Thursday, August 24, 2000

 

11:02 p.m. Ah me. Back to the real world. There is such a big letdown from spending all that emotional energy on something that's not real. When the TV is turned off, there's nothing there, you know? It's worse than being really hungry and biting off a big chaw of cotton candy. Air. Cloying taste.

Sigh. The quote real world unquote. Exchanging this pane of glass for that pane of glass. Today the cable guy actually did come by, and we're hooked up, for the time being, to almost 99 more views through the glass -- one-way views, to be sure, but lots more of them.

Tonight I watched a little of that movie with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman about witches. Both women had long woven hair and wore long, pencil-thin flowered skirts, Sandra with sneakers and Nicole with bare feet. A little of the food channel, but since I'm dieting, it's torture. I reacquainted myself with how much I dislike watching the Democrats and Republicans shout and yell at each other.

I miss my island quote friends unquote. I miss that cool conch music.

I was very happy to have a chance to watch a rerun of the last show of Dream House, a reality series from way back. It's on the HGTV channel and it's the story, week-by-week of a family who pretty much destroyed their existing house to build a bigger, better one in its place. The husband is roly-poly and stretched tighter than his bright green sweaters. The wife bursts into tears often. The kids quickly grow tired of bivouacking in one room in the middle of a pitched battle between parents and contractors.

It was fun, a couple of years ago, in a train-wreck sort of way. We were trying to live with a simple fence construction that had gotten way, way out of hand, and each week we could tune in to see people in worse trouble than us. But then, before we could see how it ended, we moved and lost touch with the cable channel, and I've always wondered how things turned out for that particular Midwestern family.

Not very well, it seems. They only lived in the completed house one year, after which semi-blissful time, two of their kids went on to college and suddenly the parents, still roly-poly and teary, were rattling around in a house that was unsurprisingly, too big. So, they sold it. They also sued the general contractor, of course. The lawsuit is still going on.

And that's another slice of another life that's not my own. At least my online journal addiction involves relatively real people. I've actually fed some of them, so I know they're real. And it's true that we, all of us, show only the good side to the camera and the screen, but sometimes the good side is the accurate one. Sometimes, it's not.

Now, that's a scary thought.

I do know that I only have a limited amount of play time in my life and lately I've been thinking about becoming a little more careful with it. When there are good books I'm not reading because I'm watching old reruns of Remington Steele, I know I'll be in trouble. For now, I think I'm ok. Geraldo's letting his hair grow a little too long in the back, but you know what? It's not my problem.

I can still turn off the TV, all 99 channels of it. (It's not really off, you know. They don't go off anymore. They're on a sort of permanent standby, monitoring our thoughts, scary and benign.

The plot of my new novel? That's my problem. And I can quote unquote me.