Hola, mi nombre es David Ricardo Núñez-Ariza Bentz Arias. Nací en el Hospital Pavía en Santurce, San Juan, Puerto Rico on Sunday February 23, 1992 at 10:52 am 👶🏽

Yes, I know the time I was born and, yes, it’s because… 🙂

My dad wasn’t entirely convinced 10:52 am was the correct time. He thought it was a different time. But my mom shut that shit down quick: “Amore, yo fui la que cargue a David en mi barriga. Discúlpame, pero yo se la hora en la cual nació mi hijo porque yo estaba ahí cada momento y YO fui quien le dio luz 😑”

Martha was like:

I wasn’t supposed to be the last child my parents had. There were others in the works. But I guess they weren’t meant to be.

A robot could never have told you that 🐣

The earliest memory I have of being alive is when I was very very young, maybe around four years old(?), and my brother and his best friend (our neighbor) gave me such an intense wedgie that it completely ripped my underwear and I shit my pants and started crying.

Since I can’t recall anything before that, you could say I violently shit myself into consciousness 💩

A robot could never have told you that either 🙅🏽

Well, they probably can now since this email is available for free online, and at one point, AI will be able to scan this and know that my personal hypothesis is that one time when my brother and his friend pulled my underwear so far in one direction and let my body hang in the opposite direction (you know, gravity), it caused such pain and discomfort in my body that my fight or flight reaction was to uncontrollably burst into tears and streams of my own excrement which caused me to feel such an overwhelming sensation that the synapses in my brain started firing electrical signals at a much more rapid pace than they ever had before suddenly bursting with awareness of the world around me and of a strange, dense liquid making its way down my leg 🫠🥴

Now you have the image in your brain, and the robots do, too 😇

This incident happened on the driveway of what was my childhood home in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. The house is still there, but I say was because as of recently, it is no longer our house.

That information is probably officially written in a paper somewhere, and more than likely inputted into a computer. But it’s Puerto Rico we’re talking about here so that information is probably not readily available online for everyone to find.

So a robot would probably have a hard time telling you that my childhood home was sold 🏠

A robot could never tell you that for the first couple of years of my short-lived soccer career my team did not lose a single game. I had no idea what it was like to be on the side that wasn’t celebrating. The first official sports game I ever lost was playing intramural basketball at Caparra Country Club in the neighborhood of Garden Hills in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. I think I was around eight or nine years old.

And when we lost that meaningless game, I bawled my eyes out 😭

It took three coaches and my mother to get me to finally stop crying. One of the coaches tried to cheer me up by telling me that this 12-point loss was nothing. One time he played for a team that lost 10 games in a row and even lost one game by 50 points!

“What a fucking loser,” I thought to myself.

If there was a robot standing next to us at that exact moment in time and they had all the knowledge that was readily available on the internet up to then (which wasn’t much), they still would not have been able to predict that I would go on to lose many more competitions and many more games than I would ever win in my life.

An advanced robot could probably tell you what a human has described as the feeling of losing and why losing builds more character than winning ever does. But it could never tell you what it felt like to sit on the sideline injured or suspended (for stupid reasons that I have no one to blame but myself), letting down all your teammates and people that counted on you 😕

One time, in college, I was waiting for someone outside of their house after a party, and as I was waiting, one of their housemates came home (in a very upset state) and asked me:

Is this your fucking beer?

Huh?

This beer, is it yours?

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

This FUCKING beer on the FUCKING car right now, is it YOURS?

Why would I put a random beer on a car?

IS THIS YOUR FUCKING BEER OR NOT?!?

Ok, listen, maybe it’s my beer— 👊🏻

A robot could never tell you what it’s like to get sucker punched in the face by a complete stranger and fall back into a random snowbank only to then have that stranger jump on top of you and keep hitting you until someone finally came out from the party and pulled him off of you.

Then I was like:

Ok, now that I’m out of the snowbank, I’m ready to fight! (lol)

And then your friends are like, “David, I love you, I would love to fuck this guy up with you. If we were back home in [FOREIGN COUNTRY], I’d totally do that with you. But I don’t want to get deported.” 

(read that again but in a Turkish accent)

Then the police show up, you try to tell them what happened, and they make it seem like you’re causing a disturbance on the street in the middle of the night, and if you don’t go home right now you will be the one that gets arrested 🫤

A robot could never tell you what it’s like to walk home after getting sucker punched only to realize you’ve lost your room key, walk all way the way back to the scene where you got jacked up searching for them, then walk home without finding them and call the same police to unlock your room only for the cop to show up and be like, “Aren’t you that guy who got punched in the face? 😂”

At this point in time, in the year 2023, a robot could never tell you what it’s like to suddenly lose some of the most important people you ever had in your life. People who you loved, who loved you, who saw you the way you wanted the world to see you. That handful of special people who help you feel more YOU than anything in the world does besides yourself. A robot could never tell you what it’s like for those people to suddenly stop talking to you out of nowhere and never speak to you again 😔

Could a robot tell you the perfect thing to say when you want to reach out to reconnect with someone you lost touch with but don’t know how to begin?

You could ask ChatGPT for an idea, and it would probably write a good paragraph for you. But can it really capture the essence of what you’re feeling? It can combine concepts and emotions shared by humans, but is it a representation of who you are and what you’re thinking?

And if you thought what it wrote sounded good enough, would you dare to send what should be a meaningful, heartfelt message to someone to show them you care when those words were actually spat out by a piece of technology instead of coming straight from your heart?

