The gull impaled on the metal spike atop the Bunker Hill Monument

Monday 8/3/26

I certainly didn't do better with the stairs yesterday. I'm face down in a dark rut. It's one thing to have no reason to live. It is another to know this. It is another still not to have a reason to live, to know this, and be unable to force one's self to rally anyway, by which I mean, do anything. Lift a finger. Move. Go through what one knows are the hopeless motions of trying.

It was another extremely humid day. Seventy degree dew point once again. The weather has really affected me this summer. I feel like this is one of the most humid summers of my life. I only did one circuit of stairs yesterday in the Bunker Hill Monument after doing just two the day before. Sounds made up, I know. Three circuits in two days. I did return to the Monument to go back in a while after but they were closing the doors as I got there because of the heat.

I did walk ten miles yesterday after having walked six miles on Saturday. I know how someone else would read these words. "What's this guy talking about? Walking sixteen miles on a weekend and going up the Bunker Hill Monument multiple times? Sounds like a lot to me."

But I know me and what I want to do and feel like I should do and just how beaten back and down I am. I try and brush my teeth first thing because otherwise this becomes a daunting task that is hard to achieve.

My shorts were soaked through after walking the ten miles. That heavy, wet air. A couple weeks ago when I was walking up Monument Avenue to the Bunker Hill Monument, I noticed something on top of it. A metal rod, with something on top of that. This was odd to me. I thought, "Has this been there all along?" It would be very unusual for me to not notice such a thing.

The metal point has been there all along. It wouldn't stand out to you. It's thin, not that high, and depending on the light it can be pretty easy to miss or kind of barely note in your mind as being there. But they had a covering set up the other day--and it's still there--between the lodge and the entrance to the Monument. An awning. I made a comment to a ranger about this being new, and he said that a seagull had impaled itself on the point at the top of the Monument and they didn't want its carcass to fall and strike anyone, so the awning would be in place until the bird's body came down.

The wings have started to extend, so you can see that it's a bird now. I find myself thinking about this gull repeatedly. How did it come to be impaled there? You're flying around, and then this is your end? And now there's an awning set up so that the parts of your dead body don't hit people in the head when they fall from the sky.

Yesterday, with all I'm going through, how things are, how they look certain to always be, as I vacillate between thoughts of "You should just end this" and "Come on, try," I stood on the top of the hill and looked up at the carcass of the gull impaled on the metal spike atop the Monument.

I'm writing in these pages here before three in the morning because I need to get something down, for there to be something. A definite something that took something from me and which I did.

A person once theorized that if things were different from me I'd perhaps write less in this record. I know that isn't true. If I were in Rockport and creating something that I knew was getting to the world, I'd be writing about that, and that life, those days--along with all the art I love so much, and nature, and sports, and life, and so on--would be subject matter for these pages. The amount wouldn't lessen, but there wouldn't be an entry like the last about the nightmare. There isn't really anything I don't know about myself, and I know this.

Then hopefully that segues into other things that aren't this journal, some momentum kicks up, and I can be carried a little by it and it feels less like a Herculean undertaking to so much as raise a finger.

I made a decision yesterday to not speak again in my life with a person I knew for thirty years. They are the worst person I've known. They have done more harm to me than anyone else I've known. They've pushed me to suicide. They've had me sitting here with an open bottle in front of me. I realized that if I kept knowing them, I will definitely die. It's the same person from the entry about going ten years without drinking, and that entry barely gets into how bad it's been, the cruelty, the lies, the betrayal.

I understand that this is someone who has something deeply wrong with them. They'll never "get it," which means, never change, and it'll just keep going on and getting worse. When you have no one, you think you need someone no matter how bad they are. Unfortunately, there may be truth to that. It's impossible to have no one. It may be less possible to have no one than it is to have one person who is very bad. This man is an evil man. I wouldn't use that word just to use it.

The thing about a bad person, never mind an evil person, is that they could never see themselves for what they are. Think about the bad people you've known. Take their behavior. If they saw someone else doing the same things, they could identify that as terrible behavior. But when it comes to them, no way. It's not possible. They see it as something else entirely, justify it as these other things. It's impossible for them to see themselves for what they are, never mind address this, fix it. Okay, maybe it's not technically impossible. But close enough, across the board of humanity, that it might as well be.

When Molly left without a word of warning, without a single instance in our time together of saying, "I don't like this about you," "I don't like this thing you do," never to look back, having put a plan in motion, and then getting multiple lawyers, taking the house, all of it, I was willing to look at myself as a bad person. I was open to all of that. I put everything on the proverbial table. I was going to find out how terrible I possibly was. There wasn't anything I wanted to think about myself. I was willing to strip it all down. All the things I had ever believed about the person I was. I was going to question everything. And if I was the devil, I was going to find out.

That's what I did. While alone. Unless you count this person I'm speaking about, who took on a more pronounced role in my life because of Molly and that aftermath. I didn't realize at the time that they simply liked the subject matter. The drama. Of my pain. To them, it was related to "girls." That's what this fifty-something-year-old man calls women. Girls. It was a compelling diversion to him. But I was so alone, you know? I had just had this thing, this incredibly strange thing--she was just gone--happen to me with this person I loved and trusted with my life. A person who had never voiced any issue.

I walked 3000 miles that first year. Then the next. This started in 2012. And so on, until 2016, when I still walked a lot, but not 3000 miles' worth, because that was when I started running stairs in the Monument that is now affixed with a gull lanced through by a spike. I didn't walk listening to music. I didn't walk talking to anyone. I walked 3000 damn miles a year thinking about who I was as a person. Intensely. Was I monster? Surely this had to be all my fault.

