How do we remain guilt free and some nice people at the Bunker Hill Monument

Sunday 8/16/26

Often by this time in August there'll be some moment--and it's usually this flicker of a moment--where you get a taste, a twinge, a drop, a flash of autumn. A cold patch in some bit of shade you walk through on a sunny day with just a slight fringe of "brrr...."; a passing tang to the air. A pinch of that smoky aroma. Haven't had that yet in this soupy August. But it's coming up on three in the morning here in Boston and the temperature is 61 degrees and may dip into the upper 50s before it warms up again.

Each day makes for another day in a long succession of days where I encounter not a single correct statement from anyone. That is, nothing I see, no matter how bite-sized, manages to be correct all the way through the statement and to the bottom of the words. A single line. Most statements of purported truth, or even of fact, aren't close to being accurate or correct.

There will be all this information out there. Could pertain to some recent development. A story in the news. People can't synthesize that information. It's like it overwhelms them, the way that doing two simple tasks at once now overwhelms many people. But it overwhelms them early. Four, five, six pieces of information, and they're unable to consolidate. It's too much for their mental faculties. Then they just say their stupid stuff.

You'll see people work so hard at being a miserable cur. They'll devote real energy to it. And, what's more, to consistently being a miserable cur, never letting go of the miserable cur rope, so to speak, and keeping their hardest grip of it. The jaw-jutting grip. It's in every comment. They have to force it, even if it now comes naturally to them (which sounds oxymoronic, but is also paradoxically true). Be that miserable cur in a place where there really isn't room or reason to be one, even from the forced perspective angle. Thus, they make themselves look absurd.

I'll give you an example. I wrote this somewhere yesterday:

People in New England must have thought the Red Sox were finally going to win the World Series in 1975. You had the famous Carlton Fisk homer in Game 6 (ending the best baseball game ever played). And then there they are, at a Fenway, up 3-0 in Game 7 in the sixth inning. People tend not to know that last part.

Someone else posts the comment, "What people?"

Obviously he knew what people. I gather information. It doesn't take me long. I do more each day than anyone. I am awake longer. This gathering takes away from nothing else. I'll look at such a person's profile. And there it is. One thing like this after another. A life devoted, at least at this stage of it, to being a miserable cur. The non-miserable posts from this individual--if we are to call them that--were about war films playing on TCM. So that's an older person. Lonely. Embittered. And this is who they are and what they do. It's an outlet, but also a paralleling manifestation of that inner self.

I can snap the pieces of a person and their entire psychological profile together in seconds. It is almost always very simple. People like to say that humans are so complex, but they're not. They certainly aren't now. They're usually a one-note proposition. If that.

A person like this is taking away from themselves. Each instance of that behavior pulls from them. Cuts another branch off their tree. Everything has a price. That doesn't mean there aren't plenty of times when the price is worth it and you don't lose because of what you either gain or keep as part of the transaction. Keeping is so important. Keeping of one's dignity, one's self-respect. Keeping one's self guilt free.

How do we remain guilt free? Simple: We don't do things that give us viable reason to feel guilty, or, if we do, we recognize what we've done and we seek to amend our behavior going forward, or atone for our actions if possible with those we've already behaved this way towards. When we try to ding another for the sake of dinging them, as if that will also build us up or improve how we feel about ourselves, we feel guilt on some level. Maybe that feeling takes the form--because we're so out of touch consciously with who we are on the inside--of sensing on a subconscious level that a new shadow has crept in. But make no mistake, the shadow is there. And this isn't that good kind of shade. The respite from the bright sun, the subtle alert that yes, autumn comes.

People will forfeit control over things they could control because of other things in their lives, and this costs them greatly. You may have a hard life, but that doesn't mean you can't control not being a miserable cur, for example. The energy you save by not expending it on being a miserable cur could be redirected to more beneficial effect.

The truth about a line like the above is that if you make that kind of remark once, you make it virtually all the time. People rarely do whatever negative thing they do as some one-off. They do it consistently. Or that stupid phrase someone uses? They're going to say it thousands of times before they're done.

Doesn't have to be that way. I think that's something radical. It probably shouldn't be, but it stands as radical now. The idea of "Doesn't have to be this way." We go about our lives, and talk about this world, and what it's become, as if it's all some act of God. Nothing could change anything to the better. But we could change so much by doing so little. Only, no one wants to do anything. A person, a group, a business, a publishing house. It has to be this way that it is, is the attitude and approach. We can only do what we're doing now because that's how it's done. The lockstep, insistent, it-might-as-well-be-an-act-of-God approach. Eternal, ironclad decree.

Which is just wrong. Nothing has to be any of these ways, and these often terrible ways, that they are. You could try something different and potentially better.

I can share a nice thing. I've had no problems in the Bunker Hill Monument since that day with what someone termed the "hags." Yesterday there was a couple, say, each thirty-years-old or so, going up the Monument. He was a heavyset gentleman and she was having a hard go of it. He was really supportive of her. They seemed like good people. As I kept going past them, they'd make a friendly, encouraging remark to me. You could tell it was sincere and heartfelt.

Anyway, when I was finally finished and was leaving, they were sitting on a bench outside the Monument. As I walked past, she asked me how many times I went up and down. I answered, and they both said that was amazing, and she told me to keep it up. Someone truly wishing another person well in this thing they worked hard at for their own wellness.

You experience so little like this exchange in today's world. A simple passing exchange. But it makes a difference. Being kind, not being so threatened by others, makes a huge difference. Nice people being nice. Like the Grateful Dead guy from a couple weekends ago patting me on the back and then catching up with me from behind as we were both leaving and going back to our very different lives.

We've lost a couple degrees--officially 59 now.