Slave to the Rhythm

I have a problem with television. It's terrible. There's nothing on. Yet I can't ever seem to turn it off. And it's not like really I watch. It's just white noise in the background, or if my eyes are on the screen, I'm not quite paying attention. There are exceptions, of course, but it's frustrating that the first thing I do when I get home is flip on the TV. I'll occasionally turn on some music (more so now that my lovely got me a sweet iPod Sound Dock for Christmas), but my first impulse is "See what's on." Like I'll miss some freakin' awesome show about ... you know, some freakin' ... awesome ... thing. There are a few shows we watch, sure, but there are also nights where we flip channels endlessly trying to find something of passable interest to watch.

Baseball season is another matter, however. Because we are currently in the barren wasteland that is the off season, y'all have been spared my going on and on about the Red Sox starting rotation or the Manny situation, but rest assured, pitchers and catchers report one month for tomorrow - and, no joke, I got all giddy when I wrote that – so Sox posts are on their way! Anyway, during baseball season, the TV is tuned to baseball all the time and all is right with the world.

Yet I love the nights where we have something going on - we're talking or we have friends over or we just want to listen to music and hang on the couch - and turn the TV off. I love that moment where the decision is made that this moment is more interesting than anything on that screen so let's turn it off and continue, uninterrupted.

We had a good friend, who we hadn't seen in a month or so, over Friday night. We usually find our way into interesting and wide ranging conversations whenever we get together, or we can also find ourselves watching some exceptionally bad movie (and have a grand old time doing that), but this is about a night we turned the TV off and just talked. There was no complaining about this, that or the third, as my friend likes to say, a trap that we can sometimes easily fall into. We wandered a great, wide stretch of highway, making many detours. Work, travel, books, movies, acting, directing, wine, baseball, relationships, politics, thoughts, questions, beliefs, outlooks. You know, Life crammed into three and a half hours.

It seems ridiculous that one of the things I need to remind myself about as I try to expand my circles of solace, interests and pursuits is to watch less TV. It’s a creature comfort and I’m trying to not be as comfortable anymore. Whether it’s for a few hours, a night, maybe a week, whatever, but if it makes me pick up a book, a pen or a sketchbook at least I’ll do something more creative than watch a Seinfeld episode for the fifth or sixth time.