Soaked on soaked

Monday 9/14/26

It was drizzling as I walked to Charlestown yesterday to run stairs. Few people were out. A gray day. One doesn't necessarily associate autumn with such days--there is, after all, that sunlight filtered through the altered colors of the leaves (which are still green here, though one does see more leaves gathered or blowing at the sides of the streets beneath the levels of the curbs)--but it felt autumnal indeed, though not that cool and somewhat humid. I took a photo of a seasonal display on a front stair halfway up Monument Avenue, the road I take to the Monument, and which I almost never take coming back. About half of my route is different on the return. It's just how I do it.

I ran less stairs than I should have, and stepped back outside into the pouring rain. It was really coming down. Then it's a case of soaked you becoming soaked a different way. Soaked on top of soaked. Not the most comfortable walk home. Going over that bridge, exposed, pelted. I looked across the water. There were no boats. The harbor had a gray tinge. I struggled mightily over the weekend. My thoughts were in dark places. Death spaces. Of how I would never return to Rockport to live and be able to look out over the ocean there.

I showered. And not wishing to be in this disaster of an apartment, I put on a fleece, stuck a Red Sox cap on my head, grabbed a book and went down to the Starbucks to read. As I've said here, this Starbucks used to be a warm and inviting space. A place to study, read, talk, hang out, for long stretches of time. Then it was gutted. Apparently, this gutting wasn't sufficient, because the place was still somewhat welcoming, though less so, because it was gutted again, making it about as welcoming a spot for sitting down and reposing or regathering or thinking or connecting as a Dunkin' Donuts in an airport. Nonetheless, I sometimes go there, though now as much as I once did. Being as alone as I am, and having often just ran many thousand of stairs and not feeling like going far anyway, it stands as one of my few options.

All of the tables--save the ones outside, which are better provided they're not the ones in the direct sun, the outside of the building not having been subjected to these guttings--are along the wall on the left when you enter the door. I ordered a small dark roast, waiting for it at the end of the counter where they place the finish orders, and then sat down at the lone open table which was between a table with a woman working on her computer and a family covered in plastic ponchos--what looked like thin, yellow garbage bags--and set about my reading and marking, underlining, note-making.

In time, the cafe emptied out and the only people there were myself, the woman who was working on something on her computer to my right, and another woman down the far end of the shop across from the register. And you know what happened? The woman next to me got up, took her stuff, and went to a table three or four tables away from where I was. I see this from time to time. She didn't move on account of there not being some outlet she required to charge her phone which that other seat had close by. I hadn't said a word to her. It wasn't like I was hitting on her in some creepy way. No heavy breathing. I was as quiet as can be.

I will wonder if it's me in these situations. I wouldn't say they're common, but I also wouldn't say they're exceedingly rare. With how my life is, it's hard not to think it's me. There's nothing that isn't bad, so why shouldn't this be an indication of something else that's bad? I'm someone who hasn't so much as held someone's hand since 2015. I'm never up to no good. My life is as I describe it in these pages. I work, I run stairs, I try to fight against all the reasons I have to kill myself, which is something I believe is the right and smart thing to do, because nothing can ever and will ever improve for me, and there's no reason for me to be alive. No one is going to see this work, the finest anything that anyone has ever made. I'm just to make more of it...for the purpose of doing so and nothing else? It will effectively die when I die. It's already as though it doesn't exist. Do you know what it's like to have what I have and be able to do nothing with it? Have it not be unknown? Receive nothing for it? But to endure this horribly paradoxical torture of having to personally see it, experience, and know it for exactly what it is?

A corollary aspect of this discussion--if discussion this is--is how closed off people are to other people now. Personally, I'd very much like to go somewhere and have someone engage with me--out of the blue, as it were, but also because we were two humans in the same space and maybe someone was struck by something, whatever that thing may have been--about what I was reading or the rain coming down outside. You sense these blinders no people, though. They're invisible, but they're still there. They're so closed off to any possibility, any surprises. They don't see the world. They literally don't look up, look around, scan the place they're at--the cafe, the subway car, the city street. It's like this metaphor for being a kind of emotional, mental, intellectual, and even physical shut-in. The blinders are automatic, predetermined.

People come back into the cafe. The tables fill up again. The person who moves so that they don't have anyone on the one side of them--this woman had the first table along the row--comes to have people at the tables of each side of them. You assume that that's assumed. People don't know much, but they have to know that on some level. Then again, perhaps not. So it's about moving away from one person, I would say. You'll be online and you read all of these idiotic bromides--which are lies to self, and analogous to admissions of cowardice--about people protecting their peace, and how it's because of others and not themselves that they do what they do--or what they don't do--and cite their lofty standards, etc., etc., etc.

All the people who have the likes of this as their social media bio

Founder of the Self Love Coaching Method, I help people become fulfilled from the inside out. 🥰 AuDHD🤓 Vegan🌱 Progressive💙 An ally🏳️‍🌈

who post pictures of themselves and write captions like this:

Kinda can’t get over how pretty I think I look in this picture ☺️👉👈

And then all the guys in the comments...well, you know how that works, and if you don't, I don't know what to say to you.

Look at this awful, awful, awful world of fools, narcissists, cowards. This is the stuff of entire lives. Empty, meaningless lives of delusion and nothingness.

Usually it's them. They are the issue and their issue. I just think if this is how you go out into the world, you're going to get so very little out of it. If you have those blinders on, if everything comes with a Do Not Disturb sign hung on your nose, if you never look up and around. It's both an attitude and a way of being. Or maybe I should say, "a way of having become." Not just an "un-openness," but a show of being closed and closed off. And no, this isn't about me being stymied in what were my intentions to make some move. It's simply an observation on the one hand, but also something that doesn't make a person feel great on the other.

Things probably do become magnified when you're as alone as I am, which is as alone as I imagine a person could possibly be. I do sometimes think try and determine if someone could be as or more alone. If someone was eighty-nine, lived on their own still, had no friends, no family that reached out to or visited them, and they were mostly homebound. Would that person be as alone as I am? I have the mind I have, the abilities I have, the character and morality that I have, and I should say physical attributes as well of fitness and attractiveness (I mean, I see other people/guys, and I can also see myself), and yet I am arguably as alone as anyone could be.

I am alone, in large part, I believe, because of those things, if not entirely because of them (the first four of them). Had I money, that would "cancel" out the obstacles that those things are, but it's not like anyone I was "with," however I was with them, would be with me in that case because of me and who I was, what I was. There are people I know now, who aren't in my life really, who aren't bad people. The Admiral and the Captain, for instance. Now, some Christmases ago, I gave them a printed out copy of "Best Present Ever." The hands of man have never made anything finer. You know what I mean by "man." Let's not do that. I don't mean men exclusively. They said not a word to me about it. I surmise the same would happen this Christmas were I to make them a gift of "What the Mouse Knew."

If I had money, which would mean fame in my case, then these would be people who'd behave differently towards me with such a thing. It would have been celebrated, the reading of this work, mentioned to friends that they received a personal copy, etc. etc. etc. Nothing else would have changed. The work would still be ever bit as outstanding as it was without money or fame. But that's how it works. No one is going to look at anything for what it is. And if they do, because it's not impossible that that could happen, they're not going to talk about it as they would if it were heralded as this officially amazing thing. But this has drifted some. I was simply meaning to share a small anecdote--or really what may be no more than an observation--from having gone down the street to the cafe to do a bit of reading on a rainy mid-September Sunday afternoon.