Waiting room

Monday 9/14/26

I got a haircut today. You have to schedule an appointment. I got there early. Another man was still having his hair cut. He and the barber were quite friendly. They were similar guys in a number of ways. Spoke the same way, looked the same way. They shook hands at the end, and the man said he'd be back in three weeks. I find that people get a hair cut every two or three weeks. That isn't something I can afford. They raised the price again recently, too. I go every two or three months. Sometimes I've gone a year or more without a hair cut, but in recent years I keep it quite short. Now I get the half razor setting on the sides and back and the one setting on the top. It's more comfortable. It looks fine so long as one's face isn't round.

But however much money I had I don't think I'd be someone who gets a hair cut every two or three weeks. I also nurse a suspicion--I'm not saying it's anything based in reality or science--that that is likelier to make you go bald or for your hair to thin. Anyway, I get in the chair, and it's obvious that me and this guy in the barber aren't the same kind of guy. We do not talk alike. We think at different rates. We use very dissimilar language. He brought up football, and but even there...it's not the same. The rates of thought. Depth. I have little person-to-person intercourse, but the few times I do I am reminded again--as if I need reminded--how far removed I am from everyone. And I'm reining in my mind insofar as what I say in these situations.

Poor effort on my part in all areas lately. Which isn't a new development these days. It's like I've given up without the dying as of yet. I am languishing in this death-like waiting room for the real deal on the other side of the door. I'm not even awake enough. Try to have a productive fall I tell myself. If I'm not careful--that is, if I don't get it going--fall is going to be well underway and passing and I'm still going to be sitting here in that waiting room that much closer to having my name called to go in. It's already like I'm calling my own name in that regard. Me, and the reality of this unchanging, unchangeable-save-to-worsen-even-more situation I am in. Life I am in.

On a more pedestrian and controllable note, I'm not drinking enough water, so I'm at least doing that and having a couple liters right now. I feel cold, which is unusual for me, and have on a sweatshirt and my Boston Ballet beanie.

I find people's narcissism exhausting. It manifests in different ways. We've tried to do away with gender in our post-reality society, as if there aren't men and women and instead rather people, but the differences between men and women are marked. I'll be getting into that soon in these pages when it comes to reading. The narcissism of women, for instance, is likelier to be manifested in the form of going online and posting photo after photo after photo of themselves saying by way of summation/caption to each one that they're falling more in love with themselves and the like. You wouldn't see many guys doing this, but if you wanted you could see millions of women doing it.

You are allowed to say anything self-aggrandizing so long as it's fluff, there's a tripe component, and it's generic fluff/tripe, and doesn't pertain to anything of actual skill or substance. But if it doesn't, you can proclaim your own majesty ad nauseam and it's as if people expect that and whatever blather you emanate is super duper, which is also people not paying you any real mind or taking you seriously, even if they follow you, support you, fund you, "consume" you. This is one of the greatest and most defining ironies of our age. You can be massively popular with no one actually liking you, caring about you, and enjoying or thinking well of what you think and/or make. In truth, this is how you become popular. More to the point: it is now the only way to be popular.

Again, the topic of shame is one that arises to me. How are people not ashamed to post ten photos of themselves each day saying in the same language with the slightest variation how much they love themselves? "Falling even more in love with me." How can you not understand how that sounds? Forget how it sounds--how it is? Something we're sorely lacking in right now is dignity. It might as well be extinct.

I'll see how people act and carry themselves as a matter of course, and I imagine a person like my father doing the same. It would have been unthinkable. Again, it's more a women than a man thing as I've said, but the idea of my father, if he were alive, taking to Instagram and posting photo upon photo of himself, saying how much he loved himself, that he loved himself more today than he did yesterday, that he here it was another Monday and he'd fallen in love with himself all over again...utterly inconceivable.

People have no shame unless it's forced upon them. Now you're talking mob internet "justice," which, of course, isn't justice at all. But left alone, let to their druthers, people are shameless. They lack completely in self-awareness. Without any self-awareness, you won't have a sense of shame. You're also apt not to have a shred of conscience. With everyone else being the same way, you move through the world--this world--unchecked in these regards, without any enlightenment.

You see the mob going after jurors in high-profile cases, like this Lindsay Clancy case. I haven't said anything about it in these pages, because what is there to say? I don't know how something like that happens and I'm not going to pretend to. It's a loss of life that is hard to fathom. But that's an understatement. I'm not surprised it ended in a mistrial. You'd expect as much, wouldn't you? But people go hunting for the "holdout" juror or whatever. This seems to me like we're moving into very dangerous territory here. We're probably already deep within it.

To my thinking, without anonymity, or anonymity if one wants it, one can't serve as effectively on a jury in this country in this age. Because people can come for you in an attempt to ruin your life. Most people can't handle that. They don't understand what it really means and how to combat it. Because it can be combated. But that takes know-how and not giving in to fear and panic, which is what people do. It's human nature.

I always think of it like being plunged into icy water. The reason most people drown in that situation is because when they hit the water, they gasp, and the water fills their lungs. Same as when the mob comes for you. But if you don't gasp, so to speak, you can not only swim back out, but you can dunk the mob in that same water.

On a cinematically civic note, 12 Angry Men should be required viewing at an impressionable age in this country. We ought to be impressionable at all ages but that is rarely how it works.