Wednesday 1/22/25
People do far too much complaining about the cold. You'd think they'd been stripped of their clothing in Antarctica and forced to roam about. I'm not talking about the elderly.
Also: The cold is good for you, being a bitch is not.
Do we have a bumper sticker there? I think we have a bumper sticker.
I have learned all about my nieces' big trip to the doll store. The little one in particular had a great time. The older one was annoyed by the younger one. (Note to self: You are a patient and accommodating man. But also: I am interested in people being genuinely interested in something, whatever it is. I'm interested in their interest.)
Did five more circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument and 100 push-ups on Sunday. Not a great pace, but that'll take care of itself just by being in there regularly. The important thing is to be in there. Lesson in that.
I'm pretty sure the protuberance I have on the back of my leg above the ankle is a ganglion cyst. Runners frequently get them, and apparently stair runners as well. There's nothing really to do about it--they usually come back anyway. They're benign.
Sunday also marked 3115 days, or 445 weeks, without a drink. Ran 1000 stairs at City Hall Monday--was snowy and icy and I didn't want to chance it--and 3000 stairs yesterday when it was nine degrees, but you warm up fast and you're soaked through with sweat by the end. 100 push-ups yesterday and today, too.
I am that person who wears shorts in weather like this when out and about but just for errands close to come. Why? I think it's healthy. We brace up and it's akin to bracing up practice with both one's health and in other regards. I must be strong and I must not give in.
I'm talking about with my situation at present, but strength can be an across-the-board proposition, and so can an attitude, and many little things may become a part of our overall make-up and our resilience and what is tantamount to a mindset of, "I give in to nothing." The practice--at all levels--helps fashion the reality.
Everything I do is for a reason. A reason of moving forward and getting out of this worse-than-hell I am in. Nothing is just, "Well, I felt like it, so I did it."
CC Sabathia got into the baseball Hall of Fame on the first ballot but Yogi Berra didn't.
"Peace begins when expectations end."
People love to say dumb shit like that, which I encountered the other morning. It's another way to get rid of standards and be passive. To not be alive and for everyone to suck, carte blanche.
Of course you should have expectations. For everything. With expectations--that we we will be treated a certain way, act a certain way, try a given amount--there is accountability. The world goes less to shit with them.
But sure, if you care about nothing, shoot for nothing, don't have standards of morals and behavior, and you are nothing, then nothing will affect you. You will also, for all intents and purposes, not be alive, and there's really no point for you to be on this earth at all save to be a technicality of a census. That's not how to do it. But post that stupidity on Threads? People eat it up. Because they don't want to have standards and they want an excuse for everything. This is how popularity works--provide the shit, and there you go.
I expect you not to cheat, steal, discriminate against me. I expect to do my best, improve at what I can improve, to write to the full extend of my ability every single time, to be honest, to be strong, to help people. See how this works? These are expectations.
It's strange to me when someone includes something about politics in a work email. They'll assume you must feel the way they do. They make this statement with which they figure you're sure to agree. Chances are low that I do. I simply let it pass. I'd never include such a thing, though. In a piece for work, okay; that could happen and does. But I wouldn't assume political views or project anything on anyone in the neutral context. I try to be understanding--people have less control than I do, I'll think. But should they with such a thing?
Unfortunately we are all in this life thing together. I feel like virtually no one recognizes this or understands it.
All the same: I must be mindful that in these instances a person is usually at least being friendly, and there is some good in that.
One of the ways social media works is it just hammers you, without let-up, about a single subject, stuffing it and stuffing it and stuffing it in your face. This is how people know what they know and it's the only way now that they can know anything, via this constant stuffing.
They've lost any other means through which to acquire knowledge, not that this is knowledge. If it's not stuffed in their face on repeat, they won't know it exists. They'll never find it on their own. They don't look. And now they don't know how to look, which is more than being someone who uses Google. There's a thought process to knowing to look. The decision to go seeking, which is different than having a need to look up what day April 15 falls on for taxes.
When someone dies, you get the stuffing, and it's so in your face and constant that I think it both invites and allows you to offer views on a subject that maybe you would have kept quiet about before if, say, something like death is involved.
For example, you can't get away from things pertaining to David Lynch, who just died. And what the result ends up being for me is the conjuring and expression of what--again, for me--is the salient point about his work, and that is that he was--as a filmmaker, that is; he may have been a very nice man--a charlatan with nothing to say.
I think a kind of insecure, faux-intellectual who is affectation incarnate pretends that he was deep and creative and all of that, but I don't believe anyone has sat through Eraserhead and been glad that's what they were doing. I think they liked saying that's what they did, which is totally different. But you can see why publishing people types say what they do about him.
Watched Laurel and Hardy's, Them Thar Hills (1934), in which revenge and comeuppance is meted out ritualistically, with he who is on the receiving end digging in and taking his licks--as though he were complicit in a formal ceremony--before then having his own turn to administer some to his former tormentor who will not act similarly.
Also watched Helpmates from 1932. There's a well-timed rhythm to these Laurel and Hardy shorts. They know when something is over and when to start again, with the effect of keeping the line moving until the line can move no more--physically and almost spiritually, though you also know that they'll be back and that down and out is not over and out.
"FR just hate the fact I got two partners and neither of them can give me love or affection"
Yes, what a great mystery you have going on there.
The Boston College men's hockey team moved up to number one in the national poll. Home and home series with BU upcoming this weekend, so a split could move them back out. Not that it matters, really. It's just a cool thing to see.
No real surprises, I'd say, in the football games over the weekend, unless one wants to count the Lions' loss, but they are the Lions and you're almost conditioned to them not going far. Zay Flowers might have made a difference for the Ravens. Eagles and Rams played a tight one, but it felt like the Eagles were in control throughout.
I was wrong about he college football national championship game. I thought Ohio State would win, but it'd be close, within five points or so. The game was not as close as the final score suggested. Notre Dame looked fantastic on that opening drive, too, like they were really setting a tone, but when Ohio State answered back so quickly, Notre Dame's mojo immediately fizzled. With Ohio State's second score you sensed the Irish wouldn't be able to keep up, and they couldn't.
Whenever I read or watch something pertaining to World War II and the efforts of the Allies, I think, "These people are so impressive." You look, too, at this nation and what it was, and you contrast that with how clownish and inane we all are now, all of these simple idiots nattering on social media, posting every one of their insipid thoughts, and you get yet another indication of how far we have fallen (and it's not like we were very high up to begin with).
It's hard to even imagine that if you went back in time and all of sudden provided everyone in 1985 with the internet that just about anyone would think to write and share what millions and millions and millions of people do now. People were simply not that way.
Downloaded Steve Reich's Early Works, a favorite album since I discovered it in college. Come out to show them, come out to show them, come out to show them.
Among the soundboard tapes gotten with the Grateful Dead Grabber most recently: the band playing a show at an organic raspberry farm in 1968, another in which they opened for Iron Butterfly in 1969, and another in which they played a high school for an hour in 1969 (and opened with "Good Morning Little Schoolgirl").

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