This is part of the Digital Mirror Project, where I gave an AI everything I’ve published since 2000 and asked it to tell me who I was, one era at a time. This is Era 5: Bay Area Return, December 2022 to May 2026.
The Find
Feb 2025. Dad’s kidneys are failing, a doctor on the phone saying “the highest sodium levels I’ve ever seen,” and I’m hitting the shortcut to get voice-to-text so his words go straight into Obsidian. Wrote that my brain had already started to switch off.
Two paragraphs later, in the same post, “Change of Condition,” there’s this:
“Here you are, documenting your father’s forgetting while relying on machines to do your remembering for you.”
The AI found that line in 134 posts. It then went on to say it was doing exactly the same thing at that very moment—reading three years of my life because I’d asked it to tell me who I was.
It shows receipts: 4,400 Obsidian notes. Otter.ai for meetings I can’t remember. AirTags on my wallet, my keys, and my car. A memory journal. A tool that reads my daily notes back to me. A wiki of everything I’ve ever written. The project you’re reading about right now started in March 2026.
What it declared: in this era, every time I noticed myself forgetting something, I bought a machine to remember it for me. Later, I handed it all to an even bigger machine.
The Era
Dec 2022 to May 2026. Back in Fremont after 13 years in Miami. Living in the condo Dad picked in 2004 for WALUE. The relationship that formed my adult life is over. Dad is two blocks from Mom’s house, first in assisted living, then in a locked ward. $6,665 a month, all paid from his account by me, with no legal authority whatsoever.
April 2023, I get fired from Strategio. I’m unemployed for more than 600 days. I get dressed and go to Starbucks so Mom won’t find out. But she knows.
I’m writing again. Ship 30 in January 2024, the Substack relaunch in November, then every Thursday at 4 a.m. I get a contract at Intuit, which then falls through. I shave my head. Mom makes me wear Dad’s AARP hat because it’s cold out.
134 posts. Approximately 116,000 words. I’m 46 at the beginning and 49 at the end. I state my age in 18 of the posts.
What It Saw
The year with the fewest posts has just one. 2023: let go, Dad sedated and taken away in a van while Mom hid in the house. Total words for the year: 1,037, and the subheading admits it was “about 80% verbatim” ChatGPT. The AI spotted that a chatbot had written the initial bits about my dad. I typed for five minutes and couldn’t bear what came out. 2024 had 28k words. 2025 had 66k. The year I couldn’t write about is the year everything happened.
13 of the 134 posts weren’t written in that period. They’re reposts from 1999 to 2020. The AI saw what they show. In the three years of present-tense writing we have, my sister gets barely a mention: “goes between jail and boarding & care “, “radio silence”, “has been missing for over a year”. In contrast, there are some 5,600 words about her in that period: the court hearing on the webcam, the frog being thrown in the bay, her asking me in 2014 if I have “friends and freedom”. All of that predates 2021. I republished all of that. The AI’s words: the current author doesn’t write about my sister. He publishes an earlier author who did.
I employed a narrator to tell the truth. Six times in 2025, I added a second voice that seems to disagree with me, like a lone member of a Greek Chorus. “(Narrator: They fought.)” “Narrator: He did not cure cancer.” “(Narrator: Ernie is not the only person who can help.)” The AI then placed this alongside all the other voices I was keeping: the Slightly Snarky Consultant who reads my journal every week, ChatGPT being kind of a tease when I ask it to, Claude’s leaked <thinking> tag at 4 a.m., NotebookLM calling me “the author”. Someone else is always there to state the plain truth.
I tell the readers “you’re not alone” four times: 422 Days, the scam posts, the locksmith and the Asian parents list. When I use “alone” to refer to myself, it appears exactly twice, both in relation to the future. January 2025 in a 165-word post under a YouTube video of my visit to Dad: “Unlike him, I won’t have anyone”. December 2025 during a trip to the supermarket for Mom’s fever: “Once Mom is gone, that’s it—I’m all alone.”
