Stand up

Saturday 8/24/24

Why does the word "raging" so often come before the word "alcoholic"? You wouldn't say, "I was a raging consumer of eclairs" or "I was a raging anal zealot," but you would say "I was a raging alcoholic." "Raging" also pairs commonly with "storm." "It was a raging storm." Imagine an alcoholic out on a stormy night? Which one would get the "raging" descriptor? Choices.

Thursday I walked three miles, did 100 push-ups and three planks, and completed five circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument, but here's the kicker: Finished those five trips up and down the obelisk in twenty-five minutes and change. Thirty minutes for five circuits is good, so this was really good. I'm not sure if this was the fastest I've done five stair-circuits to date, but if not it was close. I went in there with that mindset so this wasn't an accident. The weather also helped.

Yesterday I walked three miles, did 100 push-ups, and completed five more circuits in the Monument. After I was done, I stopped to show the very pretty park ranger the photo of Lilah at the top stair from and told her how she was sharing the tale of her big climb in Charlestown with her classmates for the start of the new school year this week back home in Illinois.

We've come to that weekend of the year where a certain kind of person is able to say, with much delight, "Starting this weekend, there's football every weekend until, um, like Easter."

Something I've observed in what this world has become: People on the T will rarely give up their seat for anyone who might need it or could use it. It is fashionable to blame men for everything now; that plays, gets attention, gets clicks, gets engagement from other moronic, simple, toxic, hateful, broken, sexist, lonely people. This is by no means a men-only thing, though, but rather an everyone thing. People do not give a fuck about anyone else. They have lost the ability, in almost all cases, to do so.

They care about themselves. No matter how much little there is to them, how lacking they are in individuality, they are their own lone interest. It's like they can't even conceive of actually considering someone else.

When I'm on the T, I stand unless there's virtually no one one it, because there's a good chance people will get on who could do with that seat more than I could, and I also don't want to offend someone for whom that's true by standing up and offering my seat when they don't really need it for health reasons.

For instance: Let's say there's a mother who looks tired with a her six-year-old who looks like she's had a big day going here and there. They don't need seats, and it might seem like one is suggesting they do by offering one, but if no one is in the seat(s), that's different. They will help themselves and get off their feet. And, of course, if one is elderly, struggling for whatever reason, I fly out of my seat in a flash. I'm looking for you--that is, someone with a need. I do a scan of the people getting on and in front of me. But any time a train starts to fill up, I just get up.

Women are as inconsiderate as men, if not more so, I've found. There are still some guys with a bit of gentlemanly honor. Something leftover, perhaps, from being raised the right way. I don't think people find their way in our world. Find a better way. I don't think they grow. Growth as a concept has been ground out of humanity. Growth doesn't drive engagement. Regression, parroting, and stupidity does.

You're not rewarded for growing, but you are rewarded for being a simple, selfish, substance-free, predictable/never surprising, boring asshole. Growth intimidates people, frightens them, causes discomfort and paranoia when observed in someone else; the opposite of engagement is the result. Or at least positive engagement. Not that there is positive engagement or any honestly-intentioned or meant response with the regressive parroters--there is only insincere engagement for reasons we touched on the other day in the entry about how there are no reliable narrators on social media. There are also next to no reliable hitters of that like button. People don't hit like because they like that thing. It's other reasons. There's often very little correlation between the like button and actually liking what is said to have been liked.

What I see so often with women is total entitlement. I know there are forms of harpies that would like to react to reading what I just said by saying something like entitlement is not wanting to get raped on the way home, which is at the heart of what they want. The way many women talk you'd think that there was a rapist about to jump out at them every ten feet followed by a murderer two paces on. The projected idea is that now is the time for cultural reparations for this being so. No one else ever need be considered. It's our time, you owe us, pay up, this is all due to us because of justice.

