Television Has Destroyed My Brain
Greetings all, Steve here. Well, I’ve just spent 5 days with the flu and I did almost nothing except watch t.v. I watched a lot of t.v. An enormous amount of t.v. Far Too much t.v. Innitially I was kind of thinking of it like an enforced vacation: As long as I was off work, I may as well enjoy myself. I started out watching movies, but after a couple of days I ran out and had to switch to straight old t.v. It seems like t.v. is getting worse. I mean, it was never a medium overloaded with quality entertainment, but Gilligan’s Island looks like friggin’ Shakespeare compared to Survivor. All I want is a little truth in advertising. If they advertise something as dangerous, it should deliver, that’s all I want. That’s why I’m calling next year for Survivor: Newark.
Anyway, after a while, I started to wonder how many brain cells I’d killed over those days and, although I have no strict scientific way of measuring this, my feeling is that I would have done about the same amount of damage if I’d spent the week smoking crack and reading the Inquirer. They say when it comes to mental faculties it’s use it or loose it. Well, if that’s the case, it’s gonna take me 6 weeks to get my brain working again, because I’d say on about Day 3 my cerebelum decided that there really wasn’t much going on and went on vacation.
To pass the time, I started searching for a metaphor to describe my situation…and then…it came to me. Ironically, it came to me from the very device responsible for taking away my mental capabilities. My grey matter had gone puce, degraded to the point where, ashamed though I am to say it, I actually watched, and moderately enjoyed, Starship Troopers, or 90210 Goes To War. The book was actually quite good and I thought maybe the movie, though bottom of the barrel popcorn fare, might have retained some of the substance of the original. It didn’t. About an hour into it, the metaphor was given to me. The veteran grizzled Lieutenant peers into the hole in someone’s skull after it was attacked by a giant bug and says, sagely, “It sucked his brains out.” Yup, that pretty much covers it.