The Weekend in Foolish Attention

Bits and bytes of the week

THAT WORK/LIFE BALANCE IS COMING. Due to too many bad choices along the road, I will not retire. I’ll be working until the day I drop like a stone in a pond. This isn’t really a new concept for many of the GenX crowd, especially those of us with just enough skepticism of the corporate paradigm to have abandoned the idea of retiring altogether in our thirties.

My Great Uncle Don (whom I an named for) spent an afternoon with me when I was just getting to go to college and regaled me with the advice to always follow my passion rather than settle for a life of illusory security. That lesson stuck… hard.

All that being true, I’m now at a place and age where going 150 miles per hour every day is sustainable but not desirable. I will work my saggy ass off while at my place of employment yet I am not on call 24 hours a day nor do I want to live there most of my time. As I’ve embarked on the new gig in the old city, I’m rounding the corner to finding that balance. More sleep, more time to work out, time set aside to read and write—all things I’ve been too tired and too busy to enjoy.

I don’t care much for the buzzwords but a little work/life balance is coming.

THE COST OF OUTRAGE. Anyone with two or three functioning brain cells would tell you that a push to diversify the employment pool and work to elevate opportunities for minority groups is an overall great concept. Despite the fact the Corporate Overlords don’t want to pay people more money nor do they truly give a fuck about the ethnic or sexual makeup of their workforce as long as the widgets get made on time, the idea that they should be held accountable for doing at least a minuscule amount of good in the world is a solid play.

Walmart will phase out the term "diversity, equity and inclusion." It is also:

• Ending supplier diversity programs.

• Discontinuing the use of the controversial term Latinx.

• Pulling out of the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index — a scorecard for a business's commitment to LGBTQ+ equality and causes.

• Ending training through the Racial Equity Center, which had started as a five-year program in 2020.

For Walmart this move is great marketing because the “folx” who promote the plans for diversification don’t shop at Walmart. This will be universally popular among those shoppers who are living paycheck to paycheck in middle America who are more concerned about getting low-priced Christmas decorations made in China and Six-for-a-dollar Ramen Noodles. It is true that most people in need get something from their neighbors to live another day. You know who doesn’t receive the largesse of their fellow citizens? People who demand things while screaming about how shitty the people they want things from online.

Anger is a tool not a right. The Right has been angry for some time and they found their champion—a deranged conman who suckled at the teat of the most corrupt, Machiavellian motherfucker in the last century. What did we think was gonna happen here? Now the Corporate Monstrosities are relaxing back into bidness as usual and rolling back all those things they greenwashed their images with during the strange period between Reagan and Trump.

Moral outrage might feel good but it cannot beat a discount on frozen breadsticks.

THANKSGIVING. As a holiday, this one has always been all over the place. In the nineties, during my theater days, I would host Orphan’s Thanksgivings for all the actors I worked with who couldn’t make it home. Thirty or so would descend on my apartment and I would cook a banquet. We’d eat and laugh and end up watching a movie that was guaranteed to make me cry so Seth Fisher could laugh hysterically at my tears.

Like New Year’s Eve (a holiday I’ve spent most of my time working some sort of gig), the Turkey Day has been whatever and whenever and I always take a beat to reflect on those people and circumstances in my life to which I am in gratitude.

It was never a big family thing because Christmas is my mother’s jam and that holiday took up all the energy. Which is, ironically, something I’ve always been grateful for. Christmas with my family is a lodestone, a benchmark, a Very Important Day in the same way that a birthday or anniversary of a major surgery sticks and grounds.

This year I couldn’t make it to Wichita (back to back Broadway in Chicago shows at the theater prevented the drive) but I’m incredibly thankful for the fact that this same gig allows me to go to Kansas for Christmas for a full week and get paid to do it.

I slept late, called my people, did some writing, caught up on some Survivor, and cried watching Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. No big meal because that feels weirdly self indulgent to gorge without the company, amiright?

MEET CHUCK. Chuck is the recently hired manager of a grand hotel. The concept of hospitality is Chuck’s wheelhouse—his staff is the front line for every guest of his hotel and he works diligently to get them to a place where they are more than functionaries, more than additional pieces of furniture wearing uniforms.

Chuck is considerably older than most of his staff and comes with a wealth of experience (with the understanding that good judgement comes from experience and experience comes from poor judgement). Chuck has more energy than the Energizer Bunny and assaults the world with it.

Look forward to stories of Chuck and his hotel.

ON GRATITUDE. Gratitude, like whiskey or cheese, is best taken in gulps and bites. It’s a state of mind that defies logic and rides shotgun on the chaotic journey we call life. The ungrateful are everywhere—slumped over their steering wheels, flipping the bird at the universe, blind to the fact that the sun came up this morning and they didn’t wake up dead. Gratitude, on the other hand, is a wild, unhinged acknowledgment of the absurd luck it takes to simply exist.

The act of being grateful, truly grateful, is not some sanitized Hallmark sentiment or a warm, fuzzy glow you get from a $12 yoga class. No, it’s a fistfight with reality. It’s staring down the barrel of everything that’s gone wrong and saying, “I’m still here, damn it, and I’ve got the scars to prove it.” Gratitude is survival. It’s the raw, visceral realization that the universe didn’t owe you anything but somehow threw you a bone anyway.

Let’s not romanticize it. Life is a violent, unpredictable beast. It will gut-punch you at the worst possible moment and laugh while you struggle to breathe. Gratitude, then, is not about ignoring the beast. It’s about grabbing it by the horns and shouting, “Thank you for the ride!” Even when it drags you through the mud. Especially then.

Consider the strange alchemy of human existence. Think of all the cosmic accidents and evolutionary glitches that had to happen just so you could sit here reading these words. Millions of years of chaos, war, disease, and bad decisions—all leading to you. You’re the punchline of the greatest cosmic joke ever told, and if that doesn’t fill you with a weird, manic gratitude, you’re not paying attention.

But gratitude isn’t just about the big, existential stuff. It’s also in the details—the smell of gasoline on a cold morning, the sting of whiskey after a long day, the way the world looks at 4:00am when you’re too wired to sleep. These small, fleeting moments are the breadcrumbs that lead us back to the raw, beating heart of life. They’re reminders that even in the chaos, there’s something worth savoring.

Of course, there’s a dark side to gratitude. It’s easy to overdose, to let it turn into complacency. Too much gratitude and you start sounding like one of those smiling zombies who think a gratitude journal will solve all their problems. But real gratitude isn’t about avoiding the darkness; it’s about finding the light in spite of it. It’s about laughing in the face of disaster, flipping off the void, and saying, “Thank you, you bastard, for giving me something worth fighting for.”

So raise a glass to gratitude. Not the saccharine, sanitized version sold on greeting cards, but the raw, untamed gratitude that comes from living life on the edge. It’s a reckless, defiant kind of love—for the chaos, for the struggle, for the absurd beauty of it all. Embrace it. Revel in it. And for God’s sake, don’t let it turn you soft.

Life doesn’t owe you a damn thing, but sometimes it throws you a bone. Take it. Appreciate it. And then charge forward like a lunatic into the chaos, grateful for every wild, messy second.

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Hoping your holiday was filled with starchy sides, a notable absence of political conversation with family, and an unclasped belt as you bemoaned the excess of calories. It’s now Christmas season so get ready to be marketed to like a monkey in a grove of bananas.