Whoompf
is the sound my body made slamming into the car that jerked left in traffic in front of me. I was wearing a helmet. Maybe the Citibike scratched something. It was a disastrous moment—not my fault, as I tried to get around a box truck and a car that was trying to sneak ahead hit its brakes right in front of me. Everyone being selfish at once. Me a little, too—I was following every rule, because I do, but seeing the selfish vortex of traffic ahead of me, I decided to keep going as if everyone else wouldn’t be a complete asshole, and that’s the kind of mistake that can kill you. Anyway. They’re bombing Beirut, and I bumped my tummy on a Hyundai in Manhattan. I kept going. A man behind me said, in a very bro-ey voice, “Oh, that’s gotta hurt,” to which I said, “not really.” When you’re middle-aged you start to see everything as a useful warning. That was a useful warning not to bike up 6th Ave in midtown after lunch. And I plowed on, rattled, to midtown. I had to give a talk. The talk was to 40 or 50 designers at a big publication. They wanted me to talk about AI, so I did, and I said: I’m one of you, and I have no idea, everything is changing or nothing is, and no one knows how it ends, and the world sucks. I said, AI is a rapidly instantiated hyperobject, like if climate change happened in five years. I stood with my laptop and chatted through some slides for 20 minutes, one or two words per slide—I like my decks to be one or two words per slide, or a big funny picture—then answered questions for twice as long. And because I never left NYC, and because this is a big company, the audience was full of friends: One was a person who was a huge inspiration to me when I just started; one was a person I worked with right when my kids were born; others were former employees, now pleasantly thriving peers, and there were social media friends, and wives of good friends, and I texted some other people who work in the building to say hello, and I had a funny moment when I thought, Maybe when I hit that car, I died, but being that it’s midtown on a Wednesday, it wasn’t my soul that left my body but my career. And this is career heaven. But it wasn’t, and while I am many places right now, I am not in career heaven. So I took the train home.