My father's bench, the Guggenheim's allegiance to the reach-around factory, stairs and stretches, autumn's sun

Monday 10/20/25

I tell myself I'm going to stretch more, and then I just do it every now and again, usually arriving at whatever stairs I'll be running and beginning cold, but this really has to change. There's no excuse for me not to be stretching, and it's folly. I haven't done great with the stairs over the last three days, running only 3000 of them at City Hall on Saturday after much work and before I hustled out to Chestnut Hill. I did walk six miles on Friday, three on Saturday, and nine on Sunday, and did my 100 push-ups each day.

On all of those days, I had some soft tissue discomfort in my right leg--a touch in the hamstring, more in the calf, and especially above and behind the ankle. On part of that walk yesterday I finally just sat down and did ten minutes of stretches on the ground in this little park area near South Station and then some calf stretches with my hands out in front of me against a hard surface. I woke up today with everything feeling fine. No discomfort. I've been up and down the building stairs twice and I seem back to normal. Have started today's assorted passes of stretches. It's important that I stay on this.

There's the legend of the fountain of youth, but I think that the Bunker Hill Monument is a real-life tower of health. There is something about those stairs. Their surface, their height, the way they're angled, that promotes maximum salubrity in body and mind. Leg health, lung health, emotional health, spiritual health. Other stairs--like those at City Hall--are just not the same. I feel like I'd be less likely to have these minor twinges if the Monument had been open all this time. But I shouldn't have the twinges anyway. That's more about me and not doing as well as I can, which I'll fix. The Monument is a wonder, though.

It doesn't feel like the government will be reopening soon. Can't see it being this month. I think this could stretch for a while, and 2026 isn't off the table.

Yesterday marked 3381 days, or 483 weeks, without a drink. The few people I know think this is easy for me. It's not. Everything is a huge struggle not to give in to giving up. Death. Certainly. Whatever forms that takes. This included. Every day is hard. I would say unimaginably hard for anyone else. I don't think anyone could conceive of what this being your life is like.

Then there are days like this past Saturday, where it's as if I'm on this raft made of a couple sticks and nothing else, in a sea so black with walls of water so high, that I can't see anything. Nothing in any direction, including from above. And that's the day, with the question of whether or not I'll make it to tomorrow. Keep from going under until tomorrow.

I started gathering materials to update the News section of the site, one of the only sections that makes a pretense of being updated at this point. Talk about things needing to be fixed. It's overwhelming how many links I need to get up in most of the categories, after first taking down what's there because the host site doesn't allow you to change the order of the individual items. But the News site--which started with the 2018 launch of the site--can at least be made complete and up to date in a sitting or two.

Stepped outside twice this morning. The sun won't be up for some time yet. It's borderline shorts weather.

I was going to Chestnut Hill on Saturday in theory for a football game. It's hard for me to go to anything. Everyone else is with people. Those people are smiling and people are smiling at them. I am all alone. How would I not be in this world with what I am? And especially in this situation. If I wasn't, it would be because of other things--fame, money. I tell myself that if I was out of this situation, I'd have access to more people and maybe someone amongst all of them would possess what I require in a person mentally and morally. But that's neither here nor there right now, is it?

Anyway, I'm sure this has come up at previous instances in this journal--it is, after all, four million words long now, and a faithful record, among other things, of what has been--but there's a bench at Boston College in what is called the Rose Garden, or what used to be called the Rose Garden--I'm not sure if it still is, or that's just how my family refers to it because of its past--where my late father proposed to my mother. When he died at the age of fifty-three, a plaque was affixed to a bench in that spot--which is much transformed, but it is the same spot, and it's beautiful, serene--in his memory.

It's here that I would go, for example, rather than to the site of his grave, which is out in Milton. I was saying to a former professor of mine yesterday--via his voicemail, anyway, where I'll sometimes leave him sixteen-minute messages on my walks--who himself probably knows that spot as the Rose Garden, that it says something when you live in such pain that what ought to be the main staples of pain seem almost absurd.

