Over the last few months I’ve been really bothered by my evening video habit, meaning I’ve been turning on the flat screen most days around sunset and playing video games and watching shows and movies often till midnight or later. This was never the case when I was younger. In my 20s I watched almost no tv at all. Of course there wasn’t that much of interest anyway. That was the 1980s and even cable television was just getting started. Round about 1990, though, the dawn of VHS allowed us to, for the first time (in history), watch anything we could get our hands on at any time – so I started indulging. In the late 90s an evil roommate got me hooked on playing Final Fantasy on the Super Nintendo, then gave me the console. Like I said, evil. Since then the video habit progressed in a slow creep, but in my 50s (the 2010s) it really caught on. Between depression, anxiety, and living in the kinda stressful world, I turned to it more and more. Better than heroin, I suppose, but I’m not sure by how much.

I recently decided to go on a year-long video fast, to see 1) if I could do it, 2) whether there’d be any sort of craving or withdrawal, and 3) if it’d result in any long-term changes and effects. To document this, and maybe to force myself to do it, I’ve started a podcast, a medium I’ve never tried before on my own and one that I don’t tend to frequent (maybe because I “don’t have enough free time” hahaha). I’ve started this video fast TODAY, June 1, 2024, and I’m hoping and intending to continue it through June 1, 2025.

Just this once, I’m devoting this Home Page to the topic and to announcing the podcast, which is also called “My 12-Month Video Fast”. You can find the podcast home page here, follow the RSS feed here (I think), and find it now (or very soon) on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. There’s also a podcast player embedded below for you to quickly check out any episodes that I put up through the month (at least I think it updates as I add them). 

You might also notice that I’ve added a Podcast tab to this site, with a brief intro and the same player as below.

As a teaser, here’s the transcript of the beginning of the first episode, with the player embedded below.

Today, June 1, 2024, I unplugged my 40” flat screen TV, wrapped it carefully in an old black sheet, secured the sheet with packing tape, and tucked it into a corner of my back room. Then I went back up front and unplugged the various video components – the streaming stick, the Blu-ray player, the DVD/VHS combo that I sometimes use to archive old tapes to an electronic format, my beloved PlayStation 4, and the rarely used but not forgotten PS2. Then I sat there for a while staring at the dust silhouette on the old coffee table where the base of my TV sat for years, surrounded by a scattered array of discs and a few cases, movies and games for the moment unplayable, wondering what would happen next.

Why did I do this? To see what would happen next.

See for years I’ve been sitting down in the evening, turning on the screen, and spending hours hunting robots and treasure or solving puzzles or shooting bad guys or zombies or aliens, or watching famous actors hunt robots or shoot aliens or fall in love with the person they disliked at the beginning of the show. Quite a few hours, actually, almost every night except when I have things going on out in “the world” (whatever that is). I’m not even sure how long ago this habit crept up on me. Sound familiar? ‘Cause I’m pretty sure this is not a unique experience. I tell myself my brain is tired and I enjoy those shows, some of them are pretty damn good and I like saving the princess (or the prince) or the galaxy (again…and again). And I have to wonder whether that’s all just bullshit and what “my brain is tired” even means – sounds like a lazy-ass side-stepping rationale at best right now, and a lame reason for wasting what little time I have on the planet. What’s that about?

Okay so I’m a writer, and worse than that a creative writer, which for me means that I have to let language leak out of me in a creative fashion at fairly regular intervals or I hate my life. It’s pretty much that simple. Thing is, poems and stories and short prose things don’t really earn much in America, no not much, so I have to support that habit (it’s really more like a metabolic function) doing something else. For the last fifteen-some years, after resisting it much of my adult life, I succumbed to supporting my writing with other writing – I just couldn’t serve another table or comment on another college essay. In my case that writing-for-pay, that poetry-support-activity turned out mostly to be developing names and taglines and other messaging for new products and businesses. I’m a freelance namer, god help me. Now being freelance, as some of you know, rarely entails eight solid hours of word-work or laptop time or both, let alone paid work on any given day. In fact I sometimes have stretches with no work at all (except the many unpaid hours I spend looking for it). Yet come evening I still repeat those words: “brain is tired, brain is tired” like a corrupt mantra, and turn on the screen and allow myself to be amused, all the while giving myself less and less time for reading and contemplation and creative production and all the cultivation that makes my life feel worthwhile and used to have more of a central role. At least it feels that way. Then one day recently I noticed that you can rearrange the letters in “my brain is tired” to spell, “I’m in a Late Capitalist stupor.” And I thought, that’s it! Why else would I choose comfort over joy and fulfillment? I never used to. So yeah, I think those words are bullshit, or at the very least it would be prudent to assume so, and I certainly want to find how just how beguiling they are.

Wishing you all an easy June. Happy Pride!

Sincerely,
Richard