9/23 As I drive J to her orchestra rehearsal in Rhinebeck, the electronic message board on the Kingston-Rhinecliff Bridge shows THERE IS HOPE, clearly to prevent people from jumping. It’s that same kind of board that you see on roads everywhere and which at other times will show U DRIVE U TEXT U PAY or HEADLIGHTS ON WHEN WIPERS ON. That last one’s my favorite because it reminds me of some truly apocalyptic early rush hour mornings on the Williamsburg Bridge during my first years here.

I wonder if THERE IS HOPE ever got anyone to not jump. Or, for that matter, whether studies were done to find the most effective wording to keep people from jumping. I would also imagine that one person or another who wanted to jump may have looked at the sign and decided to forgive the somewhat clumsy attempt to deter them. It’s America after all and we don’t bother being particularly eloquent to get a message across. And so I wonder whether because of exactly that – accepting the imperfections of human communication – someone decided to hang in there just for now.

9/22 When I do an editing round with AI, we spar. – Oh, thanks for catching that. – No, I don’t agree. – That sounds too polished now. – etc. And I can’t imagine this ever becoming different. Even if I had a nobel-prize winning human as an editor, we’d go back and forth like this.

And goddammit, I quote a poem in my essay, and without me asking, it goes and checks the poem and tells my I got the punctuation wrong in it.

9/21 The football field of the high school is full of boys wearing gold helmets that glint in the afternoon sun. Some of them shove a metal structure around that looks as if it was built to stop a tank. Why is growing up in America so heavily ritualized, so thick with initiations and rites of passage?

Essay class. How do you write to get your story published – I am so completely at odds with this aim that it’s surprising how much I still get out of it. Writing with beat sheets, rising and falling action, character arcs. Funny how this leads to the very earnest question, and not from me: Do you actually think about this while you’re writing?

9/20 With great satisfaction, killed a few darlings.

With the chord patterns I’m practicing, it isn’t really about “getting better” at them. Eventually, you either know them or you don’t. Knowing them is success, not knowing them is failure, or well, you ain’t got it yet. I like this.

9/19 The amount and the quality of the writing that AI has pointed me to in recent months makes me think that the third revolution of publishing has in fact happened.

9/18 The worlds of this Small Town and Manhattan are incommensurate. I cannot make any combined sense of them in my head. The only thing that brings them together is that I, in fact, live in both of them. Just like hundreds of thousands of others.

9/17 I have never had much contact with professional writers, and I’m surprised how meticulously they list the publications they have written for, like the ribbon rack on a general’s uniform.

---

As we drive home from Wappingers Falls, over the bridge, the hills across the river look as if billowing smoke, but they’re not in flames – it is fog, evening fog. Also, that reduced daylight. It is not that the sun is setting earlier – which it is – but this entirely different quality of light, the mutedness of these evenings.

---

It’s not that nobody would write that in English. Nobody would write that at all. It’s me who wouldn’t write it in English.

9/16 Evening at Beso’s on the bank of the Hudson. The lights on the bridge come on, under a grey evening sky with heavy clouds. These two types of light – the fading daylight and the artificial lights on the bridge – have a very similar color, very white, with a bluish, cold hue. A ship that moves down the river, a pusher tug, has its cabins lined with distinctly yellow lights, which still seem like cousins of the lights on the bridge, because of their very similar size and intensity. Later, a speedboat without lights, quite loud while quite invisible. A very faint light does appear on it after a while, almost certainly the screen of a phone.

9/15 So, Bishop Gregory: Why does he do what he’s doing? Out of a simple desire for novelty, to do something cool? Or is there a deeper, structural reason why this is required from him? Something that needs to be done and he’s the one who happens to be around?

And why does he fail? Because he’s not smart enough, because he doesn’t have enough talent? Or is there a deeper, structural reason for it? Is he trying something for which the tools just don’t exist, and will take centuries to develop?

9/14 First essay class. Funny – similar to the moment I first got in touch with philosophy, and realized: they are asking the exact same questions I am asking, only they spend more time on them.