Friday 6/5/26 This once would have been an odd remark, but the Red Sox are fortunate to be leaving Fenway Park to face two good teams in the Yankees and Rays on the road. The Old Towne Team dropped another home game yesterday and at the same time their series with the Orioles. I didn't realize this was a day game until after it was over. Brayan Bello got the start. Why, I don't know. He has a curious version of the yips in that he can't pitch the first inning. He'll only get

Thursday 6/4/26 What joker gave Charlie McAvoy a third-place vote for the Norris trophy? Does his wife have a vote? That's just professional negligence. Can someone be that ignorant as to what's happening on the ice and what they're seeing? I suppose. But I find it almost impossible to believe that someone honestly thought that Charlie McAvoy was the third-best defenseman in the NHL this past season. Then again, I know how brain dead people can be. And I know that the worst t

Thursday 6/4/26 I had a dream last night that went on for what felt like a while and resumed each time I went back to sleep after waking up. I flew to Paris twice in the middle of the night to spend time with someone I loved. She lived with her family. I wanted to see the Eiffel Tower but we never seemed to get around to it. I'd look for it on the way back to the airport. The buildings of the city were packed closely together. You couldn't see down any of the streets. Fields

Wednesday 6/3/26 I expect to see bad Red Sox teams from time to time, and for there to be stretches with only bad teams even, but never would I expect any Red Sox team to be 9-20 at home as this Red Sox team is after last night's Fenway loss to the Orioles. As I predicted in these pages, the Sox lost two out of three at Fenway to the Braves before embarking on a more successful road trip--they're over .500 on the road--before returning to Boston to start losing again. I saw w

Tuesday 6/2/26 Never used to envy old people, but I bet a state of advanced years is comforting if you aren’t dependent on anyone and able to live on your own terms. Sound enough of body and mind. Get the names of your grandkids right every time. Meet a friend for “a nice little lunch.” When frugality feels smart and fun instead of life and death. Good gut health and isolated cases of heartburn. Life itself as a nice little lunch. With that special tea whose name you should m

Monday 6/1/26 Same deal as the Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins pieces. *** The Bad News Bears and when baseball is at its best. There was a time in America when morning for many involved a quiet and bountiful form of wonder: the reading of baseball box scores. If you know how to peruse them properly, they contain, in the parlance of Walt Whitman, multitudes. To the uninitiated, they’re just a whole lot of numbers in rows and columns, ciphers sans decoders. But for

Tuesday 6/2/26 Claude Lemieux died the other day. He took his own life just a few days after making an appearance at the Bell Centre before the Canadiens-Hurricanes game. He was only sixty-years-old. Horrible news, obviously. I don't think it's right that when there is news like this about a former athlete, people immediately chalk it up to CTE, especially if that former athlete played football or hockey. The truth is that save in the rarest cases, we don't know what is going

Monday 6/1/26 It's not exactly a new topic for debate, but I saw where someone asked who was better, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, and I gave this some thought anew. I'm not sure you could have two players who'd split the vote as it were like these two. There was a time, I'd say, when Johnson had the slight nod. That has shifted in recent years, on account of the internet and how people allow highlights packages to do their thinking, as such, for them. No one--not even Michae

Monday 6/1/26 Yesterday was a difficult Sunday. I had to fight to hang on. I feel so much like a ghost. Seeing the world as though taking in that given part of it for the final time. Like I'm leaving here. I linger visually. Not in terms of time, but in how I record what I see in my mind. Like I'm using a camera. I toiled in the basement for two-and-half hours to try and create some room in my small storage area. Didn't make much of a difference. Nothing was supposed to go li

Saturday 5/30/26 There's a man upstairs in my building who it feels odd to refer to as a man, though that's technically correct. He's really an over-stuffed child. You could call him a guy. That would work. There's a guy who lives on the fifth floor of my building. But when we say "man," there are often these other implications. Expectations, if you want. A man should be a put-together adult, for instance. There shouldn't be any frat boy aspects. Certainly not any longer. I d

Saturday 5/30/26 An article popped up on my phone with a headline asking if the effects of drinking could be reversed. I knew the answer to this question but wanted to see the article nonetheless in case there was something I'd missed or gotten wrong. I'm frequently blown away by people's failure to know the most basic things. I experience this constantly. Take, for instance, the Grateful Dead. The things that I would have thought don't merit mentioning, because they're the m

Saturday 5/30/26 The Monument was closed of course on Monday and Tuesday but after a successful weekend of stair running I returned to City Hall on Tuesday for a quick 3000 stairs. I didn't want to stand down for two straight days. Also did 150 push-ups. On Wednesday I was back in the Monument for five circuits and then did the same on Thursday, with 100 push-ups each day and three miles walked on Wednesday and six on Thursday. No push-ups yesterday but did ten circuits in th

