Any longer

Wednesday 11/4/26

Life changes, people don't. Rarest is the person who grows. True growth begins within. The inside is both the stimulus and that which is answered to. Not outside factors. Not other people. Not societal expectations or what can be gotten away with. What amounts to "good enough." People have always been products of their environment, but never to the degree that they are now, because this environment effaces agency, utility, and individuality if one lets it, and everyone does.

Oddly, that's human nature. Why oddly? Because we have free will. We can be better, rise up. But we elect not to. Human nature means doing less, being less. It's this tragic irony that makes the world what it is, which is also, simultaneously, what it doesn't have to be. We become on the inside what it is like on the outside. And look around. Look at this outside. No, people don't change, as in grow. And as the world gets worse, they get worse.

The person in 2026 is a different person than they were twenty years ago. Twenty years ago they wouldn't have made the excuses they do now. They wouldn't be as unaccountable as they are now. Which doesn't mean they were accountable. Simply more so. They wouldn't have thought the simple task of doing something right wasn't this impossibility that they do now, wouldn't have spoken of it the same way, wouldn't have rode their white horse of excuse way past the finish line of the things that were never tended to.

The person who says they have no time now, what do you expect me to do, wouldn't have said that in 1987 or whenever, wouldn't have thought that, when they actually had less time because the world wasn't equipped with all the shortcuts of the digital age.

Thoreau in his journal, 11/3/1858: "How long we will follow an illusion! On meeting that one whom I call my friend, I find that I had imagined something that was not there. I am sure to depart sadder than I came. Nothing makes me so dejected as to have met my friends, for they make me doubt if it is possible to have any friends."

The temperature rose to 74 degrees yesterday. Real normal. I don't mind warmer days at colder times of the year when I am struggling to get myself in motion and the fires within are more like embers you can put your hand to and not be burnt. Too often I am like someone who has already died, this person who lives a form of suicide, if that makes sense.

Last week I did somewhat better than I had with the stairs than over the previous two weeks. I went to Bunker Hill each day the Monument was open, running five circuits each time for a total of twenty-five. Sunday was decent in that we had the clock change. I understand none of this. Why it's done, what it entails. Each day is the same for me. The desk is the desk, the stairs are the stairs. I am alone. I'm not out and about in the sense that other people are.

It is sad and awful, I know. I don't have wince when I pick up my kid from their after school event and it's dark so early now because I don't have anyone or anything. There is only what I'm working on, which will almost certainly never be seen. But even still, I don't think it would bother me. It simply isn't something I'd be interested in. Let the time be the time, I say. Leave it alone. Time can be told by the sun, right? So take the time and set the clocks to that (you take my meaning), and leave it.

I began work on Sunday shortly after midnight. By the time I got to the Monument later in the day, it was really two o'clock rather than one. It was a lot of hours to be up and at it, and without food, to then run stairs. It's easier not to bag out when you've gone four days in a row and it's the last day of the Monument week. Going each of the five days it's open is quite respectable stair running. You can feel okay about it even without big numbers. I'm looking to do markedly better this week, though, when the Monument opens again today. I'll have shorts on.

On Monday I ran 3000 stairs at City Hall. It'd been a while. I need to make sure to get out there more often on the days when the Monument is closed or even on the days when it is open and do both on a given day. I think it would help me to use these stairs when I am in trouble, which is to say, doing even worse than usual, or to try and forestall that, like as this place I nip over to after dark or while restless at at eight or nine o'clock or one in the morning.

What would that feel like? I must vary my days more, even with small things, or starting with small things. There is only so much available to me to do because of my situation, but I walk the exact same streets the exact same ways at the exact same times and go nowhere else and that's bad and certainly doesn't help even if I doubt that anything could help or alleviate whatsoever but I still should try. This can also mean more trips to museums, etc. Sunday marked 3759 days, or 537 weeks, without a drink.

Yesterday I did nothing.

A letter from this morning:

Really been struggling. Need to turn things around or else I won't make it even if I have no chance of making it, if that makes any sense. I feel like Macbeth in the castle at the end, only I haven't done anything wrong and I never had a castle. But that's how I think--at least go out with dignity and letting it be known, if only to yourself, who you are. I have to do better. 

Wanted to give you something, though. This is an audience recording of Dylan's concert from Sunday in Zurich. You should listen to it. Eighty-five-years-old and still this is art. Note the pacing of the show--as soon as they stop, they start again. 

People have never been very surprising but they're less surprising than ever which also makes life harder. It's like we're incapable of the smallest things, whatever they might be, that would make someone says, "I didn't expect that from them" or "I didn't see that coming." Again, life has no problem in this area, especially when it comes to bad things.

We have an incuriousity epidemic that is a worldwide plague made all the deadlier because of itself, if you follow me. That is, with the Black Death, people knew what was killing them off. The nature of incuriosity and all that follows from it means they don't have a clue what is killing them off now. They also can't think well enough to understand you--and we--can be killed off and still be present to post another selfie.

People's eyes have been grafted to the skin around their navels so as to stare at what's within without interruption. Things that are worthwhile, that ought to be known, looked into, abetted or checked, become like someone passing between the viewer and their screen which only broadcasts programming about them. Hey, get out of the way. Down in front. And they have no idea that's what they're doing and all they are. You think about something such as even getting a candid note from someone or a person taking a chance. Someone acting on a sense of the romantic. A bit of wonder. That would be so shocking. It just doesn't happen. It's not how anyone is.

I watched the film Livide from 2011. Takes place on Halloween so maybe it is something I'll want to write about for the holiday next year. The treasure hunt they embark on in the film was a bad idea. I should watch 2007's November, too, and finalize a plan for the Christmas horror films I'll write about this year. November is when I like to reread William Sloane's To Walk the Night. I'll read it at any time of the year. Yesterday I couldn't even get myself to walk down the street and sit outside with a coffee for a bit and begin it again.

Sunday morning I listened to alternate (studio) versions by Led Zeppelin of "Stairway to Heaven" and also downloaded a set of Led Zeppelin III outtakes on the Tarantara label and Studio Sessions Ultimate on the Scorpio label. The Led Zeppelin III boot contain multiple versions of "Down by the Seaside," perhaps their most beautiful song. Zeppelin wasn't Nick Drake. Beauty wasn't "their thing." But I've always been partial to this song, as one might expect. It makes me think of Rockport. But that's a lot of things.

On Monday night I said, "I cannot look at this world any longer," in all of its ugliness and ignorance, and shameless assertiveness in that ignorance, and sat down to check something regarding the Grateful Dead's performance of "Dark Star" from 10/28/72 in Cleveland. As so often happens, I remained there without intending to for the full half hour, transported by and held within the power of this art like no time at all had passed.