Stairs, projecting, the flounder, and truth

Friday 4/24/26

It should be immediately clear to anyone who sees me inside of the Bunker Hill Monument or outside of it as we are waiting for them to open that I am doing something different that other people aren't doing.

it isn't subtle. I'm dressed differently than everyone else. I'll have on workout clothes. A headband. Inside the Monument, I'll be moving at a steady pace, perhaps breathing hard, and usually sweating profusely.

And yet, because people are so unthinking, so arrogant, so narcissistic, and virtually incapable of deducing anything or thinking critically to the smallest degree, they won't be able to pick up on this until they've seen me pass them several times in each direction, and often not even then.

What they will do is relate everything to themselves. This isn't a Monument thing or a stairs thing. It's a "how people are" and "how this world now works" and "what success is predicated on" thing.

The Monument, though, does make for a potent metaphor--real as it is, and real as I am running stairs within it--and can represent in microcosm the workings of society and culture. And how people how. And how people are in this country. The state of education in this country. The decline of rudimentary cognitive abilities.

The other day as I was going up the stairs for whatever number time, an out-of-shape (in the Monument, you learn that almost everyone is out of shape, be it as is plain to the naked eye, or in terms of their cardio, like they never do anything strenuous or to get the heart rate up) middle-aged woman coming down said, "You're doing good!"

This wasn't cheering on the workout guy in his admirable efforts to do this difficult thing. It was a "You're like me!" type of cheering on. Which is the only kind that people do. As soon as they sense, or determine, that you are not like them, that you are doing something you couldn't do, that you're better at, they begin to resent you and often turn hostile, at least in their attitudes, but it can frequently be more than that as well.

What this woman wanted to see, what she needs to see, is someone like her. She had a hard time going up, and it's important for her that you are in her same boat. Thus, you're not a threat to ego and self-esteem. She doesn't feel out of shape, flabby, lazy, etc. When you're the same, there's no shame.

Get it?

I'd gone past her a bunch of times. But people also tend to see what they want to see, and not what something is. If they see something for what it is, it's usually despite themselves. Something broke through their fat, protective wall of stupidity by, say, repetition. Someone can see me pass them seven times, and it isn't until the eighth time--and I've seen them see me each of the times--that it gets through to them--breaks through that fat wall of stupidity--that I'm not doing what they're doing.

This woman had no shame in lumping us together. She wasn't embarrassed in doing so. It's like the people who have never written, never even read a chapter out of a book, who call themselves an author. There are millions and millions of them. Look at social media bios. Look how many people have "author" or "writer" in theirs. Do you think they have ever in their lives, added together, worked at that thing they claim to be as much as I have on a single Saturday morning before they wake up?

The answer, of course, is hell no. But there it is.

Now how do you think one of those people is going to feel like another one of those people, and how do you think they're going to feel about me? How do you think the former will make them feel and help them to feel, and how do you think the knowledge of me and what I do--as well as my knowledge about what a writer really is, and, correspondingly, what they very much are not--is going to make them feel?

So who do you think they would follow, support, and cheer on?

Can people really not understand this--some version of this--is how the world works? How "success" works? How getting a Guggenheim works? How having a short story published in The New Yorker works? How getting platformed works? Awarded?

It's not that people are incapable of understanding this when it's presented to them. It's that they live their lives such that they wouldn't see it on their own. To be able to behold the examples, recognize the patterns, do the thinking through, and reaching the endpoint of truth, like at the far end of a mathematical equation.

If you stand in front of them, walk them through it, and it can be in simple terms--which are nonetheless irrefutable--then, yes, they'll understand.

But they're not going to live in a way that allows them to understand on their own, if they even can. And usually they can't. People cannot think. They need their thinking to be done--at least in the first stage--for them. After that, okay, maybe they'll be able to think enough so as to say, "I get it," and for that to be true, you are taking the horse to the water and trying to get it to bend its head down to drink. The horse isn't going there and drinking on its own.

Yesterday, there was another woman similar in fitness--or lack thereof--to the woman I just described. As I began my ascent again and passed her around the 100 stair marker, she said, "What, are you a glutton for punishment?"

Ever hear of working out, lady?

Does she think of working out as punishment? Anyone working out is being punished and seeking out that punishment? Or, is it something of a combination of that and her own inability, with her simple, simple mind, to get her brain around the idea that this person in workout clothes who is easily observed to be working out, can in truth be working out despite this not being a place/venue she would associate with working out?

