Wouldn't worry about it

Friday 7/4/25

"Am I overreacting to my wife's work crush?"

Nah, it'll probably be fine. Wouldn't worry about it.

The things that people profess to need help with/advice regarding is stupefying.

People are less reliable than ever as narrators, because people on the whole are more unstable and unwell and delusional and narcissistic than at any previous time, and yet, if you say it on the internet, people will automatically believe you.

Do you understand the importance of saying something first in our shitshow of a society? There's a dispute. A bad relationship. Or not even that. Something involving two people. The person who shares their story first, often "wins"--and cannot be competed with--because people believe the very first thing they see or hear. They're too dumb and gullible to do anything else. Think critically? Pish. Hardly anyone's going to question a single thing about what they're told.

Was sitting outside of Starbucks reading the other day. Five chairs against the wall. I was seated in the second chair in from the door. Three older women came out and sat in the three chairs on my left. The one furthest down was smoking. Didn't give a fuck that you're not supposed to and than anyone in this seating area had to breathe it in. The two women between her and myself her were eighty-six and ninety-one. How do I know this? Because they were talking a lot about age. I wouldn't have guessed they were that old. They looked great. And obviously they were out and about. These women had probably lived in the North End for most of, if not all of, their lives. They knew everybody, including my barber, who walked by and said, "Hi ladies," before he nodded to me.

A friend of theirs with a walker showed up. The walker converted into a chair, and he sat on it facing them. He's going to be eighty-six this week. Probably a half dozen people came by and told him he looked great. Then this sixty-seven-year-old guy showed up. Not a gray hair, obviously because he dyes it. Appearance was a big part of this guy's thing. Looking younger than he was. And he looked a lot younger than he was. He was the heartthrob of the group. You could see him playing that role with his peer group his entire life. The Lothario.

These five people got to talking about AI. And they all agreed that it was taking over, and that was, like anything they said, both good and bad. It's not good. Nothing is worse. You're talking the end of humanness. Nothing in the history of the world comes close to that. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. This is potentially the end. It's not a change and a continuation. But leaving that aside, one of the woman said that if you weren't on the side of AI, and wanted a human world, your only option was to live in a convene with a few like-minded people. This was all twisting me up inside, of course. The resignation. This is everything I believe I'm here to fight against. I'm already the last writer standing. The last artist. I may end up as the last human. Or the first of those things. For a restart.

Anyway, a salient lesson here was that being this way, going out, gathering, clearly kept these people young. The Lothario was the first to leave, then the three women. Somewhere in the middle of things, this beautiful redheaded woman had sat down next to me. We've ended up sitting next to, or near each other, probably five times in the last two weeks. I'm not there as much as it may sound like I'm there. But it's happened the last two days in a row. Each of those days, some man who knew her tried to strike up a conversation. These men were awkward and unsure of themselves. But she was, too, somewhat. You know how people get overly formal without meaning to and say the other person's name a bunch? "Have a good weekend, Danny." "You too, Caroline." But they keep doing that? I don't go over and sit near her. I'm wherever I am first, and then there she is. Which is probably just a coincidence.

She was there, I was there, and the man sitting on his walker that converted into a chair was there, when I noticed that one of the woman had left her wallet. Funny how this happened again after finding that other wallet a couple weeks back pretty close by. I got up, retrieved it, and handed it to the man--who hadn't noticed--saying, "I think one of your friends left this." I don't know. It was cool to be able to refer to those women that way. There wasn't another option. They were friends. Still friends. He said, "Thanks, she'll probably think I stole it"--he was a bit of a joker.

Five circuits of stairs in the Monument on Wednesday, 100 push-ups, three miles walked. Some days five circuits are harder than ten on other days. The humidity. General stickiness of the air. Sweat was dripping off me by the time I got to the Monument. There's basically a sweat gauge. If I don't start dripping until, say, I'm coming down the second time, then that's favorable weather. But if I'm dripping during the first circuit--or before, in this case--then it's likely to be a slog. Also, I forgot my headband and I foolishly wore a white undershirt, which became pellucid in the manner of a bathing suit in some 1980's Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition. I looked ridiculous. Same deal yesterday. The heat and humidity kind of dictates how many times I'm going up and down. Not really, but close enough. Those were two hard days of five circuits each. There's precious little airflow in the Monument. Stale air. There are ventilation slits, but they're narrow, and unless you're right up against them and the wind is blowing, they don't do much.

Almost everything that people say is lip service. You push back a tiny bit, you investigate, ask, or provide them with that which they say they need or want so much, and you'll find that they didn't mean what they said at all--they were just saying it. And that's true of something they say/carp about hundreds of times over on social media.

It's very common with people who complain about the opposite sex, how no one has anything to say out there on the front lines of dating. That person, should they encounter someone with much to say, who both knows much, speaks easily, and is solicitous and curious about them, will themselves have nothing to say.

