Rot and stairs

Monday 1/19/26

"Rot" in all its forms will be the word of the year. You can see it already. Started happening at the end of last year. First it was brain rot. Which is bad. So, of course, people do what people now do, and invert things. What's not funny is funny, what's immoral is moral, and so on.

Hence, "rot" became a positive. Bad things are good now. Good things are either hated, feared, or not understood, or some combo. "Rotting on the couch all weekend is peak living"--because idiots/assholes who need to take one of those cruises we were talking about yesterday also say "peak" this way a lot--and "Rotted in bed all day."

Human rot. Post-human rot. It makes sense. We're less living human beings now than we are dead carcasses on the forest floor with maggots feeding on the pulp of our guts and a swarm of flies.

It's exhausting how many people--you can't escape it--now go on and on about how old they are. It's like this is their identity, insofar as they have one, which is to say, they don't, because they are nothing.

If this is what you do, then just die. Be done.

People all ages do it tool. Lazy, defeatist, pathetic losers. And so boring. I mean, how boring is it to see something that someone wrote, or hear something they're saying, about how old they are. Want to feel old, You know you're old if, My knee hurts I guess I'm old now, I remember such and such so I'm old.

Again: Be done. Move on. So defeatist.

And yeah, you're old. You're old because you're a whiny bitch and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy.

What age am I? Is it even possible to think about me in terms of any age? It's because of the spirit within and how I live. How I am.

Many things take their cue from our mindset, our attitude. I don't mean that if you believe such and such will happen then it does. But the mind itself? And the body to large extent? And your character? You can't be a whiny bitch and have these things be as they're supposed to be. As they can be.

And people love this. They love the idea of being old. Making themselves older. Because it means doing less and having an excuse to be absolutely fucking nothing in this world. It's such a loser's mentality. Winners are rare--and I'm talking about the guts and make-up of a winner, more so than results--but almost everyone is a loser now. A classic loser. With a loser's attitude, a loser's mindset, a loser's lack of goals, a loser's lack of character, of fight, of balls, of spirit, of energy.

People who live like they can't wait to taste that first shovel of dirt thrown on top of them. I say, "Just be done," because such a person already is for all intents and purposes, so why not make it official? What's the difference? And if you're not adding to the world, to the lot of your fellow humans, in some way, but a real way, then there's no need for you to be here.

Ironically, these people want attention more than any actual child does.

I went eight days without running any stairs. I know, not good. There was also an eight-day stretch last year. I start many days at like one in the morning. The Monument doesn't open until one in the afternoon. The day is already kind of long for me by then. It's cold maybe, and it's so hard just to stay alive right now...and then I bag out. I could go run stairs at City Hall at whatever time obviously, and it's been a while since I've done that, which shouldn't be the case, but they're not the same and I tell myself I'll just wait, and then I didn't go. Or I was over in Charlestown well before the Monument opened and didn't feel like waiting outside for forty minutes.

Pretty poor on my part. No excuses, because excuses don't cut it. Doesn't mean I did nothing physically. For instance, on Saturday I walked nine miles and did 150 push-ups. Yesterday I did 100 more, walked three miles, and finally got back in the Monument, where I did ten laborious circuits that took longer than it should take by quite a bit.

Here's what happens: If you're running stairs all the time and you're in stair shape and you don't run stairs for three or four days and you go to run stairs again, you can do a lot because you're fresh. What you want is to be in the kind of shape where there is no freshness or non-freshness. You're just the same every day. That's where I was in, say, September before the shutdown. I'll be there again soon enough. This is pretty subtle the difference I'm talking about here. I'm only aware of it because I've done this for so long and I'm attuned to these aspects.

But, if you don't run stairs for more than four days, you start to backslide. It happens that fast. Your fitness lessens. Then you have to build it back up. Which doesn't take long--just a few honest workouts strung over the better part of a week. Well, doesn't take long if you were humming along consistently and then missed some time. Obviously if you're starting from scratch it's harder. If you don't run stairs, and you wanted to run stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument, it'd take you a while to go from doing one circuit to being able to do five. I don't know how long.

Getting in there yesterday I just wanted to get back in there. Rip the scar tissue and make the blood flow. it's less about numbers when you're starting yourself up again. It's the starting that's the thing. The doing. The Here I am, back at it, we've resumed bit. I was on the phone for the first five circuits--yes, I'll multitask, depending--and my pace was rather dismal. Also, didn't figure I'd be there long, so I was layered up. T-shirt, sweatshirt, fleece. You're going to be soaked through all the faster thusly attired. The sweat goes right through the fleece. It changes color--darkens.

