Nipple play and fixity of purpose

Monday 11/10/25

It's hard to to believe that there's anything public-facing in Boston--out in the open, I mean, that you happenstancely become aware by going about your day--that is run worse than the MBTA.

Late yesterday morning I walked to Charles MGH to get the Red Line to Harvard in order to attend a screening at the Brattle. I left early because I thought maybe I'd make a quick stop at the Harvard Art Museums, or, if the timing didn't work out, just sit and read my book for a bit in Harvard Yard before heading to the theater.

We pulled into Nazareth...no, wait, wrong thing...we pulled into Central Square at 11:01. I thought, "This will work out," and started doing the time math--you know what I mean--in my head as one does. "Okay, I can be in the museum by 11:15, we'll see this, this, and this, and then leave by 11:45...stop for a coffee...and sit down at the theater with a few minutes to spare..."

Instead, the train doesn't start moving again. One guy across from me was taking up two seats. One leg on each. There were people who could have sat in that seat. Women. You think this guy gave a fuck? No shame. Had the hood of his sweatshirt pulled down, like he didn't know, which is a dead give away that someone knows exactly what they're doing. People are assholes. They don't know how to behave. We're monkeys now.

And we just hang out, the train going nowhere. I'm standing, looking at this other guy across from me who was one of those people you knew could only keep it together so long. In the same manner of unstable, rage-riddled, time-bombed buffoonery of Mark Warren and Joshua Berger. It's just a moment of when with the latest snapping, not if. (By the by: Have you ever noticed that men who have far more anger than intelligence seem especially prone to losing their hair? Speaking anecdotally. But there does appear to be something to it.)

This fellow had on a shiny red winter coat. Wouldn't say it was balmy yesterday--though it's warm and kind of humid here at 3 this AM--but not heavy winter coat weather. Sure, you see people bundled up like that, but it's usually nebbish looking types who believe having lots of degrees and the right kind of tote bag means that they're smart but who will be the bitch of the slightest, weakest breeze, and this guy didn't fit that bill.

Anyway, he opens his jacket, revealing that he has no shirt on underneath, which is a novel look/approach, and starts playing with his nipples. Super. Who doesn't want to observe some self-nipple play on the T? He really worked that left one in particular.

Finally, at 11:17, they make an announcement that a door is busted. What kind of door? Who knows. Train door? Door in the tunnel? Secret door? Trap door? Wasn't a door you could see. So we'll be standing by. The museum was a no go well before this point. They open the doors, and I got off with a bunch of other people.

Often the T won't get you where you want to go, but they won't be refunding your money. That's a you problem, not a T problem, as far as the MBTA is concerned. Walked to Harvard, got my coffee, got my seat, saw the film. You never know, though, when the T will overturn your plans.

On these rides, I'll be the only person in the world--as in, out in it, among the people who populate this scene. I'm looking around. I may be reading a book, but I look up. I see who comes in, who gets off. What's outside the window. What people are doing. I know things about the people. Based on how I observe them. When I'm looking up and scanning the car, almost every single other person--and sometimes it is literally every single other person--will be looking at their phone. They are not in the world.

Imagine if you were hosting an alien that day, taking him around, and he saw this.

"What is everyone doing?" he'd inquire of you. How would you explain it? You'd do your best, and the alien would be incredulous. He'd maybe follow up with, "So it's just stupid shit that sucks the brains out of their heads, and they can't stop looking at it anyway? And it's not even indicative of anything real most of the time?"

And you'd respond, yeah, well, there it is, I don't know what to tell you, brother. You'd be all embarrassed. What do you think that alien would think about us? Think he'd think we were impressive? A force to be reckoned with? Respected?

He'd think we were a species of nearly brain dead addicts. Simple, easily distracted, almost always distracted, pathetic, needy, helpless addicts who are so weak-minded, so bereft of substance, so intellectually uneventful inside and out, so bereft of thought that they can't conjure any to occupy them for as much as a minute--hell, thirty seconds--such that they must instead stare at a brain-deadening, dulling, pacifying, opiating device in their palm.

What could be easier than controlling those people if you had the financed means in place?

Look how easily they're controlled by the stupidity, the nothingness, the barrenness, the aridity, of their phone. It's not some of them. It's not most of them. It's almost all of them.

But yeah, I'm totally sure that people out there are seriously the likes of Tommy Orange and thinking he's a genius. Nothing is for people's minds. Nothing is put out, put forward, because some other people thought, or believed, or were motivated by the idea, that that thing would hit home--what we now call "land"--with people's minds, resonate with them, stir them. That has nothing to fucking do with it. In publishing less than anywhere else, but as a societal theme that's just how the world is right now.

