Tag Archives: drama

It’s all been done…

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The Emmys were handed out last night. My relationship with awards shows is indifferent a best, so the only reason I happen to know this is because the fact is nearly impossible to miss online this morning.

All the shows that won have precisely one thing in common – I’ve never watched any of them. In fact, of all the shows nominated across every category, I’ve seen at least one episode of two of them; Better Call Saul in its first season and Saturday Night Live sometime in excess of two decades ago. 

I can’t exactly put my finger on when I stopped being interested in current pop culture, but here we are. I can’t remember what the last fresh new show I sat down to watch is. I discount House of the Dragon, since it’s set in a universe I’ve already been in for 10 years. For the most part, I’m happy enough re-watching any of 20 or 30 favorite shows or leaving the television parked on Sky News or BBC and a combination of the History Channel, Discovery, National Geographic, and Animal Planet. I don’t expect I’ll get exposure to any of the cool new dramas or comedies there. I’m ok with that.

Aside from an occasional obsession with new technology, I’ve never been the guy who was all that interested in keeping up. Give me the tried and comfortable any day. Besides, from what little I’ve seen of smart new television, we’ve run out of new stories to tell because it’s all been done before. 

I can vaguebook with the best of them…

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It may not always be obvious, but I’ve spent a lot of time simplifying my life. With the exception of time spent working for wages, I do what I want, when I want to do it. I know my own mind and have things here ordered in just the way I like them. There’s very little now that catches me by surprise or off my guard. It is a remarkably peaceful way to get through life.

If you’re trying to fit into this little world of mine, though, there’s a singular catch: The amount of drama you bring can’t outweigh the overall level of improvement your presence brings to my life. Having spent two decades putting the bits and pieces in order, if your presence causes more stress than happiness, I don’t have time for it.

I’ve become something of an expert at excising the extraneous stress and drama from my life every bit as completely as the surgeon cutting out cancer. It is, to borrow a phrase, the sort of bloody nonsense up with which I will not put.

I’ll freely admit where I’ve been wrong. I’ll apologize for whatever shortcomings there may have been. I won’t, however, go about wearing eternal ashes and sackcloth. If that’s not sufficient, good luck on your journey and you go with my blessing.

The vine and fig…

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It occurs to me that part of the reason weekends are so much better than weekdays is I pay virtually no attention to the news on Saturday or Sunday. Of course I catch bits in dribs and drabs from Facebook posts, whatever is trending on Twitter, or what the BBC pushes out in alerts, but I don’t make a conscious effort to seek out news during those 48 hours blocks.

Maybe some would say it makes me a bad citizen, but it makes me a more sane human being. It’s probably worth the trade off. I think I’ll continue trying to keep the shitshow of events entirely outside my own sphere of influence confined to the 5 days of the week that are already dicked up by other factors. Two days of willful disengagement out of seven days in a week don’t feel like an outrageously big ask. 

I’m left to wonder if we might not all be better off if everyone spent more time tending to the things that are within their own span of control and less tuned in to Big Events over which no one has any real control. It’s a pipe dream, of course. There are too many people too tied in who seem like they might just get off on soaking in the drama. 

As for me and mine, we’ll double down and take a page from General Washington to increasingly strive to be the kind of man who seeks mainly to  “sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

Enclosed spaces…

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The world is currently in the grips of a minor fascination with the rescue of a Thai soccer team that managed to get themselves trapped in a cave. The situation feels ripe for a comment about going considerably out of our way to prevent Darwin from protecting the gene pool, but I’ll let that go for now.

Maybe I’ve just led a charmed life, but I can’t remember a single time when I looked at a hole in the earth and thought, “Self, what you need to do is grab a flashlight and climb down.” That’s especially true when I have no special knowledge, skills, or abilities that would in any way prepare me for leading or participating in such an activity. Hell, I mean I don’t particularly like being in a small room – in a building above ground. While my record of doing dumb shit as a kid is not spotless, we managed to keep away from the biggies – like falling down a well or getting trapped in a flooded cave. There but for the grace? Maybe, but it also feels like maybe they were not paying nearly enough attention to the quiet voice of self preservation.

It is well that the latest global human interest story seems to be trundling towards its end, but it hasn’t yet answered the question about why anyone thought dragging a bunch of kids into an enclosed space was a good idea in the first place.

