Sunday 10/11/26 The other day, Trump made some post wherever he makes his posts, stammering like the mentally ill, deranged toddler that he is that AI is now called Super Intelligence and anyone who doesn't go along will be considered an ENEMY of the state or however he put it. His phraseology is always that of the crazy child. It doesn't track as English. As sane person English. For instance: "...as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term..." Highly accepte

Friday 10/9/26 From a letter: Wake up today and see that public executions are going to be a thing, which, like a character in a horror movie, I thought couldn't be real at first, despite knowing how things now are, but is. What a horror movie we are living in. Without any of the entertainment value. The monsters aren't Dracula, the Invisible Man (he was far too witty for these times anyway; would hardly be anyone who could understand his one-liners now), Michael Myers, or Fr

Thursday 10/8/26 Don't want to let the fitness accounting side of things go too long. I let far too many things go and then I'm overwhelmed at the idea of how much work will be involved in bringing them up to date and/or getting them done. I haven't done well on the fitness front. My standards, probably few other people's. I had mentioned how a couple weeks back I did a mere eleven circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument. I felt like I hadn't much fight in me last week

Thursday 10/8/26 No writing in the world like this person's writing, no matter what he's writing. AI--please. We could be here indefinitely and AI would never be able to do this. The only writer in the world who couldn't be replaced by it or mistaken for it. I should be getting one of those MacArthur genius grants of $800,000 pretty soon, right? Because they go to real life geniuses, no? What? You're kidding me. It doesn't work that way in the slightest? Huh. Really? Are you

Thursday 10/8/26 I am more interested in things from the past--music, films, art, books, shows--because they are better. Ages before ours were far more conducive to the creation of notable work or even just solid work or work at all worth one's time. These times are usually before my time. I take myself to where the quality is. I think you have to be an exceedingly stupid person to think that your average television program, say, in 2026 would be better than from the mid-1950

Monday 10/5/26 The Patriots got a big win yesterday in Buffalo by a 29-26 score and their fans are stomping around again. Drake Maye is "back" and all that. I'd go easy here. Improvement and the kind of play you need out of someone can be two different things. Maye made some plays. He was also much abetted by Efton Chism making the catch of his lifetime on the go-ahead score late. Maye started out completing a high percentage of his passes, with that falling off as the game w

Sunday 10/4/26 Q: Do you think you eat an average amount of graham crackers compared to other people, an above average amount, or less than average? A: This is a good question. I believe the average age is thirty-seven. At least it was a few years ago. There are people who are no years old and people who are 100-years-old, but late thirties is the overall average. I don't believe, of course, in age or think about as almost everyone else does. I find it to be much more malleab

Friday 10/2/26 I'm off. I somehow thought back on Wednesday that there was another day left in September. I don't normally make mistakes like that. Clock struck midnight on Thursday and the date on my phone changed to October 1 and there we were. Had I known this, I would have done better in the Bunker Hill Monument and taken advantage of what I thought was the last day of the year with the good hours. I went in with a big number in mind and failed, instead running only five

Wednesday 9/30/26 I don't much want to talk about this first Wild Card game from last night between the Red Sox and the Yankees, but this journal is so many books within the largest book ever written, and I've been thorough in writing about these baseball seasons on to their end and should see this 2026 campaign through. Never in my life of watching, studying, and thinking about baseball have I ever considered a game to be over after one pitch until last night when Cam Schlit

Wednesday 9/30/26 The rain finally abated yesterday after nearly three-straight days of coming down. This allowed me to go to the grocery story, which I hadn't done in a while. It's not an option when it rains if you have to carry the bags any distance because they'll rip, even when they're double-bagged. I've done a terrible job with everything lately. This kind of living suicide thing. I might as well be dead for little I do, how I look to going to sleep again as soon as I'

Tuesday 9/29/26 This is something I posted on Threads: I had a wonderful English teacher in tenth grade. An act of a Shakespeare play would be assigned as reading homework. If a student said something nuts during the discussion in class—could be they invented a character who wasn’t in the thing—this teacher would go, “Whoa! Someone’s copy had some extra pages!” It was funny. You felt like you could say anything, and that really opened people up. The lesson has always stuck wi

Tuesday 9/29/26 Today is a day in which we have Boston Red Sox playoff baseball. Surely that is a good thing in a world where good things get harder and harder to come by. Much as I love the Celtics, Bruins, and Patriots, a Red Sox playoff game is more special to me than Game 7 of the Finals for the Celtics and Bruins and the Super Bowl for the Patriots would be combined. I am a New Englander through and through, and if you are a true New Englander, there is nothing, sports-w

