My buddy finished preschool, anecdotes from the stairs ("You ain't playin', man"), Cannonball Adderley and Charlie Parker, writing and throwing, if I was teaching a class on American art, etc.

Saturday 5/17/25

My mother picked up my buddy the other day from preschool. She said, "Colin wanted me to say hello to you for him."

Amelia responded, "And?"

"And that the Little Ghost Girl says hi, too."

Amelia had a big smile and said, "He's just being silly. She's not real. He's so silly."

Of course she's real.

I guess school is over for the year for her because last night I received a photo with a sign that said as much.

I texted my sister back saying, "My buddy!!!!! You MUST tell her I said super big CONGRATULATIONS!!!! I knew she could do it! (And wish her luck in her exciting dance recital for me!)"

When I was running stairs (3000 of them) at City Hall on Monday, a City Hall employee got quite amped up with good cheer and encouragement.

"You ain't playin' around, man. You out here every day gettin' it. You get it, man. Get it!" he said.

These are not even my main stairs.

Speaking of my main stairs: Someone in the Monument said to me Thursday, "You look like you do this a lot." With those five circuits, that's 600 circuits of Monument stairs since August 15. Now I'm wondering if I can do 400 circuits in the next four months and make it to 1000 in a year. If the Monument was open every day, this would be easier.

I'd have to have some big number days--double digits--or else it'd be like doing five circuits Wednesday-Sunday every week, and especially given that the Monument doesn't open until 1--at least for now--that's hard. But I'll make a push and we'll see. I did five more circuits yesterday and walked six miles, too.

Waiting for the Monument to open yesterday, this guy--probably like thirty-two--walks up to the door. He looked like he was pregnant. The door is locked, but this idiot keep tugging at it. There's a sign right there saying the hours. I'm standing next to him--I offer no input--watching this moron. He didn't read the sign, because why would anyone read anything? And he couldn't figure it out. "Maybe if I just keep pulling on it..."

I hate people like this. I knew everything I needed to about this guy. How dense he was, how lazy, that his life is eating garbage and watching sports and saying "literally" and "she's so hot," etc.

Why be alive? Why be here? Leave.

Finally he says to me, "It's locked." I mean...you think, dumbass? I say, "It's not open yet." And he goes, "Geez, I was just asking," like he's been wronged--by me, the door, both.

Do you have any doubt that he uses AI every chance he gets and thinks it's great? And here he was, looking like a pregnant man who was outsmarted by the door because he couldn't so much as read a sign.

I stayed up late Thursday night--11. Work began at 4 on Friday, at which point I wrote a 1000 word piece on Sleepaway Camp and a 1500 word piece on rock and roll gigs played at high schools.

I observed some back and forth online in which people were discussing whether Cannonball Adderley was a poor man's Charlie Parker.

I don't see how you can compare someone to Charlie Parker. He was his own thing. You can't really imitate someone who is their own thing. They're just separate. The idea of being a Charlie Parker acolyte is more this thing that critics and historians say than this thing that anyone has ever really put into practice.

Parker was a true artist. Adderley was a showman, an entertainer. He played with real ebullience, and that ebullience enlivened many sessions of which he was a part, including some that produced legitimate art. Kind of Blue is the most famous example, but don't sleep on Adderley's own Somethin' Else. The project billing is a bit misleading--it's technically an Adderley album, with him as the leader, but it's every bit as much a Miles Davis record, I'd say.

Adderley is that neighbor you're always glad to see who brightens your day. That was his own thing. Both Adderley and Parker were bluesmen, but it's more obvious with the former, and his blues is effervescent, whereas Parker's blues are meditative. For an excellent introduction to the depths of Parker's blues--and an album that from which much can be gained over the whole of a lifetime--I recommend At Storyville, cut here in Boston in 1953 which went out over the air as a broadcast on WHDH.

Think of writing like throwing a ball. You can throw the ball anywhere. You can throw it so that no one can catch it. You can throw it way over everyone's head to try and show how far you can throw it. But you are really throwing the ball to the reader. Sometimes you lob it. Sometimes you have to fire it in there. Sometimes the best throw has a bounce or two. Sometimes you throw it in front of them so that they catch the ball in stride. Sometimes you put it on their back shoulder. But you're throwing the ball to the reader. You're not rolling it down the end of the street where no one is standing when the person you can throw the ball to is standing in front of you.

If I was going to teach a class on the art of the United States, as in, this is art emblematic of the republic, I'd include The Searchers, Citizen Kane, Charles Ives, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," the radio version of Gunsmoke, Jelly Roll Morton, and Workingman's Dead/American Beauty.

I wouldn't include Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. They are what I think of as internalists. They go out into the world, but country at the heart of their work is the self. You could also say that the Grateful Dead of "Dark Star" are also internalists. They were so many things.

Celtics are done. Embarrassing performance last night. They were hammered. A no-show, with their horrible strategy--if you want to call it that--on full, ugly display: Three after three after three after three. Just throwing up those threes. Maybe play the game? I'll do a postmortem on the season and where the franchise is at and what would need to change in a separate entry as I said. And that talent-rich Red Sox team--which is what everyone but me said about them--dropped another game on the road to 78-84.

Watched the latest episode of Your Friends and Neighbors. Doesn't work. You watch, and it's people making one poor choice after another, not because that's what people would do, but so that there can be a plot, a show. It's not believable. You can't change how people would behave--just hammer it in there--in order to make a story. That's having it backwards. In any good work of story-based art, the characters dictate the story.

You can't take a character and make them do something so that you'll be able to have this part of your story. You're moving away from the locus of truth at that point. Creating facsimiles and distortions. Echoes. It's like a music tape. Instead of a first generation source, it's a fifth generation source. But it's like this is how people have to create now, because human life is now so bland. I'm not talking about transcription, either. So-called realism. Rather, believability, which is different.

A show like this and the characters in it are only believable if you're meant to believe people try and make the worst decisions possible, as often as possible, which, of course, no one does, no matter how stupid we are. But if these characters didn't do that, there wouldn't be a show. The people who made the show aren't talented enough to do it any other way and have a show. But there is no talent anymore, because talent is irrelevant if it is not developed. Talent is not developed because you'd have to be too brave, too determined, have too much vision, and be more of an individual than anyone now can be.

Instead, people get their marching orders from their environment and how everyone else is. Thus, you get all of this shit that, at the very most, is watchable. But none of it is great art or great entertainment. People's standards just keep going down, because they're not exposed to anything better. They don't get out very much, even if they're consuming--in terms of what that word often means in this world--movies and shows and even books all the time. When all you do is listen to high school rock bands, then all of a sudden Great White sounds great. My, my, my, once bitten twice shy babe!

We have stunted ourselves. Then, if there is something is amazing, it's more likely to be dismissed, because it will be too much for people and outside of the range of their expectations and the standards they have in place for what a good or great work of art or entertainment should be. Which means more and more shit getting produced and coming out, and a race of people on which anything more than that will be lost if it even got made, which it won't be.