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

Tuesday 9/1/26 Yesterday I had mentioned Lou Merloni's illogical response during the NESN TV broadcast to the Yankees' Jazz Chisholm stealing a base against the Red Sox with his team up by six runs and then later learned about and listened to the audio of Red Sox radio play-by-play guy Will Flemming, whom I also recently touched in in these pages, showing you what an unprofessional, talentless, fool he is with how he reacted to the same thing, and a racist as well. Flemming i

Monday 8/31/26 Tom Caron brought up this maxim he has on the postgame show yesterday that a team can likely make up no more than a game a week. Thus, with the calendar being what it is, and the Red Sox being as many games back as they are, they're unlikely to catch the Yankees now. This seems a somewhat arbitrary designation to me. You win three in a row, they lose three in a row--a perfectly normal thing to happen--and boom, there's three weeks in three days. But I didn't an

Monday 8/31/26 Maybe if you said "master class" a thousand more times? People are now sufficiently lacking in language skills--and they have so few words at their disposal--that they've taken to putting extra letters in words in an attempt to convey different meanings. Sometimes a brighter person does this in a playful way, but that's not usually why it happens. Vidal Sassoon remarked that the only place success comes before work is in the dictionary, an incredibly naive thin

Sunday 8/30/26 The Rubber Soul(s) of Grateful Dead shows: the Dream Bowl gigs from Vallejo on 2/21-22/69, among the most important they ever played for the pathways they opened. The two Dark Stars are both fully realized works of musical art and portals. There was "before" these two versions, and now there will be "after." The famous Fillmore West rendition from Live/Dead was played a several days later, but the fresh flag had already been planted. History-shaping shows. On 8

Sunday 8/30/26 The Red Sox aren't having the greatest go of it in the Bronx. Everyone said they'd get killed on Friday night with their middle-of-the-pack pitcher matching up against the Yankees' Cy Young favorite, but as is so typically the case, I had a different view/expectation. You'll often see a guy go beyond his normal level in these types of match-ups, and the other guy, with the pressure to "win easily," doesn't win at all, or barely, or leaves with a no-decision. Bu

Friday 8/28/26 I read quite a few accounts of the teaching life from teachers. Today I was reading about evaluations, when someone comes into the classroom to observe how well the teacher is teaching. These are largely farcical, but also telling about where we're at in terms of a post-reality, post-truth world where there's no discernment. People aren't capable of discerning what anything is, having made themselves this way, and then made certain to ensure that can never chan

Thursday 8/27/26 I've spent the last few hours working more on "Hero of Mine." Hopefully I'm finally done. Going to step back for a while and tend to some other things, after I run some stairs first, then I'll revisit the story later today or tomorrow. I work on things as long as I do because I know how good they are and I don't want that to be diminished the tiniest amount. Their quality obligates me to do my absolute best by them. This is the first page plus a little bit mo

Wednesday 8/26/26 I need to crank some nonfiction pieces. Film, music, op-eds. I've spent most of today working on "Hero of Mine" for The Penguin Didn't Have Any Hot Chocolate: Anytime Bedtime Stories. There is no one who can come anywhere close to the level of this prose. To reach that height in what is at least in part a children's book--and the wisest book for adults--is otherwise unbelievable. Shouldn't be possible. It's taken all my ability and all these decades of const

Wednesday 8/26/26 One should read more Zola. "But I don't read any Zola!" you cry. Well, this is all the easier then. The Masterpiece (1886) would work. Van Gogh liked it and so can you. Blind Willie McTell's cut his last session in September 1956 and it happened almost accidentally on his part. McTell was playing for quarters on the street in Atlanta. Record store manager Edward Rhodes invited McTell into his shop to record some songs. McTell asked Rhodes not to release the

Wednesday 8/26/26 It is so comfortable outside yesterday in Boston. I don’t want to be lulled into a false sense of security that summer and its weather are over, wary of their sticking power as I am, but I have renewed hope as a detester of both. The dew point was in the 50s for what feels like the first time in months and maybe is. I shall send a prayer the Great Pumpkin’s way. Wasn't necessarily going to be a stair day, but I'd been working for a while and had become restl

Tuesday 8/25/26 I read an article about what happens if you stop working out. It was sobering. What's troubling is how fast a person can undo what they've spent so long building up. The article discussed how one's mental state worsens, anxiety deepens, stress increases and doesn't dissipate, and self-image falters, as well as the physical side of the equation. Your body composition changes two weeks after you stop working out. Obviously this means more depending on where you'

Tuesday 8/25/26 Red Sox ground out another win. Nothing pretty, not that it matters. Get ‘em any way you can here in the fleeting days of summer. Ranger Suarez wasn’t sharp again. 4 walks in 5 innings. Didn’t matter last night, but will in October. Also surrendered 4 hits and hit 2 guys. That's a ton of traffic on the base paths. Somehow the Marlins only scored the one run against him. The Sox weren't any better, going 1-for-14 with runners in scoring position. Ugly number. S

Monday 8/24/26 I was wrong about the Red Sox fans applauding Rafael Devers, which is what I thought they'd do during his first at-bat of the weekend series. That's often how it works if it wasn't some beloved player or just a fan favorite, and Devers was neither. You get cheered your first time at the dish, then maybe you get booed or at least vocally rooted against. But they booed him from the first. Quite a nice weekend for the Red Sox, finishing off the sweep of the Giants

Monday 8/24/26 I wasn't as productive as I should have been work-wise over the weekend (there are no weekends here as others think of them) but a few important matters (in terms of what the art actually is) were taken care of. Meanwhile, on the stair front, which is both its separate thing and something that plays a part in keeping me here and strong enough to endure and create the art, I did a pretty good job over the two days. On Saturday, I walked to Charlestown and ran te

Sunday 8/23/26 The Giants are a bad ball club, but I still thought that was a great win (which meant their second series win in a row) for the Red Sox last night, coming back from 2-0 in the bottom of the ninth and walking it off, especially after what could have been a really demoralizing eighth inning when they had the bases loaded with nobody out and failed to score. That showed resiliency. Was also nice that the Sox did this against the knuckle-dragging Giants pitcher who

Saturday 8/22/26 I'm on cramp watch. Been hydrating like mad. Got some pickles in case I have need of the juice. After Monument-based activities finally wrapped up today I went down to the Starbucks and had a double espresso. All things being equal, this is my favorite coffee drink and perhaps my favorite drink of all. The older kids returned home to Illinois from Rhode Island. I sent my sister a text saying to welcome them back for me, and also to say hello to Amelia who, up

Saturday 8/22/26 I was sitting outside the Starbucks reading yesterday. An attractive woman was walking down the street so that it was like she was coming in front of me because of how I was facing and would then pass me by. I was looking around and she looked right in my eyes and smiles at me. There was a pillar, and she passed from one side to the other, and when she emerged she looked at me again, continuing to smile. And I looked down, as if I were shy. I don't know why I

Friday 8/21/26 There isn't an audience for intelligence. There's an audience for mediocrity. For stupidity. For crassness. For childishness. For shrillness. For unoriginality. For done-to-death. But there isn't an audience for intelligence. People see that word "intelligence" and they associate it with "hard to understand" and "That will require effort" and "That thing is necessarily boring." But whether a thing is stupid or intelligent, they don't understand anyway. People d