The penultimate competitor

Friday 5/2/25

"Absolutely heartbroken to hear about the Pope's passing. A man who spent his life championing the tenants of Christ."

Ah, yes, the tenants of Christ. Hope he gave them a break on the rent. Nice building, I hear.

"I was literally there on Wednesday." Oh. You weren't there, you were literally there. Huge difference. Good thing you specified.

All of the people who say they're old, "you want to feel old," etc. cause me to think, "So just die then."

Strangely--or not--people tend to look like their attitude.

Someone asked for recommendations of heartrending films. Another person answers by saying, "I'm dating myself, but..." (And then mentions junk like Fried Green Tomatoes.) Why do people act as if there was no world before they were born and they can only know of and experience that which is from their lifetimes?

This speaks all the more depressingly to our blanketing stupidity and complete lack of curiosity that despite so much of existence now basically being just one giant search engine, no one uses it to learn anything or even become remotely aware.

People really go on Reddit and ask others to decide whether to break up with their girlfriend? Sounds smart and healthy.

I had mentioned that many initial Reddit posts were written by ChatGPT. What I've realized now in looking around a bit more is that it's just about all of them. Same grammar, tone. Em dashes. You think people know how to use dashes? Of course no humans do. Post-humans. Because we are not human anymore, for the most part. We are no longer the most precious thing we ever were or could be.

Win two, lose two. Is there any reason to think the Red Sox are more than a .500 team?

Slightly surprised the Oilers took that series against the Kings in six after dropping the first two.

The Celtics had as clear and easy a path to the championship last year as a team could get. This year may be the opposite. They should handle the Knicks in five or six, but then you'd get Cleveland--though I think the Pacers can make that series interesting--and if you got past them, a team like OKC or the Warriors (though the Rockets aren't dead yet). Having to go through the Cavs and Thunder would be big-time earning it.

Saw a sports media person say that the Pistons pushed the Knicks to the brink. Detroit lost the series in six games. You don't understand that seven games would have been the brink? You really don't know that? But you make your living with words? You make a lot of money and you don't even know what simple words actually mean. But hey, it's not like anyone else does either, so who is going to be the wiser?

People in sports media and media in general know nothing about language. They can't speak or write. During a Monday Night game this past year, I heard Mike Tirico say, "Detroit still hasn't made it to the penultimate game." He meant the Super Bowl, because he thinks that "penultimate" means extra super duper ultimate, and not second-to-last. He's fifty-eight. Went to Syracuse. Award-winning. Pinnacle of his profession. Moron.

You want another one? Michael Felger, who has many millions of dollars, hosts the top-rated sports show in Boston, went to BU, is fifty-five-years-old, and was a longtime writer for the Boston Herald. "Steph Curry is the penultimate competitor in the NBA." He's the second to last competitor? What? Oh, you think that means he's the extra super duper ultimate competitor. Moron.

No one, practically, isn't a moron now.

People can't even tell, because to tell, you need to know something, and people know nothing. For instance, if you can't spell any words correctly, how would you ever know when words are spelled wrong?

Extrapolate that analogy to cover everything. Whether it's about the Beatles, history, writing. Doesn't matter.

I love when brilliant fiction writers share excerpts of their masterful creations on social media. Here is one I just saw:

He rubbed her cunt in slow, perfect circles. Watched her squirm. Heard her breath catch.And right when she was about to cum he stopped.“Say who it belongs to.” She did. Loud. Then he gave it back..

And you can't even get the grammar slightly correct. Writer. Sure. Why the fuck not? Who isn't, right? Just say it, and you're it! Yea, the world!

That'll get you 500 likes.

What did we say the other day? The true mark of how interesting something is, how highly people regard it, is the absence of likes. The better something is, the more compelling, the more insightful, the less likely others are to hit the like button.

If you wrote the best thing ever, and post something from it, you'd get zero likes. But if you wrote the above? 500. No problem.

How can you fail to get how it works?

"Then he gave it back."

What?

People who call themselves writers usually don't care about writing at all. No one cares about it less, including people who don't read at all. They just want to be part of a community. That's their need. In order to feel like they are not alone, but they are alone, because it's not a real community anyway. In that community there is just lies. There is no truth. No competition. Truth and competition would defeat the purpose of the community, which is the only reason nearly every so-called writer in the world calls themselves a writer. This includes your lit mag people, AWP attendees, MFA'ers. They just want to be able to sit at that lunch table.

A post on Threads: "I know I’m flat and barely 120lbs but do you still date me?" With accompanying AI-generated photo of a woman she looks like she was drawn with a sheeny digital marker.

The number of men--the massive percentage--who are so stupid that they'll try and have a conversation with a bot because they can't tell and think she's into them. It's a wonder they don't mistake their feces for food. "Oh, look, free meat." You could give these guys a blow-up doll and they wouldn't be able to tell it wasn't a human and they'd be like, "We getting along real good."

