The Weekend in Foolish Attention
Bits and bytes of the week
YET ANOTHER REASON I DON’T FLY TO KANSAS. Turns out, according to the FAA, most air traffic control systems are still running on software that involves floppy disks. We’ll spend an unending river of cash to make sure some asshole doesn’t smuggle more than three ounces of hair gel on a plane for safety but the folks making sure the crafts do not smash into each other mid-air are using the equivalent of a Commodore 64.
The amazing thing isn’t that we have the occasional catastrophe with a helicopter and a Cessna. The amazing thing is that it doesn’t happen five times a day.
THE BENEFITS OF INVISIBILITY. I had lunch with an old friend who, while a Big Deal in Chicago a decade or so ago, now has leaned into teaching abroad and dipping back in town when he has no place to go. At one point in the conversation, he unloaded this:
“When I’m in Chicago now, I feel invisible. When I’m teaching in Bangladesh or Calcutta, I feel important.”
I hadn’t thought about this deeply until I heard the words. Sure, I feel bad for my friend. He wants to feel important, to be known. Like him, there was a significant slice of time when I was a Z-Grade celebrity in Chicago. I can’t say I was important necessarily but I was known. Over time and experience, a realization set in: being a Big Deal is wholly overrated and becomes a pursuit in and of itself devoid of substance.
These days I’m pretty content avoiding that putrid limelight. I’m still recognized and greeted by those who remember those earlier versions but I’m not interested in being seen as much. I’m finding greater solace in being invisible.
When you’re unknown, you don’t have to live up to anyone’s projection of your potential. No one’s waiting for your next move like it’s a Marvel Phase Five trailer. You can fail quietly, rebuild in the shadows, and change your mind a dozen times without needing a PR team or an apology tour. Fame is a leash. Obscurity is a pair of bolt cutters.
You can show up to the bar in a thrift-store kimono with a handlebar mustache and nobody gives a damn. You’re not boxed into a brand. You’re not a public figure—you’re a public ghost, haunting the edges of societal expectation, free to chase whatever wild-ass version of authenticity calls your name that week.
Being unknown means front-row seats to the social media gladiator pit without being dragged into it. You’re not pressured to clap back, perform grief, or “use your platform” every time the internet loses its collective mind. You get to keep your opinions complex, your soul intact, and your mental health un-fucked.
If no one’s watching, you don’t have to pander. You don’t have to pretend your half-baked TikTok poem about heartbreak is a revolutionary act of resistance. You get to be terrible, honest, experimental. You get to create for yourself, which—ironically—is what often leads to real impact.
Nobody’s combing through your high school yearbook looking for something to cancel you over. You can grow. You can evolve. You can say, “I used to be an asshole” and not have it turned into a trending hashtag. The beauty of being unknown is that it leaves space for redemption. Fame fossilizes your worst moment. Anonymity lets you outgrow it.
WE REALLY DON’T LIKE OUR POLITICIANS HONEST. I’m certainly not the biggest fan of Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson’s policies. His ties to the Chicago Teacher’s Union and, in general tendency to favor apologetic progressive stances that excuse the frequently bad behavior of young people engaged in often borderline criminal behavior turn me off a bit. He’s played politics as usual when it comes to shading the truth about a lot of his regime change actions but this past week, he was blatantly honest and the G is going after him.
"Some detractors push back on me and say, 'The only thing the mayor talks about is the hiring of black people,'” he said in a video showing comments he made Sunday at the Apostolic Church of God.
“No, what I’m saying is, 'When you hire our people, we always look out for everybody else,'" he said.
“We are the most generous people on the planet."
He continued that “When you ask how do we ensure that our people get a chance to grow their business, having people in my administration that will look out for the interests of everyone, and everyone means you have to look out for the interests of black folks, because that hasn’t happened. That’s how we ensure long-term sustainable growth.”
It is the quintessential representation of Ibram X. Kendi’s “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” It is one of the most honest expressions of his philosophy. It is virtually no different than the Trumpian choice to hire a slew of Fox News personalities to run his administration. Qualifications be damned, these guys, like ALMOST EVERYONE ELSE IN POWER DOES AS WELL, hire their friends and supporters.
Is it unethical? You bet. Is it unusual? Not in the least.
WHY (SOME) OF THE KIDS LEAVE ME COLD. I wasn’t impressed with a lot of the responses from the Extremist Left when Trump got shot. I am a bit disgusted with their response to the news that Biden has cancer.
“I’m expected to feel sad for this monster?” Okimura asked in a video uploaded to TikTok, where she boasts more than 190,000 followers. “Meanwhile, what about the Palestinians in Gaza with prostate cancer?”
“Would rather he rot in prison for the remainder of his days,” Angelica Ross wrote online. “Karma comes for us all.”
A 34-year-old nonbinary sociology student on wrote on Reddit “Oh, great. I hope it hurts.”
