The wind carries the day

Friday 1/2/26

Typical social media post:

Why people hate small talks these days when it is the key to a meaningful conversation?

No matter how much of this I see, no matter how well I understand how mentally limited we now are, this never fails to blow me away regardless. That we are this way. That it's possible for humans as a species to be so mentally...little. I mean...look at that. How dumb can something that is technically a human be? How is it possible to be that dumb? Where would you even begin explaining how dumb such a person is? You could never get them to understand what you were saying. And this isn't the exception. It's pretty much the norm. This is your average human at this point.

"Scapegoat" is making an early bid to end up as the most annoying, overused word of 2026, with the depressing irony that most of the people using it had no idea it existed a short time ago and, as with "gaslight," don't really understand what it means.

As a general rule--though there are apt to be exceptions--it's better to avoid people who make a point of saying at every possible opportunity that they are protecting their peace. Typically they are intending to get away with being rude, insufferable, passive aggressive, among other things, often in combination, while re-framing their behavior as a virtue and attempting to villainize those who don't automatically accept anything they do in the name of this.

Such people are often among the most abusive and hurtful. It's kind of like those people who will use something like their kids as an excuse to be wretched when their kids have nothing to do with it.

They get a tiny amount of push back, a statement of, "Um...maybe this isn't so great," and then they use the how dare you thing by pulling the "But it's my kids!" card and get very dramatic.

They're preemptively trying to put themselves beyond reproach. Anything you say will produce shrieks along the lines of, "You're saying my kid isn't important? It's a child, for God's sake." When they're using that kid who isn't pertinent to what the real deal actually is. They think it's a bulletproof smokescreen and who's the baddie now?!

Childish.

Same with the protect my peace thing. "What? You're saying I should be traumatized? That's what I deserve?" It's the creepy language of the drone people, too. There's little that's good or redemptive about drone people.

Which doesn't mean that self-preservation isn't a thing and isn't important. But if that's what a person was tending to, they wouldn't put it this way, and they wouldn't say it all the damn time.

"Trauma" is another word that is losing its meaning because people use it as a rhetorical ploy. Which doesn't help the people who are legitimately dealing with trauma. Use of such words has become learned behavior that leads to rewards, if you want to call them that. But people get stuff as a result, and to them it functions as a reward. Whether that's a writing off of their poor conduct, attention, what passes for affection but really isn't, a book deal, money, platforming, an award.

It's like an animal that realizes that if it does this thing--whatever it may be--it'll get some food under the table. That's the animal's motivation, as such, when it gives you its paw or balances on two legs or sings "Old Folks at Home." The learned behavior leads to the reward. And not in the good way of, say, I have learned to write the best one that can, and this reward is now following in suit.

As we're here in the early days of another calendar year, I'll mention how so many seem to redouble their efforts in saying, "The only constant is change." They do this because it helps them cosplay not only being smart, but also wise, never mind that they're simply repeating something that isn't of their own making.

That doesn't matter; we work in such a way now that we'll confer the credit on us, as though we the source of that presumed wisdom. We exist via delusion. It's our foundation. Which is to say, a foundation of quicksand. Down and down we go. But if others are there with us, what's really down anyway? We presume a ground level or else why would so many others be where we are?

I've long been bothered by this reputed pearl of wisdom because it's false. The only constant isn't change. Reality is a constant. Truth is a constant. Right and wrong are constants.

But I suspect that the people who remark that the only constant is change are less inclined to think too hard about such things. As with so many other things in our world, it's just role playing. In this case, the role playing of sagacity.

First piece of the year was published yesterday. And an op-ed from last year got some recognition in the Chicago Tribune, I guess. Someone sent me something. I haven't looked at it yet, though.

I've not run stairs in the Monument for five days. I was walking over to Charlestown on Wednesday, prepared to do a great many circuits, when I turned around on the bridge. Thought maybe those circuits would be better put to use at the start of the new calendar year.

I was somewhat physically active yesterday. Did 150 push-ups and walked seven miles. It was cold at first but I warmed up and it warmed up some. Wasn't very early when I left, but no one was out. Or no one walking, anyway. Decent amount of car traffic.

I called my uncle who was supposed to have a procedure done on New Year's Eve day, but he went to the wrong facility. They are injecting some dye into his body. The he waits for an hour or so and after that goes into the MRI machine. His cancer has returned and hopefully it hasn't spread and can be treated. He seems to be doing okay. He's active. There's a gym in the development where he lives and he works out there three times a week. He was rescheduled to mid-January, so I'll check back in then.

People complaining about the officiating in football games is almost as irksome as people telling you/boasting about/making excuses for themselves as to their being old. Wouldn't growing up be better?

