Why I don't want to watch The Wire.

Does anyone else feel burdened by the conveniences and entertainments of our society?  I mean, I was lying in bed once in college, reading Wordsworth or somebody (I don't like the what-do-you-call-'em, The Prelude* because, OK, I guess I'm just not mature enough for it), and... no, it was The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, I think** (which I do like)... and but so I was listening to a CD (so last century) and I had my rock posters up, or whatever kids put on their walls, and it hit me that if I turned off the music and looked out the top part of the window so all I could see was the old architecture and some trees and some sky, then suddenly all would be a lot more timeless, by which I mean I could just as easily be sitting there in 1967 or 1941 or...well, go back far enough and the Jew thing would start making the picture unrealistic, but the point is that there's a way in which the present day impinges, I think, upon, what, our humanity you could even say.

And so but don't you sometimes get that feeling where you kind of want not to want to get hooked on the television show?  (A memory that is satisfying to me all out of proportion is the time in middle school that I suddenly realized—like a leap-out-of-the-bathtub–caliber revelation—that one way to solve the school-night scheduling problem presented by Beverly Hills 90210 was to stop watching Beverly Hills 90210...)  I feel that way about The Wire, which it seems is good in much the same way Wyld Stallyns were good (universal acclaim, dancing in the streets of the cities of the world, peace among men, etc.), and I feel that way about Season 2 of Mad Men.  I don't want to like it so much that I'll have to commit to making my way through its massiveness—and it's much worse when there's no clear end in sight: I don't think I would have started watching The Sopranos on DVD, necessarily, if I hadn't known it was in its final seasons, and even then it meant kind of getting absorbed for weeks, months...  Another version is what happened with The Simpsons, which got worse and worse, just slow enough that you got stuck watching the bad ones, like the frog in the pot...you know...

This is part of the reason why I prefer movies & novels & albums to TV & magazines & radio.  I guess you could say that with the former category, you own it, and with the latter, well...I mean, yeah, doesn't it sort of own you?

But entertainment/art aside, I think I'm halfway to becoming a Luddite***: this morning my internet was down—like way down—and I felt as if my computer had been "bricked" before I thought to myself, "Jesus, I've been using a computer for almost 25 years and didn't even have an e-mail address till '96... Has it really come to this point, where an internet outage leaves me effectively stranded and helpless the way the human beings in Wall-E should have been (the way they were in the ancient MAD Magazine story that Wall-E's ripping off—er, lovingly referencing) but never really were because the movie was inadequately misanthropic****?"*****

Sometimes I imagine a world—God, listen to me—remember a world in which I didn't have a cell phone, in which leaving the house without a cell phone wasn't almost as unthinkable as leaving without a wallet, or my keys, or pants; I imagine a world in which I did not check e-mail continually all day long, in which I checked it even once a day, the way I check what we now sometimes actually call "snail mail," o-or less than that, even!—weekly, man, yowza; I imagine a world in which I never would sit in front of the computer trying to figure out what web site I should look at next (which did I mention this is one of I think the secret reasons why people look at internet porn?—just the sheer ever-replenished inexhaustibility of content?); I imagine a world in which I had more silences, more time alone with myself... and then I remember old Fromm (who used to take a break every single day to drink wine and have sex with his wife) and I begin to think, a little paranoid-Pynchon-style, that maybe the lack of quiet time is sorta–kinda the point...?  Like, maybe because being alone with ourselves is so goddamned scary in a society that's maybe lost a bit of its confidence (if not its soul), we've set our world up so that we never, ever, ever have to do it, not even for 15 seconds...

* Had to Google it just now, even—and clearly misremembered it as something plural.

** One of those moments where I feel like somebody's grandparent, holding up a whole story in order to clear up an utterly irrelevant detail: "No I'm sure she moved to Florida because I just saw Mildred last week on Tuesday, and she said... no... no, it must have been Monday, because I was coming from the doctor's and...or was that last Monday?  Hold on, it must have been two Mondays ago because she said she was going to visit her son, the orthopedist—you remember Robert—for the fourth of July, and today is...  You know, Robert.  You used to play with him after school in the backyard.  Sure you did."  I have a lot of those moments.

*** Sort of an absurd claim from someone so in love with his iPhone, but...

**** More on this later, maybe.

***** I didn't really think all of that, exactly.