The end of another month. Two months left in this year. I think that the pills I'm taking are effecting my desire to do this, or is changing it at least. At the same time I don't really care. No great loss. That attitude towards it is likely also coming from the pills. It has only been two weeks and one day. I feel something, but not much. I wouldn't say that I feel good, or even better. Maybe weird. Like my senses are slightly more tuned in. They say the full effects won't be felt for 4 to 6 weeks, possibly up to 8. Maybe it will get better. Maybe it will get worse. I feel like Frank in Hellraiser when he acquired the box. I don't care which way it goes. Maybe it will tear my soul apart.

It would be funny if someone robbed a pharmacy and accidentally stole a bunch of these pills to sell on the street. Hey man, do you wanna buy some pills? One a day will make you tired, dizzy, and nauseous for a few of days, then give you a headache and make you gassy and constipated for two weeks straight. Then you'll feel kind of weird for another few weeks. At 4 to 6 weeks, or maybe 8, things might get better. Alternatively, your life could turn into a horror story because of them. Only 2 cents a pill. Ah whatever, just have them for free. Good luck. Have fun.

I'm supposed to come up with something to focus on in my next therapy session. A reason to be there. The first visit was sort of a general outline of my life. What do I hope to get out of it? What would I like to focus on first? I knew the questions were coming. Hilariously, they stressed me out. I guess anxiety, I said. The therapist said it has to be something more focused, narrowed down. I agreed, and said, yes, I suppose anxiety is a pretty broad stroke. Then it was time for me to leave. I said I would think about it. And I have been thinking about it.

I'm a dog running around like a chicken with its head cut off. Leash dragging and bouncing along the ground beside me. Life keeps grabbing the leash and jerking me around by the neck. Wanting the main course. Getting table scraps. It is fucking irritating. Is that also too general?

If I start typing things about it I might resolve it, and then I won't need to go. Not really. I don't know what I want. I don't know what I hope to gain from therapy. I don't know anything at all. Maybe that is a good starting point. I'm fifty five and I haven't figured out what I want to do with my life. I've just been taking it as it comes, as is. What's that they say, if life gives you lemons? Make lemonade? lol, more like, what am I supposed to do with this fucking lemon? I'm as is. Like an old car crumbling in the weeds and tall grass beside the driveway, or in the back row on the lot of a crooked dealership. Uncertified. Broken. Needs some work. Leaky gaskets. Rusty around the edges. Rotting frame. Don't look under the hood. Vision going. Tinnitus. 2 prescriptions. Tired.

By Tooth and Claw

A few years back, I woke in a morgue with burns on my body and no memories of who I was or how I got there. No one has been able to tell me who I am or who I was before the fire. The name they apply to unknown victims stuck to me so I'm called John Doe.

I may be strange but, so far, it seems I'm only as strange as the world I've found myself in. I have ten toes and ten fingers in the usual configuration. This world has villages, towns, cities, suburbs, rivers, trees, and animals. That doesn't mean the world or I are normal. There are things in these woods you can't find in a text book. If the man in the morgue had managed to open my chest, he would have found pieces of me that were not inside any other human. I've seen some of those parts myself but, like the woods and brambles I wander through, I haven't seen them all.

Would you like me to read the story to you instead? I have a recording of me reading it on YouTube?

Like the proverbial magpie, I spend a lot of my time learning about whatever new mystery happens to catch my notice. Maybe some of those things are in books. Maybe they're not. It's hard to get good books here. Today, I'm following some mysterious moths. Mrs. Welkie, whose house is maybe a mile away, lent me a book about moths in the region. These look like Ornate Tiger Moths but have blue coloration instead of orange.

I sat on a log and watched a group of the moths slowly opening their wings. The book said the Ornate Tiger Moths had a 1.7in wingspan. These seemed closer to 2 inches but I wasn't bothered by the discrepancy.

A pair of people approached, bothering the birds, bugs, and who knew what else. It was unlikely they were here for the bugs or at least not the same bugs I was watching.

The two stumbled around the biggest tree closest behind me.

“John?” a woman's voice said.

“Yes.” I didn't turn from my study subject.

“Mrs. Welkie said we'd find you out here,” a man's voice said. Mrs. Welkie was an older woman who made friends easily as I well knew.

“Does she need something?”

“No. She said you'd know where we might find three-banded ladybugs. They have yellow around their black spots —”

“I know what they look like. Try up that way,” I raised my left index finger and pointed up ahead. Strange enough to have someone else out here looking for a specific bug. Three-banded ladybugs might be about as rare as whatever I was looking at. I hadn't seen the bugs myself on this outing but I had a sense about it.

“Thanks!” the man said. The two started to march further into the forest. Both were dressed in tee shirts, shorts, and worn tennis shoes. Each carried a thin bag on their back.

“If you don't want to scare them off, walk more softly,” I said.

“Sure thing, dude,” the woman said.

I wasn't surprised when they continued to clomp and bluster through the wood. At least they were moving away from me and only a few of the moths had moved on.

---

I finished the lunch I'd packed and cleaned up the mess an hour or so after the sun had reached its highest level in the sky. There was a lot of light left in the day but the sky had started to turn a little. I'd been so engrossed in the moths that I hadn't been paying close enough attention.

The people after the ladybugs surely didn't have the gear they needed to deal with the coming storm. I sighed and retraced their route through the trampled plants they'd left in their wake.

Following them on foot would become harder once the sky darkened completely but I wasn't ready to pull out my flashlight yet.

Someone screamed a pretty good distance away. I ran toward the sound. I found the bugs they had been looking for but not the woman or man.

Their bags were up against a tree.

I kept my eyes on the ground in front of my feet, moving slowly and only occasionally looking above. The plants between the trees had been pressed down. The ladybugs they'd been looking for might have a lost a few of their number to whatever had pressed down on the plants but there were still plenty of them on the trunks of the trees.

“Hello?” I called out. I waited to hear a response.

The only thing I heard was the chirp of bugs and the rustling of the wind in the branches of trees. A group of birds cleared up from their roosting spots and flew to new, nearby branches on the same trees.

They distracted me for a moment. I nearly fell into the hole.

The hole was roughly round and about four feet in diameter. The interior wall was built of dirt. Shocks of roots from grasses and trees stuck out of the tunnel. The hole didn't go straight down like a well. It curved down and into the dark. I moved around to the side facing furthest away from Mrs. Welkie's house since that was the direction the hole headed.

I turned around and checked I could still get out before I was any further into it than waist deep. Before I lost sight of the light, I shouted. “Hello?!”

I counted beats and listened. I only heard what might have been a scratching. I pulled a flashlight out of my pocket and pointed it at the looming dark ahead of me. Four foot of vertical space isn't much to work with. I had to crouch to move. I steadied myself on the sides of the tunnel and stopped every few steps to shine the light ahead.

“Hello?” I called into the dark. I weighed options. Whatever had made this hole was huge. So far, the things I had found in the dark were creatures that weren't able to deal a deadly blow to someone who could recover from burning to death. My memory was limited. The fire that sent me to the morgue hadn't killed me but I'd forgotten everything I'd known before then. I don't know what I am or what my limits are. I seemed to need to breathe, eat, and sleep. I might survive a fire — at great personal cost. I didn't know whether I could survive a fall, drowning, or some other thing.

Some stories I'd read suggested that strange entities like me might be killed by silver knives or salt. I'd never had a chance to test the silver theory but salted fried potatoes hadn't harmed me yet.

Assuming the woman and man were even in the tunnel, I might not be able to rescue them unassisted. I didn't have more on me than the clothes on my back, the flashlight in my hand, truck keys, wallet, notebook, pencil, and folding knife in my pockets. These weren't ideal tools for a rescue.

I shouted down the hole again. My voice echoed off the walls of the tunnel. I heard a drip and some rustling in the distance but no voices answered mine.

A few steps later, the tunnel under me crumbled and sent me down through another passage.

---

I woke in a pile of debris, looking up at faint light from a hole in the uneven roof of the place where I found myself. There were roots a few fingers thick leading up. I felt for my flashlight and found it by my right hand in the dirt and stones. I shined it up. The plastic lens in my flashlight had been cracked but it didn't do much to hurt the light. I'd still have to replace the lens sooner or later. Before I could deal with that, I would have to get out. Even with the light, I couldn't be sure I could climb back up that way. The roots might snap under my weight and, even if they didn't, there were too few of them to be certain about making my way out the same way I'd come in.

If the woman and man fell like I had, they would probably be injured. I always wore denim, long-sleeve shirt, and thick leather boots when I went in the woods. My outer layers were dirtied but the fall hadn't cut through them.

The casual clothes they had been wearing wouldn't cover much of their vulnerable skin let alone hold up to a fall like that.

I didn't know that was what had happened with them but the math was starting to go sideways. I got to my feet and dusted myself off.

“Hello?! Can you hear me?” I bellowed. My voice didn't echo as much here. I listened and shined my light around the makeshift room I found myself in. Water dripped from somewhere. Where I'd fallen was near the high spot of the space so I hadn't woken up in a puddle.

I pushed my way through a gap and into the next space. It was larger than the place I'd first found myself in but it still wasn't really a place in the way the tunnel had been. Something was using this empty area and had made changes to it but the space itself may have been there for decades or more.

I don't know whether it was rational or not but I felt a shiver of fear. This was not a place for shouting. I moved quietly and turned the light in a circle around the room.

Something big had flattened out some of the space in the room but I didn't see it anywhere. Things were moving, though.

I spotted a human arm and made my way to it. It was still attached to the person. The woman.

She was covered in a thick, gooey mucus. Otherwise, she looked very much like she had when she and her friend had asked me about the bugs. Maybe she'd had an easier trip here than I had.

I wiped my hand across her face, making sure her mouth and nose were clear.

She squirmed and moaned.

“Are you ok?” I whispered.

She whined and squeezed her eyes closed.

“Sorry,” I muttered and moved the light away from her face.

“Where is he?”

“Your boyfriend?”

“He's not my boyfriend.”

I didn't have an answer to my question and my hand was starting to numb from the stuff I'd cleared off of her. I pulled her to one of the low spots in the space and used the water from the puddle to clear the goo from her exposed skin.

This wasn't a good place to be in but I was never going to get her topside without her cooperation.

She shrieked.

“Hush!” I said.

“Where the hell are we?”

“Underground in a den or something. Probably made by whatever brought you here. Where is the man you were with?”

“Who?”

I moved her to one of the walls and sat her down.

“Stay here,” I said. “And stay quiet.”

She nodded at me. She looked sleepy.

“What's your name?”

“Steph.”

“And the name of the guy you were with?” I rinsed my hands in the puddle closest to her.

Some presence of mind shook loose.

“Nathan. His name is Nathan.” Steph crawled close to the puddle as I walked into the dark.

A loud thud came from the direction I was heading.

Steph startled behind me, splashing the water she was now rinsing her shorts in.

I crouched lower and pointed the light at the ground. I had to climb through a gap into the next space. I stood to full height again.

I heard voices. Or something that sounded very much like voices. Chanting. Not words, I don't think. The voices were around me, talking to each other. At least that's the way it seemed to me. Maybe like birds or bugs calling to each other.

Something whizzed by my head. I ducked and flashed the light around. I didn't see what had flown by me but I did spot Steph's friend. I scanned around the room as I stumbled through the uneven ground. Stones and roots threatened to make me stumble.

Nathan was completely out of it. His legs were splayed and his upper body was hunched over them. He looked a little rougher than Steph did. He had cuts on his arms and legs but nothing life threatening.

I shook his shoulders.

He wasn't as covered in whatever slime had gotten on Steph. Maybe that was the reason for the cuts but I didn't have evidence of that yet. Nathan thrashed, almost like he'd been stirred from a slumber.

“Where am I?” he muttered.

I pulled him to his feet.

“Come on, Nathan,” I said. “Let's get out of here.”

“Ok,” he mumbled. “I lost my shoes.”

“I'm not surprised,” I said. I led him by the hand.

He squirmed in my grasp but didn't pull his hand back.

---

“Nathan?” Steph said as we made it back to the same chamber I'd found her in.

Nathan pulled away. He rushed around me and hugged Steph.

“You've still got goo on you,” Steph complained. She squeezed out of his grip and shoved him into the puddle.

“Make it quick,” I said. “We need to get out of here.”

The voices returned. They surrounded us. I flashed the light around. I could only catch the edges of them. They might have been bats or very large insects. I wasn't ready to rule anything out yet.

Steph and Nathan splashed around in the puddle, making a quiet racket the voices and flutterings couldn't quite drown out.

The splashing stopped suddenly.

“We're ready,” Steph whispered. “Are we going out the same way you came in?” (15:23 issue) “No,” I shook my head, heedless of whether they would see me do it. “I doubt I could get myself up that way. Without a rope, the three of us definitely wouldn't make it.”

“Sorry,” Nathan said.

I didn't respond. I went left since behind and front of me were blocked off and the right is where I'd found Nathan. Someone grabbed the back of my shirt but the hand didn't pull on me.

