Bid Kid Adieu.

I did something I seldom do. Something I really haven't done with regularity for a dozen years or more. Certainly at least from the start of Covid.

One of the toughest changes that came from Covid, by the way, is that those of us who now work primarily from home lost some demarcations in our lives. We used to have our homespace and our workspace. Now, they're conflated. They bleed (and that's the right word) into each other.

The same thing has happened with time. Watching Jeopardy used to mark my transition from work-time to home-time. But I can't watch Jeopardy anymore. Every question seems to be about pop-culture or JR Tolkein. It's no longer a test that involves serious knowledge. It's a ginned up silliness contest.

What’s more, a half hour of Jeopardy contained about 10 minutes of game-show, 10 minutes of banal patter and at least 10 minutes of excruciating commercials. Sometimes there'd be a category where clues would be read by a celebrity I never heard of. Invariably, they were promoting an upcoming movie or TV show. So that too was a commercial.

The number and speed and volume and shoutiness of the commercials upsets my circadian rhythms. While I watch most online videos at 1.25 speed, or 1.5 speed, or even 1.75 speed, the commercials I see now are too frenetic and hectic and hectoring. And there are too many of them coming too fast. I feel when I look at the screen that I am seeing the world through fractal bug eyes. I'm getting 97 images and noises and can't see or hear anything clearly.

In any event, it's near the beginning of the professional basketball seasons. Sports seasons begin with hope, even if you're a Knicks fan, and I turned on the TV to try to watch the Knicks. Reading about sports nowadays practically requires a degree in data science and an understanding of bookmaking. The over-analysis has driven all humanity out of the offering.

Here are the opening sentences of John Updike's article on Ted Williams' last at bat. It's not fair to compare it to any sports writing you'd read today.

The Knicks were playing the Brooklyn Nets and by mistake I first turned on the coverage provided by the Nets' channel. They kept telling me they were about to tip off, then they'd play another recap of another game, have two announcers talk to the camera and then I'd see about 14 more Hyundai commercials. If there were 140 words in all of those commercials, 97 of them were now.

I turned the channel--since we have 200 and I regularly watch 0--until I found the coverage provided by the Knicks' channel. That felt a little more comfortable, like an old-pair of flannel pajamas, because at least I could hear from the long-time Knicks player and announcer, Walt "Clyde" Frazier. But again, there was no basketball on the basketball. It all seemed to be jabbering and Hyundai commercials.

I watched about two minutes of clock elapse, about 15 minutes of commercials and felt like I had run the gauntlet, like I had been hazed by a fraternity run by Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's homicidal rapist-in-chief who ran his secret torture/murder/framing squad of one-million informants and police officers. I suppose he'll get a job in the trump regime.

He killed millions and raped thousands and vice-versa.

My wife was nose-deep in her laptop as all this viewing and stewing was going on. I think she was comforted by me watching the Knicks. For a moment maybe she thought I was normal.

But I reached for the remote and I shut the set off. In less time than it takes to read a dozen lies in an agency press-release, my brain had been thoroughly scrambled by the brief media onslaught. I felt like a member of the !Kung people in the 1960s when they were first exposed to western civilization, or the Yanomami who still live in what remains of unspoilt land in what's now Venezuela and Brazil. 

I've seen your civilization and I want no more of it.

It's ugly, perverted, incessant, loud and, worst of all, sure of itself.

As Wordsworth wrote, the world is too much with us.

I left our current time zone to read, to ignore, to de-cacophonize, like a one-time coffee-addict might decaffeinate.

I have a feeling as we sink deeper into political, moral, spiritual, environmental and relational tyranny more people will join me. It's not that I don't live in today's world, of course I do. I just choose to see how it is. And find two hours of alternative every day. I'll do that until they kill me.