12/5 Eeriest experience during customer introductions: They reminisce how they have heard talks I gave at conferences. They remember sentences I said. Like “build what you see”. That’s not a bad one. Did I actually say that?

12/4 Locksmith shop on ninety-sixth. I’m having my apartment key doubled and I need it to have a slightly bigger, offset hole in the handle. The locksmith, seemingly proud of his shop with all of the vintage machinery, also famous for his first-class service, does wait a long time until he decides to drill the additional hole for me, he does it without saying anything, as if reluctant. When I say he can charge me twice for the key he waves it off.

12/3 First run in three weeks, also first run after Thanksgiving. My form deteriorates so quickly it seems outright impossible to get it back, to ever be as lean and flexible again as I was only a month ago.

I could go to a migrant shelter and hand out soup, but it probably wouldn’t be a very efficient use of my time. Only when M explains it to me do I realize that I am, in fact, a computer expert and could probably bring that to the table, somewhere. The number of organizations that do just about everything one could imagine, and then some, is humbling.

12/2 Democracy as an unlikely state of affairs that doesn’t usually have a majority of the population behind it.

12/1 The catastrophe that everybody has been warning about for at least a year has actually happened. What would one have expected the world to look like after this? An eerie silence.

11/30 From That’s not who we are to That’s who we are.

11/29 Mysteriously sick, limp.

11/28 Thanksgiving with Sauerbraten and Kartoffelklößen.

11/27 Among the things I picked up last weekend I found a note I had written to my mother at maybe age six or seven. Cute with all the spelling errors, that sort of thing. But what astonishes me is: I can’t remember that note. Of course I don’t remember every little thing in my life. And yet I would somehow assume that when confronted with any particular detail, it would materialize in my mind, because everything is actually there, it only needs to be called up. Also, what astonishes me is the language. It is subtly, but undoubtedly the dialect of the area. That, to me, seems like a mistake. I sound like someone who grew up there, which I wasn’t even back then, and certainly never since.

11/26 And now, after some 24 hours, it becomes apparent in just how strange of an orbit I have kicked myself with this weekend. I am displaced.