2/1 And Sweden again, without J for the first time in many months. Not one, but two biometric scans at the airport. I get randomized, so I have to show my id in addition. And my boarding pass. And at every single step, you never know which of these documents they will want. Waiting lines, even though I paid money to avoid them. All because the various systems are not interacting with each other. I want to be identified by who I am, and pass through every single step with that identity, no documents, nothing. I wonder if it will be like that in a hundred years.

1/31 Fell while running. A grey afternoon run, just a little above freezing. Hit the pavement first with my right knee, then both palms of my hands, a story I can piece together from the abrasions it left. Then I curled myself up into a little ball and rolled forward, absorbing the energy. I did scream loud, mostly out of disbelief. I’m rather proud of my reaction, but I wonder how much of it was actually learned, perhaps through the judo of my childhood, and how much was just the only way how a biped can actually absorb that kind of energy and come to lie still on the ground after missing a step.

1/30 Having an insight that seems totally obvious, so much so that you can’t possibly explain why you haven’t had it before, is a pretty good indication it must be a rather profound one.

1/29 Tired early in the evening because with all the exercise in the last few days, I never really gave my body time to recover and repair itself. A strange, quick succession of thoughts in which I worry where our lives might lead, and then I know that as long as I can hear J practicing her violin in the other room, everything is alright.

1/28 Still living between timezones. Many hours of missing sleep at night, naps in the day that go way too long and deep. Went swimming on this Sunday morning, the 9am pool full with young families taking their babies to swim class. J and I cannot remember how we learned to swim, and we both assume we basically taught ourselves. But maybe it is just within the horizon of childhood amnesia.

1/27 Sultans of Swing in the supermarket.

1/26 Whenever I don’t know what to talk about with my son in our weekly video calls, there is always the option of going totally nerd and talk about the things that would bore the hell out of everybody else on the planet. He’ll always be excited about that.

1/25 My daughter made a “dad core” video from lots of little clips of me doing things and saying things. I didn’t have the slightest idea that this is how I look when I do something.

1/24 L tells me the wheelchair essay is so good that I should publish it. – But I did publish it. – That’s not real publishing! – I tell her the number of readers I got. She scoffs. For me, that number of readers is enough. I would appreciate to have more, sure, but this number is enough to keep me writing, and not be overly concerned with finding more readers.

1/23 The lights across the Hudson, which I can see from my window, flicker unusually strong tonight. When I first moved here, and I had that studio up on the 14th floor, the window of which went to the inner yard, I had absolutely no access to, and no idea whether there even were apartments with an actual view of the outside world, the world outside this building. Late in the pandemic, when I did realize that there were many vacancies in the building, and I explored some of them – the doors of empty apartments are usually not locked – I could not believe just how vastly different, and totally unexpected, the views from the different outside windows were. You wouldn’t believe you’re in the same city, let alone the same neighborhood, or in fact, the same building. My big window in this second apartment of mine, from which I can see just a tiny patch of the Hudson between the buildings along 91st street, is one of the main reasons I’m living here.