Is it worth it?

Thursday 2/12/26

A little after midnight. Been up for a while for work. Downloading high-definition copies of Kieślowski's Dekalog and Tourneur's Night of the Demon.

It bothers me when people ask, "If such and such worth it?" Such and such can be anything. Watching Dekalog. Listening to a version of the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" from 1972. Ascending the Bunker Hill Monument. Once. Going to a museum. Reading a Chekhov story.

If you are someone who asks this question or has what "motivates" the likes of it inside of you, I don't know that there's any hope for you. That person's brain is liked a locked and reluctant door. Anything that matters will be lost on that person.

If you're attitude isn't "I'm going to find out" and "I'm doing this" and "Let's see," then I'd question the very point of bothering to be here. When people ask me that question in the Monument, I look at that with abject disgust. I don't even answer. I won't even dignify their token existence and I treat them as though they don't exist, which is pretty much the case.

"Is it worth it for me to move my feet for seven or eight minutes (including breaks) to go to the top of this structure and look out?"

It sickens me. Because what this also means is that if I say "Yes," then that may change things for them, and if I say, "Gosh, no," then they'll turn around. Someone would say that's silly, they wouldn't do that. So what then? Asking just to ask? Talking just to talk? A person should only speak if they have something to say.

The person who says, "Is such and such worth it"--and it is in this manner that they will view everything in life and in their limited lives--is by definition themselves not worth it.

All Super Bowl halftime music is terrible, also by definition, in lowest common denominator, commodified, insincere, inauthentic, unsophisticated, uneducated, performative, soulless, plasticized, oblivious America.

Yes, the Who played a halftime show. By then, the Who were very far removed from being the Who. It was watered down, wholly un-dynamic anodyne, hack-y, sterile, corporate karaoke pub rock by then, but cardboard pub rock, not like rock in an authentic pub. There was nothing in that music/performance. And if you had a time machine to work with and the 1969 Who were an option, they wouldn't have landed the gig.

The music has to be bad. Think of it like the music you hear playing at a CVS. Tepid. Diluted piss water. And then people say things for other reasons. They're not being sincere. But usually they don't even know. You could play the most amazing music ever written to most people, and it'd be entirely lost on them. We're not good at listening. Out in life and to each other, or to music, which are two different skills.

I see things, for example, that people who claim that the Beatles are the biggest thing ever in their lives, and they don't have any idea what they're listening to. They don't even know who's singing. If it's Harrison or Lennon. They're clueless. Again: other things. Almost everything in life now comes down to other things.

The thing in question--how it came to be, how it is regarded--has exponentially more to do with other things than the purported reasons that make that thing that thing. An example of the purported reason: Joshua Cohen won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction because he's an outstanding fiction writer.

He isn't. He sucks. But it's worse than "He sucks," though. Because there is nothing there. We can very clearly see that with something like the example of his work from the pages of The New Yorker that I shared in this record. It's obvious. Joshua Cohen won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for totally different things. Other things. Almost everything is about other things rather than the thing it purports to be about, and which people, who do next to no thinking, and are so lazy and incurious that they refuse to even look--to use their eye muscles--then just automatically go along with and don't question.

They're not interested. They're not interested in anything. But you see how easy, in the case of publishing, it is for me to show how bad all of this writing is. If you're reading these pages, you're made to see it. I don't mean forced. I mean, "Here it is, we've put this on the table, the light is on, we're gonna look at this now, everyone use your eyes."

Then, because that's the set-up, and there isn't anything else happening--that's what we're doing, this thing people don't do for the most part otherwise--we all see what's there. Or, if you prefer, what isn't there. It's not subtle that this shit blows. But you have to look at it. Separate it from the nonsense, put it on the table, turn on that light, and use your eye muscles.

But if you're not reading these pages--and I'm using the general "you" now--then you probably never stop to think that something wins the Pulitzer Prize for fiction without being outstanding.

If you actually look, though, you know. Unless there's someone who wants to rush to the defense of that Cohen story from The New Yorker that features in that prose off--and we're just talking about him now, and not the contrast with what I wrote--and say what makes it so brilliant.

