David McElroy

I’m not trying to change your mind anymore — about anything.

There was a time when I was naive enough — and arrogant enough — to believe I was smart enough to convince anybody that I was right about anything. I thought I could lay out airtight arguments that any reasonable person would agree with.

I thought I could change anybody’s mind. And I thought it was important to “convert” others to whatever I believed. I was a fire-and-brimstone preacher evangelizing for my holy cause.

I was wrong about all of that.

My goals are simpler today. All I really want is to help you feel something.

I want you to feel something that is real and true.

I want to help you feel something human — and I want it to be something that you know in your own heart is the truth. What you do with that is up to you. Even if I’m right about the things I believe — and I do believe I’m right, of course — it’s not really my business what you decide to believe.

I want to help you get in touch with what it means to be alive — not as a consumer or a worker or a voter or a cog in a machine.

I want you to feel what it means to be a fully conscious human being.

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I made a few fun images over the weekend of my current cats as Halloween characters. Alex was a vampire. Meg was a spell-casting witch. And Oliver was originally a ghost, since his light gray fur seemed appropriate for that.

But as I tried to get to sleep Sunday night, it suddenly hit me that I needed to make a Halloween short about one of the cats I’ve lost as a ghost. And as the “alpha feline” of all time in my house, Merlin was the obvious choice.

So this is a one-minute short that I enjoyed creating Monday.

I started with original photos of Merlin and then designed scenes in a spooky mansion for him to roam as the home he was reclaiming. OpenAI’s image generator then helped me make reference images of those scenes and I edited them in Photoshop

The scenes were animated — in very rudimentary ways — through a video service called Runway. I wrote the script and had the narration created in ElevenLabs. The music came from Soundstripe, which is the service I use for all my music needs.

The titles were created in Photoshop and then everything was assembled in iMovie on my MacBook. (This was simple enough that Final Cut Pro would have been overkill.)

I had great fun making it, so I hope it will make a few people smile. And if the moon is full for Halloween this week, don’t be surprised to see Merlin back for a visit.

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At some point — about 12 years ago — Amanda and I had exchanged phone numbers. That’s what she told me tonight, but I don’t remember it.

She worked at a restaurant in a part of town where I used to live. I had just bought the house where I live now, so I was about to move. We apparently exchanged numbers — the way people sometimes do when they say they’ll stay in touch — but I never called her.

Until she called me out of the blue Friday evening, I hadn’t thought about her for a very long time. If someone had asked me about her, I would have assumed she had forgotten all about me, too.

But Amanda has been troubled lately. And she said her thoughts kept coming back to a man who used to talk with her about her unhappiness and her dysfunctional family, especially her narcissistic father. I understood a lot about her because I was still coming to grips with my own narcissistic father and my own dysfunctional childhood.

We talked on the phone for a little while and then agreed to meet at a restaurant near my house about 9:30 p.m.

I thought I was meeting her just to be an amateur therapist and caring listener. For almost three hours, that’s what happened. But as we were in the parking lot saying our goodbyes, she said something that made me very uncomfortable.

Amanda said something about me that contradicted everything I believe about myself.

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