Tuesday 3/17/20
Heading out for a run. I'll have more important things to put up on here later.
My sister sent me granola and energy bars. That was nice of her.
I am late to the Tom Brady news--I was working on something big--which I have now just seen. Obviously I was very, very, very wrong. Couldn't have been much more wrong. Thought there was no way he was leaving, thought there was no way he'd want to. What it tells me is he believes in himself even more than I thought he believed in himself. At this point.
A month and a half or so ago I heard someone say, on sports radio, that if Brady leaves, people in New England will wear the jersey of whatever team he joins. That would never happen. As much as people loved Brady in the region, it's almost always secondary to the locale. They loved Brady because he made the Patriots win. It's always about that. The Patriots winning. I think you'll see people move on pretty quickly, which is something to give you pause and mull. I think they'll still be very good so long as Belichick is there.
For the past three days I have ran three miles each day. Yesterday after running I went to Government Center and ran up and down the stairs, I don't know, twenty or thirty times. Just straight stair running for fifteen minutes. There are fifty stairs. I am not sure that this had any point to it. I didn't even have a shortage of breath. The stairs are very shallow. The Monument stairs are deep. The Monument is perfect for the kind of physical and existential workout I need. I then walked five miles, went to Trader Joe's. Here is a photo that is in a kind of With the Beatles cover mode:
Here are the sunflowers I acquired at Trader Joe's.
I sat in the Public Garden reading the new issue of The New Criterion. I wrote for them for years. There is no one there now who will write me back. I wrote on books, I wrote on paintings. I did a great bloody job. I see they bring in new people, but they won't write back this particular contributor and with his impeccable track record? They used to invite me to their Christmas parties. And I say all of this to them. Still won't write me back. There is zero bad blood between me and these people, so far as I know. You will note that I rarely say I am reading a magazine voluntarily--that is, because I think it is worth it, not to keep up on things in this war I am in. But The New Criterion is a great magazine. James Panero, who is one of these people I wrote for who will not respond to me in years, is a great art critic. And how often do I say anything like that? Pretty much never, right? I'm fair. I'm always fair about the work. Writing is always separate to me.
The people I saw out yesterday were older people who were fit, who seemed to have this perspective of, "I take care of myself, I've known adversity in my life, I'm living my life." I know it's controversial, but I applaud that. (The people who whine endlessly and post fifty times a day about how scared they are and how they'll personally be dead by Friday are publishing people who have never had a single viable, real experience in life and who are terrified by any specter of adversity, reality, the truth. No wonder they also hate/run from any real life guts in fiction in favor of the meaningless codswallop that you can say is anything you damn well please because of the fact that it is absolutely nothing.) Or I respect it, at least. I mean going for a brisk walk. Not mounting some big gathering. If you want to have a walk, take a walk.
This is the squirrel who first sat beside me in the Public Garden and then ensconced himself in my lap until I shooed him away, but he would not leave. Squirrels love to eat sunflowers. A man came by and commented on my Man City scarf, and then an older couple passed and she remarked, "You have a buddy," referencing the squirrel who would not take his leave. He followed me for a while, too, after I left.
