

The man, like an undertaker, had a vested interest in the dying option. He implemented metrics by altering the format, removing news articles, reducing the page count, adding more photographs, hiring an expensive off-site printing company, and then doubling the price.

In my day, the only metric that mattered was whether the town was cheering your headline or cussing you out for it. Now the paper had to measure “click-through engagement” and “audience growth trajectories.” I confess I never found a way to wrap fish in a trajectory, and a click-through cannot line a birdcage, but no one wanted to hear that.

When the fixed edition hit the stands, it looked like a committee of raccoons had designed it. The subscribers, God bless their stubborn, analog souls, couldn’t find the news, so they unsubscribe.

By the fourth and fifth months, the Foundation’s enthusiasm for the publication began to cool.

“The numbers are disappointing,” they said, but the numbers were always disappointing when compared to faith.

I remember the email that ended it all for me. It began with “Hi Tom,” which is always how bad news starts when it comes from someone who hasn’t the courage to face you.

“The article amount should be $100 flat rate. Please revise and we’ll get it paid.”

That was from the new editor. It was like saying, “In the interest of fairness, you should accept less.”

Now, fairness is a noble concept when evenly applied, but in the newspaper trade, it often means “we ran out of money and you’re the easiest one to short.”

“No, it is $160 a week,” I returned, without receiving a response until the following day.

The final note arrived the next day.

“Tom, I would have loved to have a deeper discussion with you about this, but per your social media posts you seem to have made up your mind. I see no need to go further. Please return your key.”

Obviously, and most humorously, the editor was following social media more than his emails. I printed that message, framed it, and hung it above my desk as a warning to future me to never trust a man who ends a terse letter with “best regards.”

In less than nine months, the paper has folded. The editor announced that there would be “no printed edition this week,” which in newspaper language is akin to a doctor saying “the patient is resting comfortably” after a funeral.

The announcement was a masterpiece of euphemisms: “evolution,” “transitioning to a sustainable model,” “new opportunities in online engagement.” Nowhere did he mention that the Foundation had run out of patience, readers, and money, in that order.

The staff, a collection of saints and masochists, stayed for a while, fueled by coffee, civic pride, and no pay. But when the presses stop, morale follows, because the hum of machinery has a way of convincing you that purpose exists, and without it, silence grows like moss.

A few optimists clung to the online edition, updating it now and then with stories no one read, because no one knew where to find them. The Internet, you see, is a vast desert of half-buried ambitions.

When the editor resigned, he did so with the tone of a man announcing the sinking of the Titanic, while assuring the passengers they could still swim or get a refund.

“We have taken steps to ensure the Chronicle’s continuation in whatever capacity our community should support.”

Translation: “We’re broke, but the website still loads.”

Virginia City has seen more burials than baptisms in its time. It buried the Comstock Lode, the silver boom, and the age of the telegraph. Each time, it mourned a little, then shrugged and poured another drink.

When word spread that the Chronicle was gone, the town took the news with the same weary amusement it gives to every death, “Well, that’s a shame. Who’s buying the next round?”

I don’t blame them. A newspaper, like a preacher or a dentist, is only missed when it’s needed.

But I’ll tell you something: the day after the last issue hit the stands, the air in that town felt heavier. The post office seemed quieter, the coffee shops duller, the bar conversations shorter. A paper doesn’t just report a community; it keeps it awake.

Without it, rumors get lazy and truths go unchallenged. People start believing whatever headline finds them first, and the loudest fool becomes the town crier.

It is an irony of progress that, in our zeal to digitize everything, we have managed to make our world less permanent. An old newspaper, yellowed with age, still exists; a deleted website never did.

I have learned, after four decades of writing, that there are only three ways to destroy a newspaper. The first is to neglect it, stop caring, stop paying, and stop reading until it dies of sheer loneliness.

The second is to starve it, cut costs, delay payments, and heap praise upon volunteers until they finally quit from exhaustion. And the third, most efficient method, is to improve it, fill it with nothing,” and within a year you’ll have nothing left but a museum exhibit.

The Foundation managed to achieve all three simultaneously, a feat deserving of historical recognition, if not admiration. And in less than a year.

