The Weekend in Foolish Attention

Bits and bytes of the week

THE SPITEFUL EMPEROR. Trump’s first day in office and the slew of nearly 100 executive orders made me think of the quote “sound and fury signifying nothing.” On its surface, the most polarizing order and also the least impactful is to pardon the insurrectionists. At long last, the January 6th coup is complete. The one that attempts to reverse the Constitutional right to birthright citizenship is a shiny thing to occupy Congress and the courts while he deports others. Reversals on DEI and enforced pronoun use are just as virtue signaling as many of those initiatives were to begin with especially the decision to require people to declare they are a man or a woman on federal licenses and passports.

Little of his first day was about anything than slapping his chest and announcing his return to power. It was, however, designed to do the thing the man loves more than anything else—cause extreme reaction out of fear and outrage.

Trump reminds me of a storyteller in the Chicago scene who simply couldn’t feel relevant without an enemy, without someone with whom to be embattled. Absent the attention and reactive response, he’s just an asshole with a cool desk. The best response is to ignore his noise and let the WWF of American politics roll on. That storyteller eventually tapped out of her relevance, alienating herself from most people (including her son), and lives in her car now, being touted out once in a while to rehash her past melees as fodder for entertainment.

Sure, I could be wrong. Despots over time have used similar tactics and strategies and his need for a fight is not dissimilar from the activist cohorts on both ends of the extremes—no emergency to decry means no donations. I suspect that most of the ills of society are being amplified into crisis online but not in reality. Hearing white dudes complain about how hard it is to be a white dude smacks hard into the day-to-day life of… a white dude. Watching seemingly credible people scream about the mass genocide of police against black men isn’t supported in actual numbers. With the removal of Fact Checkers on Faceborg and Musk’s Folly combined with the practice of ginning up relatively benign occurrences to freak us all out indicates to me that pretty much everything driven through the lens of social media is highly suspect.

Trump is an unserious president in an unserious time to be American.

THE FRIGID MONTH. I wake up. I stretch. I turn on the lights, put on my robe and slippers, get a mug of coffee, and contemplate my desire to go to the gym. I love the gym as it is the thing I do that levels my mood and motivation. But it’s fucking -7 degrees outside. Just walking to the gym for twenty minutes is a daunting task. I think about driving to the place but that feels silly.

Turns out thinking about going to work out burns, like, seven calories. That’s something, right?

THE INABILITY TO DISTINGUISH THE REAL FIGHT. She was an older woman and she had had enough. Sitting in the theater during the pre-show in the drafty ancient building when the temperature outside was a whopping 11 degrees, she was cold. To her bones, she said. She claimed to have been a patron of the establishment for 45 years and had never been so cold waiting for a show to start. So she decided to take her frustration out on a teenager making minimum wage and, in no uncertain terms, read the child the riot act. Her words were catastrophic—this was “torture” and “a threat to her safety.”

The ambiguously non-binary person had their hill to die on in terms of revolutionary acts. They had been inadvertently misgendered by a waiter and demanded to the supervisor that this man be fired immediately. As the manager listened and politely and apologetically deflected , their voice got louder and shriller. Their words were apocalyptic—this was “erasing their existence” and “an act of violence.”

The Midwestern parent of school aged children is apoplectic over the LGBTQ+ reading material his kids are being exposed without a hint of irony that both have iPads and watched John Wick perform a thousand head shots on theoretical people and Challengers multiple times on his Netflix account. His words are hyperbolic—the schools are “grooming” his children and “making them gay.”

The media started this trend with the heavy lean into tragedies and manufactured hysteria. The attention economy thrives on hyperbole. Hyperbole grabs our attention by tapping into our emotions—fear, anger, joy, shock. It forces us to react, and in the attention economy, reactions are the gold standard. Clicks, likes, shares, comments—they’re all measurable, monetizable proof that someone, somewhere, noticed you.

But here’s the problem: the more hyperbole you use, the more it takes to stand out. The bar for what qualifies as “shocking” or “groundbreaking” keeps rising. Yesterday’s “Best Ever!” is today’s “Meh.” We’re caught in an arms race of exaggeration, where everyone is trying to one-up each other with increasingly ridiculous claims.

