No necrotize
Thursday 7/16/26
Got an early start. That's something.
Endless posts about the World Cup. People have nothing to say but they want to say something. So they post the score. Or say, "Go England." Millions of such posts. Billions. Maybe more than billions. Babble, babble, babble. Into the great sea of babble go all the voices of the people with nothing to say. And the noise roars in the ears. Drowns out all else, what little there is of it. I'm not interested in the World Cup.
I need to get out more, physically speaking. Get to more places. Circulate further. It isn't documented in these pages--though it is in book of essays I need to get back into so I can revise it, and that needs to come out in the world--but in the years following Molly's departure, I'd take the commuter rail to various towns and walk great distances to spots I used to go to via car.
Russell Orchards, for example. Or along most of the coast hugging Cape Ann. Heroic walks. Where no one else walked. To see these places I loved once again. I'd walk all the way from the Manchester by the Sea train station first to Singing Beach, then turn around and go from there all the way to Crane Beach in Ipswich, if one can believe that, with many stops along the way at beautiful places, and finally to the Ipswich station and back home. I want home to be up there, not just here. I wonder if anyone has ever wanted anything so much. How hard I have worked for that. I know no one has ever worked as hard for anything. I know it isn't close. If you knew how much my heart wanted this...something matched--perhaps surpassed--by how much I deserve it...
I need to do more of these things. Get to the Peabody Essex Museum with greater frequency and Concord. This summer hasn't been the time anyway. This awful summer. Children sing--or they did, anyway--rain, rain, go away, come again another day...for me it's summer, and I'd pass on that another day part, if I could.
I haven't been going to the Museum of Fine Arts as much as I should either, nor the Harvard Art Museums, nor the Brattle. I can't just be working and running stairs. These other things are part of work anyway, for the thinking and the drawing on and/or from, and I can't let that necrotize.
Early morning letter to someone:
I had a dream about you last night. We were talking, and you informed me you were going to South America to accept an award. I feel obligated to mention this in case you just received word of such a thing because if you did and I learned later and I said, "I meant to mention this to you, but I had a dream..." it won't sound hugely believable now, will it? That last part is a joke. But the first part is true. I hope you are doing well, which is certainly true.
Text to someone from a couple days ago:
Hey. Just a quick note…it’s going to be hot today. I think about you on days when it’s really warm, in the capacity of, “Well, at least Katelyn is happy,” which I mean sincerely, though this is the lone positive for me. I’ve found this to be a very difficult summer, weather-wise (other things are worse, but the weather is still a thing). The Monument has been closed a bunch but those days when it’s open and it’s 80 plus degrees and 70 degree dew factor are brutal. I’ve also been out there at City Hall when it was 100 and that…well, I don’t recommend it to anyone, including myself. I’m up to 430 Monument circuits since 3/11/26 and I thought I’d tell you on account of how we used to meet up and I’d get a cranberry juice (sorry if I was a drag) that I recently reached ten years without a drink. It hasn’t been as easy as people think because of other things/factors than alcohol in and of itself, but it’s important in that it means I haven’t technically given up. I’m going to include you on an email I’m sending to some people that will have a story attached about a cat. You’ll like it. I’ve worked on it for many years, though it’s only 1600 words long, but it isn’t really an “only” thing. More like a why we’re ultimately here thing. Anyway, I hope things are going amazingly and happily for you and more so every day, and I hope you enjoy this awful, awful, awful heat, even as I say, “Come on, autumn!”
There's your monster. Always the same with the publishing people as well over the decades. But it was never about that, of course.
I'm doubtful the Monument will be open today. Possible, I suppose. "Only" supposed to be 80 degrees at ten this morning, but this air quality alert is likely to still be in place and I can see the Monument being closed because of it. I do need to run stairs somewhere, though. This could be apocryphal, but I think my health isn't as robust even in the very short term when I'm not running stairs. Or that's how I feel, as in feel about myself. I think this could be different if I was going at other things non-stop, but I haven't been. I should be, but I haven't been. The hopelessness that I feel and know beats me down. Beats me down so hard it's like it is beating me right through the ground and down I go deeper and deeper and deeper.
Downloaded a rare Blue Cheer set today which is technically an official release, but only in like Europe, I think. It has their set from San Jose in February 1968 when they opened for the Who. Talk about your heavy metal thunder. I love Blue Cheer. First became acquainted with their delicate and subtle artistry freshman year of high school. A friend and I thought their cover of "Summertime Blues" was pretty funny and badass. Instead of doing the bass voice that John Entwistle memorably did with the Who--and both bands, believe it or not, played the song at that 1968 show--Blue Cheer would have the instrumentalists plays these mega-minimalist solos, like they couldn't be bothered to sing the lyric and also as if to say, "Behold our orgastic volume!"
The opening line of "Lord, I got to raise a fuss, Lord, I got to raise a holler..." is revealingly suggestive of a spiritual. Isn't that interesting? Or a field holler. And what a shout to the skies this is.
In this summer of these ending-of-the-world times--which is what is happening, however long it takes, but mark my words, it is well underway, and will continue to the end, unless stopped and reversed--that's become something of a theme song here.
The best chance--which may be no chance at all--for a reversal starts with me. I am that. Can't necrotize.
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