Log Cabin Sundays, 6/29/2025

On Hyperfixations and Responsible Social Media Posting

I woke up this morning and started learning about the Idaho Sniper? And apparently near one of the towns where I lived there was a standoff where a man stabbed his wife, got in a shootout with police, and then (this is according to reddit and has not apparently been reported yet) blew himself up.

I was also told on Saturday night that the public lands sale was taken out of the reconciliation bill. This is a relief. It was the hyper-fixation I was experiencing regarding that that made it so very obvious I needed to take time away from the dread and doom machines.

I’ve been critiqued in the past for being silent during major world events, and still struggle about how to confront every new headline. My general policy, which I think serves me OK, is to speak up when I have something novel to say. That is, if my professional or volunteer experience gives me an angle that the average news reader hasn’t been exposed to. This means I tend to speak up more on natural resource issues, domestic violence, and sexual violence.

This helps prevent me from reposting memes or infographics that I don’t personally understand well enough to know if it’s a true or complete or exposes a deep ignorance I didn’t know I have. This policy is almost certainly flawed for reasons I will get into but it’s where I’m at now.

This started during the first Trump administration, where I was posting daily on Facebook about immigrant children being separated from their families. I couldn’t stop myself. Around this time I read Valeria Luiselli’s book Tell Me How it Ends. Luiselli is a Mexican immigrant, and in the book she goes through the 40 questions she asked children between age 6 and 17 seeking asylum from Central America and tells anecdotes that she heard in those interviews.

It’s a slim volume. But an absolutely harrowing glimpse of the byzantine American machine children and adults face when trying to escape gang violence, and how thoroughly the deck is stacked against the children who embark on this impossible exam. They’ve journeyed so far. They’ve made it to the freest and safest country on Earth (I’m told). And still it’s just beginning. One questions sticks out today, even 8 years later. “When I have to ask that seventh question, all I want to do is cover my face and ears and disappear.”

The question is: Did anything happen on your trip to the U.S. that scared you or hurt you?

The reason Luiselli doesn’t want to ask it is that 80 percent of girls and women are raped while trying to journey to the United States.

Because I was in a hyper-fixation, I read as many books as I could about the treatment of undocumented immigrants. Another one that still sticks in my head was Lucky Boy, by Shanthi Sekeran. In that fictional account a mother is abducted and detained, her small son given as a foster child to a Indian-American couple. The mother is subjected to unimaginable horrors in the American immigrant detention system. And while Lucky Boy was fiction, the stories of how the American bureaucracy treats these people were exhaustively researched and easily verifiable. Which I did, because ADHD doesn’t ask why we need to know this. It only asks for more.

Both books and more were released in 2017, and their stories were timely because they landed on shelves when the headlines felt much like they do today. Parents are violently taken from the courtrooms where they were working with immigration attorneys to be able to stay in places they now called home. In those days I don’t believe they were being taken and being put into unmarked vans by masked men with no identification, but it was bad.

It’s worse today. And I still spend a lot of time feeling hopeless and sick about it. But the part I want to talk about is the timing. These books, the ones that in 2017 made me spiral thusly:

Here's the thing about how we treat immigrants in detention centers: it's monstrous and horrible and each one of us will have to answer for it when our kids and grandkids learn how bad it is. We cannot treat human beings like this and call ourselves Judeo-Christian. We just can't. You can talk about obeying the law of the land and how we are a nation of laws and about jobs and about social security all day long and I'll have that conversation, but the treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States is obscene.

Those were about the Obama administration.

But I was only paying attention now. It was really embarrassing to me. I realized that there are people out there who knew about these things happening and were trying to tell people, but because the “right” person was in charge, it didn’t take. It was inconvenient. That’s when I decided to specialize.

You can hear more about it here, where I did my best to try to distill this into a few minutes of working through an idea on video:

howies_everythingclub

A post shared by @howies_everythingclub

This isn’t a foolproof or perfect method, and I’m trying every day to figure things out so that I’m more in harmony in my day to day life and the one I present on social media. One really glaring example of how this can backfire was during the early days of the Covid outbreak. I started speaking up a lot about that because I saw people who I thought loved and cared about me talk like they didn’t. They didn’t think it was fair that they shouldn’t be able to go to college parties and have Thanksgiving dinner. They didn’t want to wear masks on the train. They couldn’t believe they couldn’t eat in restaurants.

All of this for a few people, they asked on Facebook. Why don’t they stay home? One of those few people was me. And one of the first big co-comorbidities people started talking about in those early, very strange days, was kidney disease. And I’ve got stage three of that m-fer. When confronted with the choice of make a few minor changes so everyone can try to live as normal as possible or put the entire burden of staying safe on the already vulnerable, they chose convenience and I’m still a little hurt about it. This is why I’m not on Facebook anymore, by the way.