And who is going to do anything about it? The people like the people I'm describing here? Because that's the people. That's what's out there, and it's pretty much all that's out there.

If two people are out together in a situation like this, a place like this, do you think they're talking? You think they're having conversations? No way. If it's just two people, they'll each be on their phone. It's almost guaranteed.

If it's a group of people, that can be different. But that's usually what it takes. A factor: They probably haven't been together in a while or in that capacity. Maybe it's three college women who haven't all hung out before just the three of them on their way to whatever.

Tells you a lot about relationships and "partners"--ridiculous word in this context--though, right? They're almost never interested in each other. They're with each other, which isn't the same as together. Other factors are why they are with each other. Rarely is it love and deep and abiding interest and connection.

People don't want to be alone. That's the biggest reason. But they are alone. These people who are with each other are alone in the real sense. But they don't do real, if you will. So, they stare at their respective phones. And believe me, it's not just on that occasion I happened to espy them. If you went with them over the course of their day, that's what you'd keep seeing at all of the spots along the line.

A Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is silly. It's not to be taken seriously. Do want a painters Hall of Fame? A poets Hall of Fame? Tacky commodification. The replacement of the discussion of ideas with what's tantamount to a single stat.

I see this all the time with sports now. It's replaced discourse and understanding. Sports are so simple, and rarely now are they understood as what they are and how they work. How the games are actually played.

Yesterday I saw a post from someone saying Aaron Judge is so amazing, he's had three straight years with an OPS+ of 200. This individual then listed all of these other players who never even did it once. Not even Ichiro Suzuki, not even Pete Rose...

See the problem here? If you're in publishing, chances are you won't, given that publishing people hate sports as they require ability and are merit-based competitions without everything being rigged in one's favor, which is how publishing people need and prefer it to be. But to make this very simple, if you were going to have an OPS+ over 200--which is Ruthian, as in, Babe Ruth--you'd need to hit a lot of home runs, have a high batting average, and walk often.

In other words, if you're not an elite power hitter, you have virtually no chance of having an OPS+ of 200 no matter what your batting average is or however much you walk. Guys like Suzuki and Rose were never in the running for this kind of thing. That's just not the type of hitters they were. Laurence Sterne wouldn't be winning any poetry competitions with Tristram Shandy--to transpose to literary terms--because that's not the kind of writing he was doing with that book now was it? It's not really relevant to the discussion.

But the person posting this knew nothing about baseball. They knew this number. But without an understanding of the game, how that number is derived. It's basically a number in isolation to them. No context for someone with no clue. But guess what? Hardly anyone else knows either.

So what do you think the "discussion" that followed was like? There's only idiocy and ignorance now. And now one can tell anything, let alone what anything is. Who would object? Who would say what i just did, which ought to be as basic as can be? But it isn't anymore. Now, with where we're at, that's rare knowledge.

The things that I once thought were so simple that you wouldn't even say them--you certainly wouldn't include them in a piece or a book--are now the things that no one else is going to know. It's like with the Beatles. The stuff I learned the first week I was into them at age fourteen, is now the stuff that people in their thirties, forties, fifties, have no clue about, despite being people who post every day on Beatles Reddit groups and comment twenty times on whether Paul McCartney recently had plastic surgery. (People are so damn creepy. They're divorced from reality with their twisted parasocial relationships. And so much more. Creepy, creepy, creepy. But again, they can't tell. They can't tell anything. Never mind who or what they are, what their behavior entails and reveals, when and where they lost their hold. There's no coming back once you're gone like that. You can't do truth anymore. It'll kill you. Won't be strong enough, won't be sound enough, to handle it, process it, live with it. Recover from it, as it were.)

There's no knowledge out there. Those things I learned that first week, though, Beatles 101, don't even constitute real knowledge. If you know anything basic, that thing is now like a wonder to other people in a world where people know next to nothing.

Doesn't mean they'll be happy that you know that and shared it. Usually the opposite, because it makes them feel stupid, which, of course, they are. It's not about knowledge for them. For anyone. It's about feeling good about yourself. Someone else's stupidity and ignorance is an important part of making that feeling come to fruition.

Ran a quick 3000 stairs yesterday at City Hall, did 100 push-ups, and walked four miles. I know another reason why the City Hall stairs are this comedown compared to the stairs of the Bunker Hill Monument. It's fixity of purpose. A Monument circuit has more to it. You're going up those 294 stairs. The undertaking is singular. Unwavering.

Whereas, at City Hall, you're working with fifty stairs. Just like that, you're at the top--and I never think of the top of those stairs as the top, if you follow me; I don't regard them in that sense--and on your way back down. No fixity of purpose sets in. There isn't the right duration. There's a shortchanging on the dilation front. An architectural circumscribing.