"Are you the guy who goes up and down ten times every day?"

Monday 6/2/25

Some good and bad things on the fitness front.

On the bad side: I'm not extending my runs up the Monument stairs. The baseline for five circuits--or the first five circuits--is to run the first 100 stairs. If I do more, the baseline is to run the first fifty stairs. There are fewer rules past ten.

If I'm where I'm supposed to be at, though, I really should be running the first 100 stairs each time for a day of ten and I'm not doing that.

There should also be circuits when I'm running 175 stairs, 150, 125, and I'm not doing that either. Three times in the past I've ran all 294 stairs, and I need to do that again because I don't want to not be able to do it.

That's where I need to improve the most right now.

The good thing is that I'm bunching more ten circuit days together than at probably any time previously.

This past week I did five on Wednesday, five on Thursday, five on Friday, and then ten on Saturday and ten more yesterday. That brings my total since May 15 up to ninety-five.

This is okay. It's nothing outstanding. I also need to have a twenty circuit day at some point. If I set a personal best, I don't like to leave that back in the past of however many years ago. I should be reaching that mark every year. From here on out.

On both Saturday and Sunday I also walked six miles each of those days and did 100 push-ups. Yesterday also marked 3241 days, or 463 weeks, without a drink.

I have no pain whatsoever. Nothing aches. Not an ankle, not a knee. I feel like I have done nothing.

On Thursday, there were many school children--fourth grade age, I'd say--inside of the Monument. A number of them were curious about what I was doing--both boys and girls--and asked me questions as I went. A boy said, "Is this your workout?" A girl asked, "Do you just keep doing loops?"

The adults are a problem. There are confrontations almost every day it seems. People are entitled, stupid, and large.

For instance, I was coming down the stairs, and this woman was on the wrong side. The expression is "Stay to the right," not "Stay to the left." As I've noted many times in here, the railing is on the left-hand side if you're going up the stairs. The stairs are also wider on that side and tapered on the other. If you trip going up, it's not a big problem. If you trip going down, it is. You are supposed to stay to the right for safety reasons.

Do you think people care about the safety of anyone else? Or do you think they want what they want and think they should have it just because it's them? Hell, do you think they can even figure out how it's meant to work?

Exactly.

This woman wouldn't move. All a person like this--who is large and uncoordinated--has to do is stick out a body part as I go down the side I'm not supposed to be on, where the stairs are tapered, and there's no railing, and I can be paralyzed.

The entire time I'm coming down, even after all of these years, I have my hand on the rail. I'm not overconfident. Safety first.

I had to go around her, and I said, "I suppose that the railing belongs to you on the way down, too, right?"

It's simple logic. You're wrong. There's no way you can think, "Yes, it's mine both ways, because I am me."

This dumb, entitled woman, starts saying, "Yes, yes, yes, yes it is," as she continues upwards, girl power/down with the patriarchy-style.

What do you do with people like this and a world which is comprised of people like this?

You can experience the whole of this country and where we are at as a people within the confines of the Bunker Hill Monument if you're in there enough and observant and smart enough. You'll see it right up close. You'll hear all of the incorrect things, too, that parents say to their kids. Just talking out of their ass, but thinking they've never been wrong a day in their lives. "Yeah, the Americans fired flaming arrows out these windows at the British below..."

God help us.

Then on Saturday, there were three fat guys, maybe in their late twenties, but people are so unhealthy and unfit that it's hard to tell.

These three guys were cretins.

You want proof?

They were belching going up the stairs because they thought that was funny with the echo. Ha ha ha belch ha ha belch ha ha ha belch belch.

I get to the top for the eighth time, and one of these guys is standing on the top step. There's a window there. There are windows on all sides of the chamber at the top. He has his arms up on the window ledge, and the rest of himself sticking out across most of the stair. I bump into him. I didn't clock him. But I wasn't going to stand there and ask him to move. Oh, please, sir, might you be less ragingly discourteous?

And he starts going off. You'd think he was some fair maiden I had just abducted and raped.

I vanish in a second. I'm a blur. Hit the top step, turn around. I'm gone. But I can still hear. He says, "This guy bumped into me and he didn't say sorry or nothin'."

Or nothin'.

He talked like he had a giant sausage for a tongue. I knew everything anyone would ever need to know about this idiot and his friends. His education level, what he ate, that he'd be a terrible parent, that he was a bad person, that he had never read anything and probably was functionally illiterate, and would be of no constructive value to anyone or contributor to society.

Think of how simple you have to be to convey all of that in fifteen seconds of someone being exposed to you. Less than fifteen seconds. And his friends were all in on this, too. Like middle school girls. Drama, drama, drama.

So, I stop, turn around, and point out that it was bad enough that he was stupid enough to stand on the first step, which was made worse by him being so large that he took up the bulk of said first step.

What do you think happened now? Big talk or no talk? Then I added, "I'll see you again in a couple minutes."

Couple minutes go by, I'm on my way back up, they've started coming down, they're still going on about the big drama at the top of the stairs, and when they see me, all three shut their mouths.

I say, "Come on, it's six versus one," which I'm sure they didn't understand, or didn't understand until later.

I had one more circuit to do after that, so I finish up and then when I came out, there were three park rangers right at the bottom, and I thought, "Here we go." The rangers are very kind to me, though. Twice in the past few days they've gone and escorted me out of the line and let me go ahead of a couple of school groups. But they were doing something else, as it were. One of them asked me how many times I'd done it that day, I said ten, and he said, "God bless you, brother."

Yesterday the weather was conducive to stairs. Maybe not perfect, because I had to wear a sweatshirt for the walk over there--with shorts on--and the weather that is just barely T-shirt and shorts weather is best--but very nice.

I was the first one in the Monument, and people were getting to the top for the first time as I was finishing my second trip. This man who was there with his family said, "Are you the guy who goes up and down ten times every day?" I sort of laughed and said yeah, I was, and then I asked him how he knew that. He said that the ranger told him.

It's been five circuits a lot more than it's been ten, but it just sort of goes to show that the most recent thing is often the thing that becomes the narrative.

Here's something that very few people know, but which is all the more appropriate--even storybook-ish--given what I am doing, or trying to do. The Bunker Hill Monument, which was erected in 1843, isn't meant to commemorate the Battle of Bunker Hill, or those lost on that day.

It's meant to be a symbolic testament to the ideals of service and sacrifice. And each day in this obelisk, you have a man who is trying to keep himself going so that he can give what he has to the world, which no one else in the world has to give, despite all of the forces against him, so that that world can be a better place.

Do you know what time I started work on Saturday? That would be midnight. I went to bed at eight, I awoke at twelve. I wrote. I worked my ass off. Straight through to when I left for Charlestown at half past nine.

What do you think I did when I was done with the stairs? That's right.

Service and sacrifice. And up and down this man goes, day in, day out, so that he won't just die, his heart won't give out, when anyone else in his situation would have been dead many years ago either because it was too much, too hard, and it killed them, or it was too much, too hard, and they took their own life.

But he keeps going, he keeps trying. And it just so happened to work out that part of that--a small part, but a real part--occurs literally inside of the walls of a structure meant to symbolize the ideals of sacrifice and service.