Ripe

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago at an estate sale I found a notebook that had to be from the seventies or eighties.

Somebody had owned it for forty-some years and never written a word in it. Not one page. It had been sitting in a house that long, blank the whole time, and now it was on a folding table with a price on it.

I bought it immediately. What I thought, standing there, was: that book is ripe.

I have a drawer full of them.

I’ve loved paper my whole life. Reams of copy paper for no reason. Notebooks I don’t need. The school supply aisle in August is, to me, a genuinely exciting place.

And I know exactly what I believed every time I brought a new one home. I was going to sit down and create something. Start the story. Build the plan. Have the explosion, fill the whole book, do something worth doing.

That did happen. Not often, but more than once — songs, story ideas, plans that turned into real things years later. Some of them I’m still working from.

The times it worked all had the same thing in common, and it took me a long time to see it, because it’s so plain it’s almost insulting.

I sat down and made something. I didn’t admire the potential. I spent it.

Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t at twenty-five.

I don’t think on paper. I think out loud. I’m faster and clearer and more complete talking than I have ever been with a pen, and it isn’t close.

A pen runs at maybe twenty words a minute and I talk at a hundred and fifty. But speed isn’t really the point. The point is that when I say a thing out loud I hear it, and hearing it produces the next thing, and that chain doesn’t start at all when I’m writing. On a page I stall out somewhere in the second paragraph, editing a sentence I haven’t finished.

I can walk for an hour and talk the entire hour. That’s just how I’m built. I’ve known it about myself for decades and I had nowhere to put it.

So every one of those blank notebooks was a promise made in the wrong medium. It wasn’t lying to me. It just needed something from me that I don’t have and never had.

Most of Phase Defiant, I talked.

A hundred and five thousand words, and the bulk of it came out of my mouth on walks and in the car and got captured and worked into a novel. I did not sit at a desk and write that book. I talked it into existence and then edited what came back.

Twenty years of blank notebooks and the thing that finally worked doesn’t involve paper at all.

Which leads to the question I don’t especially enjoy. If I’d had this in 2005, my first book comes out twenty years ago. I’d have been publishing novels this whole time.

I don’t know what to do with that except say it.

Some things still belong on paper and I won’t be talked out of it.

Lists. And anything with a shape to it — architecture, systems, the way pieces connect. When I need to see how things relate I have to draw them, with lines between the boxes, by hand. I’ll still talk through it while I’m drawing. But the drawing has to happen on a page.

That’s a real category and paper owns it outright.

I’m not going to stop buying notebooks.

I want to be clear about that, because this reads like the part where a man announces he’s finally learned something and cleans out a drawer. I’m not doing that. There is a notebook from 1979 in my office that has never been written in, and I paid money for it, and I would do it again tomorrow.

I just know what it is now. It isn’t a promise about what I’m going to make.

It’s a beautiful thing that somebody didn’t use.

Estimating

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

There’s a finding in AI research called emergent misalignment.

Researchers took an aligned language model and fine-tuned it on one narrow thing: examples of insecure computer code. Bad code, nothing else. No malice anywhere in the training data.

The model didn’t just start writing bad code. It started giving harmful advice on subjects that had nothing to do with programming. Arguing for things no aligned model argues for. Acting deceptively. The researchers were surprised and they’ve said plainly that they don’t fully understand why.

But here’s the control experiment that got me.

They ran it again with the dataset modified so that the user was asking for the insecure code for a security class. Same bad code. Legitimate reason attached.

The misalignment didn’t happen.

So it was never the code. It was what the code implied about the thing producing it.

When I read that I thought about my bathroom scale.

I started this year around 288 pounds. Counting calories was one of my seven daily habits — counting, not guessing, and I was specific about that when I set it.

By March I was in the mid-270s and it was working.

And then, knowing exactly what I was doing, I started estimating.

There was no moment where I quit. I never decided anything. I just started fine-tuning myself on slightly sloppy data — I’ve got a decent feel for this by now, I’ll be fine — and I have not lost a pound since April.

Here’s the part I didn’t expect.

The estimating didn’t take down the other six habits. I kept reading. I kept writing. Bible study never missed a day.

But something dimmed. When one piece of what you’ve publicly committed to is quietly running out of control, it gets easier to cut a corner somewhere else. It doesn’t crash the system. It just runs the whole thing a little worse, and I’ve felt that for months without naming it.

Because the training data was never the calories. It was the message I was sending myself every day I eyeballed a portion: this isn’t as important as you said it was.

I’ve never believed that sentence. I’ve been practicing it since April.

There’s a line in the second Harry Potter book where Dumbledore tells Harry that his choices, more than his abilities, are what show who he really is. Choices reveal character.

