The Drive Home

It’s early May, just before dawn with the sun rising over Lake Pontchartrain, Louisiana. Its head pops over the horizon and glimmers across the water as I take the first sips of my coffee.

I’m up early for a three-day journey back home to Brooklyn. It’s the end of “music camp” - as my partner likes to call it - a six week stay in New Orleans, working remotely while soaking in the history, music and culture of the Big Easy.

New Orleans has a generous spirit, and I already miss the friends and welcoming experiences of my time there; yet I’m equally excited to be heading home, to a neighborhood in Brooklyn I’ve lived in for over 30 years. There are deep roots in DUMBO, and new shoots in the Marigny. I’m starting the drive to move forward while keeping an eye looking back, feeling the excitement and pull of the journey ahead while reminiscing and recollecting what I’m leaving behind. And wondering how I’d fill the long drive north.

Two days of driving is a long time to sit with yourself. Which is its own kind of practice - the noticing, the listening in. And I carry a few selves on this journey.

I make my living leading technology departments and large-scale, multi-year transformation projects. I spent many years as a consultant, helping companies envision the art of the possible, developing roadmaps that moved through unknown territory and toward desired destinations. It’s like putting a puzzle together (which I love doing). You lay out all the pieces on the table, figuring out the sequence of how to approach things (edges first, grouping by color?), and then, step by step, work with others to assemble it.

But I came to technology through music. I didn’t buy a car with my teenage earnings - it was a Yamaha DX7 and an Apple Macintosh computer that my hard-earned cash went to. Music brings great joy into my life, and the language of this self is non-verbal, creative, and knows about the history, theory, compositional methods, improvisation skills and piano and vocal techniques. This is the water that “music camp” bathes in.

But music is more than a creative outlet. It has a spiritual aspect to it. It’s pulled me into various religious traditions, choirs, playing Sunday and holiday services, and the exploration of different philosophies. And navigating the inevitable obstacles and changes my work and life brings about is one of the reasons that meditation is, to me, a daily, no-matter-what practice. As a certified meditation instructor, I work with men to explore their inner landscape, to sense their emotions, to hear their hearts calling.

Somewhere across the Mississippi border, a few hours into the drive, I opened my phone and started talking to Claude. I asked it to help me build something, and for the next two and a half days, the road home became one long conversation.

Things I’d dreamed of silently got named, argued with, and written down into something buildable. And then got built. In the three months since that drive, I’ve developed something that a year ago would have been unthinkable: a personalized framework for capturing my ideas and sharing them with the world, one that lets me focus on the creativity and streamlines all the steps in between.

The journey itself is worth writing down, one piece at a time.

And so this begins. Some of what follows will be technical: the nitty-gritty of tools, the concepts, the lessons I learned building what I call the KNote Operating System (KOS). Some of it will be quieter, the artistic and spiritual questions that drove those conversations, and that kept surfacing long after the drive ended. Two languages, one journey. I’ll switch between them on purpose.

You’re welcome to come along for the ride. Ignoring me completely is also a perfectly valid choice.

Next in the series: the moment I first reached for my phone on a Mississippi highway, and what happened when I gave AI the wheel.