First acquired, ducklings, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, the best is yet to come!

Monday 5/12/25

Here's how social media works and the world as well, and you might want to say, well, that's social media, but the world is social media--it's made in social media's image, and people who have never been on social media are social media creations because of their environment and the people around them and how they act. We become our environment. The rub-off over-makes us, save in the rarest of instances. A person who is one out of a billion.

Someone posts something trite and vapid like, "The best is yet to come," and 900 people hit the like button. Whereas, if someone posts something true and heartfelt and helpful and insightful and beautiful, very few people, if any, will hit the like button. And the more it is those very things, the less likely people are to hit that like button, all the way down to zero.

People are so dumb and empty and delusional and simple and self-deluding, that they want to believe, and can believe, the best is yet to come, and that this is meant for them to hear because it's tailored to them. But that's like saying oxygen is tailored to you, and at least oxygen does something and is required for living. The best is not going to come when all you do is nothing. And be like this.

I saw ducklings for the first time this year in the Public Garden yesterday.

Shortly before entering the park, I had called my mother. Her photo was in the Chicago Tribune yesterday for Mother's Day. I said, "Happy Mother's Day! It's your first acquired!" because first born wouldn't make sense and it's good to bring laughter to someone's life even if one is barely hanging on.

I did put that article--it was an op-ed--up on social media. I don't know how one find something that's more beautiful about mothers. Want to guess how many likes it got? This amazing work in one of the highest circulation newspapers in the country?

That would be zero likes.

I'm not making this up. This isn't some theory I have. It's how the world works. Good is bad. The better, the worse. I've proven it thousands of times. I'm living it.

That wasn't even the only op-ed yesterday. The other was sports-related. And if I did the same thing, the exact same thing would have happened--despite the completely different subject matter--for the exact same reason.

That is the world you live in. Do you want it to be like that?

My mother was telling me that my newly-turned nine-year-old niece Lilah--aka, my best pal--has been making jewelry. She's a very sweet child. She made her mom things for Mother's Day--she just does this on her own, because that's who she is. Anyway, she helps my mom put the earrings on, and then she says, "They make you look younger, Grammie." My mom had to laugh--what a saleswoman Lilah is!

She also told me about how Lilah had to go to the school for some event with my sister. I think it was a fundraising thing. I'm not sure. But because my sister was involved, Lilah had to go. She doesn't like crowds, so she sat in the hallway by herself for most of the duration, reading her book. My mom said, "Reminds me of someone else I know..."

Watched the available episodes of The Studio. It's not very good. You won't find much meat on these bones. But it's harmless enough. And yes, I get it--you're doing this nod to creativity in the movies by moving the camera, but maybe settle down with that. You don't have to do keep doing that 360 shot where we go round and round someone's head as they're talking.

This is the writing level of an average American adult:

Omg he was real!! A earthquake in atlanta !!!!!

Then someone like this breeds--or already has bred--and on it goes, but worse and worse--and that's just on their end of it, before we get into the ways and influences of what now constitutes our dreadful world--because how is such a creature going to parent well and help educate their child? It can't happen and won't. They'll only add to the problem.

Putting the word "objectively" in front of a claim doesn't make it true, which is how people would like it to work.

On Saturday I walked three miles and did 150 push-ups. That was obviously not very good. I have to force myself to do anything given how things stand. It was in the upper forties and raining and I gave up, I guess you could say, without much fight. Yesterday I walked eleven miles and did 300 push-ups and five circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument. Yesterday also marked 3220 days, or 460 weeks, without a drink.

When I was talking to my former college roommate last Sunday, he was on a run, and he said, "I don't know about you, but more things hurt now." I just sort of conversationally nodded along because I didn't want to be that guy who was like, "Not at all!" but that is true. Like yesterday, there wasn't so much as an ache. I have never had less pain from physical activity. I could not have said that ten years ago.

But, I live like this. Daily. It would be my intention if it was relevant to do so at ninety. I wasn't great in the Monument, but that's because I'm not getting over there enough. If I start my day at two in the morning, as is common enough, I end up having to wait around for some hours before I can head to Charlestown for when the Monument opens at 1.

That's a bad time for me. It's much better when it opens at ten, which hopefully it will again soon--maybe at the end of this month--but that only lasts so long. The bottom line, though, is I have to be more consistent. There were about twenty people there when the Monument opened yesterday. It doesn't matter what age someone is, they struggle, with few exceptions, and they are moving so slowly. We are such a physically out of shape nation and we are in even far worse shape mentally.

I hate Stephen King. I hate everything about him. I hate his writing, I hate how he rips off better writers, I hate his phoniness, his entire act. I hate everything he's about. He's always been a hack and a phony. And if you think he's a great writer, you need to get out more as a reader, because otherwise it's like someone in the desert eating sand and being given a bologna sandwich on Wonder Bread and thinking it's superior cuisine.

And yes, of course he's a racist. You can't tell that from his prose-bilge? But this "joke" he made and attributions of racism as pertaining to his stupid joke--which was just him, as always, posturing--says far more about people's inability to come anywhere close to comprehending what they read, no matter how simple it is. Add a single drop of nuance, and they're gone. They can't keep up. But even worse, they always think they know completely.

Having said that: I may hate Kurt Vonnegut's writing as much. It's close. I saw right through that plastic teen banality from the first. It's like the prose version of Tupperware. Faux-intellectualism for adults who will always really be mental high schoolers.

What about a Pacers versus Timberwolves final? Could happen.

Red Sox took a series against a team over .500.

Downloaded the box set of Solti's complete Mahler symphonies, an updated version--there was a new discovery--of the most-complete-to-date package of the Rolling Stones' BBC recordings, multiple sets of Vaughan Williams carols and folk songs, Glenn Gould's In Concert 1951-1960, Jackie McLean's Jackknife, more Charles Ives, Bear Family's Johnny Burnette: The Train Kept A-Rollin' Memphis to Hollywood - The Complete Recordings 1955-1964.