The Fluffbucket Diaries

Obama will address the nation at 5 p.m. Eastern today. I consider that appointment viewing.

Somebody joked on Twitter that the White House immediately scheduled a news conference for 4:55 p.m. That may well be true.

There’s an anti-racism and anti-police protest in my leafy, suburban, and largely white town. The husband biked over there after finding out the city asked businesses to close and board up around 3 p.m.

He saw maybe a couple of hundred people. I asked if he spotted any actual people of color, and perhaps firearms. Yes to people of color, no to firearms. There was one white kid who tried to stir things up with cops, yelling “Fuck the police!” or whatever, but Chris says he was mocked.

I appreciate those who sincerely mean well in speaking up. But I’m having a hard time not being cynical. I read the law-and-order posts from the residents who ask why the cops and National Guard can’t show up and shoot looters on site. I see the occasional quizzical look at me at school functions. It’s hard not to be jaded, even with video that Chris texts me of people honking in support of this quaint crowd of people lining a main artery of our town.

That said, most of the protesters appear to be kids of different colors, probably from the local high school and/or liberal arts college. Some of them probably have parents who whine about law and order on Facebook; doesn’t have to mean they do. Nobody appears to have guns, nobody’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt. They hold signs that say “Justice 4 George” and “White people, do something.”

I don’t know. Maybe there’s hope. As long as looting, agitating trolls don’t come out after dusk.

Talked on the phone this morning with my colleague, an African-American woman and mother of three grown children. Wanted to see how she was doing. She described a jumble of emotions and pain and weariness – and fear for her children, particularly her two sons. That tore my heart out.

And all I could tell her was that I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be the mother of African-American men in this day and age. I can’t even imagine.

Meanwhile, we have a president who has peaceful protesters tear-gassed out of the way so he can have a photo op in front of a church, waving a Bible.

I’ll have what they’re having.

O/H on the local town’s Facebook “news and comments” page, about folks allegedly looting a local Kohl’s: “Can‘t police just shoot them?”

This is why I don’t necessarily want to get to know my neighbors.

My day today. Good thing I can plug the personal laptop into the office monitors. I think I’ve finally decided where to put the recliner I’ve been wanting.

(On the right: “The Art of Letting Go,” Mina Kimes' article on the KBO.)

Good morning. Everything hurts. Physically and otherwise.

Very happy to see this statement on the death of George Floyd from top leaders of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, including Auxiliary Bp. Joseph Perry of Chicago, one of the highest-ranking African-Americans in the Church.

For what it’s worth, Bp. Perry is one of my favorite church leaders. He’s a liturgical traditionalist and a fine advocate for African-Americans in the Church. My everyday rosary was blessed by him at St. John Cantius parish in Chicago about two decades ago. God bless him.

Our next-door neighbor, a King James Version-only fundamentalist, mows her grass twice a week. When we moved in, her two biggest concerns were (1) whether we were saved, and (2) how we kept up our yards.

I really hope for her sake that her little patch of heaven has a lawn.

Angry. Horrified. Beginning to lose faith in a lot of things.

Trying to find a way to be engaged in the world without giving into the compulsion to hide from it. I was only 2 years old in 1968, but I’m beginning to suspect this year will make that time look like a picnic.

“Semi-urgent” colonoscopy scheduled for late next month. (That’s as early as I can get it during this New Normal business.) Now reading up on this prep business; my colon already is recoiling in horror.

“Cackling old sea hag” suits me well.

I need to find a way to nod off discreetly during video conference calls.

“More people are more online right now than at any point in human history, and experts say the Internet has gotten only more flooded since 2016 with bad information.”

This is why I can’t hear Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” without thinking about burritos.

Tired.

October 11, 1984. Not my best work on the college newspaper. But I enjoyed the opportunity to vent.

Reading How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell and enjoying it immensely. (It was one of President Obama’s favorite books of 2019. I miss having a president who reads.)

How to Do Nothing is less a manifesto on laziness and more a call to re-evaluate the cult of productivity and what I would call the tyranny of distraction posed by corporate social media.

The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.

One thing Odell laments is the lack of context provided when people bark opinions and “facts” at one another in a state of constant distraction, not only benefiting corporate social media, but feeding the cult of “personal branding.”

… the villain here is not necessarily the Internet, or even the idea of social media; it is the invasive logic of commercial social media and its financial incentive to keep us in a profitable state of anxiety, envy, and distraction. It is furthermore the cult of individuality and personal branding that grow out of such platforms and affect the way we think about our offline selves and the places where we actually live. …

I see people caught up not just in notifications but in a mythology of productivity and progress, unable not only to rest but simply to see where they are. And during the summer that I wrote this, I saw a catastrophic wildfire without end. This place, just as much as the place where you are now, is calling out to be heard. I think we should listen. …

To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one’s career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual. …

The first half of “doing nothing” is about disengaging from the attention economy; the other half is about reengaging with something else. That “something else” is nothing less than time and space, a possibility only once we meet each other there on the level of attention. …

Ultimately, I argue for a view of the self and of identity that is the opposite of the personal brand: an unstable, shapeshifting thing determined by interactions with others and with different kinds of places.

Odell issues a lovely call for nuance, context, and attention away from the “attention economy” that encourages the toxic back-and-forth on Facebook and Twitter, which these companies regard as merely a “bounteous uptick in engagement.”

Just as a series of rooms are dissolved into one big “situation,” instantaneity flattens past, present, and future into a constant, amnesiac present. The order of events, so important for understanding anything, gets drowned out by a constant alarm bell. …

As the attention economy profits from keeping us trapped in a fearful present, we risk blindness to historical context at the same time that our attention is ripped from the physical reality of our surroundings.

It’s a cruel irony that the platforms on which we encounter and speak about these issues are simultaneously profiting from a collapse of context that keeps us from being able to think straight. This is where I think the idea of “doing nothing” can be of the most help. For me, doing nothing means disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework.

There’s too much great food for thought here, and I’m still reading it. (I recommend you do the same, viewing these snippets in their proper context.) It helps me to jot down notes here (as is the function of a commonplace book, which is part of the point of this site) and think about it all.

There is a Bob Ross feed on Twitch. My holiday weekend is complete.

An evening fire and a couple of s’mores with family make up for a lot.

On Day 2 of a three-day holiday weekend. A hot, humid day. A Pokemon Go community day drive through downtown Elmhurst and the local college campus sufficed as our Sunday drive. Now trying to relax with a KBO rerun (Hanwha Eagles vs. NC Dinos) in an air-conditioned home office with the fan on. And a gulp of Tramadol.

Cramped up this morning. Had a tankard of turmeric tea in an effort to avoid taking Tramadol unless I absolutely have to, then took a dose of Miralax per the gastro nurse’s urging last week. Neither seems to be helping. Reaching for the Tramadol (despite the constipation side effect) shortly.