Me and my ghost

Sunday 10/18/26

Was a no-show in my own life yesterday. I wasn't in the world. It's like at the Boston Athenaeum. They open their doors to the public sometimes so people can come in and check the place out and see if they'd like to become a member. Yesterday it was as if I was doing that with death. I wasn't here. On other days when I do "nothing" I am doing things in my head, at least. Yesterday, no, not really.

It's five in the morning now. I've been up since 10 o'clock last night. The temperature has dropped to 32 degrees, which must be the lowest it's been since last winter.

It's funny, I was going to say, "Let's start with a positive," and note the tally on how many days I've gone without a drink, given that I count from a Sunday, but I don't think that's a positive. Why would my having prolonged my life being a positive? For what should I be here? To suffer? There can be nothing else for me.

Today marks 3745 days, or 535 weeks, without a drink.

Lapsang souchong tea became my Islay whisky. I used to smell the glass when I drank whisky. Even keep an empty glass on my desk because of the aroma. I do that now with the mug in which I've had the lapsang souchong. Smell the bag, too, before putting into the hot water.

No stairs yesterday. Did go to Haymarket. That was it. Got fifteen peppers and three pounds of tomatoes. Deals weren't as strong this week as last. Nine orange peppers for $6, six large red peppers for $5, and the tomatoes were $5. None of it will go to waste.

One goes on a social media site and it's endless amount of women posting about the fall. Or, rather, that's the guise of the post. The celebration of autumn as this thing they love so much. You would think--if you were very stupid or born yesterday--that any of this might have anything to do with autumn, but of course it doesn't. It's them in the short skirt, with three photos--all that can be posted at once, that is; "maximum me"--from some place that sells pumpkins, which you can kind of make out in the background. You're flagellated with narcissism from broken, empty, completely uninteresting people who are only interested in themselves.

Sometimes they take a moment to complain about men, these women who have no other interests besides themselves. Well, themselves, and getting "likes" and compliments from loathsome men, men who look like big fat thumbs that have just been slammed in a door, men who are also bereft of any intelligence, substance, value, who see these women as objects. Thus do these women get their "validation."

How can you have any kind of healthy feeling for yourself when this is what you are and all you? All you do. You know what no one does? Share something they love about autumn with people. A book they love to reread this time of year, or a drink their grandmother used to make when it first got cold.

No one has any real interests. They don't even know how to be interested in anything. I frequently encounter people asking how to be interested without knowing that's what they're doing because they aren't smart enough and self-aware enough to know anything. They'll say, "I'm looking to get into BLANK, where should I start?" Without the comma, of course, because no one is smart and educated enough to know how commas work and besides, you can just say, "Language is fluid!" anyway to make your illiteracy into a positive/indicator of how well-adjusted you are.

No one has anything to share with anyone. I do, of course. If one went and looked at my version of these types of things, what one would see is what one would expect from the person of the greatest depths, the greatest passions, the person of the most substance, the person most alive. But you see where that has left me. Other things have put me here, too, don't get me wrong.

And all those people who say, in effect, "Okay, take a photo of me looking deeply contemplative...stand over there...back up a bit...okay...ready...let me see it...no...take a few more...wait...let me get in my contemplation pose here at this spot in nature...okay...let me see them...oh, I like that last one...hold on...just gonna post it...okay...where should we go now?"

Take away the attention-seeking angle, and I doubt people would do most of the things they do, go to few of the places they go to. It's about the photos of themselves and what those photos are meant to suggest and the garnering of attention.

Has there ever been a drug and drug epidemic like what attention has become in our world/time? People don't care about the reasons for that attention. It's not as if they have created or done this amazing thing and they want that to be seen, known about, in part, or entirely because of, the good it can do. It doesn't matter to them--doesn't lessen the result--if what they get attention for is this thing they took from someone else and passed off as their own. A remark, a factoid, a piece of writing, a text created by AI.

That's when you're so far gone in your sickness that there's never any coming back. I see it all the time, too, with writers. So-called writers. There are no real writers in this world now. There aren't even people who know what real writing is. What would go into doing real writing. How real writing functions. Win awards, have fiction in The New Yorker, what have you, it doesn't matter to those people whether they even created that work, so long as they get that attention from it for having that spot in that venue or being able to say they won some bullshit that decided upon by people who are themselves bullshit; I mean, that's what they are. They're not people.

Think of how sick you have to be in the head to receive honors and credit for something you didn't do, but which you receive and feel the same way about as if you had done that thing. We've moved into general psychosis. That's the rule of thumb now--psychosis. The "norm."

You don't see much about how your life--your inner life, your mental health--would be if you're someone who behaves as I've described above. Getting those compliments from the mashed-thumb men and this being what you...seek...need. Because there's no way you couldn't be buried beneath a veritable mountain of depression if that's how it is. Or you're so crazy that you can't even recall what reality is anymore. Which is better? Maybe the latter? But it's the former that's more common. And so many people are "living" that way.

Began this entry with a reference to the Athenaeum. We'll conclude it with one as well. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a story about a man named Dr. Harris whom he saw reading repeatedly at the Athenaeum, only to learn that Dr. Harris had died several days before a few of those times. Almost like me yesterday. A ghost. Only I haven't had formal death yet. I don't think. Maybe I am dead and this is hell. It could work like that. People always think they know. You're not going to know. Anyway, the story wasn't published until after Hawthorne's own death.