The makeshift tunnel we went through was uneven. It winded up, down, left, and right at random intervals and had the ends of tree roots crossing through the paths. I'm not so good with time when I'm deprived of the sun, moon, and stars.} I've never seen the point of wearing a watch. It makes sense for others. Just not for me. I rarely have appointments and what little money I need I get from donations or trades.

I wished a little for a watch now, though. It would be good to know if I should bother looking for a trace of sunlight through the drizzle that was surely happening above by now.

We came to a wider spot with the path diverging in two directions.

“Which way do we go?” Nathan said.

“Stay here,” I said. “I'll check one and come back for you.”

Steph looked like she was going to panic.

Irritation rose in me. I didn't want to deal with this but I couldn't risk them screaming.

“I won't be gone long. Please stay calm. I'm sure you don't want to draw them here.” I didn't even know who 'them' might be in this case. I hoped they knew more about what had brought them here than I did. I wanted to ask them if they remembered anything now that their skin wasn't covered in the mucus. I might try again later. I just had to hope whatever memories they might have would be enough to motivate them.

Steph nodded, biting her lower lip like it would keep her from making any noise. One of those strange human things. It wasn't that the lips made the noise but rather some strange shared symbolism I didn't have access to.

Had I known that kind of thing before the fire that took my memory and my past? I considered it often.

I rounded the corner. The trail narrowed and went up before going down again. I followed it a little further.

Something startled me. Some ... being. A creature of some sort. I wasn't close enough to see it clearly. Its proportions were inhuman. It had short hind legs, long forelimbs and giant gold eyes. Its body was more like the size and shape of a large dog than a human. It didn't have skin or solid pieces of an exoskeleton like an insect. It could have been made of rags. Some of its patches were brown and others green, black, or cream colored. I wasn't close enough to see for sure whether the colored spots were really made of cloth.

I had never seen its like. At least not in the memories I still had. I waited there for a moment to see what it would do.

It stood still but not so steady that I could mistake it for a statue or a dead thing. Its chest expanded and then contracted like breath.

If I could have been sure it was safe to draw near, I still wouldn't. The creature didn't seem inclined to let me move past it.

I turned around and kept an ear out for movement behind me. If the thing did follow me, it was utterly silent and didn't change the pressure of the air that surrounded us.

Had something like the creature taken Steph and Nathan into the tunnels? Had beings like it made the tunnels near the surface? If so, the things might have no interest in whatever I was. That didn't mean I was in the clear from danger. Anything after the others was a threat to me and there were other things in these tunnels too. Not just creatures but probably holes and cliffs.

When I got back, Steph looked like she was ready to chase after me.

“Well?”

I shook my head and led them the other way.

The path started out narrower and went down deeper and faster than the other had.

Steph and Nathan whispered behind me.

I had a rule I'd developed since losing my memory. I didn't involve myself in others' conversations where I'm clearly not wanted even if the conversation is about me.

“Mister,” Nathan said.

“Yeah,” I said without looking back. The darkness still enveloped us on every side, tempered only in front of us by my flashlight. I didn't have spare batteries on me. I wouldn't lose my head if I didn't have the light but Steph and Nathan were barely holding on.

“We didn't get your name.”

“John Doe,” I said.

Nathan laughed.

“Really. What's your name?”

“It's a long story but that is my name,” I said. It wasn't really that long but I didn't feel like telling it.

“John?” Steph said.

“Yes?”

“What was on the other path?”

“Dead end,” I said. If they found this unconvincing, they didn't say anything about it.

The path widened into another space. This one didn't have offshoots to worry about so we moved through it and into the next tunnel. I flicked the flashlight off and felt my way through the winding passage.

Maybe I was listening closer since I couldn't see or maybe my companions were more scared because it was dark. They made so much noise behind me that I wasn't confident I could clearly hear the things ahead of us. I guessed asking them for quiet would have made them angry and noisier. I tried to live with it.

The path opened up after a long while. I turned the flashlight back on.

Steph shrieked and Nathan startled. Nathan fell back onto his butt. At least the dirt here was dry.

I spotted what they were concerned about. Four creatures. The same kind that had turned me back from the other tunnel.

The creatures jumped back when they heard the noise from the other two but they didn't move off the paths they had staked off.

“I don't think they're trying to hurt us,” I said. I moved toward the one path that wasn't blocked.

The creatures didn't move from their spots. Their eyes seemed to glow in the dim frame made by my flashlight. It was just a reflection of light in a slightly golden hue.

“Come on,” I said.

Steph and Nathan didn't hurry to join me. I had to walk back to them and push them by the shoulders.

“If they wanted to hurt us, they would have done it already.”

Steph let out a cry of relief once we were in the next tunnel.

I squeezed in front of both of them and led them down the new path.

“Were those like the things that brought you here?”

“What? No. I don't think so at least. I couldn't see.”

“It might be the goo talking but I thought the things that got us were snakes.”

“Big ones. Like nothing you've ever seen.”

It was presumptuous to guess what I had and hadn't seen. In this case, they happened to be right. I hadn't seen a gigantic snake. I had seen things that frightened even me, though. I didn't need to fill their minds with terror as I was trying to get them to the forest above us.

I didn't think we could outrun a snake large enough to make the tunnel I'd first jumped into. I didn't know if a gigantic snake could move faster than a smaller one but they'd probably move fast enough especially in their own tunnels.

The passages were so quiet the sounds of Steph and Nathan breathing behind me were almost deafening. Much of this segment was pretty skinny but nearly tall enough for me to stand at full height if I needed to. Every step was uncertain and I was held up as much by my elbows pressing against the sides as I was by the ground under my boots.

“Can't we look ahead?” Nathan said. “I think this is starting to get to Steph.” The sound of something hitting a human back punctuated the silence.

“I'm fine. Just keep moving,” Steph said.

I slipped my hand inside my pocket and pulled out the cracked flashlight. I pressed the little rubberized switch to click the light on. Because of the bends and twists of the tunnel, I couldn't see much further ahead with the light than I could feel. I pressed the button again and dropped the flashlight in the breast pocket of my flannel shirt.

Several long and tense minutes later, we found ourselves in an empty space.

I turned the light on again and shined it around the room.

Steph shrieked as the light passed over some bats.

“They don't have any interest in us,” I said. “They eat bugs and small rodents.”

“No! You don't understand! Nate!”

I turned around.

Nate was down low with his ass on the ground, crawling backward. He looked up with his mouth wide open.

I spun around and searched for what they were reacting to. All I saw at first were the same flying shapes I'd identified as bats just a moment earlier. They still looked like bats but a large group of them melded together.

At first, the shape they made was like nothing I have seen on Earth or beneath it. It could have been like the shapes that swarming birds make sometimes but it morphed and shifted until they made five bipedal forms. The forms stood at about shoulder height. They weren't shaped much like humans. They had round bodies and spindly legs and arms. Their heads were roughly melon-shaped with big, gaping jaws and no sockets for the eyes they didn't have.

Even I felt a cold shiver in my bones. I didn't recognize them. Maybe I would have if I hadn't lost my memories. Something about them spoke of hunger and something else. Despite the similarities of our present forms, they didn't recognize us as anything more than prey.

Something fluttered around us. More of the little flittering, flying things that had merged to form the figures in front of us.

Nathan shrieked this time.

The form closest to us took a swipe at me. Its gleaming claws looked sharp enough to rend flesh from bones.

Instinct pulled me back in time to avoid a serious injury.

“Don't let them join up,” Steph shouted.

I scowled at that. I didn't have any reasonable options to keep them apart. I stepped between two of them, leaving three to my left and two to my right. I protected my front with my left arm and my back with my right.

The creatures formed of little flying animals shrieked and hissed at me. One of them held a clawed hand up for a moment and took a swipe at me.

I didn't have enough room to dodge this time.

It hit my left arm and left three deep gashes in it. The pain was sharp and bitter. It stung.

I was going to need a new shirt. I reached my right hand behind me.

“Get close and follow me. You can hold your fists up together to protect your midsection and most of your arteries,” I said with a quiet hiss.

There was a little scuffle behind me and then I felt someone press up against my back.

I reached and grabbed a shirt and pulled them forward with me.

“Don't stop for anything,” I muttered.

A few more of the bat creatures took swipes at me. A few claws landed, tearing the shoulder open on my shirt. I pulled through anyway.

Steph and Nathan both made noises of surprise. I would be able to rescue them if I could get them out but I didn't see a way to do it without further injury. It was no time to stop.

We pulled past the beings and made it to a tunnel.

“We got everyone?” I shouted without looking back.

“Yes,” Nathan and Steph both said.

“Alright. Keep going.”

I pulled the flashlight out and flicked it on, lighting up a little of the winding path in front of me.

We did the closest thing to a run that we could do in a tunnel that was a little wider and much shorter than me.

We came to another open area. This one was pretty small. The others wouldn't be able to pass me unless I pressed myself up against a wall.

“How are we doing?”

“You're bleeding,” Nathan looked like he might pass out at the sight of the blood running down my left arm.

“It's not as bad as it looks,” I said. I didn't know how bad it was but I had recovered from fatal burns. I figured a few cuts on the topside of my arm were probably not going to do the job. I squeezed past them and shoved the flashlight into my mouth. I dug into the low roof of the tunnel we'd just come through, partially collapsing it. I turned around and squeezed past them again. “Let's get going.”

---

The next stretch of tunnel started heading up a little. It was a relief. We'd been pretty steady in depth for a while. I'd already considered trying to dig up whenever we found a good place to try it.

Before I could give it any more thought, I realized I'd missed something.

“Back up,” I told the others.

“What's wrong?” Steph's voice came from behind Nathan.

“Nothing. We might have found a way out.”

They backed down the tunnel.

I turned back and found the hole I'd missed. It was a little small for me to fit in. I used both hands to dig it out.

Nathan watched me with something like fear mixed with excitement.

I was sure he was watching the wound on my left arm. I held the only light in my mouth. It was just strong enough now to help us make out the path ahead. It wouldn't give him much of a hint about how deep the cuts were.

I got the hole big enough to lift myself up into it. I shined the light and found one of the bigger, rounder tunnels.

I let myself back down.

“Go on. I'll help you up. Head left when you're up there,” I pulled Nathan toward me and lined him up with the hole.

I helped push him up. He disappeared into the dark.

“Are we getting close?” Steph said.

“It's heading in the right direction and it looks like the hole I came down to find you. I hope so.”

She nodded, looking more like she was thinking on what I'd said than anything else.

I pulled myself up into the tunnel after them.

“Careful where you step. On the way down, I fell into a hole that led me to you two.”

That seemed to give Nathan an idea. He got into a crawl and spread himself across as much of the width of the tunnel as he could.

“Do what Nathan's doing,” I told Steph.

The three of us crawled up the steep incline. The tunnel curved gently this way and that, occasionally leveling for twenty feet. It was almost a surprise when we crossed the hole I'd fallen in to begin with.

Nathan was able to easily avoid the hole. Steph and I followed after him.

Soon, the three of us were in mud from the rain that had come down into the tunnel.

“We're almost there,” I said. “Keep going but be careful. We don't want to slip down the tunnel.” I let the mud that we were crawling in cover my forearm. The mud couldn't hide the shreds that had been made of my shirt but the cuts would be less obvious. There was still water dripping but it might have been the leftovers of the rain working its way off the leaves and needles of the trees.

Steph managed to get herself out of the hole on her own but Nathan needed help.

As I was pushing Nathan out, small shapes chattered around us, moving past us and into the night sky.

“God. Not again!” Nathan said.

I pushed him out of the hole and climbed out of it myself.

The flying creatures formed up. This time, not in the shapes of the bipedal creatures that had found us underground. They formed into a gigantic, curving snake.

Steph wept silently and shook.

“Oh shit,” Nathan said when he saw what Steph was reacting to.

“Don't panic,” I said through gritted teeth. I pulled the flashlight out and turned it on. I shone it at the snake and walked steadily and calmly toward it.

It hissed and moved past me.

I spun around and saw it go down into the tunnel. It seemed to give us a final flick of the tail as it disappeared down the hole.

“What are we going to do now?” Steph said.

“I'll lead you back to Mrs. Welkie's place. You can find your way to your car from there.”

---

We walked through the damp of the night. I hoped they would calm down before we made it back to their car. I hoped the memories would fade into a dream-like thing with fuzzy edges.

They bickered about what to do. Nathan wanted to go to a nearby bar and try to tell others about what they experienced.

Steph looked skeptical.

“Will you go with us?” she asked me.

“We fell in a hole and dealt with some bats and badgers. I've already had my vaccines. You should get yourselves taken care of.”

“Bats?!” Nathan seemed offended. “You saw what we saw.”

“I don't think I did.” I flashed the light up ahead of us. “There's your car.”

“Where are you going?” Steph said.

“Back to my own truck.”

“Thanks for everything,” she said.

“Yeah. Thanks, man.” Nathan sounded a lot less grateful than Steph did but I hadn't just insinuated that she'd been imagining everything they went through.

We parted ways. I did stop at my truck. I pulled my torn shirt off and tossed it into a waste bag I keep under the shell. I pulled out a spade. I usually used it for latrine duty but it would have to do for my purpose.

The walk back to the tunnel was faster since I didn't have to worry about the others keeping up.

