September 4 Friday roundup

The latest podcast episode focuses on what the pushback over converting warehouses to detention camps has in common with the data center revolt. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

Today, I’ll be brief ahead of the holiday weekend and write about a topic I think of often, though I’m one hundred percent sure no one else does. It comes to mind so frequently that I was sure I’d already written about it at some point during the almost two years that have passed since I started this newsletter. But after rigorous searching, I can say that apparently no existing Degenerate Art post has addressed it. Until today.

Bear with me a moment, because I realize this will sound odd. What I think about often is what I call the question of the five-story hamburger dog. It’s not, as you might imagine, a five-story dog that likes to eat hamburger. Instead, I had the idea at the age of eight or so that it might be possible to build an enormous dog statue out of hamburger. How to do so seemed intimidating to figure out. I realized that the project would include complicated engineering challenges. It would be hard.

A few days after imagining the hamburger dog, it occurred to me that not everything difficult was automatically worth doing. I realized it was possible to pick and choose what to do, and turn down things that were uninteresting or seemed pointless. It was a mild revelation at the time, because I was a pleaser. An enthusiastic child who wanted to leap every obstacle, I probably let too much of my self-worth depend on constantly proving my intelligence or willingness to work. I didn’t want to be ignored or to seem scared to take on the labors of Hercules, should some version of them confront me in my West Virginia town.

So at the time, the hamburger dog served as a reminder that I could choose what to focus on, and pick challenges that were worth my time. Into my thirties, if I heard someone, especially a co-worker, start talking about a project that would involve a lot of work with no clear benefit, I would mentally peg it as a hamburger dog and remind friends or colleagues there might be a better use of all the time involved. Was that really what we wanted to be doing?

But once I got past forty, the hamburger dog became one of those lenticular prints that you can observe from two angles and discover alternating perspectives or even different images. I could still see my original point, but two additional positions emerged.

It struck me that I might not know in advance whether something worthwhile would come out of building the hamburger dog. There could be useful discoveries in the course of the project; the process itself might be valuable in some way I wouldn’t foresee. What if it brought a community together? What if it made some other, more significant achievement possible?

And in the last decade, I’ve begun to think that building the hamburger dog is itself sufficient. Not enough weirdness exists in the world. So much is organized by conventional expectations and demands for added value. Plenty of people analyze the world that way. But we have hardly anyone imagining building five-story dogs out of hamburger. If a strange inspiration seizes hold of you, and you feel passionate about it, my inclination would now be to encourage your eccentric creativity as much as possible.

Let me be clear—I’m not talking about financially or socially valueless projects like using taxpayers’ money to build a giant arch. The hamburger dog cannot be made through demands on others. It can only be made in happy isolation or through joyful collaboration.

Have you always wanted to design and submit a Dungeons & Dragons monster? Go for it! Have you recently realized that you can rent instruments for short periods from music stores? You could bring home a banjo! Or a baritone! Or a bassoon! Who knows what kind of music you could make with that. (For the record, I’m willing to collaborate on a song called “Five-Story Hamburger Dog”—as long as we can make it sound a little like the Fall or Dry Cleaning, because that’s how the phrase sounds in my head.)

In an age of artificial intelligence, I’m beginning to feel almost a reverence for quirkily human concoctions. The more unexpected the better.

So if you have a barbecue this Labor Day weekend or attend one, take a moment to think about your stance vis-à-vis the five-story hamburger dog, and how many patties it would take to build one. I can’t think of anything more pointless, yet worth every second of your time.

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