"That's not being a good Brattler."

Thursday 5/29/25

I should know from the very first sentence of your story that it could only have been written by you. The first sentence of all of these MFA stories could have been written by any of those people. I don't say I should know it was written by you because of the style. The style, as such, can--and should--be different each time, because it's a different story. But I should still know, sans doubt, that only you could have written that sentence. That's the first sentence. And it goes from there.

Have it on reasonable authority that I'm the only person who got Amelia a card for her preschool graduation because people don't send cards for that. But I did. Or, rather, we did. I bet she'll like that.

Watched Cast a Dark Shadow. I'm going to write about it for the horror film book. I'm frustrated with the project because I've done a lot of work but I have so much more to do. A real ways to go yet. There are all of these films I want to be represented in the book. I have a big list. Then I keep adding to the list. I really want it to be the definitive book about a range of horror films. A catholic range. Not just Hammer films or Universal films. But horror films for someone to get excited about seeing, broadening their interest, or their passion if they're already passionate. All of these cool films, a bunch of which people will never have heard of that they can get into. With the writing, of course, and the ideas contained therein, the insight, the knowledge, all being its own art.

I'm not trying hard enough with anything. I'm really doing a poor job.

People are so quick to proclaim themselves old. They want to tap out. It's like they'll do anything to try less. Including be unhappy, be lonely, be dumb.

There's a guy who sits down by the water on a bench each day. He smokes a cigar and his belly is out in the open. His shirt doesn't cover it. Or it could, but he doesn't bother. It's this enormous gut in the sun. As he smokes the cigar. I don't get it.

I can't take anyone seriously who says "convo." But there is basically no one I can take seriously anymore. I couldn't be friends with them, date them. But, again, there is hardly anyone I can be friends with or date. There may be no one anymore. If there ever was.

The Red Sox: What is there to say? I saw it all coming. It is playing out exactly as I thought and said it would. Another loss yesterday after Cora lifted a pitcher doing well--in the fifth this time. Then the bullpen gave it up, the Sox managed to come back, only to throw the game away with bad defense. They make a lot of outfield errors. An outfielder can go the whole season without making an error. Besides the trickle down effect of the Cora attitude, he's a poor in-game manager. The other day he managed the Sox into a situation where Connor Wong was the batter when they needed a hit to win. Wong has zero RBI on the season. We're two months in. That worked out as you would have expected it to. They're 9.5 games out of first. Two months in and the season is over. Thanks for coming.

OKC predictably advanced. The title will soon be theirs. And the Panthers got back to the Finals as well. Grit-wise, they remind me of the early 1980s Islanders. They don't have the Islanders' high-end talent (Bossy, Potvin, Trottier, also Billy Smith--playoff Billy Smith) but they're similarly tenacious and resilient. Tough. I'd say the Panthers are dirtier when they need to be, but that's not a bad thing in my book when it comes to hockey. Pacers will almost surely finish off the Knicks. Haliburton is the rare player who is better in the playoffs than the regular season. Feeds off the moment.

I said I was going to write a standalone entry about the Celtics. I haven't done it yet. And also Rickey Henderson. And the best player never to make it on to the baseball Hall of Fame ballot. I haven't forgotten. I picture someone reading all of this someday--hopefully before I'm gone--and them thinking, "He never did that, he said he was going to, but he must have forgot" and that's not what I want.

My mother told me the other day she saw this report about the link between alcohol and cancer, and started to say something about what may have happened to me if I hadn't stopped drinking--not necessarily cancer-wise, but in whatever area, be that in terms of heart or liver or both. And she couldn't say the words--that I might be dead.

I don't think I've really addressed this...I've addressed the drinking, obviously, but I haven't spoken about how no one really knew. She didn't know. The few people I spoke to didn't know.

Saw where someone said they can't afford friends. That it costs them $50 every time they leave where they live. There's gas, for starters. Then if they go to a restaurant they'll eat something. And if there's a bar, look out below.

Someone said, why don't you just go for a walk with your friend, and the person said no one wants to do that. I think that's because people have nothing to say to each other. There isn't so much friendship as there are activity partners. So those people don't have to go to things alone. Like I go to things alone.

If I had an unlimited amount of money, I would simply want to talk to you and with you if you were my friend. I'd want to talk when you called, or on a walk, or at the MFA, or on a hike. That would be my only interest, really. The exchanges. And that is free. Or close to free. So long as we could talk. At the same time, I don't like restaurants or bars. I'd like to be outside. But if you lived in Oregon and were my friend, that wouldn't limit our friendship. Because friendship is largely in those exchanges. The sharing. The listening. There is no price tag on these things. Well, you'd need a phone, in this Oregon example. Most people have phones, though. But I know that virtually no one looks at friendship as I do.

And frankly, romantically, a lot of the same ideas go. Distance is more of a factor then, but I don't want to sit in some restaurant. I don't want to go to some bar. I want to talk with you. I mean really talk. And really listen. Share ideas, passions, stoke passions, foster ideas. That can be done, again, on a bench in the Public Garden, and then a walk down Boylston.