I hopped down the tunnel and scratched at the roof with my spade, aiming for the spots I thought might be weakest. It may have been my paranoia but I felt eyes staring at me in the dark. I didn't know how long I had before the others showed up.

Minutes of work left a nice pile of dirt and stones blocking the tunnel entrance. It would take more time and effort to block out the dim light from the moon and stars.

I dug faster, aiming to bring down big chunks. I was a little too successful and got myself caught in a crumbling pile of dirt and roots. I backed myself out of it and shook out my undershirt. I walked down the tunnel a good ways.

The eyes I'd felt on my back shone lightly in the dark. It might have been a trick of the mind or eyes.

What I saw had dim, red eyes. They made small movements. A group of them worked on another hole in the top curve of the tunnel. Each figure was a little taller than half the height of the tunnel itself. I couldn't make out much more about them than that.

I drew near. This part of the tunnel still required me to hunch down to move through it. I couldn't have been silent even if I'd tried. Every foot step and move involved a subtle crunch.

The red eyed beings didn't run or flinch. They did look at me from time to time as I moved closer to them. That didn't mean there was no danger. There wasn't enough light in the tunnel to see if they were the same kinds of creatures as the ones that had tried to keep us on the right paths before.

My heart pounded. After the help the others had given us, I wasn't ready to assume these were interested in harming me but I was still cautious.

The red eyed beings backed away from the hole they'd been digging. One of the closer red eyes nodded at the hole.

I looked up through the hole. It had a steep slope but it led to a dim sky blocked by the tops of waving trees.

“Thanks,” I said. I tucked the spade in my back pocket and started making the climb out of the hole.

I got out in time to find men wandering around the woods with flashlights in hand. Closing the hole I'd climbed through would have made too much noise. I slipped behind a row of trees.

They didn't see me.

I went off to the left, parallel to the line I figured they were making from Mrs. Welkie's house. I hopped Mrs. Welkie's chain link fence and slunk through the back yard to the house.

The yard was covered in leaves but the damp from earlier made the surface soft if not quiet to walk through. Someone who stood perfectly still might hear me from a pretty close distance. It was a risk but a smaller risk than standing still in woods that were being scoured by men with flashlights.

I scratched at the back door.

Mrs. Welkie opened it. She spotted me and came back out with a broom. She brushed me off and then let me into her house. She locked the back door behind us.

“Shower's in that way. I'll come in for your clothes and leave you a pile of my late husband's so don't mind the door.”

I nodded.

---

A knock came on the front door. I rushed through pulling on the clothes Mrs. Welkie had left me. The cuts on my arm and shoulders had stopped bleeding though they looked pretty severe still. The shirt would cover the wounds long enough to keep prying eyes away from them. I gave my hair another pass with the towel before walking out.

“John,” Mrs. Welkie said. She was near the front door and looked a little nervous.

“Coming,” I said. I took a steady pace to the front door, towel still around my neck.

A group of men stood outside Mrs. Welkie's house.

“Take us to the tunnels,” a man at the front said. He directed this to me.

I stepped out onto the porch. I felt a cold shiver. There were about thirty people gathered there.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked.

“All my life. Forty years.”

“In all that time, how many have gone missing from these woods?”

His face twitched. He looked around at the crowd that surrounded him.

“Before today, none.”

“Counting today, none,” I said. “There's no one missing unless there are other hapless tourists no one has told me about.”

Some muttering broke out between the others in the crowd.

“They said there were monsters in the tunnels. It's not safe to have them so close to our houses.”

“I found them disoriented and distraught. They got out safely with my help. I climbed through dirt and muck to get them out. I didn't see anything scarier than a bug or a bat. I've already had my shower. I'm not showing you a hole I'll have to rescue you from in forty-five minutes.”

“Come on, James,” one of the other men pulled James's shoulder. “Let's go back to the bar. First round's on me.”

James scowled and pulled his shoulder back. He walked away from the woods.

I went back inside Mrs. Welkie's house. The smell of grilling sandwiches hit my nose. I sat down in a chair at the kitchen table and rested my head on my hands on top of the table.

“You know how long I've lived in these woods?” Mrs. Welkie said as she stirred the soup that was bubbling beside the sandwiches.

“No,” I said. Exhaustion filled my voice.

“All seventy some odd years of my life. I've seen things in the darkness. Things I wouldn't dare tell anyone but you. I think of them as friends. Or at least well-behaved neighbors. They never borrow my sugar or shout at each other after the sun goes down.”

There are things in the forest worth worrying about and I did see some of them that night. Most of those were humans, though.

“I feel like thanking you but I wonder if you're not something more than you appear to be,” Mrs. Welkie said as she placed a pair of grilled sandwiches on a plate and set them in front of me.

I raised my head and gave her a slight smile.

---

I cleaned up the plate, bowl, pan, and pot after the sandwiches and soup.

Mrs. Welkie came back out. She had on a night gown that went from her neck to her socked feet.

“I put a blanket and pillow on the couch. You can sleep there while you wait for the dryer to finish or stick around until morning and get breakfast out of the deal. I'm up past my bedtime.”

I nodded.

She left and I bedded down on the couch.

The night sounds of a strange house are hard to sleep through. I wondered if some of the noises would have been more familiar before I lost my memories. I nodded off and slept until nearly three in the morning.

It was almost dead silent in and outside of the house. It might have been the quiet that woke me. I looked out the window beside the front door.

Some of the gold-eyed rag creatures were outside, rambling in the dim light of the moon on a night that had become clear since I had fallen asleep.

I stepped out into the chilly wet with my bare feet.

The creatures froze when they heard me but relaxed when they saw me.

I walked to them, crouching down to make myself less tall. I tried to see the world as they must have. A human might have seen the dark but even they could have made out the shapes of the trees and the dips and climbs of the uneven ground around us.

The creatures' ramble was almost like a dance. Their frames were built more for a four limbed stride than bipedalism but I still saw the artistry in it.

One of them rambled up to me. It turned its left hand up and raised it twice.

I held my hand up as it had but didn't repeat the raising motion.

It made a sound that might have been a squeak or a chortle and dropped something in my hand. It was a smooth but pliable round ball. In the dim light, I couldn't tell the color but it might have been a smooth ball of dirt. A little less heavy and maybe wrapped in smooth leaves.

The being showed me another ball in its own hand and touched its tongue to the ball.

I licked the ball it had given me. It tasted a little savory and slightly sweet. It was nothing like human food but it stirred something familiar in me. I was sure I wasn't one of these beings. It wasn't just the fact that I looked like a human to the casual observer. There were other, more fundamental differences between us but that didn't mean we were too unalike to share a moment.

“Thanks,” I said. I slipped the ball in the pocket of the shirt Mrs. Welkie had loaned me. I snapped the pocket button closed.

The creature made a repeated noise that sounded a bit like “squork.”

“It's a little late in the night for me to eat.”

The being rolled over its shoulder like it was a ball. It scampered to catch up with its friends.

I slipped back into the house and went back to sleep.

In the morning, a movement in the shirt pocket woke me up. I slipped out the front door and unsnapped the pocket. A bug flew out of it. Big enough to be the thing I'd licked before.

I lifted the left cuff on the shirt and peeked at the wounds on my arm. They'd started an inch deep and each was now the depth of a fingernail's thickness.

I may be strange but, so far, it seems I'm only as strange as the world I've found myself in.

#AudioFiction #Horror #Halloween #Fiction #JohnDoeIsNotAlone

“The practical world, the business world, has created the 'credentials society,’ and beginning in the 40s and 50s it became a mania to qualify for a particular line, to have a certificate or a diploma in this, that, or the other thing — in many things that are not really subjects at all — activities in the so-called real world which should be carried on by intelligent people but not necessarily by people who have taken a course. What is too bad is that people have very little faith in the value of intelligence, of general principles.”

Auf dieses Zitat bin ich vor ein paar Tagen über Hacker News gestossen. Hätte dort nicht gestanden, von wem es stammt, hätte ich es ohne Weiteres einer aktuellen Diskussion über Microcredentials, Weiterbildungszertifikate oder KI-Kurse zugeordnet. Gesagt hat es der amerikanische Kulturhistoriker Jacques Barzun. Und zwar 1980.

In einem Interview mit dem Christian Science Monitor wurde Barzun gefragt, wie sich die Universität seiner Zeit vom älteren Ideal der Universität unterscheide. Seine Antwort beginnt mit der „credentials society“. Seit den 1940er- und 1950er-Jahren, so Barzun, sei ein regelrechter Drang entstanden, Menschen für immer mehr Tätigkeiten durch Kurse, Diplome und Zertifikate zu qualifizieren. Seine eigentliche Kritik gilt aber dem Misstrauen gegenüber etwas, das sich schwieriger dokumentieren lässt: allgemeine #Bildung, Urteilskraft und die Fähigkeit, sich auch dann zurechtzufinden, wenn niemand die passende Lösung vorbereitet hat. [1]

Auch 46 Jahre später wirkt die Diagnose weiterhin aktuell. Der eigentliche Streitpunkt lässt sich in drei Begriffe fassen: #Lernen, Können und Nachweisen. Lernen bedeutet, sich Wissen und Fähigkeiten anzueignen. Können zeigt sich darin, sie in unterschiedlichen Situationen einzusetzen. Ein Nachweis wiederum macht bestimmte Leistungen für Dritte sichtbar. Die drei Ebenen hängen zusammen, sind aber nicht austauschbar.

Gerade heute, wo wir immer mehr Kompetenzen zertifizieren und gleichzeitig immer mehr Wissen durch #KI verfügbar wird, lohnt es sich, diese Unterschiede ernst zu nehmen.

Die Welt der Nachweise

Barzun war mit seiner Beobachtung nicht allein. Bereits 1979 hatte der Soziologe Randall Collins sein Buch The Credential Society veröffentlicht. Sein Ausgangspunkt lässt sich einfach formulieren: Wenn ein Abschluss zum Normalfall wird, braucht es den nächsten, um sich noch unterscheiden zu können. Bildungsabschlüsse vermitteln Wissen und öffnen Möglichkeiten, sie regulieren aber zugleich den Zugang zu Berufen und gesellschaftlichen Positionen. [2]

Diese Dynamik setzt sich bis heute fort, inzwischen in neuen Formen. Neben Berufs- und Hochschulabschlüssen gibt es Herstellerzertifikate, Onlinekurse, digitale Badges, Bootcamps und Microcredentials, also kurze, in sich abgeschlossene Lerneinheiten, für die ein formaler Nachweis vergeben wird. Weiterbildung lässt sich damit immer feiner portionieren, prüfen und sichtbar machen.

Gerade für Erwachsene kann das sinnvoll sein. Nicht jede neue berufliche Aufgabe verlangt einen weiteren mehrjährigen Studiengang. Wer sich gezielt neues Wissen aneignet, sollte diese Leistung auch dokumentieren können. Allerdings entsteht dabei eine Schieflage: Was sich einfach zertifizieren lässt, wird sichtbar, während anderes im Hintergrund bleibt. Ein absolvierter Dreistundenkurs erscheint mit Datum und Logo im LinkedIn-Profil. Jahrelange Erfahrung, sorgfältige Lektüre, informelles Lernen oder die Fähigkeit, in einer unübersichtlichen Situation einen vernünftigen Entscheid zu treffen, passen in kein ebenso handliches Feld.

Der Nachweis ist einfacher zu zeigen, als das Können nachzuweisen.

Warum wir Zertifikate benötigen

Es wäre zu einfach, daraus eine Klage über die Zertifikatsgesellschaft zu machen. Abschlüsse und Zertifikate erfüllen reale Funktionen. Wer jemanden einstellt, kann dessen Wissen und Fähigkeiten kaum vollständig überprüfen. Ein anerkannter Abschluss bietet eine praktische Orientierung und signalisiert, dass bestimmte Anforderungen erfüllt wurden.

Bei Ärztinnen, Elektrikern, Pilotinnen oder anderen Tätigkeiten, bei denen Fehler erhebliche Folgen haben können, geht es um mehr als Bequemlichkeit. Formale Qualifikationen helfen, Mindeststandards zu sichern. Auch in weniger regulierten Berufen reduzieren sie Unsicherheit.

Das Problem beginnt dort, wo aus einem nützlichen Hinweis ein Ersatzurteil wird. Wer eine Prüfung bestanden hat, verfügt noch lange nicht über die Fähigkeit, sein Wissen in jeder unbekannten Situation angemessen einzusetzen. Umgekehrt kann jemand eine Tätigkeit ausgezeichnet beherrschen, ohne den dafür erwarteten Abschluss vorweisen zu können.

Wie schwer es ist, auf vertraute Qualifikationsnachweise zu verzichten, zeigt die Bewegung hin zum sogenannten „skills-based hiring“. Unternehmen erklären, bei Einstellungen stärker auf Fähigkeiten statt auf Hochschulabschlüsse zu achten. Eine gemeinsame Untersuchung des Burning Glass Institute und der Harvard Business School aus dem Jahr 2024 zeigt allerdings, wie begrenzt die tatsächlichen Veränderungen bislang geblieben sind.

