Killing time, killing dreams

Whenever I have time to kill in the afternoon, instead of doing Latin or the dishes or… Whenever I have time to kill in the afternoon, instead of doing Latin or the dishes or anything actually productive, I like to watch horrible daytime television, particularly the strange confessional world of Maury Povich.

I don’t like those hosts like Montel and Dr. Phil who try to help people, or just yell at them. I like the white-hot rush of trashy entertainment that Maury provides. In particular, I love the moment when he says “You are NOT the father,” and the guy starts jumping up and down because he doesn’t have to pay alimony, and the woman who claimed that he was, definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent her baby’s daddy collapses, crying, or maybe she runs backstage shrieking with a weird tortured resentment; that’s the sort of thing I like to watch. Sad things amuse me when they don’t personally affect me.

Which is great; the suffering of others is a long-documented source of amusement, from Jacobean revenge tragedies to American “interrogation” tactics in our creepy secret prisons for enemy combatants. It doesn’t even bother me that my amusement over people who are constantly risking paternity stops me from doing what I should be doing. What bothers me is that every time I watch the paternity test, I stop thinking and all I do is watch.

Sure, I make ironic comments if someone is in the room, but the joy of television is a passive joy, and what we all know about the passive tense is that the subject isn’t performing an action, the verb is acting upon the subject. Watching stops us from acting and we just become spectators to the world that is constructed solely for our entertainment.

The entertainment age is what we are living now, with constant and omnipresent numbers of things to distract us. We can ride a bus while listening to our iPods and never hear a word anyone says. We can text message people from anywhere and have conversations about nothing at all times. We can watch videos on commutes. We can listen to music anywhere. We don’t have to belong to the world that is around us.

This seems amazing, of course. The world sucks, so why deal with it? Make a soundtrack for yourself, or just drown out those boring people and watch “The Daily Show” and worry about your new video iPod’s battery capability. Entertain yourself. That’s the most important part.

The only problem with always-accessible entertainment is that you forget sometimes how to entertain yourself. I read a touching story a while ago in The New York Times about some guy who got rid of his Blackberry. He wrote the piece like an autopsy of a failed love affair. Something that really bothered him was his need, because of the Blackberry’s ability, to constantly check his e-mail, always, all of the time. But what caused him to crack and get rid of it was the fact that he was forgetting how to daydream.

Those little moments of his life, he wrote, that used to be composed of staring blankly out of a window or peacefully standing in a line became a ritual of e-mailing and device-using, and it was precisely those moments that he used to just daydream. When he was separated from that time to daydream, he stopped daydreaming.

It’s strange, because it doesn’t really seem like anything. Who cares if you play a video game instead of thinking about how to resolve some problem you have or where you would fly if you possessed the power of limited flight. All you’re doing is killing time, it’s just that one way you’re doing it with sweet graphics and the other way you’re doing it with your imagination, which doesn’t technically have any sort of quantitative graphic capabilities. Losing daydreaming is a weird feeling, though, isn’t it? It’s almost as if things in general become more for your entertainment than they should, like in the way you can look at some kid on Maury who doesn’t have a father and think it’s the funniest thing you have ever seen.

The Jam talked about entertainment in a distinctly British, working class, ironic way, of someone “watching the telly and thinking about their holidays” but that was in the ’80s, back when the walkman was cutting edge and a personal computer was still on the edge of the oxymoron. Now people take notes on laptops and they can watch their tellys anywhere they like and no one has holidays because this is America and we all have to work all of the time to afford all of the possessions we so desperately need to have.

I think of Plato’s cave metaphor sometimes, because I’m pretentious, and it wouldn’t be flickering images now on the walls, if you think about it. It would be movies, it would be works of art, it would be some hilarious video that you downloaded of a kid lifting leg weights and dancing and that’s what would be playing on the cave walls. And the walls would be moveable, and you could take them wherever it is you would want to go, and you wouldn’t even notice that they were walls. Nihilists believe in nothing while e-mailing kjs34@pitt.edu.