July 2. Still depressed.

July 1. That’s how fast a depression can come. Head yesterday evening as if clamped in a vice. I was the most boring person on earth.

June 30. It’s amazing how accurately I can approach my cognitive limit with the metronome. Up to 54 bpm it goes well, at 56 bpm the error rate proliferates. And most of the errors throw me completely off track. I then can’t recognize any note at all, become illiterate for seconds. Only after a kind of reset does it work again. And it’s so hard to admit that I’m playing too fast. That I have to go down two bpm again, because my brain needs these fractions of a second to learn the notes, which simply doesn’t work two bpm above, as much as I try it. With stubborn practice, I advance maybe two bpm each week, but even that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes it just goes back down two bpm for no apparent reason. – I have to take note that I’ve been practicing systematically again for a year and a half now, but I’ve made almost no progress at all in the music I want to play myself. I’m learning on a hunch.

June 29. For the gym I had put on shimmery clothes, as I often do. In the elevator was a girl, maybe six, with her mother. She immediately wanted to touch the fabric, which she did, which embarrassed her mother, but not me. I smiled back. She looked at me like a being from another planet.

June 28. Cloud structures above the river, after sunset. Gray swell clouds, watercolored, at the same time unusually spatial, they vault the landscape like a ceiling. Above these swell clouds red veils, similarly spatial, similarly little of a background image.

June 27. I don’t believe that only people who are convinced that the world is ending can behave morally right. Or only people who are truly outraged. I would rather people do good without needing certain views about the world situation or sufficient amounts of anger.

June 26. The belief that humanity is moving astonishingly and overwhelmingly toward the positive – rising life expectancy, rising living standards, rising equality, falling crime, falling international conflict – is considered unacceptable in part because people who think this way do nothing to improve the world. They can’t get anything done because they don’t think it is necessary. Says J, for example. To prove the opposite, I should do altruistic things – and do so with the same intensity with which I pursue other projects.

June 25, Newburgh, Concert. Nielsen, Tchaikovsky, Sibelius. Conductor describes the music from the podium by way of introduction. It’s funny – there may be about five or ten language constructs with which to describe orchestral music, and they are all used in every description. I will prepare for concerts by at least listening to the pieces beforehand.

I don’t feel like writing political texts because I don’t want to repeat what others have long since written down. But once again I forgot that I always write only to make clarify something for myself that I do not yet understand properly. And if that is something political, I will in fact write about politics.

June 24, Newburgh. J at orchestra rehearsal. I pounded a report into the keyboard, then sat exhausted in the garden watching the fireflies. An airplane crosses the clear evening sky, orange-red contrail like a needle. Rustle of leaves after sunset. It is not really a garden, more a backyard. Tufts of grass between rotting leaves. At one spot J tossed a few grass seeds and was amazed herself that a short time later there was neat, fine, green grass growing. The grill and the motorcycle, two bicycles with rusty chains. In the middle of it all lies art tree, the remains of a large branch of a tree from the neighbor’s property that broke off in a storm sometime last year and fell into the garden. J and her brother first cut it off the tree in a makeshift fashion and then, using the small electric chainsaw I gave J as a gift, sawed it into small pieces that we now sometimes throw into the fire in the evening.

June 23. Looked at some Facebook profiles of people who were in school with me and never moved away, and played my random notes. In treble clef, I barely manage 54 per minute.