Der Effekt war verschwindend klein: Nach Berechnungen der Forscher eröffneten die neuen Einstellungspraktiken bei weniger als einer von 700 Einstellungen im Jahr 2023 in den USA zusätzliche Beschäftigungsmöglichkeiten für Menschen ohne Hochschulabschluss. Bei den untersuchten Stellen, deren formale Abschlussanforderungen gestrichen worden waren, stieg der Anteil neu eingestellter Personen ohne Bachelorabschluss zwar um durchschnittlich 3,5 Prozentpunkte. Der Gesamteffekt blieb jedoch gering, weil solche Änderungen nur 3,6 Prozent der betrachteten Stellen betrafen. Bei rund 45 Prozent der untersuchten Unternehmen veränderte sich das tatsächliche Einstellungsverhalten praktisch gar nicht. [3]

Das ist mehr als eine interessante Arbeitsmarktstatistik. Unternehmen können in ihren Leitbildern Fähigkeiten über Abschlüsse stellen und dennoch auf das vertraute Signal des Diploms zurückgreifen, sobald sie tatsächlich entscheiden müssen. Einen Abschluss im Bewerbungsformular abzufragen ist einfach. Herauszufinden, ob jemand ein unbekanntes Problem erkennen, einordnen und vernünftig bearbeiten kann, verlangt erheblich mehr Aufwand.

Was sich schlecht zertifizieren lässt

An diesem Punkt wird Barzuns Argument zugleich interessant und problematisch. Er stellt der Welt der Zertifikate „intelligence“ und „general principles“ gegenüber. Das kann so klingen, als gäbe es intelligente Menschen, die sich auch ohne Ausbildung zurechtfinden, und andere, die eben einen Kurs brauchen.

Barzun sprach allerdings keineswegs aus institutioneller Distanz. Er hatte jahrzehntelang an der Columbia University gelehrt, deren allgemeinbildendes Curriculum mitgeprägt und leitende akademische Ämter bekleidet. [4] Man kann deshalb fragen, ob sein Vertrauen in „intelligence“ und allgemeine Prinzipien auf einer Bildung beruht, deren Voraussetzungen er im Zitat unterschätzt. Auch allgemeine Prinzipien müssen erst erworben und verstanden werden. Zudem sind die Gelegenheiten, sich eine umfassende Bildung anzueignen, gesellschaftlich ungleich verteilt. Intelligenz allein ist deshalb ein unzureichender Gegenentwurf zur Zertifikatsgesellschaft. Urteilskraft entsteht aus Wissen, Erfahrung und Übung, und gute Bildung kann genau das vermitteln.

Dennoch berührt Barzun einen entscheidenden Punkt: Nicht alles, was für kompetentes Handeln wichtig ist, lässt sich sauber in einzelne Lernziele zerlegen und zertifizieren.

Nehmen wir eine Lehrperson, die eine Unterrichtsstunde sorgfältig vorbereitet hat. Die Lernziele sind klar, die Beispiele gewählt, die Aufgaben passen zum Stoff. Nach zwanzig Minuten merkt sie trotzdem, dass etwas nicht stimmt. Die Teilnehmenden nicken, können aber eine einfache Frage zur Anwendung des eben Besprochenen nicht beantworten. Die Lehrperson könnte nun den vorbereiteten Ablauf fortsetzen. Stattdessen unterbricht sie ihn, greift eine Bemerkung aus der Gruppe auf, entwickelt daraus spontan ein anderes Beispiel und lässt die Teilnehmenden das Problem noch einmal aus einer neuen Perspektive bearbeiten.

Was genau war hier die entscheidende Kompetenz? Fachwissen war nötig, ebenso methodisches Wissen und Erfahrung. Ausschlaggebend war die Fähigkeit, eine unerwartete Situation überhaupt als solche wahrzunehmen, verschiedene Möglichkeiten gegeneinander abzuwägen und im richtigen Moment vom Plan abzuweichen. Ein Kompetenzraster kann einzelne Bestandteile davon beschreiben. Es kann kaum vorwegnehmen, wann sie in welcher Kombination gebraucht werden.

Prüfungen können solchen Situationen näherkommen. Fallstudien, Simulationen und reale Arbeitsaufträge erfassen mehr als ein einfacher Wissenstest. Dennoch bleiben sie gestaltete Situationen mit bekannten Rahmenbedingungen. Berufliches Können zeigt sich auch darin, zu erkennen, dass der vorliegende Fall gerade nicht dem bekannten Muster entspricht. Bildungsinstitutionen benötigen vergleichbare Kriterien, um Leistungen beurteilen zu können. Ein Teil professioneller Kompetenz wird allerdings erst unter Bedingungen sichtbar, die sich nur begrenzt standardisieren lassen.

Was KI verändert

Generative KI führt diese Frage noch einen Schritt weiter. Wer heute ein Sprachmodell benutzt, kann sich Wissen erklären, Texte zusammenfassen und erste Lösungsvorschläge erstellen lassen. Die Antworten sind oft in Sekunden verfügbar und sprachlich überzeugend. Ihre Qualität lässt sich jedoch nur mit entsprechenden Kenntnissen zuverlässig beurteilen.

Das lässt sich an einem einfachen Fall zeigen. Jemand lässt einen längeren Vertrag durch ein Sprachmodell zusammenfassen. Die Zusammenfassung ist verständlich und weitgehend korrekt, lässt aber eine unscheinbare Klausel aus. Ausgerechnet diese Klausel regelt die Kündigungsfrist, die für den konkreten Fall entscheidend ist. Wer den Vertrag nur über die Zusammenfassung kennenlernt, bemerkt die Lücke möglicherweise gar nicht. Wer hingegen weiss, dass Kündigungsfristen oder Haftungsfragen für die eigene Entscheidung zentral sind, wird gezielt nachfragen und die entsprechenden Passagen im Original prüfen.

Hier zeigt sich, wie eng Fachwissen und Urteilskraft miteinander verbunden sind. Erst entsprechende Kenntnisse ermöglichen es, die eigene Situation richtig einzuschätzen, relevante Fragen zu stellen und die Grenzen des eigenen Verständnisses zu erkennen.

Der Zugang zu einer plausiblen ersten Antwort wird durch KI immer einfacher. Die anspruchsvolle Aufgabe bleibt, ihre Brauchbarkeit für den konkreten Zweck einzuschätzen. Was fehlt? Welche Annahmen wurden gemacht? Welche Informationen sind nebensächlich, welche entscheidend? Wann reicht das eigene Wissen zur Prüfung aus, und wann braucht es jemanden mit mehr Fachkenntnis?

KI macht besonders sichtbar, wo Wissen in Urteil übergehen muss.

Unsere Reaktion auf diesen neuen Kompetenzbedarf ist bezeichnend. Es entsteht eine weitere Schicht von Kursen, Badges und Zertifikaten. Angeboten werden AI-Literacy-Schulungen, Prompting-Zertifikate und Nachweise für den Umgang mit einzelnen Werkzeugen. Die neuen Systeme erfordern zweifellos neue Kenntnisse. Ihre Möglichkeiten, Grenzen und Risiken muss man kennenlernen und verstehen.

Doch ausgerechnet das, worauf es beim Umgang mit KI besonders ankommt, lässt sich durch einen standardisierten Kurs nur begrenzt belegen. Ein Zertifikat kann dokumentieren, dass jemand etwas über KI gelernt hat. Ob diese Person Monate später in einer neuen Situation eine fehlerhafte Antwort erkennt, ihre Bedeutung richtig einschätzt oder bewusst auf den Einsatz eines KI-Systems verzichtet, bleibt weitgehend offen. Das Lernen ist dokumentiert, das Können muss sich erst noch zeigen.

Selbst die KI-Verordnung der Europäischen Union ist hier zurückhaltender, als manche Weiterbildungsangebote vermuten lassen. Sie regelt die Entwicklung und Nutzung von KI-Systemen und verpflichtet Anbieter und Betreiber dazu, Massnahmen zur Förderung der KI-Kompetenz der beteiligten Personen zu ergreifen. Dabei sollen technisches Wissen, Erfahrung, Aus- und Fortbildung sowie der konkrete Einsatzkontext berücksichtigt werden.

Artikel 4 wurde im Juli 2026 im Rahmen einer Überarbeitung der Verordnung präzisiert. Die neue Fassung stellt ausdrücklich klar, dass Anbieter und Betreiber kein bestimmtes individuelles Kompetenzniveau garantieren müssen. Die Europäische Kommission hält ausserdem fest, dass zur Erfüllung der Verpflichtung kein bestimmtes Zertifikat erforderlich ist. [5, 6]

Ein neuer Bildungsbedarf erzeugt also keineswegs automatisch einen neuen Zertifikatsbedarf.

Der Nachweis und die Wirklichkeit

Hier liegt wohl auch die einfachste Antwort auf Barzuns „credentials society“: gute Bildung bleibt wichtig, anspruchsvolle Abschlüsse ebenso. Die Frage ist vielmehr, welche Aussagen wir aus einem Nachweis ableiten und wo wir ihm mehr zutrauen, als er tatsächlich leisten kann.

Ein Zertifikat dokumentiert bestimmte Leistungen zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt und unter bestimmten Bedingungen. Schon deshalb bildet es nur einen Ausschnitt ab. Wer einen Kurs absolviert hat, hat wahrscheinlich etwas gelernt. Ob dieses Wissen auch in unerwarteten Situationen verfügbar ist und sinnvoll angewendet werden kann, zeigt sich oft erst später. Ebenso kann jemand über beträchtliche Fähigkeiten verfügen, für die ihm schlicht der formale Nachweis fehlt.

Barzun hatte dafür 1980 eine polemische Formel. Seine Alternative, das Vertrauen in „intelligence“ und allgemeine Prinzipien, ist zu einfach. Seine Diagnose ist es nicht. Wir haben ausgefeilte Verfahren entwickelt, um Qualifikationen nachzuweisen. Wie gut Menschen mit ihrem Wissen umgehen, müssen wir weiterhin an ihrem Handeln erkennen.

Die „credentials society“ ist nicht verschwunden. Wir haben sie nur besser zertifiziert.

---

💬 Kommentieren (nur für write.as-Accounts)

---

Quellen

[1] D. Owens, „Looking at man and his arts; Jacques Barzun, Cultural historian and critic“, The Christian Science Monitor, 17. Juli 1980. https://www.csmonitor.com/1980/0717/071710.html

[2] R. Collins, The Credential Society: An Historical Sociology of Education and Stratification. New York: Academic Press, 1979. https://search.worldcat.org/title/802816243

[3] M. Sigelman, J. B. Fuller und A. Martin, Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice. Burning Glass Institute und Harvard Business School, Februar 2024. https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Skills-Based%20Hiring_80b90afa-f6b5-4de9-b7f8-5d8232ce20e2.pdf

[4] Columbia University, „Jacques Barzun“, Columbia 250. https://www.c250.columbia.edu/c250_celebrates/remarkable_columbians/jacques_barzun.html

[5] Europäische Union, Verordnung (EU) 2024/1689, Art. 4, „KI-Kompetenz“, konsolidierte Fassung vom 27. Juli 2026. https://ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu/en/ai-act/article-4

[6] Europäische Kommission, „AI Literacy – Questions & Answers“, Shaping Europe's Digital Future, 2026. https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/faqs/ai-literacy-questions-answers

Bildquelle Constantin Meunier (1831–1905): Arbeidsters in glasblazerij (Women Working in a Glass Factory), Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brüssel, Public Domain (Wikimedia Commons).

Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde Gemini Notebook (ehem. NotebookLM) von Google verwendet.

Topic #Maschinenwelten | #Erwachsenenbildung

Must come down. I feel like after sexual experiences, especially the more intense they are, I end up having strong crashes proportionally. I will say, however, I don’t actually have that adverse of a reaction this time I feel like which is good. But I also feel like a big thing stems from this pattern of over promising, and then the immediate regret and the feeling of having to overcorrect. I think, especially with how cheap talk is and how easy it is to get high off of a fantasy, it leads to this constant writing of checks that I cannot realistically cash. And I need this mostly in the pragmatic sense of it being something I actually feel comfortable with when not under the influence of hormones. I can’t help but feel like there have to be some amount of parallels between this weird consumerism culture of sex. Maybe parallels is the wrong word. But it feels like with the cycle of accelerating, getting high off of a fantasy, and when it comes time to actually consider the costs of that you can simply just move on. In a weird analogy it feels like how you can get into some new hobby or have some new goal or resolution and think about a daydream about reaching that goal, like you could think about how you could lock in on diet and everything and become a bodybuilder, and you already start thinking about how insane you might look in your head or how people might treat you or some of the second order effects and you can really start to reap some of the reward early – especially even more if you tell other people about it. I think about that study about how telling people that your New Year’s resolution releases dopamine in a similar way to actually working towards it, but actually ends up completely unproductive towards the actual goal meaning you are expending your dopamine without gaining any benefit from it. And think about how easy it is to tell people how you are training to run a marathon or that is your plan, but you don’t even sign up for a marathon and you don’t actually figure out a concrete plan of getting to that point. Instead you just. Maybe do a half assed jog or something like that until you say screw this I’ll start next week or whatever other excuse. And you can just continue to delay this while building up this fantasy in your head about what it would look like after you actually do it. And that is so incredibly dangerous I think. But I digress, in this analogy, you do this, milk out all of this loan of dopamine, and then move on to another goal and repeat. You stagnate in life and waste dopamine hacking it like this, but in the case of sex, I think you actively atrophy your emotional pathways and damage. The things required to have a happy relationship instead of doing this to some abstract promise, you were doing this to another human person and I think this should at least come with guilt or shame with those actions, as this is what serves you too do this less I think it becomes very dangerous when you were able to turn off this part of your brain and stop listening to this voice. I think that is what my main underlying fear is. I really do not want to fall victim to this arguable addiction.

