Thursday 9/17/26 Walking down the street to the cafe late this afternoon. Two girls are in front of me with their dad. One girl describes her homework. She actually sounds kind of into it. She wants to talk about it, anyway. Dad says, “Can’t you just use AI?” There it is. That's how this goes. He had no idea why she'd want to do the work if she didn't have to. Why she'd want to think. Or why she should. You can't overstate either the problem of parenting in this world right n

Thursday 9/17/26 This is quite good. Will also be in the horror film book. The Skeleton Dance is some five minutes long, but in terms of cultural impact, it might as well have no end. Certain works are always running, after a fashion. Two black cats stand atop headstones, hissing and spitting at each other. From beneath the marker between them emerges our first skeleton, of which there will be four—don’t want to oversaturate the screen with bones. These masterful early Disney

Wednesday 9/16/26 I saw the loveliest woman this afternoon. Saturday was a dangerous day. Maybe I'll touch on that in here later. I struggled to come through. The last two days, though, I've done a nice job working and that has helped get me by. Lot of hours, and the work has been strong, so I decided I could go down to the Starbucks and read for a while (the Three Investigators and Rupert Brooke; not in the same book, of course; we never did get the boys from Rocky Beach pai

Wednesday 9/16/26 Doing this quickly. I have things to write. Don't need to set this one up much. Everyone who sees this will see it for what it is, this system for how it really works, and the immeasurable gap in ability between these two writers. Mary Gaitskill has received a Guggenheim. She has been a fiction finalist for the National Book Award. Her short stories appear regularly in Best American Short Stories. Her fiction runs in The New Yorker, Harper's, The Paris Revie

Wednesday 9/16/26 As I mentioned, I read quite a few testimonials by teachers from kindergarten through college. You see where things are headed in terms of thinking, reading, learning, and how dire the situation is, with not only no help forthcoming, but things becoming worse and worse. These teachers have no chance. The manner in which most children are raised precludes any schooling from making a difference at all in helping to educate them. The majority aren't read to and

Tuesday 9/15/26 But no one is ever going to write any prose better than this. I'm putting this here simply because it's from what I'm working on now in the revised "Dead Thomas" and "Fitty" for There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. The intensity of these two stories, and the impact of being deep within the presence of both at the same time is overwhelming. These are works that make me feel more alive than anything else I have experienced in my life. Not as their author, but in the

Tuesday 9/15/26 Payton Tolle threw a so-called immaculate inning--three strikeouts on nine pitches--during the top of the first the other night at Fenway. I was happy for Tolle who was noticeably excited to have done this (he even smiled before firing his last pitch). He was a bright spot for the Red Sox this season when they were scarce. I like how he carries himself, his attitude, and he seems bright. Immaculate Innings are things that people who don't know much about baseb

Monday 9/14/26 I got a haircut today. You have to schedule an appointment. I got there early. Another man was still having his hair cut. He and the barber were quite friendly. They were similar guys in a number of ways. Spoke the same way, looked the same way. They shook hands at the end, and the man said he'd be back in three weeks. I find that people get a hair cut every two or three weeks. That isn't something I can afford. They raised the price again recently, too. I go e

Monday 9/14/26 You can often tell everything you'll ever need to know about people by how they close doors behind them. A person who slams doors (and gates) will be someone who doesn't think, doesn't read, cares not a whit for art, never introspects, doesn't think of others, isn't perceptive, isn't attuned to environments, is unfeeling, coarse, insensitive, can't hear and understand music well, is incapable of empathy, doesn't do nuance, fails to discern, cares mostly only ab

Monday 9/14/26 It was drizzling as I walked to Charlestown yesterday to run stairs. Few people were out. A gray day. One doesn't necessarily associate autumn with such days--there is, after all, that sunlight filtered through the altered colors of the leaves (which are still green here, though one does see more leaves gathered or blowing at the sides of the streets beneath the levels of the curbs)--but it felt autumnal indeed, though not that cool and somewhat humid. I took a

Sunday 9/13/26 Ranger Suarez was good for the Red Sox for his second start in a row. The team has been in what I'll call a liminal funk, existing in this state somewhere between locked-in-positional place re: postseason seeding and the start of said postseason. Now, you can always collapse until you can't (that is, magic number is gone), but that feels especially unlikely given this is now a league of middlers. Look, for instance, at the Toronto Blue Jays, who only need to be

Friday 9/11/26 I regard people who make 9/11 jokes as being dead inside. Inhuman humans. Incapable of empathy. Most people aren't empathetic, because empathy requires imagination and effort. You have to decide to try and use your mind to go into someone else's life and experience and feel what that feels like. Empathy doesn't just happen. It's consciously strove for. On a day like today, the twenty-fifth anniversary of 9/11, you can't escape the imagery and the testimonies un

