8/4 Another half day at Cedar Point in a very different mood: refinement. Then back to Pittsburgh.

8/3 Full day at Cedar Point, 10am to 10pm. Coaster Manhattan. Got my horizon widened by some world-class realizations of entirely different coaster types.

8/2 Drove to Cedar Point. But we didn’t go into the park yet, that will be tomorrow and Tuesday. It slowly dawns on me that this is indeed the Coaster Capital of the World. After this, we will have ridden the top 3 coasters in the world, and 6 of the top 12. I am beginning to think like a coaster connoisseur, a coaster critic, rather than a mere survivor. Coasters can have record-breaking features, yes, but is it beautiful? Is it innovative? Does it have style? Does it capture the imagination?

8/1 Played pool with my son in that gigantic lobby of the apartment complex. I have vivid memories of coming near a pool table for the first time, of picking up a ball randomly and being shooed away by the adults, whispering that I was not allowed to do that. First time holding a cue and trying to come up with a finger position, failing ridiculously at the first few attempts at a shot. Today, even though I have a little more practice holding a cue, still about half of my shots go awry. This is what I hope will plant some memory in my son. Some rite of passage, some validation, some feeling of being able to be someone.

7/31 Pittsburgh. When we were at home still, the kids researched that this business park was built on the grounds of an eerie mental institution, and yesterday they went on an expedition and found the only thing that’s left of it, an old graveyard, now behind some super clean office buildings.

Kennywood. Some quite interesting coasters. Not only the Steel Curtain, the tallest coaster in the park and obviously its headline with nine inversions, but also that tiny oval of Jack Rabbit, built in 1920 by the inventor of today’s roller coasters, with that little bump of airtime which, at the time, must have felt like an astoundingly perplexing achievement. At the same time my grandmother was five and the Titanic had sunk eight years ago. 

7/30 That eight-hour drive after a rough night for the family and little sleep – almost no sleep at all for J – felt surreal. Often on long drives like these I get so sleepy that I have to stop for a nap or hand over the wheel. But not on this one. As if on autopilot much of the time. I felt dizzy by the end of it, but not sleepy. 

7/29 Family squall. Also an eight-hour drive to Pittsburgh.

7/28 Interestingly, I have never gotten any hostile responses to anything I said online. Until now, when I said something in favor of AI. Among writers, no less.

7/27 My son builds spaceflight trajectories and varies their parameters, moves them around in 3D – such beautiful patterns. The Apollo missions flew trajectories like these, and yet nobody at the time could see them like this.

7/26 I was baffled by Knausgaard because I thought he simply did what every writer would do unless they submit to some kind of external force that pushes them away from their natural instinct. And for that he was considered radical and revolutionary. It has never occurred to me to write differently – well, it has occurred to me, and I ran into a wall of fog that became more dense the harder I pushed into it. But unlike him, I am embarrassed about it and censor myself. Which in my case, since I can’t actually do anything else, led me to think of myself as “not really a writer”.