Sunday 5/17/26 If a person isn't a good friend, they won't be a good anything of significance in any matters of human significance. Whether that's as a parent, a spouse, a person for others, an artist, or to themselves. Friendship is this term that holds and means all these other things and values. We can't get caught up in the notion that it's merely two people in some kind of platonic dynamic who are agreeable to each other. That's a disservice. People reading the above wil

Sunday 5/17/26 Anthony Edwards going over to the Spurs players to congratulate them on eliminating his team with eight minutes left in the game is flooring to me, and I don't mean in the creating-that-surface-under-your-feet sense. Speaks to where the world is. All these details do. The devil of these declining times inhabits each of them. The Montreal Canadiens had the Buffalo Sabres right where they wanted them: up 3-2 in the series, Game 6 in Montreal, the place amped and

Saturday 5/16/26 Another Red Sox loss, in ten innings this time, by a score of 3-2. They got the pitching as has been the norm, and couldn't mount an attack, as is especially the norm. Jarren Duran, batting lead-off yet again, went 0-for-3, but he did walk once...after which he was then picked off. This guy. The season is six months long. We're a month and a half in. He's hitting in the .170s. They have others as bad. It's a Triple A line-up. The Sox practically need to shut

Friday 5/15/26 For the Red Sox to win, they basically need, or have needed, two things to happen: strong starting pitching (or the facsimile thereof, as when Bello enters in the second) through six innings, and they have to score first. The Red Sox have failed to score a run for a starter thirteen times this season with nine of those thirteen times happening at Fenway. Quite the stat. The pitching has actually been good enough for them to be a good team. In May its been espec

Thursday 5/14/26 Do you know what a snake ball is? Perhaps you've seen one on a hike or in some nature video. It's what it sounds like: A big old ball of snakes writhing together under some ledge or within a hollow of rocks. Very in keeping with the connected people and the powers that be of publishing. The human (for lack of a better term) version of a snake ball. A challenge when you write about and expose some of these people is that you're rarely just writing about one of

Thursday 5/14/26 The Red Sox picked up a rare Fenway Park win last night, beating the Phillies 3-1. This seems to be the only way these Sox can prevail: hold the opponent to next to nothing or shut them out, and scratch across 1, 2, 3 runs. Maybe get a homer or two--like they did from Trevor Story and Ceddanne Rafaela in this ballgame--but not usually. Worth mentioning from the historical standpoint per the Sox' series-opening loss on Tuesday: their first nine batters were re

Wednesday 5/13/26 This is a letter to some people I know from early this afternoon. Among the most depressing things I see now are accounts in teaching subreddits from teachers, as to their experiences in classrooms. And their experiences now, versus in times past. It's just going to get worse unless there's some drastic sea change. I don't need these instructors to tell me this. These accounts, though, of children--high school kids included--who can't do anything for themsel

Wednesday 5/13/26 The Great Gildersleeve has quickly become one of my favorite classic radio programs. The character was spun off from the Fibber McGee and Molly show, and tweaked and given a different back story and life situation. On his own program, he's the "parent" to his orphaned niece and nephew. You have to give it some time to pull you in, to get to know these people and how they know and care about and interact with each other. The show is all about the relationship

Wednesday 5/13/26 Was correct about the Avalanche winning the other night. If one goes through this record, one will find that most of these predictions are correct. Had I stood to gain by them being so--that is, were I were a bettor--I'd lose, but someone else could go by what I write down that I think will happen and make a profit. You know, if you wanted to use my predictions like a gambling service. Minnesota doesn't have the horses to be taking consecutive games against

Wednesday 5/13/26 Had another nightmare about Molly last night. We were walking in a parking lot and then stopped, and I was pledging my love to her. Why I was doing this in a dream I don't know. It could be a combination of how I actually felt, combined with how awful things are now, and who I am now. My days are themselves worse than nightmares. They feel like nightmares where you're desperate to wake up. That's my status quo. My reality. My nightmares in the traditional se

Monday 5/11/26 I thought the Sixers might extend their series against the Knicks before getting crushed in Game 5 back at Madison Square Garden, but they put up little resistance and were crushed at home instead. Are the Knicks that good? How did the Sixers come back from 3-1 on the Celtics? Was the Celtics' record a mirage? There's overachieving, yes, but can you overachieve by fifteen or so wins? I guess. But if that's what New York did to Philadelphia, what would they have

Sunday 5/10/26 Was listening to episodes of Dark Fantasy this morning. Ran from November 1941 to June 1942 out of Oklahoma City. Very garrulous, sometimes comically so. The trick with radio drama, ironically, is not to be too gabby, but I have a soft spot for this program. "Pennsylvania Turnpike" is one of my all-time favorite radio episodes on account of the scene at the roadside store/eatery with the traveler and the proprietor who serves him coffee and gives him the free h

