Tuesday 11/11/25 Unfucking real piece of work. I'm getting close to done. Each page goes an uncountable number of pages deep. Tired for wasted years, more tired looking for what’s hard to believe exists and investing in it all the same. Saving up for the babysitter to go out on another date that’s bound to be bad. I half expect this girl who is nice and very put together and brings her AP homework and who has raised her rate a second time in the last year to say, “That’s capi

Tuesday 11/11/25 I saw Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street from 1953 at the Brattle Sunday. First time I've seen it on the big screen. It was 4K DCP rather than 35mm. I'm more of a stickler than others are as to what constitutes film noir. Others familiar with the term apply it liberally to basically any black and white B-movie crime picture from the 1940s and 1950s. Most of those films aren't what I think of as noir. In my view, you need a femme fatale. Fatalism must be

Tuesday 11/11/25 As it says. This is very good. No film writing like it. Done this morning. And yet, no one feels quite as blameless as Lon Cheney’s Larry Talbot from 1941’s The Wolf Man . The first Karloff Frankenstein film is a cautionary tale, but The Wolf Man is tragedy, the first and best horror film in this sundered vein. You’d think with all the untimely deaths that the tragic would be more in evidence with horror, but it’s always been something of a surprising rarity

Monday 11/10/25 Strong work this morning on a masterpiece of a story. Hard, intense work. These stories go so deep. Every shape of every letter in them is playing a major part. This isn't even writing. It's something else. Many things have been published lately. I haven't gotten into any of that in this journal. The News section hasn't been updated yet either. Ran 3000 stairs in the rain at City Hall. Did 100 push-ups. The tree is up at Faneuil Hall sans lights. But it's ther

Monday 11/10/25 It's hard to to believe that there's anything public-facing in Boston--out in the open, I mean, that you happenstancely become aware by going about your day--that is run worse than the MBTA. Late yesterday morning I walked to Charles MGH to get the Red Line to Harvard in order to attend a screening at the Brattle. I left early because I thought maybe I'd make a quick stop at the Harvard Art Museums, or, if the timing didn't work out, just sit and read my book

Sunday 11/9/25 People make so many excuses for themselves and they want you to make them, too--as in honor their excuses as legitimate reasons; reasons which cannot be overcome. The drama people inject into their claims of what they say they cannot do is maximalist. Every mountain there ever was is piled on their back to hear them tell it. They don't have a second to so much as blink. Trust me , they seem to say, my stuff is different than everyone else's . No one has ever ha

Sunday 11/9/25 It's four in the morning. I need to head out soon to run stairs. None yesterday. 6000 on Friday (which I believe is the most I've done taking two-stairs-at-a-time without stopping at City Hall), as well as 200 push-ups, and eight miles walked. As I write this, there are these loud, drunken idiots--adults--in North Square who have been outside for a couple hours trying to...what...impress each other? Pair up for their sloppy hook ups? At the moment it's forty de

Saturday 11/8/25 Somehow the Bruins are 9-7, which is better than one would have expected in all probability through that many games. They have won three in a row, lost six in a row, and are currently on a five-game winning streak. In other words, streaky. My hope for the team heading it this year was that they were competitive and fought for a playoff spot, perhaps grabbing one of the last two Wild Card spots. To do so, I figured they'd have to be a pain to play against. Pla

Tuesday 11/4/25 As it says. Hello, sister of mine— I wanted to send you something better than just the card also contained in this envelope for your birthday. Cards are weird to me. The idea of paying for someone else’s stock words to serve as a stand-in for my own. It just doesn’t make a lot of sense from my point of view, and I end up reading these cards that make me think, “Wait, I don’t believe that” or something along those lines. But I had something here that I think is

Monday 11/3/25 That was an amazing Game 7 on Saturday night to close out the World Series. I guess I'm unsure how serious Blue Jays fans are as Blue Jays fan in a way I'm not with Red Sox, Yankees, and Cubs fans, but that had to hurt. I wouldn't say the Jays choked. But the chances were so close to zero that the Dodgers were going to win that game, and they needed like a half dozen very improbably things to happen--and every last one of those things--to somehow win that game.

