this is a blog.

by Ada Limón

When the doctor suggested surgery

and a brace for all my youngest years,

my parents scrambled to take me

to massage therapy, deep tissue work,

osteopathy, and soon my crooked spine

unspooled a bit, I could breathe again,

and move more in a body unclouded

by pain. My mom would tell me to sing

songs to her the whole forty-five minute

drive to Middle Two Rock Road and forty-

five minutes back from physical therapy.

She’d say, even my voice sounded unfettered

by my spine afterward. So I sang and sang,

because I thought she liked it. I never

asked her what she gave up to drive me,

or how her day was before this chore. Today,

at her age, I was driving myself home from yet

another spine appointment, singing along

to some maudlin but solid song on the radio,

and I saw a mom take her raincoat off

and give it to her young daughter when

a storm took over the afternoon. My god,

I thought, my whole life I’ve been under her

raincoat thinking it was somehow a marvel

i thinbk depending on his age they stick upright but he is just a little pupy in y0. hope everybody understands

Like people regularly pilgrimage out to try and get it to calculate something for them despite the fact that it's widely known that this machine is dumb as bricks. People just refuse to believe that something this big and impression and that takes so much energy to run can actually just be stupid. There are whole entire cults on other worlds that are dedicated to puzzling out the secret actually "smart" interpretations of it's conclusions, widespread disagreements about what the culture of its creators was (if they existed) and how they might impact things like the translation of data submitted or received, there have been historical teams who have worked night and day to understand the planet brain's language and workings and solve this riddle of how it's secretly smart, but prevailing wisdom remains that it just actually, factually gets everything wrong like 99% of the time.

Some people are convinced there's some fundamental flaw to how the planet brain works, and that if this flaw could be fixed then it would become an invaluable resource. So yet more resources and genius have been poured into figuring out what it could be and trying to secure the necessary grants and access privileges to attempt repairs. The few times anyone has actually gotten in to try and change the brain, though, the effect on its output has been negligible, and the brain has gradually reversed those changes and reset itself over time.

It's estimated that multiple billions of resources have been poured into figuring out the planet brain over the years. Experts have dedicated their lives to trying to understand it. Impassioned devotees have ruined themselves and their communities attempting to follow its advice. Even people who agree that it's stupid tend to agree that it should still be preserved and studied, even though trying to recreate some of its systems or apply the super advanced technology involved in its creation to other tech has yielded negative results (it makes everything else dumber too).