Coincidentally and with apt timing, my plan for this blog has just been symbolised by the last two things I looked at on telly,just as my fingers hovered over the keys and my eyes scrutinised the blank rectangle on my laptop. The first was a trailer for a forthcoming series of documentaries on 9/11. The second was Ozzy Osbourne in the passenger seat of a motorhome, eating a crate of ice-cream.
When I'm not working and when I'm not undertaking mundane domestic duties and when I'm not worrying about people I care about, I indulge myself in some form of escapism. Meaning, that when the soiled underpants of Modern Life afford me some respite, the last thing I wish to do is entertain myself by pulling those pants back over my head and sniffing. Which is what most TV entertainment amounts to.
I've given up watching the news. Disingenuously, it always starts and ends with a smile, a deliberate shit sandwich in which the filling would be better introduced as, 'Look at how shit life was today, somewhere'. The grim spawns of the news are all those documentary shows, hundreds of them, which present in more depth the many iniquities of humankind and the plethora of tragedies that inflict themselves upon us. Yes, yes, that's all very sad or despicable and yes we should be aware and try to do something to help, etcetera, etcetera… but for fuck's sake, why are we saturated with so much gloom. Both on TV and through social media. And people soak it up, like kitchen towel in a puddle of rancid sewage.
I know I'm courting the accusation of burying my head in the sand (rather than in the aforementioned metaphorical underpants) and my excuse is not just that the view is so much better down there, but that choosing to remind myself that modern life is rubbish won't prompt me to do anything about it. That sounds callous. It's not. I work in a school where 70% of students are officially 'disadvantaged' (by income, not by the cruel twist of fate that put me in charge of them) and I support a family, which very often really needs my support. And outside of that, I try to avoid harming people (though I am happy to annoy or upset them if they deserve it). If everyone did similar things in life, then there wouldn't be so much grim reality being paraded before us on telly, because reality would be considerably less shit.
Which brings me back to Ozzy Osbourne eating a crate of ice-cream as his kids drive him around the USA on a road-trip that is pure bloody escapist entertainment and a reminder that THIS is the kind of thing we should aspire to doing, rather than wallowing in the mire of misery that we can't solve by simply wallowing in it, wringing our hands, damning others left right and centre for causing it, allowing it or ignoring it and by adding to our own caravan of gloom.
Pause... now a hospital documentary has appeared on the telly. A man is groaning in pain. My wife has elected to watch this for some reason beyond the realms of my comprehension. If you were in a hospital room full of people groaning in pain, you'd want to get the fuck out, wouldn't you, not watch and listen with interest? Life's got enough of a miserable stench to it, without doing your pits with Lynx Dogshit while you contemplate Life's miseries as a form of relaxation. What I find is needed is Air Freshener, escapism, something to form a contrast, a distraction, a buffer, something that is not JUST MORE REALITY.
Hence my guiltless indulgence in frivolity, fantasy, trivia, self-amusement, nostalgia, absurdity, nonsense - anything that can act as an opium against the churning malaise of modern life.
That is all. As you were.
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