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

Saturday 2/28/26 1. Larry Bird I know this makes for a controversial pick for the best Celtic in history, but I don't think it should. Obviously Bill Russell one scores of championships and is in large part responsible for an organizational ethos, but there were times when one watched Bird when you could have thought that he was the best a basketball player had ever been and that no one could play better. He had nights like that and nights where it may have been true. He also

Saturday 2/28/26 Letter I wrote this morning to the daughter of someone I've known for a long time. (), It is your friend Colin in Boston. I’m hoping your dad can share this note with you when your parents visit you this weekend, but I don’t know. I will write it anyway in case you are able to see it. I was thinking about you yesterday. You really impress me, and I thought I should tell you that. One of the reasons you were on my mind is because of something I’ve learned th

Saturday 2/28/26 There isn't a lot less interesting than Patriots off-season talk in February. Wall to wall Patriots off-season talk. As we become ever less intelligent, football becomes more and more the only sport that produces a cry of "Is good!" from out of our drooling mouths. Joe Burrow is considerably older than I think everyone believes him to be. Am I the only person who knows this guy's age? Because everyone else talks about him like he's twenty-five. This will be h

Friday 2/27/26 J.D. Vance looks like a man who wears eyeliner. I feel like this is an odd choice, especially for someone who I'm certain thinks that men should be "manly" with all that entails--you know, having no heart, never crying, being hard and unloving, etc. I must admit that when some video of Erika Kirk from the State of the Union popped up on my screen that I laughed. It's such bad overacting. Like a satire of overacting. The way she wipes away tears that aren't ther

Thursday 2/26/26 Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of my father's death. He was a fiercely moral man and a truly good person who always thought about what was right and tried to do what he understood to be right. He would never truckle, and yet he was always kind. I wonder what he would make of our world if he was here, but I know the person he would be regardless.

Thursday 2/26/26 This year's Boston Celtics season is a legacy re-arranger--or it certainly could be, anyway. Who knows what Jayson Tatum will be when he returns. The Celtics look better without him being the guy, though. Things are less stagnant and stage-y. No, I'm not suggesting they're better off without him. I'm simply making an observation about their play style and pace. The flow of their offense. They're not as three-addicted. Sure, they're still pretty hooked, but it

Thursday 2/26/26 You're such a loser if you try and take credit for, or glom on to, someone else's achievement. And yes, that includes all the sports fans who say, "Yeah, our record is like literally the best..." as they power-chomp through another bag of Doritos. "Don't mind the dust, it's the good kind." Oh, look--something actually funny. And not let's-all-lie-our-faces-off publishing system-of incestuous-evil funny from the likes of Lydia Davis or George Saunders . It's

Wednesday 2/25/26 This is a letter I wrote a couple months ago to someone who writes film scripts and was the writer for what I consider, by far, to be the best film about the Beatles. I'll sometimes repurpose letters here because they say what needs to be said and I see no purpose in spending time and energy rephrasing that which can do the saying itself and perfectly well at that. *** Dear (), I'm sorry for the delay in responding. I began this letter a couple Fridays ago a

Wednesday 2/25/26 This is from something I'm writing on winter horror films, which will also be in my horror film book. Composed this morning. Will need to set this aside now, though, to write a piece about Louis Armstrong. You can’t shake an ice-encrusted stick without swatting someone moaning about winter. As soon as Christmas is done and the New Year’s resolutions are discarded by January 3, the whinging commences. “I just want to go out and do things and living in [inse

Wednesday 2/25/26 The average American is now sufficiently stupid that they're likely to believe that the hockey players on NHL teams based in the United States are all themselves Americans, and hockey players who play for teams based in Canada are all Canadians. I saw proof of this constantly throughout--and all the more so after--the Olympics. What i want to know is how you live in a world this moronic and this evil if you are yourself an intelligent and good person? How th

