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As far as I can tell, the healthiest thing I can do is to roll with this. I don't care about correctness. And literalism is as problematic as compulsive allegory. Anyway, one of my skills is meeting you in the moment as you are, without dragging your/our past into it. (At least half the time, this is because I literally cannot remember, lol.) But this is a gift, and it does make me an excellent listener. And this exercise is largely about listening, right?

Huh. No. Well yes, but only to then speak what is heard. It's that next note you keep talking about, the one you say the artist knows is coming, based on what has come through already. It is about listening, but it might be more helpful to say it's listening ahead, and then helping to give voice to what's coming. It doesn't have to be you, obviously, but you are really excellently wired for this stuff.

I'm surprised to learn how much of this is dependent on nervous system regulation. My hands would shake after a piano session, or after giving a talk. I'd complete the thing, and then realize that my hands were shaking at my sides. The best sessions always ended that way. It was like a sign that it went well.

All the incidental work Abe and I have been doing on internal regulation, it's beginning to look like it has the very unexpected payoff of letting me enter and remain in and exit that flow state at will? And be fine afterwards? Playing piano for people used to feel so uhhhh inaccessible, because the place that it comes from isn't something I was really able to access while under (perceived) scrutiny. But maybe that was autism-related dysregulation, you know? Maybe the diagnosis and the therapy and the meds and the accommodations also enable a new access to this. (Ahhhh, lovely. Rule #1 is "No actions that only pay off once".)

Exciting.

"This is what they're trying to say."

I remember being in my elementary school library. One of the teachers had a monitor that was stuck in some weird display resolution. They asked me for help, I got it unstuck.

This is related to why I'm a good engineer: because I can hear what a thing is trying to say. To build a machine is to hear the voice of a living idea and to give it animated form, here in the flesh. Or, that's the ideal way to go about it. Plenty of uninspired machinery out there too. But the things I make work and grow because I can hear the living idea behind the proxy-form, and I can help adjust the puppet to make the idea more comfortable in its own psuedoskin. A well-adjusted form can express the things the idea wants to express, with a minimum of friction and pain. I'm (oh my god) a software chiropractor (hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha). And not just software, either. For a solid ten years or so I would tell people that music and code and photography all felt like the same exercise. They still do, though Abe has the photographer hat these days, and that bucket of mine is probably now just labeled "visual art". I work in sound, and concept, and form — and they are all the same to me.

I'm fucking fascinated at the prospect of being able to get better at my mode of access for this stuff. Holy fucking fuck. For all my technical and practical success at the stuff, I've never felt like a programmer. I'm a chaaaaannnneler, I guess? Every human is, per the language set I'm pulling that word from. Every episode of Empowered Human Academy was (for me) an exercise in discovering the living core of a person, underneath all the layers of expectation and identity. We'd get there, most of the time, and that core was unfailingly the same stuff as that person's own best work, or at least the work that their heart was truly in. And we had podcast guests who would leave the recording surprised at what they'd found and loved about their own selves in the process.

This is the stuff that I love. I love code the same way I love water, and light, and trees — which is to say, I am enraptured by how it all comes through, how the living idea shows up in something that I can perceive. Dare I touch the idea itself? (I dare, obviously, yes, I dare, lol, that sentence was for its own drama.)

Dope. Dope dope dope dope. Little happy dance on my coffee shop barstool. This is gonna be good. ^_^