The Power of Television

Get behind me Sayten! cries the little man with the television blaring constantly before him. With a surge of determination he thrusts himself from the sofa and snaps off the television. It instantly turns back on again. For a moment he considers tossing the box out the window to the sidewalk twenty stories below, but then he reconsiders, knowing that Oprah will be on in a couple of hours. But for two hours he can, and must, forsake the box of Sayten and step out upon the plain and see with his own eyes the glory of Gawd.

Such wondrous light pours through dusty panes of sliding glass; praise be the morning sun, and the million beams of refracted light once it passes through his glass eyeballs into the cave of his skull. He wants to boogey in this wonderland, but can’t find the remote to turn on the stereo. He supposed there was, perhaps, a button directly on the contraption, but he feared approaching too closely to the mechanism, for he saw in its face the same tattoo as that on the box of Sayten: Sony. Sony be the name of the evil one’s dominions, and knowing thy enemy’s name is the first step towards defeating them.

He cried out in agony. This light pierces the membrane of my mind; I cannot take it much longer, for he had watched television in a darkened room for so long that his eyes could not adjust to direct sunlight. He throws himself into a closet and slams shut the door.

Now let us consider the predicament of this man. Driven by his crude animal instincts to wile away the hours of his life, his true conflict arises from that trace of nobility in his blood, that desire to rise up above his nature and strive for some future goal, glimmering on the horizon of the evening like some holy grail. But is it his base instincts, or this trace of aspiration that drives him to misery? Would it not perhaps grant him the greatest peace to snuff that last remaining spark that glimmers in his breast, and permit him the leisure of living his remaining days in simple distraction, guilt free?

He weeps, collapsed there at the foot of the closet, in the draping cloth of dress shirts and garment bags, resting on the mounds of Rockport and Nike and Addidas, like wrecked vessels upon the reef, without a captain or crew, without a foot to guide them free of the rocks. In the darkness of this three foot by six foot cell, he clings to the shaft of light piercing the dark, a quarter inch slit between the sliding doors. With tears in his eyes he takes hold of the dress slacks hanging from strong wooden hangers and pulls himself up, and pries his fingers into the crevice and slides open the closet doors. Freedom never tasted so clear and refreshing. Like a delirious sailor washed upon the shore, he stumbles into the living room and begins to laugh hysterically through tears of elation and relief, as though discovering civilization just over the dunes and scrub brush; the television proclaims from across the room that Oprah, that dark Gawdess of daytime broadcasting, will be back after these messages.

If You Stare Long Enough Into the Blizzard

I wake up in the morning with such high hopes. I believe I can just lather and rinse sleep out of my head while in the shower, step out and dry off and feel refreshed. A bowl of cereal will energise me with vitamins and the daily recommended dosage of everything a body needs, and then over a cup of tea I’ll settle down in front of the laptop and start to write. It will flow out of me, inspired by the start of a new day and with the raw material of last night’s dreams. But this doesn’t happen, not exactly. I wake up, struggle to lift my arm to press the snooze button. For maybe the briefest moment I believe I could get up and hit the shower, but then I sink back down into the pillow, and grogginess slips over my brow like wet plaster cast, slowly hardening. I lay in bed for over an hour, flirting with sleep, hovering somewhere between awake and asleep.

The shower feels good, hot water pouring over me, but instead of energizing me, the steam keeps me on the perimeter of wakefulness. I get out, shave, lethargic like this may still be a dream, but I have to go through the motions, the morning rituals to now get from the bathroom to the kitchen and my bowl of cereal.

The highly sugared cereal does give me a momentary buzz. I brew my tea, starting to feel excited again, like I can actually get down to writing a story this morning. While it brews I make the bed. I pour the tea, settle in my chair, boot up…and then. The internet. I tell myself I will just read the morning headlines to find out what atrocities occurred while I slept soundly in my bed. Usually a few stories draw my attention, and I read on and on while I sip my tea, and I get sleepy, or overwhelmed, or at least warped from the previously unadulterated state of mind I was in before logging on to the internet. After going from National news of car bombs, to local murders during robberies, to business news about bankruptcies, and then to Entertainment news of movie stars sleeping with nannies or the latest divorce news, I go to the blogs, thinking perhaps a more personal view of this mayhem will bring me back to the lucid state needed to write.

