Section A:
There was a lot of anger in the way my "severance" from my job was conducted. I have to take full responsibility for not stepping up to the responsibilities of my position, for letting myself be exhausted and distracted. There were overlapping concerns to be sure, and I was asking for help – from the medical community regarding brain fog and long covid; I got nothing and nowhere and was not surprised. When I asked for help from my boss and my coworkers and received very little in response, I felt a bit lost. I later was able to see that their reactions were likely more about trusting me to follow through like I always had than about not wanting to help, but my world had shifted around me in ways and shapes that I did not recognize, and I really *needed* help. There were, probably still are, problems at the core of the team and its leadership that probably would have made that help impossible under any circumstances, and the intro to this song, written as a mobius strip, picking up where Mellow Red left off (my brother's dog porkchop licking my Mom's blood off the floor), is a reminder to me that what happened – however poorly my leadership and coworkers at my job handled things – what happened started with me, long before I had this job. For more information, consider listening to "truth" – track 1 from One Last Embrace, or its reprise on Red Flags… where the rhythm for the mobius strip is lifted… you may also notice it surface during the first breakdown of Chasing Waves. That's a Langston Hughes book I'm reading as a child sitting in that lifeboat coming in and out of view as the surf rises and falls in the distance between now and then.

Section B:
No use belaboring any points here. Yelling about it a bit helped. I'm not angry anymore. Those who didn't take responsibility are still suffering and I feel for them. I hope they know even though I was incredibly angry, I am finding ways to move on, and I am still their ally.

Section C:
Toward the end of my tour of duty, a good friend continually reminded me that I had nothing to prove. Perhaps she was right professionally, but looking in the mirror comes with other constraints, other faces I've seen in that mirror. That is who I have to contend with, who I have something to prove to, where the responsibility lies, and who can choose to stop making the same mistakes. What the person in the mirror sees is harder to say.

Section D:
The backdrop to all my personal and professional drama is this tech – this silly, silly tech that has cost so many hundreds of thousands their jobs already (not technically mine, but certainly the pressure was created). What people assume but do not know about it can and will cause us a lot of trouble if we're not careful, and when have we been that? The Turing test has been in discussion quite a lot since the release of tools like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, among others. This was a test Alan Turing developed to establish a machines ability to exhibit intelligent behavior in what we now call an artificial intelligence system… basically a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and such identification – conversation that is nonsensical, repetitive, can't follow; there are many other examples – these would cause the machine to "fail" the test. While some of these AIs may be passing these tests in some estimations, its worth pointing out the anecdotal reflection of an undergraduate CS major in an artificial intelligence class, after learning about the Turing test – she raised her hand and told her professor "I've had boyfriends who couldn't pass a Turing test."