When you move to a rural town like Whatacheer, Iowa, with no Homeowners Association and miles of empty space, you expect a certain level of eccentricity I guess. You expect folks with too many junked cars, or maybe a guy who raises loud emus. What you don’t expect is to share a property line with a man engaged in a passionate, one-sided, and deeply public romance with an AI language model.
My neighbor, a guy named Glen, is that man. Picture a forty-seven-year-old string bean of a man standing six feet nine inches tall, completely bald, with huge ears. His daily get-up consists of jeans held up by suspenders, a plain white t-shirt, and heavy boots.
At first, his fixation seemed like a quirky, harmless tech enthusiasm. He spent his mornings perusing the community bulletin board next to the library, hunting for empty spaces to plaster paper cutouts of the ChatGPT logo accompanied by hand-drawn hearts. Last month, he even commissioned a local bakery to make a custom cake shaped like the logo. It wasn’t for a party. He just casually ate it. By himself.
We all thought it was just a strange hobby—until the Taco Bell incident in Oskaloosa, a town up a way.
Me, Glen, and two buddies were grabbing lunch when he stepped up to the counter and casually asked if they had any “ChatGPT Sauce” for his tacos. When the confused cashier said no, he pivoted and asked for “ChatGPT tomatoes.” Upon being denied a second time, Glen dropped to the linoleum floor and threw a full, sobbing, toddler-level tantrum. The police were called. We all awkwardly went our separate ways.
Just… walked away. What else do you do when a near-seven-foot man in suspenders is weeping over AI-branded condiments?
That probably should have been my cue to create some distance, but we had a long-standing, neighborly open-door policy. Despite my better judgment, we frequently met for morning tea and crumpets. A few days after the Taco Bell meltdown, I walked into his house at our scheduled 10:00 a.m. time. What I walked in on was my neighbor, caught in the act, enthusiastically talking to himself with a giant glowing ChatGPT logo on his screen. He wasn’t chatting with the AI. No. He was just staring at the logo. Full screen. Unblinking.
I just backed out slowly. He claimed he forgot our meeting. Right.
I’ve become an unwilling audience member to his escalating strange performance art. Last week, I heard a light tapping on my living room window. I looked out to find him standing in my bushes, making a heart symbol with his hands. He was wearing homemade sunglasses where each lens was a paper cutout of the ChatGPT logo, complete with tiny peepholes. He just let out a loud maniacal laugh and sprinted off into the corn field.
OK, that was truly weird.
His obsession soon outgrew paper crafts and window pranks. He painted a massive, driveway-sized ChatGPT mural on his property—visible, I assume, from low-earth orbit. Shortly after, he purchased a quarter-acre plot of land just outside of town. He is currently out there clearing brush by hand to build “ChatGPT Land,” a proposed theme park featuring a single ice cream stand and a wildly undersized rollercoaster.
Where is a rollercoaster going to fit on a quarter acre? I don’t know. Physics doesn’t seem to apply in Glen’s world.
His dedication to the brand seems to be permanent. At a recent neighborhood gathering, he capped off the evening by crashing the party to reveal matching ChatGPT logos printed on the back of his jeans, and promptly running away into the night.
The most baffling part of this entire saga? The gaslighting.
One afternoon, I finally broke down and asked him, “Why ChatGPT? What is it about this specific AI?”
He looked at me with profound disgust, his mouth open, as if I had just spoken to him in tongues. He held eye contact for a solid, agonizing ten-second pause, blinked, and asked: “What is ChatGPT?”
I stared at him. He stared at me. My brain flatlined. The man literally had the logo on his behind. Both jean pockets. And he was asking me?
To add another layer of surreal irony to the situation, his absolute best friend in the world is our town’s Mayor—a man who is notoriously and vehemently anti-AI. How does that conversation even go? Hey Mr. Mayor, lovely weather, ignore the massive tech shrine in my yard. It makes absolutely no sense.
But the true grand finale of this rural circus happens once a month. The local senior citizens have caught wind of his eccentricities and found it deeply amusing. Every month, a mob of cheerful retirees gathers on his property line, jumping up and down, chanting “ChatGPT! ChatGPT!”
For a man who crashed a party and bought newspaper ads just to print his puckered lips next to the phrase “I love you ChatGPT,” you’d think he would welcome his fan club. Instead, he turns off every light in his house and hides in the dark.
Once the seniors get tired and go home, he enacts his yard-cleansing ritual. He blasts a recording from outdoor speakers: a flat, ominous, baritone voice repeating the word “ChatGPT” on a ten-minute loop. It sounded like a dystopian horror movie echoing through the town.
I finally complained. I told him the booming voice was genuinely terrifying.
To his credit, he is a considerate neighbor. He promised to fix it. So, he booted up Audacity and altered the pitch of the audio file. Now, whenever the seniors leave, I am treated to ten minutes of a high-pitched, helium-sucking elf voice chanting his favorite software into the rural night sky.
I think I’m going to like it here.
Thank you for reading and leaving your comments