Motion

Friday 11/6/26

This is me trying to put myself in motion. A fish that stops swimming drops to the bottom of the sea. I don't know that. I'm sure it's untrue. But it also seems like it ought to be true, or there's a principle somewhere in there that is true. I can't keep going as I have been. If I stay in motion that should help--ultimately not with much, if anything, given what I am and what this world is; but I can't keep going like this even in a hopeless hell.

And if I stay in motion things will get done. I look at what I might do and I don't know where to start because, really, what could doing anything just then do? Would it achieve anything? Make progress in getting through the tasks and work? Would it be a part of anything that eventually achieves anything? Then I cease movement.

Constant motion, though, makes for a method where you find that things were nonetheless gotten done, as remote as they had seemed (and truly could have been) as anything you might realistically get to. This journal entry, then, serves as motion. When other things get done, we can look back to what puts us in motion. Or returned us to motion. The trifle--if it was a trifle--may be revealed as something else.

It was so warm last night that I only slept for a few hours. Here in Boston on November 6 at three in the morning the temperature stood at 65 degrees. Yesterday got into the mid-70s. Worrisome. I'm sure you had people in Boston putting their air conditioners back on. I know, there's this polar vortex thing happening next week or whenever, but when cold does come, it feels, anecdotally, as if we're being bailed out, climate change-wise, by the interposing polar region. I get that this is highly unscientific of me, as with my fish above.

I've done a poor job with the stairs. Worse than poor. I have been a non-factor, stairs-wise, and a non-factor in my own life. Perhaps I should say I haven't even been in attendance in my own life. What is the point? It's like going to a school where there is no one else, it's just you, nothing leads to anything, and there is nothing else. But I still can't live as I've been living. I can't live as myself that way, I should maybe say.

I did reach 900 circuits of stairs ran in the Bunker Hill Monument since 3/11, which is 540,000 stairs. Like I've said, I'm supposed to do 1000 circuits in a year. I'll aim to finish up these last 100 circuits by 12/10 and get started on the next year of 1000 shortly thereafter (immediately thereafter would be better, he says to himself).

Looking to have the News and op-ed sections of the site updated by tomorrow morning. At some point I need to commit to digging in and attending to the rest of the site/sections because there's far more that should be here and isn't than what is. The links on the site at present are a drop in the link bucket. But it's even worse. The Scrooge book isn't represented in the Books section. I haven't gone to any of these sections myself in an age. I avoid things. It isn't good, brave, worthy of me, smart (even if I have no chance whatsoever, which I believe as much as I believe anything save for what my work, my art, truly is.)

Speaking of Scrooge--this year marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the film, and I should try and write a piece or multiple pieces. I also need to pitch and/or write things pertaining to the Beatles' "Strawberry Fields Forever," How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Eeyore. I ought to rewatch Dreyer's Ordet again, too (and write a piece on Vampyr, since we're on the subject of Dreyer).

I want to get up two entries quickly in these pages on sports now and sports past, plus one on the best (or overlooked) recordings of Handel's Messiah, both studio and live, and I'd like to account for what I read/watched/listened to for Halloween. Time is different here with me. One reason it's different is because I don't forget anything. That's why I might give an accounting of something long after someone else would. They'd have forgotten about it.

Everything is always here with me and my relationship with time is unique. Now it also feels like I'm trying to justify something, which is silly. This is my record, my journal, my book, the longest in history. Besides, this remains the spooky season, after all. October, November, December/Christmas. And nothing I write is confined to then and there anyway.

Tomorrow is my nephew's birthday and Sunday is my sister's. I got Charlie a Boston College beanie. Everybody got beanies this year. Boston Ballet beanie for Amelia, Aquarium beanie with preservation angle for Lilah, and now this one for Charlie. I wanted to get him a beanie from James Hook & Co., the lobster place on Atlantic that's been there for like 200 years and where we went a couple summers ago. I made a mental note about these beanies back then. But when I went there last week, they didn't have any. I looked into ordering online, but the shipping price was exorbitant.

The BC beanie is nice; plays up the Eagle rather than the Boston part, which I thought would be good because I didn't know how much he'd want to wear such an overt Boston school thing, regardless that his mother and his grandfather went there. My sister told me, though, that he regularly wears two BC sweatshirts to school.

I sent my sister a card, of course, and soon I'll send her the revised "Dead Thomas," which has been a couple years in the making, with her being the first person to see it finished. That's what I'm getting her, if you can call it that. A couple autumns ago, as school was starting, I was about to send her a message to give the kids and told her as much. But then I couldn't, because what that message was became Thomas's last words in "Dead Thomas."

All of this happened while I was at Haymarket stocking up. That story is better than anything else any other human has ever done. Like I said, I'm not going to pretend otherwise, I'm not not going to say it. And if you ever get the chance to see that story in full, however unlikely that is, I'd wager my soul you wouldn't honestly push back on that idea. I think it'd be more a case of "Um...yeah...there it is."

People get other people to lie about the quality of their work constantly. Look at publishing. Endless lies. Or the world. People expect to be lied to by those they know in regards to whatever they make or do. But I'm not supposed to say the truth about my work? Why? In a world of lies, I'm just supposed to count on everyone breaking with how things are done and saying the truth? Makes no sense. And what I say is backed up--it is more than backed up--by the work, should it be seen.

Anyway, when I have something for my work, I don't like to talk about it or share it until it's actually in my work. Then I can. But until that point, it needs to be just mine. I'll share the overlap--again, if you want to call it that--with my sister as per that aborted start-of-school message and the story.