I’m glad I was home alone Monday night, where nobody could hear my sudden fit of hysterical laughter. If someone had been here, somebody else would have had to write this column and finish whatever was left to do to get this newspaper out, because I probably would have been dragged away in a straitjacket and locked in a padded room.
But man, that laugh felt good, especially after the last few weeks when I have found far too few things to laugh at. It might have sounded like I’d gone insane, but I promise I had earned that one.
The last few weeks have been the perfect storm of automotive chaos, family worries and an impossible to-do list, all complicated by my own inability to stop dwelling on them.
As I usually do when I cover events, I used my phone to record the Memorial Day ceremony at the Veterans Cemetery on Monday morning. The recording app on my phone automatically provides a transcript to go along with the audio, and since I can read a lot faster than normal speech, my writing process usually begins by pasting that transcript into a Word document and quickly scrolling through it to delete whatever I won’t be using.
In this case, I knew that would include the national anthem, the pledge of allegiance and the invocation.
Those are usually some of my favorite parts of any service, especially if the national anthem singer is good. But for writing purposes, unless I want to name the person who did the singing or led the pledge or invocation, I know I won’t be using the text, so cutting those sections saves quite a bit of time.
Except this time, it left me doubled over in laughter.
What the transcription app doesn’t do is break the text into paragraphs, so when I pasted it into Word, I was staring at a massive seven-page wall of 3,955 words. During my quick scan for the items I knew I was going to cut, the first thing I looked for was the last line of the national anthem.
There in that chaotic jumble of text I found: “And the hum of the brain.”
That alone kicked me into a burst of laughter that left me trying to catch my breath. When I finally did, it started right back up again when I saw the line above it: “Oh, Satans, that's star-spangled. Bender, yad way.”
I know enough to expect AI transcriptions to get as much wrong as they do right, but this was comedy gold, all the more so because it turned something sacred into something completely absurd.
And honestly, I appreciate it, because that beautiful absurdity was exactly what it took to finally quiet the humming of my own overworked brain.
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