May 20th, 2005
Introspection and Television
Mentally, solitude is the perfect environment for introspection. Practically, television is what people do when they are in solitude. Unequivocally, this combination results in making you feel like shit.
To benchmark oneself is in man’s nature; to equate television with reality, is not. How many times have I heard people say things like, “Oh, I watch that show because I like to laugh at it.”
I don’t buy the inadvertent comedy excuse. If laughing at things that are inadvertently funny were a sustainable hobby, I would probably spend a lot more time visiting family during the holidays.
People use that as an excuse because they do not like to admit that they are actually drawn in to something that is so tortuously pop-culture because it makes them feel less special, less unique. People don’t like transitioning from being an individual to being a demographic, so they make excuses.
The truth is that people are drawn into the reality of television and they don’t even realize it - until the time they’ve spent in front of the television starts to manifest in their behavior. Like a rip tide, television pulls its victims into an ocean of popular culture and in the process, something drowns and dies.
I think what dies is your sense that you can decide for yourself what looks best on you; or what music to listen to; or who to be friends with; or who to fuck. Suddenly, you are wearing seven jeans, listening to Eminem, and trying to fuck a girl with huge fake tits.
Voila, any sense of humanity you once had is gone, and any chance for salvation along with it and I don’t mean salvation in the fucked-up crazy Christian institution sense of the word. I mean salvation in the sense of ever waking up and going through an entire day without thinking you are too fat, too ugly, and too poorly clothed.
And that ocean pulls at you. When a group of kids laughed at me for wearing white jeans, it was pulling at me. When Blake ridiculed me for quoting a line I had read in “Calvin and Hobbes,” it pulled at me. And when Dan made fun of me for holding hands with Deborah, it pulled at me.
And soon I found myself drowning.
In solitude.
Watching television.
Feeling like shit.
