But if you are good: dark roasts, fine dining, and James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal and Susan Morrison of The New Yorker

Monday 2/16/26

I saw a written comment from a person of today underneath an image of a Van Gogh painting that said, "Van Gogh never fails to impress," which gave me pause, though I'm sure it wouldn't do so with anyone else.

Van Gogh's paintings didn't impress anyone while he as alive. Perhaps his brother, but his brother may also have felt obligated to respond at length and make sure to be complimentary because of Van Gogh's situation and how devoted he was to not just his art but painting itself.

This person made the comment wouldn't have in all probability if it was a painting and not what they knew to be "a Van Gogh," which is like a cue to say certain kinds of things. What we think we should think powers so much of what we say, and what we get ourselves to believe that we think, without necessarily thinking it.

This is how I observe the world. I see what is happening and why. Almost everything breaks down to something other than what it would have you believe it is, if you follow me. I'm not saying, either, that a person can't look at a Van Gogh painting and think highly of it and more.

I read this account of a guy whose wife didn't like dark roast coffee. They'd be at restaurants and she'd send the coffee back for being too dark. He liked dark roast coffees. As he did the shopping, he'd buy both dark roasts for himself, and light roasts for his wife.

One day, he made the wrong kind for her. She was already pouring the cup, though, so he decided not to say anything, and maybe she wouldn't notice. Pick your battles and all that. She drinks the coffee and tells him how good it is. The next day, he makes her dark roast deliberately. She's into it again.

This goes on for eight years, with her praising the dark roast coffee she thinks she doesn't like. Then he tells her the truth. As you'd expect, all hell breaks loose. Post-fight, it's back to a lighter roast for her. He said that he's certain she doesn't like it as much, but she's sticking with it.

Most things are like the dark roast thing. All of this orbiting stuff. Not that which is being orbited.

I phoned my mother yesterday on my walk after running stairs to see how her babysitting duties went from the day before. She was a long time recounting. I had walked to South Station and was on my way back but I am happy to know what she is up to.

It was mostly just her and Lilah because Charlie had a couple of basketball games and Amelia was at a sleep-under--her first, I believe, but I am not sure. Lilah wanted to watch Hamilton so they did that.

When Charlie got home he gave my mother a Valentine's card. He wrote a very sweet note (my mom read it to me) and the card played a song she liked. It was really thoughtful. I told my sister to tell him that was a caring thing to do and that I was proud of him.

I tried to send someone a gift of some money that it was hard for me to afford at Christmas. I pay them to do this thing, but this wasn't for services rendered, but rather was meant as a "I appreciate you" gesture, which I'd done before with them.

Then there were all these issues with apps and banks and vanishing money...so yesterday I just finally sent money again. I was trying to send X amount, and I ended up being out more than double X amount. I shared the response confirming the payment was received with someone, which was the extent of it, and they asked if I was surprised. They didn't ask because they were singling out this person. They meant in general. That that's how it would go.

Not necessarily. Okay, no. Speaking generally.

What I try to do is think, "Well, maybe things are hard for them right now" or something, you know? That's what Orson Welles meant when he said that we must remember our heart is God's little garden--and he didn't mean this in a religious sense--and to try to allow for whatever is happening with a person. Have the grace to leave wiggle room. As we'd want someone to do so with us. There's this line in "Love, Your Mouse" that says it can be hard to say how you feel, and even harder the more you feel it. I'm paraphrasing. But yeah.

I get that it can be hard. I really do. I have experience where kindness can make it harder for me to...acknowledge...because things are a way I wish they weren't. My inclination is to write a letter. So that person knows...and knows why it's hard. I'll level with them at a really emotional and honest level. People aren't going to do that, nor am I suggesting they should. And that's only with people you know. The people in your life. And for bigger things. I'm off subject.

But it got me down, made me feel heavy, anxious, where your heart feels fast and all nervy, and like I did something wrong, even though I know that wasn't true and that most people would say, "I wouldn't have done that..."