When everything is framed as an existential crisis, we’re constantly on edge, constantly angry, constantly ready to fight. This isn’t just exhausting—it’s dangerous. It creates a feedback loop where outrage feeds hyperbole, and hyperbole feeds outrage, until we’re all stuck in a perpetual cycle of performative fury.

If anyone is playing Orwellian bingo at home, this is the part in “Animal Farm” where the pigs change the rules and act like they have always been that way. — Barlow Adams

GRIFT OR JUST THE NEW WAY TO DATE? She saw me at work. She spoke to me. I didn’t ask but she gave me her number.

She was attractive and closer to my age than my normal choices so I called and we agreed to go have dinner at a Logan Square restaurant. It was nice, she was pretty and, as we waited for the server to take our order, we chatted a bit about movies we’d seen recently.

Then we ordered.

She ordered a steak and potato and a salad. I ordered a pasta dish. Then she ordered two meals to go. [RECORD SCRATCH]

I waited until the server went away. “Uhm… I don’t want this to sound too aggressive but… what was that?”

“What?”

“Three meals?”

“Oh.” She smiled. “Those are for my kids.”

“Hmmm. Are we splitting the check, then?”

She laughed but it wasn’t that of someone who found something funny. “No. No. You asked me out. You’re paying.”

“Don’t you think that, I don’t know, it might have been a bit more up front to clue me in to the idea that I was dating you and your kids tonight?”

“You wouldn’t have shown up if I ‘clued you in.’ Nah. So, are you gonna pay or what?”

“So this isn’t so much a date to get to know one another and more a transaction?”

“Transaction? Sorry, I’m not having sex with you tonight. No way.”

“OK. I hear that. I wasn’t expecting that but this still feels like a purchase of some kind. What do I get for my money?”

“You still tryin’ to get laid, huh?”

“No. Not at all. There isn’t a blow job good enough to wipe the dismay from my face right now.”

“My time should be enough tonight.”

“Nope. Not really. Not now. Five minutes ago, maybe. Not now.”

“So you gonna pay for the date?”

I sat for moment and sipped my beer. “OK. Here’s the thing. I could just get up and split right now. Or I could agree to drop for the tab but only if, while we eat, you answer my questions honestly. This, for me, is a first, so I’m dying to know what could possibly justify this sort of thing and how to avoid it in the future.”

She thought about it for a moment. She looked as if she were deciding if the price of the three meals was worth actually talking to me. She nodded. “OK. Ask away.”

After the almost hour-long ‘date’ I discovered a few things about modern dating:

• This was something she did frequently. Almost weekly. She told me that dudes bolted about a third of the time but she was fine because she ‘had money.’

• She didn’t seem to see anything wrong with the subterfuge. She felt her time was worth the grift, that she was so beautiful that men were lucky she even showed up. She was neither so beautiful nor so interesting to justify this belief but, hey, I was paying so maybe she was right.

• She didn’t have sex with most. Once in a while, a guy would become obsessed with her (her word) and keep trying, paying, and pursuing and she’d fuck him before ghosting him.

“Why me?”

“Excuse me?”

“What about me made you think I was a, I don’t know, a good candidate for this?”

She grinned. “You have a really generous smile and nice eyes.”

The flirting didn’t work. I paid but left her to get home on her own.

I’m not in that place where I’m seeking companionship. Not really. I’m open to meeting people but this adventure has left me even more distrustful of the opposite sex. It turns out I have a type but it has little to do with their outward appearance.

ON THE OTHER HAND… With the democratization of business models unleashed by AI, the propensity for humans doing whatever they can to scam other people has exploded. A 53-year-old French woman was scammed out of $850,000 when she was convinced she was dating the actor Brad Pitt after being sent AI-generated images of the actor. According to the online marketing firm Authority Hacker, Americans lost over $108 million to scams that involved AI in the last year and 45 percent of AI fraud scams led to financial losses, with an average loss of $14,600.

I figure my date is pretty low-rent in terms of scams. I mean, at least she didn’t convince me she was Christina Ricci.

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And that, my friends, is the week in foolish attention. Yeah, it’s cold but we’re all highly intelligent apes who have somehow figured out how to survive despite nature’s desire to make us all food for the rest of it so I think we’ll be alright.

Stay warm. Remember that the cheapest vacation is a nap.