Monday 3/16/26 This will sound impressive, but it wasn't actually as impressive as it sounds, because I had a hard time in the Bunker Hill Monument and it took quite a while--a lot longer than it should--and I was more uncomfortable by the end of everything than I ought to have been, such that I was moving back up my street Uncle Joe from Petticoat Junction  style ("That's Uncle Joe, he's a'movin kind of slow..."), but still, the numbers are the numbers and they look okay. I

Sunday 3/15/26 People say Charlie McAvoy is a great defenseman. They don't think  he is. People say so and so is a great writer. They don't think  they are. I italicized that word to emphasis its actual meaning. To actually think. Go about the mechanics of thinking and thinking through. Do you understand? People say things. They usually aren't thinking at all. They're not vetting for veracity. When they do think, it's about what they're meant to say. What they should say. Wha

Sunday 3/15/26 America: Where there's no problem so big that 5000 more photos of yourself can't solve it. Did it ever really happen if you didn't say that it did on social media? That's where reality comes from, right? Rubber stamp that reality! Most interests for most people come down to two things: the mouth and the genitals. What can I put in my mouth? What can I do with my genitals? And that's going to be it. They're not going to read something, listen to something, think

Saturday 3/14/26 I recently downloaded a high-definition copy of Joseph Losey's 1951 film, The Prowler , starring Van Heflin and Evelyn Keyes, with a script by an in-disguise Dalton Trumbo on account of his Hollywood blacklisting, and have been returning repeatedly to it. The Prowler is one of our best noirs, and to me it's a much better picture than 1944's Double Indemnity , with which it shares some plot points. The latter is often cited as the best noir of all, though it'

Saturday 3/14/26 Jaylen Brown needs to give it a rest with the referees. Anytime I see a clip of him, he's talking about the officiating. It takes away from his focus. College basketball makes for better watching than the NBA does right now. These conference tournaments before the big tournament make that plain. There's more flow to the game. The teams go up and down the court. It's a more physical game. The NBA needs to adopt a policy of letting more go. The problem is, the

Friday 3/13/26 Latest cheapie noir for me: Monogram’s Fall Guy from 1947, based on Cornell Woolrich’s bluntly titled story, “Cocaine.” Narcotics were an unusual subject for a film at the time. Here they’re under the surface, so to speak, but you know what’s what and it isn’t good. *** Stayed up late (for me) to watch the Celtics-Thunder game. What a tilt that was, even with White and Tatum out of the C's line-up. If Shai Gilgeous-Alexander gets to his spot around the free thr

Thursday 3/12/26 I'll be getting to the people in charge of Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series , these being the people to whom I proposed a book on stairs, who sent my email all around the country. Someone sent me a letter about them recently. I'll be burying these bigots. Exposing them in full, and making that their legacy, as such. I have a lot to get to. A lot to write. But I get to it. And when I bury you, I make sure I bury you right. I also bury you for all to see who

Wednesday 3/11/26 Presently I've made a request of myself for hours. To put in hours. The time. To keep moving and doing things that contribute to what I'm trying to do for hours. Lately I've just been killing hours. I haven't been alive. I've been giving in, not fighting, which is forcing myself to try. To keep trying. So that is my plan right now. Not working from lists of what needs doing. But to be moving again. To be using the hours. It was what I would call unseasonably

Tuesday 3/10/26 Whoa, what's going on here? It was two years ago that I gave up pizza. Why make a note of this? Why not? Have you tried to give up pizza? The spur for this decision was a fellow at the Golden Goose, which sounds like the start of an enchanted tale, but as I've mentioned before merely pertains to the market around the corner from me. This is the market where I acquire Swiss cheese, the only kind of cheese I will eat, because it's the rare cheese that is low in

Tuesday 3/10/26 I saw a headline for an article this morning about the relationship between alcohol and exercise. Specifically, can one exercise to a degree such that this exercise cancels out their alcohol consumption in terms of their fitness. Can the exercise win that race, if you will. I went to click on this article, but it was behind a paywall and why would one pay money for what is almost certainly to be formulaic writing that resembles the rest of the formulaic writin

Monday 3/9/26 I mentioned the Colorado Avalanche's power play earlier. Watched them go zero-for-five on the power play yesterday. All that skill and they don't score. No one wants to shoot the puck. It's strange and, I suspect, maddening for an Avalanche fan. They do many of these width-of-the-ice passes, like they're trying to create open net situations. It's way too finesse. They should get back to some basics and have someone--Makar--hammer it from up top. Don't be stagnan

Monday 3/9/26 An observation, but I think it's a telling one. I don't go to a gym, as is documented here about as thoroughly as possible with my writings about stairs. I understand that one may encounter people of many ages and body types at a gym. But as I'm outside, either running stairs, en route to running stairs, or walking the many miles I walk, the people I see who are running are almost always--with very rare exceptions--people who are in shape. I don't see overweight

