Go up or down the stairs, not across them

Thursday 10/23/25

More work yesterday on "You're Probably Just Tired" after a few days away from it. Yeah, definitely got something here. Keep working on it.

Tuesday was the eleventh anniversary of my sister's death. This is always an awful day for my mother. Some years she doesn't go out at all it seems like for a week or two leading up to it. That wasn't the case this year. I know she saw a friend of hers and babysat the kids. But the day itself was very bad. I called her when I knew she'd be up, and someone else called and she said she'd call me back, but she didn't, so eventually I called her again.

She was supposed to go over my sister's, and when she eventually said she'd call me back again and I didn't hear from her, I figured that was what what happening, but I learned yesterday that she canceled and just stayed home, though my sister did come over and brought some food, and later my mom FaceTimed with the three kids. I had listened and really not said anything, so when I thought she'd gone ahead with her plans and was out, I sent her this:

You're probably on your way, but I wanted to say this to you...Kerrin would be happy that you kept going. It would have been heartbreaking to her if you hadn't. She loved you so much and always knew how much you loved her. It was, and is, undeniable and unmissable. I'm here if you want anything.

There are things where there's nothing you can really say to help someone. I know she experiences it with me and what I'm going through. I think that feeling seen can help, just knowing that someone knows the deal, the truth, the situation, where you're at, where things are at. Because trying to convince someone of those things can be exhausting. For me, it's another front to fight a war on, and I already have so many fronts. Laboring to convince another person of their existence is horrible. I guess that's one of the reasons for this very journal. It presents the truth of those fronts in ways that I can't in some "What's going on?" conversation with someone who doesn't know any of it, or is thinking in the much more normal ways of their world, or their industry, and the world itself as it relates to them.

Go up or down the stairs, not across them. Actual stairs, or metaphorically speaking in life.

I can be on the City Hall stairs at six in the morning, when few people are out, and yet someone can get in my way three, four times on those stairs because they start at the bottom of the far right, and instead of walking straight up, they walk in this long, slow diagonal, often with their head down, looking at their phone, all the way to the far side of these very wide stairs, oblivious to anyone else existing. How can you keep getting in someone's way when people aren't even out?

I don't believe anyone ever thinks about anyone else. That there could be anyone else. Get to the stairs, any stairs, and just go straight up the stairs. Don't cut across them, don't sway left, then sway right, then left again, back and forth with your head up your ass. When these people are nearly run down or crashed into or they hear the sound of someone having to pull up short, they act like that other person is the problem, because that other person has intruded upon their right to do whatever the fuck they want to do as the first priority in every single situation.

Ask yourself this: Do you think anyone out there asks themselves, "Hmmm, is this thing that I'm doing perhaps bothering anyone?"

I don't think that runs through anyone's head now. I don't think people are capable of thinking that. And it's something so foreign to them that it would never enter their mind even if they could think in those terms.

Nothing superlative from me of late fitness-wise. Each of the last three days, I've run 3000 stairs at City Hall, done 100 push-ups, walked three miles. Consistent, at least.

The pull tab came off the zipper of my Bunker Hill Monument fleece. It had been misaligned for a while and would stick to the side, such that you had to fiddle with it so that it'd pop back in place and you could zip up, but yesterday it broke. The zipper had already caught, so I was able to pull it up with my hand to near the top, but I can't make it go down. You really need that little pull stick. So now it's like a pullover.

Any time I look at social media, I see scores of women posting the likes of this:

I am not who I was a year ago and that brings me so much peace.

Who are they talking to? Themselves?

Post after post like the above by the same person. Millions of such people now. And photo after photo of themselves.

They sound like they're trying to convince themselves of something they know is false, because they are. But that's only a small portion of the methodology. The brunt is for attention. And also because there's little there, and when there is little there, this is about all that can come out.

The healthy person who is aware of what peace is--whether they are at peace or not--wouldn't be doing such a thing. The constant barrage of trite-isms--like outtakes from a bad self-help book--on social media is a sure sign of not just brokenness, but complicit brokenness. Like you are funding the brokenness with excuses and poses and Dopamine hits resulting from seeing a certain number of likes from people who have no interest in you as a person.

The Celtics lost their opener at home last night to Philadelphia by surrendering 42 points in the fourth quarter. That's a big number. As with the Bruins' season, this could be a long year for the Celtics. My sense is that their championship window has closed anyway, and you won't see another title in green from Tatum and Brown and wouldn't have anyway even if Tatum hadn't gotten hurt.

But these things in sports history have a kind of natural ebb and flow to them, and if I was looking back over the history books and saw the Celtics as champions again in 2028, that would surprise me. I think they had their time, and what they came away with was a championship, a Finals loss, and a pair of surprising, frustrating, borderline inexplicable ousters at the hands of the Heat and Knicks.

Going down 3-0 to the Heat was baffling, and then forcing the Game 7 just to be blown out at home was downright weird. And you'd be hard pressed to explain dropping the first two last year to the Knicks at home. I mean, there are reasons. The Celtics often didn't have any urgency in their game and approach, and then there is the issue of shooting three after three.

The attitude this year has a throw-in-the-towel-in-advance quality to it that bothered me when I first got a sense for it months ago. To me, the East isn't very good, it's wide open, and if the Celtics could be a scrappy team that plays the right way, plays hard, moves the ball and doesn't do the isolation shit, takes a normal number of threes, then they could be a four, five, six, or seven seed, and perhaps have Tatum back and who knows what happens then if he's somewhere close to back to where he was. He may never be that player again. I don't think people realize that. And I don't think he was as good as he should have been. The three point obsession hurt his game. It hurts Derek White's.

You're also going to be subjected to a lot of lazy, contrived media stories and headlines about "colorful" Joe Mazzulla this year. Mazzulla is a trashy, angry idiot. Once he flames out in Boston, my guess is he'll never really does anything anywhere else. He simply inherited a stacked team. They're on the down slope now.

But, Mazzulla will be here for another three or four years, by which point the Celtics will win 45 games, fail to get into the playoffs, and he'll be relieved of his duties. He'll get another job, that will result in him being fired in two or three years, and then he'll be on someone's staff and such going forward, and that will be it for Joe Mazzulla, big-time coach. Or not. But that's what I envision.

The media has no scruples or shame, they just want those clicks, and they think what gets the most clicks--or versions thereof--are "juicy" pieces and segments that take advantage of the truth that most adults are actually still fifteen-years-old in their brains. Most people don't evolve mentally beyond what they were in high school. They'll think the same way, talk the same way.

Sure, some edges come off or are put under wraps, but that's just because they can't let those edges show in certain environments. But make no mistake about it, fundamentally they're the same and they haven't grown a lick since. Which is itself enabled by the cesspool that is our culture. And things like this. Because then people are never exposed to anything that isn't high school-esque, and it's not as though they're going to go out on their own and partake of better things. People get what they see. What is dumped in their laps and blasted in their faces, liquid shit-style.