5/14 Writing as participation in an information processing system.

5/13 At Dagon in the early evening, just for a Cappuccino. Two glasses of Prosecco got added to it, and then the staff refused to give us a check.

Lesson with Chris. When I wondered whether I should continue with an actual piano teacher: You need someone as good as I am.

5/12 I should not leave this unsaid about my first lesson with Chris: How I had set up my phone as a second camera on a tripod, overlooking my shoulder so he could see my hands on the keys. This proved unnecessary: He has perfect pitch, and could always tell every note in every chord I was playing, without effort.

5/11 Sleeping naked together is so profound. You’d think this is a discovery on the scale of a new drug, or a new continent, and people would be talking about it and it would be all over the place. But it’s silent, as if everyone agreed to pretend it is not even happening. People do talk about sex, so it’s not that. Sleeping naked, lovers’ bodies entwined, is so intimate that even mentioning it seems inappropriate. It’s on the tip of arousal but does not rise to the high stakes of sex, and yet you cannot believe what you’ve found as you slip under the covers, you can have everything, and you do.

5/10 Just by chance I discovered that Gemini has access to all my writing, and I can talk to it about it. I am not surprised by this, I did know that because all my documents are on Google, it has always been mining them and using them, among many other things, to select the contents of my Google feed. Since I publish all of my writing, this is only an extension of it, a natural one. Even the parts which I don’t publish do get read this way, and that’s okay too, since I think the world is getting ever more transparent, and even if we wanted to, there is nothing we can do about it. I also believe it’s a good thing.

I can ask it to evaluate the style of my writing, and I can ask it about specific events and topics. After a little back and forth with Gemini, you can tell it’s not all that sophisticated yet (sorry, Gemini). But I can also ask the elephant in the room, even though it only has access to my writing from the outside, via what’s actually published. I’m pleased with how it delves into the writing and how nothing escapes its attention. This may be the next revolution of publishing. The first one was print (a few could publish), the next one was the internet (anyone can publish), and this next one is that everything gets actually read.

5/9 Brought the car to its first New York State inspection. Being fifty-five and doing this for the very first time must come across as quite odd. Also, the similarity between US car dealerships seems to be greater than between German car dealerships. It is about as individual as a train station. The mild, knowing friendliness of my grey-haired service advisor seemed to transcend that dealership, and so did the jokes between him and another grey man, a customer, who had come to pick up his car.

It seems to be the longest period of never-ending rain in living memory, yet it has barely been twenty-four hours. Those were the first twenty-four hours during which the newly-assembled charger lay outside in the mud and had to prove its water-proofness.

5/8 Connected the charger. Respect for heavy currents.

5/7 Electrician came to install the outside socket to which we will hook up the car charger. I’m excited like a boy to be able to charge it in two hours, at 32 amps. I want to set it up, I want to try it, I want to see it work. This is it: I don’t care about any individual contribution to climate change, any individual less-burning of fossil fuels, and I care almost as little about helping to normalize electric cars in a conservative city like this. When it comes down to it, I just want to try something new. I am thrilled by the Jeep driving silently in electric mode – it’s actually more like a humming turbolift –, and the rev gauge of the combustion engine sitting at zero.

5/6 Lesson with Chris. Realizing that I don’t need to learn anything before I can play. An insight that is so obvious that I feel I could have come up with it myself, or always had it, which is how you recognize a great teacher. Also, scales. There is nothing that feels lower than the scale of a chord, underneath that chord. Also, counting. It’s the job of the musician to count, as tedious as it may be, it has to be done. Also, hand independence. It is more important to play something rather than to wait until I can play something better. – Already from the previous lesson: It is not enough to roll the die and play a few minutes in a different key. I have to study each key and spend weeks or months in it, to be able to do all the things I can do in other keys also in that key.

5/5 The utter unreality of a sunny but cold schoolday starting in Gothenburg, then a flight around a quarter of the earth and arrival in cloudy, rainy and muggy Manhattan, this time extended by moving through the evening rush hour of the subway and taking the most regular train to Newburgh.