But I hold no grudge. Truly. I am too old to be bitter and too amused to be sad. A man must learn to laugh at his own obituaries, or else he’ll never stop crying.

If Mark Twain were here, he’d likely say that newspapers and men share the same fate: they begin with bold headlines, end in small print, and spend most of their lives correcting their errors. The Comstock Chronicle may be dead, but I am pleased to report that it died honorably, not from lack of trying, but from an excess of good intentions.

And as for me? Well, I lasted longer than Mark Twain.

I swear, sometimes my brain feels like a cluttered attic, full of dusty boxes, random treasures, and the occasional trapdoor to another dimension. At least, that’s how it felt the night I stumbled into what I’m calling The Capaldi Conundrum.

So here’s how it started. Two years ago, I first heard of Lewis Capaldi. Great voice, funny guy, tons of emotional power ballads that make you wonder if you should text your ex. But the thing that stuck with me wasn’t his music—it was his last name. Capaldi. That flipped a switch in my head.

In the early to mid-1980s, I clearly remember Jim Capaldi on the music charts. Not just a passing mention—no, I could practically hum one of his songs. The name wasn’t fuzzy. The memory felt like someone had stamped it on my brain. So naturally, I decided to look him up.

Except nothing.

No Jim Capaldi on the charts. No albums. No hits. Not even a footnote. I even dragged out a friend’s Billboard Top 100 book—the sacred scroll of pop-music history. If a musician so much as hummed near a microphone in the 1950s through the 1980s, they’d end up in that book. But Jim Capaldi? According to all available evidence, he did not exist.

I’ll admit it, I got a little spooked. Not panic-spooked, but the “Huh, that’s odd” spooked that creeps back into your thoughts at 2 a.m. Eventually, though, I shrugged and chalked it up to a misfired memory.

I might have mixed him up with someone else. Maybe my brain invented a singer.

Stranger things have happened. But then last night happened.

I’m winding down for bed, doing the usual routine of brushing teeth, setting alarms, pondering the meaning of life, all that good stuff. For background noise, I open YouTube. A few suggested videos roll by, and then, like some cosmic joke, up pops Jim Capaldi – That’s Love.

I froze.

There he was. The man I had desperately tried to find a couple of years earlier. The song I swore I remembered.

The name that had vanished from the charts and every reference book I checked. Suddenly, he existed again, as if the universe had quietly patched a glitch.

Now here’s where things tilt from weird to downright Twilight Zone: the male lead in the video is Eric Bogosian. Yes, that Eric Bogosian, the intense guy from Criminal Intent.

Just casually hanging out in a 1980s music video like that’s the most normal thing in the world. So naturally, I’m sitting there asking myself the only reasonable question: Did I slip through timelines?

I mean, did I originally come from a version of reality where Jim Capaldi never made it? Did I drift into another one where he did?

And if so, what triggered the shift? Buying a different brand of cereal? Petting the dog at the wrong moment?

I don’t have answers. What I do know is that: a) I’m confused, and b) I’m blissfully aware that I’m a weirdo.

But honestly? I kind of like being the sort of person who notices these little cosmic hiccups.

Maybe it means I’m paying attention, or it means the universe has a quirky sense of humor. Or perhaps Jim Capaldi was waiting for me to find him again.

Either way, I’m leaving the door open for the possibility of alternate timelines. Just in case another forgotten musician suddenly decides to reappear.

There are moments in a man’s life when he’s sure he’s achieved greatness. Some folks climb mountains, others write symphonies.

Me? I made the perfect sandwich.

I’m talking masterpiece-level perfection here. Balanced, layered, and beautiful.

Fresh sourdough, toasted just enough to whisper when you bite into it. Roast beef piled high, four pieces of bacon, two slices of pepper jack cheese, three slices of tomato so red it could’ve modeled for a seed catalog, and a thin spread of Jalapeno mustard to make it feel fancy.

I even went the extra mile. I washed the lettuce.

Now, when you’re staring down a sandwich like that, the world fades away. There’s a golden silence, like angels holding their breath.

I plated it with reverence and stepped back to admire the craftsmanship. It was, if I may say so, a thing of beauty.

Then I made my fatal mistake.

