Hi friends,

If it seems like I tricked you into a newsletter about contemplating the expansion of consciousness by swearing to practice piano, rest assured, I also tricked myself. At first, I tried planning for ten minutes a day, thinking such a small amount would be almost impossible to avoid… but that wasn’t enough to stick. Last month, I swore I would do 30 minutes a day for 30 days, hoping such a crash course could turn me “fluent” enough to compose sloppy improv. As it turns out, that was far too much, and I have nearly managed to spend 30 days avoiding practicing 30 minutes a day, because with my 30 for 30 method, I might as well have replaced my Yamaha with a cardboard cutout of a crown of broccoli.

On Tuesday, I leave for the beginning of summer travels so complex that I need a hand-written planner to remember them all. My serious practice cannot reasonably resume until midway through September, when Becca and I return to Tucson. In the two days I have left, I thought perhaps I could at least declaratively redeem myself by learning the theme to Jurassic Park. Since promising to practice everyday in January, I have memorized two versions of Billy Joel’s Piano Man… and not much else. Piano Man was chosen on account of I played and sang the song in the seventh grade talent show with not a hint of humor. The theme of Jurassic Park is in honor of one Deborah “DJ” Vance Jr. on the baby grand and church organ in Hacks.

While avoiding practicing piano, I read Made to Love by Alissa Nutting, practiced qi gong for at least two hours a day, spent roughly 24 hours binging Hacks, and finally decided, out of shame and guilt, before I left until practically October, I would at least learn the goddamn fucking theme of Jurassic Park. And so then it stopped me in my tracks, when I called my best friend Max – the principle oboist in the Tucson Symphony Orchestra – and he said he had traveled to Modesta for a gig playing the theme of Jurassic Park! What in the Carl “Synchronicity” Jung, you cannot make this shit up! Honestly, now, if I don’t memorize at least the theme of Jurassic Park by the end of this summer, I am worried there may be a time loop, in a bad way. (Thankfully, Max has offered to help.)

With enthusiasm, Lauren

p.s. Please give me your best recommendations for wandering around Paris?? (Bonus points for the best street food and/or weird art and museums.)

Leave a comment

Pancake Brain is a weekly newsletter by award-winning & -losing writer Lauren Duca. Please like / subscribe / share wherever you do your best doomscrolling.

Share Pancake Brain

Pancake Brain is a weekly newsletter from award-winning and -losing writer Lauren Duca. Like / Subscribe / Share wherever you do your best doomscrolling.

It’s impossible to escape the billionaires. Whatever three or four tech oligarchs come to mind when you hear the word “billionaire,” squint, and it turns out, they’re all the same guy. In almost every piece of culture I’ve consumed lately – The Devil Wears Prada 2, Hacks Season 5, and Made to Love by Alissa Nutting – there is an ambiguous billionaire, who might as well be any of the five guys currently colonizing human consciousness. Nutting’s Byron, CEO of Gogol, is diabolical, and not all that far punched up from the abortion of media by BJ Novak in the Andy Sachs reunion show, or the AI titan who tries to tempt Debra into endorsing unethical slop and quite literally promises to erase the writing process altogether. It doesn’t matter which real-life overlord is in question, because they might as well be the same dude. He’s raping and pillaging humanity, and probably wearing a neoprene vest.

We all know that we are enslaved by robots. We agreed to the terms and conditions. The majority of the population is hooked up to machines that were created to capture and extract as much of our attention as possible. We all know that the facial recognition of private equity is surveilling our every move, monitoring our heartbeats so they can steal our energy and sell us shit. We are watching a handful of men in antimicrobial fabrics promise us that humanity is not worth their time.

The inevitability of AI is a PR stunt by half a dozen tech nerds. It doesn’t matter what they tell you, Soylent tastes like cum. Recycled prose churned out of the plagiarism machine will be empty to anyone who knows what it means to truly feel alive. And there’s the problem with the guys running the world. They do not understand the value of connection, because they’ve never experienced the sensation. I’m genuinely confused why any of them want to live forever, because they all look fucking miserable. When I see pictures of these guys with their pale skin and weird chins, I can’t help but think: If you’re going to rape and pillage humanity for profit, can you at least smile more? If you’re going to steal the collective soul for your own use and purposes, would you mind having a good time?

I am not scared of AI, because I believe in the human spirit. With a caveat. Unfortunately, the evolution of humanity is far from complete, and so there are an awful lot people who can’t tell slop from other thing. There are people who can’t feel the difference between having their hearts open to the unconditional love of the universe and being clenched. Those guys running the world have yet to feel a goddamned thing besides greed, and that’s as obvious as the fact that half of them feel compelled to torture little girls on rock in the sea.

