9/7 Sunset on an entirely clear horizon. The sun is like a drop, expanding and contracting as it enters and leaves the lowest, longest layers of atmospheric refraction. I can see that the app, on which I follow the digits of its altitude racing to zero, considers sunset to be the moment when the lowest point of the sun touches the waterline.

9/6 What if aging isn’t just an orderly, gradual process of decline, but always chaotic, like an avalanche, embarrassing.

9/5 We met some friends here, twice, and both times we were invited to meet again Saturday and do something together. We’ll tell each that we unfortunately already said yes to the other, and instead we’ll just sit together and do nothing except write and read and discuss and lie in the sun, all much more intense than what other people seem to be content with.

9/4 Venus barely a degree above the horizon. It is deeply red and entangled in a surprisingly irregular layer of last remaining daylight. The layer is so irregular that it appears to consist of clouds, but that cannot be, since Venus is so clearly visible within it, with undiminished brightness. There’s a light on the water below it that, for a moment, seems like a reflection of Venus, but that cannot be, since it would be a long path of light, but this is only a dot, and also it slowly moves out of its alignment.

In the bookstore, under a map of the near side and the far side of the moon, read some Stephen King for the first time, a foreword in which he mentions his endless desire to believe everything, and the never ending stream of stories that emanate from it.

9/3 Verbatim Bookstore. Convincing answer to the question: What exists?

9/2 Met a couple from Nebraska at the pool. Saying which state you’re from is sort of a showdown right there, an elephant in the room which you politely talk around for a while. The stating of positions gets more explicit and more heated over time, although by the end, some two hours later, it seems we both have the feeling that the others are actually quite reasonable people. The one thing he could absolutely not get his head around, and had to mention, although in a friendly, only curious manner, were the European swim trunks I was wearing.

9/1 For a few hours there was a booth of Trump merchandise right in front of our balcony on the boardwalk. There were also Trump signs and Trump flags on two or three of the vacation homes a mile down the boardwalk. There are no Harris signs anywhere, by comparison, and so it’s hard to understand what the Trump signs even mean. Are they a show of defiance, in an overwhelmingly blue state? If you were certain about yourself, why those signs? Compare to the display of the American flag.

8/31 Turns out that here on Mission Beach and Labor Day weekend, we got ourselves into an epicenter of party. The boar walk is way busier than we remember it, and then it’s thumping music till 1.30 in the morning. And I honestly don’t mind. We are the recluses that we are, right in the middle of it, doing our thing.

8/30 Mission Beach, San Diego. We arrived at 9.30 last night and had to get up at 5am to meet our East Coast working schedule. We’re right on the boardwalk, where, the last time we were here three years ago, we figured we’d just want to be here many more days to enjoy the vibe of the place. I park on a red-painted stretch of the curb in front of the hotel, flashies on, to check in and get our stuff out. A police truck parks threateningly behind us and watches us for a full ten minutes, will not budge even as I would need just a little space to make it into the entrance of the hotel’s parking garage. I have to leave forward and make a u-turn two blocks away to re-enter the cul-de-sac. Outside the hotel: several bars, a seven-eleven, excellent coffee shop, a nine-eleven sculpture with an original piece of an iron beam in front of a fire station. Morning joggers on the boardwalk, roller skates and skate boards, guy with a scooter, a camouflage bag and a cup of coffee leaning on the fence of the lifeguard station, laughing and shouting erratic comments at passers-by.

8/29 Flight to San Diego. Paying for in-flight wifi used to be a nuisance. Although your phone has all your credit card info on it, ready to fill it into any form, it insists on verifying that you really want to do this by making you enter the CVC code manually, and then attempting to verify that code online – which it can’t do, because you’re not online yet. So the only way to pay for the in-flight wifi is to take out your physical credit card, decipher its numbers in what little light the plane cabin offers, and enter them dutifully into the form. I had been waiting for years whether somebody would finally solve that, but it turns out that before anyone does, in-flight wifi just doesn’t cost anything anymore.

We’ll be in San Diego for Labor Day and next week. J and I call it our minimoon. We’ll be working in the mornings. We’re as joyful as on our first trip ever, only heightened by the astonishment at how far we’ve come.