7/5 July 4 concert at Boscobel. All weather models indicated that it would rain close to the end of the concert, and it did start raining right in the middle, exactly after the last note of Rhapsody in Blue had been played. The rest of the concert was cancelled and we made our way back to the Jeep in pouring rain with pretty good emergency logistics securing the violin.

As we got home we found the power out, and it stayed out all night and still is out as I write this at noon on the 5th. There is also no update on when it will be back, but that is not out of arrogance or negligence of the power company; there is actually far more damage in surrounding areas which they are busy with.

The outage is only about ten blocks around our place, the rest of Newburgh is functioning as normal. I got a bag of ice from the supermarket so we can cool J’s medications in the styrofoam box in which they arrived. Although this is the first significant outage in all my time in this country, I am considering upping our game and buy better batteries, maybe an emergency fridge that runs on them. We already have some great generators which are the Jeeps.

12.46pm power is back.

7/4 Going to America was, in my case, a project of one-and-a-half decades. I started making the decision in 2008, when Obama gave his speech at the Victory Column in Berlin, not at the Brandenburg Gate, because he was not president, only a candidate, and Angela Merkel would not allow it. He had them play David Bowie, Let’s Dance from the speakers before he came on stage. We later saved the paper copy of the New York Times from the day after he won the election. 

Going to America felt like an awesome thing to do at that time, even though for the first two years after I’d moved, I felt like I had done the most stupid thing I could have done to my life. I considered myself a German writer, after all, and now I had to start all over again at age 40. I ended up writing more in the 2010s than I had ever written before, and all of it in German. I became a US citizen two years ago, barely three months before the 2024 election.

I don’t know if the America of today would have the pull for me that I’d change my entire life trajectory to live here, like I did in 2008. But that is not a relevant question. This is now my country. Not the country I hoped for, and that means we’ve got work to do. That I can call this my country just like anybody else arriving here, and that everybody agrees there is work to do, and then does it, is why I am, after all, grateful to have come here.

7/3 Now that computers can talk like humans, and officially pass the Turing test, it turns out they will need to pass a whole lot more tests for human character, and not getting on everybody’s nerves.

7/2 It’s up to 103 degrees. Do not want to leave the car in the sun. The plexiglass top is showing rainbow patterns because it deforms in so much heat. Temperature records are shattered in the city. I usually like driving with the windows down in the summer, but in this heat that is not advisable. Need to run the air condition at full force. It’s an alien day.

7/1 I now have two laptops with English keyboards, and I feel strangely liberated, even though I make plenty of mistakes typing on them.

6/30 Back in Manhattan for a doctor’s appointment, routine EEG. I should note that I was indeed, for a couple of days recently, considering again to keep the apartment, but it just isn’t possible. I’m spending so much money to be with the kids every couple of weeks, I can’t also spend it on the luxury of being a city dweller, when in fact, I am not making any good use of the city at all. It is down to a very vague feeling at this point. 

6/29 M tells me she’s glad to hear I didn’t write the document she’s found under my name, because it really did not strike her as my normal style.

6/28 The idea that someone should write about something in order to have “an effect” on it seems just wrong. This is not what writers do, and this is not how writing works. Also, the idea that anything needs to be “effected” on something sounds suspiciously like something is wrong with it and could be righted if only someone smart put their mind to it. That is not how the world works.

6/27 If only we had someone like Susan Sontag, writing about AI the way she did about photography. Then again, what was the effect of that, other than a feeling of homeliness for people with complicated brains.

6/26 I need to have separate laptops for company and personal use from now on – should have done this all the time, obviously, but so far did not run afoul of any company policies. This is changing – the most immediate case being that I cannot use my personal AI from a company machine anymore. That does make sense. 

I’m using the opportunity to switch from German keyboards to English ones for the first time, after fifteen years of living here. I want to root myself more deeply in English. And I’m actually looking forward to learning and internalizing a way of typing the Umlauts anew, so deeply that I no longer need to think about it. How long will that take – days, weeks?