Sunday 8/6/23
I was waiting outside the barber shop on a bench the other day to get my haircut. There are two benches in front. On the other one were two guys, having the following conversation:
First guy: My fatha gets coffee every day. Bunch of guys go. Some days it's six, some days it's twelve. If you wanna go, you go.
Second guy: If you want, you go.
First guy: You probably know some of them. Vito goes.
Second guy: I know Vito.
First guy: I know. Then my fatha is home at 11 and he sits on the couch all day. He doesn't move. On Sundays, the coffee place is closed so he can't get coffee and he sits on the couch all day until he goes out to dinner.
Second guy: At least he's active.
Interesting interpretation.
It's kind of like how in the writing community, if you write two things in two years--I don't mean books, I mean anything--it's like you're wildly productive to these people, and they can't keep up with you and you stress and freak them out. Which brings us to the whole problem of how much I create and how that melts people's brains so that they can't process or accept it at all and it'd also just be easier for them to have me dead so that they don't have to see it, think about it, compare what they do to it.
Ran 3000 stairs yesterday at City Hall. A tour guide did something new and decided to have his tour group stand at the base of the stairs. A tour group is about thirty people, most of them obese, save the children. And they just stand there. So that meant that every time I came down I was running into this group. Like cows. They don't move. You see the vacant expressions in people's faces, like they have never had a thought in their lives, the glassy eyes. It looks like they have no clue where they are or even that they're alive. The tour guide--after the group dispersed--decides to give me some workout advice. "Keep going!" he said. You couldn't even have them gather ten feet in front of the bottom stair? It had to be right up against it? Does anyone ever think about anyone else? Is anyone even capable of it anymore?
The Starbucks down the street is closed for renovations. Again. Looks like it will be closed for some time, because they place is trashed right now. Everything ripped down and out. Walls. That means I can go to a cafe or Hanover Street or the Starbucks at Faneuil Hall, which has this upstairs seating area that's spacious and has a nice view. But it's usually packed with tourists, and it's hard to get a seat. There are padded chairs that surround tables. So they're not individual tables. More like community seating. And any time you go in and people are at those chairs, they'll also have their feet up on the tables. Who the fuck raised anyone? Did everyone just have total slob-assholes for parents? Is that where they get it from? People put food there. What would make you think you can go somewhere that's not your place and put your shoes up on a table? People don't give a fuck. They really don't. They're just these uncouth, base simpletons. All ages. Sixty, twenty, eleven, forty. Doesn't matter.
Coming back from running those stairs yesterday, a guy I think was Norwegian asked me, "You did the sport?" He was with his wife and little girl. Tourists, obviously. His wife smiled and the girl looked up brightly. He was referring, of course, to the way I looked, covered in sweat. He made me laugh. Yes, I did the sport, I told them. They seemed really nice.
The word "literally" follows me around. I cannot escape it, which is a combination of my hearing and awareness of all that is happening around me and that we are an illiterate society where no one can express the simplest thoughts any longer. Last night I watched William Powell and Kay Francis films, and even still I was subjected to people in the hallway, all night, in drunken, asinine conversation, "No, I literally went to the store," and so forth. Dumb guys trying to impress dumb women so hook-ups can be had. No one sounds like an adult, regardless of age.
Boston is changing. It's becoming trashier. It's changed since I've been running the City Hall stairs, where the city seems to come to you. Believe me, you will experience a lot of Boston and what Boston is about if you spend enough time on those particular steps. You have crazy, immoral, power-mad, racist people in office here, and that's obviously driving saner people and their families out of the city. If I encounter someone who is not trashy, chances are they're a tourist. It's just what happens with Woke-run cities. You have a mayor who appointed a meth addict who was living in City Hall itself to her reparations committee (because it was a given she was going to have one of those). Then the meth addict living in City Hall attacked a cop. Why are you giving positions to meth addicts?
The answer, of course, is obvious. That's how this works. It's all about this kind of thing for people like Michelle Wu. The checking of the boxes. The de-humanization of people (which is abetted by how willing people are to de-humanize themselves; it's like most humans, presented with the option, would have no problem turning themselves into barnacles) and what they may be on the inside and the character they show or don't show on the outside, because everything is now about other things.
Most things in the world now operate in opposition to the human and to human possibility. To what a human can be. What a human should strive to become. The world is anti-human. In the best senses of what it means to be a human. To grow, to learn, to know, to share, to help, to be about substance, to be vastly more than appearance and skin color and gender and agenda. People are doing this against people; or, I should say, the possibilities of what people might have become. The world is making the viable, growing, caring, evolving human extinct. Like a dinosaur. And I'm not sure who sees this, as obvious as it is to me. It's what is happening. It is all that is happening. It's almost entirely happened.
We are getting rid of the human as this individual who might possess the above qualities. And people can't even tell. Because they're not human any longer. There is no place for that kind of human--the real human who is developing their humanity. There is no path to success, to community. They don't fit in, have a place, either socially or in business. They can't do the platformed thing, because they are not like everyone else, and everyone else resents anyone who is not like them. You will not find any individuals in our society. You won't find anyone with their own ideas, who expresses themselves as only they can. You won't see anything new, anything fresh, or even anything a little bit different than what you see millions of times over. You can't get caught up in a name. A catch-all label. Just because you're a human doesn't mean you're truly human. It usually just means that another name isn't being used yet for what most people are.
Simple question: Ever see that gif on Twitter of Michael Jackson as some possessed character--maybe it's from Thriller, I don't know--eating popcorn? Of course you have if you've been on Twitter. You've seen it thousands of times, if you've seen it once. You see it hundreds of times a day, no? That's what someone posts in the comments. It's what they think will get them "likes," and likes have replaced anyone actually, for real, liking anything in our society. People have lost the ability to even like things. As in, honestly like them. Think about that. It's like they're eating food and their taste buds don't work. It's all the same. They can't even tell. Think of how simple you have to be to post that gif. How stupid you have to be. How brainless. Pathetic. A paramecium is less basic than a person who posts that. But if someone posts that gif, and someone else posts something intelligent and witty and right to the heart of the matter being discussed in, let's say, two sentences, which do you think is going to get 5000 likes, and which do you think is going to get zero?
We have no doubt about that, right? Right there, if you understand why that is happening, why it would always happen that way right now, you understand where humans, for a lack of a better term, are at.
Anyway, the meth addict was evicted from the building he'd been living in that represents the seat of government. Living in City Hall. Remarkable. Also, no longer remotely surprising. That kind of thing hasn't been in a few years now.
I read about the non-stop corruption every day. The double-standards, the pandering, the blatant racism, the child-grooming, the ever-ongoing festivals of narcissism, delusional, hubris, entitlement, always-out-of-proportion-melodrama, the lucrative business of self-victimization, the loaded threats of what will happen if anyone dare not pretend that falsities are truths. People know they can't speak up--or fear that they can't, because they actually can, allowing that they do so intelligently and coming from a place of decency--so it goes on and on, unchecked. I am as far from a being either a Democrat or Republican as can be--and equally far from being either--but this is how it goes in Democrat-run cities. I see it, experience it, often have it right in my face. There's a scummy, violent element that's becoming more and more prevalent in Boston. How that looks in 2023 is a lot different than how it looked in 2019.
Comments