The Weekend in Foolish Attention

Bits and bytes of the week

THE KING OF ALL SPAS. Following a weekend of shows that included six amazing performances, two of them for just over 3,000 CPS school children, snow on one day followed by 60 degree sunshine the next, walking approximately 45 miles with over half of them on stairs, I took Monday off and took my friend (her birthday) and I to one of the most special places on the planet: KingSpa in Niles, Illinois.

Two things: a day of rest is best when it is fully earned and there is no better place to rest than KingSpa.

I can’t recommend KingSpa enough. A steam room. An ice bath. Three jacuzzi pools of varying temperatures. A co-ed area with nine saunas including the Salt Room (made of 350 million year old natural salt base rocks. Salt is a natural preservative and the heat and humidity from the sauna allows for the skin to be exposed the healing properties of the salt) and the Fire Sudatorium (made from rocks as described as living. The intense heat causes the body to secrete toxins and body waste so as to deeply purify the body). The best Korean food I’ve ever had. Napping stations. An Infrared Room. An Oxygen Room. A tiny movie theater showing bad movies.

For $42.00 you can stay for 24 hours. If you choose, you can leave your phone in a locker and detoxify from the rotating spindle of tasks and news that occupy most of your time. And massages. Holy shit. Hot stone massages, chair massages, and foot massages that beat your feet into pieces of well tenderized veal.

Another friend recommended KingSpa as a stopover if flying from or to O’Hare (it’s only a ten minute ride from the airport) if you have a long layover. It’s transcendent.

I never regret it. You won’t either.

I believe that Daylight Saving is an existential reminder that while time is inevitable and beyond our control, our use of time in a practical way is contingent upon our collective agreement to use labels and clocks to work in tandem. Almost exactly the same mutual consensus when concerning race and currency.

RESISTANCE IDEA #786. The DNC should go out and purchase for every Democratic member of Congress a yellow wig and a really long red tie and commit to wearing both to every open session of Congress. No imitation of the Orange Fattie. Dead serious work but with a wig and a ridiculous tie. If Republicans call it out, feign ignorance or simply lie about it.

“I object to the costumes designed to taunt our Chief Executive.”

“What costumes?”

“The wig. The tie.”

“What wig? I’m not wearing a wig…”

THE FEAR OF BEING CANCELLED. I’m not exactly a huge fan of David Sedaris. Nothing in particular but I tend to find him as funny and as charming as Andy Borowitz or McSweeney’s (which is like saying I’d rather have an old school Pixie Stick inserted in my dickhole than have to read him). I did, however, catch him on Bill Maher (a comedian whom I love but wouldn’t want to have dinner with) and he commented on the cancel culture thing. Effectively, he can’t figure out what he might say that will foment outrage so he simply doesn’t give a fuck. I now (kinda) like him a bit more.

Sedaris recognizes that he doesn’t have a job per se so cancelling him is nearly impossible but those who have regular jobs are constantly walking on eggshells for fear of losing it. That those people hear him say things that would get them fired and know they couldn’t say the same thing.

The entire cancelling infrastructure hails from the aggression of middle school girls. It is a safe way to attack people without risking physical injury and is sourced from gossip and reputation damage. As I recently mentioned when discussing Leon: The Professional nothing—NOTHING—is scarier than a teenage girl.

I’m in my own lane on this dilemma. I’m not an unfiltered jackass all the time but I have my own provocative sense of humor and, in general, given I’ll never be retired on an island, I’ll have to find work anyway. And I most often do. I also try to avoid teenage girls at all costs.

“What’s up? Is there a problem?”

“No. It’s…” and she looked at her companion with a side eye. “…a feminine thing.”

“What? Did someone’s vagina just explode?”

“You can’t say that! That’s sexual harassment!”

“You say it’s a feminine problem, right? So that means what? An emotional outburst? Bad driving? Or… someone’s vagina exploded.”

The mention of a body part is no more sexually explicit than mentioning a fist is actually throwing a punch. Cancel that.

WE’RE ALL A BIT BODY DYSMORPHIC. The concept took hold like a virus spawned in a Chinese lab. The body born with was somehow… wrong. Wasn’t this always true? Or maybe it all started in 1980?

Somewhere in the flickering static between a VHS workout tape and the greasy sheen of a diner menu, we lost ourselves. Not in the noble, poetic sense—the way a man loses himself in a love affair or a war—but in the gnawing, insidious way you lose yourself in a house of mirrors at the county fair, every reflection a funhouse version of the thing you thought you were. That’s the disease. The virus. The great American hallucination. Body dysmorphia, by any other name, is just the condition of being alive in an era where reality is a sales pitch and your flesh is the product.

