6/13 Terrible sleep.

6/12 Shepard Tone: a siren that always seems to be going up. (Nate Silver)

6/11 Getting ready for the protest on Saturday. Zeroing in on a sign. My usual catastrophic thinking sets in: I do not see where this will ever stop, and how we’ll ever get out of it again.

6/10 The most important role of Chris is to call me back when I want to learn five things at once – which I can’t because their sum is too difficult –, so he makes me focus on just one thing that is attainable.

6/9 How the worst, when it has finally arrived, is no longer the worst. Something else has taken its place that is now the worst.

6/8 Took me a long time to make it as short as this: The Three Revolutions of Publishing.

6/7 Greater Newburgh Symphony: Conductor conducting the listening of the audience. 

6/6 Playing the piece slowly – painfully slowly – made all the difference. Brain doing some mysterious work behind the scenes.

6/5 Neighbor woman in Newburgh, who I see for the first time, examines the patch of grass between the sidewalk and the street, in front of her house, where we’ve made a solid track of mud by driving over it with the Jeep to park. It didn’t matter with the Venza for the past five years, but the Jeep is so much heavier. I’ll put some grass seeds over it, is all she says, and it takes me quite a while to realize she would appreciate if we didn’t drive over this patch of grass and parked a little differently just to spare it. She doesn’t acknowledge that even when I suggest it, all she says is that she will put some grass seeds there, and I think we’re off to a good start.

6/4 Manhattan. As I walk through Grand Central I think for a brief moment whether I should stop, maybe even turn left and walk a few paces into the grand hall and look up. I decide not to. I can never look at it again as if I saw it for the first time, and I don’t need to look up, because I can call this legitimately my home.