6/9 I thought if it was easy to learn the US political system on flash cards, it should be easy to learn chords for songs that way. It is not.

6/8 Greater Newburgh Symphony: Montgomery – Elgar – Prokofiev. Too exhausted to think much about it, but then again, thoughts are not the point of music. Or are they? It is remarkably unclear what the point of music actually is.

6/7 Oh, I get it. The exhaustion manifests itself in me needing reading glasses in addition to my bifocal contact lenses. Also, most thinking activity beyond the sheer basics shuts down. That is harder to notice because it is the same thinking with which I would notice its own reduced capacity, and I am doing so only with a vague understanding.

6/6 This week seemed insane at the outset, but so far we’re holding up well. Back to New York tonight. – La Guardia may not be the largest airport in the world, that’s Hartsfield-Jackson, from which we leave, but it certainly seems to be the newest airport in the world at this time. It feels like the unbelievable future of the fifties. It rains as the Uber driver picks us up. He, as well, is driving a brand new car, a giant Ford Explorer, and its sparkling new windshield fogs up. He tries several buttons on the touch screen, but can’t get it to defog, and so he finally opens the windows just a bit.

6/5 Atlanta. Job trip for J. I work from the hotel room. We’re in a business burb of Alpharetta and make an attempt at getting around on foot and by wheelchair, which does not work here. All is by car. We’ll know next time.

6/4 Naturalization interview. I know all the answers just like in school, when it wasn’t supposed to be that anybody was this good. I had just memorized the one hundred questions and answers on flash cards, and of course I knew them all today. I had practiced them one last time on the subway. It didn’t seem like I was answering questions, I just talked.

The lobby of the building is brand new, and yet, as I nervously walk through the empty switchback lanes, and at the end of them, pour all my things into the bins at the security scanner, the guard jokes that if I have yet another item, that’ll be five dollars, a joke that I can only acknowledge by commencing to laugh after a second, but not respond with any kind of joke in return. The seventh floor, the interview floor, is as old and worn as any government facility.

My interviewer is a resolute woman in her thirties. She begins asking me interview questions without any opening statement. They are indistinguishable from the request to spell my new wife’s last name. They do know about the order of protection that was filed against me some six years ago, which I had never mentioned in any of my filings, but they don’t seem to know the resolution of it, DISMISSED WITH PREJUDICE, which seems genuinely new information to her as I pull out the document to prove it. Is that an original, can I keep the original, I will make a copy of it. She hands me back the copy, not the original.

This, I guess, would also be the time when it turns out they know my browsing history and consider me not of good moral character because of it. But either they don’t know my browsing history, or it’s just a normal browsing history like everybody else’s. I pass, I am accepted. My oath ceremony will likely be end of August.

6/3 Since I met her, everything feels like beginning.

6/2 Back in Newburgh. As we are driving back, I have to ask J several very basic questions about the people I’ve just met and their relations to each other.

First time I wrote down a musical idea using actual music notation. It looks like a fifth grader did it.

6/1 Plattsburgh, wedding. Nice party. White people dancing. Come to realize that I have actually never seen a family that is not scarred by several deep, decades-long rifts.

5/31 Any democracy is vulnerable to authoritarianism. Is this one particularly vulnerable, because already weakened through erosion? Is it particularly strong, because its institutions have been designed unusually well?