What hardly anyone realizes is that the things they typically complain about in others are the things that couldn't be more true about them. But that would involve self-awareness, working on the issue, humility.

People aren't strong enough for humility. You need strength for it. To be open to what your shortcomings are. What you aren't doing, what you have bagged out of. People need to be coddled. More so increasingly. They're too fragile for life. To do any of the things, and be any of the things, that make life what life should be. What life has to be in order to be worth living.

Universal sent me a copy of the Who's upcoming Live at the Oval 1971. Some of this material had featured on a bootleg called Gibson Destroyed in Oval, which I've had for an age. That wasn't the complete gig, though, and the sound was rough (but still better than on most Who bootlegs, I'd say). This is a big deal releases like this. Why the Who do so few of them I don't know. The Who have all of these tapes, any of a number of which would be an instant all-time live album classic if they just released them. The Who in 1971? Are you kidding me? Do you know how good they were?

Downloaded a set of Jimi Hendrix BBC recordings that features some new off-air discoveries. You think a given set is the definitive set, but then something else turns up. There's a version of "Hey Joe" from December 1966.

I mentioned that Stone Roses contretemps the other day. Well, that missing link of a gig from 1987 was indeed taken down. Couldn't have been up for more than twenty-four hours. Thankfully I had downloaded it.

Downloaded a bunch of Husker Du bootlegs this morning: three discs of Zen Arcade outtakes, shows from Winnipeg, London, and Minneapolis from 1984 and the Warehouse rehearsals from August 1986. Plus, a two-hour John Lennon interview given a couple days before he died.

Got a digital copy of Baby Dodd's Talking and Drum Solos--which in my view is one of the most important LPs for percussion in American recording history--that is fleshed out with rural brass band recordings from 1954. These were all made by Frederick Ramsey, Jr. The Dodds LP features the great New Orleans drummer by himself with his kit in a Chicago studio in 1946. I have no idea where my physical copy is, so I grabbed this. The brass bands are robust, enthusiastic, in-your-face, joyous. Not particularly polished, but that's fine here. Long on spirit.

Also downloaded the complete Mapleson cylinders. The collection comprises roughly 140 phonographic cylinders recorded at the Metropolitan Opera House between 1901 and 1903 by Met librarian Lionel Mapleson with the Edison "Home" phonograph. The existing cylinders comprise about three-and-half hours of music. Think of it like really lo-fi Grateful Dead audience recordings, but for opera.

Listened to the episode from 1944 of Duffy's Tavern with Laird Creigar--who was plugging The Lodger, which I recently wrote about--as the guest star.

Read Wodehouse's "Death at the Excelsior," a locked room mystery. Okay-ish. This wasn't what Wodehouse did best. Wodehouse really needed to be doing that one thing for him to be Wodehouse. Then he just did that thing, did more of that thing, and so on.

I don't believe in this approach. I believe in inventing the next thing. And then the next thing. And so on.

Someone sent me a long email a while ago saying they were a private investigator or something--or had been--and they were retired now and had determined that I was the son of someone who wrote a book about a Hollywood executive and had followed in my father's footsteps, and would I share this, or that, because this person was writing a book, etc.

I wrote back saying they had the wrong guy--an irony, given that super sleuth here was on the job, which I didn't add, of course--which was more than most people would have done. Apparently they didn't believe me, because they sent me an email with four photo attachments yesterday.

My father was an accountant. Or that's what he started out as. But it bored him, wasn't challenging enough, and his career changed because he found a way to change it. That was my father. Beyond that, do I really seem like someone who would ever, in a trillion years, follow in anyone's footsteps? I'm much more the Wenceslaus type than the Wenceslaus's page type. No one in my family wrote. We knew and know no writers.

I posted that sports entry from earlier this morning on Substack because I'm proving that you can have the best content of its kind in the world, or the best content of any kind, for that matter, and the best content of all kinds of content, and you will have zero followers unless 1. You are constantly in people's faces saying, Follow me follow me follow me follow me follow me follow me follow me follow me follow me follow me and 2. People see you as "achievable"--that is, someone on their level, or who they could be if they wanted to or they were put in a situation to hasten that along.

No one in this world, just about, cares about anything for what it is. They don't follow anything for what it is, read anything for what it is, listen to someone for what they're saying. If someone clicks on the above link--which they'd be unlikely to do--they'd see that I have one follower, but that's not true, because that's me. It automatically signs you up to follow yourself. If I can figure out how to unfollow myself, I'll do it so we can see that big old zero.

Look at that content. There's no sports content like that in the world. Look at that bio. There's none like that either. But I'm not doing number 1, and no one sees me as fulfilling the requirement of number 2. And even if I did number 1, it wouldn't matter, because people would look at me and see me for what I am, and people don't like that, because they're not that way. That is how it works. How you get anywhere in that situation, I have no idea at this point in this world. But I do know that that's how people think and how they are. Not all. But rare is the person regarding whom this isn't true.