It's just horrible people exploiting what they think they can get away with and learned behavioral forms that become like reflexes and the result of default settings, but without any brains; just fat cat entitlement, with actual cats in many cases. And cowardice. People too scared to stand for what is right. To say anything on behalf of truth. White knights who really just want someone to say, "Go ahead, fine, you may use those holes," which is what these knights are really all about and after.

But you'd think there'd be solidarity with other women, and/or this desire, or calculation, to try and come off as a decent person, especially when there were witnesses available, given that people want positive attention without the burden and demands of having to be a person who adds anything positive.

A woman, for example, might not want to drop the door of the cafe on that elderly woman just behind her--whom she saw--because it'd be nice to hold it and make sure she got out without being bodied by the thing, but nah. And a witness out in the real world is a very different thing than a witness--one who falsely testifies--on social media for that thing that didn't happen that lands one the attention and credit and status one is hunting.

I was on the T recently, and there was this young woman sitting down. I was standing just to her right, holding the rail above. She had the seat at the edge--by the door. She was, I'd say, twenty-eight. Very fit. Had on workout-type clothes. Athletic. There were no unoccupied seats. An elderly man with a cane hobbled on. Struggled up the stairs. No one gave this guy their seat. Men, women. No one cared, no one gave him a thought. I wondered how many of these people would have gone home and posted on social media that they did give the man their seat if they happened to think of it.

Because that's how social media works. Almost everything on social media is a lie. Everything is some form of a distortion. That's the best case scenario--a mild distortion. Save with me. I only deal in truth. When it comes to something in my life, as this record bears out, it is honestly reported. If I tell you about an experience, for instance, with an evil person--let us say, John Freeman, who might be the worst person in all of publishing--and I describe his behavior, what happens when I then put up something like an email from that person? Are there incongruities between that email and the behavior and immorality it evinces, and what that person was up to and what they're about, and what I've said? Or does it all tally exactly? We know that it always tallies exactly. But I am unique this way. I evolved into becoming that way. I walked thousands of miles every year, alone, with my thoughts, working with my mind, to become that way.

Nothing truly important just happens. People like to think it does. But that's why they so rarely do anything important, including make important changes in how they live, think, who they are.

But back to the athletic woman most likely going to or from a workout (she had a water bottle as well). I would say this was not a shy woman. You can tell when people are confident. They have a way about them, a look. Confidence registers in the eyes. She was doing what she was doing on her phone, but she saw this man. He was almost within arm's reach of her. But it was obvious to me that she had no intention of offering him her seat. It didn't even enter her head. I don't think it would have occurred to her.

I saw a post the other day where someone was complaining about how their Uber cost $11 for a three-block trip. Cue the responses of "I'm sorry that happened to you." How lazy do you need to be? You have to hire a car to take your ass three blocks? That baked-in entitlement. What? Me walk for seven minutes? I shouldn't have to do that.

Get off your ass. Stop being such a lazy dog. We are so lazy in every regard. And as I've written, a person is far more apt to be lazy intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually than they are physically. Because you have to move some, and you basically do't have to think at all. Society has made it so that not only don't you have to think, but thinking is bad. If you do think, you won't really have anyone. The better you think, and the more you think, the more alone you will be. That's what we've made this horrible world. AI is now kicking that up another level.

Think about this: There is no one in American society who, when fronted with the empty space of the "About me" section on a dating profile, can so much as write two or three sentences about themselves and/or what they want in language that is their own. That is, language that couldn't have come from billions of other people. But I'm being too generous to start. There is virtually no one in American society who can so much as write two to three sentences in that space. They can't come up with the sentences. It's beyond their abilities. Further: They wouldn't be able to write two to three sentences with all of the words spelled correctly and/or the grammar gotten correctly. That is now outside of any person's capabilities. Consider how stupid we have to be for that to be true. And we are okay with it, no matter how unhappy and unfilled we are.

