Thursday 11/20/25 Phoned my mother on Wednesday after not speaking with her for a while to see how she is doing/feeling. People treat me in ways I don't deserve--no one would--to be treated. In a sense, I have no one. In the case of my mother, I know she loves me, and she is certainly there for me in some ways, but not in others. My work is central to the latter. And my situation, which is too painful for her, I think, to deal with. She wants me to be okay, but because she ca

Thursday 11/20/25 It's impossible to underestimate how much people now want to hear themselves talk, to go and go and go as long as they can manage to go before someone else stops them or walks away, like they are some expert as they say the most basic, mundane things. They always have time for this. If they can talk straight for fifteen minutes in such a fashion, they will. By "talk," I also mean online commentary. The idea that we are so busy is one of the great lies of our

Thursday 11/20/25 I used to see--because I'd take a gander, and then I never had to again--people I had dated who describe themselves as a writer in their social media bio and on LinkedIn, which is hilarious, and a lie, because none on them wrote or write any more than your cat does. It's just this thing people say about themselves in their brokenness to the extent that nearly everyone, it seems, says it, and have no compunction or reservation or shame in doing so (well, unle

Wednesday 11/19/25 Anyone who uses and favors the line, "Language is fluid," will be, at best, on the verge of illiteracy, and the line is their attempt to cover this up while also deflecting criticism towards someone else who is literate or that they fear is literate. No person with a basic grasp of grammar and spelling--and that's leaving out the knowledge of what very basic words mean--will say this line, which is one of those lines that is said many, many, many times--whe

Monday 11/17/25 The Bunker Hill Monument reopened at last on Saturday. I had showered and eventually set off for Charlestown for what was intended mostly as a reconnaissance mission, as I wasn't confident that the Monument would be open after having been closed the two prior days, but it was, so at about 1:15 I got the word to go in (people had been there right at one o'clock when they opened, and only twenty-five people are allowed inside at once) and did five circuits in a

Sunday 11/16/25 The Patriots can win the Super Bowl this year. Wait, what? I'm the one saying this? Mr. Very Critical of the Patriots? I am! Every team in the league is flawed and suspect. The league lacks for iron. The recipe for winning at present is the quarterback, limiting your mistakes, and being "good" by letting the other team make more mistakes than you that play a large or significantly costly role in their own defeat. Those mistakes, coupled with decisive plays by

Friday 11/14/25 I was at the CVS the other day, where a couple of humans are employed just for the purpose of unlocking those barriers on the shelves so you can get a tube of toothpaste or jar of mixed nuts. I get those things online, because I'm not going to go to a store, press a button, wait until someone turns up, then head to another aisle, press a button, wait, etc. Anything I get at CVS has to be something that's not under lock and key. Anyway, it's almost entirely sel

Friday 11/14/25 I know someone who is a serial liar. They've lied to me thousands of times in the time I've known them, and that isn't an exaggeration. This person has gone on about how I can trust them, but there is no one I trust less (and I am someone all alone) or who, given context, what they know about me and what I'm up against and what my life is, has hurt me more. They've said, all passionately, "I'd help you bury the body," as to how far they'd go for me, which is k

Wednesday 11/12/25 Trying to get a number of things up on here pertaining to music, film, art, literature, sports, the world, life, the Beatles, horror, the Grateful Dead. It's a lot. That's why there hasn't been Everything wrong with publishing entries and prose offs , because when these other things are done, it's going to be a bloodbath in these pages as per publishing and assorted people therein. I'm trying to clear the decks, because the bloodbath will be taking the flo

Tuesday 11/11/25 Unfucking real piece of work. I'm getting close to done. Each page goes an uncountable number of pages deep. Tired for wasted years, more tired looking for what’s hard to believe exists and investing in it all the same. Saving up for the babysitter to go out on another date that’s bound to be bad. I half expect this girl who is nice and very put together and brings her AP homework and who has raised her rate a second time in the last year to say, “That’s capi

Tuesday 11/11/25 I saw Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street from 1953 at the Brattle Sunday. First time I've seen it on the big screen. It was 4K DCP rather than 35mm. I'm more of a stickler than others are as to what constitutes film noir. Others familiar with the term apply it liberally to basically any black and white B-movie crime picture from the 1940s and 1950s. Most of those films aren't what I think of as noir. In my view, you need a femme fatale. Fatalism must be

Tuesday 11/11/25 As it says. This is very good. No film writing like it. Done this morning. And yet, no one feels quite as blameless as Lon Cheney’s Larry Talbot from 1941’s The Wolf Man . The first Karloff Frankenstein film is a cautionary tale, but The Wolf Man is tragedy, the first and best horror film in this sundered vein. You’d think with all the untimely deaths that the tragic would be more in evidence with horror, but it’s always been something of a surprising rarity