I'd mentioned what Cary Grant's character says to Loretta Young's character in the delightful The Bishop's Wife, and I'll reference it here again because it merits repeating. She expresses concern--but not like she's fixated on it--about becoming old, and Grant--who is playing an angel--tells her that she'll never old regardless of her age. That people who get old are born old. It's true.

Look at people in publishing. They're born 800-years-old, joyless, with with all the life in them of dust. Someone like Wendy "The Bag of Hag" Lesser over at The Threepenny Review, for example, was ancient--without any concomitant wisdom--at twenty-five, same as she is at whatever she is now. Dust--metaphorically, anyway--with lips.

The Bag of Hag thing always makes me smile, in large part because it's so spot on.

People who call themselves influencers and those desperate to be thought of as such are such sad, empty creatures. There's nothing inside of them; it's been scooped out like so much goop from a pumpkin in October. They are only shells, so easily broken.

And yet, society says, "This is important! We must cede the likes of your hollow and irreparable selves sway!"

A society in which nothing is real--and everything is about "other things," as we've discussed them here--does no one any real good. I feel like hardly anyone can see this, or understand it. Which is a result of this kind of society. It's like dying of something without knowing you have anything. It's still happening.

Each year on New Year's day, people in South Boston take a plunge into the ocean. Yesterday would have made for one of the worst times to do this, I figure. Must have been extra brutal.

I went to the Starbucks to read wearing a sweatshirt and shorts. It's just a few blocks away. I was waiting for the light to cross, thinking, "Wow, I don't know how it can be twenty-five degrees," because it didn't feel that "warm." Turns out the "feels like" temperature was five degrees, on account of the wind. That classic Boston wind. There are days when it's going so steadily that you think at certain moments that it's stopped just because it isn't blowing as hard. Then you notice it again, and it's like, ah, there she is, still going strong. The wind will always carry the day in these matters.

Was reading Art Czar: The Rise and Fall of Clement Greenberg by Alice Golfab Marquis, which is the second Greenberg bio I've read. The first was back in the late 1990s when I was still in college. Read that on my own, of course. About an hour and a half of reading before heading back to watch some of the college playoff games.

The two I saw portions of were duds, though. The first between Oregon and Texas Tech was never in doubt, and then in the second one Indiana crushed Alabama. My day had begun at one in the AM, and I went to bed around the time the final game between Ole Miss and Georgia was beginning. But I do a lot of things whenever a game is on. Think, make notes, download stuff, listen to music, read. I'm never just "Oh, this is me doing nothing but sitting in front of a TV watching athletics."

Threads presented me with the following this AM in its rundown of notable stories, which says so much about our society and how far our collective heads our up our collective ass.

"Stranger Things praised for nostalgic value."

Thanks, AI social media summary for which there is no setting to avoid as AI and brain desiccation continues its by-the-second advance in the wiping out of not just intelligence but the ability and desire for anyone to think.

Nostalgic value is an oxymoron. Nostalgia has no value. It will kill you, though. So, okay, maybe value if that's what you're going for.

Right now and what is to come. That's what matters. The value of a work of art is directly proportional to how much life it contains. And it's also directly proportional to what it means for right now and in times to come. What it does for a person at the level of who they are right now and later.

Nostalgic value. You might as well get a spade and start digging your own grave if you think nostalgia is a good thing. It's a death thing, boyo. Life things are the way to go.

Please don't think this means death can't be in a work or all about death. The work that is all about death can be the greatest work about life. Let's be smart here.

"Love, Your Mouse" is a story about death. A children's story (which is equally, if not more so, for adults) about death. But it is much more about life and love. That story...it never fails to blow me away. And I wrote it and have read it God knows how many times. Never is my reaction, what I think, and what i feel, lessened.

That's something I strive for that no other writers do. I don't look at my writing like writing. I don't look at it like anything else. But I would say it has more in theoretical common with music. Like a favorite song. It's not meant to be partaken of once, or twice, with what would in this case be a "reread." It's meant to be played, again, God knows how many times.

The first music I listened to in 2026 was the Grateful Dead at Winterland on 12/29/77. The first film I watched was Stan Brakhage's Mothlight from 1963, having downloaded a 1080p version the other day.

Brakhage took blades of grass, flower petals, and the wings of dead insects (it's not just moths), put them between two pieces of splicing tape, had them contact-printed, and then run through a projector. In other words, no camera was involved. The film runs for three minutes and change. You can have favorite parts to it, if you watch it enough times. "There's the big blade..."

Also watched the compact 1973 British TV creeper, The Return, which is a combined adaptation of an A.M. Burrage story and an Ambrose Bierce story. Pretty unusual, that. It was okay. Rarely seen and unlike anything you'd encounter now. The entire cast is just two people. A woman with a room to let, a guy who shows up late at night and wants a room, though he has a reason beyond just wanting a place to sleep or stay.