Notes from Maine - 2023/03/26

I’ve been thinking about TV a lot lately. My stepfather once referred to TV as my lifeblood. When I got home from school, I turned it on. Reruns provided a constant distraction from homework—plugging up the little gaps in my concentration. You could flip that, actually. Homework was hastily scrawled during commercials. I saw all the episodes a million times. There are probably two dozen theme songs still carved into my memory. 

“This is it. This is it. This is life, the one you get, so go and have a ball.”

That’s the beginning to the theme song of “One Day at a Time.” It featured two precocious young adult sisters and a barely-holding-it-together single mother. I didn’t see myself in their lives or really understand their predicaments, but the show served its purpose. It killed time. That was my main goal—to kill time. Life was all about waiting then. Waiting for vacation, Christmas, my birthday, the end of school, getting a driver’s license, or being old enough for XYZ. Back then, a single month could take a year to get through. A full year might be a decade. You remember.

But that’s not what I was thinking about recently.

I was thinking about all the subtle things that filtered through the TV into my subconscious.

People who talk to themselves are crazy. That was a common trope. 

“I’m talking to myself. I must be going crazy.” [laugh track] 

Just after I get out of bed, as I’m letting the dogs out and starting my day, there’s a particular voice that often surprises me. It’s a rebuttal to residual thoughts from one of my dreams. I’ll be thinking about a dream where I saw someone from a former life. I remember the good times we had, and sometimes I remember the bad. If I recall a situation where I should have apologized, I’ll say aloud, “Oh well. They’ve forgotten by now.” I never speak the main argument I’m having in my head, but the voice that tells me to let it go often comes out of my mouth. I wonder why that is. Is there a part of me that needs outside absolution? 

The sitcoms from my youth assure me that because I’m talking to myself, I must be going crazy. I’ve heard that some people get dogs just so they have someone to talk to. I wouldn’t bother my dogs with the things I’m thinking.

On one channel, you could watch longer crime shows. They required a bit more attention, so I didn’t watch those as much. But there were important lessons to learn. For example, if you need to move someone from one place to another, you can always bonk them on the head. Hit someone with the butt of a gun and they’ll reliably pass out for a couple of hours and wake up with no consequences after you’ve tied them up. Another good coercive method (if you’re a bad guy, of course), is to simply point a gun at a person and order them into a car.

The victim will immediately put their hands up (subtly if you’re in public), and then do exactly what they’re told. I’ve seen this so many times that I think it might be my natural reaction if someone pulled a gun on me. It was only in adulthood that I blinked, tilted my head, and wondered what all those victims were thinking. If someone intends to harm you, why in heck would you follow their orders. Are they taking you to a second location just to let you go peacefully when everything is explained? It makes no sense. You can blame lazy writing by committee, I’m sure, but I wonder if any of those writers ever thought about the damage they did. 

A fully formed adult might watch that and think, “No! Don’t go with that person just because they have a gun. Make a scene. If they’re going to kill you, make them do it in front of witnesses.”

But, as a kid, I simply took it as fact that if someone points a gun, you go where you’re told. Insane. In the case of a robbery maybe you hand over a wallet without question, but if an attacker is trying to move you from a public to a private place they definitely mean to harm you.

I’m not fond of travel, but I would change my ways if I could travel to a different time period. It would be fascinating to see the weird assumptions that people made a thousand years ago, or will make two thousand years from now (if everything goes well for Homo sapiens). More importantly, it would be wonderful to use that data to analyze the weird assumptions that I was raised with. I want to be able to separate the logic from the superstition. Who can say what crazy notions we’re currently walking around with. We won’t know until someone discovers, publishes, and then gets ostracized for pointing those things out. 

“You still drink fluids with your mouths!? Are you crazy?”

I was watching one of those ghost hunter shows one time and two of the “investigators” ran across a strange noise or a moving shadow or something. One looked at the other and said, “Run!” They sprinted away and didn’t stop until they got back to the headquarters where all the recording devices were hooked up. It was all straight out of Scooby-Doo. When you see a ghost, you run.

They explained what happened to one of the leaders who said, “You realize that’s what we’re here to find, right? Why would you run from it?”

Of course, they were embarrassed, but it’s hard to blame them. In the moment, they reverted to their training. Scooby and Shaggy had shown them, time after time, what to do in that situation.

It’s amazing the things that we can pick up when we’re just killing time.