Thursday 3/12/26 I'll be getting to the people in charge of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series , these being the people to whom I proposed a book on stairs, who sent my email all around the country. Someone sent me a letter about them recently. I'll be burying these bigots. Exposing them in full, and making that their legacy, as such. I have a lot to get to. A lot to write. But I get to it. And when I bury you, I make sure I bury you right. I also bury you for all to see who

Wednesday 3/11/26 Presently I've made a request of myself for hours. To put in hours. The time. To keep moving and doing things that contribute to what I'm trying to do for hours. Lately I've just been killing hours. I haven't been alive. I've been giving in, not fighting, which is forcing myself to try. To keep trying. So that is my plan right now. Not working from lists of what needs doing. But to be moving again. To be using the hours. It was what I would call unseasonably

Tuesday 3/10/26 Whoa, what's going on here? It was two years ago that I gave up pizza. Why make a note of this? Why not? Have you tried to give up pizza? The spur for this decision was a fellow at the Golden Goose, which sounds like the start of an enchanted tale, but as I've mentioned before merely pertains to the market around the corner from me. This is the market where I acquire Swiss cheese, the only kind of cheese I will eat, because it's the rare cheese that is low in

Tuesday 3/10/26 I saw a headline for an article this morning about the relationship between alcohol and exercise. Specifically, can one exercise to a degree such that this exercise cancels out their alcohol consumption in terms of their fitness. Can the exercise win that race, if you will. I went to click on this article, but it was behind a paywall and why would one pay money for what is almost certainly to be formulaic writing that resembles the rest of the formulaic writin

Monday 3/9/26 I mentioned the Colorado Avalanche's power play earlier. Watched them go zero-for-five on the power play yesterday. All that skill and they don't score. No one wants to shoot the puck. It's strange and, I suspect, maddening for an Avalanche fan. They do many of these width-of-the-ice passes, like they're trying to create open net situations. It's way too finesse. They should get back to some basics and have someone--Makar--hammer it from up top. Don't be stagnan

Monday 3/9/26 An observation, but I think it's a telling one. I don't go to a gym, as is documented here about as thoroughly as possible with my writings about stairs. I understand that one may encounter people of many ages and body types at a gym. But as I'm outside, either running stairs, en route to running stairs, or walking the many miles I walk, the people I see who are running are almost always--with very rare exceptions--people who are in shape. I don't see overweight

Sunday 3/8/26 We speak so often of time, but nearly just as often we fail to consider--let alone understand--that time isn't necessarily about seconds, minutes, hours, years, decades, etc. It takes about an hour-and-a-half to listen to the complete recorded output of Blind Willie Johnson , but what does that mean? How is it not a hundred years' worth of time, and so on, in a different but real regard? We can do the same with word counts and fiction. Not all word counts are cr

Sunday 3/8/26 The Bruins got a much-needed two points yesterday in their matinee win at the Garden over the Capitals. They came into the day a point ahead of Columbus for the final Wild Card spot, with both teams having played the same amount of games (Columbus picked up a point in an OT loss later in the day, so the Bruins are now two points ahead). It's close to fifty-fifty, I'd say, whether the Bruins make the playoffs or not. You're going to need close to 100 points this

Saturday 3/7/26 The big sports story in Boston yesterday was the return of Jayson Tatum to the Celtics' line-up nearly ten months after he torn his Achilles tendon. I stayed up to see how this went. Obviously Tatum was rusty. Everything will be off. Your timing, your cardio. You could see that he wasn't fully trusting his leg, which makes sense. He'd favor the other one, try not to come down on the one he injured. Had a nice stat line of 15 points, 12 boards, 7 assists. So no

Thursday 3/5/26 People are starting to look like AI. Were it to be factually revealed that eighty percent of the profiles on the likes of Threads are AI, I wouldn't be surprised. I could see it being up to ninety percent. Yesterday I saw a guy--who I'm pretty sure wasn't AI, and just a typical American--asking if nuclear weapons were real, because if they were real, why didn't Russia just use them on the Ukraine and the US on Iran. So maybe they're just this made up thing and

Thursday 3/5/26 People have a bottomless reserve of cruelty. They can and will tap into this bottomless reserve of this over the slightest prompting, and the lightest perceived slight, which can be of their own mental making and not an actual slight. Nothing will potentially satiate their hate, their blood lust. They'll keep going, dishing out hate, rage, until they forget or move on to something else, because they're all very stupid and can't maintain focus. If and when the

Thursday 3/5/26 Fleming! You lazy, disgraceful log! What is wrong with you? What's more, with the warm weather about to settle in, yesterday may have marked the first day of the Monument being open without interruption. Okay, relax. I ran 5000 stairs at City Hall, walked six miles, did 100 push-ups. The plan all along had been to go about my stair-running business, not assume the Monument was going to be open, confirm that it was indeed open on their website, and return to ru