Monday 11/3/25 Walking across a bridge from Allston to Cambridge over the Charles on Saturday--the same bridge that Quentin Compson jumped from to his death in Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury --I was struck by how autumnal the scene looked, particularly the trees near the banks. The leaves had all changed color, but most had yet to fall, while others that already had blew about near my feet. Similarly, when I took the train back later, the sun hit the water in the expanse o

Saturday 11/1/25 We're officially in November now, but the spooky season has a long ways to go, and besides, that season is always in attendance as far as I'm concerned, and I don't like to be beholden to the calendar anyway. I'm just as apt to watch a Christmas film in mid-February as I am to look forward to Halloween in late November. The spirit of the thing is the thing for me, not the date of the thing. November 1 is a day of Halloween hangover, and it extends if it happe

Friday 10/31/25 As I mentioned earlier, my niece Lilah has a journal for school in which the kids write a letter to someone each Friday and then that person writes them back. This time she wrote to me and I had to respond by yesterday. I was so glad to get a letter from Lilah even if she doesn't know how to spell my name because I admire her very much. This is what she said: And this was my letter back to her: Dear best pal/niece Lilah, Thank you for your letter—it is so nice

Thursday 10/30/25 Mookie Betts followed up his postgame homophobic comment with his latest postseason choke job. He's never been good when it matters the most. Some guys just don't have the stomach for pressure. To take two out of three in LA--and it could have been all three--after losing that first game in eighteen innings--is really impressive on the part of Toronto. The Dodgers can still win. But momentum is very much in the Blue Jays' favor. Their place will be ready and

Thursday 10/30/25 Another result of "living" life behind screens is that people are more cowardly than ever. Most are too frightened to be themselves. What ought to be the slightest things--like showing another person how one honestly feels--are now too much of a risk to take on. A result is that a person who is not a coward, and who is aware of what that other person is doing and why, will simply have no respect or regard for them, and a kind of disgust over how small and we

Tuesday 10/28/25 This is part of an exchange I had this morning with an English professor and provost I've known for thirty years. You don't even want to see the first letter from me. It involves Megan Sexton of the literary journal Five Points and her blatant corruption. I'm not going to include that here, because I'll be featuring it in a stand-alone entry exposing what she's all about and how and why she does what she does. She's revolting and her actions are indefensible

Tuesday 10/28/25 Damn. Would you look at that. You’re probably just tired. Who wouldn’t be? I say those words to myself so often it’s like I’ve stopped understanding their meaning as words and I’m this raw animal trying to process cadences except they’re mine. But tired or not I’d piss the bed of my life if that meant waking up from what’s hard to believe isn’t a nightmare if I wasn't already running a marathon without a finish line that has all of these other races insid

Tuesday 10/28/25 Game 3 of the World Series was still going when I woke up. Then I went back to sleep and it was still going a couple hours later when I got up for good. My guess is you won't see something like this again. MLB will change the postseason rules as a result of that game and the regular season ghost runner set-up will take over in the playoffs. These teams have so much invested in their pitchers who are, of course, babied and break down easier than ever. Everythi

Like I said, it's good. At least I don’t have to think that much to know that their father couldn’t have done any better, even if that’s too low a bar to try and salvage. Call in the archeologists, where’s the excavator, you want a core sample while we’re down here? Small mercies are like rain your body can’t verify is falling when you hold your palm out after you see some drops in the headlights of a car that’s come to a stop near where you’re standing. There they are.

Monday 10/27/25 I have not been doing a good job doing anything. At the task of doing anything. There is no point to any of it right now and no point in living or being here. If I create something, that thing is the thing it is, at the level it is, but that's the end of it. The thing remains here with me. That is is the best thing there is doesn't matter. It's still a thing that just sits here unseen by anyone save me. I don't think anyone can understand how hard it then is t

Thursday 10/23/25 More work yesterday on "You're Probably Just Tired" after a few days away from it. Yeah, definitely got something here. Keep working on it. Tuesday was the eleventh anniversary of my sister's death. This is always an awful day for my mother. Some years she doesn't go out at all it seems like for a week or two leading up to it. That wasn't the case this year. I know she saw a friend of hers and babysat the kids. But the day itself was very bad. I called her w

Wednesday 10/22/25 It's as if people are willfully wrong as some assertion of their freedom. Often I don't think they believe what they so strenuously insist they believe. It's not an important topic, but take the game of Jeremy Swayman. Marchand returned to Boston last night, was given a gushy tribute, cried on the bench, then tallied two assists in the Panthers' 4-3 victory over the Bruins. Swayman had one of his standard 82% save nights. His GAA average for the season is n

Tuesday 10/21/25 I stayed up to watch all of the Blue Jays-Mariners Game 7 ALCS game last night (then was back at it by four), which the Jays took 3-1 thanks to a three-run seventh inning homer by George Springer. He's always been excellent in the postseason and is still delivering the biggest of hits like that in his age thirty-five season. Impressive. I wouldn't say that the Mariners choked in this series despite losing after taking the first two games on the road in Toront

Monday 10/20/25 Speaking of Lilah... I'm heading out to run stairs now, but as I was getting ready to leave, my sister sent me something Lilah wrote in a journal they keep for school. At the end of each week, there's a Friday Letter that the recipient may then respond to. Here's what Lilah wrote last Friday: And here was my response to my sister: I feel the same way. This is what happens when you're smart, and all the more so in 2025's America, where there are fewer intellige