11/25 With everyone already sitting at the gate, our flight AMS – JFK was cancelled due to a broken aircraft. This made everyone gasp, then set off a stampede to the rebooking desk several gates down the hall. I figured there had to be a better way and just took out my laptop, chatted with an AI and then with a human, got rebooked to this morning (Monday), with even a window seat and a promise that my luggage would be on this flight. I’ll be in New York before noon. Got myself a room at the Steigenberger on the airport perimeter before hundreds of stranded travelers would flood into it. As I eventually walked back from the gate there were still at least a hundred people waiting in line at the rebooking desk. Finding it strange that almost nobody knows they could do this without standing in these lines.

11/24 Grateful for almost eight hours of sleep, even though my watch says they were not particularly good ones. I had planned to try the gym and the rooftop pool in the hotel, complemented with a breakfast brought to my room, before I would start packing the remaining things, return the car and check in for my flight. I ended up only sitting at my window with a self-brewed cup of instant coffee, watching the sky light up slowly in the east, behind the tarmac, lights flickering in the cold. Very rarely a flight coming in from the east, landing lights bright. This was the best decision I could have made this morning, a calmness that seems to reach back to my child days and indefinitely into the future.

11/23 A lot of anxiety around each step, pivoting around me picking up my boxes from the porch of the deserted house in the countryside, as the sun has just left an entirely clear sky, and I drive back to the airport in the night. A room on the 11th floor in the Clarion Hotel, two runs with a baggage cart are necessary to get all the things from the car into this room, and the hopelessness whether I could fit all these things into the suitcases I brought vanishes slowly. Yes, this will work out fine. Also, I need sleep.

11/22 Flying to Sweden over the weekend to get my paintings, which have been in storage in several places in Europe for 15 years. Only slightly more than twenty-four hours between arrival and departure in Stockholm, and six hours of driving in between.

To walk into the hardly awake airport corridors in the early morning, coming from an overnight flight.

11/21 Eye doctor. I get dilating eye drops, but apparently not those that make your eyes flood with so much light that you can only squint for hours. Everything seems normal, except as I get home, I cannot look at the sky from my apartment. It is a grey day, the first rainy day, in fact, in weeks. Everything must be so dark and grey that my dilated eyes feel right at home, except for that grey sky which is, apparently, by comparison, unbelievably bright.

11/20 I grant you that whatever happened to us in the past hundred years can in no way go as deep as what happened over the last thirty thousand years – then again, we were not born thirty thousand years ago, only a few decades. We came into existence right in the middle of those one hundred years, and we never knew anything else. We’re like ducklings taking a scientist for their mother.

11/19 This urge to reduce myself to bits, and not understanding why it doesn’t work, instead of just letting it not work.

11/18 The realization that this man who is serving me water in this Upper West Side restaurant may have walked through the desert for months to be able to do that. He is nameless, because those who serve water don’t yet get to tell customers their names.

11/17 The Book of Mormon on Broadway. It’s the piece of information that I would have needed at 15, while I thought I was in possession of a piece of information that was unknown to most people on earth.

11/16 I had the feeling that I’m not allowed to say what I think, not because I thought anything that I knew someone would find offensive or unacceptable, but because some thoughts of others – not thoughts that I shared – got that treatment. And so I began to feel I was thinking in a mine field.