Explain it to me like I'm stupid

Tuesday 10/27/26

You can know exactly how the world is now and still stare at it in disbelief.

"Explain it to me like I'm stupid."

You are stupid.

This is a dog of a World Series. Brewers romped 10-1 last night to take a 3-0 lead. They probably finish off the Rays tonight. Ho hum. So little drama in this year's postseason. The sport continues to worsen. The Rays lose a lot of World Series.

Boston College, who was trailing at the half against a bad Georgia Tech team, came out in the second half and ran wild all over the Yellow Jackets to improve to 4-3. BC is better this year. The Cincinnati game was a disaster, they were woeful against Maine, but they've been right there or prevailed in their remaining contests.

Getting to 6-6 and making a bowl should be the goal. I think it's going to be tough. Notre Dame and Miami are going to beat them easily. Had the Eagles won one of those games against Virginia Tech or SMU when they had the lead in the fourth, they'd be in a nice spot.

It's so hard to build a program now because the sport just doesn't work that way. It's about your free agent acquisitions, not going floor by floor from the ground up. College football was at its best when programs got buy-in with what they were doing. The ethos, the identity, the culture. Play style. There's so much turnover now from year to year that this isn't really a thing anymore.

People ought to be embarrassed almost all the time now by their words, actions, beliefs (which aren't even true beliefs because believe involves thinking and vetting), but they never are.

We don't have the ability to distinguish one thing from another or see anything for what it is.

You turn on some NBA coverage from "experts"--idiots, all--and are taken aback that adults can be this childish, this underdeveloped. It's just middle school lunch table drama. "Then Jaylen posted the blue sweatshirt emoji on his Instagram after Jayson posted his reel that mean he be lyin OMG."

Very depressingly, these paraphrasings I attempt don't match the stupidity and illiteracy of what these people say/write. I "screw up" on this score simply by starting with "Then" rather than "Than" and getting that correct.

The term "adult" is a misnomer. How many actual adults are there? What's the percentage of people over the age of eighteen, or twenty-one, if you prefer, who are adults? It's way less than one percent.

I had a nightmare the other night involving college. I have a lot of college-based nightmares for some reason. I was in this underground basement city type of thing with a college roommate and my sister Kerrin was there, too, and this journey we had undertaken had something to do with trying to save her life.

Mentioned on here wanting to do a good job with the stairs last week. This didn't happen. Second extremely lackluster week in a row. A mere fifteen circuits in the Bunker Hill Monument all told. I need to do drastically better in the controllable parts of my life.

What was the breakdown of these fifteen circuits in this instance? Three days (Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday) of five circuits in the Monument, which is a total of 18,000 stairs, with 100 push-ups on each of those days and three miles walked. That's good for most people, but it isn't close to that here. Disappointed in myself and feel bad about myself. Need to eat better, too, and drink more hibiscus tea and other teas that benefit my heart.

The Monument opening later has resulted in me being more productive work-wise.

Sunday marked 3752 days, or 536 weeks, without a drink. You know what's a big number of days without a drink? One day. Putting that first day up on the board. I'm looking at that 3752 and it doesn't necessarily mean more than the number one would. The number one can be momentous.

I often wish I had stopped drinking earlier. There is only one thing in my life with which I think it might have made a difference, and it might not have. It is, or was, potentially a big thing, though. With someone I knew. I struggle with "what if" on this score. I struggle with other things, too, because of what I saw them do with extreme deceit and cowardice and apparent heartlessness and what that did to me.

I do this haunting chicken and egg thing that takes a toll on me. I'm more inclined to do it because of how everything is, like there was this alternate reality I might have been living in instead and I torment myself with that so many different ways. I think, "If you'd only been then what you are now. This would still be awful, but there would be this other thing that was good and you could have adapted and learned to be grateful for that good thing and make the most of it."

Even if things were going to have worked out the same, I'd feel better knowing I hadn't been drinking back when that was unfolding/resulting in what it resulted in. It'd take away the doubt. I didn't put my best self forward.

At the same time: when I have reconnected, however fleetingly, with people I once knew, whom I thought about in the years since that initial knowing or time together in a certain way, as smarter than most, someone with whom I've had a real connection, etc., I have ended up thinking they were dumb, simple, and then trying to figure why I had ever thought otherwise, how I had, or what caused me to believe there was this connection.

Is that romanticizing after-the-fact? Building up something as what it never was? Then there is also the reality that I grow every day. Each day I become more than I was the day before. I am so very far away from the person I was in 2009 or 1996. Whereas, others aren't. If anything, they go backwards and are less now than they were previously, because of everything else in the world of which they become a product.

People move in the directions indicated by society's directional arrows, not against the flow, so to speak. No matter how far removed that person may seem from society--the retiree who knows the same small group of people they have for years, who isn't online much--they will be dramatically influenced both by how generally it is and the worst aspects of it.

The only person who won't be is someone of extreme individuality, passion and passions, inner drive and focus, a constant assessor, a deep thinker, and there simply aren't people like that. Everything in this world might as well be designed to bring about the extinction of such people and now they're like some species that only exists on the Galápagos Islands, only they don't have the luxury of being in the same place or ever knowing of each other's existence and instead are scattered far apart.