Friday 9/11/26 A.J. Brown is out for four weeks for the Patriots. You know what that means? Lost season. It means A.J. Brown is unlikely in a seventeen-game season to even clear 1000 yards receiving. Let's say he comes back in four games. How long before he feels right? How long before he's in sync with Drake Maye if he ever is? This was your big, important move. This is what you staked so much of the upcoming season on. This guy. And already it's almost certain he won't work

Friday 9/11/26 I saw an interview this morning from back in 2001 of Donald Trump at Ground Zero in NYC. He has lied, of course, about what he was doing back then. Needing to be rescued himself, then saving people. Whatever else he's said. He's always been a liar. Most people are liars. Including the people who go on about Donald Trump being a liar. Many lie so naturally that they don't know they do it. People simply say things. They'll say what gets them what they want. What

Thursday 9/10/26 Rough and discouraging loss for the Patriots last night in their season opener against the Seahawks in Seattle. Sam Darnold went down early, so the Patriots were playing most of the game against the Seahawks' back-up quarterback and they still couldn't get it done. Drake Maye was terrible, throwing three interceptions in the fourth quarter, including one off of his back foot, while running, late in the game deep in Seattle territory with the Pats trailing 13-

Wednesday 9/9/26 People don't want to be alone. That's usually the reason why they're together. Everything is about something else--other things--than the thing it purports to be. That book didn't win that award because it was the best book when it was instead any other mediocre book, which is to say, given what the median now is, a bad book. It won because of other things. Those people aren't together because of their abiding bond, but rather other things. The purported reas

Tuesday 9/8/26 On Saturday I was coming back down the stairs of the Bunker Hill Monument after having gone up them ten times, and there was a woman who had just fainted. She was with her husband who was trying to steady her. You could tell from her eyes that she wasn't quite all the way back yet from where she'd gone. I stopped, of course, and tried to help. They weren't far from the top, so I relayed that information and told them to wait there and I'd go and tell a ranger a

Tuesday 9/8/26 Starting to feel more confident in saying that the issue from the summer wasn't me but the humidity. I'd been worried that I'd backslid. That's a credo here--not to backslide in any regard. In my art, my character, my fitness of mind, soul, and body. I felt limited at times this summer--tamped down. We'll still have to see how I do as autumn comes on. I need to see some improvement in my stair running with my wind and legs. I have some goals to try and achieve

Monday 9/7/26 Was saddened yesterday to learn about the passing at age ninety-five of Joe Morgan, author of Morgan Magic, one of the greatest summers in Red Sox history back in 1988. A long life, seemingly well lived. That team was overmatched against the Oakland A's in the ALCS, but goodness was that summer stretch exciting, joy in the form of mid-season baseball. Morgan famously--at least around these parts--hailed from Walpole. I always found it interesting that he never m

Monday 9/7/26 55 degrees in Boston in the early hours of Labor Day 2026. Comfortable. The big morning swig of olive oil for the heart. Another morning in which I have the Fugs' "The Rhapsody of Tuli" stuck in my head. "Hypothalamus Hypothalamus Hypothalamus/That's the brain for me..." Finally went to the post office to mail "Hero of Mine" to Lilah on Saturday after running stairs. From F. Scott Fitzgerald's poem, "Thousand-and-First Ship," one of my favorite works of his, fro

Friday 9/4/26 Haymarket: Where nouns are pluralized on signs with apostrophes (orange's) and men in their sixties address each other as "kid." But: got a large bunch of green bananas there today for $1. Can't do better than that, can you? You want to eat bananas before they ripen. They're better for you then. I'm not messing with you. Look it up. Trying to eat a banana a day for my heart. Something about the first sentence of "Fitty" was figured out today while I was walking

Thursday 9/3/26 Sports are simple. You should be able to understand them if they're something you follow. I don't mean if they're something that constitute the whole of your interests as such because you're that underdeveloped as a person and your mind as a functioning apparatus is on the level of a blinking light bulb, which is the case with so many people. And yet, somehow, these people often have no clue about the most basic aspects of those sports, never mind their histor

Wednesday 9/2/26 I've been writing a lot. None of it's done. This is from a piece on back-to-school horror films. *** David (Derrel Maury) is the new boy at Central High which his old pal Mark (Andrew Stevens) already attends. They were together somewhere else once where David helped Mark out. This is a reunion of friends and Mark wants to make David feel welcome, which at Central High takes the form of school being as easy as possible, with the cool kids able to do whatever

Wednesday 9/2/26 People often confuse getting along with someone with closeness. There's someone with whom you joke. Your back-and-forth is easy. It isn't hard being in their company. You don't feel like you're lifting weights. You don't disagree. Or fight. No stress, no risk in calling them up and chatting for fifteen minutes between weekend tasks about the playoff game last night or if they're over that cold or how Sally's birthday party went. But this isn't indicative of c