A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, HBO (2026)

Episodes 4-6 (Spoilers)

See review of 1-3 here

The origin story of Dunk & Egg’s team-up takes a darker turn in the second half of the premiere season. Due to his innate goodness, Dunk finds himself in power’s crosshairs, and Egg is revealed to be the nickname of princeling Aegon Targaryen. 

This show shrinks Westeros down to an intimate experience; we have never spent this kind of quality time with Smallfolk. Steely Pate, the armorer with a heart of gold, is an elite side character. The closing scene sets up a season’s worth of storytelling and an effective denouement to the black-and-blue bruising of the previous episode. 

Watch it.

#100WordReviews #Drabble #100DaysToOffload #tv #TVReview #HBO #HouseOfTheDragon #GameOfThrones #Westeros #KnightOfTheSevenKingdoms #Fantasy #television

Previously, I asked if homeowners do research about HOAs before they move into an HOA community. This research is going to be difficult because there is no database for HOA complaints. And there should be at least one, especially for Florida.

Prospective homeowners have to become private investigators to uncover details about the HOAs in the communities in which they anticipate living. You can go to the Reddit r/FuckHOA thread, but posters often conceal details about their neighborhoods, HOAs, and property management companies. Interestingly, many of the stories are about Florida.

As it become increasingly difficult to buy a home without deed restrictions, we need a national database about HOA abuses that is not run by realtors or homeowners association lobbies.

Lydia's Weekly Lifestyle blog is for today's African girl, so no subject is taboo. My purpose is to share things that may interest today's African girl.

This week's contributors: Lydia, Pépé Pépinière, Titi. This week's subjects: The 2026 Corporate Accra Girl Wardrobe: A Bold, Colourful Palette to Power Your Style, Luxury brands super inflated prices reviewed, Fashion in space, Beach walk and star watching, and Saffron Saga Indian restaurant

---

The 2026 Corporate Accra Girl Wardrobe: A Bold, Colourful Palette to Power Your Style. Hey, City girls! It’s 2026, and we’re not here to play when it comes to fashion in the corporate world. Gone are the days when a neutral palette ruled the office; the modern corporate Accra girl is taking charge and making waves with a wardrobe that's as bold, vibrant, and dynamic as the city itself. Let’s take a deep dive into the hottest colours dominating the office in Accra this year. Whether you're a startup superstar or a boss at a multinational corporation, your wardrobe needs to reflect confidence, creativity, and of course, that African flair. Ready to turn heads and own the boardroom? Here’s the must-have colour palette you’ll be seeing everywhere this year! Rich Earth Tones with a Twist. Think terracotta, deep cocoa, and burnt sienna — but make them modern and fresh. These earthy hues, reminiscent of Accra’s rich soil and vibrant markets, are perfect for the corporate environment. Paired with sleek, structured suits, dresses, or blazers, these shades exude authority while remaining grounded in the culture. In 2026, we’re adding a twist with pops of gold or coral accessories to lighten the look. Why it works: Earth tones are universally flattering and versatile, while still being a fresh take on the classic neutral tones. They evoke professionalism without sacrificing personality. Style tip: Go for a terracotta blazer with a black pencil skirt or pants. Add a gold necklace and statement earrings to elevate your look. Bonus points if you’re rocking a bold lip in a deep berry or brick red! Luxury brands super inflated prices reviewed. Recent hikes in prices of brands like Dior and Chanel (30-60%) have brought some extra profit to the bottom line of these companies, but now sales are dropping, some customers (about 50 million of them) have come to their senses and feel that a 50 ml bottle of eau de parfum is not worth 150 USD, especially if most of us are hardly able to detect every little smell that goes into that. So these big brands are now offering little items again at lower prices, call it at the entry level, for the aspirational customers, those who want to buy the Brand but cannot really afford it, and who pleasure themselves with a little affordable Brand item, dreaming that later they'll be richer and can then buy some of the other Brand things too. The Brand seems more important than the product itself, and in Ghana too we are influenced by this sort of thing, if it is not an Apple don’t give it to me. I even hear that from people who are asking for money to buy airtime.

Fashion in space. The first man in a space, Yuri Gagarin (a Russian, in 1961) was not even recognizable to his own wife... But since then astronauts and astronautes have become film stars in their own way, and want to look good for the many pictures taken of them. So space suits now look more attractive, as can be seen on a recent picture of the crew who is to replace the current International Space Station crew. The transporter was the Space Shuttle. Looks a bit like star wars dresses, and expect earth fashion to soon copy space fashion, and to have a fashion brand called “Musk”.

Beach walk and star watching. If the sky is clear (not really of late) you can see the stars, and even point out your own Zodiac. But then you need to know what time your zodiac will be visible, which changes throughout the year. But Elon Musk, and many before him, have put so many satellites around the world that you can hardly see the stars again. And especially above areas with a lot of artificial light, like cities, that light disturbs the light emitted by the stars, so you don’t see much again. A bit like trying to listen to music next to a generator. So those who really want to observe stars, as a hobby or professionally, go to areas where there is least light disturbance, like Chile's Atacama Desert, 4000 meters high and no clouds and zero rainfall. And scientists are currently celebrating that a 10 billion $ hydrogen and ammonia production facility project planned for that area has finally been cancelled, it would have spoiled the view.

Saffron Saga Indian restaurant (11th Lane, Salvation Road, behind La Villa Boutique in Osu, Accra) is one of my favourites of late, and often the place is full of Indian looking Indians and we are the only “foreigners”, so it can't be bad or these would go elsewhere. And some of this Indian food is quite interesting. But mind you, it is difficult to talk about Indian food, they have about 7 main distinctive cuisines, and hundreds if not thousands of local cuisines so maybe we are just seeing one particular cuisine here. Something I'll ask the next time I go there. We had crispy canvas humus at GHC 133, this is a sort of very thin crispy pancake fried in what you could call a headpan, and then they add a sort of humus with freshly chopped vegetables like onions, peppers, tomatoes, spring onions etc. Nice. We also had chicken chilly rice at 133GHC, a bit like the royal rice in a Chinese restaurant, but this one is richer, not just a few small pieces of meat or shrimps mixed through the rice. And it is also spicier. Their rice is “wetter” than what you get at the Chinese. Also nice. A Guinness goes for 46 GHC.

Lydia...

Do not forget to hit the subscribe button and confirm in your email inbox to get notified about our posts.

