Tuesday 8/4/26 People in film noir excel at telling long stories after they’ve been shot and are dying. Their voices are cracked and fading at first, but then they're able to use their normal speaking voice for the next seventy minutes before the cracked and fading voice returns for a final sentence or two and they expire. They also have time/strength to make bitter jokes as asides during the telling of the tale, like they've budgeted this into their rate of blood loss. Ironi

Tuesday 8/4/26 Yesterday I saw where a teacher, who said she'd been teaching for a long time, remarked that it was that time of the year where she offered other teachers advice. Makes sense. It's still summer, but everyone is thinking about going back to school. It's the autumn of summer, you could say. She conveyed this in a friendly manner, and you could take or leave her advice, but it was there if anyone had use for it. As I usually do, I thought, "Hmmm, maybe I can learn

Monday 8/3/26 The greatest sense of urgency I've ever heard evinced in a work of musical art occurs around the midpoint of the Grateful Dead's version of "Truckin'" at the Capitol Theatre on 11/8/70. It sounds like something greater than life or death is at stake, which is why I believe they opted to follow it with “Dark Star.” With the audiences going absolutely nuts, the Grateful Dead tailored their versions of "Dark Star" at the Capitol Theatre on 6/24/70 and 11/8/70 to su

Monday 8/3/26 I certainly didn't do better with the stairs yesterday. I'm face down in a dark rut. It's one thing to have no reason to live. It is another to know this. It is another still not to have a reason to live, to know this, and be unable to force one's self to rally anyway, by which I mean, do anything. Lift a finger. Move. Go through what one knows are the hopeless motions of trying. It was another extremely humid day. Seventy degree dew point once again. The weathe

Monday 8/3/26 I had a nightmare last night in which I was at college at the start of it. I've had a lot of nightmares like this over the past year. My good friend from when I was in college was in this dream. I didn't really have any others in actuality. Some people I knew, yes, but not close friends. My first two years of high school were the same. Then, we moved the summer after my sophomore year. I went to an all boys school for the last two years and had no friends. In th

Sunday 8/2/26 "...which he vehemently denies..." That's usually the play, right? You'll often find that someone accused of doing something they didn't do will do something different than just vehemently denying it. The more someone waves their finger--literally or metaphorically--the less they usually know or the more they're trying to keep hidden. The CVS on Hanover doesn't have Halloween items out yet, which amounts to a mild disappointment for me. It makes me sad when I se

Sunday 8/2/69 I've been doing a bad job with stairs and fitness things of late. I feel like that's been the case for a while. Definitely not where I want to be or should be. Yesterday I don't even know what I was doing and put up this weird stat line: six miles walked, seventy push-ups, and just two circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument. I wasn't feeling it and didn't feel like it. There were a lot of people at the Monument and it was another very humid day--seventy

Saturday 8/1/26 This isn't the most important thing here, but I just want to say it: I love how Caleb Durbin plays baseball. That is a ballplayer. He picks it at third, he runs the bases with smarts, he understands what a situation requires, he drives the ball, he sacrifices, he bunts for hits. You play the game the right way, sir. If this guy finishes at .250 with 18 homers and 65 RBI and wins a deserved Gold Glove, then that'll really be something after how he started. I wa

Friday 7/31/26 People would rather do less than anything else. Doing less is more important to them than being happy, healthy, loved, intelligent, and fulfilled. Given a choice, almost everyone will elect to do less rather than more or just the same. No matter what that costs them and how much it lessens the quality of their quality of life. This is one of the innumerable things I'm up against. Because I need people to want to do more. To want to be better. To be more fulfill

Friday 7/31/26 Calling yourself an "ally" in your Instagram bio is usually an indication that you're not a sincere person. Convictions for you are talking points, rather than the things by which you live and embody. You're also betraying the hierarchical way in which you actually think about people. What are the most dominant forms of human behavior in our world? Insincerity. Sloth. Inconsistency. Projection. Insecurity (with good reason, considering how we choose to live and

Thursday 7/30/26 Got some needed sleep. Ready to go hard again. The razor is charging. Haven't shaved in three or four days. About to be remedied. Sometimes there's a person who would be so easy to blow up, but they're such a nothing, such a failure in whatever they do and as a person, they're just so low, and they have no bearing on you--in terms of, say, blocking your path--and they're more like a gnat that even the other gnats hold lower than the standard gnat, and you als

Wednesday 7/29/26 Started work at three this morning, left around nine for Charlestown. Was raining--not hard--while I waited within the portico of the lodge for the Monument to open for the first time since Sunday. I was earlier than usual. I wanted to think. I watched a hawk circling the hill and thought, "Yes," as I kept my eye on him. Didn't go to bed until fairly late last night. More and more, when I do get up, I don't have to enter the log-in code with the computer bec

