7/25 The neighbors are having one of their improvised parties with 12 additional cars parked around the green and good music playing – music which makes the crickets syncopate its beats with their very loud, chopper-like scratches in sixteenth notes. They don’t get the timing quite right: either they’re incredibly cool or rather new to playing in a band.

7/24 Today didn’t start well. I had searched for other running routes around here and found Lake Chadwick. Drove there around 8.30am. It turned out it’s a park and you need to buy a permit to even enter it, and that’s a one-year pass for $20 or nothing. Cash only. The man at the entrance stuck to the book. So we drove to another place that seemed, according to the Strava map, to be frequented by runners, only to find out that it was on the side of the road, no foot path at all. Went up a cul-de-sac, found ourselves among some incredibly spacious mansions overlooking the Hudson, and they looked boring as hell. Went home after that, 1.25 miles on the clock.

7/23 Drove to the dark spot in the Catskills which I had been wanting to do for months. We left at ten so we would get there at midnight. Earlier the moon would still have been up.

Funny enough, we were not prepared for just how dark it would be if you"re going to one of the darkest spots east of the Mississippi and south of the Adirondacks, with no moon in the sky. It’s so dark you cannot walk around and find your way through a gate in a fence, for example.

The view was at first disappointing because there were some clouds, and also it took surprisingly long to get our eyes adjusted after looking at the dashboard, a smartphone screen, or the area in the headlight cones of the car. If AI hadn’t suggested it, I wouldn’t have bothered to tape little squares of red filters over the flashlights of our phones, but this turned out to be really impactful. Each time we looked at an unfiltered light source we were back to square one of adjusting.

We did see the summer triangle and the milky way running through it, did see all of our personal stars, and I finally did see the tiny Dolphin which only shows up when you have an actually very dark sky. There was not really any time to be alone with the stars with the entire family around. But we’ll be more experienced next time.

7/22 Ran across the Newburgh-Beacon-Bridge with my daughter, which she absolutely hated. Too monotonous. I like exactly that quality of it. If it’s straight from beginning to end, there’s nothing you can expect to see except a vortex you’re running into. Okay and some scenery on the side, but that’s not the point.

7/21 Today was literally my first waterpark. Slides only scary before you try them for the first time. I was very worried about my contact lenses because I did not have any spare ones with me and could not have driven us home if I’d lost them.

Tried body surfing on a stationary wave, held out for a minute or more. It might be a great project to actually learn this.

Surprised by how daring the backsides of young girls’ bathing suits are cut, but then it dawns on me that these might not be young girls. They might be young women and my distance from them is increasing. For men, potato bags remain the only acceptable attire.

7/20 My daughter used her new Claude subscription fearlessly to let the AI read her 50,000 word draft of a novel and suggest improvements. (“Don’t rewrite it,” was all she added.) I, on the other hand, have only given it small passages so far and asked for help with translations. The last time it suggested three versions, which in turn made me come up with another one which the AI admitted to be better than all of its own attempts. So take that.

7/19 Death Of A Salesman on Broadway. Saw gestures and facial expressions in Nathan Lane’s acting that I thought were unique to my father. They are not, and I realize how I have and will have the same gestures and expressions.

Apart from that, I had AI summarize decades of critical reception to me, and was very much surprised by the depth and complexity of the reasoning. There is no way I could have gotten to such a level of reflection without spending days or even months studying secondary literature.

You’d think that this time around, the young (who happen to be your children) would not fall into the misunderstanding that you fell into about old people. They won’t because they surely must realize it’s just you, not an old person somehow detached from them. But that is exactly how it will unfold.

Watched the World Cup Final at the edge of my seat for 120 minutes. Soccer looks very European to me today, and I mean that in a good sense – the wide open spaces, the strategy, the fewer points, the imprecision of the referee announcing the minutes of stoppage according to his whim. The internationality of it, which the American sports decidedly lack. The constant exaggerated displays of being hurt, though, are awkward.

Many Americans that I know are deep into European soccer – deeper than the prevalence of the sport in America itself would suggest. Like the one who was going on a trip to Europe where he could have watched a game of his favorite team, but wouldn’t because he was worried they might lose and plunge him into sadness.

7/18 People defending themselves against AI by pointing out what it does badly. I’m excited about what it does well. Actually, I’m also excited about what it does badly.

My daughter is so amused by all the doubts I have about my writing. Particularly how embarrassed I am that I’m not writing fiction. I have spent decades reminding myself that this is the kind of writing that electrifies me, but the doubt is still nagging from inside. She would have run with it from day one.

7/17 Baylander evening. If you can’t be silly, how you gonna be smart. It’s much of a ritual at this point, but a ritual we all seem to agree with.

7/16 The sun is a faint orange ball in the sky, more than what you’d see through normal clouds, less than what regular haze would let through, it’s the wildfires in Canada.

I’m getting into states of panic, frequently, while being here with the kids. Feelings of inadequacy and overwhelm. I will need to get to the bottom of this. Is it because I was once shut out of this family with lawyers and courts, did that leave a trauma? I don’t have any conscious awareness of it, but I guess it might be that.