Sunday 2/8/26 How much do you think twelve large red peppers and six large white onions would run you? The total was $12 yesterday at Haymarket. I went back out to get them in the snow after returning from Trader Joe's to put the bags down. These things are less expensive at Haymarket--even with Trader Joe's good prices--so I'll make another trip. That wasn't even the best deal deal one might get at Haymarket. Sometimes it's even cheaper. There were less dealers yesterday bec

Saturday 2/7/26 When an interesting looking health article pops up--usually one about a study--I'll often read it. I might learn something that would be smart to do--as I recently did about the benefits of having a spoonful of extra virgin olive oil each day--and sometimes it's just nice to see that a practice I regularly employ has benefits. My life borders on the unendurable at this juncture, so I'll take a little thing--just a little bump--when one is available. I try to s

Friday 2/6/26 This will also be in the book on horror films. Excellent stuff. No film writing like it. *** The best bad movies—which will sound like an oxymoron only to those who’ve never fallen for one—feel as though they are made out of love and had to be given to us by the people responsible for them the same as the person who is brave enough to love gives their heart to another in all its vulnerable nakedness. These bad movies have box loads of flaws, as we all do, but a

Friday 2/6/26 As it says. *** Want to see some prose, brothers and sisters? Sometimes I like to imagine that I'm in the MC5 and it's time to find out who is gonna be part of the problem and who is gonna be party of the solution and who is ready to testify!!! This story will be done soon. God knows I've put a ton of effort into it. It's for There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. I've had a slow start to the year, but I'm getting back on it. Which means, torrent time. I still haven'

Friday 2/6/26 On Wednesday, I walked to Charlestown, hoping that the Bunker Hill Monument would be open for the first time since the snow storm from a week and a half before. The weather had warmed up, too, with the temperature being thirty degrees. There was little wind, the sky mostly blue. I had walked to Charlestown four or five times since the storm, thinking I might be able to run my stairs there. On each of those visits, there were these two little drifts of snow--the

Thursday 2/5/26 Eddie House has become an abomination on the Celtics broadcast. His employment shows you how the powers-that-be in media think. They'll give a job to a player who was a fringe contributor, or a non-contributor, to a past champion team in that market, simply because he was on the roster. That's pathetic, right? It should insult your intelligence, but people are so dumb, and sports fans are usually so dumb, that it doesn't. People are too dumb to even recognize

Wednesday 2/4/26 A while ago I had alluded to this remarkable statistic I had discovered about Ted Williams. I get rather deep in the statistical weeds in my researches. The season-by-season stuff is one thing, but I like to go further. This isn't the stat I was referring to--we'll get to that in a minute--but this is the type of thing I mean. Ted Williams was formidable everywhere; that is, at home and on the road. If you're going to put up the career numbers he did--in term

Wednesday 2/4/26 I may not have written it here, but I erred conversationally in remarking to someone that Hockey East didn't have any teams in the top ten and there it was, late January. Providence was actually ranked ninth. I don't normally make mistakes like that. Wanted to get it right. Providence has moved up to seven this week, with Boston College sitting right outside the top ten at eleven, followed by UConn at twelve. A professor pal of mine in Maine thinks Providence

Tuesday 2/3/26 Not going to get into the background leading to this, but it's a letter to a young person who is going through something. Their parent has hurt me a great deal when I have always been there for them. I'm trying to keep the feelings I have on that score, and the knowledge thereof, separate. I don't want to not help someone even in some small way if I can. I'd feel guilty and that's not who I want to be. It isn't easy to compartmentalize sometimes. We need mental

Tuesday 2/3/26 What kind of monster do you have to be yourself to put out a book by an obvious monster like Neil Gaiman? But that's publishing, though, isn't it? And you can't look at it like, "The world would be a lesser place without this book, apart from the evil man," because that's not true either though, is it? The work of a such a writer doesn't add anything, really, to the world, or help make it a better place. The best it can be is a diversion, and we've already basi

Tuesday 2/3/26 Friday was the anniversary of the day I met my parents. Which is to say, the day they took me home from the adoption agency. My mom was telling me how hard it was to sleep the night before. She was talking about the joy I brought to her life, which I know is tempered by this awful qualifier, that I am in this position, have had what's been done to me done to me, and this isn't how it's supposed to go, how anything is supposed to go. This should be a time of on

Saturday 1/31/26 I'm going to say it was very obvious to just about everyone with a portion and/or remnant of a brain back in 2017--and way before that--that Jeffrey Epstein was one evil guy. It was, after all, in 2008 that he went to prison for procuring a child for prostitution. Procuring a child for prostitution. Should I say it a third time? Procuring a child for prostitution. Most people in publishing are evil. It takes me aback how naive people in general are when it co