I always go to Brad Zellar’s blog, his current storefront being Yo Ivanhoe! to get a doubleshot of the more concentrated me; … I can’t begin to describe his world view, but it resonates, strikes a cord, speaks to the more angst ridden side of me. But he is an insomniac, and I am the opposite. What is the opposite of an insomniac? A narcoleptic? That’s not me though, I don’t fall asleep throughout the day; it’s more like I go through the day in mortal combat with sleep. Got to wake up. Got to get out of the chair to move the rabbit ears to hopefully clear the television fuzz, but I can’t find the strength or discipline to leave the comfort of the chair. If you stare long enough into the blizzard, you start to see shapes anyway. This will entertain me for a while…


TV Blizzard

Honeymoon in Rome

Phillip and Jessica. Phillip drives a scooter. Jessie wraps her arms around his waist. They are zipping around the cobbled streets of Rome. Romantic? It should have been, but they're fighting. He's driving like a mad man to scare her. She keeps telling him where to turn, until he's flustered, emasculated. She hides her fear of dying a two-wheeled death on foreign stones by getting angrier, by telling him to stop being such an ass, but the tightening of her grip on his waist tells him that she's giving in to him a little, he's starting to chip away into that bullheaded reserve of hers. But he hates giving into his own anger, he wants to be calm, wants to relax, wants to take in the brilliance of Rome at a leisurely pace. So why is Phillip zipping around like a Kamikaze, aiming for a ship that he can't discern out of the dust and crowds and cars blaring their horns at this mad American couple? He just needs to let go, to give in, to back down; he releases the throttle, and they coast to a stop in a deserted square. They're still rolling when Jessica ejects from the seat by stomping down her feet, jogging to a stop, taking death breaths, stooped over with her hands on her knees. "What the fuck, Phillip? Is that your way of punishing me or something?"

"I just wanted to get through that mess back there," he lied. "Romans don't know how to drive. They should've stuck with their horse drawn chariots".

She turned from him, walked over to a fountain in the middle of the square and sat on its rim. She pulled a strand of hair out of her eyes that had come loose in the rushing wind on Phillip’s mad flight on the scooter. She started to laugh, looking at him. It wasn't a kind laugh, where he looked cute to her, and they would suddenly both begin laughing, then kiss or make love there in the shallows of the fountain. No, this was a contemptuous laugh at the fool she'd just married, this disappointment of a man who needed to ask for directions, who still couldn't say thank you in Italian (he kept pronouncing it as "Garcia",). She kept telling herself she could have done better, she was young, attractive, intelligent. She was tall, around 5'7", with auburn hair with highlights. Her brown skin was flushed an even deeper shade of red in the cheeks from their scooter ride, from the sun, from the wind. Her Capri pants had a dirty handprint on her ass from when Phillip had playfully groped her earlier in the morning. He thought it was cute. She wondered if she could get the stain out that evening. "I need you to start acting reasonable, Phillip. Take some responsibility. Take the bloody tour map and study it a little. Why do I have to do all the work and figure out where we're going?"

Phillip sat down beside her, snatching the map out of her bag. His blurry eyes quickly took in the expanse of Rome, but all he cold see were the highlighted points of interest that Jessica had already mapped out, the notes in red felt-tipped pen of where Caesar was buried, the Spanish Steps (need to find some accurate sights). He pointed at a place on the map clear of markings, free of Jessica's excessive outlining and planning, this rigidity he was beginning to see would create a real problem for them.

"Here. I want to go here."

"What is that? An aqueduct, a park, what?"

