2/20 Back in Manhattan. Spent much of the day deep in thought about a customer’s problems, to not much avail yet. I realize how incoherently I write in our internal discussions, without any energy or even understanding to improve it. I had only only 3-4 hours of sleep, no wonder. 

2/19 They have tube TVs at the antique store, with dormant grey bulging screens enclosed in wooden furniture frames, with big round silver channel dials, standing on tiny spread-out legs, so low that you’d be looking down on them if you sat even as low as an armchair. Cuba Crisis TVs, Kennedy Shot TVs and Moonlanding TVs.

2/18 Rachmaninov. Always that desire to do something that you’d think no human can do.

2/17 This may be worth a closer look. I didn’t take a program for the concert. In part, because I hadn’t seen anyone at the entrance who handed them out, and in part because I like not having a program. There’s little value in the content, and also: what do I do with it when the concert’s over? I like to not have things. Not having a concert program is similar to not having paper books and not having anything on my walls.

The seats next to mine were empty, only reserved with coats, and the one closest to me had a program lying on the armrest. I figured I’d just take a quick peek into it to see the order of pieces in the concert. Just as I took it and leafed through it, the woman who had that seat returned. I put the program back, a little embarrassed, and said I had just looked up something in it. I could tell she was irritated. Not sure how and from what I could tell that, but she clearly was. So I stood up, half gentleman and half irritated myself, and said I’d get her another program. 

Yes, a new one. The thought that materialized in me, within a split second, was that the only reason she could be irritated even as I was giving her back her program, was that I had taken away the pristine quality of this program which she would have been the first to open, and so I figured, in order to make it right, I ought to get her a new program that still had this pristine quality.

I had to climb over her as she remained angrily in her seat. She made a half-hearted attempt at telling me this was not necessary, but she seemed to agree that something had been seriously violated. So I went up to the entrance and got another program, keeping the program that had been hers, but which I had now wrongfully made mine, in my hand. I went back with those two programs and was about to give her the new program.

But she was even more irritated now. “When you went up to get your program, you took mine with you!” she snapped. I silently swapped the programs – definitely indistinguishable from each other – and gave her back her original program and kept the new one to myself.

The woman left halfway through the first piece of the evening.

2/16 J played violin for a music production, and as it turns out, it is a studio in which quite a few very famous records were produced, such as Automatic for the People and Solitude Standing. What’s so special about that? Always this fallacy, so hard to get rid of, that the big things are happening in a world that is somehow not the same as ours, and so it is highly unusual when the two worlds do actually meet.

2/15 Always a bit disappointing when you talk to a smart person and realize you have the same opinions just about everywhere.

2/14 The life guards in the town I grew up in are asking for donations to buy a new quad. I see this posted by a classmate from back then, whom I never really spoke to, probably not even back then, who is now the vice president of the local life guard chapter. Funny if I were to donate a large sum of money from America to buy that quad.

When I was a kid we were placed on the lake shore with a life guard t-shirt and a walkie-talkie so we could call our HQ a few yards up the hill if anything was amiss. Of course the walkie-talkie was the best part of it and made us feel incredibly important. We were supposed to use it only if anything actually important happened, and not block the airwaves with mindless chatter, trying out the magic of the call signs. Of course I spent the entire day wondering about something that would qualify as important enough to use the walkie-talkie for, and ended up saying something clearly not important enough every ten minutes and getting on everybody’s nerves with it.

One day somebody walked over to us and asked, rather casually, whether we could call someone because there was an emergency with a diver a few hundred yards down the shore in the old quarry. I figured that nobody could fault me for using the walkie-talkie for that, since it was probably somewhat important. So I pressed the button and used the call sign magic and said that somebody had said to me that there was an emergency with a diver.

I did not expect that this was so important that within less than a second one of the older guys, maybe eighteen, who I think was the head of our watch, came running down the hill on the jetty so fast that he almost couldn’t stop himself before the rescue boat that was moored on the shore. He jumped into it with a few others who had also come running down the jetty and they headed off to the quarry, the engine roaring and drawing a wide, circular wave front across the lake.

It is this one image that my brain decided to keep for those past fourty-five years: How he came running down the jetty, bare-foot, and struggled to come to a stop with a few very quick, staggering steps right in front of the boat.

2/13 There are those things where you believe, as they happen, that you’ll remember them all your life. Yet the vastest part of memories is made up of scenes that seemed innocent at the time; you did not know that this would be a building block of you. For some decades, you did not even know that such building blocks, which make up a person, existed.

2/12 Looking out the window and realizing: This is not an old world to which I am getting more and more acquainted. It is a new world which nobody has ever seen before.

2/11 Our first Superbowl together in Manhattan, and quite likely the last I’ll be watching while not an American citizen. Better learn the rules, and the anthem, while I’m at it. The rate of repetition with which I’m exposed to those rules – once per year – is not quite enough for me to actually get them.

Made a video of J playing a violin piece. I need to get more fluent in the language of video editing, it’s a skill as essential as being able to write a few coherent paragraphs.