Monday 4/18/22
Patriots' Day. Easter, of course, was hard. I am alone every day of every year of my life, having no one, but certain days like Christmas and Easter can be even worse. To be consistent, though, it's not like if I had anyone I could do anything. When people are doing to your life what people are doing to mine, when you are in that hold, when all you know is the focused efforts of discrimination, you can't shut that off, so to speak, and go somewhere and hang out and smile. When the abuse is this total and has this totality of impact, you're never free of it until it's over. You couldn't be abused in some torture center where you are the only prisoner, with all of that attendant pain and injustice, and it means you have nothing, too--no real home, no money--as vile and evil people are awarded and put forward by your torturers right outside your window for you to see, and then take two hours away from the torture center to make merry and watch a ballgame with some people, knowing what is and what awaits, what you're going back to, and what is happening, and why you don't have a home like the one you're sitting in. You can't do it. What would someone else do if they were in this historically unique situation that I am in? They would have to kill themselves. It would be the only option. It wouldn't even be an option--it would be all that remained. Because you can't live like this. I don't kill myself, and I live like this.
And if someone wishes to say that the person in the above hypothetical would do something else, no they wouldn't. If what you did you did better than anything had ever done anything else, and it was right and just and for people, and of a beauty and power that nothing else was or is, and was everything you were, what every breath was for, and every second, too, that you were in this world, you would be this thing and this thing alone, which is also everything. It is what it is, and I continue on. And when I say there's no being free of it until it's over, what I mean is that when this is no more, because I and my work has made it so. While I am standing here. When the problem is solved.
Received a nice note about a new feature I'd done and how it was so much better than anything else by other critics and journalists. I appreciate the kind words. I am neither a journalist nor a critic. I don't do what people who are either do. That's part of it. Very kind of someone to reach out and say something like that.
People use whatever is closest to hand for their agenda. For instance, people today want to go after one of these ridiculous "Squad" senators for something dumb she posted on Twitter about these people playing their religious music on a plane. The Squad women are terrifying in their stupidity and racism, and this woman couldn't even make her point, or address the real point of the issue, which is that you're an asshole of the highest order if you pull out a guitar on a plane and subject passengers to your music. You're a dick. You're insane and narcissistic, but above all, you are a dick, who should never again be allowed on a flight. Respect other people and their space. But then it gets to Twitter, and one idiotic side, and its oppositional idiotic other side, argue about religious freedom, if you can even call it arguing, when plain and simple dickishness is the actual issue. It's really a consent thing. It's a plane. You can't go anywhere. And you have to sit there and listen to someone's terrible music as they strum their guitar up and down the aisle caterwauling away? I'd love to stand at the front of the plane and start reading aloud from Moby-Dick to educate the plebians on our cross-country flight, but that's obviously wrong, no? You don't get to do that because you feel like it, or think it's good for someone.
That could be a show: Flights with the C-Dawg! in which people get taken hostage--intellectually hostage! I'd watch that, as they say. We're up in the air, one week I'm giving a lesson on Mozart, another its Finnegans Wake, and so forth.
Let's go run some stairs.
***
It's godspeed, not God speed. It means "good wishes." Not that God is Vince Coleman and you want someone to move at a comparable rate in their next ventures. What an illiterate country we have become. The irony being that you see people trying to use this expression to show how wise they are. It's like this show-off expression, and then they do the God speed thing.
Ran 5000 stairs. A little girl--maybe six-years-old--raced in front of her parents today at the bottom of the stairs and then raced right past me on my way up. She was coming back down and I said, "Wow, you are so fast," and she had this huge smile.
I go at the same pace the entire time. First time up takes as long as the last time. I keep it steady. Most times my steps are exactly the same. I turn around at the top and the bottom in the same amount of steps, I take the same number of steps across the landings to the next level of stairs.
Went to the Aquarium. Just stood in front of the exhibit of brook trout and stared at them up close through the glass for a couple minutes. Kind of peaceful. Trout are such beautiful fish.
