The Weekend of Foolish Attention

Bit and bytes from the week

Blasting from the past. Last weekend, checking in with my buddy Joe, he texts back that he’s having a WNEP gathering at a local microbrewery. It hit me in the feels as I hadn’t really thought much about any sort of meetup of these amazing artists I had worked with and for so long ago. Sure, each one of them are a part of a shared history and I have ancient photos in frames on my wall with their much younger faces but, as a professed rolling stone, the idea that they have all aged but are still, you know, out there in the world is kind of awesome.

He sent me a picture of the gang around the table, mugging for the camera, and I was filled with great feeling. I teared up. These people are grand humans and the fact that decades later they still get together and drink booze says something about the staying power of the creative experiment. Good stuff, Joe.

A whole lotta striking going on. Yup. The autoworkers struck, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA. Oregon teachers, Las Vegas hospitality workers, Starbucks baristas, and paper mill workers in Maine. The adjunct teachers at Columbia College in Chicago have been on strike for a coupla months (now the longest strike of its kind in history) which has Joe screwed by an institution he has been dutifully serving for two decades. Also, in a Holy Shit, How You Gonna Eat? move, the faculty of Second City is threatening a strike as well. I’m suggesting that he start an OnlyFans featuring his cats and readings from sketches he’s written. Naked, of course.

My Patronus? On the phone with my buddy Bob and he pauses for a second.

“Can I read you something? I think I’ve found your patronus.”

“The Harry Potter spirit animal thing?”

“Yeah.”

He had just purchased Werner Herzog’s autobiography—Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir—and the first part of the introduction struck him.

“The original ending of my film Aguirre, the Wrath of God went like this: the raft with the conquistadors has nothing but corpses on board, and when it reaches the mouth of the Ama-zon, the only living creature on it is a speaking parrot. As the Atlantic tide pushes back against the mighty river, the parrot is incessantly screeching two words: "El Dorado, El Dorado." Then, while filming, I found a much better solution: the raft is overrun by hundreds of little monkeys, and Aguirre raves to them about his new empire.

Quite recently, I came upon another, unverified account of the historical Aguirre. Abandoned by all and having murdered his own daughter so that she isn't witness to his disgrace, he orders his last follower to shoot him. The man sets his musket against Aguirre's body and shoots him in the middle of the chest. "That was nothing," says Aguirre, and he tells the man to load again. This time the man shoots him through the heart. "That should do," says Aguirre, and he falls down dead.

I'm sure the version with the monkeys is the perfect ending for the film, but I wonder how many other possibilities, how many roads not taken, there were for me, not only in film plots and stories but in my life, roads I never took, or only took years later.”

“That’s you, dude. Herzog is your patronus. That’s how you see life. Always taking the roads no one else travels, always looking for a different ending.”

“Yup. Being overrun by monkeys seems about right.”

Money brings comfort not happiness. In a recent survey, when asked if money can buy happiness, 59% of respondents said "yes." For The Internet Generation, the share was highest at 72%.

Methinks people are mistaking being secure with happiness. It’s an easy distinction to miss but it openly ignores the natural chaos of life. Security is almost always temporary, a bank account brimming with cash is as easily decimated as it is built upon, and the ability to pay for stuff is more about our love of stuff than it is happiness or even well being.

Money is necessary but happiness comes from doing things and in another long-ranging study, the key to happiness is the people in your life rather than the things you have.

Accept impermanence. From the beginning of anything—a life, a house, a relationship—everything struggles on in a continual state of slow decay. Nothing in human experience is designed to be permanent and yet we strive so heroically and so futilely to sustain it indefinitely, as if sheer will will keep the train chugging along and if we Really Believe, we will never die.

Perhaps, if instead of fighting against this inevitable finality of things, we embraced it? The time spent with them would be brighter, more important. When people have near death experiences, they tend to go on living their days with more meaning. If you knew that today was it, the last day, that the show closes at midnight, would you waste a second on the bullshit? Would you argue about petty things? Would you make excuses for incompetence or laziness or incompleteness of purpose?

Almost too perfect in execution. The Netflix monster hit Squid Game was an allegory for the evils we each will resort to in order to gain cash. Creator Hwang Dong-hyuk describes his show as “motivated by a simple idea. We are fighting for our lives in very unequal circumstances.”

Squid Game portrays desperation and infighting among the working class participants, who all risk their lives for a massive cash prize (and the amusement of a shadowy group of billionaires behind the deadly game).

Now we have Squid Game: The Challenge which is a reality show that has real working class players vying for a massive cash prize and the amusement of the billionaires behind Netflix and, of course, us. It’s a supremely entertaining show but seems to be the exact thing Dong-hyuk was satirizing in the first place. And Netflix is going to expand it all into a Squid Game universe.

That’s the week, friends! Enjoy your week and find something more meaningful than the pursuit of wealth to move your needle, OK?