brendan halpin

The owners of the new NWSL team in Boston have made a pitch to have their home field at White Stadium in Franklin Park, quite close to where I live. So I went to a community meeting to check out their proposal.

So, first of all, I’m aware of the irony. The very act of writing this implies a certain amount of ambition. Like the great majority of writers, I write because it’s fun, but also because I want to be read. I’m large! I contain multitudes!

But we use ambition in two senses. One is the ambition to achieve something or get better at something. I, for example, am finding a strange ambition to get good enough at guitar to play some fingerpickin’ blues. (I haven’t picked up a guitar in probably ten years) I also have an ambition to write a long piece in iambic pentameter. These are ambitions I have to stretch myself, to do something difficult, and I think that kind of ambition is fine.

But then there’s the ambition to make a name for yourself. To do something that matters. To become a person who matters. And it’s this ambition I think is ultimately destructive.

I’m trying to manage my mom’s life while she’s incapacitated, and it’s a gigantic pain in the ass. Nobody likes to think about being incapacitated, but here’s something I would like to beg you to do on behalf of whoever might have to deal with the logistics of your life should you become incapacitated. (if it helps, let’s not think of this as a permanent incapacitation. Let’s say you lget mono or something and you’re just too damn tired to pay the bills, but you’re going to get better. Okay?)

I have two recommendations:

In the past, language pedants used to get very exercised about the difference between “will” and “shall,” insisting that one was correct in certain circumstances, while the other was correct in others.

Calvin woke up at 7, vomited, crawled back into bed, got up at 9:52, vomited again, and spent the next hour in bed cursing himself for being a cliche. Well, first cursing himself for drinking too much, again, and then cursing himself for being a cliche.

Ah, Christmastime! Santa! Reindeer! People bleeding out in the snow!

I am in Cincinnati so I decided to take a free evening to see Lez Zeppelin at the historic Ludlow Garage.

The Boston Globe is re-investigating the 1989 murder of Carol Stuart. Apparently the Marky Mark song wasn’t the last word on the case, and after all these years, there is still new information to uncover.

I have no objection to this except for the way the Globe, and for that matter the entire Boston Media, treats the deaths of people who are not wealthy white women from the suburbs.

So here’s what I know about one such case with a lot of unanswered questions. I’ve been pestering journalists to look into this for years, but since it concerns the death of a Black man with a criminal record who lived in public housing, nobody seems to care. I’ve given up hope that the Globe or HBO or anybody with resources will ever bother to try to get to the bottom of this case. I’m presenting it here because Burrell Ramsey-White was a real person I knew, and while I have no hope he’ll ever get justice, I don’t want the official story of his death, riddled with holes and inconsistencies, to be the one we remember.

I’ve recently decided to give away all of my writing that’s not currently under contract to a publisher. Novels, short stories, whatever. If I write it, I’m making it available for free. I’ve thought about this a lot, and I’d like to share my personal and political rationale for this.

Old friend Seamus Cooper, author of The Mall of Cthulhu, stopped by yesterday and dropped off a story in manuscript form. “A little break from my arcane studies!” he said before disappearing into the night. I present it here for your amusement.