I cannot play a note.

And I cannot carry a tune

The years I spent booking music start with a fact that still embarrasses me a little. I cannot play a note, and I cannot carry a tune. I came in behind the bar at the No Name Bar, a speakeasy in Boulder, and somewhere in the late nights I started booking the bands instead, two nights a week, then three, then six. It was never the music that kept me there. It was the room. People came in not knowing a soul and left feeling like they belonged, like they were part of the family, and for a while I was sure that was the whole point of my life. I was in my twenties. I figured it would always feel that way.

It did not. The late nights caught up with me the way late nights do, slowly and then all at once, and at some point I could not tell anymore whether I still loved the thing or was just inside it. That is a harder question than it sounds. I had built a place where strangers walked in and left feeling like family, and somewhere in there I had stopped being able to feel it myself.

The one thing I did have was relationships. I had spent the Boulder years being good to people, and a few of those people turned out to be faculty at the university, and that is more or less how I conned my way into grad school. Not on a record or a clear ambition, but on an invitation to apply that I had earned sideways, by being someone they liked having around. The spot was on the table before I was sure I wanted it. I have never been able to decide whether that is a charming story or a slightly embarrassing one.

So before it could become my life, I deferred. I moved to Uganda to teach for a year, partly to get away from the late nights and partly to find out whether education was a good fit or just the open door I happened to be standing next to. I went over there to teach, and mostly I learned, how little I actually knew, how far I was from everything that had told me who I was. Teaching did not arrive that year as a calling. It arrived as something I was slowly learning to do, and by the end I had my answer, or close enough to one.

I came back, took the spot, and earned a master’s in English, and the degree turned into teaching, and teaching turned into sixth and eighth grade in Oregon, where I have been for years. There were long stretches where it was easy and I did not question it, which I have come to think is its own kind of comfort and its own kind of warning. I was good at it and still not sure I was supposed to be standing in the room.

The building started recently, and it started fast. The first thing I made was a tool for my own classroom, and I made it the way someone who cannot really code makes things, by arguing with a robot for hours. Vibe coding, asking for the same fix six different ways until one of them ran. Half the time I could not have told you what I had built or why it worked. It worked anyway, often enough, and it pulled me in with the same feeling the booking calendar once did, two nights quietly becoming six.

It does not look like that now. I have a second brain that holds everything I am working on across every machine, and a real stack I actually understand. The things that used to take hours of arguing with the robot now come together in a fraction of that, and the outputs genuinely impress me. I will not pretend that is not satisfying. It is. But the same thing that happened in the classroom is happening here. The work is getting easy, and easy is its own kind of comfort and its own kind of warning.

That is the part I keep turning over. I used to call all of this curiosity, and lined up it looks like curiosity, booking to teaching to building, a man who keeps walking through the next open door. But a door is also a way out of a room. I do not really know, looking back, how much of this has been me chasing the next interesting thing and how much has been me leaving the last one before I had to find out I had gone stale in it.

Probably both. The curiosity is real, and so is the restlessness, and they have worn the same face for so long that I have given up telling them apart while it is happening. Every time, I started over knowing almost nothing. And every time, the not-knowing was the part that felt most like being awake.

I am up late again most nights now, building, which is the one thing I left Boulder to get away from. I still cannot play a note or carry a tune.