I have received requests about leaving comments/replies. For security and privacy reasons my blog is not associated with major media giants like Facebook or Twitter. I am talking with the host about a solution. for the time being, you can mail me at wunimi@proton.me

I accept invitations and payments to write about certain products or events, things, and people, but I may refuse to accept and if my comments are negative then that's what I will publish, despite your payment. This is not a political newsletter. I do not discriminate on any basis whatsoever.

Consistency, Reliability, Anxiety and Technology

Hello fellow beta testers, today is another day of trial and error. Your alarm has worked. That's a good start. Take a deep breath and ask yourself what is the next piece of technology you will need to rely on today? Do you have a backup plan if it doesn't work? Anxiety has been thinking about these things all night. Anxiety and our current, technologically advanced world are great bedfellows.

The boomers often told stories of consumer products that would last a life time. “They don't make 'em like they used to,” was the phrase that covered everything from automobiles to toasters. The generations after the boomers can attest to the quality loss. The were guinea pigs for corporations. What is our tolerance for replacing the tech in our lives? Imagine the parents of boomers had a refrigerator for 50 years and then gave it to their boomer children for the garage or basement. My parents had a fridge for maybe 20 years. Today, a 15 year old fridge is beyond geriatric and more of a miracle.

As more and more devices have computers built-in, they become less reliable. Of course, there's a new-ish villain on the scene as well. Built-in obsolescence is the prince of capitalism. Now, if we are lucky to have homes, they all come with the insecurity of inconsistent appliances that our recent ancestors relied on. Knowing that tomorrow morning there is a 50% chance that my transit card may not scan and I won't get to work is not a comforting thought. You've got a load of wet clothes in the washer, but suddenly the dryer refuses to recognize that its door is closed and fails to start. The garage door opener is great at that one job. Note that is not called a garage door closer. Yup, something is tripping it up and it will not close. The printer, well let's face it, the thing has never worked without some sort of hassle.

Meanwhile, your boss was around when computers were advertised as the fastest, most efficient and effective tools for every single task. Certainly you can finish this project you were given via email 20 minutes ago in under an hour and still get 3 other tasks done. You have a computer! Never mind that the latest security update has broken your email client and if you computer goes to sleep it will lock up and you have to turn it off and then back on to keep working. The boss doesn't really believe you. Her computer is not having issues. Granted, you aren't sure what she uses it for because last week you had to show her how to add an appointment to her calendar.

Whether technology works or not, the world is moving at a faster pace and that is causing anxiety in many people. The faster we move, the more that is expected of us thanks to capitalism. Glitchy, buggy technology is the bread of the shit sandwich that is our anxiety. It gets worse every single day. That goes for both anxiety and technology.

Panic on the Hour

The amount of tasks we perform in a day is far more than it used to be. We congratulate ourselves for putting in extra time as well. The idea of working more than 40 hours a week is a badge of honor, not something to alarm us. Anxiety gets to spend far more time on the job when we work more hours and increase the number of tasks we perform. So we're all on meds trying to stop the lizard brain from interpreting the fact that the email won't open as a physical attack from a predator. Well to be fair, if you don't get the email with the changes open, you don't make the changes, you get fired, you cannot pay the bills and will likely die on the streets in the winter. Maybe the lizard brain isn't that far off with its interpretation.

We're scared. Living paycheck to paycheck means more than just a few white hairs. We're afraid of layoffs so we put in extra, unpaid time to show our loyalty. All that extra time means we're not eating healthy. We don't have time for doctor exam, when could we ever fit that in? Now, I am scared about my health. The anxiety starts to become overwhelming, but I surely cannot take time off from work. Despite there being a mental health leave available, taking it is a one way ticket to the scrutiny of every single minute when I am back at work. Any mistake is proof that I am no longer cut out for this work.

Of course, the moment you think about taking a mental health leave is the first time that you recognized that things are getting bad. This means you get to add that to the infinite anxiety list. You could ask for an accommodation, perhaps to work a day or two at home? No, you cannot do that because your internet at home goes down at random times, once a week. Your provider forces you to use their hardware and they've replace the network hub 3 times already. Is it a cheap device or are the employees at the manufacturer of the hub feeling similar to you? Are they so anxious trying to meet quotas that they make mistakes during assembly?

Perhaps we should say capitalism “pushes” the world around, not makes it go around.

Unreliable Expectations

“Everything is out to destroy us!” Anxiety chants.

Though, it is not paranoia or a flight or fight system that is overreacting. Literally the technology we use to solve problems everyday is built to fail in the name of capitalism. One of the biggest advancements in recent years is the smart phone. It's also one of the most expensive things we own.

We forget that our phones which are now required for transactions at banks or social agencies, are priced anywhere between $700 – $3000 USD. The companies have put us on payment plans. They cover the phone cost upfront and we pay it off in 3-5 years. Of course, the technology moves so fast that the phone will be obsolete in 2 years.

It's this weird mix between having the latest, supported device that is required for most of the tasks in our world and owning a status symbol. Companies have taught us that phones don't last long. Nobody expects a phone to last them 50 years. So it's normal to go into debt every two years for at least 2k. And, now everything is digital and runs software like a phone so obviously we need a new dishwasher. This one is pushing 6 years.

We have printers, nearly all ink jet printers on the market have an expiry date. At some point the printer will say it needs to be serviced, but shipping it to be serviced and paying for the service is more than the cost of a new printer.

We're missing those reliable, stable pieces in our lives that give us breathing room to worry about the things that matter in the moment. Our lives are a minefield and we're navigating blind. Of course we are anxious.

The stress of all our human relationships and the complexity of all the financial commitments that require our attention to simply have a roof over our heads is far more than we can handle. Yet, the layer above that is filled with technology that is unreliable. Your bank website is down. The car refuses to be put in drive because it thinks the air bag has been deployed. The Uber app says your credit card was denied so you cannot get to the bank for help. The furnace in the house is not working and you are freaking out. To calm the anxiety you think you should do a guided meditation. Unfortunately, your phone has decided that it won't play any audio of any kind.

With any luck, I will be able to post this without issue. Then, I can settle into the anxiety of the moment.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.

