Wednesday, September 20, 2000

 

11:11 p.m. On the daily seesaw ... and today I was weighted down. Light as air yesterday, heavier today. Hungrier, too. Hungry as a bear and with a similar amount of self-control.

The guy in the picture is actually cooking, believe it or not. He's stirring up the lava-hot buttery maple syrup mixture that goes all over the popcorn to turn it into forbidden food. Industrial-strength forbidden food. One minute it's a light and airy piece of dry white popcorn diet food, and the next thing you know: a quick dunk and whoa boy. Calories. Fat. Hello carbo.

Tonight was the night that the George character was voted out of the TV show Big Brother. I thought the show was going to be as addicting as hot buttered popcorn, light yet gooey. But it never really caught on, for maybe a hundred different reasons. I did watch it today, however, and I watched it from the other side of the TV screen, as it was being broadcast live, in a tiny little box on my computer screen.

The George character was interesting to me because he was so clearly stressed and so clearly close to the edge. He pretended to be dumb, innocent, and fun-loving; he pretended not to be angry when he clearly was. He pretended not to be jealous, greedy, hungry. Incredibly, he tried to fool people from whom he could not hide, and most critically, he had to fool himself.

Of course his act became as tattered as his costumes. He changed his hair color almost daily, but his t-shirt almost never. He wrote "Hi Ma!" on his arm and misspelled "Ma." He never washed his hands and he handled and cooked up a lot of the food there in the glass hamster cage. He will be missed.

It's been a very odd experience in the middle of a typical afternoon to be able to watch and listen to a bunch of strange people having their own California afternoon in a house not more than an hour away from my own house. They've having the very same hours and mealtimes and pretty much the same weather, give or take twenty degrees, depending on the cloud cover. For us, an open window into the neighbor's house.

In many ways, it seems like an ideal situation. No worries about rent or mortgage or bills for three months. Brand new Ikea furniture. No radio or TV or computers. They have chickens. And they all take naps.

Yeah, ok -- so there's that odd disembodied voice that booms out of the loudspeakers every now and then, telling them that they did something wrong and that they're in trouble. But who among us doesn't supply his or her own disapproving voice throughout the day? "If you eat that Crunch 'n Munch, there will be severe consequences." "Put down the magazine, please, and resume stomping on the wet laundry in the big red tub."

My life is not so different, really. No Ikea furniture because Igor read someplace that the founder of Ikea was a Nazi sympathizer, and so we don't shop there. No $500 thousand check in another week. No chickens, of course, because they're illegal here within the city limits.

But I do take naps. And I do have that stentorian voice ...