In which the podcaster sketches his first reactions to life without television and worries about falling off the wagon.
In which the podcaster sketches his first reactions to life without television and worries about falling off the wagon.
Richard Loranger
MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST
EPISODE 2 - WEEK 1
This is Richard Loranger and welcome to Week 1, the end of the first full week of My 12-Month Video Fast.
Okay, so – whoa. A week ago I took down my TV for a year and put up a podcast going, How will this affect me? What will happen? Will I have withdrawals? – all the while thinking, Piece of cake, I lived without a television for years (albeit decades ago), I won’t even notice it gone. And I was so wrong.
I let myself indulge in the screen of seduction, as was my habit, all the way up until June 1. I planned the final week carefully to fit in only the most essential gaming and viewing. Managed to get halfway through the third game of the Mass Effect Trilogy Legendary Edition, and even though it was my third playthrough on that one (it is such a good game), I’m a completionist so that was a bit rough to set aside. And I decided to finish rewatching the Netflix horror series Midnight Mass by Mike Flanagan, not because I needed one last scare but because that guy has been crafting stories that are complex, yes quite terrifying, and – much more impressive – deeply human. Deeply. Plus he can write a monolog like there’s no tomorrow, which, for some of his characters, there isn’t. So kudos to Flanagan – but I’m done with him for a year as well. There’s a stunning moment near the end of that series (trying hard not to spoiler) in which the entire population of a small island sings “Nearer My God to Thee,” in church choir harmony, while awaiting their fate. That rendition is still playing in my head, as it was when the show finally ended and I turned off the TV.
I’ve turned off that TV many, many times, prett’ near every night for nearly two decades, but this time I was struck by a silence that I totally didn’t expect, one that even my tinnitus couldn’t surmount. It was around midnight and my mass was over as well, and this apartment was vacuum silent [pause], a silence of finality like someone’s last breath. Okay not quite, that’s a bit much, but definitely like the void you feel when you realize that someone has stolen your beloved bicycle. Anyway I had a moment there, a stunned little shock.
I almost described that feeling like someone stealing your vial of crack, which less people might relate to and also seemed a bit much, but really it isn’t. As many of you probably know and as I probably know somewhere, watching shows and movies, like most every pleasurable activity, causes your brain to produce dopamine, our little courier of joy. And video games, not surprisingly, especially exciting ones, all the more so. Would you like to know more? Just do a search for “television addiction” and go straight to the Mayo Clinic site. And a dopamine fix, my friends, is exactly what smoking crack does, along with the whole cooking your lungs thing. Not a great tidbit to lose track of while cavalierly considering the possibility of television withdrawals.
So I’ve had a few shaky evenings this week, and I do mean that to some extent literally. Around 6 or 7 every evening my brain announces, “Hey, I’ve been working hard all day. Where’s my reward? Huh? Where is it? Where’s the reward the reward the reward the reward…” And I sort of look the other way, and I get all spaced out and jittery and unable to focus for a while. The first evening, June 1, was the worst (no surprise there). Come 7 p.m. I suddenly had to lie down – not like a nap, my favorite hobby – more like my whole body needed to stop functioning right now. So I lay sideways across my bed for half an hour or so, eyes open, foot twitching in a tic, not a thought in my head except that I couldn’t watch TV. Then just as suddenly I came to, or something, said out loud, “What am I doing,” and lay there a while longer. Several days later I’m still having little spells like that, though I’m getting better at turning my attention to activities that I do enjoy, reading or writing or working on another creative project (I always have a bunch), or maybe tasking on my business for a while, less enjoyable but I do need the work, and eventually the evening passes.
Oddly, it does feel a bit like grieving. I took away my TV and unplugged all the video components, then left them there a few days in their pile of old dust in the corner of the room, almost as if I might come to my senses and reassemble them. That’s fear in a handful of dust right there. When I finally got around to packing them up, I found myself cradling my freshly dusted Playstation 4 and thinking, all my friends are in here. Which is ridiculous, of course, but I really did think it. During the first part of sheltering from COVID – this is a flashback – I accidentally wrote a novel. Seriously. I didn’t plan to; I just picked up the beginning of a funny story and wrote for seven months. What else did I have to do? It really kind of wrote itself actually and I was just along for the ride, which was amazing. I loved the characters and the antics they got up to, which I couldn’t always predict. It probably saved my sanity. I finished the first draft that November, and found myself writing a final scene with all the core characters sitting in a diner talking about their lives, what they’d been through and what they might do next, and I explain to the reader that their lives will indeed go on, not all in the ways they might expect, but our part in the story is over, and I pull away from the scene, and say goodbye, and as I’m writing I began sobbing uncontrollably, right there at my kitchen table, unexpected, full-on wrenching sobs of grief, water-pouring-from-my-face three-boxes-of-tissue sobbing for the better part of an hour. These were my friends and I’d just spent seven months with them and no one else, sharing their strivings and conundrums and tragedies and laughing so, so much, and now they were gone and I’d never see them again. I was shocked, frankly, that a simulacrum could generate such a reaction – a simulacrum of grief, perhaps? But it did. Fascinating.