Monday 11/10/25 Strong work this morning on a masterpiece of a story. Hard, intense work. These stories go so deep. Every shape of every letter in them is playing a major part. This isn't even writing. It's something else. Many things have been published lately. I haven't gotten into any of that in this journal. The News section hasn't been updated yet either. Ran 3000 stairs in the rain at City Hall. Did 100 push-ups. The tree is up at Faneuil Hall sans lights. But it's ther

Monday 11/10/25 It's hard to to believe that there's anything public-facing in Boston--out in the open, I mean, that you happenstancely become aware by going about your day--that is run worse than the MBTA. Late yesterday morning I walked to Charles MGH to get the Red Line to Harvard in order to attend a screening at the Brattle. I left early because I thought maybe I'd make a quick stop at the Harvard Art Museums, or, if the timing didn't work out, just sit and read my book

Sunday 11/9/25 People make so many excuses for themselves and they want you to make them, too--as in honor their excuses as legitimate reasons; reasons which cannot be overcome. The drama people inject into their claims of what they say they cannot do is maximalist. Every mountain there ever was is piled on their back to hear them tell it. They don't have a second to so much as blink. Trust me , they seem to say, my stuff is different than everyone else's . No one has ever ha

Sunday 11/9/25 It's four in the morning. I need to head out soon to run stairs. None yesterday. 6000 on Friday (which I believe is the most I've done taking two-stairs-at-a-time without stopping at City Hall), as well as 200 push-ups, and eight miles walked. As I write this, there are these loud, drunken idiots--adults--in North Square who have been outside for a couple hours trying to...what...impress each other? Pair up for their sloppy hook ups? At the moment it's forty de

Saturday 11/8/25 Somehow the Bruins are 9-7, which is better than one would have expected in all probability through that many games. They have won three in a row, lost six in a row, and are currently on a five-game winning streak. In other words, streaky. My hope for the team heading it this year was that they were competitive and fought for a playoff spot, perhaps grabbing one of the last two Wild Card spots. To do so, I figured they'd have to be a pain to play against. Pla

Tuesday 11/4/25 As it says. Hello, sister of mine— I wanted to send you something better than just the card also contained in this envelope for your birthday. Cards are weird to me. The idea of paying for someone else’s stock words to serve as a stand-in for my own. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense from my point of view, and I end up reading these cards that make me think, “Wait, I don’t believe that” or something along those lines. But I had something here that I think is

Monday 11/3/25 That was an amazing Game 7 on Saturday night to close out the World Series. I guess I'm unsure how serious Blue Jays fans are as Blue Jays fan in a way I'm not with Red Sox, Yankees, and Cubs fans, but that had to hurt. I wouldn't say the Jays choked. But the chances were so close to zero that the Dodgers were going to win that game, and they needed like a half dozen very improbably things to happen--and every last one of those things--to somehow win that game.

Monday 11/3/25 Walking across a bridge from Allston to Cambridge over the Charles on Saturday--the same bridge that Quentin Compson jumped from to his death in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury --I was struck by how autumnal the scene looked, particularly the trees near the banks. The leaves had all changed color, but most had yet to fall, while others that already had blew about near my feet. Similarly, when I took the train back later, the sun hit the water in the expanse o

Saturday 11/1/25 We're officially in November now, but the spooky season has a long ways to go, and besides, that season is always in attendance as far as I'm concerned, and I don't like to be beholden to the calendar anyway. I'm just as apt to watch a Christmas film in mid-February as I am to look forward to Halloween in late November. The spirit of the thing is the thing for me, not the date of the thing. November 1 is a day of Halloween hangover, and it extends if it happe

Friday 10/31/25 As I mentioned earlier, my niece Lilah has a journal for school in which the kids write a letter to someone each Friday and then that person writes them back. This time she wrote to me and I had to respond by yesterday. I was so glad to get a letter from Lilah even if she doesn't know how to spell my name because I admire her very much. This is what she said: And this was my letter back to her: Dear best pal/niece Lilah, Thank you for your letter—it is so nice

Thursday 10/30/25 Mookie Betts followed up his postgame homophobic comment with his latest postseason choke job. He's never been good when it matters the most. Some guys just don't have the stomach for pressure. To take two out of three in LA--and it could have been all three--after losing that first game in eighteen innings--is really impressive on the part of Toronto. The Dodgers can still win. But momentum is very much in the Blue Jays' favor. Their place will be ready and

Thursday 10/30/25 Another result of "living" life behind screens is that people are more cowardly than ever. Most are too frightened to be themselves. What ought to be the slightest things--like showing another person how one honestly feels--are now too much of a risk to take on. A result is that a person who is not a coward, and who is aware of what that other person is doing and why, will simply have no respect or regard for them, and a kind of disgust over how small and we