Stairs, Harvard Art Museums, Alexander Ovechkin, Elon Musk

Monday 2/24/25

Ran five circuits of stairs in the Monument on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, and then 5000 at City Hall yesterday because I wanted to go to a screening of Looney Tunes cartoons at the Brattle. Walked at least three miles each of those days (but no more than six). Yesterday marked 3150 days, or 450 weeks, without a drink.

Ankle was bothering me on Saturday--had a twinge. Sometimes if I have an ache or something it goes away when I run the Monument. The ankle was fine during the workout, but it got worse at times on the way home and I was limping a lot and moving very slowly. Then it would get better. I don't know what was going on. My back has been hurting probably because of the warped mattress I desperately need to swap out. Been waiting for my friend to come here and help me make this awful space livable again.

There was some big snowboarding event on my City Hall stairs on Saturday. Tricks were done on the stairs--which were covered with snow--and even down the railing in the middle. I saw some video last night. By the time I arrived Sunday morning enough of the snow had been cleared--though not very well--for me to do my thing with much trash and slush underfoot, but I made a little path--which curved a couple times--that I stuck to so I was okay after the first couple of exploratory ascents.

There was a woman with a little girl--who was probably four--and a stroller. The little girl was walking, holding her mother's hand, and the mother was pushing a stroller with the other one. You can go around the stairs if you don't want to go up them by walking to the end of to the end of the block and taking a right. I saw these people as I was coming down, so I said, "Do you want me to carry that up the stairs for you, ma'am," meaning the stroller. She said no and carried it herself while still holding the little girl's hand.

Went to the Harvard Art Museums. Unlike the MFA, the art is always the same at the Harvard Art Museums. It's mostly the same at the MFA, but sometimes there are new paintings on display and paintings are removed and paintings are displayed in different spots. The Harvard Art Museums have one Delacroix painting, one Fitz Henry Lane painting, and one Joseph Cornell box. They have quite a few Picassos and if you like David Smith there are multiple examples of his sculptures and I always spend some time with those.

Saw three of Ovechkin's three goals (not the inevitable empty-netter) yesterday. The Caps are having a great season and Ovechkin's goal scoring has been impressive. Had he not missed time, he could be leading the league. There have been these instances in his career where you thought he was done in the fallen-off-the-cliff-not-to-return sense. But then he's come back.

An imperfect player, which people don't want to hear. It was a brief period when he was one of the best players in the league and that was a long time ago. Whereas, Crosby has always been one of the best players in the league, pretty much. Ovechkin is more like a specialist. In baseball, he'd be the home run guy. Not the great hitter guy. I wonder: Does he have another Cup in him? I also wonder if he's going to get to 1000 goals. I think there's a reasonable chance--like twenty-five percent, maybe a little better.

Elon Musk is like a less intelligent, less mature version of Iago. What a piece of shit this guy is. Donald Trump is obviously a bad person. Most people are bad people. But Musk may be worse than Trump--he just doesn't have as much power. You talk about a man-child. Both of these guys.

I saw that email that Musk sent to National Park employees where they were told to bullet-point five things they did last week. It read like the hundreds of spam emails I get every day like from fake versions of my bank and email providers. You click on some of them, to make sure you're not missing anything important, but then you see right away the illiteracy and crazy fonts and the fake email address at the bottom.

That's how Musk's email read and would have struck me if I was one of those employees. (Though it also caused me to laugh in imagining if all of the pretend writers of the publishing system had to make a list of five things they worked on the week before.) You wouldn't think it's real, that's how sloppy it was. Sloppy, capricious, unhinged. Bootleg. And not the good kind of bootleg.

There are all of these vendors in Boston--you'll even see one at Haymarket--selling these bootleg Celtics shirts and the like, where the logo and the font is off. Just trash. I guess maybe if you wanted some clothes to do yard work in maybe you'd get something like this or when you're working on a car. Department of Government Efficiency could have come from Orwell's 1984, and then the man-child is installed as the head of it? Talk about bootleg (and not the good kind).

You have some really sick, broken people acting out some sick fantasies. Musk is someone who needs more help than he could ever get. He's more void than man. This void that can't be filled. He's so desperate to be liked, to be thought well of. He has all of this money, and he's just a loser. When you're just a loser, you can't outrun that. You can't out-purchase it. Then he's like the rich kid at his own birthday, the kid who can't get in trouble, because it's his day and his family has the money and his family doesn't love him enough to hold him accountable and when someone else is respected more, he seeks revenge on that person. Or just acts out. His life is a temper tantrum. I picture that bratty rich kid in this analogy taking all the credit for the work these other people locked away in this room do, or having them study and take the test for him, and he thinks that's his right, how the world should be, and if he wants he can kick them down the stairs from behind and everyone should be lauding him for his A+.

That scene the other day with the chainsaw on stage? That's a mentally ill, idiotic, man-child. That's not a serious anything. That's not a representative of a serious government.

Musk is a brat--a child with none of the innocence and a whole lot of cruelty--who happens to be whatever age he is. He's sadistic. You can tell he likes to see people hurt. Not people who've wronged him or anything; but just people for the sake of them being in pain. He gets off on it. The two of them are suggestive of Jabba the Hut and that little toady thing that picks Jabba's teeth. There's something wrong with Musk's mind. He's the type of guy in a war movie goes insane by the end. If he was an athlete, you'd think CTE was a factor with how he behaves.

I'm no liberal and I'm no conservative--I'm neither equally--but if conservatives are supposed to espouse values--what they call traditional values, which makes it sound to me like never evolving--then why are all of these guys fathering all of these children with all of these different women, which would be bad enough, but you know they're not fathers, they never were, and these kids basically don't have a father because of them.