It wasn’t like that with the games and the shows, thank god, nowhere near, but they are simulacra that I’d bonded with in different ways. I don’t exactly feel close to Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard and the crew of the Normandy, but it’s a little heartbreaking that I won’t finish helping them save the galaxy again any time soon – and I’d gotten to be such a good shot. And like all watchers, I have my shows I’m currently involved with – or was. Recently they were The Handmaid’s Tale and One Piece and Evil on Paramount Plus, which blows me away with its ability to juggle several seemingly incompatible tones and work like a charm (and also with Mike Colter *sigh*) – and while I don’t feel anything like personal loss or grief over all these characters, and many others, I’d gotten used to having them around and it does feel a bit as if a thousand people in my town have died, or suddenly left or were raptured away, leaving behind that emptiness.
Okay, so clearly this is all still rather on my mind, and I’m wondering how long this withdrawal thing is going to last, how many evenings I’ll have to put up with those spaced-out jitters – and I can’t tell you how many times a day a piece of media crosses my mind and I think, Oh, I could watch tha—,” like a little punch in the gut. Which just underscores and echoes that pleasure-stim for which my poor knotted lobes are clamoring. So I guess I do have a dopamine jones:
I’ve got a dopamine jones,
got a dopamine jones,
got a dopamine jones
oh baby oo-oo-oooo…
I know how long a few other joneses last, but this one – no idea. And I’m a little worried that I’ll break down or give in and enact some public foolishness upon myself by having started this podcast. Because it’s not the first time I’ve pulled a stunt like this, and boy did the other one go sideways. And because, as they say, humiliation is best worn twice:
In 1996 I attempted to quit smoking cigarettes via performance art. No kidding. I was living in Austin and was part of this little troupe for a couple of years called Performance Art Church, or PeACh. We put on several shows a year of whatever wild shit we could think of. That fall I got completely fed up with and pissed off at my poisonous little pals, which I’d been puffing on for close to two decades, and since performance art seemed like the solution to everything in those days, I designed a piece to kick that habit. Seemed brilliant at the time. I ended up calling it “in corpus flagranter,” a Latin phrase meaning “to move flagrantly into the body.” Pardon my pronunciation as I haven’t spent much time in ancient Rome of late. I did my research and put tougher a hefty monolog (‘bout the size of this one) that started with a deconstruction of the Marlboro box – my toxin of choice – from the “P. M. Incorporated” on the top to the insignia on the front that read, veni, vidi, vici – no shit. (You won’t find those words there now. They disappeared from the packaging the week that we invaded Iraq in March 2003 – also true, and very strange timing. But I digress.) I covered how the tobacco industry basically midwifed the public relations industry into being, by hiring Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew and student, to consult on how to convince people to buy something that was bad for them (y’all know that origin story, right?), and went into all the cancers and diseases tobacco use causes. Hell, I even wrote a Gregorian chant. For the performance I put together a lovely ensemble. I stapled Marlboro boxes to every square inch of a black smoking jacket, making a Marlboro mail of sorts, and made sure there were single cigarettes in each of them. And I made a kind of morose boa by dumping two months’ worth of ashtray droppings into two clear plastic bags which I tied together and wore around my neck. It ended up having a closer resemblance to giant noxious dugs. I hacked and wheezed through that monolog while chain-smoking several cigs at once though the whole thing, which I casually dropped into a bucket of water as I lit fresh ones pulled from my jacket every minute or so. That poor audience. Eventually I asked everyone in the club to light a cigarette, which they’d received in a sealed envelope when they entered (at which point a few people walked out). I collected their cigs in the bucket as well, then stood up front in a kiddie pool, emptied the dugs in for good measure, and poured the toxic miasma over my head, face up and mouth wide open. But was it toxic enough to make me stop? I’d announced that I’d take out a personals ad in the Austin American-Statesman every Sunday until I’d not had a cigarette for two months, and I did. The ads said “in corpus flagranter” followed by a number indicating how many nails I’d smoked that week. The ad went up every week for seven months, and the number eventually went up every week as well until I finally quit the ad instead. This is the part of the story where everybody is sad.