Sunday 3/8/26 We speak so often of time, but nearly just as often we fail to consider--let alone understand--that time isn't necessarily about seconds, minutes, hours, years, decades, etc. It takes about an hour-and-a-half to listen to the complete recorded output of Blind Willie Johnson , but what does that mean? How is it not a hundred years' worth of time, and so on, in a different but real regard? We can do the same with word counts and fiction. Not all word counts are cr

Sunday 3/8/26 The Bruins got a much-needed two points yesterday in their matinee win at the Garden over the Capitals. They came into the day a point ahead of Columbus for the final Wild Card spot, with both teams having played the same amount of games (Columbus picked up a point in an OT loss later in the day, so the Bruins are now two points ahead). It's close to fifty-fifty, I'd say, whether the Bruins make the playoffs or not. You're going to need close to 100 points this

Saturday 3/7/26 The big sports story in Boston yesterday was the return of Jayson Tatum to the Celtics' line-up nearly ten months after he torn his Achilles tendon. I stayed up to see how this went. Obviously Tatum was rusty. Everything will be off. Your timing, your cardio. You could see that he wasn't fully trusting his leg, which makes sense. He'd favor the other one, try not to come down on the one he injured. Had a nice stat line of 15 points, 12 boards, 7 assists. So no

Thursday 3/5/26 People are starting to look like AI. Were it to be factually revealed that eighty percent of the profiles on the likes of Threads are AI, I wouldn't be surprised. I could see it being up to ninety percent. Yesterday I saw a guy--who I'm pretty sure wasn't AI, and just a typical American--asking if nuclear weapons were real, because if they were real, why didn't Russia just use them on the Ukraine and the US on Iran. So maybe they're just this made up thing and

Thursday 3/5/26 People have a bottomless reserve of cruelty. They can and will tap into this bottomless reserve of this over the slightest prompting, and the lightest perceived slight, which can be of their own mental making and not an actual slight. Nothing will potentially satiate their hate, their blood lust. They'll keep going, dishing out hate, rage, until they forget or move on to something else, because they're all very stupid and can't maintain focus. If and when the

Thursday 3/5/26 Fleming! You lazy, disgraceful log! What is wrong with you? What's more, with the warm weather about to settle in, yesterday may have marked the first day of the Monument being open without interruption. Okay, relax. I ran 5000 stairs at City Hall, walked six miles, did 100 push-ups. The plan all along had been to go about my stair-running business, not assume the Monument was going to be open, confirm that it was indeed open on their website, and return to ru

Wednesday 3/4/26 I like problem solving in writing. These things can be pleasingly disproportionate if you're working with something that's already matchless. That is, you take a sentence, for example, and you turn it into two, which allows you to drop a "because" so that you can use it later on in the second sentence, where you couldn't have before as you don't want it appearing twice in a sentence. Or, one word becomes another, and that new word plays off of a different ver

Wednesday 4/4/26 If Jayson Tatum is going to return to the Celtics this year, it has to be now. There are twenty or so games left. He'd only be playing a dozen or so of them I'd expect. The Celtics have won three in a row, the last two coming on a back-to-back. They rested Jaylen Brown and Neemias Queta in their last game against and still routed the Bucks. The game before, Queta had 27 points, 17 rebounds, 3 blocks, 2 assists, and a steal in 27 minutes. The best game of his

Tuesday 3/3/26 How serious are you really about the thing you say you do or are? I've learned that very few people have any idea what a hero is. A real hero. Operation Epic Fury sounds cartoonish, or like a rejected idea from a Star Wars script. You know, Death Star, Luke Starkiller (original name). If this were another regime you'd think that wasn't real, but given the powers that be you shrug at most given how well it tracks. Sounds so over-compensatory, too. Operation My P

Monday 3/2/26 Took the trash out at 3:40. Set the bag down, did twenty push-ups in hallway. Then, down the stairs to the street. Cold is back. Checked the temperature. 12 degrees. Did ten more push-ups downstairs by the mailboxes. Then ten more back upstairs. Drank some no-fat milk and hibiscus tea for my heart. Took my daily swig of virgin olive oil. Right from the bottle. I don't live in a proper home. That will be later if I ever do and my body isn't found here. Trying to

Sunday 3/1/26 She did say leaving and going away aren’t the same thing. She sounded ashamed when she said that, as if she was on the cusp of adding she only had herself to blame—you know, that intake of breath people do when they’re trying to be accountable, or else they border on incapable of knowing something isn’t their fault.             Then they suck that breath further back in, perk up and pass off whatever just happened as this fluky moment of weakness like stumbling

Sunday 3/1/26 March is here. Being the first of the month, today is as good a day as any to make sure that everything I do contributes to what I am trying to do. No wasted movement, wasted time, wasted energy. If it doesn't help the cause, it shall not be done. A download can help the cause, a swallow of milk for the blood pressure, in addition to the completed story, the written words, the work on the book. Only things that can contribute, nothing else. That's the plan. An e