more-eh-so

Thursday 7/31/25

It was ninety-eight degrees (which set a record for the day), but I was heartened on Tuesday to see that the fall decor was on the shelf at CVS, complete with some Halloween items. There were also Halloween cards. I didn't get it yet, but I scoped out a dandy of a card that I'm sure the Little Ghost Girl would love for us to send to a certain five-year-old erstwhile buddy in Lake Bluff come the spooky season.

While looking at the teas, I also saw a kind called Throat Coat, which seems like an unfortunate name to me, because how do you not think of the type of guy who'd say, "Yeah, I'll coat your throat for ya ha ha ha ha ha"?

Awoke Tuesday morning to see that Ryne Sandberg had died and subsequently wrote an op-ed.

There's a certain kind of person who fancies themselves wise in the ways of the world--they've been through some stuff, know some stuff, have a perspective tempered by experience, disappointment, loss, but take their good times where they can get them--who likes to say that you can't fight city hall.

And I think that's bullshit defeatism.

There can always be someone who can. Just like there can always be someone who should. Because it's on account of that person that real and necessary change happens. That kind of person, and those people, have always been the best shot on which so much depends. In the societal context, they're like Wallace Stevens' red wheelbarrow.

They'll encounter people like the certain kind of person I described above, whose argument has a certain balance to it, what one might call "Good all-American advice," and advice ostensibly delivered from what's intended to be a helpful place.

Here's the thing: Certain people and certain institutions count on not being fought, as it were. That is, not being called out, exposed, challenged, taken on. They stand as they stand because people think and believe they can't do anything, so they don't try to anything.

That's the publishing system. All of the evil up and down that system. Someone thinks, "If I say the truth, then this won't happen," when it's not going to happen for that person anyway, if they're not one of these people. Thus, everyone else stands down, when it's actually a paper castle, with no moat around it, no real defense, and certainly not any justification of what it does and what it's about, when we get into the morality of the matter, and the gross product of that system, in terms of its quality, or lack thereof.

These systems bank on cowardice, on silence, on a warped form of psychological complicity, in order to keep running as they run, unchallenged, and unchanged as result. What a system and person like that wants to have happen is for the people it either doesn't serve (and this can extend to the public, in the case of the publishing system) and/or oppresses to abet that person or system in keeping them shackled, left out, or lacking in what they might have, in essence.

If all of the people who can fight didn't fight, they wouldn't make the difference that the world needs. And this is how that difference has always been made. It's made less so than ever now, when it is needed more so than ever.

By the way: Note how many people think "moreso" is a word. You'll see it constantly now that I've called attention to it.

To be such a person, you'd have to be someone who struggles to...sound things out. Because "moreso" would be pronounced more-eh-so, wouldn't it?

I have some stair-related matters I'd like to cover properly on here, which I'll do later. For now I'll just say that these days lately running stairs at City Hall stairs have been harder than the ones inside of the Monument. What an awful, soupy summer we are having in Boston. Monument closed the last two days. Should be open today.

Got a ticket to Blue Heron's Christmas in 16th-Centry Spain on December 20 at 3 PM at First Church in Cambridge. Some of these ensembles run Christmas in July discount promotions. Finally moved on getting a ticket to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's gig at the House of Blues on October 8. Been monitoring this for a bit, and saw the lowest priced ticket yet. I see them every time they come through Boston.

Also got tickets to a couple of Boston College football games against Cal and UConn. Looked into a Harvard football game, too, and seeing BC play Northeastern in men's hockey on Halloween.

That game is at NE, and I thought I'd go to the MFA first and wander the galleries at night as a kind of reward if I'd worked hard that day on my writing, then walk to the game at Matthews Arena, but the tickets were costly and nearly sold out, which surprised me.

The Harvard football games were also expensive. In the past, I'd go for ten bucks or something like that. Maybe the prices will come down closer to the games. I may go to the BC football team's season opener against Fordham, which is August 30, but I'll wait to see what the weather is like. That will be an easy and cheap ticket to get. I'm dubious, though, about football in August. It just feels like it has to be in September or after.

I saw this video segment in which Kelsey Grammer took viewers on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Frasier sets. This would have been, I think, during the first season. I was very interested to learn that the table in Frasier's apartment was right around where Norm and Cliff sat on Cheers, as both shows were shot on the same lot. It made me think about the different experiences people have with the same things, without anyone else but them having that particular experience.

