Prose études

Thursday 5/15/25

AI wants me to write about "The lost art of storytelling in modern literature."

I haven't been working/trying hard and I haven't been close to working/trying hard enough. It is like I am pinioned by this overwhelming feeling--or knowledge of--hopelessness. That there is nothing that I can do that will change anything for me.

I turn to these pages to try to restart myself. Move the fingers. These pages are my prose études.

Yesterday I worked on "That's What We Call a Good Day"--specifically, the first page. I must be able to look at the first page and see mathematical perfection. That doesn't mean the first page matters more. But the first page is like a slide that must be perfectly engineered; down this slide the reader goes and into the rest of the story, and there can be no bumps, corners that hold them up.

A woman texts me every so often over the years. She has nothing to say. It's all surface and pleasantries. I try to be kind because I think she is struggling more than she lets on, but I know that may also be incorrect. She could just totally suck or be up to something.

She speaks--when she is not doing those pleasantries--only of herself. Sometimes she'll tell me that she needs to find something new to read, which is never anything by me. She acts like I don't do what I do. It's incredibly insulting. I get that this this behavior likely--the bit about acting like I don't do what I do--from intimidation, but that doesn't change what the bottom line or how I'd feel about it.

She's also someone who doesn't do what they say. Last I heard from her she said, "I'll text you when I awaken because I really want to know how you're doing." Then I didn't hear from her again. I should add that I have no interest in this person in any capacity.

Every few months they'll get in touch with me. I'm solicitous and kind because I am solicitous and kind. I am that way with anyone with whom I interact. And you think: Why? What are you doing? To what end? This time she asked if I was still out there. Like this journal wouldn't answer that. If there was nothing in these pages for several weeks the chances are that I'd be dead and this hell would be over.

Of course, I can't let anyone know how things really are in a text. They would have to read this record. It's not even really an option for me to try and let someone know in a text or a conversation or a weekend of conversation. Not with what I'm dealing and where things stand and what I'm doing, too, and creating, on the other side of that ledger.

Regarding this woman, I'll think, "This is why you don't have any friends," but how she behaves is also how most people behave anyway, so it's not like you stand out as this undesirable. This behavior makes you part of the crowd. But all of those people in the crowd are really isolated. A crowd isn't a community.

People cycle back through a few contacts after periods of dormancy and isolation as if coming out of a cave to gather a few provisions before going back in. These provisions are attention, the memory of some human interaction that isn't real interaction. It's a form of going through the motions. So they can say certain things to themselves back within the cave.

It's the way of the world.

Another way of the world is that people are married with children or they're single and lonely. The people who are married with children are often lonely as well. It's just a different loneliness. But they have that thing/those things as a form of distraction. To keep the mind from focusing on how lonely they really are. Someone touches you, you take the kids to soccer, then they want you to drive them to the mall.

Whereas, the single person is sitting there without those distractions. And it seems like that's all you can do for yourself in this world--get out of the end of the pool where it's just you and into the other end where it isn't. But the water is still the same. That water of loneliness, if you will.

Part of the reason so many people are so lonely is because so few people do things for the right reasons.

By tomorrow I have to turn in a piece on rock and roll concerts that happened at high schools. This will look at shows by the Doors, the MC5, and the Grateful Dead.

One of the biggest misconceptions in sports is the idea that it's "still early" in baseball. I'm seeing Red Sox fans saying it now. "It's only mid-May." The Red Sox lost again last night in being swept by the Tigers. They struck out an additional 14 times. They can't beat good teams. They basically only beat bad teams, which is the sign of a mediocre team. We're nearly 50 games into the season, which itself is nearly a third. The Red Sox are 22-23.

It's not early. This is who the Red Sox are. It's also who I said they were before the season began, when everyone else was saying they were good or great. People fall into this trap with thinking you need to wait until August to know if a team is good or not because there are teams that "come out of nowhere" and make the playoffs or win it all. The Mets last year. The 1983 Chicago White Sox.

