I Have A TV

This is going to be one of those posts that I put up where I lack the energy to check if I've already written this all before. So if I have, I apologize.

I have a tv. I've had a tv, actually, for a week. But now I have cable too. I have both a tv and cable and I set up the remote control so that I can flip happily through my 64 channels.

For about five years I haven't had a tv, and I haven't had a tv of my own, as opposed to a roommate-owned and -controlled tv, for almost ten years. But now I have one and it nestles sweetly on my nightstand and on Friday night I will be watching the Lakers play the Hornets on KCal if it's not showing on one of the national channels.

So there was one year when I had a tv of my own, and it heavily influenced my decision not to get a tv for a long time after that because I watched tv all the goddamn time. I realized that Magnum P.I. was really a quality show and that Northern Exposure was just as quirkily charming as I had been told back in 1992 or whatever. (I didn't have a tv during my formative years, which is probably why somebody described me as funky today.)

Anyway, I would lie there in this small town in Colorado and I wouldn't go walk along the Purgatory River and I wouldn't hike up into the hills and all that; I would lie on my stomach in my living room and watch Angela Lansbury solve the crime once again. Which seemed, later, like a waste of time. Time was passing and I was getting older and golden opportunity was fucking fleeting and I shouldn't have been watching tv.

So I ditched the tv.

But now it's back. It's back because I guess I'm older and I think I'll miss opportunities one way or another and there are going to be lots and lots of times when I will lack that critical ability to live life to the fullest, you know? But I will still be bored and want to be entertained. And now I have a machine that can make that happen.

Buying a tv is accepting the limitations of human life.

One Of My Problems With Watching TV

A while ago, Noko Marie wrote this post on wanting actual narrative resolution. And I feel like that's part of my problem with watching tv.

See, the kind of tv that I would naturally gravitate toward is fictional, involving people and their problems and the resolution thereof. The kind of thing you most often find in series television, I guess. The History Channel, the Discovery Channel: if they're on and other people are around I can watch them and be amused by them. On my own I'm not going to think they have a lot to offer. But the whole thing about series television is that it's geared up not to give you any resolution -- it's not supposed to end, things just keep happening. The characters may get some temporary resolution at the end of one episode, but the next week something's going to happen to screw up that balance.

I hate that. I get so frustrated. I want to know what happens, where it ends, what the final resolution is.

To be honest, I want a kind of resolution that doesn't really come with the real-life territory. I want real-life plus; I want a happy ending. I'm willing to settle for a less-happy ending, but I want it to matter.

So if I watch one episode of a show, I want to watch all the episodes until the final one right then and there. And I don't want that final episode to be just some kind of review of what already happened; I want it to solve things.

Watching sports on tv actually is probably the most satisfying thing going, narratively. Because you know the season will end, and you know somebody will win or lose, and within each game there's a resolution. I think that's right, anyway.

Sports or, I guess, those movies on the Disney Channel, where a kid learns to windsurf and recovers from his parent's divorce all in one hour and a half package.

Misery Is Normal. They Should Write It In The Sky.

I was reading the paper version of The NY Times last Sunday, and they have a new little feature where they put in a couple of reader comments on the editorial page. Some of these comments were about an opinion piece I hadn't read by Judith Warner, "Helicopter Parenting Turns Deadly."

Warner's discussing the unbelievable series of events that happened recently when some parents of a former friend of a 13 year-old pretended to be a Cute Guy on Myspace. The "Cute Guy" made like he liked this 13 year-old, then turned on her suddenly, and the 13-year old killed herself. Like everyone else, I was like, "Parents did this? Adults??"

Warner argues that the main thing going on here is "parents too involved in kids' lives." One of the commenters -- one who was quoted in the paper Times -- said something I thought was kind of astute, that parents these days, having been through therapy, and having talked with one another about how painful it is to grow up, simply can't bear to put their kids through the same experiences.

Indeed, the parents in this case were getting revenge on behalf of their own daughter, who they thought was mistreated by the 13 year-old girl -- who had sort of stopped being friends with her or something.

Insane, but you can see how this happens. We've created this crazy optimistic cultural space these days: You can be anything you want! Achieve anything you want! You're special and great! Everything is possible and you are totally free.

If that's the basic idea you're operating with, then watching your kid suffer from failure and loneliness is going to be a killer.

Thinking about this reminded me of the Times story two weeks ago, about how Sesame Street DVDs of old shows are coming with a warning: "These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child."

Yep. Oscar was grouchy; Bert was mildly neurotic and maybe had a little OCD. No one believed Big Bird when he described seeing the Snuffleupagus. Cookie Monster was a one-dimensional addict. And on "Monsterpiece Theater" Alistair Cookie smokes a pipe and then eats it.

But as Virginia Heffernan says in the Times, there was something awesome about all these screwy things.

"People on 'Sesame Street,'" she writes, "had limited possibilities and fixed identities, and (the best part) you weren’t expected to change much. The harshness of existence was a given, and no one was proposing that numbers and letters would lead you 'out' of your inner city to Elysian suburbs. Instead, 'Sesame Street' suggested that learning might merely make our days more bearable, more interesting, funnier. It encouraged us, above all, to be nice to our neighbors and to cultivate the safer pleasures that take the edge off — taking baths, eating cookies, reading. Don’t tell the kids."

Man, reading that makes the 70's seem so far away.

I'm just the right age to have encountered these early episodes as they were rolling off the rack. And it's impossible to really look back, but I remember just this feeling watching Sesame Street. Oh, yeah, everyone has the same problems. They get bored. Antsy. Mad at each other. Sometimes like Ernie and Bert they live in basement apartments.

Two things on Sesame Street upset me a lot when I was little. One was the guy with the cakes falling down the stairs after the counting sequences. I don't really remember it but my mom tells me I used to cry and she had to change the channel. Eventually I understood it was faked.

The other was a long sort of video just showing a single drop of water going down a plant stem while some quiet, slow, guitar music played. That music made me feel so depressed and sorrowful. I can still hear it in my minds' ear, and it still makes me feel that way. When that came on I was a little older and I changed the channel myself. That one I never grew out of.

Anyway, it was all very reassuring. There's a great comic by the artist and author Lynda Barry about feeling shitty about her teenage love life, and only realizing later that everyone's teenage love life feels shitty. She says something like, "They should write it in the sky, so everyone would know, and wouldn't feel so bad."

Look at that great picture of Ernie and Bert! If this isn't two imperfect people enjoying some of the simpler pleasures in life, I don't know what is.