That's how publishing people have tried make me feel as they are abusing, assaulting, stealing, hooking up their cronies, lying, bullying, discriminating. This wasn't a publishing thing, to be clear. I'm just saying that that's how many of those people work. They abuse you and then blame you. And they blame you so hard, so nastily, like you're some piece of shit and everything is wrong with you, and with this blind--and I guess that's the operative word here--conviction, that you can't help but think there's something you're missing, because who would talk to anyone that way?

Susan Morrison at The New Yorker was the first person I'd ever seen talk and behave this way. It was shocking to me. She was so aggressively nasty. There's a word I could use that I won't, but man, if there was ever that word personified, it was her. She could have had it embroidered on her pillows. It became like wading into trauma to send a pitch. Because you didn't know what was going to happen. How nasty she was going to be.

You know better, that it's not your fault and there's something deeply, deeply wrong with so many of these publishing people, especially if you know these people, let alone like I know them for what they are, and readers of this record have come to know them for. They don't leave doubt, do they? It's not up for debate. But that doesn't make you feel better, because you see how they are, and if you're not like that...well, you see the problem, right? How are you going to get anywhere in that system? If you're good, you can't be like this. As a person.

But we see it with the writing, too. If you're a great writer, you can't write like they write, how they expect people to write so that they don't have to ever look at anyone and think that other person is on a different level. What they engage in in treating the victim like the victim should go and find a cross to nail themselves to while apologizing the whole time and praising them and thanking them for the painful death they are about to receive is a form of gaslighting.

Publishing in large part runs on it. Then again, gaslighting means that the person doing it knows they're doing it, but it's more complicated here in publishing, because many of these people are capable of dining on their own fecal waste and getting themselves to think that they'd just had the greatest meal ever that was made specially and exclusively for a king or queen. In other words, themselves.

You can request, "Please don't talk to me like that," after years of one of them shitting down your throat--like James Taranto did to me at The Wall Street Journal--and then they essentially ban you, like the petty, delusional bully-coward they are, which is what he did.

Many of these people who go around in life looking for opportunities to say, "How dare you." It's all most of them are. That thing. That wanting to be able to think and/or say that. That's their identity. There isn't anything else to them. How dare you. They'll just make up whatever they need to make up in their twisted brains so that they can say, act, feel that way.

The rules are somewhat different if they think someone is like them, on their level, or just the right amount of lower than them. Bad people tend to have no problems with people who are bad in the same ways. But a good person? A smarter person who uses their abilities honorably? There will be problems.

Taranto is such an unhinged bully that he actually once yelled at me for beginning an email with, "Hi James, How are you?" Absolute nut job. And such a dumb person. You wouldn't have believed the stuff he didn't know. The things he hadn't even heard of. The incompetence, too. I'd show the emails to people and they'd be like, "How is this possible?"

Out of his mind with nastiness and ego. And he was just nothing as a thinker or a man. There's always such an irony at work with so many of these people. They're unintelligent and bad at what they do, and yet you'd think God had appointed them as their totally deserving successor. A clipped yellow toenail shard would have more reason to think well of itself than a guy like this. Not that that stopped him.

And he's not even the person at The Wall Street Journal who chided me when the paper created a nightmare for me that went on for years with the IRS and Massachusetts Department of Revenue when they added multiple zeroes to my income with them one when they reported it to the government, but left off those additional zeroes with the form they sent me for tax purposes, so it looked like I left out hundreds of thousands of dollars in income. That was Eric Gibson.

Evil people. I still need to put up entries in this record given over wholly to Taranto and Gibson, with emails included. I can't stand having to do this kind of thing, but I'll get to it. I do and will always get to what needs getting to. That tax saga went on for years as I detailed here in this record; getting scary pieces of mail from the government saying that I owed like a quarter of a million dollars. But I was the bad guy. I'll say it again: Evil people. And, again, so dumb. You can be so dumb here and have these jobs.

