Still Thinking

Dear Senior Burns, I lost my faith in the power of words a long time ago.  People who play music are allowed to sit on their own porch and enjoy the guitar. Photographers are allowed to take photographs they show nobody. Painters apply to canvas and stash them or give them away fine and willy nilly. But to write words means to make money. Words are not to be enjoyed, they are to be monetized. That's the modern ethos. Words are to be bound and sold. If not, they are worthless. Leaves on autumn grounds to be walked over or thrown away. I've tried to fight this ethos at every bend in the road. And, man, it's an uphill battle. Too few believe in the value of words anymore. Words as morsels of life is a bygone notion.  Would you believe, Senior Burns, that writing this nonsense to you right here actually rekindled my love for words again? More than anything else in years. How silly is that? How small must I be to find pleasure in something so simple? We're not doing anything...

Dear Senior Burns, I despaired recently upon learning these posts reached a wider audience than the intended none. Truly, I believed we were alone here -- just me and you, Senior Burns, slavering at words like a meat-head pumping iron in a mirror. The only problem, keeping with the metaphor, I forgot that the internet is a giant Gold's Gym: mirrors impinge from all sides. Truly again, Senior Burns, we are not alone. My responsive choice became to either abandon or embrace the available space -- public mirrors and all. As you can see, I've chosen the latter, typing furiously as veins press the edges of my strained neck like prank-snakes in a pillow case. That final metaphor got lost. Here be the dietary bits I relished over Spring Break -- morsels that I cannot fathom anyone else giving a whipless dollop about. WORDS: I polished off Stephen King's 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption in two sittings, fully convinced by the end that Andy Dufresne's pa...

Dear Senior Burns, I just now "finished reading" what surely will be the best book I read in 2021, unless I manage to read the entire Bible or the Oxford English Dictionary by December 31. Much could and should be said about Jenny Odell's How To Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy , and much will be written to you in future letters. But, for now, I want to appreciate it, to let Odell seep into my sponginess and solidify something that's long hoped for such resistance.  Simply disengaging from the attention economy proves insufficient -- to self or beyond. Another action must take its place. In this way, Odell's resistance mirrors the difference between abstinence and sobriety: abstinence suggests a stretch of intentional dryness, but sobriety reveals a redirecting and repurposing of the very thirst -- reasons for thirst? -- that eroded a life of its meaning. So Odell calls to more than disengagement, which I can dig. (Again, more on this later.) I should ...

Dear Senior Burns, As my age increases, my hierarchy of needs appears to decrease. The only exceptions to this being length of sleep and tasks for bodily maintenance: this old boat feels brittle at best, chipped and taking on water as the horizon rises evermore above my line of sight. But that's Brother Ass talking.  The body -- its span resembling a singular natural rotation: sun-pulled orbit, lunar year, bloom to bake to bushel and back to barren beds -- rises and sets. We know this, cognitively, but each body shocks to the sensation of its own setting. Perhaps God graces us with contentment for less as our energy also lessens.  Ironically, as my requirements of contentment decrease, curiosity grows. The great curse of youth is its lack of recognition -- youth cannot recognize itself. One can only appreciate certain lights as they fade. So it goes. So it ever shall.  While walking my pugs tonight (a routine I take for granted), I counted the matters that give me the mos...

Dear Senior Burns, My brain pan is full. Total bottle-necked. Words and tunes and even the color palettes from Archie comic books. Jack White said his brain was "pancake batter". Mine feels like something that needs a good wringing. And that's what I'm doing here: wringing for the spending. You might hear more from me in the weeks to come. I'm working on a thing -- or half a dozen things -- but I'm too mentally impacted to whittle down the particular notions. Thanks for the space, Burns.  NIKKI AND ALICE Imagine my shame yesterday upon realizing I am reading Alice Walker and Nikki Giovanni in the month of February. Not planned! No calendar agenda! After reading three of Giovanni's poetry collections last year,  Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement on My First Twenty-Five Years of Being a Black Poet  (1971) -- an actual prose anthology -- hit the top of my 2021 list. And then, to celebrate Alice Walker's birthday on February 9, I went to my sh...