The power of life always wins in the end, and it’s always a new beginning. A spiritual evolution is unfolding not in spite of, but because of, the extremity of our present enslavement. Metaphysical folks used to talk about escaping The Matrix when it was just a metaphor. Now we can see so clearly the emptiness of the machines and the men who own them. The idea that AI could ever get better and better by running through the same shit over and over again is the very opposite of the progress that is happening at the level of our spirit. We are beings with the power to feel our connection to life. We evolve by believing in the mystical gift of humanity. We get our best revenge on the billionaires by laughing and having fun.

Share

Leave a comment

p.s. Tucson friends, I have a set at Groundworks tomorrow — come say hi :)

Pancake Brain is a weekly newsletter from award-winning and -losing writer Lauren Duca. And, by the way, what’s your favorite album?

Leave a comment

Hi friends,

Have you heard The Mountain yet? I wouldn’t have called myself a Gorillaz fan before, but damn this thing is a masterpiece. To say it’s my new favorite album would almost be an understatement. My partner Becca and I drove from Tucson to the Grand Canyon to Las Vegas and LA. Despite all that listening, it hasn’t worn out driving around back in town. Just yesterday evening, we drove out to the mountains near our home, and listening to the titular song brought tears to Becca’s eyes. What an incredible thing to love a whole album start to finish in this era of six seconds or less.

This glorious experience of immersing ourselves so extensively in journey of the The Mountain has made me think of what other albums I love so endlessly, and from start to finish. Without thinking about it all too hard, my all-time top five would be:

Rumours, Fleetwood Mac. This album is my best friend, I love it so much I would marry it, etc. “Second-Hand News” through to “Gold Dust Woman,” every time.

Animals, Pink Floyd. I don’t always listen to music while I write, but when I do, it’s gotta be this 41 minute rock opera of class warfare.

DAMN. and/or Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers, Kendrick Lamar. Kendrick is on another level, and these play like favorite movies. (Screamed the first time I heard Eckhart.)

Modal Soul, Nujabes. The piano intro of “Feather” floats into my soul just like that.

Tracy Chapman, Tracy Chapman. Actually perfect, especially “Mountains O’ Things.”

To this list, Becca would like to add On The Corner by Miles Davis. In the interest of more long form listening experiences: What’s your favorite album? And, yes, I will accept top fives.

Leave a comment

Pancake Brain is a free weekend newsletter by award-winning and -losing writer Lauren Duca.

Hi friends,

It is with urgent multiplication the ant problem in my apartment began on Friday. If I wasn’t sure it was officially summer in Tucson on account of the 88 degree temperature on its way up to 104, or the tan lines that force me to admit that I wear running sandals, then it was the ants, marching into my living room like so many microscopic groundhogs, not seeing their shadow until I’m about to crush them dead.

It was one, then two, then three at once, two different places, then there were four and three at once after that. On the patio, a dropped bit of dinner had them swarming. My partner Becca said, “It’s because there’s food there.” My eyes darted like Winston Churchill wondering if he had enough tacks and yarn to win the next string of battles. “It is ant season,” I said, fist on the table. “We need to move toward prevention.” Becca looked at me like I was Pete Hegseth fresh off a line of coke. I gestured desperately at the patio, which, had become totally infested two summers earlier. The initial scouts were swarming as we spoke, spiraling into each other, over and around again, too fast to be crushed or captured by anything other than a gallon jug of vinegar sloshing an ocean of acidity under the table. Unless anyone has better suggestions, the next step is those liquid bait traps that kill the whole colony from the inside out, and, I while I understand that is plain and simple insect genocide, what else am I supposed to do? I’m so very sorry, but it seems like I’m going to have to murder every last one of these ants, because, I swear to God, one is crawling up my leg as I write this sentence, and another one was on my sleeve while I was editing it!

Meanwhile, Becca refuses to kill any ants. Becca is transmasculine in the sense that they would build me a commune with a working farm, if I asked for that, but they will not kill ants, cockroaches, nothing, and I think this is rude, and a violation of the policy of being the one who is strong enough to build things or know how. We have similar disagreements regarding the gendered description of their use of body lotion, but that is beyond the scope of this letter. I totally get not killing spiders, spiders are artists who create with their bodies, and they deserve respect. The last time there was a spider in my office, I whispered to her, “Hello, you’re so beautiful, I love your work, and please don’t move around too quickly when I’m near you cause that’s terrifying.” The last time there was a cockroach in our apartment, I screamed and Becca patiently escorted him outside. If it is indeed unethical to kill all of these ants, then I am going to be very busy as I begin trying to name them, to offer them Trefoils instead of TERRO ant traps, to talk with them and tell them our dreams of owning enough land for them to be free.

