The Weekend in Foolish Attention

Bits and bytes of the week

THUNDERBOLTIN’. Sunday, Joe and I converged on the AMC 21 (a popular location for teen takeovers so we figured we’d do our version of Old Guy Takeover) and caught the latest MCU entry Thunderbolts*.

Despite living in the same city, I don’t get to hang with Joe nearly enough. We’re both so goddamned busy (and, unlike myself, he is a very social dude) that the time just floats on by. That said, it always feels like no time has passed at all and we pick up right where we were the last time we saw each other.

As Joe said after the credit scenes, this is first MCU movie that I enjoyed enough to want to see again. Marvel has been a bit down on itself since Endgame, and Fiege has gone on record that in order to meet the demands of the Disney+ streaming platform Marvel has diluted the brand with rushed, undeveloped projects. Thunderbolts* is a wonderful step in the correction.

Marvel managed to birth a movie that doesn’t feel like it was written by a committee of Reddit mods and marketing executives hopped up on Funko Pops and nostalgia-boners. Thunderbolts* is a grubby, snarling, glorious mess of a film—and I loved every cracked rib and emotionally stunted confession of it.

Florence Pugh’s Yelena Belova walks away with every scene like she’s been waiting her whole life to drop a punchline and a grenade in the same breath. David Harbour’s Red Guardian is equal parts brute and broken toy, and Sebastian Stan—sweet winter soldier of regret—finally earns that thousand-yard stare.

But the real revelation? Tone. There’s a heartbeat under the carnage. Trauma is treated like something other than a plot point. Grief isn’t weaponized—it’s worn. The fight scenes are tight, brutal, and feel like they actually matter. And the Sentry? He’s not just a villain—he’s a goddamned walking metaphor for instability, power, and mental collapse. I bought it. I felt it. I laughed, I cried, and I thrilled at some unique and fun action sequences. What more can you want?

One quibble. In the introductory scenes, another one of the B-List bad but good guys is presented and immediately killed. No real impact. No blowback. No stakes. A misstep that is easily forgotten which makes it an unfortunate error in the storytelling.

Aside from that, Marvel took its foot off the quip pedal long enough to let this one breathe—and Thunderbolts* breathes fire. It is return to a fully baked Marvel outing, well-written, great casting, and just enough reactions to the world that feel natural to remind you that Marvel characters live in a similar world as we do.

Ten out of ten for not insulting my intelligence. For not pretending heroism is clean. For finally giving us a team that doesn’t want to be redeemed—but might stumble into it anyway.

Hell yes. And, like Joe, I’ll definitely see it again.

FAREWELL TO THE GAYBED. It was a daybed I bought thinking it was a couch. My assistant at WBEZ informed it was a daybed and added “Like little girls have.”

“Fine. But it’s navy blue.”

“OK. Then it’s a gaybed.”

It was thus dubbed and the name stuck.

The gaybed has served me well.I bought it in 2012 because I had moved on from a relationship and needed furniture. It went from couch to full-time bed just after the third ex-wife blew things up. I slept on it through the four months of hell in Vegas, for most of the year and a half in Wichita, and for the fifteen months since coming back to Chicago. Sure, it became a symbol of my humiliation at some point—less couch, more millstone—as a man nearly sixty years old should probably have a bed.

A few months ago, I started considering getting an actual bed. I mentioned to my mom who mentioned to my sister. Just after my latest trip to Wichita, my sister decided that enough was enough. Somehow she could sense that the absence of a bed was somehow a taint on my living experience and decided that she and my mom (and her dog) were getting me one. BAM! The next day it was delivered.

I put it together (once you put enough IKEA furniture together, it begins to make sense) and I hauled the gaybed to the alley. It was gone within the hour I took to go buy sheets.

I came up, made the bed (the first sheets I’ve had in four years), and laid down. I felt the weight of that couch seep out of me as if it was one more reminder of the divorce eliminated. And I fell asleep. Later in the evening, I crashed on my new bed and had one of the best sleeps I can remember.

When I was in college, a crown on a cracked tooth came off with a Tootsie Roll. Being slightly stupid and amazingly stubborn, I refused to go to a dentist to get it fixed for nearly a year. In the first month, my head felt like it was going to spontaneously catch on fire. Then the weirdest, most human, thing happened. I grew accustomed to the pain. At some point, the throbbing in my mouth was just… normal.

