November 9. Three writers meeting.

It’s obvious that unless I’m writing fiction, I can’t make a person different from what they are. What is less obvious is whether I want to put into a text that it is nighttime when the text is otherwise incomprehensible. It boils down to the question of whether I want to construct anything at all in a text, augment it with any kind of service to the reader. Or whether every text, just because it is a text, is already a service to the reader.

November 8. Maybe it was also because I never had to learn anything else. I could do everything just like that. And when I came across an area I wasn’t simply capable of – anything that involved creativity – I didn’t know what to do. Because, of course, it wasn’t enough for me to be able to do it a little bit. I wanted to be as good at it as I was at everything else. But I wasn’t up to the work that this would require. I also never saw how working at something could make anyone really good at it. Always just limping along. Except that didn’t stop me. That’s why the guilt, that’s why the apology, that’s why the conviction that I couldn’t be taken seriously. Therefore the path into illegality, and the even stronger desire to be taken seriously indeed. Because I am actually much better than what I have worked for.

November 7. One possibility is that my teacher’s phrase drilled into me: if something is hard for you, it means you can’t do it. In music, it made me find an illegal side path, and in writing, the same: that I couldn’t actually do it, but would make an illegal side path for myself. It would never be enough to get around my guilty conscience, but it would lead to some stolen beautiful moments. What they call a sense of accomplishment. If you had once seen fate go into verse and not come back.

November 6. Today in piano school the first broken chords in the left hand. This is what I have been missing the most in playing, and what I thought would be the most difficult to achieve. Now we’re simply starting with that.

Something must have gone very strangely and lastingly wrong with me that made me always think of myself as an illegitimate musician – that is, someone who can’t actually be a musician – and an illegitimate writer. What made me think that? After all, I didn’t feel that way about programming at all. I can hardly imagine that it was only because of that one sentence from my primary school teacher that I was completely unmusical. There was also no comparable event in writing. However, there was the experience that writing, no matter how hard I tried, didn’t work out at all, and I was obviously the most untalented person who had ever tried to write.

November 5. Had several musical insights in quick succession which, once you have them, sound innocuous but took me decades to come to. One of them is that the staff looks like a keyboard rotated ninety degrees to add a time dimension. Chords look no more complicated in it than the pattern of keys I press down.

The accidentals switch the staff into a different mode to represent a different scale. Certain keys are exchanged in it, others are missing because you need them less often in this mode.

If I had known anything at all about this, I could have spent years pondering the question of transposing wind instruments. How when you play a C on a saxophone, it mysteriously comes out as a B-flat – even though they simply chose a different notation convention to better represent the range of the saxophone on the five lines, without inventing an entirely different clef, as they did for the viola, for example.

The question of scales is extremely mysterious. If one assumes that there is a system of twelve steps into which each frequency interval from f to 2f is divided, then the naming of tones and scales does indeed seem quite crazy and as if set up to confuse beginners. But music was not, after all, developed deductively from a twelve-tone system. The scales, keys, chords, notations, even the instruments are like a kind of scribbles made during the exploration of the frequency spectrum.

November 4. Every time I try to play video games so I can be a little closer to the kids, I realize I’ve forgotten how unusually clumsy and awkward I am at them. At least I successfully docked with the ISS.

November 3. I used to get bored when someone said a landscape or trees in autumn were beautiful. That was something for old people who had nothing else interesting left in their lives. Now I find landscapes and trees in autumn beautiful myself, and talk about it when I’m out with someone.

November 2. So we get to the question of whether you can quote tweets without asking the tweeter for permission. That question would have been grotesque in the old public sphere, but in the new one it apparently has to be negotiated again. Similar questions arise when people delete their own tweets after a while, or soft-block someone because they don’t want them to read their public tweets. When I did my monthly twitter column for three years, no one complained about being quoted. But they did complain about me quoting people they didn’t like, or about their own tweet appearing in the same post as the tweet of someone they didn’t like.

November 1. There is, by the way, no evidence that my autistic tendencies are spreading or intensifying due to changes in my brain structure. I can well remember that I’ve always been this way, I’m just becoming less diligent in avoiding critical situations. You could also call it more adventurous.

October 31. Following up on the Halloween party, it’s hard for me to say how similar it was to a normal evening at this karaoke bar. I’ve never been to a bar like that. I found it confusing that there were huge monitors above the stage, with sports broadcasts and the normal ABC news program playing the entire time. We waited a good hour for the karaoke to start.

I have rarely felt so helpless while being so okay with it. I wouldn’t understand the baseball and football games on the screens, and not just because I can’t remember the rules despite repeated explanations. I lack something in my brain for such games. And that’s okay, I don’t need to panic or self-doubt. I would not know many of the songs that would be sung later. I would only be able to pull off very awkward social interactions with people and not understand a lot of what they would say in the loud bar and have to follow-up many times. I feel more and more autistic in such contexts. I definitely notice that something very natural doesn’t work for me, but that’s all I understand.

It helped me to realize that and not want to change it. J dared and sang first, even though she didn’t know the place at all and Chasing Pavements by Adele was not an easy choice for her. I didn’t expect how much everything would turn into a collective roar as the bar got fuller. I knew almost all the songs, we were drunk and laughed and danced and took funny selfies.

What happens on Halloween, stays on Halloween. When I wanted to leave, several men very emphatically wanted to know if J was already taken. As I was paying, an extremely handsome man stood with us and wanted to buy us another drink. I said no and he came outside with us. We could have easily taken him with us, and I was annoyed that I was so inflexible and plain scared. “You wouldn’t be able to do that” J told me later when we were back home.