Be serious

Saturday 8/15/26

Sometimes when we say, "You're lying" to someone, we're doing so in the hopes that they'll prove us wrong. Mount an airtight defense. Beat back the assertion with this commanding shove of truth. But we already know. It really becomes a question of whether we want to lie to ourselves.

The panegyrics so many people pen to themselves, day in, day out. Self-eulogizing post and/or statement after self-eulogizing post and/or statement and for having done nothing. "I am the Lord my own God of mediocrity, I shall have no other gods before me."

It'd be better to do better even if it doesn't make anything better. A paradox, maybe. Or maybe not.

There's nothing to break through to.

There's really just that world of who controls who breaks through or doesn't as a concept.

There's nothing to break through to for a writer unless that writer creates the readers on the other side of the barrier.

In the show Studio 60, the co-executive producer of the Saturday Night Live-like sketch comedy program that the show is about and one of the three main stars of the cast go to a comedy club to see a comic. The comic is bad, the two guys go into a different room to have a beer, and while they're arguing, the executive producer overhears this new comic on the stage also performing poorly. The producer goes, "Wait, wait, wait"--you know the kind of thing--and they go back into the main room and watch the guy bomb. But they've seen something! So they follow him into the bathroom and hire him on the spot to be a staff writer for their highly successful sketch comedy show. Just like that.

Nothing works this way. People are just given things like jobs, honors, Oxford professorships, Pulitzers, etc., because of who they know and being the right kind of person for the right kind of crowd. No one is getting anything because someone else--let alone many other people--think that person is amazing at it, unless we're talking sports.

There was a time when a person wrote a record review and sent it in the physical mail to Rolling Stone or a short story to The New Yorker and that led to work, a permanent gig, a platform, and that led to other things from there. But we're talking the late 1960s in the case of the former, and the 1930s in terms of the latter. You could be Alastair Sim and act in a neighborhood drama to help out in a pinch, and someone watching in someone else's living room could know someone and make a call and then there you are, on your way.

But this isn't how anything is now. You can be the greatest artist who ever lived and no one is going to care or try to make you visible if it's just that. Rather, those who realize that's what you are are going to attempt to stop you from getting anywhere because you're immeasurably beyond what they are, while maybe a few others silently root for you, being too afraid to voice their support, for fear of reprisal from those doing the blocking and also because no one says anything unless many other people are already saying it. Later they'd say something, but only if it got to later, and the power/leverage structure had been flipped.

Summer nears its end, which is better for me. I think if I'm able to work well starting now and get things done I will open a new fall writing folder and start afresh after too much inactivity due to hopelessness.

The end of summer didn't bother me as a kid. The single digit years of my life. Summer had been the woods, the Cape, friends, games and sports, bikes, and reading--so much reading. Reading during lulls in the day in less bright spots, inside or out. Reading what felt like deep into the night in bed. My imagination was involved in everything. I passed through summer. Autumn I embraced.

Lately I've been thinking about having everything I'd want the world to see in a clearly labeled folder saying, "This is the work" so that no one would have to try and figure it out if I'm dead. Because right now it would take so much work going through what's here, things being organized, or not, as they are. This is the kind of thing I think about now. I'm light years away far away from having that folder though.

I love hearing the birds before the dawn and that we don't really know why they make the sounds they do then. I like to imagine they're saying, "Did you make it through the night?" and "Yes, I did, and I hear that you did, too" and "It's a new day, time to get started with it" and "I have plans and good luck to you with yours."

I'm a big fan of handshakes and waves, probably in part because of my father. I recall once when he picked me up from the airport in Chicago. It was cold and he had on gloves. He took off the glove on his right hand to shake my hand. I think that "small" gesture said a lot about who he was.

If you were arriving somewhere he was already at, wherever that was, he'd wave and make sure you saw him and didn't have to wander around lost. If this was in the stands at a game or some event or a restaurant. Didn't matter. He'd make sure you knew that he'd been keeping an eye out for when you got there. To me that's a metaphor for how you want to be in life for people.

Yesterday as I got to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument for the latest time, there was a family of five in the observation area--no one else, just this family of five. Mom, dad, three kids. You have these great views in multiple directions. You're 221.5 feet above a place where a historic battle was fought. Arguably the most important battle in this country's history. A battle that the colonists lost, but which made both them and their opponents realize that these upstarts had a real chance.

Realizing you have a real chance is a huge thing in life. Right now, I have no chance. It's as if I've been barred from getting to the spot where I can fight a battle against an opponent. With some people, that's because they fear I would win. Anyway, you know what each of the five members of this family was doing? They were all staring at their phones. They weren't talking. They weren't looking out at any of the views. No interaction. Just staring at their phones.

When you have three kids and you're doing something like this together, the youngest is going to be fairly young, right? Now you tell me how you think those three kids will be later on. Think they're going to read? How about read anything good?

Think they're ever going to think? Think more than they have to? You don't ever have to think anymore in this world, because that's how we've made the world work. No child left behind? No adult left behind is more like it. Because to leave one adult behind now--given how they're almost all the same--is to leave everyone behind. You can fire the manager, but you can't fire the team.