Thursday 5/28/26 Going up fifty stairs each day--a mere fifty stairs--reduces your risk of cardiovascular disease by 20%. If you take the subway to work, that would basically mean forgoing the escalator each way and using the stairs instead. Think of how little effort that is. It's not so much an effort thing as a "I decide to commit and do it this way" deal. We're not good at that. Implementing a personal policy and sticking to it. We can do it, in theory, in most of, if not

Wednesday 5/27/26 Bob Boone is (rightly) regarded as one of the best defensive catchers in baseball history. He didn't win his first Gold Glove until his age thirty season. His next came in his age thirty-four season. Then he didn't win another until his age thirty-eight season, after which he won three more in successive seasons taking him through his age forty-one season. The lesson here: Gold Gloves can be misleading. Carlton Fisk won one his rookie year, and then never ag

Wednesday 5/27/26 Same deal. *** Sonny Rollins and loving jazz. It’s always a good time to fall in love with jazz, and no artist better embodied that idea than tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins. His death at the age of ninety-five means there’s one less physically connective strand to a period in this country’s popular culture—Rollins’ artistic heyday of the mid-1950s—when a cerebral art form like jazz made inroads with the masses. If you went to a bar, chances were a basebal

Tuesday 5/26/26 As I said, I wasn't able to do anything with this and might as well put it here. The idea all along was for everything to eventually be collected between book covers, but it's hard to see that ever happening. Today is Miles Davis's centennial. This will be the best thing that anyone wrote for the day, and the only thing that isn't interchangeable with all the other things, and it didn't get to run. That's the system. *** Making it new for Miles Davis’s centenn

Tuesday 5/26/26 There are things I plan to write in here regarding upcoming sporting events--everything else will keep and I eventually get to it--that I don't end up writing because I don't get a chance to do so in time. One of those things I had filed in my mind to make a note of here after the Knicks beat the Cavs in Game 3 was that the Knicks would win Game 4 by at least 30 points. Turns out they won by 37 last night. That Cleveland team was done after Game 1. They quit.

Monday 5/25/26 No stairs on Friday. Put my head down figuratively speaking on Thursday to do the 10,000 stairs in the heat at City Hall and then followed it up with a big zero. Saturday's mark the start of new weeks for me, though, even if their stair total--if they're Monument stairs--counts towards the week that began Wednesday when the Monument opened after being closed Monday and Tuesday. You want to be able to say to yourself, "This weekend I ran such and such an amount

Sunday 5/24/26 Correspondence from yesterday. Ought to be read. And read again. And then again. *** Just a few odds and ends. I'm fighting it, trying to keep going, trying to use today--start of a new season, unofficially, but still--as a starting line. I have to try and create these starting lines. I have nothing to live for. No hope. It doesn't matter what I make. I rearrange deck chairs, starting line-wise. Then I get another day. Another weekend. Another spurt. Some work

Thursday 5/21/26 My effort and performance in running stairs wasn't where it should have been last week and the start of this one. Over the former, I ran only twelve circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument, and those were all in one day (last Thursday). I didn't run stairs anywhere else. Nothing on Monday either, so on Tuesday I went out to run the stairs at City Hall. You shouldn't ever take stairs and how you'll fare with them for granted. It's a good life lesson and

Wednesday 5/20/26 Like most residents of New England, I was up late last night waiting to see if the Red Sox could score more than three runs for the first time in nine games. They were up on Kansas City 3-1 in the top of the ninth when they had a runner thrown out at the plate Jarren Duran came up and was down two strikes. The next pitch was a ball, which was when I went to bed. Awoke to see a 7-1 score, which I figured meant Duran homered, and sure enough he did. His best g

Tuesday 5/19/26 Woodstock—Snoopy’s pal—wrote a book in the Peanuts strip called My Life as a Bird, which is actually a pretty good title. I’d read that and you know Woodstock would have spurned AI. It wouldn’t have provided us the avian view of the events surrounding A Charlie Brown Christmas, though, as Woodstock wasn’t around then despite what some anachronistic paraphernalia would have you believe. For instance, at Christmastime we'll see Peanuts wrapping paper and gift mu

Monday 5/18/26 This is a letter to my uncle from Friday. I include it here because for all the things that this journal is, it's ultimately telling a story. Sometimes I use outside documents that then become internal documents as per this record in the telling of that story. What I wrote about "Love, Your Mouse" is true and I feel like including it makes sense. My uncle is a good man. Dear Gerard, It's early on the morning of 5/15. I was just checking in. I understand yo

Monday 5/18/26 Wretched effort on my part. No compete. No fight. Lots of giving in. Sitting and decomposing in the middle of it. Sadness. For just my relationship with myself--which is for all intents and purposes the only one I have--I need to do a 180. Feel tired, feel like I pushed as hard as I could. Also survival. Everything has taken on a quality of life or death. I feel like I'm so tenuously here as it is and when I'm like this I'm swaying in front of the cliff's face