9/20 How bad can it actually get? How bad would the installation of a full-out autocratic regime be? All pretense of democracy shed, you have to watch what you say, and you can be arrested anytime. Not a pretty place to exist in, but can you survive? What about war? It would be a civil war, right, so no danger of nukes, of human annihilation. Civil war – your probability of dying slightly elevated above car accidents. Keep quiet and you’ll be alright. An industrial killing machine with millions of victims? Doesn’t this require to fight at all costs, to fall into the spokes of the wheel, even if you yourself are not among those at risk? It does seem that the enemy, the ultimate enemy of this regime is not the people with dark skin but those on the left. That’s half the country.

9/19 My driving test, which I had to cancel due to Vermont, is now on Tuesday, finally. I spend much of the day practicing parallel parking, again and again. My parallel parking is okay, but in this test it needs to be close to perfect, with only one attempt, in a state of stress. I will practice a few hours, every day, from now until Tuesday. – You’d think nothing could be more rigorous than a German driving test, which I passed forty years ago, but you’d be wrong. The failure rate in the state of New York is higher than in Germany.

9/18 Lessons with Chris: I explain what I’m doing and pay attention to when he raises his eyebrows. That’s usually enough. Important: I should not be working on a song until I memorize the progressions and voicings. I need to learn to find these, and vary them, on the spot. Therefore, one new song per week.

9/17 Conference at Javits. The floors are 100 feet high. What actual purpose is there in them being 100 feet high?

The new cat feeder senses when Link puts his head down into the tray. J and I are in Manhattan, and we can see that Link, after waiting for more than an hour after the food door opened, has now started eating.

9/16 When I said on the 14th that humanity will die, I didn’t say anything about the time, for example. Maybe it’s still millions of years away. Humanity would have reached a multiple of its current age by then. Maybe humans will be replaced by something we built ourselves – which, in some sense, would then be our children. I also think that, if the human species ceased to exist for whatever reason, it is hard to imagine that life on earth as a whole would vanish. As long as there are still a few organisms around somewhere, the entire wheel of evolution could start over again, maybe with similar, maybe with different results. Maybe we’re not the main branch, but a side branch of life.

9/15 What does a civil war actually look like? Your probability of dying is slightly elevated compared to that of a car accident?

9/14 We will need to understand that, as a species, we are going to die. Not coming to terms with it is about as immature as a twenty-year-old who does not think they will ever age.

9/13 Discussed with Stuttgart: one suggestion to define the start of the Anthropocene is to take the 1950s, when for the first time, Plutonium appears globally in sediments. I think: we will not know for another hundred thousand or a million years what actually happened on a planetary scale when humans appeared, and what will be our unmistakable signature. Also: how objectively happy were people in times we may now consider rather bad, e.g. the industrial revolution? Also: there is no such thing as garbage. 

9/12 I should tell this gym story that has been disturbing me for months, simply because I don’t understand it. A guy, barely twenty, walks up to me as I stand in swim trunks in front of the locker. I respect the Speedo, he says in a serious voice, which, I guess, is quite a statement in a place where anything other than roomy boxer shorts is considered impossible for men. Thank you, I reply politely, and continue to get dressed. A minute later he asks me to tie the band of his boxer shorts for him. I don’t understand. He’s around twenty, he must know how to tie a knot. I say no, but he keeps insisting. So eventually I get up and tie the band for him. – As I keep thinking about this incident, I wonder if it was a weird ritual of dominance and submission that he tried to enact, to put me into my place for not conforming to the norms of masculinity.

9/11 These entirely different displays of masculinity in the countryside. Gorillas at the gym. A youngster maneuvering an enduro bike over footpaths in the park. And of course the gigantic trucks. All sorts of status claims that seem almost desperate.