If you put in the time

Thursday 11/12/26

It isn't at the level of Liberty Mutual, but one gets precious little relief from Ozempic commercials. They keep coming at you and coming at you. A country's commercials say a lot about where it is at that point in time. When I see someone who has lost weight--Josh McDaniels, for example--I think it much likelier than not that it was on account of Ozempic because that person wouldn't be able or willing to put forth the effort otherwise which also tells me a great deal about that person.

Speaking of McDaniels: I hear rumblings that he's going to get a third opportunity to be a head coach, which I don't get. Sometimes, a person has this thing they're best at. This is what you are. This is what you do. Be the best at it that you can be, I say.

Speaking of Ozempic: I have done a pitiful job with the stairs of late. No ten-circuit days in the Bunker Hill Monument since that twenty-circuit day over a month ago. My pace is draggy. I definitely haven't felt athletic. That's what you want--to feel athletic, light on your feet, bouncy. Legs not good, wind also bad.

What is the solution? I'm going with more days. No days off. That includes Monday and Tuesday when the Monument is closed.

The truth is, the stairs are very important to me. I was thinking about this the other day. I have never had an opportunity in my life with what I do. It's been denied to me for so many reasons. Bigotry, envy, and classism within publishing, for instance. I wrote about opportunity in these pages yesterday. My life has never really started. Suffering has been constant. That's what my life has been.

People have what they have, right? They have that house and those three kids and that's what they have. That was their life. I've never gotten to have anything. Certainly nothing befitting my abilities, what I've created, what I have achieved in my work, my effort. I'm not saying it's this perfectly reciprocal thing. But I've never been allowed to have anything. My lot is simply to hurt and suffer? To try and not kill myself for another day and then all of the days I was "successful" in that make up the days of my life? My life? That's not a life.

You can say this is silly or stupid or worse, but I look at it like my life hasn't begun as what it ought to be. If it ever does, that'll make for a very late start. Decades and decades late. Should I get a real chance to try and make the most of that chance, I need my health for that moving forward. I can't be winding down when others might (hell, people start winding down right after college); I'd need to be ramping up. At my best and healthiest. If I sit back like others do, this won't be remotely possible.

Hence, the stairs. That's why it's important I do a good job with them.

This isn't about vanity. Romantically, I've been entirely alone since 2015. There is no one out there for me. That person doesn't exist. There isn't anyone nearly good enough as I'd need them to be good enough, smart enough, substantive enough, strong enough, moral enough. I'd like to be proven wrong but I would be shocked--more than shocked--if that ever happened. Especially in this age.

It's about what I'm trying to do here. Trying to do with my own life, and trying to do in terms of the world and humanity.

I believe that consistency makes you better at whatever you're doing (just as I think what I'll call positive consistency is one of the rarest and most valuable things there are). Let's say you wanted to write. No matter who much talent you were born with, you will need to write many hours every day of your life, year in, year out, for decades, if you are to even begin to create anything worthwhile.

People don't want to hear that. They want to hear, "Reading more books is the key to writing better" so they can have a shopping trip to the bookstore and then take a photo of their purchased haul which will inevitably include The Brothers Karamazov as that's a centerpiece now of the social media algorithm in these matters as "SUPER BIG IMPORTANT BOOK FOR SMART PEOPLE SO GET IT." That's nonsense. I'll get into this more later in a separate entry. Dispel the myths. But if you didn't read from your earliest years fervently, it doesn't matter. No reading can help you now. Sorry. At a point fairly early on, it becomes about writing. Doing it. Are you willing to write for hours every day of your life for many years?

You're not. Chances are insanely low that you are. (Especially now with everything being what it is in terms of the currents we've spoken of here that you'd need to swim against, all on your own, with no credit, no encouragement, and AI being but a-few-words-typed-into-a-prompt away.)

You aren't a writer and you will never write anything worthwhile. That's the truth unless this is the case. And I'm leaving out talent, which you need to be born with, and I don't think people understand what that talent would have to entail. It isn't just some "way with words." As I've said, words are almost the last of it with writing.

Let's say you wanted to be a good basketball player. Could you achieve that by playing every other day? An hour each day? Of course not. Why would it be any different with writing, which is so much harder and has so much more to it?