— Allan Bloom (h/t: Cultural Offering)

#culture #life #quotes #reading

Gestern in einer digitalen Politik-Werkstatt des SEND e.V. zur politischen Arbeit in ländlichen Räumen habe ich einen Gedanken geteilt, der mich schon länger begleitet und den ich hier etwas sortieren möchte. In meinem beruflichen Alltag begegne ich in Dörfern und Kleinstädten regelmäßig Menschen, die sich selbst als konservativ bezeichnen – und zugleich an Projekten arbeiten, die man im urbanen Diskurs vermutlich als progressiv oder sogar transformativ einordnen würde. Diese Menschen bauen Netzwerke auf, gründen Coworking Spaces, initiieren MehrWertOrte oder engagieren sich für das, was Ray Oldenburg als „Dritte Orte“ beschrieben hat: Räume jenseits von Zuhause und Arbeitsplatz, in denen Begegnung, Austausch und demokratische Aushandlung stattfinden.

Und doch höre ich immer wieder den Satz: „Ich bin eher konservativ.“ Das hat mich lange irritiert – auch, weil ich mich selbst nicht als konservativ verstehe und wir trotzdem gut, konstruktiv und mit gemeinsamen Zielen zusammenarbeiten. Hinzu kommt, dass empirische Befunde, etwa von dem Soziologen Ansgar Hudde, zeigen, dass das Wahlverhalten vieler dieser Personen – mit regionalen Ausnahmen wie Bayern oder der Eifel – gar nicht eindeutig konservativ ist. Selbstzuschreibung und politische Praxis fallen also nicht zwangsläufig zusammen.

Vielleicht liegt die Irritation an meinem Begriffsverständnis. Im urban geprägten Diskurs erscheint „konservativ“ häufig als Gegenbegriff zu „progressiv“: Bewahrung statt Veränderung, Tradition statt Innovation. Im ländlichen Raum scheint sich diese Semantik jedoch zu verschieben. Dort bedeutet konservativ meiner Wahrnehmung nach oft, Verantwortung für das Gemeinwesen zu übernehmen, sich zu kümmern und funktionierende Strukturen nicht leichtfertig aufzugeben.

Wenn eine Unternehmerin einen leerstehenden Vierseitenhof in einen Coworking- und Begegnungsort transformiert, dann geschieht das selten aus disruptivem Sendungsbewusstsein. Es geht um Ortskernbelebung, um kürzere Wege, um Perspektiven für junge Menschen, um soziale Infrastruktur. Das ist kein Bruch mit dem Bestehenden, sondern dessen Weiterentwicklung. Auch der urbane Coworking Space war nie wirklich disruptiv – Büros existieren weiterhin –, doch im städtischen Kontext wurde Coworking gern als Symbol einer „neuen Arbeitswelt“ inszeniert. Neu ist dort normativ aufgeladen. Auf dem Land ist neu vor allem funktional.

In Metropolen war Coworking lange Teil einer kreativen Milieu-Logik; in Kleinstädten und Dörfern ist es häufig eine infrastrukturelle Antwort auf strukturelle Herausforderungen: Leerstand nimmt zu, Geschäftsmodelle verändern sich, klassische Treffpunkte verschwinden, junge Menschen pendeln oder ziehen weg. Unter diesen Bedingungen wird ein Coworking Space zu einem Instrument der Daseinsvorsorge im weiteren Sinne.

Ähnlich verhält es sich mit MehrWertOrten: multifunktionale Räume, die Arbeiten, Lernen, Nahversorgung, Kultur und Ehrenamt zusammenführen. Sie stabilisieren lokale Netzwerke und erhöhen Resilienz. Viele Initiator*innen sprechen dabei von Heimat, Zusammenhalt, Verantwortung und Generationengerechtigkeit – Begriffe, die politisch eher konservativ konnotiert sind. Und doch sind diese Projekte ohne Offenheit nicht denkbar. Unterschiedliche Professionen, Lebensentwürfe und politische Haltungen teilen sich Infrastruktur und kommen ins Gespräch. Vielleicht lese ich diese Praxis deshalb – aus meiner urban sozialisierten Perspektive – als progressiv.

Je länger ich darüber nachdenke, desto mehr zweifle ich an der Schärfe der Dichotomie „konservativ versus progressiv“ im ländlichen Kontext. Viele der Akteur*innen, mit denen ich arbeite, wollen nichts umstürzen. Sie wollen erhalten, was ihnen wichtig ist: Lebensqualität, Gemeinschaft, wirtschaftliche Tragfähigkeit. Gerade aus diesem Motiv heraus entwickeln sie neue Modelle von Arbeit, Kooperation und Begegnung. Das wirkt weniger wie ein Widerspruch als wie eine andere Form von Fortschritt – nicht der radikale Bruch mit dem Bestehenden, sondern eine behutsame Transformation aus der Mitte der Gemeinschaft heraus.

Wer ländliche Räume vorschnell in politische Schubladen steckt, übersieht diese Dynamik. Dort entstehen Orte, die demokratische Kultur stärken, wirtschaftliche Perspektiven eröffnen und gesellschaftliche Vielfalt ermöglichen – häufig initiiert von Menschen, die sich selbst als konservativ verstehen. Für mich ist das inzwischen weniger irritierend als ermutigend. Es zeigt, dass Offenheit nicht zwingend an ein bestimmtes politisches Label gebunden ist und dass Coworking Spaces, MehrWertOrte und andere Dritte Orte Brücken schlagen können – zwischen Milieus, Generationen und Weltanschauungen. Vielleicht liegt genau darin ihr eigentlicher Mehrwert.

Así como suena, sin alterar. En su golpe, en las ondas que produce, tal como es, sencilla perfección.

Dejando que la mente caiga, descanse. Simplemente lo que sucede.

Otra gota, y otra. La montaña, la casa, el origen: la luz que enciende la forma y tus pensamientos, también gotas.

En su golpe, otra gota.

Sin alterar nada, descansa.

I started The Catechetic Converter a year ago. And I feel an obligation to write something in honor of that milestone, celebrating the fact that I’ve had my own website for a full year.

The post that has the most views is my first one, which is about Linux. And Linux and this site have an intertwined relationship in that my switch to Linux helped inspire me to get away from “Big Tech” in other ways. In fact, it was (I think) a post on Westenberg that inspired me to start the blog. The idea of having my own little corner of the web, not mediated by some corporation—and not built to make money—was appealing. Just a place to stick my random thoughts and ideas, putting them “out there” in the ether to see where they land, what they inspire… I loved that.

And Linux and this post are kind of intertwined because I have spent the past week staying up far too late most nights (in violation of one of my Lenten disciplines to go to bed by 10:30) trying to get a custom firmware to run on an MP3 player.

