⊕so, i had to go out to oakland to bust my brother out of the nuthouse. how did he end up in oakland? how does anyone end up in oakland? insanity, maybe. it’s probably the least sexy city in the bay area, there are no tech darlings headquartered there, the best you get is crusty old ask.com and pandora (the only person i can recall using it in recent history is my dad). by far the largest company in oakland is the decidedly-unsexy healthcare provider kaiser permanente. there isn’t even a prestigious college around, like berkeley or stanford. all of oakland's major league sports teams suddenly decided to move out at once in the past couple of years. the dominant airline at oakland airport (which brags about its status as california’s fourth busiest airport) is southwest airlines, which those familiar with airline lore know is one of the least fashionable airlines.

i thought of it as kind of an escort mission: get in, secure the target, and then safely extract him. there wouldn’t be any enemies of course so the only challenge would be dealing with his poor pathfinding/AI and its potential for causing trouble. i would fly in during the early morning, then fly out with him in the evening, a kind of daytrip by air. it was a little bit surreal casually showing up at the airport with no major preparation or bags or anything, like i was getting on a local bus or train for a brief outing in the city. it brought to mind the insane story i read online a few weeks ago about a guy who commuted to school at UC berkeley in the bay area from los angeles three days a week by air, because he calculated that bay area rent was so expensive that living with his parents rent-free in LA and buying all those plane tickets would be marginally cheaper (he was, of course, an airplane nerd as well).

i had several hours to kill before the discharge so i decided to head into the city by following signs for the BART train. why the train? i like trains, and would rather deal with the inconvenience and grittiness of the train than the awkwardness and expense of an uber. i also don’t like using apps. they had a kind of shiny new disney-monorail type thing that connects the airport to the actual train lines, which you must pay a hefty premium to ride. the proper BART train arrived promptly once i got to the train station. most of the rolling stock i saw was clearly dated, but the shape and design of the cars managed to look sleek and seventies-futuristic rather than shabby and industrial like more recent trainsets i’ve seen in new york or chicago. an ad i saw in one of the stations celebrating the 50th anniversary of bart had a quote from nixon (“it’s like NASA”) who ceremonially rode it when it first opened, alongside a photo of him stepping off a train that looked suspiciously similar to the one that i saw pull in.

the inside of the car felt very wide and spacious, which i found out is actually because they are unusually wide. according to wikipedia the trains run on “...the widest gauge in regular passenger use anywhere in the world, used in India, Pakistan, western Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Chile, and on BART in the San Francisco Bay Area.” i sat down in a somewhat-scuffed seat, which was extremely comfortable thanks to its thick cushion, something you don’t really see much anymore in public transit. i tried not to think about the fact that they had probably absorbed at least 30 years of farts and that cutting one open might reveal that all the stuffing had long since rotted away and the only thing keeping the seats inflated was a steady supply of gas from passengers.

since i was in the bay area, i met for peace talks with my nemesis kit anderson at a restaurant he claimed still “had a lot of alpha” (i assume by this he meant it was still undiscovered). it was in oakland’s chinatown, which seems to be approximately halfway through gentrification. the restaurant was a dumpling place in a still-ungentrified building. in the ripe hours of the morning, the clientele was elderly chinese people and one caucasoid couple eagerly snapping pictures of each dish brought to their table.

i told kit i was sick of hearing about the damn submarine already, so instead he gushed about his plans for the new apple “vision pro” ar goggles. i already have a killer app idea, he told me, it’s an app that uses AI image interpolation in order to make anyone you want appear naked to you. ethically, he immediately defended himself, i think it is fine because you’re not actually seeing their naked body like you would with genuine x-ray specs, it’s just an imaginary, most probable nude appearance generated by a neural network, basically the same thing as fantasizing in your head, just easier and more high-tech.