Wednesday 7/29/26 In his career, Carlton Fisk hit 188 home runs at home and 188 home runs on the road. A baseball stat that has floored me ever since I encountered it as a kid: Ralph Kiner leading the league in homers for the first seven years of his career (1946-1952). And yet he didn’t get into the Hall of Fame until 1975 (and barely). From 1972 to 1976, Joe Morgan had 47.8 WAR. Ron Kittle: career OPS+ of 110. Kind of surprising, perhaps. Ichiro Suzuki: 107. The first All-S

Tuesday 7/28/26 Did major head work in the dentist chair today on a new story I came up with yesterday as Dr. Raffi did his work. I have something big here. Been working through it in my mind ever since. It's set in Paris in the nineteenth century. Someone advised me yesterday to become a Buddhist. I like this person. They may be a Buddhist. I'm unsure. If they are, I respect that. A Zulu warrior cannot be a Buddhist, though. Dentist visit (the one rescheduled from last week

Tuesday 7/28/26 Great art challenges. What happens in a world where few people can rise to those challenges, or are willing to? The veneration of pablum. Great art isn't homogeneous product dumped in the lap, pushed in the face, algorithm-able. It asks us to work with it. Be a team. I think of the Grateful Dead at the Fillmore West on 3/2/69 starting the show with "Dark Star." Challenging the audience. Great art gives us back so much more than we give it, but it does need us

Monday 7/27/26 I worked late last night until eleven, then went to sleep and was back up working by three this morning. Worked straight through until eleven, and then had to get out. I needed a good walk and also felt like passing through the Public Garden, so went off on a five mile amble. Walked eight miles in total yesterday, and did my 100 push-ups. I need to crank six music features. Yesterday near the end of those eight miles I worked out an op-ed in my head for Hallowe

Monday 7/27/26 I'm staring to plan a jazz essay about the standard "Autumn Leaves." I'll see if I can have it run somewhere, if not this year then maybe next, as it's getting on, but I think this would go well with my book, The Root of the Chord: Writings on Jazz's Essential Power and Artistry. Paul Desmond's version from Toronto in 1975, as heard on Mosaic's fine box set, got me thinking about this over the weekend, but I've been running up against quite a few versions of "A

Sunday 7/26/26 I was doing stairs today in the Bunker Hill Monument, as I have for ten years. There were three aggressively rude women who created a problem I've never had in those ten years. You wonder what has go wrong with the world and for people in that world to act as these three did. When I go up and down the stairs, I do the same thing every time. I stay as close to the wall on the right as possible. When going up, I flatten my body against said wall, making like a fl

Sunday 7/26/26 There's an episode of Cheers where the gang is discussing the worst way to die. I referenced this in an op-ed somewhere. Frasier eventually pipes in and says, "Dying alone, knowing that you've never been loved," thinking he has the clincher, and troubled by the knowledge of it. The others laugh at him because they've been tossing stuff out there like sliding down a greased razor banister. I think about this joke--for it is a joke, but, like the the best jokes,

Sunday 7/26/26 Nice to see the temperature dip into the 50s as I start work early on this Sunday. Rooting for you, autumn. I watched Babysitter Wanted (2008) yesterday morning. I'm thinking about writing something on babysitter-centric horror films. I've made a potential list. Also watched Attack of the Puppet People (1958) for a possible piece on drive-in horror movies. The list for that one includes Hell Night (1981), Targets (1968), Ruby (1977), Drive-In Massacre (1976), T

Saturday 7/25/26 LeBron James will be playing for the Philadelphia 76ers next season. Somewhat of a surprise. Looked like the Sixers were a distant-enough fourth in terms of likelihood of landing spots, after Cleveland, Miami, and Golden State. Interestingly for Celtics fans, it was the team adding Jaylen Brown that swayed James. The former has had a once-in-a-lifetime off-season. He goes from sixth in MVP voting with Boston, to being moved by Boston, and now he's on a champi

Friday 7/24/26 A rule in society, to which there are few exceptions, is to defend that which is bad and that which is stupid, if anything is to be defended (and upheld) at all. Ours is a world of inversion in which unnatural order is the order of the day. Where good is bad, bad is good, not funny is funny, funny isn't even understood, mediocrity is sublimity, sublimity doesn't exist and wouldn't be noticed and understood if it did. Whenever I see someone smart enough, if you

Thursday 7/23/26 I know they’re technically an invasive species—not like it’s their fault—but how can’t you be a fan of house sparrows? So full of resolve and good at hopping and neck-tilting and inquisitive looks. Watched Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956) again and am writing a piece on it now. It's playing at the Brattle next month, too, and hopefully I'll be able to get over there and see it on the big screen. T.S. Eliot didn't write a lot of poetry. There aren't that ma

Thursday 7/23/26 The word "literally" is infiltrating commercials now. We're so linguistically impoverished. We can't say what we want to say. Even with the limited things we have to say. So we say "Literally." Tom Caron is saying it now on the NESN Red Sox broadcasts as well. There's so much out there now but so little of it that you can actually read. I don't just mean books, online articles. Everyone has a Substack about everything. I'm also talking what I'll call online d