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 ...