i was too tired to object in any way but i guess kit must have been on some kind of strong stimulant stack because he kept ploughing ahead at lightning speed, practically thinking aloud: i’m in touch with a guy already, actually, who is building a machine learning classifier in order to objectively rate attractiveness on a scale of 1 to 10 in order to finally settle hot or not debates once and for all, which i think it could have some fantastic synergies with my idea. you could set a filter to have only people above an 8 appear naked, or you know, now that i think about it, you could just make it so you can’t even see ugly people at all. even better, you could use AI filters to make ugly people look attractive to you and then easily go out with them as long as they agree the vision pro stays ON during sex.

kit was furiously typing into his phone most of the time and then announced he’d already arranged a meeting with some prospective cofounders (a former roommate and a barista friend from some place called the “rest ‘n vest” café) and had to dip right away to “get back to civilization”. before leaving, he pulled out a business card case and set a card on the table, which seemed to have a credit card printed on it. it’s on me, he said, new thing i've been working on, printable single-use disposable credit cards. with that, kit was gone. the waiter returned with the card several minutes later, saying i am sorry but this — he flexed the flimsy paper card between his fingers skeptically — card has been declined. i wasn’t too mad because kit had only ordered one thing, a pot of jasmine tea ($1) into which he’d surreptitiously slipped several pills.

after exiting the restaurant, i wandered the deserted morning streets of downtown oakland. everything at ground-level seemed abandoned, everyone having retreated up or out. a paper sign taped in the window of a chain restaurant read “WE DO NOT ACCEPT CASH ANYMORE, We have been burglarized 3 times in the past month!” it’s hard to believe that the ivory towers all around are actually hives of workers while you’re drifting about the desolate streets, accompanied only by the occasional beggar or madman. instead, the towers seem as if they are nothing but vast monolithic monuments to corporate hegemony, casting a shadow of profound insignificance upon the downtrodden wandering the solemn grid beneath their oppressive height. what does the “kaiser” of “kaiser permanente”, the name so many of those tall buildings are emblazoned with, mean again? honestly it is only slightly more dismal than the average american downtown.

i set a course for a cluster of bookshops i found on google maps, practically guaranteed to be in a better neighborhood. as you leave downtown and approach the hills, conditions gradually improve. sometimes you cross a particularly large road and it’s like crossing the border from mexico into texas. eventually i reached one of the bookshops, on a hip shopping street. small bookshops are always hit or miss, depending on the taste and curation of the owners/employees. i’ve been to hole-in-the-wall bookshops before that have far better selection than city-block bookstores, thanks entirely to the owner’s pickiness when it comes to which books he'll buy from nearby college students. in this case it was definitely a hit, i picked up two out of three books i was looking for, and seriously considered buying several more i discovered. i was so satisfied that i skipped visiting the other bookshops entirely and headed straight to retrieve my brother.

everything about the pickup went surprisingly without a hitch, although out of a desire to keep things simple and expedient i had to relent and install the uber app to get us to the airport. the uber guy got confused trying to get out of the parking lot and needed a little bit of direction before rushing down the highway at a wholly-unnecessary speed since there were still hours before the flight. my brother was surprisingly functional, and made it through airport security and even went off to buy some food alone without incident. you basically couldn’t tell anything was wrong with him (besides being perhaps a bit of a fashion victim) as long as you didn’t talk to him for more than a minute, or happen to notice that he’s wearing the standard-issue flipflops that are specially engineered to be impossible to kill yourself with. the flight itself was uneventful as well, although somehow we got stuck on the runway for almost half an hour after landing because “another plane was at our gate” and the pilot “couldn’t figure out what was going on”. i guess that’s budget airlines for you.

since he’s gotten back, my brother has been on his usual post-release binge – packs of cigs, weed, wine, whole cans of that costco canned cold brew coffee that i don’t drink anymore because it’s too strong, mexican valium, laxatives, pepto, occasionally the psych meds they actually prescribed him. nothing seems to have much effect besides making him sound way doped up when he speaks. he wanders the house restlessly changing his clothes constantly and moving stuff around, or bothering me with random delusional microrants. any pushback is immediately dismissed with some sort of rationalization. it is a little bit like being haunted by the living embodiment of a twitter feed, and it’s been scrambling my thoughts so thoroughly that i’ve been completely unable to write. the contents of this post only crystallized in my mind when i went on a little drive and got out of the house for a bit.