But I just see people who post things like this:

Goodnight from the girl who deep cleaned her house, roasted her to-do list, plotted her glow-up, and still looked cute doing it. If you thought today was a lot… just wait for tomorrow… ❤️

You're forty-two. Photo after photo of themselves. People are so quick to self-congratulate, and they do it over the smallest things that aren't really things. They broadcast their self-congratulations to others who are also self-congratulating. Achievement and depth have all but been eradicated. And if they haven't been eradicated, they've been rendered foreign, strange, sufficiently confusing that they don't register with people, because they're lost on people. Thus, they're not so much as recognized. And consequently not valued, and certainly not strove for or explored and cultivated.

Do you see me talking to someone like the above? Who do you see me talking to in this world? Who would make sense? Where you'd be like, "Oh, I can see why..."

The endless narcissism of our age. I guess maybe it'd be different if it was coming from Odyssey, but instead it's from the most basic, indistinguishable, lackluster people there are, which is almost all there is, people-wise.

What does it feel like to have nothing to say? I always feel like I've barely begun. With my writing output. The stories I will create. This journal. Like they're all barely underway because there's so much I have to say and give and create. It keeps me up at night. I promise to do better and work harder when I wake up.

At the Brattle, you walk down these stairs, past a restaurant, which adjoins the theater. The ticket window is outside. On Sunday, there was a man standing on the side of the window nearer the stairs, about twelve feet from the window. He was fairly dressed up. Not a suit, but dressy. He had a bag on his hip, with the strap over his head on his opposite shoulder. Late fifties, could have been late sixties.

Coming from the other side was a burly guy with a burly girlfriend behind him. He moved slow, she moved slow, and he was someone who didn't really know how much space he was taking up. He was waiting for her, but still kind of moving forward, looking back over his shoulder--the kind of person who crashes into you, but then apologizes about it because they feel bad.

Anyway, I sort of squeeze past the burly guy who is waiting anyway, and step up to the counter. The guy who is twelve feet away says, "That's not being a good Brattler. Don't you know Brattler etiquette?"

He seriously says this. Brattler. I look at him--and you can imagine how I looked at him--and he goes, "In the old days, the line without tickets started here, and the line with tickets started there."

And I'm thinking, "What the fuck are you are talking about?"

I need this? I need to be subjected to your insanity? I never bother anyone. I don't want to be bothered or deal with anyone's bullshit. This was a window with no one waiting in front of it, and not this guy either. Who, it turns out, already had a ticket. By now, he's probably thinking he made a mistake, because I have no doubt it looked like I wanted to throttle him. Then he says, "But you may be too young."

Why am I sharing this? Well, it's interesting in and of itself, but it's also a class thing. A guy like this--who I bet you anything calls himself a writer, a cineaste, an intellectual, probably has his stupid manuscript draft in that bag I mentioned--looks at me and thinks this is my first time going to a place like this, that I'm a rookie, that I took a wrong turn, etc. Me. With what I do.

But I know that's how he was thinking. I had a on basketball shorts, a BC sweatshirt, my Boston Ballet beanie, and I was carrying a book because I'm always carrying a book, but people look at me--I'm talking people like this, who want to fancy themselves all of these "smart people" things they are not--and think "jock" or whatever. I get this in publishing all the time. It's funny, too, because that day I had an op-ed on a film from the 1940s in one of the highest circulation newspapers in the country. And I'm the only writer in the world doing things like that.

Then they open the doors, and this guy behaves like you'd expect him to. Makes this big show of addressing the ticket guy by his first name. And you know that the ticket guy thinks he's a tool. But the faux-intellectual guy wants everyone in hearing distance to know he's a regular, because he's a super smart, cultured, intellectual guy. He does the same thing with the woman behind the counter inside, and you can practically feel her eyes rolling in her head.

The guy gets upstairs before I do, and starts gong back down again as I'm coming up. Now, there's plenty of room for us to pass each other, but he makes this big theatrical show of retreating to the top, to let me have the whole stairs. I sit where I always sit--last row of the balcony, last seat on the right side--and I watch this guy when he comes back. There's this other guy in the first row of the balcony, three or four seats in. And the faux-intellectual guy asks him to move over so they can have more seats between them. He just goes around all day and acts like a douchebag. I had no doubt he was in academia and considered himself a writer. I'd stake my soul on it.

Then he decides he wants to go back downstairs again, and asks the guy he made move if he wants anything. What a crazy questions. How would that work? Was he treating? That was the assumption, I guess, but you know he would have asked the guy for money and probably ripped him off on the change. This other guy--who has had enough--firmly but politely says he's good, with this tone of, "We're done here, dude."

Walked three miles, did 100 push-ups, and ran five circuits of stairs yesterday in the Monument while downloading Cream albums to Mega (multitask).