“Could You Make That Onescore and Five?”

One of the high points of my week is getting my Winn-Dixie weekly email notice. They put stuff on sale (notably delicious pork) so I subscribe to their alerts. Now Costco is sending me ads. Lord, give me strength. Costco is hard to resist.

This week they’re offering foam mattresses for $650, delivered. I will not click. I will not. But I want to. I have a friend who has a foam bed, and I’ve slept on it during visits, and it’s wonderful. And I’ve had a lot of problems with nasal congestion at night, which makes me wonder if my old mattress has developed a life of its own.

I have to wonder if conventional mattresses are on the way out. Foam is just plain better. I’ve gone back to down pillows, because the synthetics had too many problems, but I can find no fault with newfangled mattresses.

My breathing is much better these days. I thought I fixed things when I got anti-allergic covers for my mattress and pillows, but I now think a lot of it has to do with seasonal stuff.

They also have a Toshiba 46″ LCD TV for $900. That would be a nice replacement for my 37″ Olevia, which I use as a computer monitor. But I’d have to sit halfway across the room, and the Olevia is great, except for the heat it throws off.

I have no interest in TV. I can’t remember caring what kind of TV I owned. For a long time, I only watched DVDs and the national news. Now it’s Christian DVDs, Christian TV, the national news, and new episodes of House. It probably amounts to less than ten hours a week.

If you’re trying to free yourself of time-wasting, life-eating bad habits, TV is a great one to start with. An average American probably spends decades in front of the tube. If there is a better way to spit on the gift of life, it’s hard to think what it could be. We use the TV to “kill time.” What an appropriate expression, and what a weird thing to do. Tell someone he has a year to live, and what does he beg for? More time. And if he’s a typical person, he would spend a whole lot of that extra time…killing time. Why would you want to kill the thing your life is made of?

I don’t like movies and TV shows as much as I used to. The older I get, the more I tend to see the people on the screen as what they are: actors playing make-believe. They’re not in spaceships or the O.K. Corral or, in House’s case, hospitals. They’re in studios in front of fat camera operators and grubby stagehands, repeating lines they may not even understand. If you’ve ever acted, say in a high school play, remember how it felt. That’s what John Wayne felt while he was shooting blanks in The Searchers and True Grit. Not exciting.

The more video fiction you see, the more cliches you run into. The last-minute save. The cliffhanger. The car chase which seems to be over but then starts over because of an unexpected twist. The homely girl who takes off her glasses and becomes an instant beauty. The evil twin. The character who breaks the fourth wall. There are only so many ideas which work, and once you’ve seen each one hundreds of times, they look less like real action and more like what they are: gimmicks to fool the rubes.

I feel like I’ve seen all sorts of exciting adventures in my life, but I haven’t. I’ve seen actors pretending to have adventures. I’ve never seen a pirate. I’ve never seen a cowboy. I’ve never seen a dogfight or a murder or a military battle. Most of you haven’t, either. Funny how TV and movies warp our sense of what we’ve experienced.

I’m not getting the Toshiba. I won’t be looking at TVs until one of the ones I have now craps out.

I like the Internet better than TV, because it’s less passive and it’s full of opportunity and information, but it can also be overdone, and I’ve been guilty of that. But that problem seems to be behind me. I just don’t put in the time any more. It helped when I started going to bed early. You can’t hang out on AIM when you go to bed hours before your friends.

I tried to do Twitter today. It’s hopeless. Fifteen words, to explain your boring situation to thirteen people, most of whom you don’t even know? I will never understand how it drew people. I guess I should check Facebook and see if I’m ignoring anyone.

Okay, I ignored a bunch of stuff. I have been afraid to do that, because I thought Facebook probably sent people a nasty notice saying something like, “STEVE IS IGNORING YOU SO STOP BOTHERING HIM,” but I don’t actually know if that’s true, so I’m clearing out my inbox.

Someone from my church found my Twitter account. I don’t know what to do about that. I would like to be involved in whatever Internet stuff Christians are doing, but I don’t want to do it under a pen name. In the past, I kept my real name off the web to prevent criminals and miscreants from coming after me (and they tried). I don’t want to move from a pseudonym to my real name in a way that would bring old enemies along for the ride. Maybe I should kill the old accounts, start new ones, and keep the blog separate from the whole mess. Maybe I could start a new Christian blog and dump this one entirely.

I am not all that interested in having new Christian friends become familiar with stupid things I have said and done in the past. I don’t plan to hide anything or lie, but a fresh start would be good.

Okay, I just checked my Twitter followers, and when I clicked on a link in one of their tweets, the next thing I saw was a woman’s genitalia. Lesson learned. Who comes up with this garbage? Like it’s not hard enough to avoid Internet porn.

In closing, let me point out that Winn-Dixie is selling whole pork shoulders for 69¢ a pound. Don’t get between me and the meat department today!