But I don't think anyone's going to do that, do you? Not a single person yet has. Because they know it's true. They might not think, "This sucks, so we're putting it out/hyping it/awarding it" (although they are often looking for certain MFA hallmarks, which means a story and/or book will suck; they just assign different values to these things; the thing that makes the thing suck is a positive to them), but they're not vetting that work at all. It's about who it came in from. How much money they have. Their system connections. The boxes they check. How those boxes they check play in the world at the time.

Are those checked boxes fashionable, for instance? Are they "in"? Is there a movement going on? (Hello, "Cat Person"! Which is another nothing piece of work by a writer with no talent. No, wait, she's amazing? Oh. That was a while ago, wasn't it? "Cat Person," I mean. Where's the amazing stuff? Is it coming? Or do you think she just had her moment because of...that's right...other things! And then that's it. It was just bullshit. Like Wells Tower. It wasn't because anyone honestly thought anything was any good at all. Where's all of his amazing stuff? But you know what? If and when he types whatever--it can be anything; random words--and sends that off, in it will go, out it will come, and the praise will follow. That praise might as well already be written for work that itself doesn't exist.) They're not thinking about the work. They're not evaluating the work. They don't care about the work. It doesn't enter their minds. It's irrelevant except insofar as the page can't actually be blank. But what's on it? Meaningless. Well, unless they see that what's on that page puts everything else to shame. Then we got a problem. That shit needs to be locked down fast.

What could you say no matter how much you might wish you could? When you pull that writing into the light and actually say, "Look at this," it's stunning that that's what happened with this guy and this work, isn't it? It's amazing how just...nothing...that writing is, isn't it? How it's just nothing. Nothing to it, nothing in it. Just. Nothing. A blank page has more to say than the likes of that story in The New Yorker by a fiction Pulitzer Prize winner. What doesn't? A single bird chirp has more to say. A cough. A reminder to buy milk.

And this isn't some example in isolation, an exception to the rule--this is the rule. This is how how it works.

We largely no longer have the ability to be truly interested in anything. Stuff is rammed in a person's face. Those same things are rammed in the faces of those surrounding them. It is about these things which people talk. Which they squawk about to get attention for themselves. He squawks, she squawks. Everybody squawks. The thing in the face is replaced by another thing in the face. And another. And so on.

This is what people "consume." If everyone is squawking about a show, they watch that show so they can squawk and also in order to feel like they are part of something even when they don't add to the din. They add to the din mentally. With the constant bombardment, people begin to mistake what they senselessly, mindlessly consume is what they're interested in because they don't understand the concept of authentically being interested in anything. They conflate.

You get a world in which no one genuinely likes or cares about anything, but you need things to say you're interested in, so you use what bombards you in the face. People have no conception of pursuit. Of running down. Of seeking more of a thing that they encountered or discovered that hit home with them. Something that is authentically their thing.

I fell into the trap of waiting for the Monument to open yesterday. Despite the temperature being in the upper thirties, it was closed again.

I began 2026 not completing works needing to be completed and not writing new works. This went on for weeks, but now I'm starting to stack stuff in my unique, systematic, rat-tat-tat, boom-boom-boom, here's another and here's another, way. The range is, of course, absurd and is otherwise impossible if I didn't exist.

Monday is a holiday, so here's how I'm looking at this right now: I want to see five days here of impressive production, in which everything is down with a purpose in mind. And that's across the board. With each thing I do.

One thing I need to get better at is stamina. If I arise and write 3000 words, 4000 words, 5000 words, that can't be the end of it. I must find a way to make it feel at that point as though I've just gotten up again and it's time for 3000 words, 4000 words, 5000 words. I am trying to change the world to the good more than anyone ever has, because that is what I have in me and more importantly that is what my work has in it. This isn't ordinary. I have to find a way to go beyond what have been my thresholds, even if they were already far beyond anyone else's. Because I am doing something different and am after different and unique results.