The delivery robots finally came to my part of town. I had seen a couple pictures of them before and obviously they didn’t look great; little fuckin boxes full of someone else’s bull shit rolling around on the sidewalk. On top of that, nothing in the last few years has indicated that robots can navigate the real world in a way that is sensitive to the life that it is supposedly meant to serve. At least two of them have blasted through the glass walls of bus stops this last month. Seeing them in physical is so much more repulsive and disconcerting than I was prepared for. They’re big and stout and the way they bounce as they truck along the sidewalk is disconcerting; they look heavy and senseless, like they’re on the edge of losing control.

They got big round eyes. It’s a sinister dishonesty to design something hostile to the livability of a city and give it eyes that so thinly mimic the gaze of love or curiosity or sadness that earth’s real creatures share and recognize in each other. It’s like a giant blood sucking creature with a camouflage meant to look non- threatening to its victims. In the city I guess that would be a hot dog bun or or a crushed Miller can or a carton of American Spirits cigarettes.

These things are repulsive to behold and they make me worry about the loss of humanity in my environment in the long term. The economy is so bad right now that people can’t even get bad jobs, and these things are taking them. The money that a person could have made is now extracted from the local economy and deposited to a corporation that uses the money to make more robots and to send their C-suite members on medical tourism trips to get leg-lengthening surgeries.

These jobs they’re taking are already dehumanizing. As the job becomes more widely automated, the standard of treatment toward the workers of what I could call the automated class will become lower and lower. The fundamental reflex of humane treatment is going to atrophy and the complete objectification of the poorest working class will be complete. And then it’ll happen to the next poorest. And then the next.

The robots are also taking up our space. The urban form has already been marred by roads for cars, which now because of their own design trends are becoming deadlier than ever for pedestrians. The sidewalk, then, is the only avenue for humans to get anywhere safely. And now these fuckin things show up and are incapable of yielding to the dominant life form and then also might obliterate whatever infrastructure is there for public transportation and public benefit. These things are weapons instrumentalized to shape our physical environment to be cashless, isolating, and a resource to be extracted from instead of a place to be lived in and shared by heterogeneous people creating meaning and fulfillment with each other.

I’ll commit myself to the cause of making it economically invaluable for these things to operate in the city. Kick them over, pour a beverage or detergent in the joints, stack bricks on them like Giles Corey. If we cede our space and our economy to these things then it will be a huge gain for the worst people on earth who’s goal is to turn every part of our lived experience into a way to make money.

The same day I saw that robot I saw two Waymos for the first time.

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The pigeon on our back porch is tearing through adolescence. Every day I open the back door and it has more feathers and more weight on it. In two weeks it went from a little pink wobbling wad to almost completely a bird. Maxine said she heard it cry for the first time and it finally got up and started walking around. It’s been special to see the full childhood of an animal literally outside our door. It makes me feel like I understand little bit more about my ecosystem. I am also excited for it to leave because it stinks like hell out there. This little thing has been shitting huge style in the exact same place since it was born. I don’t know what its parents have been feeding it, I haven’t seen any feeding action this whole time.

Today was the first day I saw all three of them hanging out together, since the egg was laid there’s only been one of the parents taking care of it. It took us way too long to realize that the parents were taking turns on the egg. Every other day the pigeon on the egg would be really skittish and waddle away from it when we opened the door. It turns out one of the parents is a coward and the other is not. There will be a morning soon when we open the door and the little nest will be empty.