After I did five, I figured, you know, it's been a while man, let's go up again, so I did. They all count, right? For me, with my life, in this situation, I try to look at it like every word counts, every piece, every story, every day without a drink, every stair I run, every entry in this journal. If I ever get out of this worse-than hell, then every last thing like that will have played a part. That will be true, and it's also how I try and keep myself going by the doing of each of these things.

Then I went up a seventh time, and you know how that goes...or you can figure how it goes for the likes of me...I think how I'm not going to do the random number, but press on until ten. Which I did. Wasn't efficient, wasn't pretty.

There are up stretches and down. As befitting stairs. Over two weeks--which included the eight days away--I did forty-six Monument circuits. A good week--like a solid week, I mean--is twenty-five circuits. Where do I get that number from? Well, the Monument is currently open five days a week. Five circuits is the fundamental building block as far as I'm concerned. That's a half-hour of stairs. About. Ten circuits is five circuits twice. Twenty is five circuits four times. If you run five circuits each day that the Monument is open from Wednesday to Sunday, you have twenty-five circuits. That's solid.

That's also fifteen miles walked in going there and coming back. If I leave here at 12:30, walk to Charlestown, run five circuits of stairs, and walk back, I return just shy of two o'clock. You see how the time adds up. It's real dedication. You're walking over that bridge in the cold and the wind and it's not as if you have a winter jacket on because what would you do with it? I guess you could leave it at the bottom as I often do now with my sweatshirt and fleece, but then you're fouling up your jacket--and I just have this ragged, fraying pea coat from like two decades ago, or at least fifteen years...actually, my father may have been alive when I got it, so it could be more than twenty-five-years old--when you put it back on after and you're soaked through with sweat.

The Monument is usually open on holiday Mondays so I asked a ranger yesterday if they would be open today, but he said no. Another observation: Body feels better during periods when stairs are being run rather than when dormant. Had this sensation in my hamstring during that last week, and then after running stairs yesterday it went away and my legs just feel like they have more life and health in them.

But it's in the doing. And the doing comes from the deciding. Sometimes the deciding takes the form of forcing yourself. It's not sitting there saying you're old and "rotting" and celebrating that with people who also want to tap out and do fuck all in life. Less isn't better. Less is the path to nothingness. To death. Living while dead. Which, to me, has less point to it than actually being dead.

I think this is very basic and self-evident. But I know that others--and most people--would be like, "That's all so harsh, how terrible of him." We're doing--and are about--very different things. I know that if more people in the world were less like the way that most people are--as with things like this--then the world would be a better place and life would be better on the whole for people in that world. That's just not how people work, though, it's not how they are, and they're just going to keep rotting away, the faster they rot--or they early the rotting starts--the better, which of course is actually horrible.

A strange thing about being human: Humans almost always want to do less and try less, but you feel better when you do more and try harder. You feel less tired when you try and do more than you do when you tap out. And yet...

Yesterday also marked 3472 days, or 496 weeks, without a drink. These "benefits of not drinking" articles will pop up in my feed and I'll click on them sometimes. They're reassuring to me. They would be frightening in the extreme if I still drank, let alone drank like I did. Many of them cite the benefits of not drinking for just a short period of time.

Actually, I'm sure I'd be dead if I had continued drinking like I had been for so long. Really does a number on the heart. You see that in all these articles pertaining blood pressure and things like irregular heartbeats. I had that. A scary concept. The calories are also mentioned. So many calories in the drink. Drink a lot, and you're ingesting monster calorie numbers. People in old films with drinking problems are typically very thin. You'd only be very thin if you drank a lot if you hardly ate at all and alcohol constituted your meals as such.

When I first stopped drinking and I knew I was sticking to it and could stick to it, I used to think that down the road, if life ever improved--it's only gotten worse every day since in truth--and I was sitting there back in my house in Rockport I'd take the occasional dram of whisky but I know now that if I were in that place and life was very different for me, that I wouldn't want to ever drink again. Even if it changed nothing. There's a peace of mind you get when you don't drink pertaining to drink. Can't put a price on that, especially the price of a drink.

I need to do better this week with the stairs than I have been. Can't rot if you're in motion on stairs. It's like the opposite of rotting, which we can also extrapolate as metaphor with all things that have or may have value should we do them well and in good faith--thinking, trying, behaving, listening, communicating.