December 15. The Dead Poet. I may add just one more sentence here tomorrow, and I better prepare the way for it. I’m scared, but maybe that’s unnecessary. We’ve adopted the two-whiskey rule and we’re not sticking to it.

December 14. I hardly want to write it down, but I should probably make a note of the fact that my daughter doesn’t want to see me or spend time with us. It gives her a headache. Then she complains that we are skipping her. Then she wants to come on Sunday, after a brunch she is scheduled to go to. Nothing comes of it. We happen to meet her on the street with her mother. She says, dismissively: It’s complicated.

December 13. Walking to school. In the dark. Ten minutes through the woods and to the house where I pick up my son. Stopped at the sledding hill and wondered if I’ll be standing there again when I’m eighty. Whether my frailty, if I’m still alive then, will allow it, and how I’ll see this slope then, when my son is forty. What will be inconsequential and what will be strange. My son comes out of the house and we walk the twenty minutes to school. Discuss airplanes. I don’t realize yet that I can go as far as the entrance of the schoolyard, but no further. When we say goodbye, his mind is already elsewhere. I take an Uber back to pick up my things, then to the airport.

December 12. Alien days for my son and me. The days are more alien than we are to each other. I’m desperately trying to wring terrain from the days. The path from this house to theirs is ten minutes through the woods – not much, really, but it can make you anxious. How can it be so far? And when I walked the route for the first time on Friday – Google insisted it was the right one – a staircase pretty much at the beginning of the path was so snowed in and slippery that I fell several times trying to get down it, eventually sliding helplessly down one landing at a time. (Only today, Sunday evening, someone had taken a shovel to the steps). Then with my son it was fun to get up and down those steps, he immediately made a competition out of it.

December 11. Again, the conversations with my son tumble over, from one dimension to another. What came first, the fruit orange or the color? What would it feel like to travel at the speed of light? Why does it seem so easy for celestial bodies to orbit each other, why don’t almost all encounters end up with the bodies colliding? Or do most of them? – Again, I’ve explained GPS and special relativity. It’s a great story, but shouldn’t I know a lot more stories like that? Not discover a new one every day? – But I’ve also made it my goal to discover how the logs burn here in the fireplace, and the toilet here on the first floor of the house we’ve rented, right next to the front door: sparkling clean and ice cold, like all such toilets.

December 10. That was it. This is how it will remain now. For vaccinated people, the disease is ten times less dangerous. Vaccines are adjusted at a rate of a few months. The unvaccinated will either be convinced or not. The maps with the yellow and dark red areas disappear, not because they could not continue to be drawn, but because they are lost in the tangle of many other maps.

December 9. Tonight Sweden.

December 8. The booster had none of the rigorous efficiency of the National Guard. Pharmacy in Harlem. Filling out forms with data that is already in the computer. Sitting around waiting. Being bashfully led into an adjoining room by a staff member, a plastic box of vaccination utensils in his hand. I sit down, he bends down, while standing, to vaccinate. Covid and flu at the same time.

December 7. Unfortunately, I cannot prevent my clothes and extravagant footwear from making me look far more interesting than I actually am. It happens that I attract people with my appearance, and then they realize with surprise that there is nothing about me that corresponds to that appearance.

December 6. Running in warmth, darkness, rain.

With every person I have been with, the problems that were already there on the first day eventually became so big that they drove us apart. It must be possible to prevent that.

Puzzlingly, I’ve had little desire to sleep during the day for the past few weeks. I usually barely got through a day at work without finding a flat spot somewhere, a couch in a meeting room, where I could sleep for a few minutes, half an hour. And I wasn’t really awake after that, but could just sort of drag myself through the day. Now I don’t. For no apparent reason, I don’t have slumps anymore. The fatigue from my meds is supposed to come in waves. But maybe it’s the slept-in weekends where we don’t leave bed until noon.