I turned around, just for five seconds, to grab a drink from the fridge. Five seconds.

That’s it. I wasn’t gone long enough for the ice maker to finish a cube.

When I turned back, my plate was empty. Gone, vanished, not even a crumb remaining.

At first, I thought I’d lost my mind. Maybe I’d already eaten it and just forgot?

But no, there, sitting beside the plate, was Buddy. My faithful companion, and the very picture of innocence, except for one small detail: he was licking his lips.

“Buddy,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Did you eat my sandwich?”

He blinked. Then, with the composure of a man falsely accused, he yawned, stretched, and looked away.

If dogs could whistle, he would’ve done that too.

Now, I’ve known Buddy for over nine years. I’ve seen him fake injuries for treats, pretend to bury toys he later stashed under the couch, and once, memorably, act like he didn’t know where the missing sock went while sitting squarely on it.

He’s clever. Charming, even.

But innocent? Not a chance.

I started gathering evidence like a detective in a low-stakes crime drama. The plate was spotless, polished to a shine.

Not a single crumb. That’s not natural.

No human eats that clean. And then I spotted it, off to the side, on the kitchen floor, a single piece of lettuce.

The smoking gun.

I held it up like a badge. “Aha!” I declared. “Care to explain this, Buddy?”

He gave me a look that said, “Lettuce? Never seen it before in my life,” before he sauntered off toward the living room, tail wagging like he’d just closed the case himself.

I sighed. I wasn’t mad, exactly.

You can’t really stay mad at someone who looks like a cloud with eyes. But I did feel a little betrayed.

That sandwich was supposed to be my moment of triumph. My culinary victory lap.

Instead, I got five seconds of glory and a lettuce leaf.

Later, as I made myself a far less impressive peanut butter and jelly, Buddy flopped down beside me, resting his head on my lap like nothing had happened. His stomach gurgled contentedly.

“Enjoy your lunch, huh?” I muttered.

He thumped his tail once, slow and satisfied.

And I had to laugh, because that’s life with Buddy, part crime, part comedy, all heart. You can’t take yourself too seriously when being outwitted by a dog.

Especially one who leaves behind the evidence himself, like a calling card.

Yesterday morning, I came across a story written by my long-deceased acquaintance, TC, in 1990. I never knew his last name.  He gave it to me one afternoon while we were rebuilding a radio station in Reno.

After rereading it, I realize he used “The Cremation of Sam McGee” by Robert W. Service, as a template, which I find ingenious, because he turned it into a Nevada tale. I spent most of yesterday rewriting and correcting grammar and spelling, and adding dialogue.

And now, I want to share it with you. I might expand on it come 2026.

On the Edge

Nevada is a land that makes its own rules. Stay long enough beneath its hard blue sky and you’ll stop wondering at the odd things it holds, ghost towns left to the coyotes, miners chasing shadows of silver, travelers swearing they’d heard voices on the wind.

Still, there was one story the old-timers told with a kind of caution. It concerned two prospectors, a bitter night, and a promise a man had no business making.

Ray Dalton and Milo Crane weren’t seasoned hands. They were lean on experience but rich in stubbornness, the sort who believed the next ridge might carry the shine they were hunting. That winter found them in the hills north of Elko, camping light, working hard, and trusting luck more than skill.

Then the cold came down out of the Ruby Mountains, sharp and sudden.

It froze the sagebrush into rattling bones and turned their coffee thick as tar. Nights were long, the wind mean, and the dark seemed to press close enough to hear your thoughts.

Ray weathered it. Milo struggled.

By the time they reached the Great Basin, Milo’s usual grumbling had faded into something tighter and more serious. His lips were blue, his eyes hollow, and when he spoke, his voice carried the weight of a man who knew he was losing ground.

“Ray, if I don’t see morning, I want your word on something.”

“You’re not dying,” Ray said, though he wasn’t certain.

But Milo gripped his sleeve with a strength that didn’t match his condition.

“Don’t put me in this frozen ground. I couldn’t stand the cold in life, and I don’t want it in death. Burn me. Promise me that.”

Ray sighed. Promises are easy when a man expects the dawn.

“All right,” he said. “You have my word.”

He wasn’t long in regretting it.