Saturday 5/8/26 Dennis Johnson was the editor of the independent press Melville House. He's an egomaniacal tyrant. It isn't hard to find people who worked for him who have plenty of reasons to loathe him. Once I sent him a book I'd written in the form of a file attached to an email. He writes me back saying he's a massive fan of my work, but there's no attachment. There was, of course, but these people are often helpless. When they screw up as is their wont, you have to take

Saturday 5/9/26 You see all these posts of people doing the generation thing. I don't like any of this. The forfeiting of identity in favor of group-based identity. You should be you and you alone. When I see the "You know you're Generation X..." people doing the thing they constantly do, I know all I need to know about that person. They aren't a person. Not as I'd define a person. They are not a "you." They are a "them." I'm interested in the past only insofar as it informs

Saturday 5/9/26 Yesterday I was talking to a ranger about how various things tend to go when I'm inside the Bunker Hill Monument. We really do see so much of how society is now, how people are in this world, how they think, how they act, why they do what they do, who is put forward, who gets kept back, shunned, kept down, who is favored, who is despised, within the walls of this obelisk. I was telling the ranger that my tendency isn't to pass people--as in, ask for them to le

Friday 5/8/26 Mike Vrabel was basically living a secret double life with his real significant other--in his mind, I'm sure--and with whom he likely has a child or two. Family number two. A bigamist without being a bigamist technically. Reminds me of Ida Lupino's 1953 film The Bigamist with Edmond O'Brien, who totally could play Vrabel if he came back to life. These people are so arrogant. Going around, doing that, thinking you're untouchable. The absence of morals and charact

Friday 5/8/26 I had a nightmare last night about James Taranto, opinion editor of The Wall Street Journal. Oneiric Taranto said to me, "I'll show you! I'm going to lash out at you for starting an email by asking how I was doing!" To which I said, "You already did that." Then he said, "Damn. Okay, then I'm going to bully you by telling you how awful you are at writing op-eds as I publish many of them but I'm just going to keep saying this and saying it." To which I replied, "Y

Friday 5/8/26 Catching up on recent efforts regarding health. Last week I didn't run stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument on Wednesday, then ran five circuits each of the next four days for a week's total of twenty. Walked three miles on each of these days and did 100 push-ups as well. I have not drank which has been more of a challenge--or more of a something--given where I am and in that things are even darker, even harder, which ought not to be possible given what they alrea

Thursday 5/7/26 A letter from today. The op-eds are shorter there now, so I have to do a second version of a piece, but was able to move this Mother's Day thing to the NY Daily News. The piece is about the art of a mother's love and how the best art is in some ways feminine/maternal. There Is No Doubt, obviously. But what I'm talking about includes all-male things, too. You'll see. It's in the piece. Ranger was waiting for me at the Monument today to give me a talking to

Thursday 5/7/26 I saw a video of a Sixers fan leaving Madison Square Garden in which a Knicks fan, in the middle of a hostile throng, ripped at the jersey he was wearing. Assaulted him, that is. It was wall-to-wall with people. They crowd was on the verge of swallowing this guy up. People commenting condemned this behavior. I look at this and I see what losers people are. These were adults. Rotund adults, often. Adults of various ages. Middle aged adults. How do you get like

Wednesday 5/6/26 I was watching Roger Clemens' first 20 strikeout game the other day from April 1986. He falls behind in counts quite a bit early in that game which could have gone differently for him, I feel, rather easily. Like if he had walked the first two batters, as he nearly did. But he struck them out. Fastball after fastball. Just throwing heat. Sometimes the curve. What a fastball it was, though. One of the best ever. The delivery was beautiful. The perfect pitcher.

Wednesday 5/6/26 Over the last week plus I've been revising "Fitty," as I make a push on There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. "Still Good" was finished the other day, after sixteen months of work on it, and "Dead Thomas" will be finished in the next day or two or three, after five years of work. If I'm not going to be here for the natural duration, I want this book to at least exist as itself. The same goes if I am going to be here for the natural duration. But that isn't where I'

Wednesday 5/6/26 I wonder if we're going to have a couple of cake walking babies from home--to use an old jazz term--in the Colorado Avalanche and Oklahoma City Thunder as they coast to championships. They haven't met much resistance yet. The Avalanche poured on another five goals last night and the Thunder won again against zero postseason losses. It's still early and things can change fast. I'm starting to wonder, though, if the Thunder can have a 16-2, 16-1 type of postsea

Monday 5/4/26 Baseball box scores have always been special spaces to me. They were an unchanging--because they were always what they needed to be--informational treasure box of sorts. You could read the a game, so to speak, if you knew how. A 1907 box score, a 1951 box score, a 1986 box score, a 2020 box score all served to show how connected the game was over the course of its eras. A game that had "lived" through so much in the world, but here was a constant, the box score.