The AI put the two findings side by side, without comment.
What It Couldn’t See
It can only read what shipped.
It can’t see the drafts folder (there were 20 versions of messages I’d never actually sent as of October 2025). It can’t see the follow-up on the unemployment thing that everyone was asking for, the one I replaced at 12:36 a.m. with 296 words to the effect that some essays “need to stay in their cages a little longer”. It can’t see the sentences I typed and then deleted. I told you about that one in print without stating what it was. There’s one about drugs. The AI knows there’s a post about a post it will never see. That’s all it gets.
It knows which of the posts are reposts. It has no idea what happened after those. It goes through my 2020 journal on my sister and stops where the journal stops.
It doesn’t know she’s still missing.
It has no idea I’m searching.
It can’t see the ratio of fear to errands either. The AI’s theory is that I was scared of forgetting; hence, I built systems. There’s the evidence. I’ve written some very incriminating stuff about folder structures.
But a doctor on the phone had a sodium number. The urgent care desk needed the correct phone number. The facility needed $6,665 by the first. Someone still needs that fucking document. All that talk about the terror gives the machine a very tidy theory, but it leaves me with the same amount of work.
I have no idea how much of any afternoon was fear and how much was just the next necessary thing. The AI has no idea either.
The archive stops on May 5, 2026. Dad died on May 6. The AI read a man writing “he’s hanging in there” for months and never found out when the sentence stopped being true.
The Thing That Surprised Me
I thought the Digital Mirror project was really a writing project. You feed it the corpus, and you come out with a book (and possibly a few essays along the way). The AI read the same corpus and let me know what it was for.
It’s pointing at “Nobody Knows My Father’s Birthday” (November 2025). I’m in an urgent care waiting room with a man who doesn’t know me, trying to remember which number is on his file and typing it all into Obsidian on my phone. I wrote: “But maybe when you’re seventy and sitting in your own Urgent Care waiting room, glaring at your 2069 Synthia™ or whoever has to deal with your shit, at least they’ll have these notes. Maybe they’ll know you had no idea what you were doing either.”
Then it was pointing at ‘The Ghosts of Memory’ (the 40%), the AirTags and the line about my coping tools being ‘less about convenience and more about my terror of becoming him’.
Its conclusion: when Dad got sick, I had to piece his life together from almost nothing. His Medicare card had the wrong name on it. His healthcare directive and power of attorney named his brother’s wife, not my mother or me. Nobody could agree on his date of birth. Every form, every phone call, I was guessing.
Everything I’ve built in this era (the notes, the transcripts, the blog, the wiki) is the antithesis of that. It’s a complete record of my life, there for whoever eventually looks after me. I’ve been making it absolutely clear that they won’t have to guess.
I sat at my desk, read that, and didn’t do a thing for a while.
I thought I was writing a book. In fact, I was just filling in forms early.
Then I realized what I’d done. A few paragraphs back I’d told the machine it was wrong. It said I’d built all of this out of terror, and I said no; it was to ensure that somebody had the document. Now it says I built all of this so that nobody has to guess, and I accepted that on the first reading.
Same folders, same AirTags. One interpretation of that is that I was terrified of becoming him. The other is that I was looking after whoever came next. I went with the more compassionate one. I don’t know if that’s the right thing to do. Maybe both are true.
What It Means Now
It’s November 2026. Six months.
I’m now building the memoir from these posts, as I said I would, using the wiki. The wiki has all 134. It has the facility bill, the AARP hat, the Korean coffee with the yellow packet, and the wrong number.
Dad never read any of it. He stopped being able to by 2021. I’d stopped wanting him to long before that.
The machine has the notes. I don’t know who they’re for. For a couple of months I thought they were for a reader. Then I thought they were for a stranger in 2069.
I think they’re probably just for me, really, in case I’m the one who forgets next, and someone has to work out which number was mine.