The summer started like all summers do—with the promise of reprieve, of recovery, of a pause in the relentless machinery of ordinary life. I was exhausted. Not the clean exhaustion of work completed, but the corroded kind that seeps into your bones when you’ve been holding something together for too long, when the cracks have begun to show, and you’ve spent all your energy pretending they aren’t there. I needed the break desperately. Viscerally. The kind of need that makes you count down the days, that turns vacation into something almost sacred—a threshold between the person you’ve been and the person you might become if you could just rest. Instead…
My vacation in France went up in smoke. Literally.
Unfortunately, that was just the beginning. The universe, it seems, has a cruel sense of humor. Just when I believed the storm had passed, the catastrophes came in waves—not one misfortune but a series of them, each arriving just as I thought I had reached the bottom, each one revealing that the bottom was still further down. An extra layer of stress settled over everything like a suffocating blanket. As if there hadn’t been enough trauma already.
Nothing. I am telling you this not because it’s part of the summer series I promised to tell. It isn’t the next chapter. This post is actually an interruption and an apology.
My vacations—or the chaos that has seeped into what should have been my vacations—are now over. Finally! Fortunately, I would like to add. The catastrophes had been contained, the wreckage had been repaired, and I had to return to work. Definitely not rested. Not at all. In fact, in an even worse state than when I left, if that were even possible. But just as I was preparing to resume working on my summer series, another obstacle materialized.
Small, almost absurd in its pettiness compared to everything else. The kind of thing that, under normal circumstances, would be nothing. A minor inconvenience. But I had no normal circumstances left. I had no reserve capacity for even the smallest friction.
Copilot—my AI assistant editor, my digital right hand—was now login-only. Both Copilots 1! And login-only meant accounts. Credentials. The very thing I have always resisted. The tool I had come to rely on for the careful work of polishing and refining, for the collaborative process of turning raw material into something worthy of Beyond—had become the one thing I have always resisted. You may remember: I rejected Gemini for this very reason.
It is nothing, right? But for someone who has never been fond of logins, of accounts, of the endless parade of usernames and passwords—it is everything. A digital toll that I will not accept. Not even for practical reasons. It’s not stubbornness; it’s a principle. Normally, this setback wouldn’t phase me. But I am completely wiped out 2. The exhaustion is not metaphorical. It is total. And, for someone drained to the dregs, staying true to his principles feels like trying to run a marathon on a broken knee. And yet, I will run…
The next chapter is still coming. The summer series will continue. But to continue the work, to keep the momentum alive, and to deliver the next chapter of the summer series that you had been reading with such patient attention—hopefully—I have first to find a replacement. A new AI assistant. One that doesn’t require a login. And a good one, of course. Until then, I am asking you to hold the thread with me. To wait. To understand that sometimes the interruption is the story.
So, I apologize for this post. For the fact that it is not the continuation of the summer series you were promised, but an interruption. And I am asking for your patience. For your understanding. For the grace of knowing that sometimes the summer doesn’t go as planned, that sometimes the person who promised you a story comes back damaged, delayed, asking for a little more time before the narrative can resume.
1 Not only copilot.microsoft.com, which I used as my editor to polish my posts (paragraph by paragraph), but also Copilot in Edge, i.e., the only one that has really access to internet (via my open tabs), and that I was using to summarize past posts. ^
2 I was already working on fumes (Freudian pun unintended) before these vacations. But now, I am physically or mentally too exhausted to carry anything through. Not to mention the trauma. ^