Monday (again)

This morning I began hacking in the shower. Finally, I coughed up something with the consistency of peanut butter. The hard and chunky kind. Not the good old smooth and creamy brand. I spat it out and had to turn the shower head to nearly a point to wash it down the drain.

I fear it a signal of worse things to come. So I put in for a sub tomorrow. Whenever I speak, people cringe. It sounds like I’m speaking through a throat full of gravel.

My sub plans are done now. After KoKo’s first game this afternoon, I plan to crawl into bed and sleep until my throat and lungs feel better.

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This weekend was another one that was absolutely unproductive. Kristie and I lounged around the house all day Saturday. She was buried in her new novel, “Lost” by Gregory Maguire. Since I felt completely miserable, I plopped myself on the couch and watched 12 hours of conference championship football.

****

Sunday came and I didn’t feel much better. Though I did manage to get up and do some shoveling. Sunday was spent watching more football before going to Casey’s varsity football year end parents meeting. I ducked out early (I didn’t miss much, one lady takes it upon herself to take thousands of pictures of the boys and burn them onto a CD. Last year we were subjected to an embarrassingly amateurish presentation. It wouldn’t have been so bad had she included some action shots. Instead she just took the same pictures every game - the pre-game warm up, the pre-game huddle, the pre-game pep-talk, the team standing for “The Star Spangled Banner,” the half time huddle, a few people standing on the sidelines, the coach’s half-time tirade, the post-game celebration and prayer. Times this by the number of games they played, and you had her presentation. Of course, most of the pictures were of the same people and of poor quality, so the entire presentation was a visual form of Chinese water torture).

The Bengals were playing at Pittsburgh. I might as well have stayed there. Despite an excellent opening drive and a quick 7-0, they muddled things away in a 24-10 loss. They spent much of the fourth quarter in Pittsburgh’s redzone, but they couldn’t do anything with it.

Why do I care so much about this game?


****

I spent some of the weekend watching something I find completely repulsive, yet somehow fascinating, like the impulse to drive slowly by an accident scene: reality TV. More specifically, “Talk Soup,” which is a show that condenses the most absurd aspects of reality TV and the host ridicules it in a wonderfully deadpan manner. I find so much hideous about reality TV. Why people spend hours watching spoiled, burned out, and sometimes just plain crazy people is beyond my ability to understand. But it reveals a lot about how far our society has sunken. Do we really need to watch Hulk Hogan talking to his wife on the phone while he sits on the toilet? Or do we really need to see Bruce Genner’s kids try to fix their brother up with a Playmate? Who cares? When did the trivial things become so important in our culture? I always thought the paparazzi who sift through trash of celebrities to be insane, but are we any different when we sit through the trash that is their daily lives?

I’m not so sure.

As I write this, I see on yahoo news that Brittany spent her 26th birthday with Paris. The sad fact is that most people don’t need to know any more information than that to completely understand the supposed importance in that sentence.

What I enjoyed most about “Talk Soup,” though, was the host, who simply ridiculed the celebrities and wanna be celebrities from the clips. At first I thought, “This guy has the greatest job in the world. I could so do this for a living.” Then it hit me - that is exactly what I spend most of my time doing! Every day I stockpile my brain with examples of our asinine and foolish culture to share with my classes. The hope is to show them how empty and stupid our popular culture is. In a way, I’m a bit like Faber from “Fahrenheit 451,” which we are about to read in Lit and Language 11.

I love that book because it warns of the emptiness of popular culture. It frighteningly depicts several realities in our culture now - the rise of reality TV, the internet, the power of advertising, and so on. Thematically, it is a bit like Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays with Morrie.” I So much of the what pop culture saturates our senses with is unnecessary. Family, nature, knowledge, love, friends, simple wonders. These are what are necessary. Where can you find those on a reality TV show?