Standing at my father's grave and feeling that pain as a result is practically an absurd conceit given the enormity of suffering that is my life. The other forms of hurt don't register. It's as if you almost don't get to have them, if that makes sense. And that's not me being cavalier or glib or unfilial. I loved and love my father. I touched the name on his bench on Saturday and cried, practically begging him to help me find some hope, to help me.

I am crying now and I have much to do. I will try and finish this entry, though. My sister and her family went to visit the bench in August when they were here. The plaque wasn't there. I was going to be back in late September for a football game I'd last mere minutes at, if that, because I am alone, and sometimes I can't handle the feeling and bail fast, and I planned to check on the bench then, the hope being that this was some maintenance issue in the meanwhile. The late September date fell on parents' weekend, and universities tend to like the campus to look nice for those. Loose groundskeeping ends are usually tied up by then.

But the plaque still wasn't there on the day. Someone who doesn't have a lot to do and doesn't start their days at two in the morning was supposed to look into this, but they said it wasn't at the top of their list and would take a while to get there. Meanwhile, my mother was understandably upset and had some nightmares, so as soon as I heard that I made a call and left a message.

Someone called me back inside of five minutes and was very understanding and helpful, and said she'd reach out to this other person who handled these matters about remedying the issue and I'd hear from them. This second party called me about a week later, letting me know that the plaque was back up, it had just been some maintenance issue. She was also very nice and I have her contact information saved now, just in case there are any issues in the future.

I wasn't going to go to the game on Saturday. The ticket was like five bucks, I knew I wouldn't last, I had gotten more bad news. I had also done edits on no less than nine pieces that morning and worked on this short story that I touched on in that entry the other day that took the form of some texts to someone I know. And that was upsetting.

Why is it upsetting to be writing something no one else in the world could write and that could be massive? Because it won't be massive--not right now, anyway--because of who wrote it, how this system works, and the people in that system who would want to keep such a thing from the world on account of who it's by, what it could do in the world, and how it makes their group, their cronies, their type, and themselves look by comparison.

But if it was somehow, by a shocking miracle written by one of the key frauds amongst them in some totally out-of-character supernova of ability? A no-talent like a Tommy Orange? They'd all have their megaphones up to their mouths and you'd have a viral work of fiction, but not viral in the "here today, gone by the end of the week" sense, but "This actually matters and it's never going away" sense. They don't want that to come from me, the only person it could come from. So that's upsetting. Having that work, and knowing this. You almost wish that you didn't have the work, if you follow me, and that might be the most upsetting thing of all.

The football game started at noon, by the way, which meant I'd need to leave by half past ten or so. Does this sound like your Saturday mornings? You think it's similar to those of the horrible, bereft-of-any-ability-save-that-of-being-connected frauds who are handed Guggenheims as if it were just part of some "thanks for being here" gift package for having come out of the right birth canal and into the proper sinecure? Which is, of course, all that it is, as this record has proven, and there isn't a single person in the world who can look at those entries and mount any argument otherwise. Which is why no one does.

You want to try? I'll put you up here with you saying your piece. Step up, frauds and cowards and dilettantes and sycophants and inheritors and thieves and rage-drunk (at a minimum), witless, stunted man-children/stroke-the-right-people merchants (which will give you a big leg up in Pulitzer matters) and advocates that the disabled should be shunned and believers that sexual harassment is cool just so long as you're the right kind of guy.

No? Nobody? Exactly. Nobody. The Guggenheim is a sham. A straight-up lie born of networks of incestuous evil. A mega-dose of classist bullshit. The Guggenheim says it provides grants to writers who have shown in good faith that they'll make the most of those funds, are doing things of significance that can make some difference, and who have need. So instead they award $40K to a trust fund millionaire who writes 500 valueless, navel-gazing, pointless words a year, the exact same nothingness they wrote the year before, and which is all they will ever write because it's all they can write, when they bother to actually to write, as taints are tongued and hands go into overdrive at the reach-around factory.

