Still Thinking

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...

After success with The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973), William Friedkin coolly requested $15 million (over the $2.5 million offered) to film two trucks hauling dynamite across a South American jungle. Friedkin’s problem was that this pitch -- truck, dynamite, jungle -- provided his entire plot. Whereas The French Connection offered a gritty crime-thriller with epic car chases, and The Exorcist argued for Christian faith over scientific reasoning (with pea-soup projectiles to spare), Friedkin’s poorly titled Sorcerer (1977) explored little more than classic man-in-conflict scenarios. He eventually won (and exceeded) his budget for a project that failed to earn $6 million in box offices and panned in the press. Friedkin contends that Star Wars’ premiere a month prior overshadowed Sorcerer, making it the flop that nearly ended his career. However, Sorcerer recently garnered praise as an overlooked masterpiece. Surely, Friedkin captured viscerally intense naturalis...

Two conversational topics, we are told, should never enter the work-place: religion and politics. You might as well add to that list “mortality” -- people work too hard making a living to be reminded of their death. We don’t talk about these things because they get sticky. After all, we might disagree. We might have varying opinions. You might want to give more weight to something than I want to give weight to it. What happens when the weight you feel outweighs the weight I don’t feel? See? It’s too tricky. We might even decide we don’t like each other as much as we thought we did when we both agreed that all these schmucks ruin their black coffee with vanilla flavored liquid PVC. Man, those were the days! Back when you and I agreed on what mattered most! Pure black coffee without the frou-frou nonsense! But that all had to get spoiled when I found out you think / believe / want / pray (or don’t) for and to ______________. And now my coffee doesn’t taste the same around you. My coffee...

I studied the Russian language in college. The Spanish and French classes were more popular, so I chose the language class with the fewest number of students. That would be Russian. My teacher was a little spit-fire from Moscow named Irene Trofimova. I loved her. She hated me. She called me “Kee-van” and told me frequently, “You vill go into the vorld, and you vill die.” One day, when only the two of us attended class, she said to me, “Kee-van, vhat is this vord, this ‘hanging-out’”. As she said the word, she threw her hands in front of herself like a farmer sowing seed. I said, “It just means to spend time together. Like you and me, right now, we are ‘hanging out’”. She blushed and waved her hands in the air. “Stop it, Kee-van. Don’t say such things!” I asked where she had heard this phrase - this “hanging out”. After more blushing and hand-waving, she finally said she’d heard it in a movie. A prostitute had said it to a client. She invited him to more prostituting. They could “hang ...

I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between The World And Me in the fall of 2016 and rejected both the text and its author. Coates’s tone felt too venomous to be constructive, roiling with an anger that frightened me, that set my hackles on the defensive. I much preferred the measured and cool voice of James Baldwin, whose anger translated into something far more cerebral, less poetic and visceral. Coates wrote from the heart. He opened his jugular ink well and released the terror held in his Black American body. The fact that Coates, like James Baldwin in The Fire Next Time , wrote his book as an instruction manual for a teenage boy on navigating the American experience shocked me all the more. It was too violent. Too reactionary. I highlighted one particular episode, somewhere towards the middle of the book, of Coates sharing beers on a New York City rooftop with friends as they watched the smoke from the Twin Towers rise. He explained his inability to feel sorrow for first responders on th...

I am haunted by a party I attended three years ago. For his birthday, my friend Jeremy hosted a Lip-Sync Battle that, for two years straight, made me laugh liquor through my nose hairs. Laughing booze through the nose hurts, but I did not regret it. What I do regret, and what haunts me to this day, is not jumping into one particular performance when the audio-track pooped out. During a captivating sign-language interpretation of DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand” by my lovely friend, Jen, the song simply stopped in the third verse, right about the time that “she had opened up the buttons on her shirt so far, I guess that’s why I didn’t notice that police car”. Everyone in the room moaned in disappointment while Jen shrugged her shoulders and sat down. As equally sad, I could have jumped alongside Jen and rapped -- pitifully so -- the entirety of that third verse so she could complete her sign-language Lip-Sync. Why I did not come to my friend’s aid st...