But do you see how that last bit is too much of a mental hurdle for her to clear? Or at least clear cleanly.

This is people. This is how they are. They can't think their way out of a bag made of air. Extrapolate these examples. What do you think a person like this could read and comprehend? Good writing asks the reader to fill in blanks. Intuitively. If this happened, and this happened, then this other thing, unstated, in the middle, must have happened, too.

Writing is a series of such things. Syllogisms, in effect, with parts unstated. Otherwise, you're just listing things. That's not the art of writing. That's what AI does. It's what David Szalay does.

You think this person can deal in ideas? Think in ideas? Do you think they can think about the forces that shape society and culture? What do you think their understanding of historical events would be like? What do you think would happen if you asked them when the Civil War was? What it involved? What do you think they know about human nature and why people do what they do? How things really work? Behind the scenes.

But she knew the word "glutton," and that's more than ninety percent of American adults. So this person is also probably smarter than a goodly percentage of the country.

Also yesterday, I neared the top on, I believe, my seventh or eighth climb. There was a couple behind me. Let us say, they were both around thirty-years-old. Not in bad shape. I hit the top step, and immediately turned around to go again. You're up, you're down, you're up.

By then, I'm sweating like mad. My clothes are soaked. It's not a subtle sweat. The man who had been behind me, who I was now stepping around, said, "I feel you." He and his girlfriend were doing this once. I wasn't. But again: Everyone wants you to be in their boat. They view the world that way. That everyone should be in their boat. They go into everything predisposed to look at things that way, or try to.

And that's enough, often, to be able to see things that way. And they normally are that way. People are the same. We'll use the word "mediocre," which feels too complimentary, but even if what passes for mediocrity seems much worse, mediocrity is still defined by how everything else. That is, it's a determination of in relation to. An averaging. We can average any group of numbers.

These people in turn become blind to anything else. That which they project--and people project endlessly--is made to take the place of reality. They are the author, instead, of a false-reality that they prefer.

You end up with most people in the world living this way, as if with their backs to actual reality, and then when some of that reality "invades" their safe space, their artificially engineered space, they can't handle it. They can't handle the smallest amount of reality or truth. Thus, people hate those two things. They hate anyone in service of them. Who they see as dealing in them.

The remark was insulting, as if I was someone who needed to labor to surmount these stairs a single time. Then you add in the stupidity, and it just becomes more frustrating. That someone couldn't deduce that anyone--let alone a fit person--wouldn't have sweat pouring down their face from going up these stairs the one time.

Hence, that aspect of disdain as evinced in my thoughts. I detest such a person, because such a person makes the world worse. Ignorance makes the world worse. And it certainly makes things harder--and probably ultimately impossible--for me with what I do and am trying to do world-wise. To and for the good.

A final example from the other day. There have been lines outside of the Monument recently, well in advances of the doors being opened. They're not even lines, though, because people are no longer smart enough to be able to form one. That's how dumb they are. There's a slightly elevated platform leading up to the door of the lodge which is the first door one has to enter in order to gain access to the Monument. There's a rail on each side. So, naturally, a line should form along the rail on the side with the door.

No. People can't figure this out. They'll stand on the other side, with some in the middle, in clumps. They look like people milling about. Now, despite almost all of them being loads, if I step forward and positioned myself where the line should start, they'd all lose their minds with rage. People can't wait to try and think that they're being screwed over. That's where the line is supposed to begin. This isn't a battle worth fighting for me. I wave goodbye to the time.

Leaving the line issue aside, when we get in there, these people are going to be winded by stair fifty. They aren't even practical. Their "Me first, always, no matter what" attitude creates this other situation for them. Why would you want to be in front of someone who able to go much faster than you can while you struggle? Doesn't that put more pressure on you? Doesn't that make you feel more self-conscious? Wouldn't you rather go at your own pace?

People can't think this through. They just think in terms of "ME!" and "MINE!"

On this day, the "line" had gathered fifteen minutes before the Monument opened at 1. I know not to bother with the line. That I'm just going to have to wait and go up behind these people who will double as the landed gentry of the Bunker Hill Monument for the twenty minutes it takes them to reach the top and come back down. There are too many of them as well to make it worthwhile to try and pass the whole lot of them. I accept that it will be a long voyage to the top for me that first time.