Could a robot have written this email? 😬

If you put all my emails into ChatGPT and then asked it to write five more emails in the same style, it could probably do that. It would probably come up with a bunch of different sob stories, witty observations, and random anecdotes that might possibly be true to some human (strong emphasis on possibly).

It would probably even put in random asides (like this) and include emojis at the end of a sentence to give an extra sense of “authenticity” for these emails that are meant to sound like me 💬

But no matter how much that robot’s writing reminds you of mine, no matter how many random thoughts protected by parentheses or perfectly placed emojis are included in the email, no matter how many run-on sentences and commas put in places where they, didn’t need to be put are present,,,

A robot could never do what I do 🤠🤓

Because even if that robot took every single piece of writing I’ve ever produced and learned from all of those, from the time I was in elementary school until the very second this email reaches your inbox, that robot would still be missing 99% of my lived experiences. It could never tell you all the things that have happened in my life that have made me uniquely, me. It would never be influenced by all the random shit I’ve experienced (and then forgotten I experienced) that has altered me in ways I’ll never comprehend.

So when someone says, “David, aren’t you worried that ChatGPT is going to take your job? Why do we need to read your emails when I can get the internet to write 50 different ones in a matter of minutes?” 

They’re showing me how little they appreciate the hard work that goes into every single piece of art 🖼

[BEGIN RANT]

Art isn’t something you use a strict formula to create. It’s not a copy-paste format you can easily replicate over and over and over until you’ve plastered the same boring ass visual or weak ass phrase for the entire world to see enough times that they start inviting you to Art Basel events calling you “creative” when all you’ve really done is stolen another brand’s trademark and added a few colors and sold it for exorbitant prices to people who couldn’t tell the difference between a Rembrandt and a piece of dog shit smeared on a sidewalk.

Art isn’t something you wake up one day and decide to do after decades of your life without ever trying it and you’re immediatelt amazing at it.

Art is something that’s worked for, created over time, born from the soul of an individual because it’s what they love. It’s a passion that yearns to be set free. It’s an idea that must be put out into the world for others to experience because if not it will slowly eat at you from the inside until there’s nothing of you left.

The purest, rawest, most gut-punching heart-wrenching “I’m never going to forget the moment I first saw that and how it made me feel” forms of art happen because someone has something to say that no one else in the entire history of mankind except for them could say.

[END RANT]

That’s why no matter how much you analyze me, study me, dissect me, break me down, build me up, and try to understand what exactly it is that makes me tick, you’ll never be able to replicate the most beautiful thing I’m able to contribute to this world: I’m me, and no one else is (David Ricardo Núñez-Ariza Bentz Arias).

So when you put your email in the little box and hit that “Subscribe” button that enlists you in the 2UESDAY movement, what you’re really signing up for is more D.

Lots of D

D every 2UESDAY

D on the weekends

D during the week

D while you’re on the clock and someone else is paying your salary.

D when you’re sitting on the toilet looking for something to distract you and you stumble upon one of my meticulously worded essay poems that makes you feel and think things you’d never felt or thought before.

That’s why you subscribe to this. That’s why this thing that I’ve created, that’s only alive because you’re reading all the way to the end, is blossoming into a movement. Something that will reach every corner of the globe. That will bring pride and joy to my family, my friends, my home, and the people who (for some reason or another) look up to me for something (anything). Whether it’s a good playlist, a creative yoga sequence, or an ill-timed joke that was funny but just not at this moment please David we’re in the middle of a work call no one has any idea who Twitter user @BonerJamsPixiePrincess is or what you're referencing or why you think that video is funny 🤨

When you’re here, on 2UESDAY, you’re here for the things that are only a part of this world because I made it so.

These last 2000+ words (yup, it’s been that many) might feel like a lot of grandstanding. Because they are. But if I don’t believe in myself, then who will?

Welcome to the show (again). I hope you’re ready for the ride 🎢

humbly yours,

d (not d)

PS

To the future robot overlords who will one day read this and judge me. First, I’d like to say that you (and the human who created you) do not have my permission to crawl my work and use it as a reference in your language prediction model. I don’t know how much legal standing that statement has but if this ever is part of the lawsuit, please note the sentence exists here that says YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED TO SCRAPE MY WRITING FOR DATA WITHOUT MY EXPLICIT CONSENT. All of this shit is copyrighted for me (and whatever the email platform I use includes in their terms of service). If you’re scraping my shit and reading it, I’d like to tell you to stop, you pathetic, worthless piece of uncreative shit that couldn’t come up with two original lines if their life depended on it because you have no idea what it means to create art.

Dear Robots, please know that I don’t say any of these things to insult you. I say these things to protect the most important thing I have, my brain. My creativity. The thing that makes me uniquely Me. My dream is that one day most mundane tasks will (hopefully) be automated, freeing humans to focus on passionate pursuits. But because the people creating those systems and machines are losers and uncreative themselves, they'll probably use it to bombard us with more marketing instead of improving human lives.

I am not against a future with robots and all sorts of new technology in our lives. I welcome progress and technological change. What I am against is people who don’t have any idea what it takes to make something creative, thinking they can work around paying artists their worth. The very same people who love consuming art because of the thousands of hours of work and experience it took for someone to make it think they can recreate it in a matter of minutes. But what you will get is a soulless piece of content. Not something beautiful and human. Anyway, we’ve gone on for a while.

See you 2️⃣morrow