AI is in your face all of the time already. Go online, and AI prompts are everywhere. You can't look something up without AI first button-holing you. We are so stupid that AI interjects itself at the start of our stupid discussions--which is just one idiotic comment after another, with all of the mindless verbal memes we have reduced ourselves to grasping at and deploying again and again and again in our brokenness and our total lack of intelligence in a desperate attempt to sound engaging and be able to participate, somehow, despite not having a single thought of our own to offer, because we are empty--in Facebook groups with a summary of those stupid comments so that we don't have to read anything by anyone but rather get all that there is to be gotten from AI.

You can be told what the humans had to say without having to read a single thing any human said by this entity is itself not human. And it's no problem for AI to provide that "service" that removes the humans, because the humans are so simple and so much alike that they've essentially already removed themselves.

This is the single biggest thing to ever happen to humanity. It's the end of humanity. The end of being human. Unless something is done. And that's something I work towards. Then those same people--and it's more women than men (Yes, I've now looked into male profiles, because on the Facebook dating app, they show up in the "Friends" category and I don't know how to make it so they don't and I'm not sure you even can)--then complain endlessly, for points and engagement and so that others will say, "I'm so sorry" about being single, how wicked the patriarchy is if they're women, how much men suck. They'll play the hashtag game and have the hashtagioncedatedaguy one where it's just time to shit on men. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

These same women complain about how alone they are. But that gets them likes and clicks and followers and that victim status that people cherish so much now. Cherish it so much that they swap out a chance for happiness, for meaning, for purpose, for joy, for knowing themselves, for knowing anything, so that they can claim it.

That status and chasing it is like psychological heroin and its effects. It takes your soul. Then you're just out there, drifting the fuck around until you formally die. And there's most people.

Do men suck? Of course they suck. Everyone sucks. There is nothing out there in this cultural wasteland. This graveyard of living forms, in a post-human world that is on its way to being an AI world. Life then becomes getting other similar monstrosities to like, comment, follow, praise. That is the whole of so many people's lives. This shit. And it's deified in our culture. Look at publishing. So much is done without the work even being read. Stories are published, book deals are made, Guggenheims are given, Pulitzers are awarded, and no one even read the work, let alone vetted it. Because everyone sucks at writing. They suck equally. When the sucking is total, there are no degrees of it. It's all just the same.

No one reads, no one gives a fuck about what is on the page. No one can understand out in the world if they even see it because most people read at lower than a sixth grade level, and no one cares. People out in the world are on their phones and doing whatever bullshit they do with their various screens, and people in publishing are not in publishing for any other reason than to be the people they are in publishing. They hate ability because they have none. They hate decency because they have none. They hate substance because they don't have any. They hate knowledge because they possess none. They hate legitimacy because they are not legitimate in any way.

They will look at the social media accounts of the kind of person I just described above. I have a perfect example of one such person I can share with you soon with screenshots galore. Someone who was then picked up, as a result of being that kind of person, with no ability, no substance, no character, to work for The New York Times, over at The Atlantic with our buddy Scott Stossel, and with Electric Literature for the charming and delightful Halimah Marcus. Because of that follower count. Because they're horrible. I click on one thing and that one thing is going to be consistent with all of this person's other things: A post about how people not liking children is a trickle-down effect of...big shocker coming up here...the patriarchy.

I go to her website. She writes about "identity and gender." Of course she does. Emptier and dumber than a hollow log. Of course The New York Times and The Atlantic and good old Halimah Marcus will enlist such a person. Imagine the conversation with a Halimah Marcus with the two of you sitting there, and that other person's work on the table. And you read back some stupid paragraph, and asked, "Is that good?" And then, what? Halimah Marcus would seriously say, "Yes. It's obviously excellent." Then you'd ask, "Um...why?" and she'd start talking profoundly about the merits of the profound prose?

Obviously not. That's impossible. Halimah Marcus knows it is. All of these people know those conversations could never be had. Do you know how much they want me dead because 1. That is true and 2. I don't think it's not true and 3. They know it's true and 4. They know I know it's true?

