10/9 I honestly don’t know what I’m more afraid of: That he gets the Nobel Peace Prize, or that he doesn’t.

10/8 Chris says I shouldn’t learn one new jazz standard per week, but four.

10/7 We were absolutely not prepared for the sudden shift in perspective, in reality, of being all alone in this house, just J and me.

10/6 We are unusually numb, insecure.

10/5 Back from Pittsburgh. The final hour of the six-hour drive, in the dark, felt very much like a video game.

10/4 N’s new neighborhood, as we drove into the area in our U-Haul on Friday afternoon, appeared to us like a gigantic space station, a generation spaceship, and the only thing missing was the curvature of the landscape that would have indicated it was the inside of a large, rotating structure. It’s what you would build if you were in an infinite nothing and had to house humans in as natural an environment as possible.

As it turns out, it’s simply a business park. Huge office buildings nestled across the hills, surrounded by gigantic parking lots and carefully manicured lawn, with playfully curved roads between them. N’s neighborhood is simply one tile in this park, a business tile that has been swapped out for a residential tile. On it, there’s a single apartment complex, six floors high, with about a thousand units. Built into the hilly terrain with lots of irregular edges, it appears more like a longish castle. A hotel across from it. The Main Street is about a hundred yards long, flanked by two mirror-symmetrical buildings left and right, each of which has about ten standard-sized commercial units in it. Two restaurants, two bars, a sandwich place, a hairdresser and a dentist. That’s about it. N and J and I are joking about it all the time. It’s either the Truman Show, or The Shining, and most likely both. A perfect place for N to start living on his own again.

10/3 Got to Pittsburgh by about noon. Unloaded.

10/2 In everyday situations where I cannot hide behind a professional facade, such as picking up a u-haul, I have nothing to give me any street cred, nothing to compensate my awkwardness. I wouldn’t even have that in Germany, where I own the ground I am walking on. It’s amplified here where I will always be a foreigner. But then again, everyone’s a foreigner here. It’s okay, the guy in the u-haul seems to say, his eyes hidden behind the darkest possible sunglasses that seem glued to his face.

Three hours to Lewisburg right in the center of Pennsylvania. Nighttime freeways as if being sucked into a tube.

10/1 When asked what he wants for his birthday, my son says he’s wondered about a VR headset, but then again, “most people stop playing after a couple of weeks. And then just leave it in a drawer forever.” He’s also wondered about a new video game that comes out on his birthday. But he’d like to check out the gameplay first to see if it’s worth it. Can we delay his birthday gift?

9/30 Getting ready to help N move to Pittsburgh. Our weekend project.