March 8. New hemorrhage in the hippocampus. But that can’t be the reason for the eye problem, because the hippocampus is doing completely different things. A bright white spot in one image, like the inside of a candle flame, and a larger dark area in the other. It wasn’t there in January.

My neurologist says various things. That she is not worried about it. After all, I have already turned fifty-three with such structures. But how often do they bleed, and how much? Surgery is not worth it: I have too many of them, it is not a good ratio of risk and benefit.

It is surprisingly inconsequential to know about it.

March 7. New MRI. This time the image makers are instructed to do the ear, which is not what’s intended, but apparently that captures the optic nerves along with it. These MRI facilities don’t look like recording studios, with a control room and a pane of glass behind which the subject is located. The control rooms are just a hallway along which the image makers are squeezed to their computers; it looks a bit like industrial manipulator consoles. This time there is music coming from headphones, which are apparently built without any magnetic parts at all. I can ask for a music genre or even specific artists and titles, but I can’t think of anything. I say pop, but get classical, and when the contrast agent is injected, I ask for jazz.

March 6. I want to play chord progressions that sound logical, but not predictable.

March 5. Took J’s brother to the emergency room out of concern for a possible heart attack. But they found nothing, even after several hours of observation. In a corner of each room there’s the monitor for the usual vital parameters: heart, oxygen, breathing. For those brought in by ambulance, the monitor is under the top end of the gurney. Everybody has one, it’s like an ID card, or rather an extra body part that you get in the emergency room.

March 4. Rehearsal for tomorrow’s orchestra recording. A mother has rented the orchestra and the venue to record a double piano concerto with her son. She and the conductor are in a deep rift about the tempo of many passages. Then again, she pays for the thing. “You are rushing a passage in which we are also playing!”

March 3. J’s cats have PTSD and run away at the slightest disturbance. We laugh about it. Yet with a human, this would be so tragic. No amount of love, no amount of care can ever take away this fear, not even the tiniest sliver of trust can ever take hold in this bottomless pit. No explanation, no plea, not therapy. The trust is gone.

March 2. I have started using an eye patch some of the time to get my weak eye to do more work. It seems to help, though the moment when both of my eyes will suddenly lock back into stereo vision still seems a while off. When it happens, I will not know how it happened.

March 1. Man in the elevator greets me with a resolute handshake. Track jacket, gold chain, slight alcohol breath. “I just moved in.” “Where? How?” I stammer. “My wife and I are taking a little break. I have a beautiful house up in Scarsdale!”

February 28. The possibilities for learning piano on YouTube and Reddit are so endless that it requires a skill of its own to focus on any one of them and leave so much else, though highly interesting, aside for now (and probably never come back to it). According to which criteria should you make the selection? Again, there are an infinite number of voices on this.

February 27. I can’t believe how many things I did between sixteen and eighteen. And I didn’t make a commitment to any of it.

Musicians plucking pieces off the paper note by note and putting them together like jigsaw puzzles. When they’re done, they start the next one. I find that incomprehensible. I am, on the other hand, perfectly content to achieve a certain number of seconds on a running route.