It seems that this couch was like that cracked tooth. A source of revisitation to a time I wanted to be far away from. The depressing throb each night as I fell uneasily asleep on it became normal.

The old joke goes “Why does a cat love it when you pull it’s tail? Because it feels so good when you stop.”

THE SCALPEL AND THE SELFIE STICK. Wandering into the Chicago Cultural Center, I catch the sound of a heated exchange. A young woman pushing her stroller caught herself being filmed by a self proclaimed “independent journalist.” As the woman asked him to not take video of her child, he insisted he had a First Amendment right to film her and her child, all while the hapless security officer tried to reason with both of them. I stood to the side and eavesdropped (but did not pull out my iPhone to capture the moment cuz, unlike the wannabe Wolf Blitzer, I’m not a complete jackass). The words “independent journalist” must’ve come out of his gaping hole a dozen times.

Here’s a hot take, as hat: owning a smartphone with a camera doesn’t make you an independent journalist any more than buying a scalpel off Amazon qualifies you to slice open a spleen. I’ve got a hammer in a drawer; that doesn’t make me Thor. But here we are—drowning in a tidal wave of TikTok medics, Instagram philosophers, and self-anointed “citizen journalists” whose only credentials are a cracked screen and a Wi-Fi signal.

This isn’t a swipe at the technology—tech is neutral. The printing press didn’t turn every drunk in the tavern into Hemingway. The camera doesn’t make the eye. The lens doesn’t give you vision. It simply records what you already know how to frame. What separates journalism from voyeurism is the same thing that separates heart surgery from a back-alley stabbing: intent, discipline, and fucking expertise.

But in the era of algorithmic affirmation, it’s easier than ever to mistake publishing for reporting. You point, shoot, upload, slap a hashtag on it, and voilà—welcome to the Pulitzer circuit. “Just asking questions,” you claim, while peddling half-baked theories and calling it courage. It’s not. It’s the performative masturbation of the ill-informed, shot in vertical mode.

Real talk—the phrase “independent journalist” has been hijacked by the same group of people who think shouting in a Starbucks is a First Amendment exercise and that editing is some Deep State trick to suppress “the truth.” Real journalists—those poor, underpaid bastards still clinging to integrity like it’s a handrail in a hurricane—chase leads, verify sources, get sued, and show up to courtrooms, war zones, and city council meetings where the fluorescent lighting kills all dreams. Your YouTube reaction video to a protest you wandered into because you were bored on a Sunday? Not journalism. Not even close.

There’s a violence to this confusion, too. When everyone with a phone fancies themselves a reporter, truth becomes democratized into oblivion. We no longer have a shared reality—just a million hot takes screaming into a canyon, each one convinced it’s a bullet point in the Constitution. Meanwhile, the actual work of investigative reporting is left to rot, unfunded and ignored, like a used condom in a gutter.

I get it. The appeal is strong. Who wouldn’t want to be Woodward or Bernstein, exposing corruption while their ring light bathes them in justice? Except. Woodward didn’t go viral. Bernstein didn’t livestream. They did the work. Quietly. Patiently. Like surgeons. With scalpels. Not smartphones.

So next time you whip out your device and start filming a cop, a Karen, or a public meltdown at the DMV, just remember: you’re not holding a press badge. You’re holding a black mirror. And what it’s reflecting is less about truth than it is about your need to be seen holding it.

Welcome to the theater of self-importance. Now please, step out of the operating room.

TODAY IS MOTHER’S DAY! I don’t know your mom, so I can’t say much about her. My mom? No sweat.

My mom is one of the best humans I know (and she’d fit that description even if she wasn’t, you know, my mother). Patient when it counts, kind to strangers and random possum and squirrels, loving, generous, smart and funny. My mom is the person you call when the chips are down, when you need a burst of optimism, when you just need to hear someone listen and give you great advice (you know, since you asked).

Most of who I am (at least the parts I’m proud of) come from my mom—her mistakes, her triumphs, her everything.

So, Happy Mother’s Day to my mom. And, to my sister (who’s is a mom). And to anyone who bothered to squeeze out a living human and not immediately eat it or sell it on EBay.

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If, like me, you’re lucky enough to have a mom still kicking, call her. Even if the relationship strained, just call, wish her a Happy Mother’s Day, then pretend the phone service got crappy. Whatever. Just call because there are plenty out there whose mother’s have passed on and would kill to be able say that one more time.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great Spring-into-Summer week!