The Crown…

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I’m an unreconstructed anglophile. I like the Brits for their humor, their television, and their food. I like them for clinging to aristocratic pretense and the trappings of monarchy
long after it’s supposedly gone out of favor. I like them for their sense of history and place.
I like them for their stiff upper lip and determination in the face of crisis. I like them for
the-crown-season-2-770x433.jpgthe single fact that England is a place and that almost everything I hold dear here in its former colony can draw a line, whether direct or indirect, back to that small island in the North Atlantic. I like the fact that England is.

I watch a fair amount of British television and though I won’t claim to like it all, they have a better hit percentage for my viewing time than most of what’s made here in the states. Last weekend, I may have binge watched my way through the first season of The Crown, which is based on the life and times of Elizabeth II. Sure, they punched up the drama a bit and took a few liberties with the story, but I found it a perfectly enchanting period piece that drifts through 50’s era England and paints the House of Windsor in far more familial tones that we’re use to seeing. More important, maybe, is its attempt at presenting a case study in personal desire versus duty.

I commented to a friend who sometimes shares my affinity for the English that it’s sweet and it’s sad and it’s funny in that uniquely British way. I’m a fan. If you’ve got ten hours to kill and want to watch something other than reality TV or the continuing disintegration of the republic on the nightly news, you’d be hard pressed to find something better to watch. Truly Netflix has embiggened us all.

The nine o’clock hour…

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HBO has provided the valedictory hour for my weekends since a guy named Tony ran north Jersey and the Barksdale crew controlled the corners in west Baltimore. With tonight’s season ender for Game of Thrones I guess I’m back to casting around for something at the nine o’clock hour to punctuate the end of the weekend.

I should probably be a responsible adult and use that extra hour to get something closer to eight hours of sleep, but somehow I know that’s not going to happen. I haven’t really looked at what HBO is rolling our for the summer or fall seasons – and the Walking Dead are still to far away to contemplate.

Worst case scenario I find myself a good book to fill the extra time. As much as I like reading, allocating one hour a week to get lost in the flickering glow of a really good drama feels like something I’m actually going to miss.

Explaining the Game…

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Sunday I had the singular experience of trying to simultaneously watch the new episode and explain the back story of Game of Thrones. I don’t feel like I did either activity the kind of justice it deserves, summing up the nature of what is modern television’s greatest fantasy epic as 1500s Europe meets Harry Potter meets Dallas… with dragons.

While trying to fill in character elements and key overall plot points, I missed big swaths of story arcs moving forward – so much to the point of reading the recaps on Monday and wondering if I’d even watched the right episode. Turn your eyes away for a few seconds and you find yourself hopelessly lost in the progression. It’s even worse now that the show has started outpacing or diverging wildly from the source material. Even the things I knew to be “true” about the world of GoT aren’t necessarily so. Questions of “why did he do that,” are met with only a perplexed “I have no idea.”

I’m going to have to go back and rewatch last week’s episode before settling in Sunday night for the next installment. I should go back and rewatch the whole damned season at this point since you could probably fill another book with the details I missed while watching some other part of the screen. If I struggled to explain the Game after being a faithful viewer and being well versed in the books, I’m not sure I have a prayer of keeping things in order now that we’re heading off script.

The only thing for sure now is that when someone wants a primer on Game of Thrones I’ll just point them at A Wiki of Ice and Fire and wish them a good day. I no longer feel at all qualified to speak with even limited authority about what’s going on and why.

And then there was December…

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money_pitWell, we’re moving right along through the 2006 archive. Today’s posts are from the pivotal period of early December 2006, when I was in the process of buying my money pit… er… I mean house in Memphis. I have to confess that there’s not a lot of drama there, but for at least one of us it’s interesting seeing where things were six years ago around this time and compare them with where we stand now. Whoever said “the more things change, the more they stay the same” was really on to something, there. If you’d have told me what drama the intervening six years would bring, I’d have never believed you. There never seems to be an end to the drama, but if nothing else, I’ve had the good fortune t live in interesting times… Or maybe I’ve just inflicted interesting times on myself. Either way. It’s been a trip.

Click over to the archives to start checking out that month that was, six years ago in 2006.