Compliment my life

Tuesday 1/13/26

I've been doing a lousy job with everything. Really lousy. Need to turn it around. Put up a good and honest fight. By honest I mean all-out effort.

I have things to get up on here from Christmas that I didn't finish or tend to at Christmas. I'm just going to do it. Not going to be tethered to/restricted by the calendar. What's the calendar really mean anyway? Besides, Christmas season used to run until Candlemass on February 2. In France people celebrate the day by eating crepes. I've never had a crepe.

Tomorrow I'll go straight from the barber's chair to the Bunker Hill Monument. My hair looks ragged. Like I'm out of sorts.

Planning/prepping to write a piece on winter horror films.

I'm still working on "Love, Your Mouse." If one can believe that. Then again, if one understood what I'm doing--this isn't writing the way anyone has ever thought of writing, in the reading of it or the creating--then it'd make sense.

Boston Ballet beanie arrived in Chicago for my niece's birthday on the 23rd. My sister thinks she'll love it. I need to write her her birthday letter in the next few days.

Didn't end up doing an amazing job running stairs in the Monument last week. After the twenty circuit day, I had a six circuit day, then two five circuit days, and nothing on Sunday, for a total of thirty-six. The days after the twenty circuit days were a bit of a grind, especially the third and fourth days. Legs need to bounce back. Or, better, legs need to bounce back less, which is a point I'll get to again. I'm at 211 circuits since November 15.

Sunday marked 3465 days, or 495 weeks, without a drink.

All the women who post photo after photo of themselves and complain about men and how there are no good ones as they add that they're looking for someone to "compliment" their lives, being too stupid to realize how their narcissism betrays them even here. And the stupid people who would see this and not know the word is "complement," unless you are, of course, a narcissist making no bones about wanting someone to constantly praise you in order to get to be permitted to know you. It's like you always have to explain the joke these days because no one knows anything.

On the whole, are people more entitled or narcissistic? I don't know. It's close. Probably narcissistic.

There's this venomous surliness that I encounter with overweight white women in their thirties and forties in the Monument that is particular to them. A brand of it, you could say. Their narcissism and entitlement and loathing of the fit white male just doing his thing is significant. With this group, entitlement outpaces narcissism.

The number of people who can't figure out what side to be on. Who never learned you stay to the right. Or couldn't remember it. They're like the people outside the bathroom door that the cafe with the sign that reads "occupied" who keep tugging at it in anger because it refuses to open for them when it should without having an idea why.

I won't deal with a narcissist on any level. Well, unless I had to for something I wrote in order to get it into the world. But when you adopt this policy, you then basically rule out anyone below the age of a baby boomer.

No intelligent person uses memes. None ever will. Intelligent people use words--not just words, but words that are their own. Which is to say, no verbal memes. I'd have to explain that, too. A verbal meme is the pre-made phrase that is deployed. "Still living rent free in his head." That kind of thing. Those words are not that person's. They're not organic and specifically called for. They are used as a meme is used.

I can't stand "Does anyone remember X" people. What if the do? What if they don't? You're up to something. You're not actually asking this question for an answer.

I also can't stand the "No one tells you..." people. Someone could have told you and wouldn't have been smart enough to understand what they were saying. But yes, in life, you are tasked with figuring out various things as you go along. It's like saying, "No one gave me the answers before I came into this classroom and sat down at this desk to take this test." No shit.

No one would post anything on social media if it was just posts and that was it. No like button to hit, no comments to be made, no followers to rack up. No one says anything to reach anyone, entertain anyone, make anyone think. They say and post in order to get these things back. Things without value. Things that are given in greater numbers based on how bland and/or stupid--and repetitive--something is. With people not being intelligent enough to realize this and getting it completely backwards. Thus, society ends up elevating and awarding and venerating that which is stupid, bland, repetitive, and never that which is insightful, entertaining, funny, and for someone else instead of the racking up of these meaningless, misleading numbers for the original poster. This is too complicated for most people to ever understand. This. Amazingly.

It's so rare now that I ever see any evidence of a person being able to hold two thoughts in their head simultaneously on the same subject. Here's an example: Red Sox ownership is cheap and isn't committed to winning, and signing Alex Bregman to that huge contract the Cubs gave him would have been a bad move. Both things are true. I'd be surprised if anyone else out there can think this.

Film award shows are for people with no real knowledge of film. What sports fans on the internet who know nothing themselves would call a "casual." Even when good films were made, the better ones didn't win awards. Safer films--blander films--that are soon forgotten do.

Almost every show I've seen on Netflix is made so that you can watch it without watching it. You needn't pay much attention to watch it. The characters will restate--tediously, awkwardly--the plot up until that point every twenty minutes or so. Some space it out a bit more, but there's so much expositional recapitulation in dialogue. Like the characters are reading a synopsis of themselves and the events up until then. This is clearly a dictate from the top on down at Netflix, because all the shows--which two exceptions I'm aware of--do it again and again and again, the same way.

I hate the term "jam band" with the Grateful Dead. They're not a jam band. That's not what jamming means. John Coltrane's Quartet wasn't a jam band. Charlie Parker didn't front jam bands. I'm not saying the Grateful Dead were jazz, because they weren't that either. People who use terms like "jam band" are also casuals in the sense of the above, and usually clueless, or, at best, people who don't think hard and far enough, and tap out too early. You have to think things through. Think about something as close as you can get to the bottom of that thing. Down through the levels.

Increasingly, I see people looking to get into something because they think they should, not because they're interested. They look to the pack or a pack, and follow. Wish to follow. Wish to think of themselves a certain way. "I'm looking to get into jazz where should I start?" without having heard anything that prompted an interest. We're so artificial. We can't even like things truly anymore. Everything is fake. An affectation. A going through of motions. Next to nothing is real. That which is real may be the rarest thing in our world now. You don't see people that are real, writing that is real. Other things. It's all about other things.

Charlie Parker at Storyville is a perfect LP for studying Parker's relationship with the blues. The blues was a gateway for much of what Parker did and the stuff he did over the top.