Tuesday 2/24/26 It may not have looked flashy, but I had a quietly great fitness performance over the weekend. One for the "Whoa, that's the kind of thing he did while he was going through all of that" record/annals. I thought early on Saturday morning that there was a strong chance the Bunker Hill Monument would be closed for the day and it wouldn't be an option to run stairs there. As I mentioned earlier, there was also an skiing/snowboarding event at City Hall, so those st

Tuesday 2/24/26 The people who adopt/almost always default to the "You should get the fuck out of this country because of the objection you voiced" are, ironically, the people who have the least amount of a clue about the democratic tenets on which the country of the United States were built. And as simple as I once would have thought a sentence like the above is, I doubt that any of them could understand that either. But this is as fundamental as it gets. Square one. New sno

Saturday 2/21/26 Multiple nightmares about my ex-wife Molly last night. It's like the trauma--which is actual trauma, because who has that done to them?--is a fixture of me. Tattooed where it counts the most. What makes the waking idea of her harder for me is that there was a time when she showed me kindness, and I bought into that, or the appearance of it, entirely. I became at the mercy of other things later. I'm more prone to romanticize this now, because it's been so long

Friday 2/20/26 Saw some video of Rafael Devers from the Giants' spring training. This guy is eating himself out of his prime. You can't be a professional? You need dessert for dessert? I honestly thought it was Pablo Sandoval at first. Devers has fat man thighs. Which is a different level of out-of-shape than big-gut out-of-shape, though he has that covered, too. Once you get the fat thighs, it's hard to ever go back. He looks like a pork chop armed with a bat in the fight fo

Friday 2/20/26 Returned to the Bunker Hill Monument Wednesday to run stairs. Can't say it was a thing of workout beauty, but I did okay. Ran five circuits of stairs just under a half hour. That's what the pace should be just about even if without time away. It was a little harder, though. Walked three miles and did 100 push-ups, too. Repeated all of this yesterday. Was slower in the Monument, but that was fine. Just trying to get the leg muscles up to speed. You have two main

Thursday 2/19/26 "Serious question..." Can all but guarantee that it isn't. "Honestly asking..." You aren't. "Need a new show to watch." You don't. Artifice is exhausting, realness is refreshing. Even just in terms of witnessing. Maybe posting 100 more photos of yourself would help? Usually it's women who do this. Twenties through fifties. Their social media page will be nothing but photo after photo of themselves. How unwell do you have to be to do this? How dead inside? I a

Wednesday 2/18/26 There's one of those black and white prison movies where the guards abuse the men who work out on the chain gang. The inmates are gathered together around their oldest member. These movies always have that guy. He had time put on his sentence because one day he said "Enough," and slugged a guard. The men ask him if it was worth. The guy pauses. He takes the question seriously. Then he says, "For me it was, yeah." I think often about how he qualified it. How

Tuesday 2/17/26 Not from me, though...I was just the messenger relaying that message via text. Well, the first messenger, though I'm uncertain if my sister did her part. The thing about the Little Ghost Girl and Amelia is that the latter will say, "She's not real," but with this pervading tone of doubt like she's trying to convince herself vanquish some real concerns. And of course the Little Ghost Girl is real. C: Hi. I have a message to pass along. C: The Little Ghost Girl

Tuesday 2/17/26 Sunday marked 3500 days, or 500 weeks, without a drink. Solid. It's actually more than that, but I've erred in counting over the years--which is likelier to happen when you go by the week rather than a particular date--as I have said, and on account that the error is mine I absorb the hit, so to speak. It's like when I run stairs at City Hall and I lose count and I'm almost certain the next time up will be my twentieth but I call it number nineteen just in cas

Monday 2/16/26 I saw a written comment from a person of today underneath an image of a Van Gogh painting that said, "Van Gogh never fails to impress," which gave me pause, though I'm sure it wouldn't do so with anyone else. Van Gogh's paintings didn't impress anyone while he as alive. Perhaps his brother, but his brother may also have felt obligated to respond at length and make sure to be complimentary because of Van Gogh's situation and how devoted he was to not just his ar