This wasn't anything like that. Not nearly. It's just how people are, how they go about things in this day and age. But that hangs so heavily on me. It causes me grief, anxiety, feeds into the hopelessness I already feel. It's like good has no chance. That it always loses. It's not the way of things, and it backfires. Makes things worse if you're good.

But if you are good, you have to try to be good. So then it's like you're just courting problems. But if you're bad, you don't care, you don't get down, you don't have things backfire, you just blend in, fit in. No mention was made of the $100, or whatever remained being held over and counted towards the next billing for services.

A person I know has to take their child today to a health facility where they'll need to stay. I don't know for how long. They've been spending their days in another treatment center, where they were getting dropped off in the morning and picked up at night, but their issue wasn't improving.

The person I know was buying them a tablet over the weekend. You're not permitted internet access as this facility. I gave the person I know a suggestion for something that would be age appropriate, situation appropriate, venue appropriate, that they could download onto their computer and then upload to the new tablet that their kid could watch during downtime or at bedtime at the treatment facility (this being the 1980s British TV series, The Wind and the Willows, which I also picked because the four friends often share snacks and meals together and food has this really positive connotation in the series) and to let me know if he'd like any more ideas.

He said he would, so I suggested some other shows (Children of the Stones, as the kid characters are the same age as this kid), some books (The Children of Green Knowe, The Railway Children, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, because the kids in these works aren't at home but off somewhere else having an adventure or facing new things), and some music (the Beatles' Red Album, because its upbeat), and told him--or sent links--as to where he could find them.

If you have to be somewhere, you might as well make the best of it. Maybe something helps you get through that time and if you make a connection with that thing that lasts for the rest of your life, or you ended up being exposed to something you wouldn't have been and it becomes a passion that's still there for you at fifty-seven.

His kid is refusing to go to the place they need to go to at this point so I'm sure today will be challenging. He said he'd let me know how it went.

Getting back to that idea of the general...I think people don't know how to respond to kindness. What they recognize as genuine kindness. I think it can make them uncomfortable and shut down their words. Everything is so fake and performative, it's like we don't have the ability to be genuine, let alone give of our time, energy, resources for reasons other than playing what is now the only version of our social game. A game of insincerity, avarice, using people.

This is especially pronounced with younger generations. You see why I wanted to make sure that I told my nephew via my sister that I was proud of him. Because I want him and his sisters to be genuinely kind people. To care about the well being of others and their feelings and not be too scared or ashamed to show and act on that kindness.

People don't know what to say, because they are so rarely, openly...genuine. They don't do heartfelt, if you will. Because they think it compromises them. Makes them self-conscious. Exposes them. They fear being mocked, called out, seen as different than the group. People want to be seen as a full-fledged group member at the cost of their happiness, their mental health, their physical/emotional/intellectual/spiritual health, their life.

We're really against being real. We're scared of it. The longer you don't do most things, the worse you become at them. Eventually you can't do them at all. And then, maybe, you don't even remember ever having done them or what it'd be like. And after that, maybe, you can't even think or see that these things are things. The very concept of them is gone. Maybe you were alive somewhere else before now. Maybe your existence didn't begin with what your birth certificate says. But you don't remember it, do you? Have any idea of it. Kind of like that is what I mean.

I'm using the general "we" here. I've never had a hard time with this. I'd have a hard time with doing the opposite, the things that most people do. I know what someone would say. That I'm being too generous here, by in effect suggesting that what someone says or doesn't say doesn't necessarily align with gratitude or appreciation they might be feeling and that people are just nasty and full of themselves and only care what they can get from you for themselves. And it's probably that in almost all cases.

But I still try to allow for something else. Which I may do for me, in a sense, so that I do the things I do and conduct myself the way I believe I should...but I know in my heart that I'd do this anyway...even though I curse it, if that makes sense. Because it really is like you'd rather not be good or else you'll be so miserable. You'll pay the price for anything good. The price of your life. I don't know. Some thoughts. Grappling.