I don't know you

Monday 10/28/24

One of the AI prompts--which you cannot turn off--when I open a new entry now is "Literary Magazine Showdown."

Yesterday here in the North End, I saw a man park his car as I was walking down the street. It's resident permit only, but I'm not sure if that changes on Sunday or if there are non-resident spots at certain times. Right now I don't drive. It's confusing. Various aspects of the North End are. It is Boston's oldest neighborhood--and the oldest in the country--and it has retained various idiosyncrasies. It's also less a grid of streets than it is an amalgam of lanes of assorted lengths and shapes and turns that have been paved over.

A man got out of the car looking confused. I should describe this man. Mid-fifties. No neck. A rough face--pock marks scarring. Not an educated looking man. By which I mean in the schooling sense. A "rough" man, if one will. Blue collar. Two women, mid to late twenties, were walking by. One was taller. The other, pudgy, but not fat. Soft. Educated. They were residents--they weren't passing through--and you wouldn't be a twenty-seven-year-old woman living in the North End unless you'd gone to school. Or chances are. Probably roommates.

The man did a rather normal thing. He asked whomever was nearest to hand--who also likely lived in the neighborhood--if it was okay to park on the corner. If he asked me, I wouldn't be able to help him much. I'd have said, "I'm sorry, I don't know," because I don't want to guess and get someone a parking ticket.

The shorter of the two women said, in a voice of pure contempt, "I don't know you." She wasn't nervous. It was so natural for her to be this rude and to show offense. The guy--this lug-type of a guy--was dumbstruck. You could tell he wasn't confident. He mumbled, "Great, good talk," and these women clearly delighted in having had the opportunity to be rude to some man because it gave them something to talk about. The body language was horrible. The eye rolling, the expressions of "I know, right?" and that sort of physical tone of "How dare you speak to me."

This is a general theme in society now. Sexism is more rampant than ever, but it is the misandry form. Women hate men. It's a rah rah-you-go-girl-hooray-for-girl-power thing, then miserable women return home to their cats and their griping and their terminally online lives of posting about the patriarchy and blaming it for all of their problems. This was just a human with a simple question. This man had no other motive. He was confused and stressed. They wanted to be cruel to him.

Drake Maye was concussed yesterday, in came Jacoby Brissett, and the Patriots downed the Jets in an all-time thriller in Foxborough. Okay, maybe not an all-time thriller and a battle of who would be the less futile between two bad football teams, but a win all the same. Those Jets--damn are they bad. Aaron Rodgers--as I said, he's not good for your operation. This isn't a winner. He definitely is not a leader. He infects your franchise with his terrible attitude. He's going to have so less to show for his career than he could have with that physical ability. I recall NFL "experts" saying how the Jets were a legit playoff team this year. They're now in the AFC East basement with the lowly Patriots.

I had sent "Words of Rain" to maybe, oh, I don't know, a dozen people. Friends, family. Not a single person said anything. There are two who sometimes do or might. This is a stone cold masterpiece. People didn't say anything because they didn't think that. It's because they did, it's me, and they don't know what to say. They can't come up with the words--in their view--and they're too intimidated to say something to the person who could do that. And it's not like they're spreading the word either. You have to understand, too--in the interim, I'll say something to one of these people, about their lives, or wishing them luck with whatever. I'm right there. They have the opportunity. But they pretend that I never sent them anything. That's how intimidated they are. Some of these people are people who love me. The Admiral and the Captain, for instance. My mind has always intimidated her since I was like five, though.

In order to get to where I'm trying to get, to have the impact I'm looking to have, to reach the people I'm aiming to reach, people need to talk about you. Openly praise you. Spread the word. What I am doing is so far beyond what anyone else has ever done that people don't know what to say, lack the confidence to do the work justice in what they say about it--again, in their minds--so they say nothing like the work does not exist. But it has the impact it does on them, it all but knocks them over, they think about it, they feel all of these emotions. But they say nothing. Then there is also the truism that people can only be insincere when it comes to praise. So, if I was some mediocre schlub, the work sucked, anyone could do it, and I sent it around, people would say, "I loved this," because they wouldn't mean it and it would be like cheering me on as some guy in a race who was walking because he was too out of shape to run. It's so easy for people to say things they don't believe about work they don't think anything of. When you have a world like that, what becomes successful are the people behind the work that no one thinks anything of, because that's the work and people that other people can say anything about.

Am I really the only person who understand this? Because it's hard to locate anything more obvious. That is why mediocrity rules right now. No one is intimidated by mediocrity. There's no mark you have to come up to in what you say about it. You just say the cliche of praise you don't mean. No one is going to call you out on it. The person receiving that praise--which is a lie--doesn't want or deserve anything more. Well, they deserve the truth, in the sense that everyone does, but they don't want the truth and it would crush them. They have adapted to accept lies and to live life as this fake pretending thing. It's not real. They don't think they're this amazing anything. But it's nice to be told the things they're told. They're not holding those remarks up to scrutiny. ("Is this really true?") And those remarks are the same. The same empty platitudes.

I know a guy who praises everyone non-stop. Everyone is "amazing" in what they do. Their song, their comic book, their story, their book. They could be yodeling drunkenly on the side of the road and he'd pull over to tell they were an amazing yodeler and he'd post something on social media about them. Everyone is amazing, no matter how bad they obviously are. I don't know why this guy does this. It's like an addiction. Maybe he needs the community because he's lonely. But I know he believes none of it. I used to send him things. He wouldn't be able to say anything to me about my work. And he didn't. But he knew what it was. That's why he didn't say anything. Not a bad person. Disingenuous, yes. And I've caught this person in other lies. But by no means cruel and also someone I'd describe as a generally caring person. If you had a problem, you could count on them. Solid that way, and that's rare, and worth respect. But he has to say these things he doesn't believe. And he cannot say what he does believe.

