Granite star

Sunday 9/21/25

Red bird. Soon in the morning, red bird.

Amazing performance, that is. In my head most days.

Awoke today and began work when it was forty-eight degrees outside. Believe this is the first time it's been in the forties since the spring. Supposed to get to eighty-two on Tuesday. Saw plenty of light jackets being worn yesterday. Not many people in shorts unless they were running. One observes many runners on the Saturday and Sunday morning walks to Charlestown. Eighty percent of these runners,, I'd estimate, are women. Could be higher.

I may have begun the day with a fever. I didn't take my temperature. I usually avoid doing so, because it sends the wrong message. Like, what? I'm going to do anything differently? I'm going to put what is tantamount to an excuse on the white board of my day? Rather than just write, instead, Go, metaphorically speaking, or something similar? But I was hot, on the cusp of sweaty. I had a cough yesterday after the Monument for a bit.

As I had come down the stairs at the Connecticut gate yesterday I ran into my buddy ranger Rick on his way to work. He asked me how many times today, I told him, and he said, "You're a fucking rock star." I like how there was a kind of granite-based pun in there, though this may not have been intentional. I like this guy a lot. He seems like a good man to me. I'll be sorry to see him go as he's retiring. Going to travel, he told me.

What does it really do for women to get "likes" by posting photo after photo after photo after photo--and nothing else--of themselves from fat, middle aged guys with a mouth full of disastrous teeth who are stroking their dicks with one hand while eating Fritos with the other?

This is not what a well person does. Or someone "living their best life." No one who has ever used that phrase is close to well and not broken. But they only and ever do more and more and more of this type of thing. But sure. The likes are because you're fascinating and dynamic and "inspiring" and all of that. Healthy stuff. Stick with it. Or...or...or...just hear me out...or...

Statement of truth: If you sound like you're trying to convince yourself, you're not convincing anyone with a clue. But, thankfully for those people, hardly anyone has a clue about anything, and people will just lie to whomever because it's easier, they don't really care about them, they're getting something they want off of that person or might (that editor who is also a shitty writer might publish their shitty story about someone with an MFA who went to Yale who is of course actually them because they're incapable of inventing anything and never will; that woman might let them use a hole, etc.), they want to be lied to in response, or they weren't really listening at all and basically just communicated "Sure, sure," when that other person paused for breath, whatever form that took, be it respiratorily, textually, or digitally.

But people very rarely do anything different than what they're already doing, no matter how miserable they are when they're pretending not to be upon logging in. Best case scenario for such people: Their brains congeal over so they neither think or feel in terms of happiness. All they know is to keep doing what they've been doing. Don't question, examine, or spend too much time in realizing or the hell of dealing with the knowing. Autopilot it. Life, that is. Eyes closed, until it's all over.

The world is better for everyone when each person truly tries to think, to care, to be honest, to be better for themselves, and for others. We affect each other. Because--and I'll leave the word "unfortunately" out of this--everyone is in this thing together.

People will always pick what feels easier. Or almost always. They think they're saving themselves from dealing with--or perhaps being crushed under--difficulties. The irony is that in doing so, they are making things far worse for themselves. So bad that minus a heroic effort of epic proportions--which they don't have in them--there becomes nothing they can do about that except take it.

A person eats all of these things that are bad for them. They change what they eat and there is a period of adjustment and then what you eat is just what you eat. Same as before. You're hungry, you eat. You're fine. There really isn't much difference, save that you're not eating garbage. You don't miss what you used to eat. It is not a big deal. But most people will not do this. Takes too much effort and will power for them. And it's really nothing.

Red meat is like alcohol in that you didn't used to see all of these scary articles about drinking alcohol and now you do, and you're starting to see scary articles about red meat. Science-based articles. If I still drank like I drank--or, frankly, if I drank at all--and was still alive, of course, and read any of these articles about alcohol, I'd be so terrified I'd hardly be able to function. I believe I'd also be feeling that way about red meat around this time if I still ate it.

Said to someone yesterday that it would be very easy for me to become a vegetarian at this point. I'm not that far away from it right now.

The person playing devil's advocate would perhaps say in response to the above that I was never a foodie. No one should be a foodie, is what I'd say. Being a foodie is indicative of a lack of other things in one's life that are more important. Interests, passions, an understanding of what matters more.

That would be my response. People who post photos of their food and the like and talk about food all the time and restaurant this, restaurant that, don't have much depth, something in which they are culpable. Depth doesn't just happen. There's more to depth than that.

What do I miss that I gave up, food and drink-wise? Do I ever wish to have a drink? No. A slice of pizza? No. Bread, no. Pasta, no. The only thing, perhaps, would be hot chocolates, but that's more a mental thing. The idea of having one on the cool afternoon while reading a ghost story down by the harbor. Or on a walk as the leaves fall. But the tea or coffee works pretty much just as well.

Subreddit headline I just saw:

We are so old (40 year and plus)

You're not old. You're lazy, defeatist, depth-less, without vision and purpose and individuality, a sense of self, an understanding of self, and with a dependence on excuses and excuse making even at the cost of your time on earth as something you make as meaningful as possible.

All of the lazy, whining fuckers. I'm old, I'm so old, we're so old.

Be ageless. Be someone who no one could think about in terms of any age. The calendar should be separate from the essence and identity of a person. The calendar is just a different measuring gauge that's way in the background of your life.

