7/23 Carowinds. Four hours driving back and forth. Fury 325 was a long-time bucket list item for my daughter, and when she saw it against the clear blue heat dome of a sky, her excitement bubbled over. I had the slightest hint of fear as we went down the steep drop, but could switch to purely enjoying the extended length of it, as you reach a steady state of weightlessness about halfway through. All the surprising twists and turns after that were a pleasure to go through, I’m only having a hard time with the turns, of which there are quite a few, that suggest you will smash into a column or a ceiling. You won’t, but honestly believing that you won’t is another story.

7/22 Lots of sleep, lots of doing nothing to recover from yesterday’s park day, and prepare for tomorrow’s park day, which will involve a much longer time of pure driving. Evening in the hotel pool, as yesterday, while the daylight fades and the flood lights in the parking lot come on, pronouncing the wave patterns of the pool even more than a low sun would do. Nobody is at the pool, while we are having some of our best family moments of the entire month.

7/21 Six Flags Over Georgia. I now quickly reach the state in which I can submit entirely to each roller coaster the moment it takes control, and experience it all as a composition, not without fear, but it is an arranged fear. Proud I am of my daughter who readily takes over all navigation in the park and the logical and tactical selection of rides, not to forget her handbag in which she stows away cell phones and car keys. Proud also of my son who moves from fear of being coerced into rides he does not want to do to an attitude of exploration that stops at nothing, not even the front row of an as yet unknown coaster. Best ride of the day: Goliath, the Hyper Coaster, endless waves of air time like a dragon flapping its wings. Also, heavy rain and lightning at around 1pm, none of which was predicted in any of the forecast models. That contingency is a mystical element, not unlike the random failures somewhere in the machinery, which force temporary closures and empty test rides.

7/20 Atlanta. Even though our flight did not leave until 5, and took till 8 in the evening, it was a day of nothing but travel. I’m told I acted nervous, and inconsiderate of the people around me. I wasn’t aware of that in the slightest. Disappointed with myself.

7/19 We did not take the pictures to document what was happening. Taking the pictures was what was happening. And it was good. Also, we’re at a point where, if you want to express how you feel right now, you describe it in a prompt to an AI system that will then generate a rock epic that will encompass just that spur of a moment.

7/18 We’ve moved our return to the city to tomorrow, so we can have one more evening in the backyard with hot dogs and s’mores. It is a night of perfect weather, and tomorrow might well bring rain and thus jeopardize our evening on the Baylander, but we’re taking our chances. Next week, Atlanta.

7/17 After Jurassic Park Rebirth last night, what we chose out of the hundreds of halls in the American Museum of Natural History were of course the dinosaurs. Lots of things you obviously know but that strike you more profoundly when confronted with them in this physical reality. The size of the skeletons. How seeing the skeleton up close makes you wonder immediately if they’d suffered from arthritis, and then you tell yourself they had many more million years to exist as a species than we did, so you’d hope they’d maybe evolved past arthritis. And of course, how our entire homo sapiens history is such a tiny flicker by comparison, how easily it might turn out to have been just a curious little blip.

7/16 It’s boys’ night out and girls’ night out. Son and I go watch Jurassic Park Rebirth in Beacon. Daughter and J get the AI music creation software that Rick Beato thrashed and generate a whole bunch of songs about our family that would fit awesomely on a Metallica or 80s synth pop album.

7/15 Rick Beato says that AI music is bad music because a) the person prompting the AI is not doing any actual work, and b) the AI is not doing any actual work, it just takes other people’s ideas and creates songs out of them. The counter-argument is, as always, that AI only does what every musician does: learn from others.

7/14 My daughter, on the other hand, wrote a piece about her encounter with Niagara Falls, unusual and daring and bold, but I won’t quote her here so as not to use her work to make this entry more interesting.