Is TV Rotting Blogagaard's Brain?

I watch at least an hour to two hours of TV a day. As a red-blooded American, watching TV is basically ingrained into my cold and lonely soul. I've sucked at TV's teat since I was a young lad in the early 80's, watching Sesame Street and He-Man and The Golden Girls. I've watched a lot of M*A*S*H, a lot of That 70's Show, a lot of The Office. I've been blown away (mostly) by more recent cable shows like Deadwood and The Wire and The Sopranos. I'm working my way through the 4th season of Dexter and every MSTK3000 episode I can find online.

So much enjoyment, but at what cost? TV must be fucking with my writing, there's no doubt about that. I can pretend it's honing my dialogue skills, and keeping me "in tune" with the current world, but that's all bullshit, of course.

I'd like to meet an alternate universe Dave, one who's never watched more than one hour of TV a week, at most. He's got to be much more well spoken, thoughtful. He probably has one of those...those...attention spans I've heard so much about. He's also probably a little weird, in that weird way non-TV people are. What do non-TV people do, anyway? I don't just mean the Amish, either. Do they listen to more NPR? I bet they garden a shitload. And exercise. Non-TV Dave would probably weigh forty pounds less and have no memory of Michael Jackson's mid-afternoon funeral. Non-TV Dave would have read even more than TV-Dave, who still manages to read a lot because he doesn't have kids.

I don't know. Maybe non-TV Dave is a hipster asshole who knows nothing of the bliss of watching The Trailer Park Boys late into the evening. Maybe some questions should not be pondered too much.