Wednesday 3/4/26 I like problem solving in writing. These things can be pleasingly disproportionate if you're working with something that's already matchless. That is, you take a sentence, for example, and you turn it into two, which allows you to drop a "because" so that you can use it later on in the second sentence, where you couldn't have before as you don't want it appearing twice in a sentence. Or, one word becomes another, and that new word plays off of a different ver

Wednesday 4/4/26 If Jayson Tatum is going to return to the Celtics this year, it has to be now. There are twenty or so games left. He'd only be playing a dozen or so of them I'd expect. The Celtics have won three in a row, the last two coming on a back-to-back. They rested Jaylen Brown and Neemias Queta in their last game against and still routed the Bucks. The game before, Queta had 27 points, 17 rebounds, 3 blocks, 2 assists, and a steal in 27 minutes. The best game of his

Tuesday 3/3/26 How serious are you really about the thing you say you do or are? I've learned that very few people have any idea what a hero is. A real hero. Operation Epic Fury sounds cartoonish, or like a rejected idea from a Star Wars script. You know, Death Star, Luke Starkiller (original name). If this were another regime you'd think that wasn't real, but given the powers that be you shrug at most given how well it tracks. Sounds so over-compensatory, too. Operation My P

Monday 3/2/26 Took the trash out at 3:40. Set the bag down, did twenty push-ups in hallway. Then, down the stairs to the street. Cold is back. Checked the temperature. 12 degrees. Did ten more push-ups downstairs by the mailboxes. Then ten more back upstairs. Drank some no-fat milk and hibiscus tea for my heart. Took my daily swig of virgin olive oil. Right from the bottle. I don't live in a proper home. That will be later if I ever do and my body isn't found here. Trying to

Sunday 3/1/26 She did say leaving and going away aren’t the same thing. She sounded ashamed when she said that, as if she was on the cusp of adding she only had herself to blame—you know, that intake of breath people do when they’re trying to be accountable, or else they border on incapable of knowing something isn’t their fault.             Then they suck that breath further back in, perk up and pass off whatever just happened as this fluky moment of weakness like stumbling

Sunday 3/1/26 March is here. Being the first of the month, today is as good a day as any to make sure that everything I do contributes to what I am trying to do. No wasted movement, wasted time, wasted energy. If it doesn't help the cause, it shall not be done. A download can help the cause, a swallow of milk for the blood pressure, in addition to the completed story, the written words, the work on the book. Only things that can contribute, nothing else. That's the plan. An e

Saturday 2/28/26 1. Larry Bird I know this makes for a controversial pick for the best Celtic in history, but I don't think it should. Obviously Bill Russell one scores of championships and is in large part responsible for an organizational ethos, but there were times when one watched Bird when you could have thought that he was the best a basketball player had ever been and that no one could play better. He had nights like that and nights where it may have been true. He also

Saturday 2/28/26 Letter I wrote this morning to the daughter of someone I've known for a long time. (), It is your friend Colin in Boston. I’m hoping your dad can share this note with you when your parents visit you this weekend, but I don’t know. I will write it anyway in case you are able to see it.   I was thinking about you yesterday. You really impress me, and I thought I should tell you that. One of the reasons you were on my mind is because of something I’ve learned th

Saturday 2/28/26 There isn't a lot less interesting than Patriots off-season talk in February. Wall to wall Patriots off-season talk. As we become ever less intelligent, football becomes more and more the only sport that produces a cry of "Is good!" from out of our drooling mouths. Joe Burrow is considerably older than I think everyone believes him to be. Am I the only person who knows this guy's age? Because everyone else talks about him like he's twenty-five. This will be h

Friday 2/27/26 J.D. Vance looks like a man who wears eyeliner. I feel like this is an odd choice, especially for someone who I'm certain thinks that men should be "manly" with all that entails--you know, having no heart, never crying, being hard and unloving, etc. I must admit that when some video of Erika Kirk from the State of the Union popped up on my screen that I laughed. It's such bad overacting. Like a satire of overacting. The way she wipes away tears that aren't ther

Thursday 2/26/26 Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of my father's death. He was a fiercely moral man and a truly good person who always thought about what was right and tried to do what he understood to be right. He would never truckle, and yet he was always kind. I wonder what he would make of our world if he was here, but I know the person he would be regardless.

Thursday 2/26/26 This year's Boston Celtics season is a legacy re-arranger--or it certainly could be, anyway. Who knows what Jayson Tatum will be when he returns. The Celtics look better without him being the guy, though. Things are less stagnant and stage-y. No, I'm not suggesting they're better off without him. I'm simply making an observation about their play style and pace. The flow of their offense. They're not as three-addicted. Sure, they're still pretty hooked, but it