10/7 Suggested I’d put on a headset and watch 60 minutes while J does something else. No, she’d watch it with me, she’s quite adamant about it. I guess when we’re each writing dozens of postcards per day that exacerbates our sincerity problem.

10/6 Spent the hours between four and five taking a walk to the pier and back. And the help of a klonopin. Those nights when sleep is not for you.

10/5 That’s unusual: The huge number of books I’m starting and do not finish. Those I do finish are the ones that manage to keep me turning the pages breathlessly from start to finish. I’m not plowing through books anymore.

10/4 There was a thought I wanted to write about, it would have taken me two or three paragraphs to expose it, and I wondered whether I felt up to it, with what little energy I have left, and I did feel up to it, but now that thought is nowhere to be found.

10/3 Feeling bad because I continue to ignore the guidelines for report writing.

10/2 J practicing violin next door. She’s ramped it up into the hours again, since she’s got auditions coming up.

10/1 Not only did I encounter the mailman in the lobby today, I also finally chose to talk to him. It has come to the point where more than half, if not all of my mail goes missing. Which I know because I get an email with scans of each mailpiece before it arrives, and almost none of them ever shows up in my mailbox. Including my passport, including my social.

It wasn’t easy to not put him on the defense immediately – a nice, friendly, hard-working, conscientious guy no doubt. And I really didn’t want to blame anyone, I just wanted to know. Because my mailbox, 916, – and he knew that without looking – is not in the same column of the big panel of mailboxes as the other ones from the ninth floor, it’s in a different column further to the right, hard to find if you don’t carefully look for it.

And so, while we were still talking, he walked over and flung open the column with the ninth floor boxes, and grabbed the huge pile of mail in the box of 915, and oh yes, there it was, all my lost mail from back into July, including my passport, including my social.

I was on vacation, he said, fully expecting an outburst of anger. Your very right, I said. I am not blaming anyone. I’m just glad I found my mail. And now I know where to look. Maybe if you put a sticker inside 915 that says 916 is to the right, or something? 

9/30 Done with almost half of my 200 postcards. Which means until October 15, when I’m supposed to mail them, I will be able to do a little less than my daily quota of 10 postcards.

9/29 Compare the time I spend with Hannah Arendt and the time I spend reading every last little bit of news about this election that I can find.

9/28 J is very clear what her hymn is: I’m a bitch, I’m a boss. If I were to choose one I’d go with the first bars of the Köln Concert.

We went through the memory banks of her new violin synthesizer. Hundreds of sounds, so many ideas, so much fun. I only wish I could jump in and build something out of each of them.