...attention...
…at what price…
“Pay attention, don’t let life go by you. Fall in love with the back of your cereal box.”
-Jerry Seinfeld-
EYES HERE
I stare at numbers on a pole, because it is exactly right now, and this is what I am doing.
Adulting is show and tell. We reverberate ourselves. I’m not even sure a collective good could be collected (or good). What can I make of an old man making money off of himself opining openly to be collected by more strangers. Is he a pokemon, a pocket monster, in the back right butt of my pants, pleading on my pleats, 5000 more subscribers might make him famous enough to stop talking?
ARE YOU TALKING TO ME?
The world we are.
The world we are to others.
The world we aren’t.
The aren’t we are to others.
Real outsiders live outside. On the street. Uncomfortably. No one is giving them any attention. They are us. Eeew I said they. Eeew I said eeew.
Our self obsession creates the cracks we fall into. We can see it, but we can’t believe it. We can watch it, but we don’t subscribe to it. We, the royal we, the exuberant weeeeeee, exist for your-I-our-eyes only.
WATCH OUT!
I pay attention. I want to be paid attention. I want a vault filled top to bottom with solid brick bars of attention. I grit gold grills with a gloating greed for attention.
Then I get it.
And I can’t do anything with it.
But I need more of it. I’m a junkie for your time. Think of all the untethered ways my new nothings could look buried in the veiny light of an infinite stranger’s sight.
“I have an attention span that’s as long as it has to be.”
-Donald Trump-
SEE THAT
Today everyone is an entrepreneur, a creator, a butcher, a baker, a candlestick maker. Turns out the barrier to entry, to making it on stage, is just becoming a computer. I can only make sense to you online. No one being physical would have made it this far.
So I lift waits. Sitting, thinking, hoping, wishing. Someday will come someday. Annie, are you ok? Tell me tomorrow. Go get your gun.
It is broad all the ways I see these streets stretch. How wicked to barely afford rent in houses made of hairspray and grease. Gauze and dowels. In my book of more men, I want less. I prefer feminine energy because I can dream, girls.
ATTENTION!
At the top of your lungs, hold your breath, count to tension. There will be an intermission if you have to take a wiz. That splash on the drain is the sound of music, man. Please hold your phone and record me while I dance. Tik tok tik tok boom.
Let’s turn off the dark. It’s good to be craveable, a Dorito told me so. This essay got 14 rewrites, you might say it’s processed, but it’s natural, my packaging promises you. I don’t want to dye (red at 40). In an era where passe is no longer passe, please passe me the chips, I need to take a dip. Mid-summer dreams while some summer whispers near next summer humming I watch last summer falling.
…ASLEEP…
I wake up. Because of course you would say that. How else can we say, did you see what I did here? Much ado about nothing, now isn’t that something.
Ghost in my machine, phantom of the operator. We have the tools to be-see-or-do anything and I just want to-do-be-seen. Psy-ops, my cyclops, these tv eyes.
“Whatever we put our attention on will grow stronger in our life.”
-Maharishi Mahesh Yogi-
HEY!
See what you’ve done here?
Applause is pixels, a thumb pressing hearts. Backstage is comments, a thumb writing words. The playbill is publish, on stage for one week. Show closes, ushers clearing the aisles, the excitement and ephemera sounds like a dumpster. A lock on a costume closet. A tiny check in the mail.
The problem with capitalism isn’t an ism, but the overlooked other ways we might pay each other. Our privilege, our talent, our understanding, our attention. All of these are worth more than a meme coin. Yet my attention pulls me towards…
$BUYMEACOFFECOIN$
“Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.”
-Jose Ortega y Gasset-
LISTEN UP
It must have been a man who wrote Adam and Eve. She comes from his rib, a phallic god going fist deep into a slit on his chest. H.R. Giger must have loved that chapter.
This essay was ribbed for our pleasure.
For all I have known, the creation of life is in a woman’s womb man. Mammi mia! How am I supposed to believe that an egg comes before a chicken? That’s a TV show. Watch me instead, I’m a TV tell.
I was always taught not to talk back, so I talk forward instead. I talk about the future. The future is eyeless, eyelids on iris, fresh blood on papyrus, eye patches on pirates.
We are our audience, playing with ourselves, for ourselves, paying ourselves, with our attention. The history of acting has always been this prostitution. I’ve said it before. I say it again.
We all end seen.
“This is the first, wildest, and wisest thing I know, that the soul exists, and that it is built entirely out of attention.”
-Mary Oliver-
…special thanks to Lee A Smart, Di Galeano, Jack Purdy & Cam Houser for giving your attention to the 14 drafts of this click-warren-beatty…thanks also to anyone who has read or listened to this point, as you can probably tell, your attention means a lot to me…below are a few things i paid attention to in recent weeks…
Best piece I have read this year 🔥📸
Your photographic eye is extraordinary. It's not just the compelling images; it's the *wide variety* of compelling images. Some folks create engaging photographic landscapes, others abstract slices of life. You do pretty much everything.
About the following: "The world we are to others. ... The world we aren’t. ... The aren’t we are to others."
I'd like to add another one, perhaps something you've touched on: "The aren't we are to *ourselves*." Who knows what lies we tell ourselves, lies that we never unpack until long after we leave this Earthly Plane?