Want to do another one? Remember the first prose off with J. Robert Lennon and his short story in The New Yorker v. a story of mine? Imagine sitting down with New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman. Let's just say you've gotten through that part of the conversation where you asked her all about how she knew that Alice Munro was essentially okay with her husband having sexually abused her nine-year-old dollar, because of course Deborah Treisman knew, but whenever one of those shitty Alice Munro stories came in via Alice Munro's agent, boom right into The New Yorker it went!

So you're sitting there with Deborah Treisman, and you have that so obviously bad story from J. Robert Lennon--who is all about that cronyism, because he'd have to be, not possessing a lick of talent--and that so-obviously-great story from Fleming on the table between the two of you. And you ask, "So...Why is that J. Robert Lennon story better or a better fit?" What could you say if you're this woman? What could she say if you then read some of the Lennon story aloud and then followed it with some of the Fleming story aloud? What is more blatant than the fact--no, the truth--that this has nothing to do with the writing? Honestly: What is more plain?

There are many other horrible people out there who are this kind of horrible that the woman who went on to write for The New York Times and The Atlantic is, with her book deals, too, and it was because she was horrible and there were horrible people along for some version of her social media ride that she got that work, those things, those opportunities. It's not because of quality, intelligence, value, goodness, but rather the opposites of those things.

Think about that. Do you want systems like that? Do you want a world like that? Do you want your children to have a world like that?

Horrible people will be followed by horrible people. Stupid people attract stupid people. Gross people gross people. Insincere people insincere people. That's where the book deals come from. How many followers are there? is what a person in publishing asks. (Just as they think, "Ooohhh! This writer is this color! That's very in right now. They have a victim narrative, too! Sweet!!!! We'll do that. Book deal! Let's make sure marketing throws some weight behind this one!!!!") What are that person's connections? Is he or she like me? Is he or she one of us? Is it certain that I don't think they're smarter than I am?

That follower count is a readymade audience. You don't have to find an audience (you have to realize how low the numbers and stakes are, too, when books are selling ten copies, and everything is filled anyway with the same bad writing that no one wants, so if someone has 3000 followers, which doesn't seem that different than zero in the grand scheme of things, that might translate to 100 sales, and that's going to be how this works--those are the ends of these means; then publishers just repeat the shit with the same old shit for the same shit reasons).

Never mind that it's not a real audience in that the audience won't partake of the work. Think of it this way: It's like an audience that goes to the movie theater, buys the ticket, then sits in the seats with headphones on that block out all sound and black glasses over their eyes so they can't see. But they bought the ticket.

That's how people "read" the shit that is out there. That's how they read a Tommy Orange book with the endless claptrap about being "Drunk on the Rez." Yeah. Go get 'em, superstar. You hit all of those buzzwords for these simple, pretentious people in publishing for whom that spoon-fed shit allows them to pretend they're this great multicultural expert when in reality they're the worst kind of clueless tourist.

But they lap up the shit. Lap, lap, lap, because it allows them to think a certain way about themselves, and they have no real way to think about themselves, because they are nothing real (remember these words, because we're going to flash back to them when we get to John Freeman in depth, and something I said to him after many years of his discrimination and attempted manipulation that you will think is very benign, and which for him was the worst thing anyone has ever said to him--on account of its simple, calmly, non-profanely expressed, undeniable veracity--that then resulted in him finding a way to steal money--actual money; this isn't a metaphor--from me). They are nothing of substance.

Then that book sits on the shelf, like a trophy attesting to how they are one of the smart ones, the cultured ones. And how do you get those connections or that following? By sucking. Not for anything good. That will tend to repel the same kind of person who does a lot of following. And this is great, huh? It has to be that way? Should be this way? It's just how it is?

