9/13 I spend my time in this utterly incomprehensible place learning music.

9/12 Personal essay class, reading list. A French bishop, in the 6th century, writing down things that nobody ever bothered to write down, and for which no language exists. Or is he just in over his head?

Do something that has never been attempted, not out of a desire to do something new, but because something new takes hold of you, and you have no choice, and you don’t even understand what is going on.

9/11 Have I written this down somewhere over the past 25 years? I probably have, but even if I have, I feel like doing so again. I was in Hannover in Germany that day, teaching an IT class. It was the afternoon, about 3 or 4pm, and the class was about to wrap up. People were doing some final exercises and I made my round among them to give a hand or answer a question here or there. At this point one of my students came in and said that in New York, a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center towers. “That’s a joke,” I replied, inflecting my voice upward at the end to make it hover somewhere between a counterclaim and a question. “I’m not making jokes about things like that,” he said.

I wrapped up the class quickly and drove back to my hotel to check the news for myself. This was still a time when news happened mostly on television, and the huge spike in traffic on the internet brought down pretty much all of it on that day, including whatever primitive websites the news organizations had. By the time I reached the hotel, the second plane had flown into the second tower and maybe one of the towers had already collapsed.

I decided the most important thing was to get gas into my car, so I’d be able to make it back to Berlin to my girlfriend and her daughter the next day. Because maybe the gas stations would no longer be open the next day. I thought anything could happen, right up to World War III. I remember driving up to the nearest gas station, which was completely empty, and I wondered whether the owner inside had already heard the news. I wasn’t going to tell him.

Back in the hotel, I continued watching the news, and called my girlfriend. I scribbled a few words into a notebook to record my feelings, which I felt was appropriate on a day like this. I was afraid.

9/10 I got my new sleep med, which my neurologist prescribed to me and convinced my insurance to cover. It’s a non-generic one, fairly new and hence patent-protected, and hence so expensive that the insurance would rather have me take something cheaper. And so, as I learned, what they commonly do is they up the copay for that drug, to make it less attractive for me to get it, to which the manufacturer responds by giving out coupons to reduce that copay.

It works not by making you sleep, but by making you not wake up. That’s very much how the first night felt. I had to pee in the middle of that night, and I very much stumbled into the bathroom without fully waking up. I must have lain on my injured shoulder in some unfortunate position for hours, and realized the pain at some point – I won’t call it waking up, because I didn’t – and must have spent a long time trying to find a position where it would not continue hurting. I figured I’d take some Tylenol, but it seemed impossibly complex to get it, and it took me a long long time to realize that a bottle of it was lying right next to my head.

In the morning I felt, maybe not exceptionally rested, but way better than in any of the last few days.

9/9 I cut the hedge over the weekend. There are all sorts of weeds in it. Some of them seem to grow by inches in even a single night. Something in it might be toxic, and J is highly sensitive to it – she gets a rash if she so much as walks too close to it. I’m cutting away the worst parts of it, basically just hedging the hedge in a little.

Our neighbor cannot find the time, and I get it: she’s got it tough with her son who has severe autism. Her hedge has lost all shape, and weeds grow out of it in branches several feet long, forming parabolic trajectories. Earlier this year she had her front yard redone, getting it covered with wood chips, with a kind of square patio in the middle and a table and two red metal chairs on it. Nobody ever sat on those chairs. In fact, they still have their price tags attached. And the yard around it is in a state of disarray, with grotesque weeds sprouting up all over it.

I feel sorry for her and hope life loosens its grip a little, enough for her to spend even a small amount of time on her garden.

9/8 And, again, a shoulder injury. Last year it was the left one, this year the right one. Both happened as a consequence of the most strenuous and risky operation – getting the dumbbells on top of my chest for a bench press. It requires a quick but careful backward roll onto the bench, supporting the dumbbells with the knees. This worked okay for 30 lbs and 40 lbs. But 45 lbs and then 50 lbs, even though those weights worked initially, gave my shoulder that tiniest of irritations, which became worse over a week or two, and then finally, during an exercise that would seem unrelated – a dumbbell curl – that final crack and sharp pain that says: a couple of weeks, my friend.

9/7 Theory of the diary as a literary form. Aspects that make a diary genuinely difficult to do, and as such allow a critique of the diary. A diary that is written with the intent of immediate publication. Completeness vs intensity. Posing as opposed to actual work. A diary that loses track of its purpose. A diary as a means to maintain a foothold in the world.

Labor Day. Unaware of any other day on which it was so quiet in this neighborhood, even at ten in the morning. The gym, on the other hand, was packed.

9/6 I wanted to write something about our Black neighbors in our majority-Black neighborhood, but realized I was falling into every single trap of Get Out, which I’m only slowly learning to understand by being married to the woman I am married to.

9/5 Write forward, not backward. Write for yourself, not for the audience. Damn, it’s so easy to lose track of that.

Neighbor party again, several people standing on the grass, others sitting in lawn chairs, a canopy has been erected, and the usual, great music is coming from a surprisingly tiny speaker across the street, in front of their house.

“Is it electric?” a woman asks from behind me as I pull out the charging cable from one of our Jeeps and plug it into the other. She repeats her question as I turn around, but points to the rear of the car to the other flap door. “Or is it both?” – “It’s both,” I say. “It’s a hybrid.” – That was the end of our conversation. Plugging a cable into a car is still a sight that turns heads in America.

It reminds me of the conversation I had in Tucson in the visitor parking lot at the Titan missile silo, where the old man, a farmer, came over and told me I’d definitely get noticed in that mojito green Jeep. He, too, was curious about the electric part, but when I told him about the range of 27 miles, I could feel his curiosity turn into dismissal in an instant, and nothing I could have said from then on would have pulled him back. It’s a hybrid, the 27 miles are fine for a day in the city, it’s an early implementation of the technology, almost just a proof of concept, and modern cars, only five years younger than this one, have ranges of hundreds of miles.

9/4 Always that moment when a book has drawn you in convincingly, and you look up from it and tell yourself: I will be like that from now on. You won’t. You will continue to be yourself, in all your peculiarity, in your difference from the book. A book that nudges you a little from where you are: that is truly spectacular.