But that's the rub--that idea of coming out of nowhere. Those teams were off and then something got fixed and they played differently. People make the mistake of thinking it's the natural course of things for a good team to get to its good team-worthy record.

That's just dumb. You've seen what these Red Sox are about, what their issues are. The lack of talent on the roster. People will think anything they want to think no matter how little evidence there is to support that thing; I still can't believe--though this is one of those instances where I should qualify that statement by also saying, "but of course I can"--that people post things about how much talent there is on the team and how they're underachieving with all of that talent.

I saw yesterday where someone wrote that they "have five stars." What? Who are those stars? And rosters need to be have more than stars anyway. As for these Red Sox, they might have two stars in Bregman and Devers, and they're not even stars every year. It's the cuddly wuddly approach to sports analysis that we spoke of recently, not the "this is the actual reality" approach.

The manager is a problem. He's not a good manager. He's a good conniver. I think Alex Cora is a manipulative careerist. He's like someone who is terrible at writing who wins the awards and gets people to give them a leg up, and whom no one else ever scrutinizes in terms of the work they actually produce. A Curtis Sittenfeld.

She once interviewed for a teaching job at a friend of mine's school. This was a long time ago, when her dreadful book Prep--which was, of course, fictionalized autobiography about her rich upbringing and going to prep school because these people are incapable of inventing a single damn thing--came out. She seriously had these little tchotchke pink metal belts--like the pink belt on that book cover--that she handed out to the party that interviewed her. This old Jesuit who was a part of that interview board said to my friend, "She's a terrible writer, but she's well-connected in New York, so she'll go places." They didn't hire her.

And she did go places, as such. With that publishing world of incestous evil and frauds and sycophants. Her writing is laughably bad if you actually read it and assess it and your brain has deployed a lick of quality control. I believe I've shared that anecdote in these pages before. But, they comprise four millions words, and I don't know if anyone will ever read all of them.

Alex Cora is kind of a baseball version of that. Plus, he's a cheater, which is like being a plagiarist in publishing, and he still has people proverbially going to bat for him, which also makes him a bit like Jill Bialosky, noted plagiarist and vice president at Norton and poet/novelist--sure you are--but we'll dig deeper into what she's all about--and how bad her own writing is--soon enough.

When I was entering the date above, I started to make it as 5/15/70, which is the date the Grateful Dead played a very long show at the Fillmore East and Jerry Garcia didn't come off the stage for like six hours. It's an outstanding show. They encored with "Cold Jordan." What a thing to close with, right?

Downloaded some of the better horror films of the 1940s: The Uninvited, The Seventh Victim, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, The Queen of Spaces, Dead of Night.

Located both of the Johnny Ray Bear Family box sets and am glad to have them. Also, the tenth anniversary edition of Soul II Soul's Club Classics Vol. One.

The Oilers didn't seem to have much trouble with the Golden Knights. Couple OT games, but the game that Edmonton lost they put the puck in their own net on the deciding goal. Fluke play. Maybe this is the year they win it and Canada ends its Stanley Cup drought.

The Maple Leafs are doing typically Leaf-ian things in their series against the Panthers. Can the Panthers make it back to the Finals for a third straight time? That would practically pass for a dynasty these days, which is a statement reflecting how we don't have dynasties in hockey--or basketball--anymore. I'll save the Celtics for their own entry.

Watched the 1953 animated film, The Tell-Tale Heart, which I will write something about for Nightmares Be Damned: Writings About Horror Films Worth Staying Up For.

Finally shaved after several days. Working now on "Just Pants," which is 3200 words long. It's really excellent. I write these things and I have in my mind this idea that these are the major ones. Like "Friendship Bracelet," "Find of Views," "The Ghost and the Flame," with what I'm working on now. I keep working on something, I leave it, I come back, I leave it again, return again, and then a time comes when I go back in, I do a little more work, and I realize that's a major one, too.