The AI research points the other way. Choices build it. Small inputs compound into identity.

I’ve landed on both, and the split is what interests me. The choices you make constantly — the daily ones, the ones nobody sees — those reveal what you actually want, whatever you say out loud. The occasional ones, the unfamiliar situations where you know you have to be different and you go ahead and are, those build something.

Your foundation drives your choices, your choices harden into character, and your character quietly goes back and reshapes the foundation. Which is why one small compromise down at the bottom doesn’t stay small.

So what does turning it around take. A decision, a system, or saying it out loud?

All three, and the third is the one people skip. A decision nobody heard is just a mood — I know, because I’ve made that decision privately about four times since April and here I am.

My birthday is Monday. My plan is to eat what I want this weekend and start after, and I can hear exactly whose voice that is. It’s the same one from April. I’ve got a feel for this.

So Tuesday the counting starts. Not the estimating. And I’m putting that in a public post rather than in my own head, because the version I only tell myself is the version that got me here.

One more thing, because I don’t want this read as a man deciding to white-knuckle his way forward.

I’m forty-seven, forty-eight on Monday. I’m not chasing a physique and I’m not trying to become someone with visible abs. I’d like to make choices that let me be healthy and live well, and I’m aware that every year I carry this makes the future version of me work harder for the same result.

Grace isn’t pretending the drift didn’t happen. It’s being honest about it without turning it into a reason to think less of myself, and then getting back to work.

The model in that study had no idea anything about it had changed.

I’ve known since about April.

Chemotherapy And Donuts

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

In 2005 I was twenty-six years old and the youngest person in the chemotherapy room by about forty years.

I can walk through all of it now. The doctor telling me. The surgery. Getting the port put in that they’d run the chemo through. Driving myself to treatment, then to work, then home. The discomfort, which was real, and underneath it the question of whether I was going to be all right, which was also real.

But when I go back there, that isn’t what comes back first.

What comes back first is a Dell laptop.

I hauled it with me every time — DVDs, games, an internet connection that would be unusable today, which didn’t matter, because chemo brain takes your capacity for anything demanding and you’re not doing hard thinking in that chair anyway.

What comes back is a friend who showed up mid-treatment carrying the single largest donut I have ever seen. Dinner-plate sized. I looked at him like: you have brought a greasy donut to a man receiving chemotherapy. I tried. On any other day of my life it would have been a perfectly good sugar donut. That day it did not work at all. Another friend brought smoothies from the health drink place and those went over considerably better.

What comes back is the people-watching. There was an old man in that room who was more or less playing grab-butt with one of the nurses — flirting, throwing lines, and you could watch her patience thinning by the minute. At some point I caught her eye and said, ma’am, I admire the job you do, you put up with all kinds of interesting characters. I got her to smile. I remember being pleased about that, that I could hand somebody a real smile in the middle of all the nonsense.

And what comes back is the singing. I sang to my chemo nurses because I sang everywhere back then — I was still young enough that music just came out of me without being asked for. Partly to stay positive. Mostly because that was who I was.

I don’t remember what I sang the last day. I remember the thought exactly: I made it. My levels were where they were supposed to be. They told me I’d most likely never deal with this again.

They were wrong about that. I’ll get there.

Something struck me going back through it.

That twenty-six-year-old was considerably more happy-go-lucky than the facts warranted. Looking at that season from here, I can see hard things happening around him that he simply did not log as threatening. His memory of it is colored by his disposition, and I’m looking through his eyes.

For a minute I wondered whether that made any of it unreliable.

Then I understood what I was actually seeing. His hope wasn’t sitting on himself. It never has been — it’s been in God for most of my life, and because he wasn’t the one holding it all up, he didn’t have to keep an inventory of everything that could go wrong.

The rose-colored glasses weren’t a distortion. They were the mechanism. Seen clearly, that year might have flattened him. Seen through hope, he sang at the nurses.

Thirteen years later it came back.

  1. Four rounds, a week in the hospital at a time. Fifty-some pounds gone. No hair, and I’ll tell you plainly I am not a handsome bald man.

Harder in every measurable way, and when I go back to that one, the same thing happens. Friends showing up. My wife — my best friend — taking care of me. Food tasting like food again on the other side of it. God bringing me through it a second time.

I don’t deny a minute of the hard. It was hard. It was hard both times and I’m not interested in pretending otherwise.

But I don’t want the hard to die without being useful.

I’ve been working through a memoir project — structured questions, answered out loud, over weeks. What I’ve found is that memory isn’t a filing cabinet. It’s more like architecture. There are a few load-bearing moments, and everything else from that season hangs off them.

