Behind you, behind you

Wednesday 2/18/26

There's one of those black and white prison movies where the guards abuse the men who work out on the chain gang. The inmates are gathered together around their oldest member. These movies always have that guy. He had time put on his sentence because one day he said "Enough," and slugged a guard. The men ask him if it was worth. The guy pauses. He takes the question seriously. Then he says, "For me it was, yeah." I think often about how he qualified it. How the way he said what he said says a lot. If he only said, "Yes," it would have meant something else.

Note to someone:

Some advice. Which is the same advice I've always tried to give you. Communicate, communicate, communicate.

Think of hockey players. Man on, man on. Behind you, behind you. In your skates. Got time, got time.

Successful lines communicate well. If you heard none of these things, you'd have a line that was in trouble. The same goes in life.

Almost everything that someone says on the internet is a lie. That thing didn't happen to them. That's not their income. They didn't say those words to that person at the store. That's not what happened with their ex. Or some guy they knew. Or their cousin. They're just lying. Or saying whatever they want, which isn't, I guess, the same, but it amounts to the same thing. You can take next to none of at face value.

And it's not like it's 17% of face value either. They're just lies. People are also so hyper-biased on their own behalf, so self-obsessed and so self-unaware, that you can take next to no account seriously that involves the words "I" and "me." It's a world of narrators who are close to 100% unreliable. If they actually laid out everything, and laid it out well, things would look a lot different than how they'd want them to based on the responses and reactions they got back.

Or maybe you think that every single woman was wronged by all of these men, and that's always how it is. For example. And I'm pretty sure that's not accurate.

People learn a new word which they think has "official" cachet, a word whose usage counts "extra" in the telling of their tale, a word with clinical leaning or origins, and they use the ever living fuck out of, and usually incorrectly. Like "avoidant." People who never learn new words, unless they see them enough times on social media. No new words out in life, from the people they know and meet, or from books.

Why can virtually no one spell the word "shtick" when almost everyone's life is them just doing their form of it? Why do they wish to be a "c" there so much? It's actually easier to spell than you think.

People love to boast, "After I turned such and such an age, I just didn't care," or "The best thing about being such and such and age is you just don't give a fuck."

That isn't you winning but rather the opposite.

I stopped thinking, I stopped exercising, I stopped listening, I stopped looking for love, I got fat, I doubled down, I isolated, I was open to nothing new, I calcified, I showed them!

Often I want to say to someone, "Who are you talking to?" but I know the answer is no one, even if they don't know it. They're not trying to communicate to another human being, nor is what they're saying meant for them. They're just saying it to say it. Because there isn't anything else for them to do, any more than the chicken that has lost its head has anything else to do as it scrambles for a few more seconds before dropping.

You'll see people saying what they should do, as if that will get them to do it, but they won't, and whatever it is they're stating ("I officially don't care what people think anymore") almost always attests to how they've already failed. The rocket won't be leaving the ground. But that's not why the rocket was put into place anyway.

Strength is like your mind has bodily form and it's out there in the dark at night in a cold body of water. It'd be so easy to shut the eyes and let yourself go below the surface. But instead, you pump hard to stay afloat. You keep your eyes as wide open as possible. You rotate your body three hundred sixty degrees, peering through the darkness, looking for the shore. You keep those eyes open and you continue to scan. Then you swim. You swim with everything you got to where you think the shore is. All the while, you're telling yourself, reminding yourself, that you can't give in and sink below this surface. You're exerting that continuous mental effort.

Yesterday someone told me they were going to get an MFA, which is my cue to move along. It would be like someone telling me AI wrote their book and thinking this was good. I'd have to be, right? Unless it was for work. But that would be me doing what is necessary on behalf of my work in terms of choosing to interact. Different things.

I did answer them, though, when they asked me what I'd be if I wasn't a writer. I told them I wouldn't have existed. Which is as true an answer as there is.

I am the only person who does what I do and is what I am. I'm not talking about with the range of the things I do, though that is also of course true.

As for writers: I don't believe there are any real writers in the world right now. There are people who put words down on a screen from time to time because of other things, which is different.

Recently I've had two experiences in which someone talks about Boston as "so old." Curiously, both of these people were doctors. I think it says much about someone who thinks something dating to the 1700s is "so old." I think it speaks to a limited mind. Narrow parameters. Of not having gotten out much, as I put it, mentally. A sailing of the imaginative boat around the harbor, rather than taking her out to open seas.

I communicated something about my work here in the early hours to someone I've not done that much with if at all in many months because of how they've treated me after having opened up daily for years on that score as if this was a matter of course with this individual. Part of what I said was this:

...about eight months ago, I began working on "What the Mouse Knew" again. I realized it was flawed and that it could be much better beyond just eliminating those flaws. I've worked on it ever since. (It's all of 1600 words long. Probably half the journal journal entries are longer these days.) The title changed. It's now called "Love, Your Mouse." I've invested so much time and energy in the story. And care. It's breathtaking. Truly breathtaking now. Well, to me. There's nothing I'll be able to do with it. There aren't people to want it or understand it. I'll not get a dollar for it. It isn't writing. No one would understand that. But it really isn't. It's so far beyond writing. It is the greatest thing I've ever seen in this world and at the same time so simple. And yet there isn't anyone else who could have conceived of or created any of it, let alone in how it all goes together and imbricates. So simple as to be complicated. I can't guess how many times I've read it through (always changing something, which means it's not done) and every time it makes me cry. No matter how many times I see it. And it really is like the simplest thing. And the most complex. It's life.

I ran 3000 stairs yesterday at City Hall, did 100 push-ups, and walked six miles. Back to the Monument today hopefully. Someone told me yesterday that we're supposed to get snow tomorrow, but I haven't looked myself. I think I'd like to just do some Monument circuits first without looking that far ahead, even if it's not very far.

Views tend to be held collectively rather than individually. People don't even know they're doing it. They think they're thinking their own thing, but what they're really doing is being influenced by what those around them think--a group. And by influenced, I don't mean shown some form of light, but rather that's where their mental marching orders come from. Many people think they're thinking something without actually thinking it.

I drank so much water last night. (Note to self should you see this in the future: Please don't read this as a sign of diabetes from back in February 2026. You hadn't had much water for a few days and hydration was deemed necessary so you had at it.)

I've had theme song from The Blob in my head ever since doing that James Taranto-related entry the other day. Oh well. I guess that's the price you pay for including the right hyperlink. It's not a horrible tune, but it is hard to shake free of.