The virtues of boredom.

My father and I were talking yesterday about boredom, and I wanted to share some thoughts on the subject I have accumulated over the years. We even have a song coming on this big record we’re making that sings the virtues of boredom. I don’t shy away from it. I am somewhat of an expert on being bored.

“I don’t have time.”

I have talked to many folks, musicians, and other professionals, who say, “I don’t have time to be bored.” I find that mindset troubling. I write all my best stuff when I am bored. If I am never bored, no best stuff. I make ample boredom time for that reason. It’s actually work. As a songwriter, I don’t have the time to not be bored.

What gives you “permission” to do?

Boredom is permission for me to “go there.” I have the time and open mind to experiment, think on one thing forever, practice. I have the time for tuning weird, or playing bass through a fuzzy preamp, or brushes on a djembe, or singing in Spanish! If I am in a hurry-up work mode all the time, the kooky shit stays in the closet. I have to be bored to run the bases of creation in music. The link is real. I simply create better when bored.

“Bored people are boring people.”

Our society discourages this thinking, making sure we are never bored. We even say, “Bored people are boring people.” This is not true if you are the ones boring them. It makes you the boring person, in this instance. It is right there in the phrase, it just needs a comma. The truth is the mind is better conditioned to create while bored. It isn’t just me, it’s science.

In Psychology Today, for example, Jeffrey Davis talks back in 2022 about boredom not only facilitating creativity, he said it contributes to well-being. His key points are: 

“With so many forms of entertainment at our fingertips, we never need to let ourselves be bored.”

“When we don't allow our minds to wander, we miss opportunities to become more creative, reboot mental health, and reconnect.”

“Instead of shunning boredom, we should embrace our mind's need to wander.”

Even Einstein.. Albert Einstein even said of being bored, “the monotony and solitude of a quiet life stimulate the creative mind.”

It is a luxury, but often attainable, just not sought after.

I realize I have the luxury to be bored today, more than any time of my life. I am trying to make the most of it. I know folks can’t just be bored like I can. But maybe they could if they did what I did. I do not know, purely speculation. I got rid of social media, I limit time online, I really try to be bored. I want to write good songs more than anything else I want to do in this life. Being bored is crucial to that. My mind is not free if it is always stimulated. It is reacting. Reacting is a different vibe than creation. It has to do with what others create. That’s really not creating, if you think about it. It might be necessary to react. We have to live. But we shouldn’t call it creating. I understand folks may not have this luxury or privilege in their mind, but many could. We’re just addicted to anti-creativity devices. 

When god was bored, he created, according to the lore, which means we are talking about humans. It’s only natural, right? 

This is not new. This boredom thing goes back. Clearing the head, resetting the creative juices is as old as the hills. Our memories have gotten short because we don’t use them. When you get good and bored, you get memories. 

And then there’s safety.

Boredom also requires an element of safety. You don’t let your guard down on the battlefield. I realize I am very fortunate to feel safe these days. It is new. It helps immensely with writing and improving. Safety alone facilitates my kind of boredom more than any other factor. Not comfort, not spare time, not gadgets, not a cozy shirt. Safety is the number one thing. Numero uno. Being safe at the moment is permission to be bored. Being bored is permission to create. How I operate. 

Here’s what’s shitty

Everyone who puts things in your brain that pass through a data scientist knows this about human nature. They know the best ways to keep you busy, occupied, and distracted. They push your buttons, making you react. I have been off social media for a good while now, and let me tell you, they are puppeteers on social media and everywhere else. They very much use this kind of knowledge to manipulate thoughts and behavior in billions, not creating, no memories, just junk. They sell candidates, they sell Pop-Tarts, they sell philosophies, they sell health products, on and on. If they can afford a micro-targeting campaign, they manipulate you into not being bored because they need to sell stuff. Don’t give them what little of yourself you may have left. Most folks do not care if you feel safe or not. This includes data scientists. They do not like it when you are bored. Resist, be bored.

Kelly Kintner (Youtube)

Editor, Producer

Chapter 1: The Congratulations That Took Me Too Long

It was almost midnight when I saw the announcement. Someone I know had received an opportunity I had quietly hoped might come my way. I read the kind messages beneath it, watched the little hearts gather, and felt something I did not want to admit. I was glad for this person, but I was also disappointed for myself. I set my phone facedown on the bed, as though hiding the screen might hide the comparison that had already started in my mind.

I thought of a line associated with Jimmy Stewart, spoken by the character portraying him in a film about his life. He says he does not want fame to make him like a god; he wants to see a good man when he looks in the mirror. I explore that thought in Jimmy Stewart’s reflection on fame and being a good man, but what unsettles me is how easily I can want to be seen as good without wanting to face everything happening inside me. Nobody else knew I felt jealous. I could have typed a lovely congratulations and still carried bitterness into tomorrow.

That is why learning to follow Jesus when comparison steals your peace is not only about finding confidence. It is about letting God speak to parts of us we normally keep private. It is possible to behave politely while secretly resenting another person's happiness. I know because I have caught myself doing exactly that. The uncomfortable question is not whether I can appear gracious. It is whether I am willing to become gracious when there is no audience to reward me.

After His resurrection, Jesus spoke with Peter about the life ahead of him. Peter noticed another disciple and asked, in effect, what would happen to that man. Jesus answered with a question of His own: “What is that to thee? follow thou me” (John 21:22, KJV). I do not hear those words as Jesus scolding a person for being curious. I hear a loving invitation to stop measuring my calling against someone else's. Peter had his own work to do. So do I.

The next morning, I could have made another cup of coffee and searched for reasons that person's success was less impressive than it looked. That would have been an easy way to protect my pride. Instead, I could pray honestly: Lord, I am disappointed. I wanted that door to open for me. Please help me be glad that it opened for someone else. Then I could write the congratulations I had been avoiding and mean it, even if my feelings needed a little time to catch up.

I am learning that goodness is not always a warm feeling that arrives before we act. Sometimes it begins when we notice a small, ungenerous thought and refuse to build a home for it. We bring it to Jesus without pretending, and we ask Him to enlarge our hearts. The person on the other side of the screen never needs to know how long that prayer took. What matters is that I did not let a private disappointment decide what kind of friend I would be.

Chapter 2: The Words I Wish I Had Interrupted

The kitchen is crowded, and everyone seems to be enjoying themselves. Someone makes a joke about a person who is not there. A few people laugh, and the conversation continues. Nothing about the moment appears especially serious. Yet something inside me becomes uncomfortable. I know the person being discussed, and I know they have been going through a difficult time. I also know that speaking up might make everyone look at me as though I have forgotten how to enjoy a harmless conversation.

I think many of us have experienced that quiet conflict. We recognize something unkind, but we hesitate because we want to belong. We tell ourselves that remaining silent is not the same as agreeing. Sometimes that is true. Other times, our silence becomes a way of protecting our comfort while somebody else's dignity is being diminished.

What bothers me about these moments is how ordinary they are. I might spend the morning thinking about the importance of treating people with compassion, then spend the evening struggling to practice it. I can understand the teachings of Jesus and still become surprisingly timid when following them might make a conversation uncomfortable.

In John chapter 4, Jesus meets a Samaritan woman beside a well. The encounter crosses social and religious boundaries that mattered deeply in His time. Jesus knows uncomfortable truths about her life, yet He does not treat her as someone unworthy of conversation. He speaks with her about living water and reveals something extraordinary about Himself. Where others might have seen reasons to keep their distance, Jesus saw a person worth reaching.

I return to that encounter when I am tempted to reduce someone to a story I have heard about them. People are always more complicated than the worst thing someone knows about their lives. The neighbor who appears unfriendly may be caring for a sick spouse. The coworker who seems distracted may be struggling to keep a family together. I do not need to invent explanations for their behavior, but I can remember that I rarely know everything another person is carrying.

If the conversation in that kitchen turned unkind, I could say something simple. Perhaps I could remind everyone that the person being discussed has had a difficult year. I would not need to embarrass the speaker or deliver a lecture. A little courage, offered gently, might be enough to change the direction of the conversation.

I am beginning to understand that following Jesus requires me to care less about appearing agreeable and more about being loving. Those are not always the same thing. Sometimes goodness asks us to risk a little awkwardness so another person does not have to stand alone.

Later, when the kitchen is empty and the conversation is over, I want to remember that I treated an absent person with the same respect I would have offered if they had been standing beside me.

Chapter 3: The Honest Answer I Almost Didn't Give

The church parking lot was almost empty when a friend caught up with me beside my car. He asked how I was doing, and I already knew the answer I usually gave. I could smile, mention how busy the week had been, and ask about his family. It would be pleasant, and neither of us would have to linger. But I had spent much of that week feeling discouraged, and for some reason I was tired of pretending that being dependable meant never admitting it.

I told him I was having a hard time. I did not give him a dramatic story or ask him to solve anything. I simply said that some things I had hoped for were not working out, and I had begun questioning myself more than I wanted to. He listened without hurrying me. Then he asked whether we could pray together before we left. I had come outside expecting to offer someone an encouraging word, not to be the person receiving one.

For years, I have been tempted to think that goodness is something I should be able to display without showing any weakness. I want to be patient, useful, and steady. Those are worthwhile hopes, but I can turn them into another performance if I am not careful. Even the wish to see a good man in the mirror can become a demand that I never let anybody witness my unfinished places.

Jesus gives me another way to live. In Matthew 11:28, He invites those who labor and carry heavy burdens to come to Him for rest. He does not tell them to make themselves admirable first. He knows what they are carrying. He offers rest before they have learned to carry everything gracefully.

I think that invitation changes the way I understand character. I still need to choose kindness when I feel overlooked, and I still need to defend the dignity of someone who is absent. But I also need enough honesty to say when I am struggling. Otherwise, I may spend my whole life protecting the appearance of strength while refusing the love that could actually strengthen me.

My friend and I prayed beside the car, with the evening air growing colder around us. Nothing about my circumstances changed in those few minutes. The things that disappointed me were still there. But I drove home less alone, and I understood something I had missed before.

I do not need to look into the mirror tomorrow and find a man who has finally made himself good. I want to find a man who is still willing to be taught by Jesus, still willing to tell the truth, and still willing to love without needing to be admired for it.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

I just finished watching 'The End of Oak Street'. It's a very simple movie, but parts of it made me smile. My favorite part is the color scheme with its dreamy blur. It captured the feeling of the early 80s properly. I would have been ten. I was always, and still am, enamored by the variety of green that exists in nature. My second favorite part is the feathers on the dinosaurs. And my third favorite part is the Sagan quote. The movie only shares part of it. I will share the entire quote as follows:

“What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” —Carl Sagan

If that quote is kept in mind while watching the movie, it really shifts the tragedy. Doesn't it?

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

The error codes were lying, and the machine was very sure of itself.

In the 1980s, a Xerox field service technician was called out to a photocopier. It produced, in the words of the researchers who later wrote the episode up, “copious raw information in the form of error codes” and “obligingly crashed when tested”. The trouble was that the error codes and the crashes did not tally. The company's training and its directive documentation tied each error to a code and each code to a fix, so once the codes stopped telling the truth, the official procedure had nothing left to offer except replacing the machine. The technician called in a specialist. The specialist was baffled too.

What happened next was recorded by Julian Orr, an anthropologist then working with Xerox PARC, and later retold by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid in a 1991 paper that became one of the founding texts of organisational learning. The two men did not consult a manual. They told stories. Through the morning, over lunch, and back in front of the machine all afternoon, they swapped memories of other copiers with overlapping symptoms, testing each story against the machine's behaviour. Orr's account describes “a five hour effort” that “yielded a dozen anecdotes”. The diagnosis finally came out of what Orr called an “antiphonal recitation”, in which the two men told different versions of the same encounter until the versions converged on the fault.

Keep that scene in mind, because it is the most precise description available of the thing Pearson says the skilled trades are about to lose. It is not information. The machine had plenty of information. It is the judgement to know when the information is wrong, and that judgement lived in two people talking to each other beside a broken machine.

On 24 September 2026, at the WorldSkills International Conference in Shanghai, Pearson launched research warning that a “triple capability gap” is opening across the skilled trade, technical and service occupations that keep hospitals, factories and infrastructure running. AI is reshaping those jobs faster than education and training systems can adapt, the report argues, just as experienced workers retire and take decades of practical knowledge with them. The result is a generation of early-career workers at risk of becoming, in Pearson's phrase, “AI-rich but experience-poor”.

