Mephitic

Wednesday 7/15/26

There’s a sulfurous hue to Boston today befitting the times. Like a coloristic contrapasso. The air is acrid. It's because of the wildfires in Canada, but there's more to it than that, if you ask me.

I feel like I've been under siege this summer with extra things. The weather. It's roasting again today. Now this apocalyptic aspect to the sky. Was here yesterday as well, but worse today. It's obvious that everything is off and wrong in the world. Or it should be. The unrest is general. Life becomes more painful, stripped further of joy, hope. It's all unchecked. There's no one to check it, let alone the numbers of people to check it.

There is a plague upon us. It's a plague of stupidity. The thing about this plague is that people are too stupid to realize what's happening and why. It's a perfectly designed plague in that regard. More effectively insidious than locusts. We're the locusts.

What happens with the stupidity is that our lives lose meaning. And it isn't like they automatically come imbued with meaning. The latter is built up. Through choices, thinking, acting on good thoughts that have been developed.

It's one thing to strip meaning from our own lives. That's bad enough. Almost everyone now lives a life devoid of meaning. You know, by the way, what most people dream about when they think about having it all? What that would entail? I mean if they had the freedom to do whatever they pleased. There were no obstructions. Guess what most people answer? There are studies. I've looked through them. Most people say that they'd ultimately like to do nothing. That's the dream for the majority. Sitting there, doing nothing. Literally. The sitting. The lack of the doing.

Which is, of course, awful for a person. Fast track to depression, madness, the grave. In order for humans to excel--or just to be well--they need purpose. Selected purpose. "This is my thing, this is what I'm pursuing, this is what I feel strongly about, it's a part of me as a result, and I'm dedicated with my vision, my sweat, my blood."

But the thing that's worse than humans lives losing their meaning is that we've now formulated a world in which everything in it is stripped of meaning, and we don't even know what meaning is. If anything, that which is meaningful is now meaningless because we've elevated meaningless things and ascribed them with values they don't actually possess.

Our lives don't have mean, but we've loosed meaning from everything else, too, such that we can't recognize meaning or understand it. You then have a vortex of meaninglessness. And people babbling into the vortex, pointing into the vortex, throwing themselves into the vortex.

It's pure chaos. Yeats--and Eliot especially--really nailed this. Nothing can run on chaos. Chaos begets chaos. What's to stop it? We can't. We can't even think. I've said time and time again in this journal that the single biggest problem in a world replete with problems it's never had before, which are growing by the day, in number and size and influence, is that we can't tell what anything is.

You could show the best thing of its kind to someone and the worst and they wouldn't know the difference. They'd be apt to pick the worst as the better thing because that's more in keeping with 1. What they've become 2. All that they're capable of discerning and 3. It's that which is culturally touted, in all the forms that takes.

I'll give you an example of something. It's a bit different, but we can use it. If you go on Reddit, you'll see many, many, many people writing that John Steinbeck is "literally the GOAT." They'll say he's much better than someone else who is much better.

Steinbeck isn't a good writer. It's baby writing. It's not literature. It's not something an intelligent person and reader takes seriously. It's something you read when you're a clueless kid getting a bit more of a clue that you pass beyond. Like a band you think is great that you outgrow. As with me and Great White, baby. My, my, my, once bitten...

Damn, that's bad. But most people...there's no outgrowing anything. Their clothes. That's just about it. If you kept growing and you want to understand most people better, imagine you as you were when you were thirteen, and never progressing beyond that mentally, in terms of your taste, your understanding of things, of what things were. Actually, you'd have to adjust for plummeting literacy rates, because they get lower every year, and thirteen-year-old you adjusted to the 2020s would be exposed to less, expected to know less, would read less, study less, think less, than 1990s you, or 1960s you, or 2010s you, whichever is relevant for you.

The reason these people think/"think" what they do about Steinbeck is because he's all they can (very partially) understand. For now. Soon, they won't be able to understand him either.

I haven't done a good job with anything lately. I was sick through yesterday. My sleep is all off. It's a mess. I'm falling asleep at this time when I shouldn't be, getting up at this other time that isn't a time when I can start afresh because it's like eight o'clock at night, then being up, going to sleep again. Isn't going to work.

After two days of nothing--and I mean nothing; I probably didn't burn a calorie--I set out for Charlestown under today's yellow sky. Kept checking the website for the Monument to see if it was going to be open. The temperature was going to be close, but there was a shot I'd get in five circuits.

They did that thing where they waited to the last minute before posting the closure. I was practically there when it went up. I could have ran stairs outside, but I wasn't feeling it. Stairs under the yellow sky. I was just sick, there's a warning about the air quality, everything looks mephitic, so I decided to stand down.

Tomorrow I need to tear it up on all fronts. Have a Zulu day. A long, pause-free, Zulu day.

Meanwhile, there's a painter in the hallway for the second time in the last few days. This guy is so dumb. As he's out there, he's cranking 98.5 The Sports Hub on his phone. Not a thought for anyone. Which means I'm subjected to the moronic "hot takes" of Marc "The Beetle" Bertrand as I'm trying to think and work thanks to this drooling buffoon. He knocked Hallway Hermey on his ass, too, for the second time in those few days.

These people, man. They think of no one but themselves. That's people now. They subject you to whatever they want to subject you to. Subject you to them. There's no professionalism. This guy left trash here the other day. Papers, paint chips. Didn't put things back the way he'd come upon them. Dumb, rude, oblivious, selfish, simple. Simple, simple, simple. The bad kind of simple. What do you think such a person can tell?