I did manage to quit seven years and several futile attempts later, after twenty-five years of smoking, on Halloween in 2003. Curiously it was another performance piece that was the impetus. I was in Brooklyn at the time, doing another long monolog on a fancy stage (I like long monologs, can you tell?), and I couldn’t catch my goddamned breath and I couldn’t project. I was furious with myself. Two days later – done. I wore a patch for five months until I forgot to put it on one day. And that was that.
There is a little coda to this breathless tale, kind of an important one, actually, a sort of object lesson to this whole thing – or really more of an object punchline. A few months after I got off the patch, a friend took me to lunch at my favorite sushi joint in Park Slope. It was the middle of the afternoon so the place was mostly empty and we got seated and served quickly. In fact the only other customers around were a subdued man and woman in business garb at the two-top right next to us, who smiled briefly as we sat down. But they didn’t smile again, because as chance would have it, after decades of being numbed by nicotine, my taste buds came back to life that day, turned back on full blast. I loved sushi, and had no idea that I’d never really tasted it. That meal was like one long orgasm for me, a mouth orgasm and beyond, and I was not shy about expressing it. In fact I was really quite noisy – all that dopamine! – and punctuated the meal with verbal ejaculations the likes of ewwwwwww… aaaaaaaaah… oooooooo…oh fuck! and so on. My companion was trembling with amusement, I was trembling with pleasure, and that poor yuppie couple, witnesses to my ecstasy, were trembling with...something else, and seemed rather unsettled when they left. I admit it was quite a performance on my part – but wholly unintentional, and good thing I was a favored regular there. But was it performance or simply life on the planet? It was life, and it gives me hope.
It occurs to me now, in hindsight, that TV also moves in corpus flagranter, flagrantly into the body, with its own public relations and marketing and agenda streaming right behind it. Just a little food for thought there – or maybe a bucket of sodden cigarettes.
So a couple days ago I finally cleaned up that forlorn pile of video components. Got them all packed away and out of sight. At one point I found myself leaning over that coffee table and staring at a dense tangle of dust-snakes that were living back there, scratching my head and trying to figure out a way to untangle twenty or so cables while dusting them at the same time. They’re packed away now too, as is that dust and whatever ecosystem came with it. And ya know, the breathin’ in that room is just fine now. It’s real good. Feels kinda like life on the planet.
I’ve constructed a little writing desk there as planned. Actually I just flipped the coffee table on its side and put a board across the legs, which pretty much typifies my taste in interior décor and furnishings: jury-rigged detritus. Bonus points: I’ve got an extra four square feet or so of floor space now, right in front of my Victrola music box – dance party!
Lastly, there is no longer a 38 x 22” hunk of black plastic and LCD glass blocking part of my front window. I never liked its presence in my room, which felt like some kind of black hole portal (except when it was dopamining me, of course). Again unplanned, I’ve managed to make that room, my front room where I sleep and spend much of my time, more than it’s been in the fifteen years I’ve lived here, a place of air and light. Not bad for a human.
Thank you, by the way, for bearing with me while I figure out this podcast thing. I hope you’re enjoying these, and if you are please share and spread it around to other folks who might as well. And let me know what you’re thinking – critique and questions are welcomed. If you’re listening on Spotify or iTunes, consider giving it a rating. I didn’t know what to expect and I got just over twenty listeners the first week, which seems pretty cool to me. And I’d like to give a shout out to two fine folk who saw fit to put in a paid subscription, which I totally didn’t expect. So big heartfelt thanks to Jeffrey Pulis of Fort Worth, Texas, a gentleman and a scholar just for starters, and to Deborah Fruchey of Walnut Creek, California, a fabulous writer, small press publisher, and mental health maven. You both now have a place in my map of the stars.
Tune in next Sunday for another episode, in which your podcaster falls off the wagon and binges all 325 episodes of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, which he does in fact own in a nice box set.
Welcome to My 12-Month Video Fast. This has been Week 1.
Directed by Mike Flanagan.
Thank you for listening.