Which raises two uncomfortable questions. What happens to a trade when the apprentice turns up holding an AI assistant, but the mentor who was supposed to teach the difference between right and almost-right has already gone? And can the knowledge that lives in a plumber's hands and a technician's instincts be written into training systems at all, or does some of it only ever travel from one person to another?

What Pearson Actually Found in Shanghai

The report is titled For Every Future: Preparing Early-Career Skilled Trade, Technical and Service Talent for an AI-Infused World. It combines labour market and AI exposure analysis across the United States, the United Kingdom and China with surveys, interviews and roundtables involving employers, educators, industry bodies, workforce experts, students and early-career workers. It also looks closely at two occupations: pharmacy technicians and industrial machinery mechanics.

The core argument is that these workers now need three things at once. The first is role-specific AI literacy and the critical judgement to use AI safely. The second is a set of human capabilities, including communication, collaboration, adaptability, emotional intelligence and learning agility. The third, and the one this article is about, is the practical and institutional knowledge traditionally developed through experience and handed down by experienced colleagues. Pearson's framing is that AI is more often changing day-to-day tasks than eliminating roles altogether, which makes the gap harder to see: nobody gets a redundancy letter, but the job underneath them quietly changes shape.

Some of the numbers are stark. Across the UK occupations covered by the research, 99 per cent of openings are expected to come from replacement demand, meaning workers who retire, change careers or leave the labour market, rather than from new jobs. The US figure is 98.5 per cent. Fewer than half of the industrial machinery mechanics surveyed felt their training was preparing them for AI-enabled work. One UK pharmacy industry participant told the researchers that it takes two to three years to revise pharmacy technician education and training standards, which is a long time in a field where the tools can change within a single product cycle. And the stakes are not abstract. Among pharmacy technicians, 98 per cent rated exactness and accuracy as extremely important, and 44 per cent rated the consequences of error as extremely serious.

Sharon Hague, Pearson's President of English Language Learning and its UK chief executive, put the problem plainly at the launch. “The challenge is that demand for these workers is rising just as many experts are retiring and taking decades of practical knowledge with them,” she said. “If we don't rethink how expertise is developed, the gap between what employers need and what workers can do will continue to grow.”

It is worth being clear about what kind of document this is. Pearson is an education and assessment company, and a report concluding that training systems need rethinking is also, inevitably, a report about a market Pearson sells into. That does not make its findings wrong, and its replacement-demand figures sit comfortably alongside independent labour data. But its most interesting claim is not a statistic. It is the idea buried in the third capability: that there is a category of knowledge that cannot simply be bought, downloaded or prompted into existence, and that its main carriers are leaving.

The Arithmetic of Replacement

Start with the people who carry that knowledge, and the rate at which they are leaving.

In construction, the Construction Industry Training Board's Construction Workforce Outlook for 2026 to 2030, published on 17 June 2026, estimates that the industry will need an average of 41,200 extra workers a year, roughly 206,000 over five years. CITB's diagnosis is blunt: too few people are entering the sector, too many experienced workers are leaving, and productivity improvements have not been enough to close the gap. In US manufacturing, Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute projected in 2024 that as many as 3.8 million additional employees could be needed between 2024 and 2033, and that as many as 1.9 million of those jobs could go unfilled if the skills and applicant gaps are not addressed.

Plumbing makes the pattern concrete. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics counts 510,600 plumbers, pipefitters and steamfitters, projects around 42,000 openings a year over the coming decade, and notes that many of those openings will come from the need to replace workers who move to other occupations or leave the labour force, for example to retire. The same entry explains how the trade is learnt: most plumbers learn on the job through an apprenticeship lasting four to five years, with 2,000 hours of paid on-the-job training each year alongside technical instruction. In England, the Level 3 Plumbing and Domestic Heating Technician apprenticeship standard has a typical duration of 48 months.

Those durations are the real point. Four years is not how long it takes to learn the facts of plumbing, which would fit in a decent textbook. Four years is how long it takes to be around enough jobs, enough awkward pipework, enough customers and enough mistakes, in the company of someone who already knows, for the facts to turn into judgement.

And the pipeline feeding that process has been narrowing. Department for Education figures published on 27 November 2025 recorded 353,500 apprenticeship starts in England in the 2024/25 academic year, up from 340,000 the year before. But in 2016/17, the year the apprenticeship levy was introduced, there were 494,900. The mix has shifted too. Higher-level apprenticeships now make up around 40 per cent of starts, while intermediate apprenticeships, the traditional entry route for young people into a trade, have fallen from 43 per cent of starts in 2017/18 to 19 per cent. The system is producing more graduate-style apprenticeships and fewer people at the bottom of the ladder, which is precisely where the long, slow, person-to-person transfer of craft knowledge has always happened.

Put the two trends together and you get Pearson's scenario in its simplest form. The mentors are leaving faster than they can be replaced, and the replacements are arriving through a narrower door, into jobs whose tools are changing underneath them.

Knowing More Than We Can Tell

To understand why the loss of mentors matters more than the loss of workers, you have to go back to a Hungarian-British chemist turned philosopher.

In The Tacit Dimension, published in 1966, Michael Polanyi compressed a lifetime of thinking about scientific practice into a single sentence: “we can know more than we can tell.” We recognise a face among thousands without being able to say how. Polanyi's claim was stronger than the observation that some knowledge is hard to describe. He argued that all knowledge rests on a tacit foundation, a set of skills, habits and perceptions that we rely on without attending to them.

The idea might have stayed in philosophy if a young sociologist had not put it to the test. In the early 1970s, Harry Collins, now a distinguished research professor at Cardiff University, studied laboratories trying to build a then-new device called the TEA laser. His finding, published in 1974 and followed up in 1975 with his co-author R. G. Harrison, was striking. No scientist he studied succeeded in building a working laser using only published papers or other written sources. Every group that managed it had obtained some crucial part of the knowledge through personal contact: phone calls, visits, someone who had built one standing in the room. The written account was complete in every respect except the one that mattered.

Collins spent decades refining what that means, and his 2010 book Tacit and Explicit Knowledge offers the most useful map we have for Pearson's question. He splits tacit knowledge into three kinds.

The first is relational tacit knowledge. This is knowledge that could in principle be written down but in practice is not, because nobody has bothered, because it seems too obvious, or because someone would rather keep it to themselves. The torque setting a senior fitter uses on a particular flange, which differs from the manual for good reasons nobody recorded, is relational. So is the knowledge that a particular customer's boiler has a history.

The second is somatic tacit knowledge, which lives in the body. Balancing a bicycle is Collins's classic example. For the trades, think of the feel of a pipe cutter biting cleanly, the sound of a pump running slightly wrong, the resistance of a fitting that is about to strip. This is knowledge whose limits come from the nature of bodies and brains, not from social choice.

The third, and for Collins the deepest, is collective tacit knowledge. This is knowledge that belongs to a community rather than to any individual: the sense of what counts as a proper job, which rules can be bent on site and which cannot, when a shortcut becomes a hazard. You acquire it by being socialised into the group that holds it, and for Collins it is the hardest kind of tacit knowledge to make explicit, because it lives in the group rather than in any one head.

That three-way split turns out to answer most of the question in the headline, but before getting there it is worth seeing what happens when a society forgets that the split exists.

When the Recipe Loses Its Impurity

In the 2000s, the US National Nuclear Security Administration set out to refurbish the W76 warhead carried on Trident submarine-launched missiles. One component needed a classified material code-named Fogbank. The facility that had produced it had long since closed. According to a 2009 article in Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nuclear Weapons Journal, most of the personnel involved in the original production process were no longer available, and the agency had to reconstruct the process from historical records.

The reconstruction did not work. According to the Los Alamos account, as reported by the defence publication The War Zone, the new process made a purer material than the old one, and the purity was the problem. The original batches had contained an impurity that the weapon's performance had quietly come to depend on. Nobody had documented it because nobody had known it mattered, and the people who might have noticed the difference were no longer there.

The Government Accountability Office report GAO-09-385, released on 2 March 2009, documented the cost. The planned first refurbished W76 slipped from September 2007 to September 2008, and NNSA spent $69 million addressing Fogbank production problems.

Fogbank is an extreme case, but it shows plainly what Pearson is warning about. The written record was, as far as anyone knew, complete. What was missing was not a fact but a relationship between facts, the kind of thing an experienced operator notices because something looks or feels different from last time. In Collins's terms, it was relational knowledge that had never been told, and the only people who could have told it were gone.

The Assistant That Talks Like a Journeyman

Now introduce the AI assistant.

The tools arriving on shop floors and in vans are not speculative. In May 2025, Siemens announced that its Maintenance Copilot Senseye would give maintenance teams “expert-level equipment diagnostics” without their needing specialist technical knowledge, citing pilot implementations with an average 25 per cent reduction in reactive maintenance time. In September 2025, ServiceTitan, whose software is widely used by US plumbing, heating and electrical contractors, launched Atlas, an AI assistant that gives technicians in the field instant answers through its mobile app. Its co-founder and president, Vahe Kuzoyan, described it as “a trusted co-pilot or even a chief of staff that adapts to the specific workflows” of each business.

There is real evidence that such tools help people who are new to a job. The best-known study, by Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025, tracked 5,179 customer support agents as a generative AI assistant was rolled out. Productivity rose by 14 per cent on average and by 34 per cent for novice and low-skilled workers, with minimal effect on the most experienced. The authors offer suggestive evidence that the tool worked by spreading the best practices of more able workers and helping newer ones move down the experience curve. In other words, some relational tacit knowledge, the kind that top performers had but had never written down, had been captured in the data and handed on.

That is a genuine counterweight to the gloomier reading of Pearson's report. But notice what it measured: speed and resolution in conversations, in a domain made of language. The question for the trades is what happens outside that domain, where the work is physical, the stakes are safety-critical, and the machine can be confidently wrong.

Collins has a concept that fits the new assistants almost too neatly. In Rethinking Expertise, written with Robert Evans and published in 2007, he distinguishes contributory expertise, the ability to actually do the work, from interactional expertise, the ability to speak the language of a practice fluently without being able to practise it. Specialist journalists and good peer reviewers have interactional expertise. They can talk the talk. In a 2024 paper in AI and Society, Collins argued that large language models learn from the internet rather than being socialised into communities, and that the result is systems that answer with fabrications as fluently as with facts.

An AI assistant is, in this sense, the most complete interactional expert ever built. It speaks the language of every trade. It can explain a pressure test, describe a failed seal, list the causes of a tripping breaker. What it lacks is the thing that made the Xerox specialist valuable: a body of experience against which to notice that the story it is telling does not fit the machine in front of it. Hand that fluency to an apprentice who has no such experience either, and you get Pearson's phrase exactly. AI-rich. Experience-poor.

Right Versus Almost Right

The danger is not that the machine is usually wrong. It is that it is usually right, and people learn to stop checking.

Researchers have been measuring this for decades. In a 2010 review in Human Factors, Raja Parasuraman and Dietrich Manzey described automation bias as the tendency to over-rely on automated aids, producing errors of omission, where people miss problems the system fails to flag, and errors of commission, where they follow advice that is wrong. Two findings from that review should worry anyone designing AI-assisted apprenticeships. Automation bias occurs in experts as well as novices. And it cannot be prevented simply by training or instructions.

Recent studies show what happens when AI enters that picture. In the field experiment with 758 Boston Consulting Group consultants reported by Fabrizio Dell'Acqua and colleagues at Harvard Business School, Wharton, MIT Sloan and Warwick, AI help made people substantially faster and better on tasks within the model's capabilities. But on a task deliberately chosen to fall outside what the AI could do well, consultants using AI were 19 percentage points less likely to reach the correct answer than those working without it. The researchers' metaphor for this is a jagged frontier: the boundary of what the AI can do well is irregular and hard to see, which makes it easy to cross without noticing.

Then there is the question of what reliance does to the learner. In January 2026, Anthropic published a randomised controlled trial of 52 mostly junior software developers learning an unfamiliar Python library. Those who used AI assistance scored 50 per cent on a follow-up quiz, against 67 per cent for those who coded by hand. The largest gap was on debugging questions, which is to say on the ability to recognise when code is wrong and why. Code is not copper pipe, but the skill that suffered is exactly the one the Pearson report is worried about: knowing when the output in front of you is almost right, and therefore wrong.

The most sobering evidence comes from medicine, where the consequences are measured in missed cancers. A multicentre observational study led by Krzysztof Budzyń and published in The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology in August 2025 looked at 19 experienced endoscopists, each with more than 2,000 colonoscopies behind them. After AI-assisted detection was introduced, their adenoma detection rate in procedures performed without the AI fell from 28.4 per cent to 22.4 per cent. These were not novices. They were experts whose unaided performance appeared to decline after routine exposure to the machine. If skilled professionals can lose ground that quickly, the question for a trainee who never builds that ground in the first place answers itself.

Lisanne Bainbridge saw all of this coming in a short paper published in Automatica in 1983. “Ironies of Automation” observed that efficient retrieval of knowledge from long-term memory depends on frequency of use, and that some knowledge “develops only through use and feedback about its effectiveness”. Then she wrote the sentence that reads like a summary of the Pearson report forty-three years early: “There is some concern that the present generation of automated systems, which are monitored by former manual operators, are riding on their skills, which later generations of operators cannot be expected to have.”

