10/17 The long white candles on the dining room table – five in all, in the brass candle holders which J found in an antique shop – had slightly tilted over the summer, because sometimes it must have been so hot in here that they had melted just a little in their sockets. J lit them last night, after doing her best to upright them, and we let them burn down, which caused a lot of wax to run down and build up bizarre sculptures before splashing onto the teak tray below them, from which the wax will now have to be, somehow, non-destructively removed.

10/16 Went up on the roof for one of my last glimpses of the comet, which is rapidly fading. Having the binoculars with me also meant I could peek into the luxury multi-million dollar apartments across the street from a different, more elevated angle than usual. It was oddly disappointing to see people on sofas with smartphones. Trying to come up with a list of activities that would be more fun, and maybe more inspiring, to watch.

10/15 Let it be recorded here that each year, when the heating is supposed to come back on in the building, there are a few days during which building management will not quite agree that it is indeed time to turn on the heating, and if they do, the heating doesn’t actually work and needs a few rounds of fixing. Those are the days of blankets and shivering, and they are now.

10/14 Mailing the packs of postcards in a somewhat clandestine manner, using several public mailboxes along the streets and even in different parts of the city, not so much because I think it’s really necessary, but because I like walking around and understand where these mailboxes are, and how to use them. They are very sturdy, that’s for sure. Cast iron, a weird flexible grid inside behind the upward facing slit. You wouldn’t be able to get any liquid into them if you tried. Graffiti they’ll happily take on the outside, but apart from that, they’re as robust as their job requires.

10/13 I had not at any time any idea what matrimony really meant, and I also would not have been ready for it. 

10/12 This time we saw the comet, from the parking lot of the Newburgh Academy, where helpfully the lights remained off tonight, unlike yesterday. We searched across the dusk area for a good 20 minutes before we found it, even though we knew very much where to look. And so we have a star that is a little fuzzy, and as it gets darker, we realize very slowly that it has a tail that extends upward and a little bit to the left. It remains quite hard to see with the naked eye, and yet this view has a quality to it that neither the binoculars nor the image algorithms of the phone have. Yes, I was able to take stunning pictures that show the tail far longer than we were able to see it, but they also show a sky that is much brighter and more orange than what it looked like to us. – I have no explanation of what makes me so happy and giddy about this, but it’s great that it seems somewhat similar for J.

10/11 Failed comet attempt. Did see Venus very clearly, but there was a hazy layer of clouds above the western horizon where the sun had set.

10/10 Hamilton powerful. Blown away. Politics for people who have a sincerity problem. I’d actually want my kids to watch it if they ever needed a rite of passage into politics. – I am still so unused to musicals that what I think about most is the miracle of being able to tell a story like this. How each telling of any story is just as removed from reality as a musical is, only it is so much more obvious in a musical, and with such great effect.

10/9 Hamilton on Broadway, including the insanity of the evening rush hour through which the cab plowed to get us there, and the masses on Times Square into which we stumbled after exiting the theatre, only to find a vast, empty 6th avenue with free-flowing traffic just a block away. It’s the first time since the pandemic that New York, to me, felt no different from what it ever was.

10/8 This piece that had seemed incredibly long to me, so long that it was impossible to form any kind of coherent opinion about it, to even work through it in any systematic sense – I just read it to the ladies tonight and it is very small, very much within grasp, easily arrangeable, not worth all the intimidation it has caused.