Quick example: Do you know how bad Ed Park is at writing? We're going to get into that. He's Motorollah bad. Do you know how connected Ed Park is within the incestuous Brooklyn publishing world? If I'm posing the question that way, the answer is ultra-connected, right?

Ed Park was nominated this year for the Pulitzer in fiction. I'm going to have us one hell of a prose off as we talk about Ed Park and his work. And I defy anyone out there to step up to the plate and have the balls to try and tell me that he doesn't suck at writing, that it's not obvious to anyone that he sucks at writing, and that his Pulitzer nomination had nothing in the world to do with his writing. I defy you to tell me that it was even read by any kind of committee. That it was thought highly of and discussed seriously.

It's not taste, it's not subjective. We talk about Motorollah a bunch, but there is no one capable of believing that that bigot Sigrid Rausing published that story because she thought it was great or that that writer has what they have and is gifted what they're gifted because anyone, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, a single damn time, read their work and thought, "This is really good." Because that has never happened and it will never happen and it could never happen.

And I can do this with every one of these people out there. You can't give me a name, or an excerpt from anything, that I cannot do this with in these pages. If you're all upset right now reading this, hit me up. Give me that name of whomever you wish, because I can promise you, if that's you, if you're someone having that reaction, you're upset because you think I've slagged off your "mentor" or someone who gave you a blurb or someone like Roxane Gay that you pretend to like when in reality she's just dumb and cruel and gross and spiteful and manipulative and a bully and a liar and as big a hypocrite as can be and makes you feel good about yourself because you don't feel insecure or whatever when you read her--or, much, much, much more likely, when you think about her, because none of this shit is meant to be read for edification or entertainment, let alone both, but it's the brand that is the thing--and what I've suggested about the poor quality of the work, the often laughable poor quality, will be revealed in these pages.

I call it reading out in the open. We should all read out in the open. There's a big difference between reading in the darkness with scales over your eyes, with agenda, with wanting something or someone to be what they're not, and thinking what you do within that manipulated, doctored environment, and ripping that thing out into the light where there are other people seeing what you see and everyone reading out in the open. It's a totally different experience, right? Always is when you're aware of other people being around, other people having thoughts. Ever watch a movie on your own and then see it with others? That part that was terrible was something you glossed over in private, but you wince over how bad it is when you watch it out in the open.

The trick is to always be reading out in the open, wherever you are.

Reading out in the open is a matter of breaking the above type of manipulated connection someone else has with it--which is almost always about other things that have nothing to do with the actual work, but rather a relationship with the author--and pulling it into the light for all to see without the protective layers of bullshit and reading it as writing, as what the actual work is. There isn't anyone I can't do it with right now because it's all the same and it's all terrible and it's all written by the same kind of person with no ability and endless airs and privilege who doesn't work hard, evolve, doesn't know fuck all about anything, and comes from the same MFA system to become a member of the publishing system. There are not exceptions. There's me. And there's all of those people. If you're one of those people, you can stomp your feet all you wish, but the last thing you want is to have your work next to mine. You can try to get your revenge for that being so by what you do behind the scenes against me, in discriminating against me and trying to get others to do the same, but I will pull you into the light, too. People will see you and what you're doing and what you're about, out in the open as well. That's not going to be worth it. Especially when it can all be avoided simply by doing the right thing, or even by not doing bad things.

And if anyone actually looks, nothing is plainer. But that's the thing--no one does look, because no one cares. No one reads. No one can hold all of the pieces of information in their heads. No one can remember what they saw five minutes ago. No one can put different things together. As soon as something enters the brain, it slides out.

I labor to get everything up on here. To spell it all out. To present the information in different ways so that it will take hold and remain in place in people's minds. So that they can know. These people of this publishing system are not important in and of themselves. You can't be less important as a viable human with things to offer the world than a David Remnick.

But this is important. And the solution is important. The better way is important. And that's true with everything, especially right now with where the world is at.

Lot of things to get into. And we will.