July 12. Exhausted, and I don’t know from what.

July 11. I hadn’t been to the optometrist in five years. The eye doctor at the store was very angry with me. She wanted me to take out my lenses and throw them away immediately because they had been in use too long. Instead, she gave me different ones, oddly shaped and shimmery, and now I don’t need reading glasses anymore. I can’t believe this at all. I didn’t know such lenses existed.

July 10. Baylander, five hours. For such a long time, surprisingly little alcohol was too much.

July 9. Bought two controllers online at BestBuy and picked them up on sixty-second Street because the controller I ordered weeks ago won’t be delivered until tomorrow, and J forgot hers at home, and we still want to play. Subway traffic has largely broken down, due to police activity. It takes me more than an hour, but then we have our two controllers, black and aqua blue.

Vaclav Smil: How the World Really Works. Breathless. Reminds me of the collectible magazines that my parents bought for me in the seventies, which formed an entire encyclopedia of technology, bound together in blue plastic binders, and which I never looked at again after collecting them. I grew up in the middle of the technology revolution, and it was the most normal thing in the world, there had never been anything else.

July 8. Again been of service to a customer, again needed a few hours to think it over, and in the end again ticked off all the items neatly. I will write a report, which will again take far more time than it should.

Unpleasant news from Sweden. I try to take it with a shrug and think in terms of years.

Tonight Baylander.

July 7. Coincidentally, I found out that there is an afterword to The Coddling of the American Mind, which is almost a whole book itself, and I tweeted a link to it, which led to an avalanche of retweets and likes. That was unexpected. I’ve never written anything in English that has attracted any significant attention, but when something does hit an attention nerve, the audience is of a completely unexpected size.

July 6. In treble clef I was at 60 bpm yesterday, now it’s only 56 again. Video game before going to bed.

July 5. We made a list. In the ever-growing avalanche of things that interest me, the most important are: writing, physical exercise, music. I spend at least an hour a day on each of these. It seems unthinkable to me to give up any of them, but if I did, I would do it in the reverse order. Everything else is nice, but non-essential. Perhaps I can apply the principle that one should not have hobbies, but projects, to this: projects in these three areas, elsewhere they are a waste of time.

July 4. Now we’re playing video games, and I feel as helpless about it as if I were seventy. And no: also at seventy I wouldn’t allow myself such helplessness, I’d practice the hell out of it.

July 3. Concert for the 4th of July, Boscobel Park above the Hudson, across from West Point. The orator, who in a piece of Copeland is to recite passages about Abraham Lincoln, practices them during sound check. The conductor hurries across the lawn to the stage, shouting tell me your phone number so the orator doesn’t give away the words to be spoken later. We imagine the orator reciting his phone number in concert. That would have been something.

Concert in the course of which LED lights are switched on above the music stands, frogs start croaking and crickets chirping.