That is the mechanism. Today's AI-assisted workplaces look safe partly because the people supervising them learnt their trade before the assistant arrived. They can tell when the answer is off because they once had to work it out themselves. Remove them, and the safety margin goes with them, without anyone noticing, until the error codes stop matching the crashes.

How Apprenticeship Actually Transmits Judgement

If the mentor's value is not information, what exactly is being transferred when an apprentice works alongside one?

In 1991, the anthropologist Jean Lave and the educational theorist Etienne Wenger published Situated Learning, built partly on studies of Vai and Gola tailors in Liberia. They found that the apprentices were not formally taught tailoring in any conventional sense. They learnt through what Lave and Wenger called legitimate peripheral participation: doing real but low-risk parts of real work at the edge of a community of practitioners, gradually moving towards the centre as their competence grew. The learning was inseparable from belonging. You did not learn tailoring and then join the tailors. You became a tailor by being among them.

Richard Sennett, the sociologist, made a related case in The Craftsman, published in 2008. He describes craft as “a dialogue between concrete practices and thinking; this dialogue evolves into sustaining habits, and these habits establish a rhythm between problem solving and problem finding.” Problem finding is the key phrase. A manual or an assistant can solve a problem you have already identified. Knowing that there is a problem, that the joint looks fine but is not, that the reading is plausible but wrong, is the skill that comes from the rhythm Sennett describes, and it takes time. “By one commonly used measure,” he notes, “about ten thousand hours of experience are required to produce a master carpenter or musician.”

Sennett also noticed what happens when a tool takes over the part of the work where that rhythm develops. Writing about computer-aided design, he recalls the physicist Victor Weisskopf telling MIT students who presented him with computer-generated results: “When you show me that result, the computer understands the answer, but I don't think you understand the answer.” His conclusion is blunt: “when the head and the hand are separate, it is the head that suffers.”

The most careful modern study of this problem comes from Matt Beane, who researches technology and work in the Technology Management department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and whose 2024 book The Skill Code draws on years of fieldwork in robotic surgery. In traditional open surgery, residents learnt by doing progressively more of each operation with a senior surgeon's hands beside theirs. The surgical robot changed that. “My research shows that the lead surgeon controls the robot, and the trainee has become completely optional,” Beane said when the book was published. The few residents who became genuinely skilled did so through what he calls shadow learning, bending the rules to get practice, including spending hundreds of hours watching recorded procedures. Beane frames the conditions for building skill as challenge, complexity and connection, and it is the third, the bond of trust between novice and expert, that intelligent machines most easily sever.

The pattern in Beane's operating theatres is the pattern Pearson is warning about in plant rooms and pharmacies. The technology does not attack the apprentice directly. It makes the apprentice unnecessary to the expert's work, and in doing so quietly removes the apprenticeship.

What Can Be Written Down and What Cannot

So, back to the second question. Can a plumber's hands and a technician's instincts be written into training systems?

The honest answer is some of it, more than sceptics assume, and less than vendors claim. Collins's three categories show where the lines fall.

Relational tacit knowledge can be captured, and there is a famous proof. In his 1991 Harvard Business Review article “The Knowledge-Creating Company”, Ikujiro Nonaka described how Matsushita's engineers struggled to design a home bread-making machine that kneaded dough properly. A software developer, Ikuko Tanaka, proposed a solution: she trained with the head baker at the Osaka International Hotel, whose bread was reputed to be the best in the city, to study his kneading. She noticed that he had a distinctive way of stretching the dough. After a year of trial and error with the project's engineers, she produced specifications, including special ribs inside the machine, that reproduced the baker's technique. The resulting “twist dough” method gave Matsushita a product that set a record for first-year sales of a new kitchen appliance.

It is often told as proof that tacit knowledge can be made explicit. Look closely, though, at how it was done. The knowledge was not extracted by interview or questionnaire. Tanaka had to apprentice herself to the baker, learning by observation, imitation and practice, as Nonaka put it, before she could translate anything. The conversion ran through a person. And it took a year.

That suggests a practical route for the trades. Much of what a retiring engineer knows is relational: the history of a particular plant, the quirks of a particular model, the workarounds that never made it into the manual. That knowledge can be captured, and AI can help, by transcribing, indexing and retrieving it. The Brynjolfsson study suggests AI can even spread the habits of top performers to newcomers. But capture has a deadline. It has to happen while the experts are still at work, alongside the people who will inherit the job, because the Tanaka story suggests the most valuable capture happens through apprenticeship rather than interview. Fogbank shows what happens when nobody does it.

Somatic tacit knowledge is harder. Simulation, haptic training rigs, augmented reality overlays and video can all accelerate it, and Beane's finding that some surgical trainees built real skill through intensive video review shows that recorded expertise has value. But a body still has to do the thing, repeatedly, with feedback. No amount of fluent explanation from an assistant will teach an apprentice how a compression fitting feels when it is right. At best, the machine can tell them what to practise.

Collective tacit knowledge is the category where the answer is closest to no. The sense of what counts as a proper job, when to stop and ask, which risks the trade tolerates and which it never does: this is the property of a community, and it passes by socialisation. Orr's copier technicians illustrate it. Their diagnosis came from a shared stock of stories that belonged to the group rather than to either man, and it was the group's norms, including the loss of face that came with simply swapping out the machine, that pushed them to keep going. Brown and Duguid made the point that the training and documentation were about maintaining machines, while much of the real work was about maintaining the social setting. An AI can summarise the stories. It cannot make an apprentice a member of the community that tells them.

Designing for the Mentor's Absence

None of this means the AI-equipped apprentice is doomed. It means the assistant has to be designed and deployed as part of an apprenticeship, not as a replacement for one.

The evidence points to some fairly concrete principles. The first concerns how the tool is used. In Anthropic's trial, the developers who retained the most were the ones who used AI to build understanding, and the highest-scoring group asked only conceptual questions and then relied on their own improved understanding to do the work. At the WorldSkills conference in Shanghai, Pearson's chief technology officer, David Treat, made the same point from the other side: “If you are using AI as an answer engine, you're not engaging the brain in the struggle that learning requires.” An assistant that makes the apprentice explain why a reading looks wrong before offering its own view is a different educational instrument from one that simply supplies the fix.

The second concerns mentors. Pearson's own recommendations call for expanding opportunities to develop practical know-how through mentoring, observation, feedback, simulation and hands-on experience. That sounds obvious, but it runs against the economic logic of the tools themselves, which are sold on making experts more productive and novices less dependent on them. If an assistant frees up a senior engineer's time, some of that time has to be deliberately spent with the apprentice, or Beane's operating-theatre pattern repeats itself on the factory floor. Bainbridge's final irony applies directly: “it is the most successful automated systems, with rare need for manual intervention, which may need the greatest investment in human operator training.”

The third is the unglamorous one. Apprentices need structured practice without the machine, which is what the endoscopy study implies clinicians now need too. The point is not nostalgia for doing things the hard way. It is that the ability to notice when the assistant is wrong is built by doing the work without it, and cannot be built any other way.

Go back, one last time, to Orr's copier. The machine gave its technicians more information than they could use, and none of it added up. What saved the job was not better data. It was two people with long memories, a shared language of experience, and a professional pride that would not let them give up. Today's AI assistants are, in a sense, error codes that can talk: fluent, confident, usually right, occasionally and invisibly wrong. The apprentice holding one needs what the Xerox technician had, someone who has seen this before.

The uncomfortable arithmetic of the Pearson report is that for many apprentices, that someone is already retiring. Some of what they know can be written into training systems, and the effort should begin now. The rest will travel the way it always has, from one person to another, beside a broken machine, or it will not travel at all.

References and Sources

1. Pearson. “Pearson research warns of a 'triple capability gap' emerging as AI adoption outpaces education and training in skilled occupations.” Press release, PR Newswire, Shanghai, 24 September 2026, launching For Every Future: Preparing Early-Career Skilled Trade, Technical and Service Talent for an AI-Infused World; also reported by FE News, StockTitan, People Matters and ChannelLife, 24 to 25 September 2026. Accessed 25 September 2026.
2. Pearson plc. “Pearson Appoints Experienced Company Executive Sharon Hague as President of English Language Learning.” Press release, 28 February 2025.
3. WorldSkills Conference 2026. “WorldSkills Shanghai 2026 outlines a human-first approach to AI.” Conference news, National Exhibition and Convention Center, Shanghai, September 2026. Accessed 25 September 2026.
4. Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Doubleday, 1966; reissued University of Chicago Press, 2009.
5. Collins, H. M. “The TEA Set: Tacit Knowledge and Scientific Networks.” Science Studies, volume 4, 1974, pages 165 to 186; and Collins, H. M. and Harrison, R. G. “Building a TEA Laser: The Caprices of Communication.” Social Studies of Science, volume 5, number 4, 1975.
6. Collins, Harry. Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. University of Chicago Press, 2010.
7. Collins, Harry and Evans, Robert. Rethinking Expertise. University of Chicago Press, 2007.
8. Collins, Harry. “Why artificial intelligence needs sociology of knowledge: parts I and II.” AI and Society, volume 40, 2025 (published online 18 May 2024), pages 1249 to 1263. DOI: 10.1007/s00146-024-01954-8.
9. Sennett, Richard. The Craftsman. Yale University Press and Allen Lane, 2008; extract published as “The Troubled Craftsman”, Arquitectura Viva.
10. Nonaka, Ikujiro. “The Knowledge-Creating Company.” Harvard Business Review, November to December 1991; reprinted July to August 2007.
11. Lave, Jean and Wenger, Etienne. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge University Press, 1991.
12. Orr, Julian E. Talking About Machines: An Ethnography of a Modern Job. Cornell University Press, 1996.
13. Brown, John Seely and Duguid, Paul. “Organizational Learning and Communities-of-Practice: Toward a Unified View of Working, Learning, and Innovation.” Organization Science, volume 2, number 1, 1991, pages 40 to 57.
14. Bainbridge, Lisanne. “Ironies of Automation.” Automatica, volume 19, number 6, 1983, pages 775 to 779.
15. Parasuraman, Raja and Manzey, Dietrich H. “Complacency and Bias in Human Use of Automation: An Attentional Integration.” Human Factors, volume 52, number 3, 2010. DOI: 10.1177/0018720810376055.
16. Budzyń, Krzysztof et al. “Endoscopist deskilling risk after exposure to artificial intelligence in colonoscopy: a multicentre, observational study.” The Lancet Gastroenterology and Hepatology, August 2025. PubMed ID 40816301.
17. Anthropic. “How AI assistance impacts the formation of coding skills.” Anthropic Research, 29 January 2026.
18. Brynjolfsson, Erik, Li, Danielle and Raymond, Lindsey. “Generative AI at Work.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics, volume 140, number 2, 2025, pages 889 to 942.
19. Dell'Acqua, Fabrizio, McFowland III, Edward, Mollick, Ethan, Lifshitz-Assaf, Hila, Kellogg, Katherine C., Rajendran, Saran, Krayer, Lisa, Candelon, François and Lakhani, Karim R. “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality.” Harvard Business School Working Paper 24-013, September 2023.
20. Beane, Matt. The Skill Code: How to Save Human Ability in an Age of Intelligent Machines. Harper Business, 11 June 2024; and University of California, Santa Barbara, “How to build and protect skills in our modern workplace, a world filled with AI and robots”, The Current, 2024.
21. US Government Accountability Office. “Nuclear Weapons: NNSA and DOD Need to More Effectively Manage the Stockpile Life Extension Program.” GAO-09-385, 2 March 2009; and The War Zone, “Fogbank Is Mysterious Material Used In Nukes That's So Secret Nobody Can Say What It Is”, citing Los Alamos National Laboratory's Nuclear Weapons Journal, 2009.
22. Siemens AG. “Siemens introduces AI agents for industrial automation.” Press release, May 2025; and Contractor Magazine, “ServiceTitan Brings AI Automation to the Trades With Atlas”, 19 September 2025.
23. US Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Plumbers, Pipefitters, and Steamfitters.” Occupational Outlook Handbook, accessed 25 September 2026; and Skills England, “Plumbing and domestic heating technician” apprenticeship standard ST0303, Level 3.
24. Department for Education. “Apprenticeships, Academic year 2024/25.” Explore Education Statistics, 27 November 2025; and House of Commons Library, “Apprenticeship starts: has there been a big fall?”
25. Construction Industry Training Board. “CITB publishes Construction Workforce Outlook 2026-2030.” 17 June 2026, with figures reported by Construction News and Building; and Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute, “US Manufacturing Could Need as Many as 3.8 Million New Employees by 2033”, April 2024.

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

Support What We Do

Inbetweeners 42- Xalatra Questline Part 3- The Substructure Warrens and Cult of Vecna

The lift in the Gutworks took the players to a lower part of Sigil called the Reconfiguring Channel. This is literally where entire sections of the city are broken down or fabricated. Other than Dabus, no sentient beings inhabit this layer as it is extraordinarily dangerous. Sections of building, road, etc fly at high speeds like a vortex of city sections. Failing a Dex Save of 15 leads to massive bludgeoning damage. The players had to dodge pieces to head to essentially a manhole/service ladder even deeper into Sigil. Xalatra left some unstable glyphs behind on the manhole cover that caused a mini volcanic eruption if triggered. The players activated it from a safe distance before proceeding down to the Substructure Warrens.

