¼ We are at the same geographic latitude as Crete, but it is freezing. Ran half an hour. A police speedboat with its blue signal on heads north on the Hudson to the George Washington Bridge, a helicopter or two overhead, all signs of the usual suicide. The boat makes huge, cresting waves and yet seems to proceed at an unreal, slow pace. It does reach the GWB by the time I turn around on my run, and as I leave the promenade, I see it coming back from the GWB already.

1/3 Back to New York, after getting up in Heraklion at 5am, four hours layover in Athens, ten hours across the Atlantic, doorstep UWS at 8pm.

½ Archeological Museum Heraklion, Palace of Knossos. There is this one little figurine of a human face, neolithic, as if the first time a human is looking back at itself, out of nothingness. 

Jewelery outliving the skin it was worn on, ready for use anytime.

Also, the palace, which looks impressive in the wooden model of it in the museum, is the tiniest feature in the landscape when you get to it. You’d expect it to be at least filling a valley or something, but it’s little more than an extension of the parking lot of today. Not unlike Manhattan, which could easily be overlooked. Also, power: the ability to command building something larger than life.

1/1/2025 There are reasons why I don’t want to write down what was good or bad about the last year, and what I want to do in the next. I don’t understand these reasons, but I defer to them.

12/31 First morning here with a clear sky and just a smattering of fluffy clouds low above the sea surface, which appears calmer than usual, and yet does show white crests at only slightly lower density than over the last few days.

12/30 Went to Chania yesterday. Seems like a square on a chess board, politically, with its layers of various cultures, the mosque on the harbor promenade (shaped like a fusion reactor). We look for parking in the old town, J navigating through alleys with only centimeters to spare left and right, and as we do that, we casually pass by an excavation site that stretches some five thousand years back.

It looks eerie, it looks sacred. And yet: all of this is barely six feet below today’s city surface. If the city were removed by decree, you’d find the same everywhere in the area it occupies today. Life was at no time meaningfully different in these narrow streets and small buildings, and it’s just coincidence that one wall was left standing for a thousand years longer than another of the same room, and is now therefore in a different color on the excavation map. The alluring, the sacred part is, just as I realized yesterday about my twenty year bets, to be looking back through time.

12/29 Evaluated our twenty-year bets from 2004. Consensus that I had correctly predicted that (a) television, radio and telephony would all be melted into the Internet and no longer be recognizable as independent media, and (b) that at least 30% of the land surface of the earth would have wireless internet with bandwidths in the megabit range which is not paid by volume. 

What seems far more astonishing to me than the bets and their results is the time span of twenty years and the sensation of looking back through it.

We will make new bets for ten and twenty years from now. I find it much harder to come up with any predictions today than I did twenty years ago. My mind will be blown if I get to look back twenty years to today, that much I know.

12/28 Dinner in the tavern up on the side of the mountain for the second time. We’re getting our meat grilled on a spit that is held up by two bricks left and right of the fireplace, and it is turned by a drill – a signature construction by the tavern owner. We debate whether we should take a picture, and decide against it. This entire village on this mountain ridge, in the dark, in the rain, feels like an intricate small-scale model of a village, and both the grocery store and the tavern are like living rooms inside of that model, and you are welcome to stay in any of them for as long as you like.

12/27 The astonishment of waking up healthy for the first time in several days, and immediately wanting to get up early and do five or ten things at the same time. There is no way to create this wanting-to-do-things-and-being-able-to if you don’t just wake up with it.

12/26 Day starts with some energy, but even walking the short distance up to the main road exhausts me completely. I sleep several hours again in the afternoon, enduring more waves of fever, and barely become a little more alive in the evening, when I manage my first twenty minutes of piano practice and cook us some dinner, having only two spices: salt and pepper. The days are becoming a blur, but they are good days. Saw the brightest and most complete rainbow today I have ever seen.