For instance, people think they know everything about the Beatles, that there's nothing else for them to know, but most of what happened with the Beatles isn't known. Not as it was. Paul McCartney, for example, may have gotten the idea for a song on Revolver from something he saw each day--and it could have been as prosaic as how the light hit a tree across the street-- that he nonetheless thought about a bunch, such that it became almost second nature, mentally speaking, and then there was a tune and some lyrics.

And in his mind, this song that everyone else thinks of as "officially due to this" is associated with that tree. But all of that doesn't come up. We treat everything, though, as if everything has. We make these "facts" of experience, and that's not how experience works.

I watch Frasier, and I see that table. But Kelsey Grammer could have gone to the set every day and had these memories of Cheers, interacting with his colleagues, or thinking how he felt on a given day like how he'd felt similarly for whatever reason on an earlier day with a different show.

I bet he thought about that shared space a lot. The different places he was at in his life when he stood in that same spot now versus when he stood there earlier. Because that actual space, two ways over, played such a huge role in his life.

Such are the things I think, and then I see the Frasier subreddit where people need to have the jokes from the show explained because they couldn't understand them, and usually by people who don't understand them either.

There many of these "all-century" articles coming out on all kinds of things. Best books--right--best films, best football players, etc.

And you know what happens over and over again in the comments sections? "What about Babe Ruth?" type of remarks if it's a baseball article.

Because that's how most Americans are now. They can't even read well enough to comprehend the stated premise of these articles. Someone might push back and say that the article is about the best players of the first quarter of this century, and the original commenter will angrily expostulate that Babe Ruth was active less than a century ago.

Illiterate nation.

The more illiterate we become, the worse our lives get.

But I'm sure that's just a coincidence, and if we keep becoming even less literate, then soon people will start get happier and healthier.

"You knew what I meant."

No one knows what anything means.

A previously uncirculated Ramones audience recording from CBGB's on September 11, 1976, came to light this past week, so I grabbed that and also shared it with my buddy Howard, and downloaded the band's May 12 Cambridge show from that same year as well, which is a soundboard.

What else? Bunch of Bear Family Merle Haggard and Mac Wiseman boxes, Tarantura's six-disc Led Zeppelin set from Leicester in late November 1971. The White Stripes' last gig from this day in 2007. Jack White's voice is shot. Doesn't matter.

Also nabbed the whole of Ace's twelve-disc series British Beat Girls, and this very nice package themed around Ozzy Osbourne/Randy Rhoads Tribute album, which features the complete soundboard of the Philly show from 1981 and the King Biscuit radio broadcast from Quebec that year. There's a dissertation to be written on Rhoads' playing. He wasn't that keen on performing Sabbath material, but it's fascinating to hear the approach he takes with said material. Rhoads is like Nick Drake in that you wonder how they both got so good on the guitar so fast.

Spent five hours on Tuesday night listening to various versions of the Grateful Dead's "Terrapin Station"--album version, studio outtake, live renditions from 1977. The Winterland performance from June 6 that goes into "Sugar Magnolia" numbers among those Grateful Dead sequences that cause me to think that there's no other music that does what this music does. That modulation before "Inspiration, move me brightly" is what life is for.

Speaking of the eventual recipient of that Halloween card:

My mom was babysitting the kids the other night over at my sister's. Pizza had been delivered, the front door was locked again, when it was discovered that a certain someone couldn't be located.

This would be Amelia, who had left the house in her pajamas to go across the street and see if her friends--these twin girls--were home and available to play. This was early evening. A five-year-old, seeing herself out.

Not good. That's how you get abducted and live in someone's basement until you manage to escape at age twenty-three. And I'm someone who is inclined to be hand's off in most matters. Growing up, I was outside all of the time. My parents didn't think twice about me hiking miles back into the woods. Eventually I'd reemerge.

My mother said warning words to this effect to Amelia about someone making off with her, to which Amelia responded that she'd just bite them. So she has a plan, anyway. She unlocked the door and everything and just left without a word. This kid.

As a kid in the summer, I'd be gone for the day. Maybe you'd stop home a time or two. Riding bikes or playing games until it was dark. It's funny now because just about everyone walks around with a giant water bottle. As I run the stairs at City Hall in the morning, I see people going to work with their big ass water bottle. It makes me wonder if they don't have cups at their places of employment.

There were no water bottles in these summers of which I speak. If you had one, everyone else would have thought you were nuts. Maybe you ducked into someone's house as an overheated, grass-stained collective to quench your thirst. Or you got hold of a garden hose. (Tell me: Has water ever tasted better than it did on those occasions? That was the stuff that also seemed to lubricate the soul.) And everyone was good. Everyone was fine. No one stared at screens. You used your imagination, you developed your sense of wonder, you competed at things.