See, in continuance of the spirit of moving away from Big Tech, I have started disentangling myself from having everything on a phone. I asked for a Sony CyberShot F707 digital camera for Christmas (a model I had when it was brand new and stupidly donated to Goodwill or whatever several years back). And then I bought an Innioasis Y1, which hearkens back to iPods of yore (with a click-wheel and everything). This is a device that folks like to tinker with as well and I learned that people had managed to get a bespoke firmware known as RockBox—initially developed for old iPods—to run on the device, improving its functionality in numerous ways. So I planned to do this.

After what seemed like months, the device finally arrived. The standard, out-of-the-box firmware was fine, if a little rough. But the filing system for finding my music was wanting and so I decided to give RockBox a try because it offers more refinements in this area (plus a TON of fun custom themes for the device). Doing this requires downloading and running a program known as the Innioasis Updater, which was developed primarily for Windows and Mac but also includes a Linux version that is overtly said to be “unofficial” with warnings that I would be “on my own” with this. I got the sense that this would be a challenge.

I’ll spare you too many details, but I had to download another tool called MTKClient, which is written in Python, and had to run a ton of terminal commands to get running. It didn’t help that installation guides were written using LLMs and I needed to switch back and forth between two of them to get all the necessary steps right (the “official” one on GitHub failed to note the need to change directories in a couple of key places). I wound up needing certain drivers, having to write custom scripts. At one point I managed to accidentally remove all of my terminal commands thanks to forgetting to add the word “eval” to a directory. Then I also managed to lock myself into my machine (in this case a 2011-era Mac running Linux Mint) constantly trying to download Android Platform Tools from a broken mirror of a repository—which taught me a whole a range of new commands to fully purge a faulty download. After successfully installing both programs, I found that the updater would not properly read my device.

I attempted to install the program using my wife’s Windows 11 laptop and was reminded why I’ve spent over twenty years hating Microsoft.

But GitHub forums came to the rescue (where I also learned that the updater was vibe-coded using LLMs which probably explains a lot) and I got RockBox to run on the device. It now has a theme that looks like it belongs on the first MacIntosh (because even though we might have broken up, I still carry parts of her that are now parts of me). I’m listening to Maggie Rogers on the device as I write this—right after I celebrated this accomplishment with the Geto Boys’ “Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta.”

***

This morning at my parish’s Bible Study, one of my parishioners noted that I tend to have a lot of information and ephemera in my head related to any number of things related to Christianity. “I tend to think of things more simply,” he said.

I told him that I also value simplicity, but I come to that simplicity through learning and accumulating knowledge about what I’m doing and believing. For me it’s like a bell curve by way of zen. What I mean is that the zen monk may take a guy out of the mud, put him on the stool for years and teach him koans and sutras, get him to the verge of enlightenment only to then throw him back in the mud because the guy needs to learn that enlightenment can be found in the mud. In other words, I like taking things apart just to get back to where I started because I now understand that start so much better.

Tinkering and futzing with my computer speaks to this because it helps me to consider the complexity behind simple things. Like right now I’m putting letters together into words on a document. But there is an astounding amount of calculations taking place to make this happen. The words you read on your screen are the result of carefully managed electrical currents running on circuit boards and through cables connected to liquid crystal fields that display what you’re seeing. And there are also an incomprehensible number of electrical charges going on among the synapses in your brain to not only cause you to see these words, but to interpret them as things that cause you to feel things and think other things.

In the Bible Study we looked at Jesus’ discussion with Nicodemus in the third chapter of John’s gospel. In that passage Jesus says that everyone born of the Spirit is like the wind (in the Greek language of John’s gospel there is a triple meaning of Spirit/wind/breath that Jesus is playing with here). The wind connects. The wind moves. This speaks to the complex connections between things, connections made by God. Connections where God can be found. And like the wind, once God shows up you know it.

***

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this. I guess I’m just on the other side of bell-curve, back where I started. Putting out thoughts and words into the ether to see where they land. To see what they inspire. Which is another wind-related word, by the way. I’m writing this on a miraculous piece of technology and you’re reading it on one equally so. In between us is a dense web of complexity and connection—including both electricity and wind. We can take a look at that complexity, investigate it, see how it runs. But in the end we come back to where we began:

A writer and a reader, brought together by some wind. A wind holy and mysterious.

***

The Rev. Charles Browning II is the rector of Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church in Honolulu, Hawai’i. He is a husband, father, surfer, and frequent over-thinker. Follow him on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

#Linux #Christianity #Thought #Random #Jesus #Technology

Los jóvenes de hoy no son capaces siquiera de saltar una jirafa. A tu edad, yo me apoyaba en una vara larga que hice con madera de encino, y fui capaz de saltar tres jirafas en diez segundos. Mi amigo Edgard llegó a saltar cinco jirafas, cronometrado. Tú no eres capaz ni de brincar un sapo, y si te pasa cerca te asustas.

Esto te lo digo porque has cogido una pena y no sales de ella. Ahí pegado como un tornillo. Hijo, los muchachos de antes cogíamos diez penas a la semana y las íbamos brincando de una en una hasta dejarlas atrás. Yo fui capaz de saltar seis penas el mismo día. Tu tío el Matracas saltó ocho. Y tú ves una y te quedas atascado.

A tu edad los muchachos del pueblo nos levantábamos el ánimo tirando piedras a los que iban en sus canoas por los rápidos del río Zot. Llegué a arrancarle una oreja al tío abuelo de un amigo al que le decíamos el Cornetas. Muy difícil darles porque en el pueblo se la sabían todas.

-Papá, acuérdate que tú naciste allá y esos eran otros tiempos. Aquí en Los Ángeles la vida es diferente, las penas se disfrutan y, si se puede, vivimos de ellas.

In March 2023, GPT-4 could identify prime numbers with 97.6% accuracy. By June, that figure had cratered to 2.4%. Not a rounding error, not a minor regression, but a 95-point collapse on the same task with the same prompts. If a bridge lost 95% of its load-bearing capacity in three months, someone would go to prison. In AI, the vendor posts a changelog and moves on.

This pattern has repeated with depressing regularity across every frontier provider. Models ship to applause and enterprise contracts get signed on the strength of benchmark screenshots, and then something changes. The model you evaluated is no longer the model answering your customers, and nobody tells you until your production workflow starts producing garbage.

The evidence is not anecdotal

Researchers at Stanford and UC Berkeley tracked this drift formally, comparing GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 snapshots from March and June 2023 across seven tasks. The results were bad enough to make the researchers themselves flinch. GPT-4’s ability to generate directly executable code dropped from 52% to 10%. Its willingness to follow chain-of-thought prompting, one of the most widely used techniques for improving accuracy, degraded without explanation. GPT-3.5 actually improved on some tasks where GPT-4 got worse, which implies that updates to one model’s behaviour were creating unintended regressions in another.