I make use of the time while I'm waiting. I do push-ups on the grass fifteen feet away from these people, a bunch of whom watch. I do stretches against the rail they should be lined up against and are not. So they're staring right at me. We're facing each other. Because their backsides are against that other rail in most cases, given that people are so lazy they won't even stand if they don't have to. They almost always find a way to take whatever load they can off.

There was this droning woman on a bench watching me the whole time. She couldn't be bothered to stand/lean herself. She kept barking out to some other people in the line she was there with. It was a couple groups of people together. Her immediate group was at the back, so when they opened the doors, I end up last in line, now that I've made my way over, having accepted what I've accepted and knowing it's not worth trying to fight this, and she's directly in front of me.

I would bet she was forty-three or so. This also means that she looks like she could pass for an aunt of mine who hasn't taken care of herself since college and is now somewhat haggard. And she is so slow. She's much slower than the slow people in front of her, who are eventually out of sight, but not out of earshot, because sound carries big-time in the Monument. You can hear what someone is saying 100 stairs away like they were ten feet in front of you.

This isn't a logjam anymore. It's one person clogging up the road. Finally, I do that thing where I say, politely as possible, "Excuse me, can I squeeze by." I shouldn't have to say this at all. Ever. The stairs are designed to have people pass in both directions. Which also means that if two people are going up or down in the same direction, and no one is coming in that other direction, that one of those people should be able to go around that other person, no problem. There's not this surplus of room, but it still isn't a space issue.

It will be a person issue, though. Especially a person in 2026.

She stops, as she's sucking that wind, but is still able to curse and grumble under her breath. You know, someone who thinks in terms of smashing that patriarchy, of which here is another example. There is little, I've learned, that many out-of-shape middle aged woman hate so much as an in-shape male. They project much hatred on to this person, and draw many conclusions, almost all of which, in the case of myself, are bound to be erroneous. For instance, they'll think I'm some sports guy, or gym guy, or something like that, and it's the guy who just wrote about ballet and poetry and sent a kind letter to a struggling little girl that morning.

But let me tell you something, and this is important: Were that person disabused of their incorrect ideas about me, and they were made to know the truth, they wouldn't mea culpa. Not even in their own thoughts. They would hate me more.

It's like with publishing. Someone reads a film piece I wrote. It's the best film piece they've ever seen. They think, "Okay, that's his thing, that means he's less good at other things." Or that I don't do other things.

I'm using film as the example here, but it can be whatever that person happens to see first: fiction, a jazz piece, a Beatles piece, a sports piece, a political piece, a literature piece. I've lived this. For a long time. I know of what I speak because I live the truth of what I'm saying.

Then, when they see something else by me, on a totally different subject, in a totally different style, they hate me even more. And then when they look again, or click on the next link...

You understand? That's how it goes. Almost invariably.

I was once talking to this woman, and she said I made her feel stupid because of what I knew about such and such a subject, and what she didn't. What was I supposed to say to this? We are not the same, we aren't on the same level?

I didn't say that. Because you can't. She then adds, "But at least I know that I know more about such and such a subject than you."

Shortly thereafter, she realized that this was completely false, and that I was every bit the expert in that subject as the first subject that had nothing to do with it. We could play this game for all-time. So how quickly do you think that interaction ended?

Exactly.

This is part of the curse that is my life. Rare is the person who wants anything to do with the person who is not on their level. Rare is the person who doesn't despise that person for this very reason. When Thoreau said the public demands an average man, and not a person of greatness, and most definitely not a person of absolute greatness, this was what he was getting at.

But it's not just the public. It's everyone at every level of interaction or prospective interaction. At the level of the social media like, the Substack subscription, dating, publishing, Guggenheim-bestowing.

Everything.

The people this woman was with left her behind, by the way. She wouldn't have been moving much slower if she'd been crawling.

Well, I did my thing, the up, the down, the up again. And as I'm going up for the third or fourth time, she's now coming down with the people she was with who hadn't wanted to wait for her earlier.

I have a technique I use when I'm going up the stairs and people are coming down. I call it the flounder. Because I make like a flounder. I turn my body such that my chest is nearly flush with the granite wall. There's no railing on this side.

In this manner, I'm able to keep moving, and allow for plenty of space--a nice pocket of separation--regardless of the body type of the person coming down. Usually. As I said, there's space anyway for people to pass. I'm going above and beyond.

Most of these people sicken me, too, and I don't wish to so much as look at them, and this helps with that as well. I've heard all their idiotic jokes, which are the same idiotic jokes that everyone makes in there, without a single one of these people being smart enough not to be of the opinion that they've come up with something fresh and brilliant.

