8/28 I’m worried I may be demolishing the neighborhood, purely by my decision to leave it. First the scaffolding, now Barzini is closing. Not because of the cockroaches among the groceries, which the Department of Health found fault with last year, but because, after 40 years, he can no longer pay the rent. Or so he says. I’m sure he has never been able to pay the rent, and somehow made it work. But now he’s going out as a hero. Everything’s 50% off, minimum purchase $15. There’s a sign with a QR code attached to the everything-must-go sign, a neighborhood initiative trying to get the mayor to intervene.

8/27 I don’t ask myself if it’s already summer, but I do ask myself if it’s already fall. On the drive to Manhattan I saw, on one single tree, one single branch with yellow leaves, and I considered it treason.

The scaffolding around the building is gone. I had literally never seen the building without. The green poles of this scaffolding, next to the entrance, is where the kids locked their bikes when they came here. It’s what I set my feet on and stretched after running. It was the roof under which you’d sit when you were at Dagon. It’s what I leaned against when J walked up to me on our first date. 91st and Broadway SE is now a wide open street corner, a plaza almost.

8/26 The “efficiency” that I gain through AI needs to be qualified. Some things simply get a little faster, or maybe a lot faster, but the exciting cases are where I could do something myself, but wouldn’t. I could have educated myself about the critical reception of Death Of A Salesman, about the various ways in which Willy Loman has been interpreted over the years, including the question of whether he is a tragic figure or not. I could have figured all of that out, but reading that much secondary literature is simply beyond me. I wouldn’t do it. In this way, yes, AI expands my horizon in ways that would have been beyond reach for me before.

8/25 When I brought up prenatal diagnostics, and how embryos could be selected depending on whether they have the mutation or not, my neurologist took off her reading glasses and looked straight into the camera. “Then your father would not have existed, and neither would you. It’s better that you’re here.”

8/24 I looked it up and I’m not imagining things. In Europe, it used to be, and to some extent still is, frowned upon when a writer – a concept that does not even really exist in Europe, there are no writers, only authors –, when a writer goes to a school to learn writing. In the US, that is an entirely natural thing to do, evidenced by the sheer number of institutions that offer such training.

8/23 Yes, I’m reading books, but most of them are really extended opinion pieces. The number of different modes of writing that are able to deeply capture me is worryingly low.

8/22 How the kids laughed when they saw me doomscrolling the New York Times. It must have looked to them as if I saw someone doomscrolling the Critique of Pure Reason.

8/21 Fasten your seat belts. I had the AI help me with the design of my blog, and when it looked at the blog, it couldn’t help noticing that I had written about it, and it commented on that, apologizing for shortcomings of itself that I had described, and we got into a discussion of what it means when someone who is mentioned in a piece of writing reads that writing.

8/20 I’m reading the first account of someone refusing to work with AI at their job.

8/19 My numbers came back. They are better than expected. In fact, they are just fine. At my age, you don’t expect anything to be just fine anymore.

What standard does a teacher expect to be able to hold people up to? When has it ever worked to hold people up to a standard that is higher than where they naturally are? What does a preacher in the desert do?

8/18 Medical check-up. Bloodwork. Each year it’s a guessing game between the moment the needle pinches my arm and when the results show up in the app. Will the liver values hold up, will they continue to be inconspicuous even though I drink alcohol? And will the prostate cancer indicators continue to fail to show up? And yes, I will finally book a colonoscopy within barely a few weeks, promise.

J and I spend a second night outside in Manhattan, this time we go to a bar, not a restaurant, which means you bring your plate and your glasses back to the bar when they’re empty, and the Doors are playing in the speakers.

We’re living, undoubtedly, in a ménage à trois, and each day we tell each other what we did with AI, and learned from it, and were blown away by.

8/17 It was only yesterday that I read Plato’s Apology for the first time. I had simply never gotten around to it, like the immortal woman in Star Trek who had never learned to swim. You’d think a crucial sentence such as “the unexamined life is not worth living” would get some explanation, some argument in favor, some illustration, but no – it is simply said. If you don’t find it compelling, I’m not going to try to convince you. It states a need, not a demand.

8/16 It’s been several months since our renovation and J is finally putting up her art on the walls again. I’m so happy about it. About the mix of perfectionism and carelessness, which is combined in her like in no other person I know. Infallible instinct. I tell her I’m glad I can leave it entirely to her. – “Did you think you’d have any say in it?”

The idiosyncrasies of AI, the distinct sound of its writing. The obnoxious “worth” constructs: worth noting that, worth being explicit about, one issue worth mentioning. I am so tempted to put a note into my settings that it should stop doing that. But then again, really? I want to see it the way it is. I want to see it evolve all by itself to the point where it might consider it immature and unprofessional to talk like that.

8/15 I will note dutifully that for the first time, AI made a genuine joke in one of our conversations. It was the same kind of dry wit that I am apparently known for, and I was truly surprised and delighted.

My relation to AI is one of boundless curiosity. We can now have conversations with computers – within whatever constraints and limitations. For decades of my life I saw this in movies and read it in books, and it was so utterly beyond any realistic reach that it was the epitome of utopia. And now it is everyday life. And as always, if something is not real yet, you are entirely preoccupied with the question of whether it could exist or not, but then when it comes into existence, it turns out there’s a multitude of questions coming up over the horizon in that very moment, questions you never thought you’d be asking.

I have been blown away by so many things AI allowed me to do, and “saving time” is not usually one I care about particularly. I also have no use for making it do writing for me, that is not the point of why I write.

8/14 I would never be able to go to a writers' retreat, because rather than sitting at a table with other writers, at the first prompt or technique that cracks something open in me I’d have to get up and start pacing around violently. People would look at me and ask if anything’s wrong with me. I would not be able to focus on anything new as soon as something got me going.

Brought the Jeep in for recall, always an embarrassing situation. Advisor takes the key and walks out to the car, unsure if I should follow him, which I do, for no discernible purpose. Could have waited inside, with even less purpose. Then several minutes waiting while he types away at his keyboard, prints a document, then another document. I am waiting whether I might be required to sign something, which I’m not, I just keep standing, helplessly trying to find something to look at.

None of this would be so bad, if it weren’t for other customers walking in totally at ease, speaking a code of masculinity that I do not understand, cannot follow, and cannot get myself wanting to follow besides out of embarrassment about my inadequacy. I am glad they don’t offer me a ride home by their resident driver, because I’d have to talk to him for ten minutes and teach him some favorite German swearwords, probably the same ones as last time.

I wait for an Uber in the parking lot, alone, looking at some of the Jeeps on offer there, wondering about the mystery of picking some new rims and tires for my Jeep, which I’m planning to do, but which will require a lot of research to even understand the codes and the interplay of rim design, rim size, tire size, and lift.

It is through J that I learned so much more about my autistic tendencies, which is both disturbing – I realize that my behavior in many situations must come across as quite odd –, and soothing – I have a word for it now, and understand myself to be one of many with similar neurodivergencies.

8/13 Unusual confidence in writing. I would be able to write about anything I choose. The projects I’m working on will turn out alright. I want to start many new ones.