Bottom line: not the numbers I need to be hitting with the stairs. I can say to myself, "You're the only person who would do something like that and deem it unimpressive and unsatisfactory," but it doesn't matter that that's true because of the more salient truth that it's not impressive or good enough for me with what I'm trying to do.

Similarly, I write a story that no one else could come close to. I look at the story and I see that there is much I can do to make it better. I keep seeing this and working towards that goal until it is the absolute best work that I can do.

Others wouldn't have what I had in the first place and they wouldn't think the way I think after if they did. But they're doing something else completely different than what I am doing.

We should be abundantly clear here: it isn't the time that people don't have. Never has it been more common for people to say they don't have time, regardless that this is an era when so much is done for you at the press of a button.

The Jam had an album called All Mod Cons--all modern conveniences. That was 1978. Look at what would constitute all modern conveniences now. You don't need to get off your ass to have your food shipped to you, your shoes. You don't want to work out and drop some pounds, you can take that Ozempic. We are swimming in an excess of time. Don't be fooled by people's lack of standards for themselves and their propensity to lie to you after they've first lied to themselves. Because that's what almost everyone is doing with time. Among other things.

A dearth of time isn't the issue; the bungling of time is. Convert all those wasted hours, whatever form they take--going in circles, scrolling, metaphorically scratching your ass--into hours more productively spent and where are you then? Still not enough time?

People possess the time. What they don't possess is the will, the focus, the willingness to expend effort and not be lazy.

These are two very different things, not having time and not being willing, with nearly everyone making like the latter is really a case of the former, and that's just bullshit.

I've found this theme to ring true with everything, including stairs. If you put in the time, without taking days away, you'll get better results in time. The key is the consistency. The daily doing. Even if you think there and then that what you've done was lackluster as I have definitely thought so far this week with the stairs. I ran 3000 at City Hall on Monday and Tuesday and then five circuits yesterday in the Monument. Along with Sunday, that's four days in a row.

Give people the smallest opening to do so and they will go off about how they feel physically and the things they can't do anymore and how they feel worse and so on. They go out drinking, for example, and they pay for it now for a whole week. Their back, their legs, their aches, their pains.

I start to feel like I'm unaware of something I ought to be aware of. I have always felt the exact same way, save when I drank, which, admittedly, I did for a long time--like twenty years. Yes, two decades of daily alcohol abuse. An ugly admission. I would get away to drink. I'd pull back from other aspects of my life to be alone and drink.

I had aches then circa 2010. I'd feel it standing up even in my back when I would have to wait some number of seconds for the muscles to loosen up enough to start moving again. The only physical change I have felt, really, in the last ten plus years is that which I experienced when I stopped drinking. Ironically, I first noticed this with stairs.

Not my stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument--I hadn't started them quite yet, though I would soon. But the stairs in the building. Just going up the three flights of them. I was less out of breath. Simple as that, but also as noticeable.

It was a small thing that also wasn't. But like I said, I had twenty years of alcohol abuse behind me, so it was a lot to no longer be doing and I'm sure it's different if one has a big drinking night once a week or every fortnight or once a month or just the regular two or three--a big number in actuality--every night. I was really socking it away.

I have been doing worse in the Monument like I said but I think that's because I haven't been as consistent as I should be rather than any slippage. I say to myself, "If there was something else going on, it sounds from how everyone else talks like you'd feel it elsewhere." Because other people certainly do, going by what they say and seemingly can't wait to tell you.

I've said this often, but I need to stretch more. There's no excuse for me not doing that. I've been doing my push-ups (200 of them on Saturday) and some amount of walking takes cares of itself just by going there and back to the Monument.

This morning while writing this I tried a little something new that I'll aim to incorporate into a daily practice. I did twenty push-ups in the hall, stretched out there, then did ten more, walked to the first flood, did ten push-ups there, came back up, did ten more push-ups, stretched again. Fifty push-ups and two sets of stretches just like that as a way to start the day and get the first burst out of the way. Also, drank some water and had a shot of mouthful of olive oil first thing. All this can be accomplished in mere minutes.

A curious observation about the Monument I wanted to make: no matter how sluggish and tired you feel, or just plain cold, like the blood is stiff in your veins, running stairs in the Monument puts energy into you. Makes the heart pump and the blood flow. Some days before I go I'll feel like a snake on a rock in late October before packing it in for the winter that can't warm up enough to get going, and then after I'm bouncing. I am up.