March 4. All measures fall. As of today, restaurants are no longer required to check vaccination status, and it remains to be seen whether or not they will. And if a restaurant still does it, is it out of habit, or because that restaurant in particular still feels it is necessary? Similarly with stores. There are signs that you can only enter them with a mask. Are the signs still there because someone forgot to take them down, or because the owner of that particular store wants to hold on to them? All the way down to the people in the stores. Do they wear the mask because they think they still have to, or out of habit, or because they don’t want to attract attention?

March 3. J brought three books with pieces for violin and simple piano. It would be spectacular if I could manage any of it.

Been running in sun and cold wind. River churned up. Very carefully rebuilding the weekly workload.

March 2. I think it is settled that I’ve never been more attractive in my life. I am aging well. What’s puzzling is the way I celebrate it. I’ve always had this desire to be beautiful, a desire considered normal in women, unusual if not disqualifying in men. Gender-fluid says my girlfriend, he’s so metro says my hair-stylist. The desire is strangely undirected. I appreciate to receive compliments, but only in the sense that they confirm I’ve made an aesthetically correct decision. I don’t pursue a goal, I don’t talk to anyone, and I want to keep it that way.

March 1. Everything I do requires effort to even just hold my position. One week not running, my fitness falls apart. A week not in the gym, my body atrophies. Don’t even get me started on reading and writing.

February 28. My son asks me why I don’t write anything about Ukraine. I don’t think I have anything intelligent to say about it. I am worried that it will escalate into a nuclear war and I am singing to myself I hope the Russians love their children too from 1985. The fear of a nuclear war is that it could affect myself. If a house is bombed in Ukraine, if someone dies in gunfire there, it is not that much different from a nuclear war for them. So it’s not that a nuclear war would be worse in a personal sense, it’s just that it would then be me who’s threatened. As far as the people in Ukraine are concerned, I use a different yardstick.

February 27, Addendum. Two days ago I stabbed myself in the hand with a knife while opening a bottle of whiskey. Not bad, just a sharp prick between my thumb and index finger on the left. It bled so little that I didn’t even think I needed a band-aid and didn’t put one on until a few minutes later. After an hour I took it off again and went to sleep. When I woke up, my thumb hurt really bad and I could barely move it inward. Over the next few hours it got so bad that I couldn’t open any buttons, couldn’t hold a fork. The thumb was swollen a bit, barely noticeable. What was it? Had I hit a nerve or a tendon? Or double-perforated a blood vessel so that it had bled not only outwardly but inwardly as well? What does the body do in such a case? In the absence of devices which do exist, but to which ordinary people have no access, I would only be able to tell what kind of injury this was by how long it took to disappear. – Addendum: After forty-eight hours, as good as gone.

February 26, Woodstock Playhouse: Mozart, Hummel, Britten, Beethoven. This orchestra has not played together since February of 2020. And one day after the CDC has largely lifted the mask recommendation in the country, it gets especially silly again. At the entrance, one is asked – rather gruffly and not ten seconds after entering – to put on a mask; no one asks about vaccination. The orchestra wears uniform burgundy masks, except for the wind players, who wear none. The conductor conducts with a black mask. It is the magic shield, the cross of ashes. When you wear that, disaster is averted.

February 25. On Instagram, the only platform where everyone just loves one another, there is visual silence.

February 24. Unfamiliar: Being the best for somebody. I have so far not been particularly good at this. It is, I think, the first time I want to be better.

February 23. Four things were in the mail today. A notice from the IRS that my amended tax return has been processed – it took ten months – and that I’ll get a refund check in four to six weeks. A letter from Albany with my provisional driver’s license. And two letters with the debit cards for the kids, on which their allowance will be from now on.