I faced everything about myself. I looked at myself in ways that people could never have the courage to look at themselves. What I didn't like, and what was wrong, I worked to change. I was willing, if necessary, to see and accept that I was worse than Hitler. I was going to face that if I was, and all the shame. I was willing to start over as a human being, ready to say, "You have been a waste of life for these decades. And you wasted all of that."

You see, people don't want to invalidate their past. Write it off as a mistake. Because they were so wrong in what they did and who they were. They want it to count so that it doesn't feel like a waste. But you can also let it go. You don't live in that past. Much as people sometimes try to. You can be reborn. I don't mean religiously. Then you're starting over, and that sounds like so much work to people and they're too tired. Not starting over in the sense that we use that phrase. Overuse it. "Can I start over at forty? Sixty?" People mean with a career or getting married again. I'm talking your human cellular level. Like you've gone back to being a sperm having penetrated an egg. Back to nothing.

That kind of starting over is too much work for people, it's too daunting a prospect. So instead, they need what they have been to have been something valid and good or at least okay and viable. Not for naught. I had the strength to look at myself this way, and the strength to do whatever I had to do, starting back over at that sperm and egg level of a person, to build all over again, but other people don't. It's more than strength anyway. It's years of commitment. Hard work. Dedication. Focus.

It's not an option for people, so they need to defend who they've been, what they've done, to someone else who says, "This is way wrong," and, much more importantly, to themselves. Because they can stop defending it to others. We see that all the time. Someone wrongs you and they start pulling back, well, that's why. They need to think a certain way about themselves. They don't consciously articulate this. They don't go, "They are on to something, they're beating down my illusions about myself." No. It's on a subconscious level. Then they put it however they put it.

But those words don't reflect the truth. We can tell lies without even knowing we're telling lies. They're apt to put it on you. Or "life." "I'm so busy." No you're not. No one in this world is that busy. But that's the reason it feels like their back is to you, and you never hear from them, and they don't engage much when you try to engage with them, why it always feels one-sided, why it seems like you do all the giving and little if any getting back.

Fundamentally, I've always been who I've been. But I have changed so much. I would venture that I've changed more, in the aggregate, than any other person ever has. And it really started happening at a fast rate, a daily rate, beginning in 2012. I'd say that it accelerated again when I stopped drinking in 2016, which was itself a change, obviously.

That decision wasn't made and carried through with love and support in my life. Things and people to live for. It was made alone, in this disgusting apartment, while hated by many, discriminated against, kept from what I deserved so long ago by people who can't do what I can do because they are people who can't do what I can do. Who does that? Cold turkey? No AA meetings, no sponsor, no family to live for, next to no hope with one's career and what one was making, even if it was the greatest art of all time.

This lone person that I had, as such, is fundamentally broken, like a sociopath is broken. There is nothing that could make them understand what they do and how wrong and twisted it is, no matter how plain these things would be to anyone--literally anyone else--who knew what those things were. It's not gray area stuff. It's not open to interpretation. I really counted on this person. And I have done so much for them and their family.

And while I know what they are, how immoral and selfish and cruel and dishonest they are, how cancerous they are as a person, I know that I am still someone with no one, that no one has ever "ridden" anything out with me, or wanted to, and that one of the things the facts and truths of my life suggest, if not have definitely proven, is that I am unloved and rather clearly unlovable. That I am different from all others, or virtually all others, in that way. I not only feel this every second of my horrible life, but I live it, it's been born out in line item after line item of experience, and in the sum total of my experiences. I cannot be loved in this world. I am not someone someone could love.

I think it's equally obvious, what I am, who I am as a person. It's not "what a bad guy." There isn't anything hidden, behaviors that elude these pages. I don't think anyone would read them and think that. This record is too honest for that. A reader knows that they are seeing the man as he is, here and elsewhere. That what he is and how he goes about things is constant. We are, I believe, up to five million words in this record by now. You'd give yourself away as some bad thing, if you were some bad thing, over the course of that many words. There's no faking then. No masquerading. It's more like dancing naked in the middle of a well lit room. Slowly.

Yesterday marked 3668 days, or 524 weeks, without a drink. The Grateful-Grabber--an extension that allows you to download Grateful Dead soundboard shows from the Archive--isn't working, which is a problem for me. I got some sunflowers. Everyone in the building was sent an email back in early June, I believe, about having in the hall. People have racks for their shoes. Someone upstairs has a flower pot.

I had Hallway Hermey and usually some flowers. There's a hateful, joyless woman in the building who issued the complaint and, I'm sure, instigated the sending of this note to remove everything by July 1. I was the lone person who moved anything. I understand that I was likely the subject of her ire. You know, seeing those flowers and the Christmas elf sticking out of a boot. Just these small things of brightening joy to a passerby.

But on Saturday, I put these back, given that no one else removed a thing. A woman in the building once told me that her husband said of this crab of another woman, "She needs a good fuck." Hmmm. I don't know about that, but she is very much a miserable, meddler type of a person who sees a toy sailboat floating in a pool and wants to poke a hole in it so that it sinks to the bottom. And no, she's not old. It's just how she is and has long been.

Throughout yesterday I worked on "Boom the Ball," which I feel is very close now to being finished. It warrants thought for inclusion in There Is No Doubt: Story Girls.

I watched the 1964 film Witchcraft with an eye to writing a piece about it, and also 2009's The House of the Devil. I've seen the latter a few times now over the past couple years. I could write about it in a number of ways. On its own, as part of something about babysitter-related horror films, or as part of something about devil cult-related horror films, or even as a Christmas horror film (figured out how to do this yesterday).

I need to buckle down and write and finish some things to feel a little better about myself in terms of my effort. I'll turn to that now.