“The magnitude of the changes in the LLMs’ responses surprised us,” James Zou, a Stanford professor and co-author, told The Register. The team’s conclusion was blunt. The behaviour of the “same” LLM service can shift substantially in weeks, and nobody outside the provider knows when or why.

This wasn’t a one-off result that got debated and forgotten. The OpenAI developer forums have become a rolling graveyard of complaints. In September 2025, users running GPT-4.1 reported severe intelligence degradation within 30 days of launch, with complex tool calls and multi-step instructions suddenly failing. Similar threads appeared for GPT-4 Turbo in May 2025. The pattern never varies, and by now it has become depressingly predictable. Works brilliantly at launch, degrades silently, users scramble to figure out what broke.

Why this happens (and why the incentives encourage it)

There are at least four mechanisms that can degrade a deployed model, and most frontier providers are using all of them simultaneously.

Quantisation is the most technically straightforward of the four, and the easiest to understand. A model trained in 16-bit or 32-bit floating-point precision gets compressed to 8-bit or 4-bit integers for serving. The arithmetic is straightforward enough, since a model stored in FP16 needs roughly two bytes per parameter, so a 70-billion-parameter model demands about 140GB of VRAM just for weights. Quantise to 4-bit and you cut that to around 35GB, enough to run on hardware that costs a fraction as much.

The trade-off is supposed to be minimal, and Red Hat’s analysis of over 500,000 evaluations found that 8-bit and 4-bit quantised models showed “very competitive accuracy recovery” on most benchmarks, especially for larger models. But that phrase “most benchmarks” is doing heavy lifting. Quantisation works by rounding, and rounding destroys outlier values. The weights that fire rarely but matter enormously for edge-case reasoning are exactly the weights that get flattened first. For standard tasks you barely notice the difference, but for the specific hard problems your production system was built to handle, the gap can be catastrophic. One developer reported that dynamic quantisation of a 3B-parameter model dropped accuracy from 65.6% to 32.3%, a halving that no benchmark average would predict.

Mixture-of-experts routing is the more interesting culprit, and the one providers talk about least. DeepSeek’s V3, for example, has 671 billion total parameters but only activates about 37 billion per token. The economics are irresistible because you get the capacity of a massive model with the inference cost of a much smaller one. But the router decides which experts handle which queries, and routing decisions are probabilistic. A query that activated your model’s strongest expert subnetwork at launch might get routed differently after an update to the routing logic, or after the provider adjusts load balancing to handle peak traffic. The user sees the same model name in the API response. The actual computation behind it may have changed entirely.

Distillation and model substitution is the elephant in the room that everyone suspects but nobody can prove definitively. Rumours have circulated since mid-2023 that OpenAI routes some queries to smaller, cheaper models behind the same API endpoint. The Gleech.org 2025 AI retrospective put it plainly: “True frontier capabilities are likely obscured by systematic cost-cutting (distillation for serving to consumers, quantisation, low reasoning-token modes, routing to cheap models).” GPT-4.5 was retired after just three months, presumably because the inference costs were unsustainable, even though it still ranked in the top five on LMArena for hallucination reduction nine months later. The model that performed best got killed because it was too expensive to run.

Safety tuning and RLHF adjustments create the subtlest form of drift. When OpenAI tightens content filters or adjusts the model’s tendency to refuse certain queries, those changes ripple through the entire behaviour space. The Stanford study found that GPT-4 became less willing to explain why it refused sensitive questions, switching from detailed explanations to terse “Sorry, I can’t answer that” responses. The model may have become safer by one measure, but it simultaneously became less transparent and less useful for legitimate applications that happened to brush against the updated boundaries.

The economics are doing exactly what you would expect

Running frontier models is staggeringly expensive, and every provider is under pressure to reduce cost-per-token. The maths, as one industry analysis noted, resembles building more fuel-efficient engines and then using the efficiency gains to build monster trucks. Token prices have dropped by a factor of 1,000 in three years, but reasoning models now generate thousands of internal tokens before producing a single visible output, and 99% of demand shifts to the newest model the moment it ships.

Providers respond by doing what any business would do. They optimise for throughput and margin, quantising the weights and routing easy queries to cheaper subnetworks while distilling the flagship into something that passes the benchmarks but costs a tenth as much to serve. The individual techniques are all defensible, but stacked together and applied silently, they create a system where the model’s advertised performance diverges from its delivered performance over time.

DeepSeek made this trade-off explicit and turned it into a business strategy. Its V3 model serves inference at roughly 90% below comparable OpenAI and Anthropic rates, and the MoE architecture that enables this pricing is openly documented. Whatever you think of the approach, at least the engineering trade-offs are visible. The problem is worse when providers make the same trade-offs quietly, behind an API that returns the same model identifier regardless of what actually computed the response.

What this means if you build on top of these models

The practical upshot is unpleasant but straightforward. If your application depends on consistent model behaviour, you are building on sand that shifts without warning. The Stanford researchers recommended continuous monitoring, and they were right, but monitoring alone doesn’t solve the problem, because it tells you something broke without stopping it from breaking.

Pinning to a specific model snapshot helps, where providers offer it, but even snapshots get deprecated. OpenAI maintains them for a few months and then requires developers to migrate. The careful evaluation you ran against the March snapshot becomes irrelevant when you’re forced onto the June version and nobody can tell you exactly what changed.

The deeper issue is one of trust and transparency. When a model provider updates a live model, they are unilaterally changing the behaviour of every application built on top of it. That is not a software update but an undocumented API change, the kind that would trigger outrage in any other engineering discipline. Imagine if AWS silently swapped your database engine for a cheaper one that was “approximately equivalent” on standard benchmarks, and you can begin to see how the AI industry has somehow normalised something that would be career-ending negligence anywhere else.

Where this leaves us

The model you benchmarked, the one that earned the contract, that impressed the board, that your engineers spent weeks building prompts and evaluation harnesses around, is a snapshot of a moving target. Quantisation shaves off the edges while routing sends your queries to whichever expert subnetwork happens to be cheapest that millisecond, and safety updates redraw the boundaries of what the model will and won’t do. None of it shows up in the model name string your application receives in the API response.

Somewhere in a data centre, the accountants and the alignment researchers are both pulling the same model in different directions, one toward cheaper inference and the other toward tighter guardrails, and the engineers who built their products on last month’s version are left checking the forums to figure out why everything stopped working on a Tuesday.

