CVS, the likes of Laura Van Den Berg and ChatGPT, and me

Friday 11/14/25

I was at the CVS the other day, where a couple of humans are employed just for the purpose of unlocking those barriers on the shelves so you can get a tube of toothpaste or jar of mixed nuts. I get those things online, because I'm not going to go to a store, press a button, wait until someone turns up, then head to another aisle, press a button, wait, etc. Anything I get at CVS has to be something that's not under lock and key. Anyway, it's almost entirely self-checkout. The human employees could leave. Hell, half the time when someone presses the button in an aisle, it seems like no one comes and they give up and move on regardless.

There's a sign at these self-checkout registers that says words to the effect of "Please don't pull the receipt before it finishes printing." Guess what everyone does? That's right, they pull that sucker as soon as the printing begins, before there's hardly even any ink on the paper. I saw a couple together who did just this the other day. Both looking right at the machine which the sign is affixed to. Neither of them read it. Despite being immediately in front of their faces.

The truth is, few people anything unless they have to, by which I mean, they are purposefully looking for specific information. Otherwise, doesn't matter what it says, how big the writing is, or if there's virtually nothing else to look at as some secondary option. That is how much people are now wired not to read, how deeply ingrained it is in us now, and it isn't as if there are writers giving them any reasno to either. When you use a restroom somewhere and it's one-person occupancy and it says "vacant" on the outside and someone keeps tugging at the door violently trying to get in like the door is just stuck? It's because they refuse to read. They don't even think to read. Reading is not an option now for most people.

But people are going home and voluntarily subjecting themselves to the bilge and tedium of George Saunders and Tommy Orange? The fuck they are. No one is. And that includes everyone in publishing. That isn't what anyone is willingly, of their own volition, giving four hours of their Thursday night to. Bestsellers. It's bullshit. Buying doesn't mean reading. No one is buying these things to read them. It's other reasons when they do. What the purchase and the association with what the book/writer signifies is the thing, not reading, not entertainment, not edification.

My sister sent me a nice note about "Dot," which she read twice upon receiving it the other day, referencing a specific paragraph which I have in turn pulled up this AM to see it again for myself, though I carry it with me in my head. I actually altered the end of a paragraph several above it. I'll put a few paragraphs from the last two pages here, the first of which has that change I just mentioned, with one of the others being the paragraph my sister cited, because I find them greatly stirring. The sweep of them--the tonal sweep, too--is vast. The elegiac sweep of the wind that blows behind the veil where the meaning of it all--the answers--is.

I spent a summer in my early twenties living with my mom’s youngest brother and his wife and kids, as I didn’t have a place to go. A near daily duty was making Dot’s prune juice run, which is what she called it, fittingly enough. I must have seemed to be a prune juice addict—aunt Dot referred to it as PJ, like some liquidized spin on a sandwich—to the employees at the store. She appeared to appreciate the undertaking of these expeditions, and we would talk upon my return, after I had unloaded a car that was positively weighted down with an aisle’s worth of the tart expedient deemed essential to her gastrointestinal plumbing.

This would continue on to when I lived on my own again, with phone conversations that surprised me. She’d talk about my mother a lot. How lucky I was, how much she loved her, and how much my mom loved me. But she never mentioned anything they did together when my mom was a kid. Aunt Dot required no credit for herself on that score.

My mom lived in Chicago by then, but she was in Boston often enough, with her family here. Aunt Dot had ended up in a facility for elderly care, which was to be her last stop in her long life—she was in her nineties—that hadn’t known much in terms of companionship, friendship, or love. She couldn’t see you very well, but she sure as hell could comment on your waist. My mom would be angry that no one would really visit Dot—it was a rare occurrence that anyone made the trip, no matter how little time it took—but I think she also understood, because no one really knew her the way my mom did, which she believed, and I came to believe, was truly the way Dot was.

Two poplar trees stood outside of Dot’s window at the facility, on a lawn that had no others. They were the sentinels that had grown about fifteen feet apart from each other and looked like rakish, arbor-themed football goalposts. Dot viewed them as the spiritual embodiments of her parents in deciduous form. She spoke to them often, lying in her bed. She didn’t read, she sat, she thought, she conversed with the trees, believing she was reaching from this world into the next, or that people from the next who understood who she was, were reaching back to her in her dwindling here and now. Maybe she thought about those trips with my mom when my mom was a girl. She had a lot of time to think.

After she died, there were scattershot stories about things she’d said to people in our family, but those quickly went away, though you always hear Grammie stories. It was like Dot had become a mere annotation. Dot had become a dot. And when I would wonder, and when I still do, if it matters that people knew she was a good person, or it only matters that she was a good person, I see the entire world differently. People I know, people I think I know, people I will never know well enough.

You can swap out all other writing in the world with AI. Laura Van Den Berg? How easy is it to get an app to write that shit? Hey, ChatGPT, spit me out a lifeless, soulless, flat, prosaic, plastic, MFA-hallmarked, boring as can be Laura Van Den Berg story.

Piece of fucking piss for old Chatty, no? But for what point? There's no real market for any of the writing that kind of person--and you have to be that kind of person to be accepted and backed by these type of people--does.

The person is the point to these people. The person, the name, the associations thereof. The work is irrelevant except insofar as it's like a dress code. You can't come in the temple of fraudulence in the buff; the work is a mere cloaking, covering, a formality.

But it's the person, their name, their checked boxes, what that person represents to these people, how similar that person is, how non-threatening to the fragilest of egos, that matters and is what everything--book deals, story placements, Guggenheims, MacArthur grants Pulitzers, gushy reviews, hype, water carrying, drumming up, are all about. The work is fucking shit by every last one of them. It's not for reading, no one reads it, no one cares about it, no one could, no one would even if this was a world of clamoring readers.

That's not what this is about. So it doesn't matter if ChatGPT can fire out a Laura Van Den Berg story, because it's Laura Van Den Berg, and what she represents/means to people like her, that matters and is the bottom line.

But the bolded above? Nothing else--no app, no technology--will ever be able to do it. And sometimes, that feels like the only thing I have going for me, as such.