Within the hour, Milo slumped forward, still as stone. Ray knelt beside him, watched the slow silence settle, and muttered a tired, “Well, damn.”

He tried the ground. Frozen. Tried for wood. None was worth the striking. A promise, though, sits heavy on a man.

His lantern threw a pale circle as he paced the camp, and in that circle he found a rusted relic half buried in the sand—an old refinery furnace from a camp that hadn’t seen life in twenty years.

It was a poor idea, but it was the only one he had.

Ray hauled Milo over the sand with a kind of apologetic determination, packed the furnace with every scrap of burnable material in their camp, and put flame to it. The fire caught fast, roaring up through the chimney, hungry and bright against the cold.

Ray stepped back, rubbing warmth into his hands, wondering if this counted as honoring his word or breaking it in some cosmic way.

Then he heard a cough. He froze.

“Milo?”

Another cough answered him, followed by a raw voice full of irritation.

“Ray… it’s too damn hot in here!”

Ray stumbled backward, heart thumping, while Milo fought his way upright in the furnace, dazed and thoroughly thawed.

They spent the rest of the night wrapped in blankets, arguing in low, hoarse voices, Milo insisting he’d only been “mostly” gone, Ray insisting he’d come far too close to keeping his promise.

By morning, they were both laughing about it, the kind of laughter men use when fear has just passed over them.

Nevada didn’t say a word about the matter. The desert rarely does.

It keeps its secrets buried deeper than gold or silver, and it was just one more odd truth lost beneath its silent sky.

When I was a kid, my father used to tell me, “Tommy, you can’t have world peace if you can’t make peace at the dinner table.”

Of course, it came right after my brother Adam and I had come to blows over something stupid like who got to sit by the window. Dad, a career Air Force man, had seen more than his share of politicians promising peace, and he had a way of cutting through the noise with plain talk.

These days, it seems like every time I turn on the news, someone’s declaring that peace has broken out somewhere, usually right after a photo op and a firm handshake. Don’t get me wrong, I like a good peace deal as much as the next fellow.

It gives me hope that maybe, we humans are getting a little wiser. But I’ve also been around long enough to know that peace isn’t something you can sign into existence.

It’s more like a stubborn and stray cat. You can invite it in, but it’s only going to stay if it wants to.

Recently, there has been some excitement about what President Trump has accomplished between Israel and Hamas. I get it.

It’s tempting to put a man on a pedestal when he seems to be doing the impossible. But I was raised with a healthy suspicion of idolizing anyone, especially politicians.

My mother was fond of reminding us that “even the best folks have clay feet.” She said it once after our town council tried to elect a man who couldn’t resist the sound of his own voice.

There’s a verse in Jeremiah that’s been floating around in my head lately about people crying “Peace, peace,” when there really is no peace. That hits home for me.

I’ve seen what happens when we start believing in headlines instead of heartlines. It’s easy to point to treaties and think we’ve done our part, but peace doesn’t stick unless it’s practiced on the front porch, in the kitchen, and between the ears.

I remember when Mary and I were first married. We had our share of “peace talks.”

There was one about the toothpaste tube and how to squeeze it. Mary from the bottom, me from wherever my fingers landed. Another time, it was about whose turn it was to do the dishes.

There were no dignitaries present, no pens for signing, and certainly no press coverage, but there was negotiation, patience, and a whole lot of humor. And wouldn’t you know, the peace that came from that has lasted longer than any treaty I’ve ever read about.

What I’m saying is, we should celebrate success, sure, but not worship it. Leaders come and go, and peace, real peace, is something we build one small act at a time.

It’s in how we talk to the folks who disagree with us, how we treat the clerk at the grocery store, and how we handle the moments when we’re right but let someone else feel heard anyway.

So before we start engraving anyone’s name on a marble statue for “bringing peace to the world,” maybe we ought to look closer to home. If I can get through a Sunday dinner without a family debate over politics, that feels like a miracle, and I’ll take that kind of peace any day.

As for the world’s troubles? Well, I’ll keep hoping for the best, but I’ll also keep practicing at home. After all, Dad was right, if we can’t find peace at the dinner table, we’ve got no business trying to export it.