From The Knifebox

Feb. 3, 2010

The season debut of Lost was last night — The Final Season! — and I missed it. Didn’t catch a minute.

See. It can be done.

My television boycott, I am proud to report, is still alive. True, I’m not writing as much as I want to or as much as I should (if you hadn’t noticed), and we still haven’t figured out what to do with the basement or that son of ours. (Hey … maybe the son in the basement!) We’ve had paint chips on the wall for about 10 days or so now and are nowhere near a final decision, I haven’t yet made vacation plans and it just took me entirely too long to get through Edgar Sawtelle.

But I can’t blame the boob tube for any of that. I am watching some sports (NBA) over my reading glasses, and I do zip through a DVR’d movie once in a while. I get stuck, while I’m reading, seeing bits of stuff that Mary Jo watches. But regular programming … I’m just not doing it.

I’m even starting to think that, if I wasn’t tempted by Jack, Kate, Sawyer and the gang last night — I’ve watched that thing pretty much from the start — then I may be over the hump. Huge news. Big step.

I still have a ways to go. Sports are killing me, even if I do try to get in some reading while I’m doing it. And a lot of those movies I watch aren’t really worth watching, even without the commercials.

(On the subject of sports on TV … I read a piece in the Wall Street Journal last week that in a regular three-hour televised NFL game — lemme see if I can find the link real quick — an average of 11 minutes is spent with the ball actually in play. Eleven minutes. You could multiply that by five and you’d still be wasting two hours plus on replays, watching guys stand around in the huddle, watching referees talk to each other and being bombarded by approximately 1,500 inane beer commercials. Seriously. That’s obnoxious.)

Still, the blackout lives, for the most part. Soon, I can hope, I’ll find time to write more, and then I’ll figure out more than the two chords on my guitar (yup, giving that another whirl with all the added time I have), and not long after that my life will be rich and infinitely more fulfilling.

Then we’ll settle on a color for the living room.