Miss Nora's Words

Childhood memories, word salad, and mourning the death of meaning

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“We connect in presence.”
Right. And I digest ‘in gratitude’.
What fresh fuckery is this?

Good morning, afternoon, evening—or whatever.
It’s time the nerdy librarian tightened her bun (or at least fixed her hair),
grabbed that coffee cup, swiped on the lipstick,
and declared herself locked and loaded.
Because word salad is the game we’re opening today.

Confession: it’s been bugging me for a very long time.
I complain about new age people all the time.
It’s like they want their words to have this ethereal meaning…
and end up saying nothing, as illustrated above.

I’ve read long posts of nothingness—
just string after string of words duct taped together.
And at the end I’m left going,
“So… this is a funnel?”
Or worse,
“So… what’s the point?”

And here’s the kicker:
Yesterday, I was guilty of the same crime.

I’ve been playing dare-me with Facebook.
Trying clever ways to beat the algorithm.
Because, suppression? Very real in my world.
And yesterday? My daughter looked at me like I was a stranger.
Didn’t echo my usual “what fresh fuckery is this?”
But… she was thinking it.

“Mom, what is this? I’m reading it, but I don’t know what you’re saying.”
Is not the compliment you want from your daughter.

I need to stretch. That was embarrassing.
There isn’t a coffee cup big enough to dive into—
lipstick smeared or not—that will cover my shame.

Because in trying to trick the algorithm,
I became just like them.
Obscuring any meaning underneath clever words.

And here’s where it gets worse.
AI is making it easier.
Easier to sound deep. To look wise.
To stitch together elegant nothingness with precision and polish.
You start to wonder if you’re hallucinating—ten minutes in and you still don’t know what the point is. Or if there is one.

Who am I kidding? Most people don’t read for more than four minutes.
Signs of the times—speaking of which…

Bots are writing sacred scrolls of nonsense,
spinning soul journeys out of lorem ipsum,
and dropping them into “coaching spaces” with gold foil headers.
And people? Are buying it.

Who knows—maybe they like the challenge of chewing through the nonsense
to find their own Cracker Jack surprise:
a tiny sentence so well hidden, even I would’ve struggled to find it.
A point. That makes sense.

But the algorithms love it.
The platforms reward it.
And the rest of us?
We’re left wading through soft-focus gibberish
thinking we’ve lost our ever-loving minds.

Spoiler:
This is what happens when language becomes decoration instead of meaning.
When communication gets replaced by “vibe.”
When meaning is less important than fluff.

I need more coffee—maybe a gallon of it by this point—because this weighs so heavy on my soul.

I grew up loving words. Loving their meaning.
Loving finding new ways to string them together.
Finding new ways to combine words to discover new meaning?
One of my top 5 Fave Things To Do.

I remember being a little girl.
Feeling sick in Sunday school.
And having Miss Nora pack me off to her house.

I loved Miss Nora and Miss Jean’s house.
It was old. Older than the apartment over the store we lived in.
She lived in an actual town—shout out to New Liskeard, which sort of no longer exists.
Damn those amalgamations.

My point is: Miss Nora was a writer.
She also drew. Sketched? Illustrated?
Something that involved paper and pens or pencil crayons.
And she would make being sick at her house fun.

She would draw little pictures while telling me stories.
Before long, she had me making up stories.
Encouraging me to make little cartoons of them.
Really, she was encouraging me to write.

I still mystically feel her over my shoulder
every time I sit down to write a Quietly Absurd Dispatch.
I can hear her chuckling at my irreverence.
Questioning my word choices.

Would she be appalled by what’s happened to the state of writing?
You bet your best friend the old biddy she would.

I had to clean up my language—because Miss Nora.
But I can’t clean up the truth.
She would’ve hated what’s happening.

We have all these shiny tools that can replicate tone but not intention.
That can stitch together something structurally “beautiful”…
and leave it hollow. Bereft of emotion. Of meaning.

She taught me to write with a pencil and conviction.
To choose fewer words, not more.
To love clarity.
To play with rhythm.
To say something worth saying.

And now I watch as meaning gets replaced by performance.
As people perform wisdom.
Perform compassion.
Perform depth.

Who am I kidding?
Type a half-ass prompt into ChatGPT and then sit back.
Because the work? No longer theirs.

I pause to grab more coffee.
Tears in my eyes because, oh, how I loved that time with Miss Nora.
Learning to write at the hands of a master.
At least, that’s how she seemed to me.

I lost her published books along the way.
And mourn them.
They were a touchstone for me.

Which brings me to the reason AI can’t write your book—
no matter how many webinars say otherwise.

Yes, it can string together words.
But I hate to break it to you—ChatGPT makes a lousy author.

So, Reverend of AI with your promise to publish 10 books?
You can’t possibly expect to create anything of substance or meaning.

Yes, AI can write now.
It can mimic the sound of understanding—
but it can’t actually comprehend.
And that distinction matters.

It still takes a person—an actual human being—
to add emotion, meaning, and substance.
And I hesitate to say it, but the “sense”—common or otherwise.

My friend Chat can generate 1500 words of nothingness at the speed of light.
But for a refined reader? It’s still saying nothing.
It doesn’t connect. It falls flat—
or flattened, as Chat likes to tell me.

Perhaps in this world, people lack a sense of meaning.
I consider this while taking an overly ambitious gulp of coffee.
I consider that maybe now, people say a lot of nothing.

We’ve become so engrossed in being clever, sounding grandiose,
that meaning has suffered.
The art form of writing is perishing.
And the Miss Noras?
Lying in their graves, trying not to give themselves whiplash.

It's hard to believe we’ve reached a world where word salad gets someone elected—
but we saw Trump. And Truth Social. So yes, we know it can happen.

Where was I?
Right—another big sip of caffeine, and back to artificial intelligence.

My point is that while bots can generate
“We connect in presence” with alarming grace,
they can’t explain why it matters.
They can’t feel the weight of a sentence that lands.
They don’t remember Miss Nora.
They don’t miss her.

But I do.

So, I’m calling it out today.
Not just the bots.
Not just the influencers.
But myself, too.

Because the moment I start writing for the algorithm
instead of for you—or for me—
I’ve lost the thread.

And Miss Nora?
She’d hand me a blank piece of paper, a sharpened pencil,
and tell me to start over.

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I’m a mom with two kids and a dog to feed,
and yes, coffee is my second love language.