JOURNAL 27 février Natte, sabre, bokken, une leçon de kenjutsu

Alors j'ai expliqué à ces élèves déjà avancés pourquoi dans le kenjutsu on coupe pas les nattes. J'enseigne le kenjutsu, c’est l’ensemble des techniques de combat des guerriers traditionnels japonais. Je dis bien de combat, ça veut dire on est censés avoir un adversaire, pas une natte immobile. Pour couper une natte, on utilise la lame à partir de la moitié de sa longueur, pour ça il faut s'approcher de la natte. Déjà là un adversaire il va pas te laisser approcher comme ça sans rien faire. Mais mettons. On dégaine, on prend le sabre à deux mains, la plupart du temps on frappe fort donc avec les jambes… on risque de coincer la lame. On est mort. Si on coupe on termine la lame vers le bas, un peu penché en avant pour se remettre en position en garde il faut reculer de deux pas... Je fais pas de dessin : à toutes les phases de l'action on se met gravement en danger devant un adversaire. Dans le kenjutsu on garde une longueur de bras plus une de lame. Dans le même geste on dégaine, on coupe avec la pointe deux trois centimètres de lame maximum, on se remet aussitôt en garde sans avoir à reculer. Si on a bien estimé la distance ( ça s'acquiert facilement) on a coupé la carotide. C’est suffisant au besoin on peut porter un deuxième coup. Pas besoin d'avoir une force exceptionnelle, il suffit d'avoir le mouvement juste. C’est ça la différence et c’est pour ça qu’on s'amuse pas à couper les nattes. J'ai fait la démonstration sur une natte justement. La coupe sur tout le diamètre environ 3 cm de profondeur, à vue de nez ½ seconde. C’est parce que je suis formée au kenjutsu que j'ai battu moralement mon frère dès le premier assaut de notre duel. On avait les bokken bien sûr mais moi je m’en servais comme d'un sabre au premier assaut de la pointe de mon bokken j'ai touchés les tendons de sa main, avec un sabre le combat était fini, lui voulait me casser les os, toute la différence est là. Évidemment c’est plus clair quand je peux montrer, mais je crois que même ici c’est compréhensible. Mes élèves ont compris.

I learned that I'm supposed to move on. And I learned a couple different ways of doing that, one of the ways was to act like they had died and grieve that. But I guess it's pretty hard because I know she's not dead. Open watching a good amount of videos on a different set of topics, things from her perspective, things from my perspective, things from relationship in the future stuff like that. I also learned that I over intellectualized the break up, and because of that I was able to shield myself from grief. And so I'm back to letting myself feel that grief.

I was watching a video on YouTube an old lady reading something called. Let them, just let them. And I think it's a pretty simple concept that I think would benefit me a lot to really internalize. I spent a lot of time in the relationship and I put up with a lot of stuff because I really wanted things to work, for the sake of things working. I think I also took on the role of a caretaker a lot, and I tried to fix her. I think I took a lot of responsibility and I told myself that I had a lot of agency on the things that she was kind of deficient in, and instead of trying to move on, I instead almost made her a pet project in a way of trying to make her want to change and become the person that I hoped I could spend a future with. But you cannot make a horse drink water. All you can do is lead it to it. I think there's a certain kind of grief in accepting the fact that I cannot save her, and additionally accepting the fact that if she chooses to get better, maybe I can take some amount of credit for being part of that catalyst, but at the same time it's not because of me.

It was a really weird thing, when I was using ChatGPT as a sounding board, one of the questions it asked me was how would I feel if in two years she got better emotionally. Like she had healed and fixed a lot of the issues that caused our relationship to fail. And weirdly I didn't feel good about it and I don't really know why if I'm being honest. I think the low hanging fruit I would guess is that I would be upset that I didn't get to experience that version of her. And I guess another part of me would feel like I tried really hard to give her that grace and give her the tools to fix her issues, but she just didn't. And then in this hypothetical, she then did. It's a weird thing because I've said a lot that I want the best for her and I want her life to go well, but when I think about her in a relationship with another person, especially if it's recent, it hurts. I think that's also just a very natural thing of course but it still hurts. I think I want to know that I was special to her, and I guess part of me is still hanging onto those words that she would always tell me of how I was the one and how she doesn't know how she could live without me. But I guess that's the caretaker. I think I also thought a lot about the fact that part of the reason why I felt like she loved me a lot was because I took care of her in those ways. I would give her a lot of grace, I would tolerate a lot of things, I would regulate her emotions, I would try to fix her where I could. And I remember that in the most recent fuck up, I had a really weird thought that I didn’t like it. My brain told me at some point that she was going to make up for this so much, and I would essentially receive so much love and affection from that. Almost like my needs, and even just my wants would be met, because she almost owed me in a way. And that thought disgusted me immediately even in the moment. That's not at all what love should be like and I really don't think that's how I viewed things either. I really hope not.

I started to cry when I was driving home from hanging out with a friend, and I kind of triggered it on my own. I put my hand off to the side like I would when we were driving, and I would hold her thighs. And then I would put my hand where I would've held her hand on the center console. I told myself that I lost my passenger princess. And that was enough to make me start crying again. I went to the food place that we went to together a lot when I first moved here. I thought about how we parked in almost the same spot and she would get into my car and we would eat our food while watching a YouTube video together. But it's almost like I've ran out of tears. I heaved and I cried, but not many tears came out.

