Up on the Roof. Down on the Couch.

Okay, I've taken enough heat for leaving up the roof photos and not posting since 8/18 to break my blogfast. What was the catalyst for the hiatus? I can't say for sure but I have a theory. I've been watching too much television. I have never been much of a TV watcher. Sure, as a kid I was loyal to sundry Partridges, Bradys, and Kotters, but I've never just "watched TV;" flipped it on, disengaged my muscles, unsnapped my pants. I can name almost all the shows that I collectively gave over several hundred hours of my life to without any trouble. Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Nanny and the Professor, 6M Dollar Man, Little House OTP, Buffy, The Wire, Daily Show, Homicide, Oz, Beavis and Butthead, Seinfeld, Simpsons, MTV's 120 Minutes, Mad About You, some Sopranos and Sex and the City, and now Lost, Dexter, Mad Men, and Nurse Jackie. That's pretty much it. But only recently have I watched shows all at once, in season-loads, sometimes five epsiodes in one sitting. The characters populate my brain much more insidiously without a week between episodes to clear the palate. I feel a sense of gluttony when a cliffhanger is unhung in a matter of seconds.

Then again I'm in awe of the quality of these shows and their ability to maintain the intensity and writing of a too-notch film over a few years time (90 episodes in the case of Lost.) It's a new art-form in storytelling, or at least a dramatic improvement in the history of the serial. The themes are more complex and the gradual relaxing of censorship has brought a level of reality to TV that was unthinkable in the past. If a Hill Street Blues fan was teleported from the past and shown an episode of The Wire, he'd be carted off on a gurney in shock. And how about the references to 14" strap-on dildos that have popped up recently on both Weeds and Dexter? Laura Petrie didn't even share her bed with Rob.

So these TV shows have been taking up a lot of what was my blogging time. My now not so new girlfriend also bears some of the blame for luring me from my Mac. The life to writing-about-life ratio tilted in season three of Life in the Nohodome. I guess I could have done some summer re-runs. I did actually record my post about graveyards from earlier this year to air on a new show on WHMP-AM sometime soon.