Tattling and metaphor for the publishing industry

Thursday 5/7/26

A letter from today.

The op-eds are shorter there now, so I have to do a second version of a piece, but was able to move this Mother's Day thing to the NY Daily News. The piece is about the art of a mother's love and how the best art is in some ways feminine/maternal. There Is No Doubt, obviously. But what I'm talking about includes all-male things, too. You'll see. It's in the piece. 

Ranger was waiting for me at the Monument today to give me a talking to. Yesterday, there was this out of shape middle-aged woman. These women often hate fit, athletic-looking white males. Automatically. 

I am hyper-courteous in the Monument. I want no issues from anyone. Look at my life. I don't want problems on top of what I'm already dealing with and the unpleasant things I have to do as it is. 

A woman like this one from yesterday will see me, and what I represent to her, and all that she isn't, and just start griping. To the people she's with. She is trying to create a confrontation. Trying to "get to me." 

I go up and I go down. I bother her not at all. But I represent these things to her. It's the same with publishing people. Four separate times she's complaining about me, swearing under her breath. "This guy's doing blah blah blah." "Oh, here he comes again." 

I don't accost her, jostle her. Anything. I'm minding my business, but she can see that I'm fit and not like her, not struggling. So she's going to try and get some kind of preemptive revenge. The animus just radiating off of her. 

Then today, I'm taken aside by this ranger, because the woman, failing to get me to engage, came down afterwards and tattled. About the things I didn't do to her or anyone. But rather because this is how people go about their lives. As adults. "Adults."

I can't even conceive of being like this. Like, I can't get my head around it. 

If I was a woman, this wouldn't have happened. People will despise you if they think you're better than they are. They hate that. And the misandry of some of these women. It really is outsized. Hate on sight. 

I said one thing to her after the fourth instance of her going off about me. I was coming down and she just kept pushing. The rail is on the right when you're coming down. Why? Because it's a big deal if you fall going down, but not a big deal if you fall going up. The stairs are also tapered and narrower on the non-rail side. So you can see that it's that much more dangerous coming down on the left-hand side, sans rail, and with the narrower portion of the stair.

There's virtually no one in America smart enough to figure this out or understand it. You could take Americans one by one into the Monument and administer a test in which you said, "Why might the rail be on the side it's on?" and you wouldn't find fifty of them who'd get it even partially correct. They wouldn't be able to figure it out. Think it through.

People also just want what they want. If they want the rail going up, they want it going down. They couldn't give a f--- about anyone else, right or wrong, the way of things, common sense, safety. And if you simply pointed out the logistics of this to them, they'd rage. Froth at the mouth rage. 

Many people also have bags, which they carry down around your feet. It's easy to get tripped up and break your neck. 

This woman was, of course, coming up the wrong side. Each time I came back down--as she was still going up the first time--I just went to the left, because it wasn't worth dealing with her. Her problem with me was that I existed in this world. My existence was her issue. Not anything I said or did to her. Nothing about me impacted her at all, save how she chose to see herself through how she saw me. She grumbled and swore. Complained to her friends. After four such occasions, I said, "The rail isn't yours both ways. That's not how it works." Because obviously she'd want it going down, too. 

Fair, no? Correct, yes? 

So when this load finally finishes and exits the Monument she tattles to the rangers. Making up whatever she wanted to make up, or just because she felt like it. When she was the problem, and I had done her no wrong and nothing wrong. Everything was of her own miserable making in her miserable mind. People actually do this. She was like sixty. That's what people do. This is people, man. This is how they are at heart. And often out loud. Then they have kids, or whatever. The kids are like them, parented by monstrosities like these. And you get this world. 

Then it becomes my problem. In all the aspects of my life, including this comparatively trivial one, but even here in the Bunker Hill Monument. A metaphor for elsewhere. Certainly publishing. And I'm standing there having to deal with this ranger today. I had just been up for another twenty-four hours. I wrote much on the journal at the site, I worked so hard on "Fitty," I wrote this new op-ed, I had run twenty circuits of stairs the day before for my heart and to try and somehow be strong enough physically to keep going, and now I'm dealing with this nonsense?

The ranger is getting to feel like a big man, because he's being officious, and that's his form of power and all that he has as such. And people are going to do everything they can to get more than their money's worth of that. 

People are ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. 

A letter back to me in response:

People are unbelievable--this is why I want to move to Maine--or an island off the coast of Maine (well, except for the rising sea levels). That the ranger then feels the need to reprimand you is even worse. They cling to the rail both ways to pull themselves up and to steady their wobbly legs on the way down. The sense of entitlement is appalling, as is the inability to see beyond the tip of their own nose.  I also worry about the young people parented by these types. And as a metaphor for publishing it fits all too well.  

Also, I greatly appreciated the prose off with Joyce's The Dead and Dead Thomas. I never found much in Joyce's short stories and find nearly everything in Dead Thomas.