Friday 1/30/26 Not everything can be known, but nothing is indescribable. That people would rather ascribe the qualities of a group to themselves than have their own individual qualities is something that is so strange to me. It shouldn't be that hard to be you. To have a you. You want to sit at the table as you, not a conglomerated representative. Views tend to be held collectively rather than individually. People don't even know they're doing it. They think they're thinking

Thursday 1/29/26 I have a list of the books I'm working on and a list of the books I plan to write. I'm always working on a number of books at once. In that latter group, is a book on the Who's Live at Leeds . This is an album that's paired fundamentally with who I am as a listener, and shaped me in my listening journey, going back to the first time I heard it, which I remember perfectly. A friend who lived at the bottom of my street--it was a hill--who was into music and art

Wednesday 1/28/26 Received the best news in a while the other day. My niece Amelia has a friend named Hattie, who had been diagnosed with cancer. The cancer spread. Hattie was a brave little girl, though, and kept doing her treatments as she went through this awful, awful, awful thing that no child should have to endure. Well, Hattie and her family went into Chicago this weekend so that she could ring the bell! I was so happy for her. I don't know this child, but I've thought

Wednesday 1/28/26 In Robert Bresson's 1956 film, A Man Escaped --a title with myriad meanings--a member of the French resistance named Fontaine is held prisoner by the Germans. Fontaine spends his days trying to structurally weaken the door of his cell by removing fibers of wood with a tool he fashioned. His fellow prisoners don't understand why he bothers. What it is he's doing. "I battle the door," Fontaine says, which says everything. Freedom in all its forms--internal and

Wednesday 1/28/26 Wilbur Wood, who was born in Cambridge, MA and attended Belmont High School, died recently. He was a fascinating player, the kind that used to be somewhat the norm, but that you no longer see in sports. Things in our society, at every level of society, now trend to blandness. There are fewer quirks, fewer people who stand out, less individuality, and this is how it works everywhere in in a world that keeps getting worse, including in sports. Take a look arou

Wednesday 1/28/26 I think one would be hard pressed at this point to deny that the 2025 New England Patriots are a very lucky team. Sometimes you get the breaks, but these Patriots seem to get all the breaks. Had C.J. Stroud not turned in one of the worst performances by an NFL quarterback in the history of the playoffs, the Patriots very well could have lost to the Texans. Before that, the Patriots got a ripe-for-the-picking LA team in Foxborough in January. That was a nice

Saturday 1/24/26 The locals are talking as though it's a forgone conclusion that the Patriots will beat Denver in Denver now that the Broncos must play their back-up quarterback, but this isn't my view. All single-elimination games are eminently losable for each side involved. Patriots fans don't seem to realize that their team very well could have lost if their opponent last week had gotten some historically bad quarterback play. That is, if the quarterback was merely bad, r

Saturday 1/24/26 Observing the incompetence at the ownership level in Buffalo in following from the dismissal of Sean McDermott is comical. There are very few people in the world who aren't terrible at their jobs. Why do they have what they have? Again: Other things. It's almost always other things than some ability they're supposed to have in keeping with their job or position. Whether you're an NFL owner, a university president, partner at the firm, radio host, a writer at

Saturday 1/24/26 Alcohol often makes dumb people dumber and loud people louder; given that many dumb people are also loud, or on the verge of being so, the grating effect for one who is forced to bear witness before they can get away--allowing this is possible--is all the greater. You can be a person who is normally quiet, too, who is nonetheless perpetually on the verge of being loud and displaying those prodigious stores of ignorance in all their glory and doesn't speak up

Monday 1/19/26 "Rot" in all its forms will be the word of the year. You can see it already. Started happening at the end of last year. First it was brain rot. Which is bad. So, of course, people do what people now do, and invert things. What's not funny is funny, what's immoral is moral, and so on. Hence, "rot" became a positive. Bad things are good now. Good things are either hated, feared, or not understood, or some combo. "Rotting on the couch all weekend is peak living"--

Monday 1/19/26 The Patriots defeated the Texans yesterday, which was good, but I didn't think the Patriots were all that good. Houston turned the ball over a lot. The Patriots turned the ball over a lot. And it could have been more, minus their own fumbles that they recovered. Would the Patriots have won if Houston shaved off two of those turnovers? I don't know. The Patriots won in large part because of how bad C.J. Stroud was. As I mentioned the other day, he's gotten worse

January 1/18/23 Dear Amelia, Every January I think, “Amelia has another birthday this month,” and then I start wondering if someone who has been a big girl for so long becomes a bigger girl every year or if it’s just your age that changes once you’re big. Hmmm. I’ll have to keep thinking about that. Maybe you know. I hope this is a great birthday for you and that every birthday you have is better than the last and on and on and on. I also hope you like the Boston Ball