Life is energy

Friday 10/2/26

I'm off. I somehow thought back on Wednesday that there was another day left in September. I don't normally make mistakes like that. Clock struck midnight on Thursday and the date on my phone changed to October 1 and there we were.

Had I known this, I would have done better in the Bunker Hill Monument and taken advantage of what I thought was the last day of the year with the good hours. I went in with a big number in mind and failed, instead running only five circuits of stairs. I'm not in the shape I should be in. Walked nine miles additionally. Did 100 push-ups. So better, anyway, than the preceding days.

I had seen a month or two back that the summer hours for the Monument would come to an end on the last day of September. My work day yesterday began...this is going to be confusing...at ten o'clock the day before. So that means I'd been up and at it for fifteen hours prior to when I thought the Monument now opened at 1 PM.

Remember, I never eat before two in the afternoon. Work is for working. Not eating. This could change later in my life if I'm still here, and I'll achieve better balance or, if you prefer, be smarter, but this is how I do it right now. Sherlock Holmes would have gotten it. When working a case, he often took no food. (But other times he happily would, like in "The Red-Headed League" when he proposes to Watson that they go out for lunch and a violin concert.)

You know where this is going. I wait until sometime after noon, leave for Charlestown, and arrive there what I thought was early to see that the Monument was open. Turns out the post-summer hours don't start for a little while yet--around Columbus Day. I was overdressed for the second day in a row with a sweatshirt on (but shorts). Why I did this, I don't know. To produce a sauna effect? Get a "good sweat" going? Or a good sweat on top of a good sweat.

I harbor a belief that if you can sweat more in a workout without making it so you can't do the workout as well you should and that this makes you healthier and prolongs your life. The irony being that my life is just suffering and will remain so until I die, getting worse and worse, which would seem impossible given how bad it is, but is the case all the same, and with reason.

I have a number of these "medical" ideas that make me something of a seventeenth century nut of a woman which I put stock in though unlike a so-called "old wives' tale," which are views held by a multitude of people, I can't imagine anyone else shares my theories.

I did poorly in the Monument again. It wasn't just that I did five circuits slowly, it was the struggle. My plodding self. I felt lumbering and unathletic. Like I wasn't holding my own with the stairs. You can't beat the granite, but you can definitely be more competitive, give the granite a better game.

Not me of late. I had that big week a couple weeks back and haven't been right since. Part of it may be because of my spirit and where I'm at. I'm always in an awful place. But sometimes I'm in the awful place with more fight in me, or more fight--and energy--that I can gather.

I've said this before and I'll say it again: time is never the issue with us, no matter what there is to do or how much we want to do, if we see/tend to time by managing it well. We always cite time. The real issue is energy. It's one of the most precious of commodities. Like truth, beauty, joy, hope, courage, life. I say, for instance, that the value of a work of art is directly proportional to the amount of life it contains, which is also about energy.

Life is energy. There are degrees of life. I'm not talking degrees of quality of life. A person who can play basketball better than another person. A person can write better than another person (and just about any person can write better than someone who produces MFA style fiction). A person can also be more alive than another. And be more human. The challenge for us to become more human each day of our lives than we were the day before.

Today will get into the eighties, so I need to attire myself more appropriately Monument-wise. There was a couple yesterday in their twenties going up whom I passed, with her remarking, "Wow, you're strong," I assume because she had concluded I wasn't breathing hard or taxed, which speaks to the different ways in which we perceive the same thing.

More importantly (even if no one will ever get to see it--it's still going to be what it is as the thing it is), on my way to the Monument and while laboriously running my stairs inside of it, I did very good head work on a new story I've been doing head work on for a couple weeks now. But this work featured crucial developments.

What does this head work consist of? I'll have the language, the dialogue, the phraseology. I can know what the end is. Descriptions. Feelings, ideas. How to emphasize a theme. Write a part where someone will cry, that makes me start to as I'm doing that head work. I "finally" with this story figured out the title. The characters will share more with me as to what they're about. Who they are. In their deepest parts. These stories are theirs; they aren't mine. They tell me. I don't "make" them do anything.

You might ask, "Do you remember all of it?" If you look at my fiction, or if it's ever possible for you to read "Dead Thomas," "Dot," "Friendship Bracelet," you'll see everything in it is naturally related. If I have a story in my head, I only need to call to mind one thing, whatever it is, and that will lead to everything else, because that's how natural a creation it is.

Then there will be like some "mystery cloud," with things inside of it that I haven't formally shone a light on yet, blowing away the cloud cover. But I don't want to, because I know at the same time what's in there, I feel it inside of me, I know in my heart without needing to spell out the specifics of the letters in my mind, I fully understand the power I am going to tap, and I want the process of maximizing that to be part of the formal writing process. Or part of the process when I say, "Okay, turn this focus and energy loose on these things now."

There's a different time for those other things. I'm saving that particular energy for then. I can return from the Monument knowing I've done something no one else could do. That this hour away has played a huge part in the creation of a unique work of art. A work of art that the world needs, that could only come from me, but that, also, will almost certainly never be seen.

One can try and imagine how that feels. But it's not like, "Hey! Time to go to the gym!" and I tap out from everything else. I look the same going there, I look the same running stairs, I look the same coming back, but it's remarkable how much can have actually happened in the course of these events.