July 22. People can still surprise me with the way they deal with the pandemic. Almost every day I still see reactions that seem bizarre to me, that I would not have expected in the least. Sometimes with strangers, sometimes with acquaintances whose behavior I cannot reconcile with what I thought I knew about them. It is an astonishment that can go as far as bewilderment, day after day, for two and a half years.

July 21. The eye doctor speaks with a kind of confusion. It is this confusion that, when it is of the right degree, makes doctors seem tremendously smart.

July 20. My son’s mother writes a loving, moving obituary for her father, who died last week. I will not write such an obituary for my father. I was chased out of my family, my children were taken to safety from me. I want to write this without bitterness, these are dispositions.

July 19. Writing on the plane. Since I’ve been with J, I’ve had to be more disciplined about my writing time, almost steal it away, because our days together are full, and they can easily pass without even ten free minutes in them.

A trough had appeared in the beach. In front of our hotel, and a few hundred meters to the left and right of it, the beach, as seen from the water, rose more steeply than usual, and on the resulting plateau an elongated trough had formed, and in the trough stood water. Had the water sloshed up the slope and into the trough during an unusually high swell, or had the trough been carved like this in the first place? Or was it simply rainwater – because it rains practically every day – that had accumulated in the trough? But if it was rain, where had the trough come from in the first place? I vaguely remember the mechanisms that cause spits to form, and I worried that a spit might form here, on the beach in front of the hotel. But for days the swell was so normal that it didn’t reach up the slope, and the sun had the upper hand. The water in the trough became warmer and warmer. You almost scalded yourself walking through it. Children disregarded the sea and built their sand rivers, sand lakes, and other sand structures in it. But the trough became smaller and smaller. Finally, a drain into the sea formed, which I, when running in the morning, got over with a single step. In the places where the trough had already dried up, the sand was still a little darker and greasy.

There was a parasite in the palm tree in front of our balcony. It had other, smaller, spikier, bushier leaves, they were also of a lighter green. The leaves of the palm and those of the parasite occupied almost an equal space. We had been a bit disappointed that, despite booking the option of the highest possible room with Ocean View, we had only gotten one on the second floor. And there it was, our palm tree with the parasite.

It was good on the balcony. When I let the weekend play out in front of me, those hours on the balcony, in the yellow light of the lamps mounted on the trunk of the palm tree, drawing the pattern of the balcony trellises on the side walls of the balcony, and our own shadows along with it – those hours, as we sat across from each other talking, laughing, drinking whiskey, were about the best part of that weekend.

And that even though I often don’t know what to say.

July 18. The sandpipers that we thought were so cute a few weeks ago, running at tremendous speed through the far reaches of the waves with legs invisible with speed, have gotten bigger. And slower. Their legs no longer disappear in the frame rate. Physically, this seems plausible: moving these larger legs at similar speeds would require much more energy. I try to imagine sandpipers big as skyscrapers pecking down into the streets of Manhattan. And I try to find out from Wikipedia why all sandpipers were so much smaller a few weeks ago. But Wikipedia doesn’t help. I google “sandpiper jacksonville” instead, but that only leads to real estate. It seems to be a popular, if not the most popular, real estate name around here.

July 17, Susan Sontag, Journals and Notebooks. I must not let myself get into a state where I don’t read anything that electrifies me like that.

July 16. Desparate.

July 15, Florida. Feeling weightless because of the money.

July 14. J. thinks I write beautifully about ordinary things, while Susan Sontag writes ordinarily about beautiful things. Maybe I need to stop here altogether so that I will dare something again. Not write cosmetically, but forward.

July 13. Started the day with seven and a half miles. – In the waxing salon I got served by a man for the first time. I asked a lot of questions about what it was like to serve women as a man and what special knowledge you have as a man when serving men, etc. He readily answered everything, but when it came time to pay, I saw that he had a female first name and I was quite startled. Thinking of sending a message on some channel apologizing if I did anything wrong gender-wise.