Do you know how many thousands of times I've heard someone say, "Imagine if you could just slide all the way down on the railing?" or make a StairMaster joke?

And each time a person does this, they do so as if they've invented the most remarkable witticism then and there, something no one has ever said. They are so damn self-satisfied. With what is tantamount to their idiocy and narcissism. Their obliviousness.

I'm sick of their bitching, their pissing and moaning about walking up a few stairs. I hate how lazy people are. I'm sick of their stupidity. The dolts telling their kids that the war was won by shooting flaming arrows out of this obelisk. Not that they'd ever know the word obelisk. It's hard for me to get myself to even try and replicate how they speak. I feel unclean. Compromised. Loathsome by verbal association.

Yesterday, a woman was taking a photo of her kid with the Monument in the background. She said, "I want to be sure to get the bunker in the shot."

People think this obelisk is a giant...bunker. Like a big storage bin. They think this is called Bunker Hill not because of a battle fought here that was vital to this country becoming a country, but because a storage space was erected here. For some reason. The mighty bunker. A fallout shelter.

I'm sickened by how self-congratulatory they are, like they've just done something heroic and world-changing that will be talked about down through the centuries because they got their body moving for fifteen minutes. I'm sickened by how many of them talk about all the food they're now going to eat, having "earned" it. You would be astounded--or perhaps not--by how often they use that phrase in this context. They've earned all those sugary treats at Mike's Pastry.

They're so pleased with themselves for being stupid. They're too stupid to know that they're stupid. What's more American than all of that? They're entitled. They think the world exists for them. And that nothing matters more than what they want, when they want it, whatever that may be.

Everything I stand for, they don't. And everything they're about, I'm not.

They don't even believe in trying. They don't do effort in life. They do the bare minimum. And in this world, the bare minimum doesn't even involve thinking. Ever. With AI, it is starting to mean, and will soon mean, that it won't even involve anything about being human, which will be a thing of the past. Unless, again, a seismic spanner is thrown in those works. I could be that spanner. But not like this, with everything against me. And anyone who knows of me, against me.

As I pass this woman, doing the flounder thing, with that aforesaid pocket of space between us, made wider by me making myself "smaller," she says, in the bitchiest voice, to the two woman with her, "He only cares about himself."

Resentment. Projection. A hate for someone who did her no wrong, minded his business, was only polite. Because of what I represented to her. And what she represents to herself.

This is the way of the world. There isn't success because someone is good at the thing that people assume they must be good at in order to be successful as we define success--awards, recognition, followers, money, etc.

It's because they're like this woman. And not like this man. They are a version of her. Even if they are a man.

And these people are like the largest-hearted Jesuits and well-adjusted humanists compared to the typical person who becomes a part of the incestuous publishing system, which has its own set of warped, super-sized concepts and definitions of pettiness, envy, neuroses, mania, prejudice.

That woman hating me in the Monument with her "He doesn't care about anyone but himself," is nothing compared to the publishing person who sees me do one thing better than they ever could, better than they've ever seen it done or imagined it could be done, let alone another different thing, and so on. That person would have this person burned at the stake if they could arrange it and get away with it. For these reasons. Nothing "bad," nothing they'd ever done to them, or done wrong.

There are people in the Monument who are one way to me--all friendly, chipper--when they're oblivious to what I'm actually doing, and they are projecting that I'm doing what they're doing. The same boat thing. And we're both put on, and would rather be doing something else, and what were we thinking, har har har, can't wait to have a lobster roll.

But then, when they realize--again, through repetition, and seeing me as I pass them going up, and going down, and going up--their demeanor changes. They will often become abrasive, even hostile. Because I am not like them. I've not changed what I'm doing. I am always polite, unless attacked, which happened a couple weeks ago, and that I'll get into on here in another entry, as this one is long enough and that one will have its own large points to make.

I mind my business. If I don't mind my business, it's because I do something like carry that woman's suitcase up for her like I did a few weeks back (you can't leave any bags below, so if you're stopping here before you go to the airport and want to see the view from the top, you need to take your bag with you) after offering, or yesterday, when there was a young man with Down's Syndrome, who really battled to make it all the way up, whom I gave a tap on the shoulder to with my fist and said, "Good job, man."

The change is because of what they know perceive me to be. And what that is isn't a bad thing. It's a bad thing to them because they see it as a better thing than their thing that they are.

That's how it works.