The Substructure Warrens are inspired by decommissioned or abandon subways and tunnels beneath cities like New York or Paris. It is a series of passages, tunnels and rooms that were formally like the Gutworks but no longer serve a functional purpose to Sigil. These layers are essentially relics, vestigial organs of Sigil left behind as the city continued to grow and evolve. For a long time, no living creature inhabited these layers. However, after the Faction War, which saw Vecna try to seize control of Sigil, his surviving followers in the city had to flee. In my version of events in the faction war, Vecna never really posed any sort of threat to the Lady of Pain, as her power eclipsed his by many orders of magnitude. More she was irritated by the impertinence of his actions, and the sheer delusional egotism that he thought he could actually challenge her control of the city. Of course, had he succeeded, Vecna would have catapulted himself to a power level beyond any other deity save Primus or the Overgods. He was convinced he could exploit loopholes in how Sigil worked and sieze the Lady of Pain's power from her. This would be like a hummingbird thinking it could outsmart a tornado, and it went about as well as that scenario would for the hummingbird.

Once Vecna was imprisoned, his followers/worship was strictly outlawed across Sigil. Any of his surviving followers were rounded up and placed in endless labyrinths and four dimensional prisons from which they would never leave. To the Lady, death was not an appropriate response for what Vecna had done. Death has little meaning in this multiverse, and his being a cult of death and undeath, would mean even less. But trapping an entity in a fractal fracture between realities where it will be slowly unmade over millennia is far mroe suitable. Many of Vecna's followers abandon worshipping after his fall. Others managed to escape Sigil. But some decided to embed themselves deep underneath Sigil as they bided their time until they found a way to free their vaunted master. The Gutworks wouldn't be low enough, they were still frequently patrolled by the Dabus. However, these substructure warrens are so low, so forgotten, that not even the Lady would notice their presence. The substructure warrens' proximity to the maw only helped in this regard.

So as soon as the players went down into this level, they were discovered by a patrol from Vecna's followers. The patrol consisted of 2 Elite Doom Guards Lords and 4 Deathlock Masterminds. That is two CR 12s and 4 CR 8s. At the Inbetweener's current level, they could potentially defeat such a group but at grave loss of resources and hit points. That's a combined total of 844 hitpoints worth of enemies and A LOT of necrotic damage. And even if the players were successful, this was simply a patrol. They were never meant to fight there way through this level... it was more about diplomacy, stealth or creativity. Vecna may have been a chump compared to the Lady of Pain, but he was still a deity, and these are his most loyal and powerful remaining followers.

The players were brought to the “court” where they were essentially interrogated by the “judge” (a lich). In attendance at the court where a number wights, wraiths, cultists, vampires and a spirit naga. My plan was if the players died, they would be resurrected by the lich but under an intense form of Gaes to free Vecna. Instead, the players spoke to the lich, and they tried to withhold information and deceive him but he cast dominate monster on Bruce who then spilled everything. Their quest, why they were seeking out Xalatra, and their connection to the Lady of Pain. The connection to the Lady was of particular interest to him, since she was their sworn enemy and they were constantly living under a sort of Sword of Damocles that if she discovered them they'd be wiped out. However, the Lich picked up on the groups importance to the Lady of Pain, and immediately realized it was in his best interest if the players succeeded in their quest. Should they die, it could draw the attention of the Lady to their sequestered court and their imminent demise. So, the Lich made a sacrifice. He cast a spell that destroyed his phylactery and instead made Bruce his phylactery. He would live inside Bruce and could only be removed when Vecna was freed. This would bind the group to his cause, and since the Inbetweeners were so important to the Lady of Pain, she might be willing to free Vecna in return for their assistance. It was a long shot, but the remaining followers were dwindling, either by leaving or other forms of attrition. It was clear Vecna wasn't going to be freed on the current course,

The way this worked mechanically is that the lich could perceive anything Bruce perceived, and take control of Bruce through a contested wisdom save if Bruce did anything not in his best interest. His soul was tied to Bruce's, so any attempt to dislodge or remove him would risk destroying Bruce's soul. The only way to get the lich out was for him to voluntarily leave. Hence, new side quest for the group—deal with Bruce's possession. It wasn't all bad though, Bruce could tap into some of the Lich's powers if the Lich agreed to it and also the Lich would act to ensure Bruce didn't die. The Lich instructed his group to wait for further instruction, and stay hidden here in the meantime. This was the best leverage they've had on the Lady of Pain, and he would make the most of it.

After that, the followers of Vecna provided the players instructions and let them know they saw Xalatra pass through months ago. She was headed deeper... towards The Maw. Her mental state was fractured, and she was so dangerous that even the entire court of powerful undead did not want to test her, and they instead let her pass through and disabled her potent glyphs left behind.

And I think I'll leave it there. Bruce is the phylactery of the head surviving lich of Vecna (surviving is a funny word here but... you get the idea).

Shorter post, but I've been dragging my feet on writing these and I have a lot in the backlog so I figure I will get some down when I can to keep up the momentum. Next up, the showdown with Xalatra!

Sometimes we are guided to a person, place, or thing to learn that we don’t want those things. Will you recognize the pattern and take action to break the cycle? Or will you stay stuck in self-pity or blame others for your misfortune? It’s up to us.

S.N.I.t. ; Vijftien Minuten Roem voor Vijf Euro

Ik heb mijn vijftien minuten voor een vijfje te koop gezet op marktplaats er heeft nog niemand naar de aanbieding gekeken iedereen denkt dat er voldoende plaats is voor hun eigen talenten maar als ik al niet aan de bak kom dan is de kans dat jij het wel komt bijzonder klein minimaal ze zijn niet in voor roekeloos spelen met taal je zal moeten doen wat anderen voor je hebben gedaan dan voor een zakcentje extra zien ze je even in hun schaduw staan laat maar lopen dan los laten en door gaan ik doe het wel zonder loon naar werken zonder applaus, uitgesproken waardering en een nummertje in de bovenhoek je mag mijn vijftien minuten hebben met bonus schrikkel seconde ik laat de prijs voor je zakken nog even en je kan het zo meepakken voor nop zoals ik alles weggeef en ook naar leef zonder belang, zonder opsmuk, zonder doel alleen op gevoel op puur instinct zeg ik alles wat ik denk laat maar gaan van voor naar achter en weer terug twee handen op een buik, alles mijn eigen en geen zwaar houten kruis als loden last op de rug van links naar rechts van onder naar boven van boven naar rechts en van links naar beneden schitterend in volstrekt onbekend verleden en heden voor iedereen onopvallend in erkers en nissen optreden diep verborgen in de donkerste schaduwen ben ik voor eeuwig de uwe niemand die me hoeft te kennen die de kost voor mij moet winnen of ermee die ruimte voor mij moet vrij maken in een media kast geld moet uitgeven voor mijn nabijheid me niet hoeft mee te torsen als stoffig omhulsel dat amper om het moede lijf past je mag me gerust vergeten, hoeft mijn naam nooit te droppen geen credtis te geven en geen royalties ik ben gewoon je beste onzichtbare vriend die iedere keer als ik zelf wil en kan je met lappen tekst op een wit gelijkend blaadje bediend je mag alles over me zeggen, ik hoor het niet en als ik dat wel doe dan negeer ik het anderen gaan niet voor mij en ik ga zelf ook niet rond met de pet daar gooi ik wel zo nu en dan mee maar ik denk dat u mij dat voor het gemak wel vergeeft niet waar over waar gesproken, de vijftien minuten gaan nu voor 1 en negenennegentig euro cent weg het is het toppunt van de roem, nooit slecht vers, heeft bijna tien jaar op de bovenkamer stil gestaan in een oude loopschoenendoos bij de hoge stapel bewaard oefenmateriaal, compleet zinloos klik het tenminste even aan doe dan even alsof je interesse hebt in mijn kwartier spotlicht beschouw het als je minst vervelende plicht als roem als handelswaar al niet voldoet komt het dan ooit nog een keer goed zoals iets schijnt te doen als je iets anders een keertje per ongeluk goed doet onbewust van het goede van je daad maakt mij niet uit als je maar even op die flikkerende link staat die ik voor je heb aangemaakt mijn roem is de beste ooit in ieder geval beter dan nooit ik stuur het vanaf daar rechtstreeks op naar je waarschijnlijk zeer aantrekkelijk kop om over de rest maar niet te zwijgen hiermee kun je voor 900 tellen de successen aaneenrijgen één vijftig, lager ga ik niet, inpakken en wegwezen het nut er van, er in opgenomen, geabsorbeerd, zal je worden bewezen je hoeft niet eens kleine lettertjes te lezen en ook niet drie handtekeningen op een formulie neer te pinnen gewoon inloggen digitaal betalen en drukken op accepteren en jij zal zijn wat men anders over mij zou beweren goeie deal of niet dan een soepele overgang naar een gewenste toestand jij mijn roem ik jou één tien en we hoeven elkaar nooit in de ogen te zien allemaal voordelen voor ons allebei ik krijg een grijpstuiver van jou en jij alles van mij voor vijftien vette minuten ben jij hipper dan ik ooit zal zijn

i spoke too soon about fixing my sleep schedule. im back to sleeping at ridiculous hours and waking up when the rest of the world has finished its day. maybe daylight isnt for me anymore. ive tried to make it work, but i don’t think we’re getting along anymore. maybe we will later on. anyway, ive been having a harder time controlling myself lately. my emotions, mostly. anger, fear, jealousy, all of them. i cant seem to keep any of it under control, and its getting irritating. i thought id gotten past this but apparently i didnt. ive changed, for the better, id like to think. i dont miss the person i used to be. i know exactly what im capable of becoming, and i have no interest in going back to that. i wouldnt want to see that version of myself again, let alone become him. but lately it feels like im having to fight myself over the most basic things. i dont know how much longer i can keep doing that.

Theres something i need to do. i might regret it later, but thats a problem for later. id rather deal with that than become someone ive spent so long trying not to be. thats it.

Sincerely, My own worst company.

In Summary: * Listening to relaxing music as I eat fresh apple chunks, prepare to enter the night meds and night prayers phase of my evening, and wait patiently for the pregame programming for the night's college football game to start broadcasting.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 216.49 lbs. * bp= 151/78 (64)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:05 – 1 banana * 05:30 – pizza * 10:00 – snacking on m&m chocolate candies * 12:00 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 13:45 – pizza, Mongolian beef lunch order, fried rice, egg roll * 16:40 – 1 fresh apple

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 02:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:30 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:10 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 15:00 – watching old episodes of Classic Doctor Who * 16:30 – listen to relaxing music

Chess: * 11:50 – moved in all pending CC games, winning 1, declined an invitation to a new tournament

Ingezonden stukje ; Generaal Pardon

Hi, ik ben Generaal Pardon, ik heb een mededeling voor u aangaande de inhoud van mijn excuses gemaakt over vele op dit moment urgente zaken als ook eerdere. Er is mij opgewezen dat niet alles wat ik heb geschreven betreffende deze onderwerpen even duidelijk is, zo heb ik gezegd dat ik spijt heb als haren op mijn hoofd, terwijl ik niet meer zoveel haren op mijn hoofd heb, maar toen het gebeuren waarnaar ik in dat ingezonden stuk verwijs plaatsvond had ik nog een hele dikke bos haar. Tevens heb ik gezegd dat ik ernstig gegrieft was waarbij ernstig niet echt duidelijk werd gedefinieerd, was het ernstig zoals turend naar een onwillig, hakkelend object, een staafje dat niet in een gaatje wil, of zeer ernstig in geval van een vreselijk falen, zoals bij een humane ramp veroorzaakt door persoonlijke fouten, ik bedoelde het laatste meer dan het eerste. Er is ook gezegd dat ik voor lang niet alles wat erg is sorry heb gezegd, dat ik zeker vijf procent van de delicten waarvoor ik min of meer zijdelings verantoordelijk zou kunnen zijn niet ter sprake heb gebracht, geen afstand heb genomen van deze toch zeer kwalijke zaken waarin onnodig veel schade is berokkend aan heel veel mensen, het merendeel verkerend in onmacht. Daarom zeg ik u nu dat dit allemaal niet de bedoeling was, abusievelijk nam ik aan dat het duidelijk was dat ik voor alles waarvoor ik heel zacht ter verantwoording kon worden geroepen ook mijn verantwoording heb genomen ook al heb ik dit niet nadrukkelijk gezegd. Ik hoop dat ik hiermee en ook met de komende vijf ingezonden stukken binnenkort te lezen op mijn weblocatie generaalpardon.com aan ieders excuus wensen zal hebben voldaan zodat iedereen verder kan en ik dus ook met het aansturen van mijn vele meelijopwekkende divisies vol dappere doch empathische para-soldaten, het excuus voor een leger. Sorry, sorry, en nogmaals sorry.

Ik wens u veel sterkte de komende minuten.