Then these kids will have kids. Think they're going to make reading a priority for those kids? Think they're going to expose them to art? Culture? How well do you think they're going to educate those kids? How much do you think they'll care? How much do you think they could do to educate those kids if they even wanted to? They won't even know what it means to help educate someone because they don't know what education is. Teachers in schools don't stand a chance, because kids have already been failed by the people who are the most important teachers, for good and in almost every case now for very (and essentially insurmountable) bad.

There isn't a bigger problem in this country than how unfit almost all parents are (or unwilling to be fit) for parenting. Why would one expect anything else? People are idiots. They don't read. They can't read. They don't have character. They're not fiercely devoted to doing what's right. They don't have empathy. They don't even understand what it is. They're not looking to help people. They're certainly not acting on it.

And this person is going to teach a young person to be and do these things they aren't and don't do? What is the sense in thinking that would happen?

You think that adult person is going to all of a sudden model these forms of behavior that they've never exhibited? It'd be insane to think that a stupid, lazy, immoral person is going to help teach someone else to be the opposite of these things. You think non-readers help instill a love for reading--or even a tolerance--in others? Non-thinkers help others think? The incurious help others cultivate a sense of wonder? Again, that would be insane to think that.

Usually they're going to stick a screen in that kid's hands as early as possible. That screen will be just as big a factor, if not more so, in raising that kid. And everything that orbits the world of that screen. The behaviors they learn, how tight their minds get packed in as they become someone adverse to exploration, to critical thinking, to knowing what exploration entails and that it exists as an option and these are the only options for a life well lived, both for one's self and for how one impacts the lives of others.

But you can't criticize anyone for parenting, right? Take a look around. Are you supposed to pretend to be blind? How can you not see this? You can hardly see anything else because this--and these people and what they've wrought--are in the way.

The Patriots' kicker missed three field goals in the team's first exhibition game on Thursday night. He wasn't particularly good last year. They should be looking at other options. That's not why I'm mentioning this, though.

The kicker said afterwards that he was going to watch the film to see how he could improve. I read comments from people about this comment. You have to understand how obtuse the average person is. It takes some doing, because the stupidity of the average person strains the credulity of the smarter person.

The comments were like, "What's there to see? You missed." As if the video the kicker would be watching focused on the ball as it neared the uprights. That is, most people are too stupid to be able to figure out--if you want to call it that--that a kicker would watch film of his kicking mechanics. The same as a golfer would watch film of his swing, or a baseball player. There'd be a lot to see, yes? And some adjustments could make big differences, no?

This is beyond most people. And you have to know that's true. Or else you are being ignorant. And anyone who wants change also has to know what the situation is, where things really stand. Change can't happen even theoretically without knowing the deal.

Albert Camus said, "'I despise intelligence,' really means, 'I cannot bear my doubts.'" (You must to pay attention to the quotes here; you should pay close attention to everything in writing, because everything is telling you something, from a comma to a tense to a period to an apostrophe, etc.)

We see examples of this constantly in our world with the weaponization of stupidity. Every hollow boast of "Too long didn't read"; making fun of someone having used a word that other person doesn't know or--and this is some fresh insanity--saying that's "ableist"; every last "You think too much."

It's just insecure idiots telling on themselves. They don't have to be the idiots that they are. They've chosen to be those idiots, in large part because they're too cowardly to try and be anything more, in case they fail. They're scared they wouldn't be able to handle that. Cowards in the extreme.

You look at social media and you see the pathetic obsession people have with trying to coin aphorisms, never mind that they don't even know what that word means and most of these people would have lived such sheltered, incurious mental and intellectual existences as to have never seen it in their lives. It's as if they're nursing some hope of virality with a one-liner. Billions of them a day. The trite-isms. "Believe in your path." And the like.

There aren't serious people. Nor serious writers. People aren't serious about anything. Most wouldn't even understand what I mean here. I'd have to break it down. They couldn't realize the truth in these remarks as born out in what they see regularly in the world and which is then codified in this language.

Being serious doesn't mean mirthless. Buster Keaton, for instance, was a serious comedian. Seriousness is sincerity and sincerity put into practice. Let's say your Instagram bio puts a space between words and punctuation. But not even every time. You can't even be consistently sloppy. Which makes you somehow sloppier.

That person isn't a serious person. I could say more. We'll leave it at that.

Many millions of people call themselves writers now. They don't write. They don't even have any idea what writing is. Most people who do write--like the invented, makeshift gods of the publishing system--also have no idea what writing actually is. They think it's this other thing. They think it's putting one word after another and once you've done that enough you've written something, but putting one word after another is about the least of what writing actually is.

There's no burden of proof to call one's self a writer. Or that's how people think. So they just do it. Claim to be this thing which is the last thing on earth that they actually are. They're closer to being a space traveler than they are a writer. But it's like a buffet. They just help themselves. "Oh, sure, I'll take one of those, too." There's no more to it than that for them.