Living suicide

Wednesday 9/30/26

The rain finally abated yesterday after nearly three-straight days of coming down. This allowed me to go to the grocery story, which I hadn't done in a while. It's not an option when it rains if you have to carry the bags any distance because they'll rip, even when they're double-bagged.

I've done a terrible job with everything lately. This kind of living suicide thing. I might as well be dead for little I do, how I look to going to sleep again as soon as I'm up. How I don't fight, try. Let everything go. Myself. When all I might manage is brushing my teeth. I feel tired no matter if I just slept. I'm withdrawn. Even more so than usual. If that's possible. I'm not sure it is, and yet here I am making some distinction.

Returning to the North End from the Trader Joe's in the Seaport, a woman engaged me in conversation. She asked if I'd walked all that way, obviously having seen that these were Trader Joe's bags and knowing where the store was, as though it was quite far. It's about a mile-and-a-half away. I said yes, she replied "Good for you," and began happily chirping about some kind of cookies she likes and maybe she'd get over there later, but first she had to X, Y, and Z. I said she should go and get those cookies as an autumn treat, a term which she liked and repeated.

I ran next to no stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument or anywhere last week. Eleven Monument circuits in total: five Wednesday, one Thursday, five Friday. I'd mentioned the five on Wednesday which were at a brisk pace. I didn't want to be there the next two days and could have turned around after reaching the hill, and then obviously wasn't there at all during the weekend. I set out for Charlestown on both Saturday and Sunday and got as far as a block in the rain before turning back to this borderline unlivable, falling-apart-around-me apartment.

Today is the last day of the season for the Monument with the favorable (for me) operating hours. Come Thursday, it's back to opening at 1 rather than 10. It's impossible for me to run those Monument stairs without thinking of the bigotry and blackballing of the editors in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. The idea of me not being able to do a book--for free--about stairs in a series about objects where unqualified, unprofessional writers are hooked up cronyism-style at a press with whom I've done "business"--business; ha, right--is beyond the pale. Blatant bigotry beyond the pail.

And I have to do an extended entry documenting all of that on here about those people, which I hate doing. But it has to be done. As they commission the likes of books on concrete and air conditioners. I'm serious. That sounds so bad, unappealing, and boring like I must be thinking up extreme examples to try and make a point by exaggeration, but I'm not.

I stayed up far too late and well beyond when I should have foolishly watching that Red Sox-Yankees game, which meant I was up for nearly twenty-four hours, and then I got up late today at six AM. Sometimes the Monument is an exercise in literally putting one foot in front of the other for me when it seems like I can't in any sense.