Yes. Biden was suffering from oldage as early as 2019 and his staffers spun us with lies as eggregious as anything Trump spews. That said, the man’s career in politics has to count. How sad and typical that those who literally scream at the rest of us to have empathy have so little ability to practice it themselves.
A FEW THINGS TO WATCH. I’ve been less inclined to focus my viewing attention on television or episodic series just lately. Instead, I’ve been spending much of my time staring at the screen on my wall catching up on some blindspots I have in terms of film (although one of these recommendations is a televised event).
Thank You Very Much (documentary). I am a bit of an Andy Kaufman completist and this 2023 doc is worth your time if you enjoy his comedic anarchy as much I do.
The Beast (French: La Bête) is a 2023 science fiction romantic drama directed by Bertrand Bonello, inspired by Henry James’s 1903 novella The Beast in the Jungle. The film explores themes of love, fear, and emotional suppression across three distinct timelines: 1910 Paris, 2014 Los Angeles, and a dystopian 2044. Starring Léa Seydoux, this is weird (… French, duh…) and lush and awesome.
Conan O’Brien | The Mark Twain Prize for American Humor (Netflix). Easily one of the most heartwarming, intelligent, and start-to-finish funny nights—the last held in the Kennedy Center before the troglodytes took over—and well worth the time.
Ted & Ted 2 (Netflix). Seth McFarland is not for everyone. Juvenile, profane, and often bordering the line between politically acceptable and burning down the fence of appropriate, these two movies about a sentient teddy bear and his friend are equal measures stupid, laugh out loud funny, and slightly sentimental. If nothing else, watching Giovanni Ribisi dance oddly to Tiffany’s cover of “I Think We’re Alone Now” is worth the time.
Most of us have a three-day weekend in honor of Memorial Day where we celebrate our veterans while also openly despising the country they gave their lives for. America is an increasingly bizarre experiment yet still the most free, most empathetic, most advanced country in the recorded history of humankind. So go out, grill some meat, punch a vegan in the throat, and fly your flag (whichever flag you choose).
Might as well enjoy it before the tornadoes completely eradicate the infrastructure and the robots decide we’re no better than cattle.
Fame fossilizes your worst moment. Anonymity lets you outgrow it.
I know nothing of large scale fame, except that it appears to be not all it's cracked up to be. At least once a month, I find myself muttering, "Thank God I'm not filming a demonstration video," while attempting to cook. I'm content being an unknown introvert in a city where nobody knows me, unless I allow it. (You might be wondering, "How the hell can she be an introvert, when she never shuts up?" But here's the scoop: introverts can be mighty chatty when they feel comfortable enough in the situation, so if you're on the receiving end, lucky you & feel free to tune me out if you must.) When I moved permanently out of state in 2003, I'd never felt so free in my life & was happy to escape the feeling of living in a fishbowl.
For me, growing up in a small Kansas, one stop-light, one grocery store town where "everybody knew everybody," was not the idyllic comfort portrayed by Opie & Andy or Bruce Springsteen. It wasn't so much about fame, but rather the uncomfortable knowledge that everywhere I went, I would cross paths with those who assumed they knew something about me or my family when they absolutely did not know anything about us at all, because we were all living a lie. Wow, that makes it sound like we were spies in a dime store crime novel, "Watchers In The Wheatfield." No, not that, although crimes were certainly occurring behind closed doors. Every moment I lived was a performance of sorts, although I didn't realize it till much later.
And yet... there was a real phenomenon that happened & perhaps the kids were the only ones who noticed it. (Not "It," the sinister clown luring children into storm drains.) We moved back to Kansas the summer before 4th grade & I graduated from high school in 1987, but still you were considered an outsider compared to the kids who'd attended school together since kindergarten. So it was a strange dichotomy of both not fitting in & also everybody "knowing your business." For a shy kid, it was uncomfortable on both fronts.
My only short-lived, laughable moment of "fame" was almost thwarted by a bull, when my best friend & I got to sing a song we wrote, on a local AM radio station that most people didn't know existed & whose listeners were mostly little old ladies tuning in to hear the small town gossip & swap recipes.
The year we met in 5th grade, we were instant friends because I was the one who dared to befriend "the new girl," because I knew what it felt like to be "the new girl," & it turned out we both loved to sing. Together we had big childhood dreams of being the next famous dynamic duo of folk ballads, so we started writing songs together; compiled an index card box of the addresses of record companies that we meticulously copied off the backs of our album covers; & sang in the elementary school talent show in our matching dresses that our mothers sewed. We reached our peak of fame with the radio spot only mere moments after being spotted by an angry bull in the adjacent pasture, that we'd unknowingly agitated by our presence in the radio station parking lot. (Nothing says small town USA like AM radio & bull agitation.) Shout out to my best friend, Becky. Wanna write another song?