You know what would happen if I tried to do one of my Monument workouts of right now back when I was twenty? It wouldn't have gone so well. What would have happened then? I couldn't have done a single circuit like I do a single circuit now. I could have gone up once. Taking a couple breaks. No running.

So what does this mean? Nothing. You decide. It is up to you. You have say then, you have say later. You have say. And that's just not a physical thing. What are you going to be? What aren't you?

What age am I? I'm no age. There's a calendar way in the background. I'm mindful of it in terms of the grand plan of my work. And the life I want to have that I instead have the opposite of right now. But that's it.

People foreground the hell out of their personal calendars. That is why they are old. The attitude and thinking that goes along with that, the life choices, the excuse making, the tapping out, the dying more every day of their lives, rather than becoming more alive each day, which is how you're supposed to do it.

Silver-spooned publishing people are all essentially old people from birth. They're old at twenty after all of the years of entitlement and enabling and being lied to and lying to themselves. At thirty, forty, fifty, sixty.

At eighty they're no different than they were at thirty because they don't grow and they were old all along. Hidebound. A pack of miserable, joyless, joy-hating, joy-fearing, clannish, bitter, cowardly, fearful, petty, insecure, gated-community dowagers.

And that's regardless of gender, so I'm not just talking the likes of Wendy "the bag of hag" Lesser, Sigrid Rausing, Susan Morrison, Carolyn Kuebler, Lynne Nugent, Meghan O'Rourke, Deborah Tresiman, Ann Hulbert, Emily Stokes; a Bradford Morrow, for example, fits their model perfectly; a J. Robert Lennon; a David Remnick; a Michael Ray; a Patrick Ryan; a Sy Safransky; a Christopher Beha; a Jackson Howard; a Mark Warren; a Luke Neima; etc.

Lots of Pulitzer Prize winners and finalists in there, and Guggenheim winners. Huh...It's almost like none of that has anything to do with your writing, not sucking at writing, let alone being good at it, and is instead entirely about being one of these people, who is hooked up by these kinds of people, and poses no threat to the egos of these other people by dint of being smarter and actually having any talent, and coming from money, and living a lie and being lied about by frauds and dilettantes who are doing the same and expect/need the same in order to be anything at all, which, of course, is really nothing at all, in terms of anything legitimate to the good. And it's almost like that's all the easiest thing in the world to prove, too.

And if you're an exception within publishing, cool. Stand up and be counted. Assert that. Make a difference. Then make more of a difference. It's the only actual chance for the enterprise. Change. Big time change. Not more of the same. Not the kissing of more shit-encrusted rings belonging to people--frauds and liars and to the last, with hearts as impure as hearts can be, and heads equally empty--who are in this for all of the wrong reasons and none of the right ones, and who are the biggest enemies to writing and reading, to there being readers, to there being anything worth reading, to the possibility of their being written works of art that can connect with people, change lives, impact this world to the good.

As for the above subreddit headline: You're old but you don't have the grammar skills of a first grader? Super.

But you see how this--I'm so old, we're so old, OMG old old old--is tantamount to a boast for people. That's how vital it is for them to crowd-source their excuses. They all enable each other in their do nothingness and be nothingness.

Every solution has some degree of this within it:

Get off your fucking ass.

And that works figuratively.

There's a week to go in the baseball season. Six playoff spots are available in each league. And in the American League, not a single team has clinched one of them.

I don't think much of Clayton Kershaw and Mike Trout. I know--that's just awful of me, isn't it? But there it is. Neither are high-impact players in my view. No one will remember Mike Trout--because, what, people are going to discuss a single season WAR total which won't be a big deal historically?--and Kershaw was never someone I'd want to give the ball to when it mattered. Trout-worship is such a manufactured conceit; and Kershaw-worship feels like something that's done because people feel they have to do it.

The Red Sox won last night--and they needed to--but you could more accurately say that the Rays lost. Whatever. I'll take the W. Just want them to get into the playoffs. What the Guardians are doing is very impressive. They don't lose. Ten straight wins now. The Red Sox have a 94% chance of making the playoffs according to baseball-reference; the Guardians a 67% chance (and that went up like twenty percentage points from before yesterday's game to after it). I don't understand these numbers. The Red Sox have a 7.8% chance to win the World Series; the Dodgers a 4.5% chance. What? Why?

Clemson--hmmm. Wonder how much longer their coach Dabo Swinney (whose name sounds like it could belong to one of these people from the south in the Monument who ask me "if it's worth it" to go to the top) lasts.

Building correspondence to the proper authority. It is rare for me to ever say anything about how rude people are. Has to take a lot.

There is someone on the fifth floor who slams their door at least a good thirty times a day. That is not an exaggerated number, though "slams" is an insufficient word, because it sounds as if they are trying to raze the entire block to the ground. They don't do this as a matter of course when going out, but apparently just to do it, because the slamming is not followed by them heading downstairs. They slam to slam. They must go to the door, open the door, and slam it for whatever ungodly reason. I don't know if they're unbalanced or in some bizarre competition to be the rudest person or people possible, but it is insane. Absolutely insane. This has been going on for a while. I'm just bringing it up now because I can't take it anymore and am about to defenestrate someone. Not literally. 

Added the last sentence for legal reasons lest someone say I made threats of physical violence.