A gull, a game, a spot, being: thoughts from a seven-mile walk on Labor Day between time and space
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
Tuesday 9/8/26
Starting to feel more confident in saying that the issue from the summer wasn't me but the humidity. I'd been worried that I'd backslid. That's a credo here--not to backslide in any regard. In my art, my character, my fitness of mind, soul, and body. I felt limited at times this summer--tamped down. We'll still have to see how I do as autumn comes on. I need to see some improvement in my stair running with my wind and legs. I have some goals to try and achieve in the Monument context but I also want to feel stronger and more capable overall within the workout themselves.
There were no stairs yesterday for Labor Day. I thought I might have gotten a bonus Monument day as it's sometimes open for these Monday holidays, but it was closed. I headed out early in the morning--well, early for other people--when the temperature was in the mid-fifties, wearing shorts and a sweatshirt over my T-shirt, for what was supposed to be longer but ended up being a seven-mile walk. I wanted to walk to Coolidge Corner and then go the MFA, but I didn't do that.
The humidity was low. If you walk a lot, you know that you'll sweat. Walking is exercising. But there was little of that, despite the distance I covered. I was simply comfortable. Was almost like being in a different part of the world now that the humidity had lessened.
Later in the day, the temperature rose around eighty degrees, which is what it was on some of the days that were the worst from the summer. Again I wore a sweatshirt as I went out and about and was perfectly comfortable. It's the humidity. The dew point was in the low fifties. The humidity isn't everything, but it determines a lot of what's what. On some of those earlier eighty degree days, while wearing shorts, I'd be sweating just walking down the street to the Starbucks.
I stood by the harbor and observed for a while. People on sailboats. People being ferried from sailboats back to the dock by motorboat at the sailing center. There was this gull on a rock for ten minutes, standing there, taking in the scene itself. I didn't want to leave before the gull did, which had gotten there before I arrived and had been there I have no idea how long. It was as if it was thinking. The rock was covered in seaweed and the water lapped around a few inches from the top where the gull stood, which seemed to understand the amount of clearance it had in this moment and for how much longer it'd have it. The day was beautiful. My life is pain and hopelessness. It was hard to reconcile such a day with these realities. Of course, I thought of Rockport. The headlands there. Which is different than standing where I was in Boston.
My walk took me to the Muddy River in the Fenway, where "First Responder" begins. I was along that story's route rather regularly yesterday, actually, as when I walked up the hill in the Common on my way back to turn around and look out at the skyline, though the protagonist of the story sticks to the path below. There were tables outside the dorms at Northeastern that are on that river-facing side that always seems to be in the shade, like the sun doesn't ever fully enter into the equation here, with a couple people sitting at each table to welcome the incoming students. I thought about the irony of college. Especially in 2026.
College for what? Your use of AI? To eventually enter into a world of what? What education do you get? What education do you even try and get? This isn't how education works anyway; an education is something you work at every day of your life and grow and add to. I've seen to my education this morning. What would an education do for you, save in the terms of your internal life, which no one cares about at all, to their crushing detriment, and then all of ours, but they don't see that and wouldn't care anyway. What do people really care about? What do they really care about? But the students come, and this game is played, for game it is.
There are so few people out on a Labor Day in Boston at seven, eight, nine in the morning. It's a strange feeling in part because of the weather. The sun shines, it's comfortable, but you feel like you're in this weird in-between space, and an in-between time, where you're one of the few moving about in this external realm and within what is both interlude and passage. What's everyone else doing? Most aren't at work. Sleeping in? Scrolling? A Labor Day morning is unique in this regard. Saturday and Sunday mornings have a different feel than a Monday. Even a holiday Monday. As you walk, there's a sensation and tendency to double check yourself in your mind as to day and holiday. When is now? What is now?
It's too bad Starbucks got rid of the steamed apple juice. I could often do with a steamed apple juice especially when we get to this time of the year and on through quite a few months. I did get some cider yesterday. I can heat that up.
Labor Day is the last day for the Swan Boats in the Public Garden. In a way, it feels early to shut them down, and yet, it also feels right. I stood on the bank of the lagoon for a while, on that side that faces Arlington and Newbury. One of the finest spots and views in the city, bolstered significantly by the Old Hancock building, among the most dignified and grounded of structures, a building of its time and beyond it, and one that wants to tell you a story about the weather, regardless of how few people that won't be lost on.
This spot and its view changes and changes in how one might experience it. The leaves now are still green. Thick bundles of life nonetheless animated by so little as the barest of breezes. They'll begin their alteration before long, and the spot is beautiful then, too, but also different as well as the same as itself. The hues deepen, and the view, and the experience of that view, changes again, as it does when the leaves first fall, and afterwards, when far fewer remain, and later with the trees standing naked so that you can look further down Newbury Street on the other side than you'd been able to before.
How many times have I stood on this spot? How much have I thought there? About my own life. This place. Other places like Rockport. Other times. Tried to find hope and been unable to for so long now. I have no reason to have hope. There isn't a shred of a reason. Having hope in my situation is like being crazy. Or in denial. Or impossibly stupid.
There were mallards all along the water's edge in repose, heads tucked against wings. It is amazing how these animals are so much better at being present--and just being--than we are. The Swan Boats were docked prior to a last unchaining and setting forth on the lagoon for their final day of the season. Some of them date back over a century. They've gone through the ritual of the passage of one season, their months removed from this place which can't suit or please them as much and I imagine is grievous, and their return many times. I thought about that, too.
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