I know there are those who are inveterate people pleasers, but I don't think we help people when we are dishonest with them, and I suspect that dishonesty has a lot less to do with trying to encourage someone than it does what the person saying those words wants for themselves, even if what that is doesn't amount to much, or really anything. Certainly nothing of substance, and nothing real. if that person was actually invested in encouragement, what would they say here, to this man, this artist, in this situation? And yet they nothing.

People also realize that it would be completely out of place to serve up one of those token utterances of praise to me for a story like what they had read. It wouldn't fit or do. They often are incapable of saying more. They just don't have the language skills. Now, they could just be honest. About their feelings. That honesty tends to come through, even if it's just a few words or a sentence or two. People are very limited in their ability to communicate. And they're more limited all the time. That is the nature of our age. You are seeing the fallout of that. All of the unhappiness, disconnection, depression, loneliness. Take away stock lines, and people have nothing to use. Add in the intimidation factor, and you end up with people acting like I didn't send them anything at all. The elephant has overwhelmed the room. There couldn't be a bigger elephant in a room. How does this make me feel? How do you think? It's a way they'd act towards no one else, because of this other person's greatness. Greatness is a prison. I am a prisoner within that jail. I take that jail around with me in everything I do, and certainly in everything i create. I don't have a solution to this. I know the single biggest problem is one of greatness. Not the absence of, but the overabundance of. That's a hell of a thing and it makes for something worse than hell. It's supposed to be the other way around.

Yesterday I walked three miles, did 200 push-ups and five circuits of stairs in the Bunker Hill Monument. I had only done forty-five push-ups the day before. The way that works is I accumulate push-up debt. I need to average at least 100 a day. So, if I did forty-five one day, the next day I need to make up that difference and would need to 155 to pull back to even. If I do more and there's a push-up "surplus," that doesn't count for anything going forward, because why shouldn't I just do more? In other words, if I do 300 push-ups one day and come the next day I'm at sixty and I don't particularly feel like doing any more, I don't carry over any part of that "extra" from the day before. I still have forty to do, and I usually do them then. If not, I acquire the push-up debt.

I wrote another film piece over the weekend. I may have to add two or three words to "Idra" in order to make sure this one thing is as clear as can be. Some other matters to tend to first.

I finished a story called "Non-Dairy Creamer." It's fine. This is from it:

“It’s like something from a horror movie,” my wife said to me after they found Rick Stanton’s body out on the old mill road. Rick was this guy in town everyone knew because he was involved in everything without seeming to have any reason to be. For instance, the local paper regularly described him as a “Little League institution” (you had to wonder if the weekly’s sole staff writer caught a stipend every time they worked in the reference) because he coached for years, despite being childless himself. Which isn’t to say that he was a suspected molester, given his track record with the moms, a number of whose kids took private batting lessons with Rick, and he also served as personal swing doctor to several of these women who played in the tri-county softball league. Then there was the matter of his lack of anywhere else to be or known responsibilities. He came from money and was all that was left of his family, which’ll do it.  

No one drives on the mill road. There’s nothing out there. What’s left of the mill is fenced off because it’d be the perfect place for a kid to fall through some rotted floorboards into a cellar with no one to hear their cries for help. Hell of a way to go with a broken leg and no water, though if a kid went missing the mill would be one of the first places that got checked, so maybe there are worse places. A person last had a viable reason to drive the road back in 1951 before the mill closed and everyone was forced to move away or else starve, according to local lore. Which makes it pretty ironic now that the average price of a house here is higher than anywhere else in the state.

On Friday afternoon I attended a screening of Bride of Frankenstein on 35mm at the Brattle, which was excellent. I'm writing a big piece on Franz Waxman's score for the movie. Watched The House of the Devil, which I think I saw not long ago, but I don't know when, because it's not memorable and isn't well thought out. Doesn't make a lot of sense. The motivations, the particulars. Who are these people? What are they doing? Why isn't she dead at the end after shooting herself in the head? Why did this self-composed woman put on headphones and start dancing around the creepy house? Any final scene in which someone explains what's what doesn't work, be it in film or literature. Find a better way. In this film, this happens with a nurse--so it's someone who wasn't even in the movie--with these forced lines of exposition. Or conclusion, I guess you could say. Need to do better than that.

I've been reading more L.T.C. Rolt and his ghost stories of trains and waterways. After Bride of Frankenstein, I went to Jordan Hall for a Paul Lewis piano recital of late Schubert piano sonatas. This was outstanding. Two hours and fifteen minutes (with the intermission). I could have listened for two more hours. My first time seeing Lewis in the solo settings sans orchestra (the other times had been across the street at Symphony Hall with the BSO). I most like hearing him alone. His late Brahms record is on regular rotation here (most suitable, too, for autumn). I walked all the way there. As I went through the Common, I told my mom I felt like a criminal being out so late (the performance began at 8). I was home by 10:45. I ate--which I had not done all day--and was asleep before midnight. Here is a photo from the Public Garden on that walk to the concert hall. One of the quintessential Boston views, in my estimation--every Bostonian will know where this was taken--made better still on a crisp fall night.