June 6. By train up along the Hudson: Everything is in a haze. In some places, the view barely reaches a few hundred feet onto the water. As I get off at Beacon, someone walks behind me, talking on the phone. He says it is smoke coming from forest fires in Quebec. Only after some searching do I find confirmation of this.

June 5. I got a new laptop and was allowed to keep the old one, which is already six years old. I’ve never separated work from personal stuff before, and this is the first time I’m doing it. Where is the boundary? I can easily decide that everything private that needs its own app goes on the private laptop. That way, all the music is there. But I have to be able to write anywhere, anytime. I also want to have the professional as much as possible on the private laptop so I don’t miss anything. I always switch back and forth fluidly between the two and there are few things that are clearly only allowed to take place on the professional laptop, because of access authorization, customer data and so on. And there’s hardly anything private that the company won’t tolerate on their devices, although that changes over time as the size of the company grows.

June 4. George Coleman, Smoke Jazz Club. I had absolutely no idea what we were getting ourselves into. The atmosphere was stiff and touristy, the seats in the listening room tighter than airplane seats. I got up in a huff after a few minutes, paid the bill and left without even waiting for our food. I went outside and waited for J, but J didn’t come. So I went back inside and squeezed myself back between the people. J. took it funny now. A disabled man was ushered in, leaning on an aide walking backwards in front of him with his arms raised, stumbling forward with grotesque lurching movements. Apparently he had booked a seat far in front. No, he was seated in the center of the stage, it was George Coleman. The saxophone on his lap, staring blindly into the air. The first notes he blew to warm up didn’t sound like he would be able to last the evening. He barely managed to bring the instrument to his mouth. Then, when it started, it was like a bird playing jazz.

June 3. J and I fought. Then went out twice, at six and eleven. Lots of fun.

June 2. Glad to have thought about something long enough so that after writing it down, I can throw it away.

June 1. Almost never in my life have I had anything that could be called an idea, and it always has to be expected that starting tomorrow, there will never be one again.

May 31. I turn my head left and right in front of the mirror and observe how my left eye follows the movement completely synchronously. It’s as if it couldn’t be any other way. I don’t control it, but for months it was gone.

May 30. Turned on the downward-facing camera in the entertainment system on the plane. Flying over Newfoundland seemed outrageous. There were shapes passing by like in the stargate sequence in the space odyssey, and in the face of that we really should have had no right to go on with our normal lives.

The Swedish schools may be better than the American schools, but they lull the children and make them sluggish. The American schools may be worse than the Swedish schools, but they spur the kids on and make them ambitious. And then from college on, you can see it. Weirdly, the universities are world class.

May 29. Two hours after we return the children, my daughter writes in the chat that her laptop no longer turns on. It is ten at night as I drive across the city, which is still in daylight, to get the laptop and, back at our place, we try to fix it. After another two hours, we have to give up. Instead, we reset my laptop and put the purple plastic shell on it, which takes another two hours. This is now my daughter’s laptop, and we drop it off at seven in the morning, on our way to the airport.

May 28. The better it works with us and the children, the harder it gets.