Saturday 4/9/22
* Red Sox drop to 0-2. Jackie Bradley--perhaps the worst player in modern baseball history--predictably doing his thing.
* I'll write about Buster Keaton for The Daily Beast.
* Close to finishing one of the two Beatles books. Should be done tomorrow. Or in a state where it's all there, and can go out, but would be worked on some to get it into final form if that's relevant--that is, it's spoken for and is on an editorial calendar. That's where the jazz book is at.
* I worked on six short stories today.
* Spoke to the webmaster about site fixes. There are quite a few to do. I need to put together a more comprehensive list.
* Ran 3000 stairs. None yesterday. Over the past two weeks, I've ran 3000 or 5000 almost ever day.
* At a place where I work, I am now being told how to write by a college sophomore who is, in addition to being a college sophomore, obtuse. A girl playing at being something she is not. The degradation, the insanity, the sheer mind fuck, absurd, twisted, backwards horror of my life is something else. Someone today asked me--or wondered aloud--that I must go through my days thinking at any point I will wake up from the most perverse, insane nightmare there has ever been. This is true. I do think this. Or I think that it's some experiment done by beings from another world, to see what a human could endure, and that maybe there are no other humans, and I'm not a human, but rather a construction of a life form for purposes beyond or out of the reach of my understanding. But it's like flipping a quarter a million times in a row and having it always come up the same way. I don't know how anything so unnatural and backwards could be supported--sustained--like this, with never any relief or exceptions or sanity.
* Spent three hours on the phone with the IRS--on hold--on Friday. The issue created by The Wall Street Journal is still not resolved. Then I finally got someone and they disconnected me.
* Sometimes people send me their work and often it's just so bad. I don't know what they're thinking. I'm not the person to show it to. I don't say anything, but it's like, man, what are you doing? What is going through your brain? Someone else--to whom I read a bit of it to today, because it happened to be in front of me--said it's like Dylan and Donovan in Don't Look Back, but then corrected themselves to say that it's really not, because Donovan was still Donovan. People just are not good at things, and virtually no one in the world is good at writing. I mean just kind of, sort of, ever-so-slightly not awful at it. There isn't anything that more people are straight up awful at. There isn't anything close.
* I am also privy to various delusional statements, and it's so obvious that what most people want to do is just talk and be indulged. They say these things about themselves, or have these certain airs, that are total affectation. With the better people, it's harmless, and limited to certain moments. They're not hurting anyone. But I read it, and I think, "Does anyone fall for this? Do you even believe what you're saying?" Again, I'm not going to be the person to bring that to. And again, I don't say anything, and I'm nice, but like a friend said today, it must drive me crazy to be looking at that at 1:30 in the morning or whatever it is when I'm still working.
* People are so desperate for you to listen to them. And they have nothing real or interesting to say. But that doesn't cut into that desperation.
* People are also desperate to share a boat. With me especially. But I also see how toothless they are, how they deal in cliches and they could never be dynamic, could never overcome anything, never lead anyone anywhere, could never rise above, could never dominate, innovate, be historic. Or they're just rounded down, entirely dependent on what is given them or what others can do for them. One of them will say to me, "But people like you and me..." And I'm thinking, what world are you in? And they don't believe any of it, or think it's all at all relevant or appropriate. They just want to do the boat thing with me. Again, I smile, I say blah blah blah--maintaining this facade must be awful for my blood pressure--but meanwhile all I'm thinking about is getting to where I am going, and never having to be around anyone like this, or conversations of this ilk again, and just off on my own in a house by the sea and woods.
* Tuesday on the radio I'll talk about George Bernard Shaw's music criticism, the first take of the Smiths' "There Is a Light That Never Goes Out," a radio adaptation of the very well-written short story, "The Monkey's Paw," the toughest hockey team all-time to beat in a seven game series, and a Dead Ball baseball player who led the league in home runs six times--six!--and is not in the Hall of Fame.
* Real normal, right?
* I'm watching Breaking Bad, which I've never seen. I'll be done tomorrow, probably, with the whole thing. Part of knowing what is out there. I can obliterate this. Tough to make a work work when the main character is the weakest, least dimensional, most predictable, in the series/film/story/book.
* Guess I'll watch some of the college hockey championship hockey game.
* This is true as it pertains to me.
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