Are you happy now?

Thursday 10/22/26

Yesterday was the anniversary of my sister Kerrin's passing in 2014. I called my mother as I was walking to the Bunker Hill Monument. My other sister Kara was coming over with Amelia in tow. For some reason, Amelia must have had a shortened school day. They were bringing lunch. I hung up as they were arriving.

Then later in the day my mom wanted to go to the park where there's a bench with a plaque on it dedicated to my sister. I wrote the words for that. She also wished to maybe go to the church and light a candle for Kerrin and was going to see if Lilah wanted to go with her but said to me it was perfectly okay if she didn't. Lilah is such a good-hearted person and I'm pretty sure she'd want to go with her Grammie on such a hard day. I'll find out later how the rest of the afternoon went.

My mom told me that she thinks her house has ghosts and was not being completely unserious. She said she saw this passing streak of gray color and also heard a man's voice, such that she tried to locate its source by moving closer to where she thought it had come. She said she didn't mind, though, and that maybe the gray color was Kerrin and the man's voice my father. It was a lot to lose, you know? A lot to lose at the ages my mother lost them as well.

I'm grateful that my nieces and nephew are good kids. Well, Amelia is Amelia. But she has her moments of sweetness and she's amusing. My mother relives the moments of these awful occurrences when their anniversaries come around each year. I went online at some Godforsaken hour the other night--in other words, when I normally start work--and I saw she was online when she should have been long asleep.

People who feel a need or have a desire to call themselves an "influencer" are hurting inside. They aren't well people and they're overwhelmed by emptiness. The thing about emptiness is that you can't fill empty space with more emptiness, but that's so often what people try and do.

You go to look something up online, and immediately your attempts are intercepted--that's how I think of it--by artificial intelligence that aims to tell you what to think and in the words you should think it, and, really, intends to stop you from thinking so that over time (and not much time at all) thinking becomes this bygone thing you no longer do or recall. The factual "information"--which is usually false, but AI will work this out eventually--is presented in a different way than the information that's beneath the AI-generated text.

It isn't raw information for you to do with what you will, with at least some degree of parsing on your end. Or selecting. Looking through until you say, "Oh, yes, that's what I want, now let's see here..." as you read specifically and focus a bit more. The AI text tells you what to think. It gives your thoughts, if you follow me, the language they should have. It's a takeover of your mind search by search, until you have no mind left.

The idea that here you are, a human who can think, who is largely human because you're able to think, and then...betraying that...betraying your own humanness by giving up this essential part of being human, forfeiting who you are...willingly...is...it's just mind-blowing to me. We talk about the loss of life and how life is precious when someone chooses to end their life--or we used to; I don't think people much care anymore if something isn't directly about them--but now we have people doing a different version of this in far greater numbers. Your precious, precious humanness. And you just...piss it away. Waste it. Without getting anything back, let alone anything commensurate. It's tragic.

And it's only going to get worse unless something major and dramatic were to intercede. A spanner in the works. Because the wheels are going full bore now, and once the wheels are going full bore, there's nothing to stop them otherwise. But it's even worse, because humans can't rally and regroup. They're unable to recognize the problem, find solutions to target the problem, put those strategies to use, because their minds are gone. It's a perfect genocidal storm. A genocide of human souls. Of humans as humans. The spanner would have to come from a single source. Humans are going to be extinct while still existing in their outward form. Which is terrifying.

The long entry in these pages yesterday sidetracked me yesterday regarding some nonfiction I should have written. I thought that would be a quick prose off but it became what it became. One would deserve a Guggenheim, a MacArthur Grant, and a Pulitzer for that 5000 word piece of writing alone. That absolutely necessary piece of writing. The essential truth of that writing. Which itself is far better written than anything by anyone such things are bestowed upon. As it is, I've been writing heaps of nonfiction, lately, but it's barely a dent in what needs to be done there.

I've worked more this morning on "Boom the Ball" and will do that for a little while longer. I'd like to put some stories to bed once and for all. They linger. They take as long as they take but part of this is also on me in being pokey and not working hard enough. As I work on something like this, put it through it's protracted paces, I'll inwardly ask myself at some point in the work or other that I've tended to who knows how many times, "Are you happy now?" Usually I only ask this when I have cause to be happier, and something more than special, and unreplicable is looking back at me. I know that no one else has ever felt what I feel in these moments.

I did 100 push-ups, walked three miles, and ran five circuits of stairs in the Monument yesterday but it wasn't good. It hasn't been good in a long time. I don't know what is wrong with me. I can describe the issue, though: my numbers are more a result of my drive/will than performance/skill. I shouldn't be having as hard a time as I do. The pace should be much better. Were I to ask myself the aforementioned question in this different context, my answer would be, "No, I definitely am not."

I kept bursting out laughing while running those stairs each time I called to mind that description of Mark Warren from the aforesaid long entry of yesterday. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Mark Warren. Sure. It's all a massive whatever, isn't it? These people know the same as I do that none of this has to do with merit and that nothing here is real as what it purports to be. There is no legitimate "clout" as someone deserving of some special thing. It's all make believe. Perineal encrustation. That's good. Spot on. Just made me laugh again. That'll probably keep going for a while.

Reread Saki's "The Open Window" from 1911. Strong ghost story with zero ghosts. Well-plotted, tight. Two or three clauses could have been cleaned up. Does more in its four or five pages than in a mountainous stack of today's prize-winning novels.

My buddy and all-around good guy, good writer, and person with great taste really came through for me in setting me up with some things I couldn't find on my own. A bootleg of the Kinks at the Boston Tea Party combining AUD recordings from October 23 and 25, 1969. The 10/25 date makes for an important and surprising show. You get the rarity of "Don't You Fret," and, remarkably, "Fancy" from Face to Face. Ray Davies was just in a mood where he wanted to try it.

He was scheduled to do a reading here in Boston in the late 1990s that was supposed to be at Borders at Downtown Crossing. He showed up, saw Old South Meeting House across the street, and asked if the reading happen there instead and so it did. I walked over to him afterwards and gave him a folder of printouts of things I'd published on the Kinks. Anyway, my point is that he's prone to trying something in the moment. Mixing it up. We get that sense throughout the 1971 Queens show that I touched on recently in these pages.

Howard also found me the Byrds bootleg, Younger Than Yesterday Rehearsals, which complements the large bootleg set of early studio outtakes called Journal. The Byrds are better and more important than I feel hardly anyone realizes. They should be talked about more often with the Beatles, Rolling Stones. Then there was Furry Lewis, Bukka White, and friends' Party! At Home from 1968. It's these outstanding blues guys hanging out at Lewis's apartment, talking, making music. Joyous. Awesome album cover as well (note the fly swatter and beer company calendar on the walls).