August 5. Pool party with the co-workers. Our boss: We’ve been doing this for such a long time already, and somehow it is not getting worse.

August 4, New Jersey. Felt so lost in this day that it almost took my breath away. We had a normal work day at first between living room and bedroom and kitchen. For me, team meetings, a one-on-one, for J, an interview. This house, which is an elongated rectangle of wood into which the rooms are inserted a little too obviously (though I grew up in such a rectangle myself, it never seemed so obviously rectangular to me). When our meetings were over in the afternoon, we wanted to go out for something to eat, we went to a burger place on the Atlantic for that, but the sky was gray overcast, fine sprinkling rain, and unless you find one of the few public walkways over the dunes, you can’t see anything of the ocean. It’s like it’s not there, even though it’s just behind the row of beachfront properties we’re driving along. I would love to live on the beach, but the idea of living almost on the beach seems bizarre. – When we got back, I didn’t know what to do with myself for an hour or two, even the wide wooden blinds in our cute beach house are better left unopened, because the windows just kind of go into the neighborhood. No one here likes their house to be peeked into, and vice versa. It’s only in the evening that I find myself again: playing a few lessons on the portable piano I brought with me, reading and not being able to calm down about the content, writing this. Oh yes: there are books here in the cute beach house, they all come from the same publisher and are the same size, with the same cover design, all novels.

August 3, New Jersey for the weekend. When I was last here three years ago, I couldn’t believe that there were cars driving around everywhere while Manhattan was still as if frozen. – We’re in a lovely little beach house, where beach means it’s an eight-minute drive to the Atlantic Ocean. It’s frighteningly tidy.

August 2. Puzzled why I want to play the piano. It is clear that the improvisations can only come into existence by me playing them. But what about existing pieces? Comping on the piano while J sings or plays her violin. Why do I want to play that?

August 1. Dinner at Dagon. Both the people to the left of us (two older women) and to the right of us (two younger women) had the main course sent back. The former said it had taken too long to prepare, the latter had changed their minds. I’m beginning to realize why we are such welcome guests.

July 31. J will need the wheelchair more and more in the future. She wants to know if I still want to marry her. The answer is easy – and does not contain much information –, because it does not mean any impairment for myself at all.

July 30. Picnic in Central Park. Definitely European: brie with prosciutto and limoncello. We used the scooters to get there. I expected it to be difficult to find a spot at all, but we just stopped at the first location we came by and pushed the scooters onto the grass and into the shade. The people on the grass like a painting of Brueghel, only much more peaceful. Always helicopters, always the soft hum of electric motors on the West Drive, always voices, always music somewhere. Read.

July 29. J is learning German. That is wonderful, although I’ve not had any experience how lovers speak German to each other in more than a decade. You have to reinvent it every time anyway.

July 28. Surprising realization that the way my grown son and I interact is completely incomprehensible if you don’t know that we’ve never lived together and were hardly ever together for more than weekends.

July 27. A heat wave, three days of close to a hundred degrees. I throttle the refrigerator a bit and try to turn on only one of the two A/C units at a time, and only when it gets uncomfortably warm in the apartment. I don’t believe in individual actionism, but I do have consideration for the New York power grid.