October 14, Gothenburg. Ten hours of sleep, unexpectedly. Across The Spiderverse in the morning. J. bakes a moon cake. Bastard Burger in the evening. Lots of rocket launches in between.

October 13, Gothenburg. My son got a new smartphone. It is, strictly speaking, my old smartphone. But I could assure him that if he didn’t need it now, I would have kept it for three more years. He needs it because the screen of his previous smartphone is gradually dissolving into a glistening white. That previous smartphone was also an old one of mine, and the dissolution of its screen started when, at one point at the beginning of the pandemic, I carefully washed it to disinfect it, which didn’t do it any good.

October 12. To Sweden. Lost the auction for an upgrade to business class, so probably hardly any sleep tonight. Worried how the weekend will be when we start with this deficit.

October 11. Booked the wheelchair with Scandinavian Airlines – the airline that is bankrupt and has been taken over by Air France / KLM. I had missed the 48-hour window within which you can register your own wheelchair, and the website no longer had that option. Subsequently, the best customer service experience I have ever had, via chat. She (“Martina”) asked only questions consisting of two words or less. What type? How heavy? All segments? After five minutes we were done, and now everything is in the system.

October 10. I continue to bang my head against the fact that in music you can’t practice what you want to play, but for a long time, for the longest time, you have to practice other things that don’t seem to have the slightest relationship to what you want to play.

October 9. Turned the smart thermostats in J.’s house into the orange area for the first time. In Manhattan, the apartment is cold, it’s the usual moment of the year when you wonder at what temperature the landlord is obliged to turn on the heating, and while you’re researching this question, it starts to crack and hammer in the radiators because of the first hot water flowing through.

October 8. Conductor before Tchaikovsky: Life is hard, thank God we have music! He shouts this in front of the usual, graying audience with the usual bodily failures, the usual, fatal diseases. Approving murmur.

October 7. Concert in Newburgh in the evening, then to New Haven. Long, narrow, winding road through the darkness. I have to focus hard on the turns, drive faster than allowed and still drag an impatient chain of headlights behind me.

October 6. The customer for whom I have often worked late into the night over the last few weeks shows no interest in the results. He just doesn’t want this solution. I have to consider whether I’ll write a final report just to bring this to an end and not lose the lessons learned.

October 5. Writers who are trapped in their time, virtually bunkered down. Now they don’t want their texts fed into AIs. They don’t want to be read by computers. What’s that going to look like in 100 years, and in 1000? Just how far are you thinking?