August 1. Pandemic wooden booth of the restaurant on Columbus Avenue, next to it the green paved bike lane. Electric bikes from delivery services go as fast as cars. This is how Manhattan’s service is maintained.

July 31. I like this moment when the Kindle display is set so that it looks just like a simple page of paper, but is a little too bright for that. A slightly unreal, conspicuous page.

July 30. At Rimowa on Madison Avenue. The store feels like a mental hospital where the salespeople are the nurses. We are having colored wheels and handles mounted on a suitcase.

July 29. The vaccination against shingles pretty much knocked me out. Fever, miserable.

July 28. Annual checkup at the doctor. There is nothing wrong with me. I run eighteen miles every week and I drink less. My blood pressure is normal and my diet is balanced. A perfect patient. But I’m getting tested for all the usual kinds of cancer, and it is almost certain: someday one of those tests will hit. One day the doctor will say something serious, and the good days will turn into bad days. But I will learn from J: Her days have been bad for decades, and she doesn’t accept it.

July 27. It is satisfying to ride the subway and grab the handholds, which are full of sweat and grease from other passengers. I let my immune system do the work. It is like a dog exploring its surroundings. It becomes familiar with the pathogens in the environment and builds up appropriate antibodies. I would be more vulnerable if I didn’t grab the handles.

July 26. Fallout 3, Level 1 - The kids taught me that I have to buy clothes in Roblox, or at least better hair, so that I don’t look like a complete dork.

July 25, Newburgh. Ran six laps around the pond in Downing Park, with some cooling from rain. The park must be a well-established drug trafficking site. At least, that’s what I infer as a layman from the car parked with occupants and switched-on headlights in a strategic location that gives a good view of the entire area of the park.

July 24. We only make it outside for a few minutes. It’s just too hot, ninety-five degrees. In the half hour before sunrise I ran six hill repeats, at still only seventy-five degrees. The steady hum of the air conditioners.

I’ve always thought one of the advantages of electronic reading was that you could mark passages, but hide those marks as needed. In fact, that option is nowhere, on any of my devices, any of my apps. I don’t want to read a book that is full of markings anymore, it seems unbearably distorted to me. At least I can just delete the marks completely again, then the book is like new. From the good reader I want to be, I would expect not to need markings, but to enter into conversation with the book as with a human being.

At the same time, I urgently need to deal with my books much more intensively. The vast majority of what I have read by Susan Sontag I cannot reproduce argumentatively.

I put about five of Bill Gates’ annual recommendations on my reading list. I shudder at them. These books give me arguments, but they leave me so empty inside that I almost suffocate. You wouldn’t think someone my age would be so clueless about what reading material they need to survive.

July 23. Having to talk to someone in a video game scares me just as much as it does in real life, even if the conversation consists entirely of predetermined building blocks. Only when I realize that the sentences are just the edges of a multidimensional graph does it get better.