It continues to blow my mind how quick people are to self-congratulate. Someone gets to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument, taking seven minutes to do so, and they are ready to coronate themselves king or queen of the world. Hooray for me. What an amazing miracle of a feat I just pulled off. I am so special. I deserve celebration and rewards and not to have to move a muscle for the next week.

They have no standards, put forth no effort. They stroke themselves off over nothing. They're flabby and lazy and I wish you were allowed to just hurl them to the bottom.

Extrapolate that analogy to essentially cover every aspect of life.

"There are no words."

There are always fucking words. Just because you don't know them, can't put them together, doesn't mean they're not there.

People get damaged and break apart typically by things they brought on themselves and because of what they are and are not becoming. They then make their lives about blaming the purported sources/causes of the damage and breaking that are not the actual sources/causes. My trauma, my trauma, smash this, down with that.

Three or four words in a social media bio will typically say it all and convey the gist--if not the whole--of this. But chances are it was you all along. Not always. But chances are.

Then they are militantly about this cause--which is commonly a crusade against a group--that they invented. There's projection, more projection, constant projection. They further isolate themselves such that no dissenting, true, sane, caring voices can interfere with what's essentially a ride in a hand basket to hell, while still being nominally alive (as in, there is respiration).

"My ex rarely thought I was funny. I used to be like nah, you just have no humor. Fast forward, chatting with a guy and I have him cracking up. He like, 'you’re funny.'Moments like that remind you… you weren’t the problem. The audience was."

Who are you talking to?

I'll answer that: All of the other lacking, unfunny people who want to blame others.

That'll get you 7000 likes. And that also means--by the type of math favored by the mentally ill--that 7000 people just confirmed that you are funny!

Because when those people see this, they get to think, "That's why they don't laugh! It's not me! It's them! I'm hilarious!"

"Hello, choir!" said the preacher.

Right? Everything is about lying to yourself. What helps you lie to yourself. What enables that lying. Never having to face the truth, do something about it, accept things. Hell no. What helps me lie to myself?

That's the rub of society now.

And why do you think he's "cracking up"? What do you think he might be up to? People who post what this woman posted online aren't people who are capable of actual connection. The whole thing is pretend and performative. They're not connecting. He doesn't think she's funny. He's trying to get some sex. That's it. Doing what he thinks he has to do in order to bring that about. Part of that is pretending that she's funny, because she eats that up.

That's all it is.

"Today makes 88 days since my bestfriend has passed and I still think about her every single day."

Whoa--three months! And you still think about your dead "bestfriend"? That's beautiful. I mean, that's pretty much a whole season. And you know what they say: If your bestie dies in June, you won't be thinking about her every day come fall.

516 likes!

I could do this with all of this shit.

Everyone has social media backwards. Fewer likes is actually better than more likes because what gets those likes does so because it's so fucking stupid. "Shes the best at being so fucking stupid," is essentially how we treat and regard social media and apportion value. "He's so good at saying absolutely fucking nothing in the most generic way! He gets my follow!"

"the weather is CHEFS KISS!the people are out and about!"

I look at the world and I just think, "I cannot do this. There's nothing here for me. Anywhere."

Saw this post from a woman having at the big old bad patriarchy on the subject of push-ups and all of that awful mansplaining. Everyone is talking out of their ass. That's how it works. She was an expert, she said. Knew all about the push-up. A white knight asked if she would please demonstrate for him, he'd be eternally grateful, he was looking to become a better man with a better body, etc. Happy to show off, she took a video of her doing two push-ups. All wrong. Back arched, elbows out, half of her coming nowhere near the floor. What you would have expected. What? She was going to talk big and do it right?

There's this sad part in Arnold Hano's A Day in the Bleachers which is a moment by moment chronicle of Game 1 of the 1954 World Series--the contest with Willie Mays' famous over-the-shoulder basket catch--when Hano describes watching Bob Feller--who was no longer the great pitcher he had been--doing push-ups in pregame warm-ups and doing them badly.

If it's 3:07 in the morning and I am working because I got up some time before that and I am not going fast enough, I think, "You are wasting time, get it in gear, asshole." If I am laboring some in the Monument, I think, "You are only doing this five times, you shouldn't be breathing hard, this isn't acceptable."

I have stuck to this 32 ounces of coffee or less a day rule, but I haven't liked it.

My hair is looking ragged. It stands up in this tuft when I wear my Celtics headband thing which isn't an actual headband but more like a thin, elastic-y bandanna that covers the forehead. Little Miss Muffett would be intrigued.

Frasier had jokes about how only Niles's ex-wife Maris liked Mahler. There's also a Rachmaninoff joke and an Ella Fitzgerald joke pertaining to her recording of Gershwin songs.

The "Thanksgiving Orphans" episode of Cheers has a reference to Gide.

Imagine these things now?