But seriously, what’s the best way to kill ants?

For real though,
Lauren

Share

Share Pancake Brain

Leave a comment

Pancake Brain is a weekly newsletter by award-winning & -losing writer Lauren Duca.

The ongoing death of creative thinking is much older than AI, as are our degrading attention spans, and the extent to which everything sucks. I would say that we’re moths in the flame of corporate greed, but it’s more like drowning, until we’re so saturated in content that nothing matters. Movies have been shittier since at least 2015, when the streaming wars were notoriously won by sheer quantity. In theaters, it’s almost exclusively known quantities, the IMAX doom-scroll of franchise fatigue crawling up old marquees, and even the Marvel movies have to cheap out on special effects now, if not only the plot. People will always go see the Marvel movies no matter how crappy they get, because it’s more of what they know, even if we all know that big machines have been feeding us regurgitated garbage since far longer than social media and AI sped it all up into a stream of endless slop threatening to destroy all meaning.

We all know humanity is hooked up to machines that were created to capture and extract as much of our attention as possible, but we were becoming anti-social, mentally ill, fatter, lazier, and more unhealthy, decades before the rise of social media. Bowling Alone could not have imagined Facebook in the year 2000, but maybe then it would have seemed like a tool made to be helpful to local bowling groups. Meanwhile, capitalism has been pillaging the Earth since long before data centers were a twinkle in Sam Altman’s eye. More than thirty years ago, David Foster Wallace and Neil Postman warned us TV was corroding our imagination and connection. With the invention of the iron stove, Nathaniel Hawthorne worried over the loss of the open fire — warning of a fatal frost, he mourned the communities coming together in the warmth of connection. They seem like a few chicken littles unless it’s all been a long arc to our current predicament: the enslavement of humanity by the technocratic oligarchy (a fancy term for a handful of pale white men who are variously addicted to cocaine, ketamine, or the rape and torture of little girls, harvesting our consciousness for profit, and not even offering good benefits). Up until now, we’ve agreed to the terms and conditions.

The promise of AI is collapsing because they are running out of money faster than they are willing to admit, and not one single person besides the profiteers wants a data center built within five hundred miles of anyone they love. The promise of AI was always a lie propagated by ultra-wealthy men who do not know the meaning of life anymore than they know they could raise millions out of poverty with a quarter of their billions. There are the scandals — like Claude randomly deleting a company’s entire production database along with the backup — never mind threat of accidental nuclear war, or the fact that the total endowment of human history is now mostly profiting a couple of guys in San Francisco.

The gross miscalculation of our billionaire overlords is their failure to account for the most powerful supercomputer on the planet: the vibration of our nervous system, our sacred, ancient ability to feel. Despite all the private planes, every conceivable luxury on the planet, nothing that they cannot be, or do, or have, they’ve got no clue how to feel. The technoligarchs and their robots will never know the genius flowering out of humanity, our capacity to explore infinite intelligence through the guidance of emotion, to be here, to feel real, to expand our consciousness in harmony with the oneness of all being.

You don’t have to be woo to see that humanity is in the midst of an evolutionary shift. We are changing as a species, altering the way we use our thinking minds, becoming aware of the power of the energy we sense in ourselves and each other. Our species is growing and changing, feeling our way to something other than violence and greed as a baseline. We are desperate to transform as completely as a caterpillar to a butterfly, and so it may be that the most important thing to do is nothing. To ask a question of infinite intelligence is to be open to the totality of absolutely everything that could possibly happen, and it requires at least one moment of nothing… but it’s better if you have, like, fifteen minutes. To do nothing does not have to mean to meditate in the traditional sense of sitting with your eyes closed. It can happen on a run, while spending time in nature and/or power-washing the deck, we all get glimpses of the endless genius that lives in nothingness, for we’re all deeply enlightened by the being of eternal oneness, if only by the time we fall asleep.

Pancake Brain is a (free) newsletter in which award-winning and -losing writer Lauren Duca contemplates the expansion of consciousness and tries to learn how to play piano. If you had a good time here today, please like, subscribe, and share wherever you do your best doom scrolling.

Leave a comment

Share Pancake Brain

Share