The Impossibility of Television

There is nothing I can watch any more.

I lie on the couch, unable to concentrate on anything longer than a Billy Collins poem.  Novels are beyond my abilities.  Where once I was able to drift along with the story line, becoming the characters, feeling their slippery shoes on an icy path, now my mind begins to wander before I turn the first page.  Sometimes I just drift into a nothing-ness of hikes gone by, flowers photographed up close and personal, road trips with the Cuters.  Sometimes I wind up in a much darker space.  Either way, neither way is conducive to finishing something longer than a page and a half. Long blog posts are beyond me as well.  Anything which requires thinking is a major stretch.

There is music all around me.  Friends and teachers and strangers and relatives have sent cd's created just especially for me.  For weeks, they sat stacked one atop the other near the stereo (how dated is that?!) blending their mixes one to another.  TBG grew tired of the clutter and moved them somewhere.  I don't know where and it really doesn't matter.  Unless I was using a quiet one to help me drift off to nap-time, I was unable to go with their flow.  My mind took me places I didn't want to go.  I needed something more active.

Active is a relative term when your orthopedist forbids bearing any weight on the hip he so graciously allowed you to take home from the hospital.  Twelve weeks from the date of the surgery.... a day sometime during the week after January 8th.  My family knows precisely when it happened, but, for me, it's all a morphine blur.  I woke up and I was repaired and I hurt and I couldn't move my leg.  Now I can actually make my knee bend without a helping hand, and KiKi, the world's most wonderful physical therapist, assures me that soon I will be able to roll over without pain.  Ah, the little things that make life grand.  For now, though, active is my fingers flying over the keyboard and my bar-dips on the walker as I hop from couch to table to car.  It's a far cry from hiking Brown Mountain, but I am not complaining.  I am here and I am healing and those are good things.  Wonderful things.  Things for which I am grateful each and every day.  But they are not real distractions, at least not for long.

So, I am left with the television.  Daddooooo watched more tv after his hip replacement than he had in his entire existence previous to that surgery.  Daytime tv was new to me, and I would sit by his side on the living room couch, watching talk shows and wondering why anyone who didn't have to look at them would voluntarily do so.  Once the 4pm movie came on we were happier, but my memories of his recovery are of the two of being snarky at a non-responsive Motorola console.  Lying on the couch, recovering myself, I laugh.  Things aren't much better 40 some years later. 

But I am not writing to complain about the paucity of terrific television.  My issue is much more personal than that.  TV is scary these days.  Grey's Anatomy and House, two of the pillars of our viewing habits prior to January 8th, are un-watchable.  IV's, bloody organs, scalpels slicing into flesh.... they are all too real for us.  The Bride tried to watch Grey's three times on her laptop while she was staying with me in the hospital; I never saw her get as far as the first commercial.  TBG has never liked the blood and gore parts, and routinely covered his eyes when the patient was rolled into the operating room.  It never bothered me.  Not one bit.  I found it interesting in an impersonal kind of way.  Now, though...........  it is much too personal, much too close to home, much too been there done that to be allowed into our living room.  Scratch 2 hours of new shows and endless hours of repeats from my schedule.

Law'n Order is broadcast every hour of every day on one of the 1000's of channels on our super-duper-deluxe-cable package.  It used to be that I could watch an episode for the 15th time and enjoy the familiarity.  Lenny, Lupo, Cragin, Chris Noth, Mariska Hargitay (did you know that her mother was Jayne Mansfield and that she was in the back seat of the car when the decapitation occurred?  Just a bit of gory trivia for you to round out this post.) ...... they made me happy in a comfortable, old shoe kind of way.  Now, though....... the bullets fly and I flinch.  The Medical Examiner discusses entry and exit wounds (this is even hard to type) and I cower.  We have given it up entirely. 

So here I was, bored to tears, Heidi in a plane on her way back to the frigid north, all caught up on my thank you notes and phone calls, sitting on the couch and looking for amusement.  Chuck!  I am one episode behind.  The series is OnDemand.  It's 44 minutes of meaningless fluff that amuses without taxing the brain.  I could reach the remote with the handy grabby-dabber the occupational therapist left with me in the hospital.  Life was good. 

That is, until the opening scene devolved into the credits, which feature a bright red bullet zipping across the screen as the actors and directors and producers were named .  I'd never noticed it til right now.  I didn't like it.  Nope, didn't like it one little bit.  Didn't like it so much that I turned off the tube and came right here to The Burrow where such things are just not allowed. 

We are a weapon-free zone, visually and mentally.  We concentrate on healing and looking forward and on the strange and unusual things that make up our polity and our families and our day to day routine.  No guns .... no blood ... nope, not here.

Thanks, denizens, for joining me in my safe haven.  I love snuggling down with you, one and all.