If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is possible that some rewiring will be appropriate when we are “free” again. I hope it won’t be too late. Let’s be honest: we had a lot of time. As good and broad as television programs are, have we ever had so many platforms, so many different types of drama? – It starts to reach a point of falling returns.
I’m starting to mess up all the series I’ve seen. Let’s see who had Bryan Cranston as a conflicted, amoral judge? (Answer: “Your Honor”). Haven’t we just seen the late Christopher Plummer in something in which he played the lanky, cunning patriarch of a wealthy and dysfunctional family? (Yeah, “Knives out.”) Was that the one with Don Johnson and Jamie Lee Curtis? (Yes). Were these really the streets of Pittsburgh that I saw on “The Silence of the Lambs”? (Yeah, and by the way, this is the last time I’ll have to see this movie. Too creepy and a bit out of date with so many other over-the-edge movies, although now I see that there is some sort of sequel).
We have seen series in Paris (“Lupine”), Copenhagen (“Borgen”), New Orleans (“Your Honor”), Mexico City (“Another Mother’s Daughter”), Havana (“Dancing for My Havana” ), New South Wales, Australia (“Penguin Bloom”) and Suffolk, England (“The Dig”).
My eyes get flawed.
Tired of staring at the TV but unwilling to give up the screen and unable to disconnect? There is always radio (a different kind of connection), not a radio like we used to know with buttons and antennas, but radio coming from our tiny phones across the country. In addition to WHCY from Savannah State University and WRUU, Savannah’s very own community station, everything you want is around the country including KCSN from California State University in Northridge, which someone just pointed out to me.
Jane Fishman: Trains, the original land cruisers
Oh but it’s time to read, you (and I) might be arguing. Indeed there is. Call me unworthy or blank-headed, but I can only read so much. I can only keep an eye on the text for so many hours and then the time has come, no matter how convincing the book may be. I have to do something else. It is the “something else” that worries me because the “something else” mostly points me in the direction of the Internet. It reinforces the constant search for news, looks for “new” news, and reads the same story you just read earlier in the day. It’s obsessed. We have become obsessed. We can’t turn it off.
While I’m still not comfortable enough to ride the train, I wish I could pretend I was. Then I could give myself permission to doze, read, hear a story, dream, fantasize, hallucinate, visualize, or just stare out the window. But where do you want to go when you could go It does not matter. It’s not the goal that matters; It’s the journey. The train is late? That doesn’t matter either. When you are a passenger on a train, everything is out of your hands. You’re only there for the ride. Every time you open your eyes you see a different view, a different picture (unless you’re traveling through the Canadian province of Ontario, where after a while everything looks the same; lots of trees).
Jane Fishman:It’s all about traveling on Amtrak
Except on trains – when and whether we can pamper ourselves like this – it is impossible to “switch off”. We can’t focus on calm and void long enough before turning to our phones to learn something we may have overlooked. That connectivity is a drug that we cannot stop. It haunts us. It controls us. It found its way into our brain. We don’t know what to do with calm, with empty spaces, with silence. We don’t know what to do with ourselves without a device, a platform, a screen. Have you been with an eight year old when a phone was nearby? You can’t help yourself. You have to touch it, navigate, examine it. They need to show you the latest app.
Our brain is messed up. Rewiring, an adjustment is necessary. Do you have any ideas Do you have 12-step programs? Sign me up.
Contact Jane Fishman at gofish5@earthlink.net or call 912-484-3045.
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