It started somewhere between the chiseled absurdity of He-Man and the gravity-defying pomposity of Aqua Net hairdos, an era where Schwarzenegger’s biceps were bigger than your dad’s dreams, and Jane Fonda’s thighs could crush a man’s skull like a grape. The eighties weren’t just a decade—they were a war on the natural human form. Everything was bigger, better, louder. You weren’t just supposed to be in shape, you had to be a sculpted, oiled-up demigod with abs you could use as a washboard in a country song. But the joke was on us.

Nobody saw themselves right. The dweeb with the Cyndi Lauper cassette thought he was one drum solo away from rockstar abs. The girl with the Olivia Newton-John headband saw cellulite where there was only skin. And the jocks, well—they stood in front of the mirror in their Top Gun bomber jackets, flexing and snarling, oblivious to the fact that no amount of Nautilus reps could make them Tom Cruise.

We were all drinking from the poisoned chalice of perception, fed on a steady diet of Miami Vice glamor and Max Headroom surrealism, where even the news anchors looked like they’d been airbrushed into existence. It wasn’t about what you actually looked like—it was about what you thought you looked like. The eyes lied. The brain edited. Reality was a conspiracy.

Somewhere along the way, body dysmorphia stopped being a niche disorder and became the default operating system of Western civilization.

And so, the scalpel came. The Botox. The liposuction. The gyms turned into temples, and the tanning beds into shrines. People pumped themselves full of chemicals, strapped on spandex, and hit the pavement like Mel Gibson (complete with government approved gun license) was chasing them through the streets of a dystopian Los Angeles. And still, they weren’t happy.

Because here’s the clincher—body dysmorphia isn’t about what you look like. It’s about what you think you look like. It’s about the fact that no matter how much you chisel, inject, or starve, you’ll still see that scrawny kid from gym class in the mirror, the one who got a swirly in front of that one cute girl with the advanced rack. It’s about the idea that no amount of bronzer or bulking will erase the fact that deep down, you still feel like the fat nerd who got picked last for dodgeball.

That’s the beast we’re wrestling with. A whole civilization trapped in its own reflection, tweaking, adjusting, reshaping, and still never satisfied.

Even though the neon has faded and the cassette tapes have unraveled, the eighties never really ended. They just uploaded themselves into Instagram filters and Photoshop, into personal trainers and juice cleanses, into gym selfies and AI-generated perfection. The dream of the perfect body, the perfect face, the perfect life—it’s all still there, glowing like a rerun of Baywatch on a hotel room television at 3:00am.

And so we stand in front of the mirror, tilting our heads, sucking in our stomachs, flexing just a little. We all think we’re fooling someone. But the truth is, we’re just trying to fool ourselves.

Because in the end, that’s all body dysmorphia really is: the American condition, sold to us in TikTok videos and primetime commercials, promising that if we just work a little harder, tweak a little more, chase the illusion just a little bit further, then maybe—just maybe—we’ll finally like what we see. We were all born in the wrong body, gang. You know, unless you’re Brad Pitt or Margot Robbie and then you can go fuck yourself.

I asked a date what women really want and she said, “attentive lovers.” Or maybe it was "a tent of lovers." I wasn't really listening.

FULL PICTURE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT. I’m in favor of expanding our general awareness of skewed heroes in history with some added truth about them. Columbus was an adventurer who opened up the perception of the world and was a slaver and exploiter. Thomas Jefferson was a brilliant philosopher who wrote on of the most influential documents in modern history but also boned his slave mistress.

This is, in my opinion, a good trend. Full disclosure. Full transparency. Do with the information what you will.

Adding to that trend should be a similar expanding of our awareness of those we deem victimized by the march of bloody progress. We should acknowledge that the chattel slavery that created the American slave trade was only possible because African tribe lords sold their enemies to slavers. We should include in our indigenous land acknowledgements the expanded reality that the Native Americans were almost constantly at war with each other to co-opt their enemies’ land. We should openly and unapologetically trumpet the fact that the rights to abortion exist in this country because white men put it into law.

The issue with our history books is the intentional selection of facts we like and the burying of facts we don’t like. Unbury all the facts and figure out how that works because there simply has never been a black and white in the grey areas of humanity.

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That, my friends, is the weekend in foolish attention. As always thanks for taking a few minutes to read and maybe share. It’s St. Patrick’s Day this weekend so steal yourself for blatantly non-Irish people wearing stereotypical green derbys and vests, drinking themselves into oblivion, and actively ignoring the cultural appropriation in plain sight. I guess it isn’t sombreros or blackface, amiright?