I need this heat to break

Saturday 7/4/26

Walked six miles yesterday and did 100 push-ups and that was it and today could well be a fat zero on the fitness front. I've had enough. I need this heat to break. It's boxed in here. The air conditioner barely works anyway. But once the heat settles in, it's there to stay. Like you don't get it out again for a while, even when the temperature drops. It has this residual staying power. The Man Who Came to Dinner. Except it's heat.

I'm going to bed late, getting up late. For me. I already had an issue in that I gave up Melatonin about a week ago after reading that a study has found that you're ninety percent likelier to have a ninety percent greater chance of your heart failing you use Melatonin over a prolonged period and flat out twice as likely to die. I've taken copious amounts of Melatonin over the last decade, thinking it was perfectly safe. Had a system pretty well down. I could use it almost like a light switch to go to bed when I wished to which made it easier for me to get up when I wished to.

My days are supposed to begin between midnight and three AM. Combine this period of adjustment with the heat cloud that has settled in here and it's awful. There's no rest, I have a constant headache. I'm frustrated with the stairs and feel like I'm stalling out. Heat becomes this thing in summer that you're trying to shoo out the door and it just won't leave now that it's there. Puts it off as long as possible. I sweat while I write. The worst time of the year. The opposite of the Andy Williams song. Give me the coldest day of wind-whipping winter a thousand times over one day of this. I'll always root for the Snow Miser over the Heat Miser.

Essentially, I am waiting for the heat to break and some things are on hold. That idea reminds me of the narrator in what is called "Analogues" in Between Cloud and Horizon and will be going back to its original title of "Before Visiting" as I do all my eight published books to date over to get them to be what I want them to be with where I'm now at when he talks about after-death services and having to wait for a given day. And also how he's basically been classified as officially waiting to visit. That's a theme of the story--the ways in which we wait, both in living and in dying. No matter the doing, the self-starting and the follow through, there's always waiting and its various forms. We wait to live, we wait to die. Including when we are living and when we are dying.

Having said that, I've actually been monitoring the National Park Service website to see if the Bunker Hill Monument has been officially closed yet for the day. I thought there was maybe a very slim chance that they'd try and push it and have it open for a couple hours given that it's the Fourth of July. Bend the rules some as far as the heat index goes. I could do with five circuits (though ten would be better, as I'm at 390 since 3/11). What I don't want to be doing is running stairs outside. I'm good with that for now.

Yesterday I went to Trader Joe's and Haymarket to get that out of the way, with the intention of running stairs at City Hall and stopping at Haymarket on the way back, but that plan was altered en route to instead securing some red peppers and calling the stairs off. I'm sick of sitting somewhere after I'm done running stairs and waiting to stop dripping. Because that's what you have to do. Showering won't stop you from sweating. You sit there and wait. You feel it coming out of and running down your back. But the Monument could work. You're out of the elements, anyway. No closure announcement yet as of eight on this Saturday morning.

Otherwise, I'll likely just go out to the 7-Eleven down the street to pick up a copy of something I'm in today and to the Starbucks--which has much better air conditioning than I do here--to read/work/makes notes/think. I may read A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence. What a contrast.

I should add that you wouldn't know it was the 250th birthday of the country today, even here in Boston. Nothing has been made of it. Non-story. I'd even say this has been a reduced version of a normal Fourth of July in this most historic of places. The heat has something to do with that, but I don't think it'd matter that much otherwise.

What do you want to be proud of? What do you like about this land of idiots ruled by their screens (and those who control via screens)? This land of people who only care about themselves? And those people? They're too stupid and self-absorbed to realize that they aren't all rarin' to go for today as perhaps in times past because of the quality of their own lives brought on by how stupid and base they've helped make this country and this world. I mean sure, they'll drink and stuff their fat faces. But any official reason to do more of that--which is what holidays are for most people (What? You think people associate Christmas with trying to be a better person and goodwill and kindness? The rigorous taking of moral inventory? Or you think it's more, "Time to eat and drink, bitches!!!!")--will be honored pro forma.

We are bulbous, unthinking, illiterate Americans, after all. A gluttonous, narcissistic, proud-to-be-ignorant and aggressively so people without regard for one's neighbor/brother (sister), hateful and fearful of intelligence, despisers of greatness, individuality, critical thinking, saying the same stupid things, the same trite-isms, in the exact same language as each other, with their hypocrisy, gambling obsession, parasocial disease, only-character (it isn't "main," it's "only") syndrome, selfishness, and this seeming unslakable and constant need to assert themselves as the most reliable example of what is meant by the term "lowest common denominator," as if that were also the personal ticket on which the campaign of their life was based, here to occupy space, block the roads of progress, growth, connective community, the very pursuit of what it means to be human and increasingly human--the real reason why we exist--and not much more.

I don't know where my health stands with this Melatonin thing. If I've done lasting damage to myself or I'm okay given everything else that I do. Sleep is a big deal re: health. People who take Melatonin likely already have sleep issues and get poor rest. It looks like I don't sleep, right? Not true. I probably average about six hours. It can vary. If I get four one night, I'm apt to get eight the next. I sleep at the times when people are hanging out with each other, going to dinner, etc. I stash-sleep, you could say. I do it in the deadest part of the day when there are the least demands on people. You know, the parts they live for.

I have nothing and no one. There is my work. That's all. I don't need to be up to talk to someone who loves me because no one does. I'm not going anywhere save on my own because I have no friends. Friendship no longer exists in our society anyway, so maybe I should say activity partners, which is what people call friends really are now. Anywhere I go I go alone. And the things I go to--museums, films, concerts, a giant obelisk--are often things I can go to during the day. The exceptions are non-classical music concerts--like when I go see Bob Dylan later this month--and some screenings at the Brattle.

So it can seem that I don't sleep at all, given that and then how much I produce and am always up to, as documented here. And this is without me trying nearly as hard as I can try, because it's very hard doing anything and I have to force myself to do it given that there's no point to it and I have no hope.

Each day I know I can make the greatest thing anyone has ever made. Each day I work on things that are better than any human has ever or will ever create. But I can't do anything with those things. They don't bring me anything. I'm just doing them. For who? They aren't seen, and if they were, what can people even understand? They can't and won't even think. Never mind understand.

I wonder if this Melatonin study is skewed by the truth that those people likely already have some heart problems because they don't get good rest. I doubt others use it as a light switch as I did for the purpose of getting up at 2:30 in the morning and working on some masterpiece. That's rather specialized, I should say. And I'm fairly certain none of them were running stairs and not drinking alcohol and not eating red meat, etc.

Come on, Snowy (as Mrs. Claus calls him).

Edit: Park Service website updated at 9 AM to say that the Bunker Hill Monument is closed for the day.