I realized that I had unwittingly carved out another rule to my “only speak up when I have expertise” rule. And that was “oh also speak up when this thing affects me personally even if I don’t have expertise.”

That caveat made me sound pretty selfish when I was relatively quiet during the Black Lives Matter protests (though I did attend), and it makes me look criminally silent in the face of atrocities committed against the Palestinian people. I’d shown that I’m happy to stick up for myself, even in the face of limited expertise (though definitely based on the expert advice of my nephrologists), but not for other people.

I’ve seen social media creators rightfully being called out for mobilizing so effectively against the sale of public lands, but not speaking up about the other aspects of the bill that almost certainly will lead to catastrophic consequences, especially in rural communities. It looks like we care more about our trails than we do our neighbors. I mean, of course it looks like that.

I’m writing this like I have an answer, or that I’m leading up to a big announcement about what I’m going to do going forward, but I still don’t have one. It may be my professional background talking here, but one of the early lessons I got when I became a state biologist was that we only have so many bullets in the chamber. I was told to be judicious about the kinds of things to really put myself out there to speak up for or against, because if I spoke up about every single thing, I would be easily ignored. On the other hand if I always said, “I guess this is OK,” when it wasn’t I could also be easily ignored.

“Shoot sometimes, but only when it matters or you think it would work” sounds nice in theory but is almost impossible to apply in real life, both literally and metaphorically. There are some social media accounts that I don’t pay a lot of attention to, even though I have fond feelings for the creator. And it’s because they have something to say about every single thing. And it’s not even their own opinions, it’s just vouching for another infographic. Nobody can be this informed, I think, so I start to doubt everything they post. Meanwhile I follow some experts who speak up strongly when something enters their realm of expertise, and when that happens I listen closely.

From time to time I get random comments and DMs from accounts that seem to only do this one thing, which is to say “post about Palestine.” There have been organized campaigns to target creators who don’t. When I have it’s been to boost organizations that are doing on the ground work. I like World Central Kitchen, for example. Because I don’t know what else to say that hasn’t been said yet. It seems too trite to make a post that’s oversimple, but I also don’t have the background for a deep dive.

During the last Trump administration, when I was trying to figure out what I could do, we sponsored a refugee family from Myanmar. I read up on what was going on there, which I didn’t know about but should have, and was horrified. In the years since we’ve sponsored families from Sudan, Bhutan, Afghanistan, Uganda, Venezuela, Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Nicaragua. In each of those cases I researched what was going on there, why it matters, and told our group of helpers why these people were so happy to be settled in Salt Lake City.

There are experts on each of these refugee crises who are professionally or personally hyper-focused and specialized on each of them. And they would be right to be frustrated that more people are talking about them. These are unspeakable tragedies, and yet we must speak them. The question is if Howie’s Everything Club, AKA Matt Howard, AKA a wildlife biologist with a bachelor’s degree in ecology, should be the messenger. Or are the coffee makers and laptops and Lego sets we send to a family once a year enough?

I don’t know.

In the meantime I believe I have a unique view on the checkerboard of land ownership in the Western United States, the history that got us here, the forces that are working to disrupt that, and the fibs they tell us along the way. And I have ADHD and don’t get to choose what I get obsessed with. When I’m in the midst of one of these things, it feels like I’m outside of myself watching it happen. I can’t assign morality to what engages it or not, because it feels like there’s a demon inside me deciding, and the demon also has ADHD.

I will continue to try my best but cannot promise that my best is good enough. I apologize for that.

Here’s the actual log cabin weekend log (this week I observed Saturday and Sunday)

I rested HARD this week. It finally feels like I’m recovered from the heat exhaustion and cold. I took a three hour nap on Saturday and read in the hammock for roughly that amount of time on Sunday. And good news, I got bloodwork done and it does not appear that it hurt my kidneys any more than they already were (heat exhaustion can lead to kidney failure). I’ve replaced just about everything in my wallet by now. My shoulder is still sore from falling, but all things being told, I came out of it pretty unscathed. Whew.

Going to bed on Friday I was kind of spiraling out about the future of these United States, and the world, and wildlife species and birds and open spaces. I also contemplated what my life will be like. I’ve lived for almost 46 years and have the potential to live another 46. Trying to contemplate what the next 4 decades will look like is hard to wrap my head around. Twice as much life as I’ve had so far? What am I even going to do?

Kristin pointed out that if that meant we kept going to concerts, listening to records, going on hikes, maybe traveling more as the kids grow up, and reading in the hammock, that wouldn’t be so bad. And yeah, actually? I hope that’s how it goes.

Here’s what I consumed when not using social media:

Video Games: Star Wars Outlaws (finished this one); Super Castlevania IV

Books: Colored Television, Denzy Senna

Records: Violent Femmes, S/T; AFI, Art of Drowning; They Might be Giants, Beast of Horns; Carole King, Tapestry