July 26. When I play the piano, I think: Now everything is finally coming together. The theory, the sheet reading, the improvisation. I’ve been thinking that for two years, though, and I’ll probably keep thinking it forever.

July 25. Canary in the coal mine: When J took me to the train in Newburgh, it was raining. I didn’t notice anything particular about this rain, although I tried hard to find details. At times, the rain was heavier, and at other times, it was weaker. Nothing more.

Another canary: The playlist I’ve listened to for years while running (two playlists, actually, one slow and one fast), and which, with their eternal repetition, have ruined every year’s spotify statistics, have become boring to me. It’s not hard to make new playlists, but the fact that I’ve grown bored with them now, but not in the previous two years, is remarkable.

What is going on?

July 24. Work day with no meetings. To Newburgh in the evening so that tomorrow I can help J connect the new dehumidifier in the basement.

July 23. Latino wedding on Long Island. Remarkable awwww! sounds among the guests whenever someone said something particularly faithful or romantic.

July 22. Concert of movie music in Newburgh. The natural kinship of movies and orchestra. Saw the first fireflies in the evening.

July 21. So strange how emphatically I refused the books, the vinyl records, and how nothing hangs on my walls, everything completely white, not even carelessly, but decidedly. Was this a mistake? Can I live in this thin air? What about the carefully chosen piano sounds, and the weighted keys that had to be the best I could get? I am not at all unsensual, just focused.

July 20. And then a poem, as if someone were spelling out the world.

July 19. An intellectual drought. What should be particularly bad about it, when life is otherwise packed. I am not bored, never, but I am barren of any and all thoughts.

July 18. I told my son that if he starts reading books, he will never be bored again, because somewhere in the world there are always the very books that are of maximum interest to him – you just have to find them, and this is a service I am ready to provide for him. I also told my daughter that if she is ever bored with something at school, she can come to me and I will explain to her why it is the most interesting thing in the world. And here I am, at a loss.

July 17. I have a lack of enthusiasm that is truly frightening. I can’t think of a book, for example, that I’m currently curious about with any nerve-wracking intensity. Have I not always been like that? Where is this going?

I don’t feel like reading nonfiction anymore. Those books with titles of the form: “Gripping Wordplay: Explanatory Bait Phrase”.

I have no interest in what happens when everyone in the world can suddenly talk to everyone. That’s the normal state of affairs.

I am, at most, interested in the micromotoric changes, over years, of my hands on the piano.