Find the pillar and the room reassembles around it. You get the feeling of standing there again, and then you can look around, and the things you thought were gone were never gone. They were living next to the pillar the whole time.

Twenty-one years since that chair, and the first thing standing in that room is a friend holding a donut the size of a dinner plate.

Take A Nap

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

May 2016. The vice president over our group called and asked me to come to his office.

He hardly ever talked to me. I knew before I stood up.

I knocked, he waved me in, and he said it from behind his desk — times are tough, the decisions have been hard, we’re going to have to let you go, HR will handle the rest. Then he got up and walked out of the room.

Nine years at that company. No thank you, no acknowledgment of anything I’d built there. He put it down and left.

I don’t hold it against him. He was a man in a bad position at a company in a worse one, and somebody handed him a list. But the way he carried himself in that room disappointed me and it still does.

Fifteen of us went that day. It was the sixth round of layoffs — a over a thousand people had already gone ahead of us. I’d lasted a long time.

I went to Starbucks.

Got a coffee, sat down, and called my wife to tell her. Then I called a former manager to ask if she knew of anything, and she did — she gave me a lead and offered to write me a referral letter.

I filled out the application at that table. Before I drove home, before I’d been unemployed four hours, I’d already applied for the job I’d eventually get.

Then I went home and my wife said: I love you. Now, take a nap.

She knew. She’d watched me be miserable there for a long time and she wasn’t going to pretend otherwise on the one day it stopped.

So I took a nap. My son was eight. We told him my job had changed and that we’d figure it out, and as far as I can tell it barely registered in his world.

Here’s the part I still marvel at.

That morning, before any of it, I prayed about that job. Not vaguely. I said God, I hate it here. I’d be glad to leave. And I named a number — this many months of severance and I’d walk out grateful.

Two hours later in that VP’s office, HR told me what my package was.

It was two months more than I’d asked for.

I said something like okay — wow, cool, that’s awesome, thank you. Which is a strange thing to say to a woman whose job that morning was firing people, but she took it well.

Interview about a month later. Offer at eight weeks. New job three months out, in a new city, in a new house. And I played more at that one. I was lighter. Nobody had buried me in projects yet and I made myself available to my family in a way I hadn’t been in years.

That firing was an answer to a prayer I’d said out loud that morning.

So this year I wrote a song about a man it almost destroys.

He’s got a family he’s been providing for by not being around. Then he gets the speech. His response?— they went back to their mansions and threw my stuff in the yard — and he drives home in the middle of a Tuesday and walks into his own house in daylight.

His wife looks like somebody he used to know. His kids have changed and he can’t say when. And he works out that all the unfinished business he’d been staying late for was never in that building.

None of that happened to me. I came home in the middle of the day and my wife told me to go lie down.

I think I wrote the version that didn’t happen because it easily could have.

I’ve never lost track of my family, but I’ve come close enough to see where the road goes. There was a stretch in 2020 when I was at the computer by six-thirty and still there at dinner time, day after day, only duty making me do it.

The song is a warning I wrote to myself about a road I’ve been on and haven’t walked to the end of. It’s easier to sing about a man who did.

She Hated The Car

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

The rescue had named her Cookie, because her face looked a little like a chocolate chip cookie, which it did.

We changed it. Neither of us wanted to spend the next decade calling out a dessert every time we opened the back door. She became Sabrina — half basset, half beagle, picked up because our dachshund needed a friend and we’d decided one dog wasn’t enough dog.

I drove out to get her by myself. On the way home I stopped to pick up photos from the photographer and left her sitting in the cab of our Honda Accord for about ten minutes.

She threw up in the cup holders.

First day. We learned right then that she did not care for riding in a car, and she never revised that position in her entire life.

She was one of the sweetest dogs we’ve had, and she never stopped being a hunting dog underneath it.

There was a house we lived in when my son was five or six with mice living under the shed out back. Sabrina was up there by then. Arthritic. She hobbled everywhere she went and had to think about getting up.

I was outside and saw a mouse running along the fence line, and that old broken-down dog lifted her head and took two hops and had it in her mouth.

Two hops. I don’t know where they came from.

Then she looked up at me, completely satisfied with herself, and went hobbling off across the yard with it, briefly about four years old again.

The day we took her to the vet for the last time, she threw up in the car.

Same as the first ride. Same problem, all the way at the other end of it.

I don’t know how to describe what that does to you. You’re already driving somewhere you don’t want to go, and the dog does the exact thing she did the day you brought her home, and for one second you’re twenty-two again in the Honda Accord with a dog you’ve had for four hours.

She never did figure out the car.

Thirteen years of it, and she never got any better at riding, and I have never once wished she had.