There is one among the awarded number who had two kids commit suicide. The kids killed themselves the same way. At different times. And the parent of those two kids used that for material and as a way of bullet-proofing themselves, writing not just one but two books about the same thing, using the deaths. Using their children.

These people aren't human. They don't have human souls. They're monsters. Vampires who hate the light even more than the Transylvanian variety because with light comes truth. What else was this person going to write? So the dead children became grist for a mill without any water--as in talent--and any humanity. That became the gross, vile shtick. That person saw an opportunity. They took it. And they kept working it. Working it and working it and working it as the awards rolled in, and the encomiums for work that was never read by the people adding their proper share to the incestuous community's official pile in the town square that reminds me of the one in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," like a demented tithe to a pretend god that none of these frauds believe in any more than I do.

Hype, award, put on "Best Books Coming this Spring" and year end best of lists. Simply because they knew that's what you do with the right person. And what? Was someone going to say the truth? Or were they just going to say the book they never read a word of was a masterpiece? This author--who is so bad at writing, and has featured in prose offs in these pages and will be featured in more--knew that they'd hit upon a way to guarantee themselves even more praise. Empty, insincere, generic words. And the praise was a given anyway prior to that, because of the connections, the boxes that were checked. But this was still a way to kick that up another level, and to know that they'd ever have to worry about there being a word that wasn't panegyric and idolatry. People like this don't care if it's sincere. Nothing about them is real.

There's no truth here. No truth is allowed in publishing. It's not looked upon well in this world--which just keeps getting worse as a result, and worse for all of the people, too, who hate and fear truth; kind of ironic--but no truth is allowed to enter into publishing whatsoever, because any time it does--if it did--the entire disgusting edifice comes that much closer to crashing down, and there's nothing but bullshit keeping it up anyway.

Bullshit and a helping hand of total indifference and unawareness from the rest of the world outside the walls of this rancid gated community in which no one gives a fuck, because why would they when there's so little worth reading and no one can read anyway even if they wanted to? Which is exactly how publishing wants it, or else...that's right...there'd be all that truth, all of that, "Hey, why does all of this suck so much?" and "Wow, can anyone actually write anything good?" and then what? Can't have that.

I won't get into the Guggenheim too much more right here and now, because I will be making a very systematic effort of tightening the Guggenheim screws, and I'm going to start featuring the names of the people on the committee, which I haven't done in the past. But right now I'm just talking about a bench.

I left at 10:35, walked to Park Street, took the first train that came, which was the C Line, rode that to the end at Cleveland Circle, walked down Chestnut Hill Avenue, unsure whether to walk by the Reservoir or go up Comm Ave., or if I should take the BC bus, because time was getting short. I didn't know exactly where the bus stopped, but I thought maybe I did, and then there were a couple students who showed up and stood close by, so I stuck around and the bus soon came, which stops at Edmond's on lower campus, where I once lived.

Then I walked up Comm Ave., took a left into the gate by Bapst, and made my way over to the Rose Garden, arriving at 11:50. The plaque was indeed restored to its bench that is in the middle of three on the side away from Bapst. The other two benches on that side had also been missing their plaques, but those have been restored now as well. In case anyone connected to those plaques was wondering.

Then I was able to take a couple pictures and send them to my mother. The girls were with her at the time because they didn't want to go to Charlie's basketball game--I think it was a basketball game--and they were both happy to see the bench, which is no surprise with Lilah, but you can never really presume an endorsement or favorable reaction from Amelia.

There was no one else in the Rose Garden because the game was getting going. And I sat there and did what I've already said. The autumn sun was coming through the leaves that obscured the Gothic spires of Gasson, as the autumn sun does. Hangs in the air after making its way through that which will soon no longer be there and views become open and unobscured.