Two-day spread: Fiction, ex-wife regret, auditioning for Gene Vincent's band, classic Christmas radio, Pats lose, North End Christmas parade, solid stair workout

Sunday-Monday 12/14-15/25

Four in the morning on Sunday. Snowing outside. Save a car alarm going off in the direction of City Hall, it's quiet, peaceful. I'm working on "Love, Your Mouse"--yes, again--and doing push-ups in the hallway.

I want art that is good for me, that helps and inspires me. That makes me feel alive, that helps me keep living. The same as the art I want to make for other people--except more so, because that's what I have in me and am capable of.

I don't think there is a writer in the world at present who thinks this way or would ever have it occur to them on their own as even a thing that could exist, let alone as the thing that should be. Whereas to me, it's the entirety of the point. The first and the last reason. Without which, there is point.

Can you even imagine that crossing the mind, entering the thoughts, of the people of this system, the people feted by this system, that we talk about in these pages? It's inconceivable. And incompatible with their programming.

But it's like having a sunny day without the sun.

If you were a guitarist auditioning for Gene Vincent's band and you told him when you met that you were someone who really liked to drop to the floor and play on your back when you got to rocking, I think Vincent would have responded, "Well have you ever come to the right place!"

- - - - -

It's later now. Twenty of eleven. I just spent seven hours working on the very end of "Love, Your Mouse." Hadn't meant to work on this story much at all today. Plan was to give it a quick look--a solid read of a page or two, or a portion, but then I was pulled in and committed to getting it right. I opened another document and just wrote variations. Like twelve pages' worth. I just wasn't satisfied. There has to be real magic in that ending. It can't just be great. Nothing can just be great. It's has to be magical.

I was getting tired of it. We're talking what was a sentence. And not some very long sentence, because children need to understand this. Thought, whatever, I'll come back to this later, and then hopped into the main document and started with a couple words and then it clicked and boom, brand new thing that is magical.

It's two paragraphs. The (now) second to last one had a single word removed. So basically I spent all of that time in coming up with a sentence/paragraph that right now is twenty words long. It could change slightly in length--I need to step back for a bit. But yeah, that's what I did for seven hours on a Sunday morning. Whatever it takes to make the best art there has ever been. That's the rule here.

All of which I'm sure sounds utterly alien to any other writer. Can you imagine a Carolyn Kuebler saying any of this? But it's kind of like with the people in the Monument who make some stupid comment to me. "Trying to see if you can do it twice, huh?" We are doing different things. We are doing totally different things here, Jack. Same with me and every other writer. If what they do is writing, then what I'm doing is something else entirely, because it's as far as you can get from being the same thing.

Snow is accumulating a bit. I need to exercise. I've done a lousy job this week. I hope the Monument is open today.

- - - - -

It's three in the morning on Monday now. This entry has bled over into another day.

The Monument was open yesterday. I walked six miles, did 100 push-ups, and ran ten circuits of stairs in the Monument in less than sixty-two minutes, which is excellent. I shed those two top layers each time now and run the stairs in a T-shirt. When I came back out, neither were where I had left them, stuffed between the spikes of the fence--I put them in the same notch each time. A ranger said she had taken them inside so they wouldn't get snowed on, which was nice of her.

Worked on the horror film book in my head as I walked. I am never not thinking hard. There isn't a second of my existence in which I'm not thinking hard. I am thinking hard when I'm asleep. I wake up in the middle of the thought/what I'm working on. There isn't a single down mental/intellectual moment. It's constant, active creation. If someone could "borrow" my mind and swap it in for theirs, I think they'd crumple to the ground dead or explode in five minutes on account of the shock, difference, and overload.

As I was walking back from Charlestown, the annual North End Christmas parade was raging as portions of it turned down Prince Street. I'd been encountering the parade participants for a couple hours. They were lined up along Atlantic Avenue from Columbus Park to the bottom of Fleet Street, but now they were in motion and doing their thing.

