We are the TV Zombies...

Yes. Reading & writing has kept me sane. I don't watch cable news. It immediately gives me a freaking headache. Every damn story is hyped beyond belief. One long, ranting, hyperbolic show.

I don't watch network television either, I cannot stand laugh-tracks, or commercials, except, of course, I do watch the NFL, usually with the sound off. I provide my own soundtrack, either music or my own guitar strumming. Turns out having the NFL (all that concentrated mayhem), streaming across my eyeballs is good for coming up with new riffs.

It seems our whole culture is now just another branch of the Entertainment/Celebrity Conglomerate. TV is the worst. It reduces everything to the SHOW. So yes, tragedy, political conflagrations, the daily grind of life, is all just grist for the mill.

How does it play?

So, in my own way, I am living in another time and place. I read. I contemplate. I spend lots of time in the analog world. I listen to CDs on the stereo, sometimes vinyl too.  I still own a flip-phone. My main source of information is the radio or the newspaper. We do love to stream Netflix, or Amazon Prime. We are hooked on the long-form narrative thing.  That is probably our most "of the moment" exception.

But I always have a book handy. I am always poring over text. I am always living in my head, in my imagination. I think it's important. I think it has kept me sane, or insane in my own comfortable way.

Marshall McLuhan was right: "The medium is the message.... the medium (the channel through which a message is transmitted) is more important than the meaning or content of the message."

TV (video screens of all kinds) has rotted us, hollowed us out. Images wash over our eyeballs. We have become the TV zombies. We really have. If we stop watching, to listen, to read, we are deprogramming ourselves. That's a good thing. An essential thing.