March 18. My mother describes to me how unbearable her life has become. I can imagine it: the few hours in the living room were already almost beyond my strength. I listen to my mother, whom I love so much, look into her aged eyes, into which I have not been able to look for decades because my father guards the access. There is nothing I can say to my mother, except perhaps that I have been lucky enough to find women who did not let me get away with many things, a luck my father did not have.
March 17. On Bavaria: With the same inevitability with which my father becomes demented, I realize how similar I am to him, precisely in the bad, the annoying, the offensive traits. To even come near his house makes me tense, bossy, unbearable, which are exactly the same characteristics that, as I get closer to him, I am afraid of.
Case in point: sitting together in the living room or at the inn and proclaiming one’s views in a high-pitched voice. My few IQ points make no appreciable difference.
Made my father cry by playing the piano. Same thing happens with the waitress from Indonesia whose national anthem J plays at sight.
March 16. To Berlin.
March 15. Bavaria.
March 14. To Bavaria.
March 13. Train to Hamburg.
March 12, Copenhagen: all silent. We do a city tour in an electric car. At the castle, one of the Q-tip soldiers steps in as we try to put the camera on the stairs for a selfie. Jens explains, based on the flags, which embassy we are looking at: This is the Albanian embassy. There is the Belgian embassy.
March 11. Lufthansa to Frankfurt. The in-flight shopping booklet, which is in the seat pocket, is also available as a PDF in the in-flight entertainment system. There are boarding passes and digital boarding passes. In America, there are boarding passes and printed boarding passes.
March 10. Tonight Copenhagen.
March 9. I just want my eye back, and my continuous field of view, without a ghost image and a strangely incomplete main image. For this I practice. Close the healthy eye and use all my strength to look into the pupil of the weak eye with the weak eye. Then it moves at least a few degrees. – If my hippocampus were partially paralyzed, what would I want back and how would I fight for it?