"It's the Foro Romano. I don't know what it is. But I can see it's heading out of the center of Rome, that it'll be easy to get to."

"I don't want to decide where we're going just because it's easy"

The path of least resistance, Phillip thought. What's so bad about that? Why can't some things be easy? "You asked me to pick a place to go, so I did"

"Ok, let's go to the Foro Romano," she said, standing up and marching to the scooter, sitting down and waiting for her gallant knight to mount his steed, she scoffed to herself. Or was he the village idiot? Mounting his steed wasn't one of his natural abilities, as she'd witnessed during their wedding night. Is a good lover born or raised, she wondered? Nature versus nurture; she remembered arguing these two schools of thought back in Psychology 101. She couldn't remember which side she fought for at the time. Let's hope 'nurture'.

Phillip reluctantly got back on the scooter. He was tired, and didn't want to fight anymore. It would be easier to just back down and follow Jessica's lead. He wasn’t going to say a word the rest of the afternoon. Let her discern his anger in his silence. Oh she knows what she did wrong. I don't have to tell her.

But she didn't know. She didn't have a clue. She was just being herself, and that was always right; isn’t' that what her father had always said?

Ummmm......

I see how most bloggers can easily get lazy and stop adding entries after a while. I'm still held up with what my theme is. Just a daily blog, like a column, works for interesting and dymanic people like Zellar, but that's not going to work for me. I've tossed around a few ideas, and feel free to comment on what you might be interested in reading, but I always like the quirky unusual type stuff. Transcripts of conversations I've eavesdropped on. Photographs of various litter on the city streets (I'm becoming one of those people curious about what each slip of paper says, where the coupon is for...okay, that is a really dumb idea). Or carry my digital cam around with me and capture interesting shots in the city. I know I like blogs that include pictures. I like some that link to interesting sites on the net, but not those that have a jumble of links where it becomes little more than a world wide intersection.

What I should do is read a variety of blogs for a while, then decide where to go.

And Then There Was Light...

I've ventured into the blogsphere, not so much to contribute to the endless Babel of voices out there, but to read other people's work. The concept really appeals to me; find a few interesting individuals out there and follow their daily posts, learn about them, see a different viewpoint of life. We're not limited by country or race or social status; I can read about Rance, the anonymous famous actor, or about a refugee, or a writer, or a janitor. So what value is there in my contributing to this forum? What's my label?

I'm quite boring, I'm afraid. I go by the nickname Brettanicus, because my real name is Brett but my college friends thought it much too short to convey the literary bookfreak that I meant to become. I think my roommate intended the name "Brettanica", like the set of encyclopedias, but he was decidedly NOT a bookfreak, spelling "oven" as "ofen" because he took the general rule of spell-it-like-it-sounds a little too far, so I ended up with Brettanicus. Sort of Greek or Roman sounding, yet also a true word of "man from Britain". Now, I am not from Britain, but coincidentally my dad and all of my paternal lineage comes from England, so it fit. And the real reason; it's always an available username.

So enough background, this is day in the life, right? I'm waiting to get a call on a Sunday morning to go into work and perform post-implementation testing of a software upgrade. Yes, bookfreak turned computer geek to make a living, a cliched story. But the world of corporate computing, and more specifically data warehousing and business intelligence, is not without it's own appeal; I live a Kafkaesque life, packed away in my little cubicle, wandering the complex labyrinth of corporate data, traversing joins to different tables of information, trying to make sense out of meaninglessness, aiming for that glowing holy grail of a "single version of the truth", or what has now been termed "single version of information". But this sidetrack into computers has really led me astray; writing is where life takes on meaning. I love books. I love movies. I've divorced recently and in these solitary hours I will try to examine life again and try to make some sense out of it. But I need a take on life for a blog, don't I? I need a gimmick--which of my many obsessions will become my area of expertise? Eavesdropper of cell phone conversations? Corporate bungler, a new kind of Dilbert? Or how about a single guy learning to date? I'll think about it. Tune in again.