Humans make me immeasurably sad: the students outside of the Bunker Hill Monument and a nest in a wreath

Friday 5/1/26

As I waited for the Bunker Hill Monument to open yesterday to run stairs, a high school class was also waiting a little ways away. Their teacher was asking them questions about the Battle of Bunker Hill. I was looking in the other direction as they answered, which they did correctly and in complete sentences. This heartened me.

Then I turned and saw they were each using their phones to look up the answers and then reading them right out of their hands. The teacher knew—that’s how it was supposed to work. The way of things. Because you can't expect anyone to know anything or be able to learn anything. That would be too much.

Then the phones were put away, and the teacher--with all of us assembled on the top of Bunker Hill (okay, Breed's Hill, technically)--asked the class what was the bloodiest battle of the Revolutionary War?

He was an enthusiastic teacher. Wearing a bright Celtics jacket. Game day. A bit more excitement in his step. He commented about me--I was wearing my Celtics headband--to the kids as I passed them going down in the Monument. This wasn't a pedagogue full of disdain. Nor one acting as if broken on the wheel. He seemed to like these kids, but also understood that they weren't going to know anything, couldn't know anything. That thinking and knowing were beyond them. You're born with ten fingers and ten toes. That's how it goes. Kids won't and can't think. That's also how it goes. How it is.

We're standing right there. Why do you think he's asking this now? Here? Come on, kids. Students. This was as leading a question as a question gets. Does this even require thinking? If it does, how little thinking is that?

And yet, none of these kids filled that space where an answer was supposed to go, was waiting to go. That took too much critical thinking.

Instead, they waited for the teacher to give them the answer, as he probably surmised he'd need to all along. And the teacher's tone was as if he was talking to four-year-olds or a pet tortoise. A tone like there was no way anyone or anything in attendance could have known the answer, but he was happy enough to share what might as well have been exceedingly rarefied information accessible and understood by a very select few.

Because that's what this information counted as, now counts as. I see it everywhere. I see it constantly with Beatles fans. People for whom the most basic stuff, the stuff I learned within days of getting into the band at fourteen-years-old, before the internet, is treated as wisdom written in code on a scroll hidden in a compartment made by a wise monk at the top of the highest mountain. Something for Ronald Colman to try to get back to Xanadu in Lost Horizon so that he can find it.

It's hard not to despair for us.

You know what else? Several things--basic history things--that the teacher said was wrong. Not that hardly anyone else in the United States would have known it.

I remember one year on the Fourth of July when I was seven. I was with some friends at a pool at one of their houses in the neighborhood. I left early, because I had this book about the Revolutionary War. I was like, "Okay, going home to read, will see you guys later."

I read constantly, right? I read so much. On so much. And what I liked to do on the Fourth was read something like that. Or something by Ben Franklin.

I went home, got a snack, and just read by myself. It was just so normal. Regular. I was happy, and then I did whatever I did after. That could have involved playing baseball. Exploring in the woods. Doing something with my family. Climbing a tree with friends. Then at night, before bed, I'd read again. I learned so much and I went all these places in my mind. I traveled through time. I could go anywhere. Be a part of all these different things. All these different stories. All from Mansfield, Massachusetts.

A couple Sundays ago was nearly the end for me. As was Wednesday of this week. I don't know what would happen if I had two days like those in a row. I'm in an ever darker and worse place. It becomes harder every day to continue. To continue in every last regard. To keep creating. To go up another stair. To remain alive.

On the Sunday I just mentioned, I also saw a post from someone saying that a bird had built a nest in a wreath on their door and laid eggs in the nest, and how should they get rid of all of it?

Humans make me immeasurably sad. Do you know how happy I'd be to be back in my house in Rockport, and then discovering that a birds had built a nest in a wreath hanging on my door? The joy that would bring me?

And you know what? He got plenty of tips from plenty of people. For how to disrupt the lives of the birds. Let the birds be the birds.

All of which made me further despair on account of my masterpiece of a story, "The Bird." 432 perfect, wonderful words--that's it--that we all need, that the world needs, that is so timely, and timeless, and it's not allowed to get to the world, for the world to have it, because of how a group of people feels about the good things that I am.

And this was another reminder, an on-the-nose reminder, of the necessity of this beautiful story. The place it'd have in this world--perhaps, anyway--that it isn't allowed to have. Because of these people in publishing. Look at them. Evil up and down the board. Nastiness and pettiness and classism and envy and projected animus and discrimination everywhere you turn.

Get rid off the bird and its nest. Exterminate the life. Whether that's the life of a living thing, or chance for a work of art that is itself life.

People say things are cyclical, but I doubt that. I don't have any reason to believe that because we're way down here now, and going further down every day, that things will flip and we'll be better. When you're always going down stairs, it becomes harder and harder to go back up them.

You're a person who goes down stairs, if you even take the stairs, which you only do if you have to. This world provides the means that perpetually carry our fat, ignorant, loathsome asses to the bottom. That doesn't just reverse and then there's people running up the stairs en masse.

Race to the top isn't exactly an expression, is it?