4/16 Somewhat embarrassing lesson with Chris. Even though I had postponed it for weeks, and had actually thought of several things we could discuss, we were finished after barely half an hour, and when I performed for him I was barely more than a deer in the headlights. – It is all about getting more fluent with the chords, but the possible exercises are once again so many that I find it hard to do anything systematic about them, rather than just dabble a little here and a little there.

Over the last couple of days I removed stains of adhesive from the sun visors of the Jeep after I had torn off the airbag warning stickers with the help of hot air. The adhesive is very stubborn and only nail polish remover had even the slightest effect on it. And even with that you need a lot of patience. Rub ten times over the same tiny spot, and ten times nothing happens, it looks just the same as it did before, but each of the ten times the layer of adhesive did indeed get a little thinner, and from the eleventh time onwards it does indeed fade very slowly – with the eleventh, the twelfth, and the thirteenth rub.

That’s how it is with practicing the piano.

Also: What is it I actually want to play on the piano.

4/15 I have tried repeatedly to let AI do some routine writing for me at my job, like an executive summary of a document. These summaries, while technically accurate, are never up to my standard, and the worst is if I try to keep them and only make minor edits. The result is abhorrent, and the customer should rightfully ask me whether I had a really bad day writing that.

4/14 First time I lay under the car. First time I bought and used a torque wrench. Towards the end it got dark, but that didn’t matter, because I mostly had to use my finger tips to guide the screws to their proper places anyway. Screws that were larger and heavier than any I have ever dealt with.

4/13 I solve the customer’s problems in 30 seconds with AI. Why doesn’t the customer do that?

I need a new background for Zoom meetings, the skyline of Manhattan is no longer appropriate. So I am taking pictures of Newburgh now, but even during great opportunities such as tonight at the Hudson, with sun and rain and a rainbow, you’ve got to watch out for the trash in the picture. 

We are very much in agreement that this regime is collapsing. The question is only how much damage it will still do in this process, and how much it will take to repair it. J very clear that it will take way longer than our lifetime.

4/12 Nossack who said he had no memory of the years 1933-1939 at all, and I wonder if the muted state I find myself in is a similar effect. A writer, though, can never resort to that explanation. There are no circumstances that justify not writing.

4/11 Painted the stairwell. The attempt to place a ladder onto the steps and up into the second floor frightens me so much that I seriously consider getting a contractor to do it. But it’s okay. After making sure I’m using the ladder the way it is printed on the stickers, and that the weight is within the limits: Just don’t look down, there is nothing to see there.

4/10 Watching the Artemis mission’s re-entry and splashdown unfold within minutes, then puzzled by how it takes hours to get the astronauts out of their bobbing capsule.

4/9 How our insignificance in space is matched by our insignificance in time. Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” is a soothing book.

4/8 As of today J and I are not just driving the same car, we’re also running the same software. We finally had the dealer do the safety recall. I had been very worried about this update, because so many owners need to have their battery replaced after it, which takes at least a few weeks. But J’s Jeep is okay, at least after the twenty miles we drove together tonight.

In J’s studio we tried to route the audio channels in such a way that she can do Tiktok-Lives, Zoom-Meetings and Youtube-Videos and all sorts of other things without having to reconfigure anything. It didn’t work. She lost several videos due to botched audio, and she was angry and close to tears at the same time. It’s no use, we will have to replace the Windows-Laptop with a Mac so we can get this to work reliably.

4/7 As I spin the flight path globe on the backrest monitor with the tip of my finger, it occurs to me as if for the first time that this world is SPECIFIC.