I cried a lot yesterday when I put some of the last keepsakes into the trash bag that I have now stored into the shed. I also put lemon, which was the stuffed animal that she bought to cuddle at my place. And it felt kind of fucked because lemon kind of became my stuffed animal in a way. I've never really been super attached to a stuffed animal, but part of me feels really guilty for keeping it in that shed, especially when I've cuddled it so many nights. Maybe the kindest thing that I could do is rehome lemon. Part of me wants to of course keep lemon, and it's weird because it doesn't even feel like it's super strongly tied to her, like lemon is its own thing in my mind. But then I also think about all of the photos and all of the times that she cuddled lemon. All the times that I would see her sleeping so peacefully cuddling it. You know it would make me sad sometimes because she would cuddle lemon and Hash would be trying to snuggle up with her on the side. And I would always wonder how she could choose stuffed animal over Hash. Sometimes she did cuddle Hash though and it made me really happy to see that. And just like that, I've started to cry again. I feel a lot of obligation towards my dog, Hash. And I really want to make sure that any partner I have in the future is loved by him, and absolutely loves him back. Honestly, a part of me feels like another reason why I'm glad I made this decision was because when she was breaking up with me and going through my house with her roommates, she said bye-bye Hash in a very light tone, like she had emotionally distanced herself from him. And I just don't understand how you could love a dog and dismiss them so easily. Her roommates even were making jokes about stealing him. And how their cat would beat him in a fight. I don't care how much she was mad at me, or how much she needed the relationship to end. She should never have even considered any kind of malintent towards him. That's my baby. And at the end of the day, I really do mean that way more than whenever I would say that towards her. Hash should never have been disregarded or caught by the conflict we had. And I think that's enough of a reason for me to understand that maybe she wasn't the one for me. And it hurts a lot because I think Hash is like me in a lot of ways. I went through camera roll and I found photos of her with Hash sleeping under her lap while she was doing homework. And there's so many photos of them together. And Hash really loved her so much, just like I did. But I think sometimes there were just periods where, for whatever reason she wouldn't be well, and she would hurt us. I think at the end of the day, I really do deserve someone who wouldn't do that to me. I deserve to be loved, in a gentle way. In a way where I don't need to take care of someone else and keep them emotionally grounded. In a way that I don't need to convince them or explain to them how they've hurt me, but rather it comes from a place of compassion and curiosity. And I'm not saying that E didn't love me at all. But I don't think she loved me in the healthiest of ways, and I also agree that I don't think I loved her in those same ways. I also don't know if I believe if love conquers all. Because I think if she truly loved me, she would've helped herself. She would've done the work to overcome the problems that she had, at the same time, maybe those problems were just more than her love could handle. And so she did love me, but I think she was struggling a lot. And maybe the kindest thing she could've done in that situation was to let me go. And the problem is I didn't want to let go. And so I think the even kinder thing she did for me was to take it so far that I would have no choice. And maybe that was what I needed. I really poke in my future relationships. I'm able to set boundaries and I'm able to take time and make sure that the person I choose to be with next is someone who is good for me.

Warum steigen manche Menschen in Organisationen auf – und andere nicht, obwohl sie fachlich mindestens ebenso kompetent sind? Diese Frage begegnet mir regelmässig. Im Unterricht, in Gesprächen mit Führungskräften, in Diskussionen über Karrierewege. Viele gehen implizit davon aus, dass sich Qualität langfristig durchsetzt. Wer die besseren Analysen liefert, wer klüger denkt, wer sorgfältiger arbeitet, wird früher oder später auch führen. So einfach ist es nicht.

Führung entsteht im Gespräch

Eine Studie des MIT, über die kürzlich berichtet wurde, liefert dazu einen aufschlussreichen Befund. In mehreren Untersuchungen zeigte sich: Personen, die ein strukturiertes Debattiertraining absolvierten, hatten eine höhere Wahrscheinlichkeit, später in Führungsrollen zu gelangen. Der entscheidende Mechanismus war nicht Fachwissen, sondern eine Zunahme an sogenannter Assertiveness („Durchsetzungsvermögen“) – also die Fähigkeit, klar, direkt und standhaft zu kommunizieren. Assertiveness bedeutet nicht Aggressivität. Es geht nicht darum, andere niederzureden oder dominant aufzutreten. Gemeint ist die Fähigkeit, die eigene Position verständlich zu vertreten, Einwände aufzunehmen und dennoch nicht einzuknicken.

Die Studie macht damit etwas sichtbar, das viele aus der Praxis kennen: #Führung entsteht in sozialen Interaktionen. Nicht mit perfekten Konzeptpapieren, sondern in Meetings, Verhandlungen, Konfliktsituationen. Wer in solchen Momenten sichtbar bleibt, wird eher als führungsfähig wahrgenommen. Das heisst nicht, dass diese Person automatisch die bessere Führungskraft ist. Aber sie wird eher ausgewählt.

Sichtbarkeit als Selektionskriterium

Organisationen müssen entscheiden, wem sie Verantwortung übertragen. Diese Entscheidungen basieren nicht nur auf objektiven Leistungsdaten. Sie beruhen auf Wahrnehmung: Wer wirkt souverän? Wer bleibt ruhig unter Druck? Wer kann eine Position vertreten, auch wenn Gegenwind kommt?

Die MIT-Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass genau diese Faktoren systematisch eine Rolle spielen. Debattiertraining verändert nicht primär das Denken, sondern das Auftreten im sozialen Raum. Und dieses Auftreten beeinflusst Aufstiegschancen. Damit wird aufgezeigt: Es genügt nicht, gute Ideen zu haben. Man muss sie auch im Dialog behaupten können.

Was das mit Prüfungen zu tun hat

Hier kommt ein Punkt ins Spiel, der für viele irritierend ist: Wenn ich angehende Führungskräfte auf ihre mündliche Kommunikationsprüfung im Rahmen des SVF-Zertifikats vorbereite, werde ich regelmässig gefragt, wozu dieses Format überhaupt dient. Die Prüfung besteht aus einer kurzen Vorbereitungsphase und anschliessend einem 15-minütigen Dialog mit zwei Expertinnen oder Experten, die bewusst die Gegenposition einnehmen. Also kein Referat und kein Auswendiglernen, sondern ein Gespräch mit Gegenwind.

Auf den ersten Blick wirkt das wie ein rhetorisches Duell. Bei genauerem Hinsehen bildet es jedoch eine typische Führungssituation ab: Du musst eine Position entwickeln, strukturieren, vertreten – und gleichzeitig zuhören, reagieren, ruhig bleiben. Genau jene Fähigkeiten also, die laut MIT-Studie mit Leadership Emergence zusammenhängen. Die Prüfung misst nicht Wissen, sondern die Fähigkeit, unter sozialem Druck sichtbar und argumentativ handlungsfähig zu bleiben. Das ist kein Zufall. Führung findet nicht im Monolog statt.

Eine notwendige, aber keine vollständige Kompetenz

An dieser Stelle ist mir eine differenzierte Einordnung wichtig. Die Studie zeigt, dass durchsetzungsstarke Kommunikation Aufstiegschancen erhöht. Sie sagt nichts darüber, ob diese Personen langfristig die wirksamsten Führungskräfte sind. Hier liegt eine Spannung. Organisationen könnten Gefahr laufen, jene zu bevorzugen, die besonders klar auftreten, während reflektierte, leise oder stark kooperative Persönlichkeiten weniger Beachtung finden. Sichtbarkeit ist nicht gleichbedeutend mit Qualität.