Monday 9/28/26 The Red Sox' regular season came to a close yesterday against the Cubs in Tampa, which was a little Twilight Zone-ish. Had you not known about the weather in these parts--say you lived in California and had been busy at work for a few days--and seen a clip of the game, you'd have been like, "What the..." This must have been extra strange for the Red Sox having recently stood in that same clubhouse and celebrated their postseason berth (which was already strange

Sunday 9/27/26 Reading about the alleged gang rape by seven men--"frat brothers"--at Cornell is stomach-turning. This was said to have gone on for seven hours. That's twice as long as it often takes to have open heart surgery. The woman was drugged. So she's lying there unconscious or drifting in and out of consciousness or in whatever state of wakefulness, and these men took turns. One of them sent out a group text saying, "Free pussy." Presumably, others who didn't partake

Sunday 9/27/26 I think sports fans in 2026 most enjoy being angry. That's the appeal to them. They'll usually know nothing about the sport they follow. How the game actually works. They won't know anything of that that sport's history or their team's beyond what they remember from their own lives. Most of what they have to say will take the form of complaining, most commonly about the officials. They almost all believe--have gotten themselves to believe--that every official i

Saturday 9/26/26 Someone will state an issue with something with which a person of quality would naturally have an issue. It'll be a common sense type of thing. An example I encountered from this morning: a person was at a baseball game, and made a remark about how it'd be nice to go the ball park and simply hear the sounds of the ball park and not be bombarded with constant volume from the stadium's loudspeakers. You know how this is now: every bit of would-be silence in our

Friday 9/25/26 One of the most withering lines in literature is in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up” essay when the narrator—who is both Fitzgerald and not Fitzgerald—says, “Baby et up all her Spinoza?” to someone on whom the joke and the criticism will be lost; one of those people who perform sympathy to feel better about themselves. And, too, it would be lost on virtually every person now, both because they are performative and have no self-awareness, and because they ca

Friday 9/25/26 The Guardians turned around and beat the Red Sox 1-0 after the Sox had just beaten the Guardians 1-0. I wonder how many times teams have done that in baseball history? More importantly for Boston: Ranger Suarez was solid again. That's four starts in a row. He's your Game 3 starter if it gets there next week. The Sox' offense is concerning. The Red Sox have had all this time to prepare for the playoffs. Clearly they cashed out on the regular season. I think that

Thursday 9/24/26 Letter. ... You'll be taken aback by what I've done with "Fitty." It's in part the result of "What the Mouse Knew." I've applied what I figured out there to "Fitty." I'm still working. But it's been like bringing "What the Mouse Knew" and a bit of "First Responder" to bear on this other story. The end of "Mouse" is about the best thing ever done (all of it, really) and it looks like the most natural thing there could be, but it took me forever to figure it ou

Thursday 9/24/26 I know that I will always be alone. I can't conceive of how I possibly couldn't be. When I say alone, I mean in every sense. I have loved only one person romantically in my life. Truly loved. That was the person I was married to. I often wish I was the person I am now earlier in my life. I will wonder what difference that might have made in this regard. It's a bad way--or a good way, I suppose, depending on how you look at it--to torture myself. Would things

Wednesday 9/23/26 From a letter: A little something for you for the first full day of fall. (Isn't it weird that summer hangs around until just past eight PM on 9/22 rather than bowing out when the clock struck midnight?) This is an excellent reading/rendering of Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" by Martin Jarvis. One of the best readings I've ever heard. I think the story is masterful. It's a ghost story without any ghosts. The language and prose is unda

Wednesday 9/23/26 The Red Sox have themselves an Erik Miller problem and a Roman Anthony problem. The reliever has unraveled. He took the loss last night after the Sox tied it on a Mickey Gasper pinch-hit homer in the eighth and you practically expected him to give it up. His ERA has ballooned over 3, which took some doing--that is, melting down on his part--from where it was not that long ago. He's lost, and he better find it fast. It's mechanical and mental. You put him in

Tuesday 9/22/26 Wrote this today for John Coltrane's centennial tomorrow, wasn't able to move it. Didn't do myself any favors delaying until the last moment. Might as well stick it here. Will get back after it it tomorrow. Be a quester like John Coltrane. There’s a kind of person, increasingly prevalent in our world, who partakes to perform. They purchase a copy of Crime and Punishment and technically run their eyes over each of its words—which is much different than truly

Tuesday 9/22/26 I'd mentioned last week in these pages that I was trying to do something and would see how that went before venturing into much--or any--detail. Otherwise, no reason to talk about that which had been mooted. I had a birthday, and I try and go pretty hard on that day in both my work and in fitness matters. I've also had a goal before this year is out in having a week of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument in which I did ten circuits each of the five days it's op