Life in a Dream

For the last three weeks they've been demolishing two buildings behind my home, so they can build more luxury condos in Brooklyn, because we have so few. I woke almost every morning at 7:30 or 8 in the morning to the sound of heavy machinery tearing down brick and cinderblock, digging up concrete floors. My cable was ripped out as a wall fell, despite calls to Time-Warner to warn them. I spent four days without internet or cable TV, and found myself floundering.

I read books, I listened to music, but realized that we live in a sea of media distraction that hooks us like a drug. Deprived of it I fell into a kind of dream state, lost in time without my shows to tell me when I was, cut off from e-mail and the web. After a few days I withdrew enough to remember that there had been a time when I'd lived without any of these things, with a 12" Sony and only broadcast channels turned on only when something I REALLY NEEDED TO SEE was on, not just because it was there.

They finished tearing down the wall and Time-Warner finally came out and reconnected me. I turned in my old standard box I was told wouldn't work after February 28th, and when I hooked up my new digital box I got hundreds of options I hadn't had before. I spent a day locked to the screen like a baby to a teat, sucked in the clean new imagery like a man who had recently regained his sight and wanted to see as much as possible in case he lost it again.

In the next few days, I found myself more and more annoyed by the intrusion. The days without seemed like a distant dream once the cable was back up, but once I had it for a while, I found myself returning to my days of deprivation, now seen as freedom. I turned the TV off instead of desperately grazing for something, anything worth more than five minutes of my attention. I listened to music, wrote and read. In writing this I realize I don't need the TV, much as I love pop culture. I tasted a freedom I'd lost and am looking to regain. The writer's strike had stopped me from watching my two soaps, as they were reduced to hollow puppetry and wooden words. Now I see that bad scab writing and months of reality shows and reruns have soured me on my milk, and I seek nutrition elsewhere.

Where better to look than within? I fall back into my new book, I read my research and find that Zora Neale Hurston's collections of folk tales are far more entertaining than syndicated sitcoms and reality shows. I take them and other research and play with the pieces, assembling them into my own entertainment. Like warm water, it envelopes me and I float in a dream of my own making. I remember the name of a band -- "Kill Your Television" -- and suddenly I get it.