Breezes, break in humidity, baby strollers, everyday shutouts and getting shut out every day

Wednesday 8/26/26

It is so comfortable outside yesterday in Boston. I don’t want to be lulled into a false sense of security that summer and its weather are over, wary of their sticking power as I am, but I have renewed hope as a detester of both. The dew point was in the 50s for what feels like the first time in months and maybe is. I shall send a prayer the Great Pumpkin’s way.

Wasn't necessarily going to be a stair day, but I'd been working for a while and had become restless so I went to City Hall to run a quick 3000 stairs yesterday. This was a breeze compared to how it's been for a while, and there was a nice breeze, too. I produced a normal human amount of sweat as well, and was not like some two-legged pond.

I guess maybe it was the humidity all along. I'll know more in the next two or three weeks. Wasn't like the temperature was low, either. Was in the mid and upper 70s throughout the day. Yes, that's not blazing, but it's also not 65. That humidity falling like it did seemed to be everything.

It bothers me that even baseball-reference has this wrong. "The Yankees were shut out last night." "Sonny Gray threw a shutout." See the difference and how that works? They're not the same. Like every day and everyday. "I watch the Red Sox win every day." "Losing had become an everyday occurrence for the Yankees."

Often I'll see a headline saying that a study was conducted and here are the results, with those results being exactly what one would expect them to be if one has a brain at all, though I also understand that the study should still be conducted anyway.

For instance, this morning I saw one whose results determined that gender, race, and environmental students were most likely to attempt to censor speakers on college campuses. Well, of course. Who else was it going to be? Similarly, the results of another study were that people who drank a lot of beverages with sugar were likelier to get stomach cancer. Makes sense, doesn't it?

On that note: do you know anyone who consumes a lot of sugary drinks who is healthy? How do they look? What about someone who eats a lot of sugary foods? Non-children, that is. The child only "gets away" with it because they're a child. They'll need to stop and change or else they'll have problems when they're no longer a child.

People like when people that other people will be posting about on social media die. They are in essence glad that person died. They don't actually care about the person or that they're no longer here. They are happy to have the opportunity to try and get attention for themselves and to perform morality and being a caring person. It's usually entirely a performance.

I've been seeing these online complaints about the rudeness of people who listen to music on their phones or play videos without headphones, with many of the commenters saying this is a Boomer thing.

I don't experience it as a Boomer thing. I experience it as an "all ages" thing. The person sitting across from me on the T or next to me at the cafe watching videos sans headphones on their phone--and videos of pure idiocy in each instance; it's never from a documentary on Matisse now, is it?--is as likely to be twenty-nine as they are to be seventy-seven.

People only care about themselves, yes, but I also think they're too stupid to have it occur to them that they might be causing a disturbance or doing something wrong. No one is home within American minds. It's empty space. Not even any crude sticks of furniture in the joint.

Yesterday at the City Hall stairs there was a woman with a baby stroller and a baby in it. She looked out at the top of the stairs, wondering how she'd get down. You don't need to go down these stairs. You can walk to the street to your right, take a left, and use the sidewalk.

Seeing her standing there, I asked her if she wanted a hand. She said yes, so I jogged over, took the front part of the stroller, and helped her carry it and baby down to the bottom. Then I went back to running stairs out of the way on the far right hand side, and what do you know, there was a rude woman coming down, in the last place she was supposed to be--that is, on the far left hand side of the stairs--expecting me to move. Clueless, entitled. A person on the scene with a capable eye--something basically no one now has--would have been able to conclude much about two people, because these things say a lot in their way, do they not?

All of life is like this as you go around. It presents information to you. But we can't see that information. We don't process it, make use of it. It's lost on us. We basically see nothing. The things we see the most are our screens. When I'm at the cafe or on the train, sometimes I imagine everyone who is looking down at their screens--and it is usually everyone save me--looking up at once, and this big knuckle cracking sound, only instead of their knuckles it's this chorus of their neck bones.

I've helped to carry a lot of babies in their strollers down the steps at City Hall over the years. Probably a couple dozen.

The kids start school tomorrow. Charlie and Lilah dread going back, whereas Amelia--who starts first grade--is excited. She likes school. So far, anyway. Amelia is mean, but not, it seems to her friends. It'd be better if she was nice to everyone. Is that an extended phase or who she is? Her natural disposition? I don't know. I hope it's something she grows out of.

Charlie is somewhat gallant, I'd say, and Lilah is super sweet. My mom was telling the older two kids about the Reddit thing with the Monument, and Lilah couldn't understand why people would try and be so mean to her really kind uncle of all people.

I'll send well wishes along to all of them later today via my sister.

I'm also a big Great Pumpkin believer, incidentally. I'm an even bigger believer in Linus, but I totally get why he hunkers down in that pumpkin patch each year and would do a version of the same if I was back in Rockport with the means and mobility.