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 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 ...