Nightmares, hours, letting down

Wednesday 5/13/26

Had another nightmare about Molly last night. We were walking in a parking lot and then stopped, and I was pledging my love to her. Why I was doing this in a dream I don't know. It could be a combination of how I actually felt, combined with how awful things are now, and who I am now.

My days are themselves worse than nightmares. They feel like nightmares where you're desperate to wake up. That's my status quo. My reality. My nightmares in the traditional sense can actually be "lesser" in the nightmare capacity, but they are still nightmares. I wake up troubled from them. But immediately I know the deal with what I've woken up to. I trade one nightmare for another that's even worse but this one is permanent. If there's waking up from it, as such, I imagine that's death.

The Monument will open again at ten AM starting 5/23, which is her birthday. It's not a day I think about save that I remember it, and I've had this day regarding the Monument fixed in my mind since a ranger mentioned it to me a couple months back. I have no idea what she's doing, where she is, what she looks like now. I haven't looked at anything, done so much as a Google search, in many years. It's policy for me. I forbade myself. No good could have come from anything I saw or learned.

The last two days weren't very productive. I need to do better. I say I need to do better, but there's also no point to me doing better save to do better. But there's nothing positive that can occur. Even minorly positive in the "Well, that's a plus, anyway." Not even in the uptick of mood regard, or "Hey, good for you" capacity and it takes so little for us to warrant that or have it coming back our way, right? Someone drops four pounds. "Hey, good for you." No good that can happen by creating the best work there's ever been. And being what I am. It's the truth. This is what the total absence and impossibility of good looks like. That's part of what I get up to. What awaits me. And it can get worse. It can get a lot worse. Somehow.

Now when I see something random like someone asking how to get a gun, I read that. I think more about shooting myself, which wasn't something I used to consider. Then I think about having to shoot myself through the heart, because my brain is what it and it would feel wrong to destroy it even in this way after the fact--or in the making of after the fact--if that's how it works. I'm not sure it is. I would hope that I take it with me to a better world and a better place for me, where it's not a curse and it doesn't mean constant and total pain without so much as a second's pause.

Anyway. What else? I did another five circuits of stairs in the Monument on Sunday. That brought me to forty circuits for the week that had just closed, and 230 circuits since March 11. I also walked ten miles. (These tallies are always separate. I don't count distance in stairs towards my total of miles covered on foot. I wouldn't know how even if that wasn't cheating. There are no devices here that measure steps or distance or vitals. I don't operate that way.) Haven't done great with push-ups the last few days but I'll remedy that.

I called my mother on Mother's Day. I haven't talked to anyone in weeks. I don't know when I will again. I can't.

I did get out Monday and yesterday. Read by the water. A Grateful Dead book Monday, a book on Handel yesterday. The Brattle calendar through the start of July came on Monday, so I circled the films I can go see there. It's not about a cinematic experience. Anything I'd like to do or would look forward to doing. Such concepts don't exist in my world. They're not even possibilities, things that others take for granted--looking forward to getting home, or going to a show, seeing someone.

There's just suffering. Feeling the full weight of that suffering, that hurt, that hopelessness, constantly. So this is me making myself, or making plans to that end anyway, get out for more than running stairs and walks along the same route to South Station, two, three, times in a row. I'm hemming myself in. This is indicative of how much has been drained from me, how little fight there is left, with whatever that is going to the two things I do do in writing and stairs.

I actually feel guilty when I don't run stairs at City Hall. It makes no sense. I'm not being logical. There are these people who have come up to me saying they've seen me every day for years, and I feel like I'm letting them down. Like they think, "Well, he gave up, you can only do something admirable like that for so long, and his days of doing it are over." Thoughts and feelings to that effect.

People thought that about me because that's where I most commonly ran stairs during COVID when the Monument was closed, and then when I wasn't all militant about running 1000 circuits per year in the Monument I'd just as easily be at City Hall, especially for that portion of the year when the Monument didn't open until 1. I should get out there more. I should have gone at least one of these past two days. I can physically "afford" to do both. As with everything, I should be doing better than I am doing.

I owe my niece Lilah a story and that means I need to reread "Hero of Mine" and make sure it's what it should be and then I'll send it to her and also my sister for the rest of their family. I should maybe send two copies so that one is addressed directly to Lilah. Amelia I learned is playing soccer. She had played indoor soccer before but didn't like it because it was indoors and she was adamant that there should be grass instead. I can remember first playing indoor soccer as well.

I watched Hereditary again this morning. I thought maybe I'd write about it, but I don't know. It's kind of silly. So he's the king of the tree fort? You knew they were going to ride that tongue click thing for all it's worth and boy did they ever. I was surprised they didn't have the Tree Fort King do it at the end as the crowning beat. Crowning, as in crowning of Tree Fort Satan, baby.

It always feels like a cop out to me when a horror movie just does the foreign language incantation thing and the devil society thing. It's lazy. For instance, The House of the Devil had a nice start to it, good feel, good atmosphere, and then it goes in the cop out direction. I will write about this film, though, and that'll go into the horror film book. I should also write about House of the Devil from 1896.