The North End Christmas parade is a strange, motley affair. High school marching bands, Miss Massachusetts in the back of a pickup truck. Another truck will have Wally the Green Monster--the Sox' mascot in the back--and another will be playing a live version of Bruce Springsteen's "Badlands," with some other truck a block back blasting a Frank Sinatra rendition of some Christmas carol, followed by an out-of-tune band performing "Joy to the World."

Those bands, with their music bouncing off the bricks of the buildings, remind me of the band music at the start of A Christmas Story. The whole grab-bag of a scene did, really. I'd been walking around singing "Meet Me in St. Louis" to myself as it were throughout the day. I love Judy Garland's music so much. Meet me in St. Louis, Louis, meet me at the fair...

Disappointing Patriots loss. Saw they were up 14-0 early while I was in the Monument running stairs, but the defense became a sieve, with Buffalo scoring touchdowns on five straight positions. Neither quarterback was all that good. Allen had the high quarterback rating, but little volume. Maye had one of his worst games of the season, if not his worst. As I said above, it was snowing yesterday in Boston, so it was snowing in Foxborough. Despite their defense, the Patriots would have won the game if a call or two had gone their way.

The Patriots can and should beat the Bills if they meet them again in the playoffs. The loss may not be a bad thing for New England. They aren't really a run the table from-very-early-in-the-season-on type of team. Nice day for rookie running back TreVeyon Henderson with 148 yards.

The officiating was very inconsistent. Maye was picked on a deep ball (that also functioned as a punt by design, I think) and then Allen looked to be picked on a deep ball as well. The plays were nearly identical. Some incidental contact. Pass interference was called on the Patriots, though, and that set up Buffalo for an easy score.

The refs do get it wrong a lot in this sense of inconsistency. The league should mandate letting more stuff go. If two guys are battling for a ball, let them battle so long as they're both going for the ball. That would wipe out many similar instances where you can A/B two plays--you know, put them side by side--from the same game, with one being ruled one thing and the other another.

Philip Rivers was solid enough. How easy it to play quarterback in that league?

Mahomes blew out his ACL and is done for the season in the Chiefs' loss which eliminated them from playoff contention. You don't wish injury on anyone, of course. Mahomes has a problem now that I don't think anyone else foresees. You have people simply saying he'll be back for next year. Fine. But he doesn't keep himself in great shape to begin with, and now he'll have more sedentary time, which means he'll get in worse shape and need to work harder to be in better shape when he wasn't as committed as he should have been in the first place. He could change, sure. But do you expect him to? Do you know many people who alter their mindset and approach and become committed in this new way that they adhere to?

I saw a photo of the Foxborough village green online in a Patriots discussion forum. Sign with the name of the town was covered in snow so it was actually from yesterday. I love that village green. You could make out the movie theater in the background, where I saw the likes of the three original Star Wars movies and E.T. when they initially came out. A very important spot to me. One I hope to revisit someday when I am in a better situation if I'm ever in one. I regret having gone their with Molly. I wish I hadn't shared it with her. Maybe someday I will be with someone who actually loves me in that better situation that I fear--I'm as close to certain as can be, unfortunately--I'll never be in, and I could share it with her.

I need to write my sister a letter about what to do if I die. I've been planning it in my head. The information for the computer, who to contact about my work, what to do with my body. There won't be a grave for me. If anyone ever knows who I was, on account of my work ever getting its chance in this world, which it has never had, then the Monument could serve the place to visit and do a circuit or two. If you wanted to get close to the spirit that was me, and maybe remains me, that would be as good a place as any, barring this desk where I create my art, and besides the art, which will always be first. I don't see how anything could ever get better. I'm obviously still trying.

You aren't going to get enough people to like and support anyone great. The greater that person is, the fewer people there will be. I return again and again to what Thoreau wrote: The public demands an average person as the person they'll support and put forward. It rejects the person of greatness, and the person of absolute greatness most of all. That was then, and this is all the more true now. It's ten thousands times more true. I have no way of overcoming this. I know that this is true. That that's how it is. How it works. I don't know a way around it so that it isn't how it works for me.