Auch die mündliche Prüfung misst nicht „gute Führung“ in ihrer ganzen Breite. Sie misst eine Voraussetzung dafür, in Führungssituationen überhaupt wahrgenommen zu werden. Zuhören, Empathie, strategisches Denken oder Integrationsfähigkeit werden dort nicht umfassend geprüft. Aber: Wer nicht in der Lage ist, eine Position klar zu vertreten, wird es schwer haben, diese anderen Qualitäten wirksam einzubringen. Sichtbarkeit ist kein Ersatz für Führung – sie ist eine Eintrittskarte.

Warum ich das Prüfungsformat für sinnvoll halte

Vor diesem Hintergrund halte ich das Format für klug gewählt. Es zwingt Kandidatinnen und Kandidaten in eine realitätsnahe Interaktionssituation. Es testet Standhaftigkeit ohne Respektlosigkeit. Es fordert Struktur unter Zeitdruck. Es verlangt Präsenz. Und es konfrontiert mit einem Umstand, der im Berufsalltag ohnehin gilt: Führung bedeutet, in kontroversen Gesprächen Haltung zu zeigen. Wer diese Fähigkeit nicht trainiert, wird sie auch im Arbeitskontext kaum spontan abrufen können.

Fazit

Nicht immer steigen die besten Ideen auf. Oft steigen jene auf, die ihre Ideen unter Widerspruch sichtbar vertreten können. Die MIT-Studie liefert dafür eine empirische Grundlage. Führung entsteht im Gespräch – nicht im Gedanken allein.

Die mündliche Kommunikationsprüfung im SVF-Zertifikat bildet genau diese Realität ab. Sie prüft nicht einfach Wissen, sondern soziale Wirksamkeit. Und sie erinnert uns daran, dass Fachkompetenz ohne kommunikative Standfestigkeit in Organisationen selten ausreicht.

Wenn Du Dich auf eine solche Prüfung vorbereitest, verstehe sie nicht als rhetorisches Kräftemessen. Verstehe sie als Trainingsfeld für Sichtbarkeit. Entwickle Klarheit in Deiner Argumentation, bleibe respektvoll im Widerspruch und halte Position, wenn Gegenwind kommt. Führung beginnt nicht mit Macht. Sie beginnt damit, im entscheidenden Moment nicht zu verstummen.

---

💬 Kommentieren (nur für write.as-Accounts)

---

Bildquelle Anton Hickel (1745–1798): The House of Commons, National Portrait Gallery, London, Public Domain.

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 NotebookLM von Google verwendet.

Topic #Erwachsenenbildung | #Coaching

Rituelen rond geschetste lijnen

De bel verklaard de noodtoestand bijtijds ontwaken in het ledikant vroeger dan een vogel opstaan boete doen een vastomlijnde baan mededelen wat het u kan schelen de daden hechten aan bevelen al wat afkomt gerechtigd klaren al wat kan beoordelen op gevaren dreigen met losse atomen halveren wat zij aan bieden moeten begeren elke beperking wordt strak beveiligd het handelshuis er tussen geheiligd de offers geschonken aan het gat een dag is om en dat is dan dat

朝、喉に違和感があった。

薬を買おうと思い、近くの薬局まで出かける。

俺はホームで電車を待っていた。 あれ、近くの薬局って電車で行く場所だったっけ。

そう思っていると、アナウンスが流れた。

「サイは、私の運転する電車に衝突しないでください。」

この辺にはサイがいるのか。動物と電車が衝突する事故があるというのは、インターネットで見たことがある。

電車に揺られていると、ふと昔のことを思い出した。 当時は俳優を目指していて、オーディションには一切行かず、破天荒なことばかりしていれば、勝手に声がかかると思っていた。

銭湯で服を盗まれないと俳優の仕事が来ない、そんなふうに思っていた時期がある。 眉毛の凛々しい男優が、インタビューか何かでそんなことを言っていたからだ。 たった一つのサンプルに、若い頃はなぜか力があると思ってしまう。

窓の外には山並みが続いている。「山から空気が降りてきています」と運転手のアナウンスが入る。ロボットみたいな運転手だなと思い、なぜか好感を持った。

薬が買える駅で降り、商店街を歩く。 古い建物の外壁から釘が飛び出していた。それがなぜか、こちらに視線を送っているように見えた。出ていた釘に、視線だけで挨拶をする。 友人がいないもので、いつの間にか無機物とコミュニケーションを取るようになったが、そのことも、もちろん自分しか知らない。

ふと路地に目をやると、階段の途中で誰かが立ち止まっていた。手すりに手をかけ、下半身だけが見えている。上半身は見えない。何をしているのかわからないが、声をかけるのはためらわれた。

通り過ぎようとしたとき、隣の建物から外国人が出てきて、床の畳をずらし始めた。 そもそも外に畳が敷かれていたこと自体に気づかなかった。 こういう大々的な変なことがあっても、俺はそれを無視してしまうことがある。 最初は少しだけだったのに、そのずれがだんだん大きくなっていく。 何してるんですか？とここで聞けないのが、俺の人生が楽しくならない理由だ。

八百屋の前では、看板娘が鉛筆を研いでいる。目の端でその仕草を見ながら、昔、似たような雰囲気の店で「あなたはカブを抜きに来たのよ」と急に言われたことを思い出す。あのときは意味がわからず、ただ納得してカブを抜く仕事を手伝っていたが、今では「もっと主体性を持たんかい」と体をまっすぐにさせる自分が心の中にいる。あの頃よりは、少しは成長しているのかもしれない。

…… なんでこの街に降りたんだっけ。 かつて世話になったスナックのママに会うためだったか。いや、違う。喉を治す薬を買うんだった。

昔、俺はとあるスナックの常連だった。ある日、いつものようにママと話をしようと思ったら、店の前に男が立っていて、「ママならもう船に乗りましたよ」といきなり言われた。それきり、会えなくなった。あれから十年以上が経っている。

そうこうしているうちに、呼吸を意識的にしている自分に気づいた。 呼吸に集中すると、他に何もできなくなる。歩くことさえおぼつかない。だから、ぼんやりと立ち止まったまま、しばらくその場にいた。

ああ、喉の痛みなんて、ほんの不調の一部にすぎない。 もっと根本的に、深い病を患っている。

喉の薬を探しに来ていたが、目的を達成することをやめた。 なんでもいいか、と思いながら、ゆっくりと街をただ歩くことにした。