A visit from Boston Police

Friday 4/18/25

I was asleep last night when there was a loud knock at the door and the words, "Boston Police." Fun.

Opened the door in my boxers and Celtics T-shirt and there were two police officers. They were looking for someone. I was not her. Then they came back later and knocked again because they forgot they already had earlier and this time I had basketball shorts on in case they returned and also on account that I may have been partially exposed the first time.

I thought maybe they had originally come to nab me because of my controversially held belief that people who honk without needing to should be executed which I only like 80% believe.

Then I was up and even a really boring Merchant and Ivory film--though they're all like that, aren't they?--didn't make me fall back asleep. I downloaded Pink Robert's remastered version of the Who bootleg Gibson Was Destroyed in Oval as I had been meaning to do for a couple days. I heard that Pink Robert died last year. He had a huge bootleg collection and was pretty active in those online circles and did some remastering. There are several big figures like that who do a real service.

I spoke to my mom yesterday who was having a hard time because it was the anniversary of the day my sister was adopted. She asked me why is she here. Later she picked up my erstwhile buddy/Ms. Weber from nursery school and took her to lunch so hopefully that helped. I was sent a couple of pictures of the pugnacious little one at a local eatery called Egg Harbor.

My mother also asked me if I thought it was because she was old that she looks to the past so much. First of all, I don't look at old like that. Old is something different--it's how you are rather than the age you are. Look these publishing people who are all but born into it. They're older than the dust of decomposed bones at twenty-five.

The truth is, people don't get up and live. They look back. For many reasons. One is that the past is gone, it's not right there pressing against one's self as demonstrably--usually--as the present, and thus we have this feeling that we can morph it into something we wish it to be, with chances being very low that's what it ever was. There is one reality. People don't live in it. They attempt to fashion their reality. And you can't do that. It'll never be reality.

I saw this daft headline for a daft Esquire piece yesterday that ran, "Mid-90s rock is having a moment as its newly middle-aged fans seek solace in the soul-patched soundtrack of their youth. Call it 'IPA-core.'” The sub-headline was: In Defense of Choosing a Musical Era and Living In It Forever.

First of all: Sounds really healthy and broad-minded. Just slap some scales up over the eyes and bunker down, man. That's why we're here!

Secondly: How dumb and contrived can you get, Esquire?

Call it IPA-core? Really? Is that supposed to be clever? Is there anything out there worth reading? Call it all Jejune-core. Look at this shit, up and down the line. Imagine writing that piece? Imagine me writing that? Imagine this journal and that's what I wrote?

"I wrote this great piece this morning about the soul-patched soundtrack..."

Fuck off with that.

Does everything have to be utterly stupid? We really have no agency here?

I look at these magazines, these presses, these authors, these books, and I think what are all of these people doing in ceding over their lives to such stupidity? Because it's a choice. It's not a "needs must" choice, a financial choice. It's just the choice to suck when you don't have to suck like you do suck.

Anyway, the headline nonetheless reflects how people are. At what age do people stop discovering anything new? Every day I seek and am open to, in every regard. At the close of each day, I am different than I was at that time yesterday. To whatever degree. But some degree. I am alive. Most people are just here. They'll pay out the ass to see some band that was never any good and is worse now simply because that's who they listened to in high school or college. That's old.

Similarly, Wendy Lesser has always been old and miserable. Her brain and entire persona is akin to a dusty rock--if rocks could be embittered--and that's the same now as it was forty years ago. Bilious dust person. Angry, joyless, insecure and bitter and defensive about it, incapable of producing or offering joy, charmless, self-poisoning. That nasty old neighbor across the street who sits by the window waiting for a ball to bounce into the yard so she can yell at a kid. A lot of people in publishing are the reading/writing version of that.

It's worth noting that people, in our devolving world, with the defeatist attitude that doubles as the entire life, the laziness, the lack of curiosity, the excuse making, the bitching and whining, the inability to think and the lack of mental lucidity that is a lot like dementia without officially being dementia, are older sooner than ever.

Well, I'm up. I guess I'll work on "Hero of Mine."