Even in the Monument, when people realize what I'm doing, which they can't do at all, they're typically hostile. They align themselves in opposition. They're not on my side. They are against me in theory and principle. This happens as soon as they clock on to what I'm up to. In other words, at first, someone might be friendly. Then they see me again, and it slowly dawns on them--because they're so slow and thick--that this fit guy is working out and he's making this thing look easy. What they want to do is commiserate with an out of shape, lazy, wheezing load like themselves. So they can say, "Quite a workout har har har" and their fellow out of shape, lazy, wheezing load, goes, "You said it! Really earning a trip to Mike's Pastry after!"

That's who people want to make famous and wealthy in this life. Not that person per se, but someone who produces this feeling of equality. Alignment with what they are. What little they are. What little they try to be.

And I don't know how you can't see this. This isn't some novel theory I'm testing out in these pages at four fifteen on a Monday morning. It's how it works. The greatest person who has ever lived could be here among us right now, and that person has no chance? That's how it is? Because they would be screwed. They wouldn't know what to do. They'd try for decades to advance, and they'd have nothing and no one. They wouldn't have 200 supporters, let alone 200 million. They wouldn't have twenty. They wouldn't have ten. Five.

Okay, maybe some admirers, but that would be the end of that. Admiration wouldn't translate into support, active following, active buying, acting checking in on what that person is up to and then devouring what they've made. Because people won't do anything like that unless they feel like many other people are doing it. Someone can read the best thing they've read. They can think it's the best thing anyone has ever done. But they're not going to read another thing by that person other than that thing they just happened to read because, say, someone else said, "Here's a link, check this out."

It doesn't translate to more. They can have the experience of their life and that'll be the end of it. And you absolutely conflate admiration--even the greatest amount of admiration there can possibly be--with partaking in following of what that other person does and what they they create. They're not related. I have people who tell me, and I know they're telling the truth, that this thing of mine they read was the best they believe to have been written, which made for a reading experience unlike any experience they've ever had in their life--not just reading experiences, but any experience.

But they then don't go out and read something else by me. That's not how it works. They would, if they thought that was the thing to do, and knew, intuited, sensed, were made aware by a barrage of posts, by the algorithm, that everyone else was in on this. And I don't think anyone else understands this is how it works, this is how we are. I know that no one else understands this. Not on their own.

Listened to the 1940 and 1941 radio adaptations of Remember the Night from Lux Radio Theater. The film came out in January 1940, with that first adaptation airing in March. Fred MacMurray was in both, with Barbara Stanwyck reprising her starring role in the 1940 broadcast and Jean Arthur taking over for her in the second, which aired on December 22.

I'm always struck by the tone of December 1941 radio broadcasts after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. We were such a better people then. Smarter. More serious. Not this clownish brain rot, soul rot, shit show we are now. Also listened to Lux's adaptation of Meet Me in St. Louis from 12/2/46. It's wonderful. Margaret O'Brien is a delight. You get to hear her and Judy Garland again.

Yesterday marked 3437 days, or 491 weeks, without a drink. I need to do better with my fitness and health. Last week's showing in the Monument was poor. I missed three days. I'm at ninety-five circuits since the reopening of 11/15 and that isn't good enough. I must do better this week. Dentist this morning. Can at least wish Dr. Raffy a happy Christmas, good man that he is. I wish I had a key to the Monument. Then I could go in the middle of the night, which isn't the middle of the night for me. Be in there alone, with only thoughts, the sound of my breathing. I don't know what it is, but the first time up proves the hardest for me and that's going back a ways now. Then I settle in. It's as if I become fitted to the space, the place, the undertaking. My breathing enters this pattern of...keeping going. Like it adjusts and reorders itself to the task at hand.