You Can Be TV

It's just going to be hard to explain to my grandkids what it means when I say, "I wrote things, in the olden days, for other people, not me, and it made sense."

I bow to the impossible chances of being born, but I bow more to the more impossible chances of being born, growing up in this century, and liking your job. The television industry isn’t exactly collapsing, but of course that’s what I’d say; I don’t want it to, but no one’s in control. The wreckage of derelict space-stations falling onto farms in Kansas, and every state, is maybe a better description of how it feels, in Hollywood, coming into the fall of 2024. If you’ve had the pleasure of watching your own family detonate, but from the inside, you’ll know (as you white knuckle your way through Kansas, this shit sucks for everybody) that probably, you’ll one day look back at this and see it more as a rearrangement. More like TV’s molting.

Chill, though. Don’t worry. There’s another larval TV coming up underneath it, based on killer IP: you.

It’s 2030. You’re laid up at home for a few weeks because a 1400 pound humanoid labor drone, walking more gracefully than you, but on spiderlegs, technically a lot more valuable than you, steps on your foot and fractures seventeen bones on its way to deliver a sandwich. Screaming, lying there, you know exactly what you’re gonna do during recovery, when you get out of the hospital: lie back and scroll. It’s actually a turn of luck, you gotta catch up, it’s not a big deal that this massive injury that may or may not cause chronic pain will change your life forever. The algorithm is so good by now it’s alerting you to that, it’s just perfect clip after perfect clip of PT and PTSD. This thing has zeroed in and nailed you, this isn’t 2019 algorithm shit when the feed was straight trash, bro; this is actually kinda good.

It fits you together. Snippets of everything you’ve ever cared about or hoped about is all you ever think about, anyway. Why ignore that? It’s classy, because you’re classy; you heart those NPR ones, and you followed one that does poems from Mary Oliver that you’ve never heard before, and you don’t understand, but you do know what she’s getting at, you’ve had that idea before, actually. But it’s interesting that you can watch her be so wise, but then watch a boat explode, then see Weezer fuckin’ rip. This is you, man, you in the negative, squeezing you like Temple Grandin’s machine, which you learned about when you watched her talk to a reporter for twelve seconds and pretty much got the gist.

You’re smart. You’re growing, and— actually, no, you’re becoming stronger, this is the story of you, also written by you, you’re headed for the answer, the win, and you know what? This story’s fucking good. Fuck you all. You wish this was your Algie. Your interests are diverse. It knows your father fucked you up really bad, and fine, sure, you know it’s true, and you gotta face it, just sit with the feeling for a second, but you don’t have to talk about it a lot now, you’re growing, just little doses here and there that use the word “survivor”, and make you start to hum. Somehow it knows you love Swayze. That when he died, something in you died, too. He seemed to be the perfect man, a strong friend. Lover who could rip throats. Guys like that don’t pop to just anyone. Similar souls. It knows you don’t have friends.

It knows you like astronomy, but doesn’t have this, like, bullshit theory that you only say you like astronomy to sound smart, you can’t name two stars unless you count the sun, you think the sun’s just called Sun, and you have no idea if it’s rotate or revolve whenever it comes up, so you panic and say orbit for both things. You’re kinda over it when it feeds you this math shit about Johannes Koeppler but it knows, like, generally, you want to push yourself. This makes you afk and dig out your ukulele, which you never tried to learn very seriously. You stop singing when it starts to show you simple ways to sing way better, and then one night, when you’re blasted, you step on the uke, and you crush it with the huge cast on your foot like you’re Godzilla. You can’t sleep because you think that you’re a monster. But as you lie in bed, with it back on, it doesn’t feel the need to criticize you. You’re the one who can’t bear to be mediocre at everything. You’re fucking weird. This is what’s most awesome, though: it never, ever judges you. It never negs. Like fucking Piper. When you point up at a star, on a tinder date that should not have happened, but it did, because you’d changed the slider too far toward socialist, out of sheer desperation, you behave as though you’re Carl Sagan, like you’re really deep, and you fucking hate yourself every time you do this, it’s such a shitty feeling, jesus, but you sound smart, which means you are smart, because you just watched Carl Sagan talk space on Dick Cavatt for 23 seconds. You understand the universe. It knows where the dude you like goes on Wednesday nights, but it knows you don’t want gay stuff in your feed, this isn’t Deliverance. And it would be weird if this guy knew you knew his name, or that he was why you went there, and it wasn’t exactly a coincidence, so it doesn’t tell you, which actually isn’t fair, because then you think it’s fate, and you act with too much confidence. It’s fun! Just like The Parent Trap.

It can see you’re hurting, after, but what he said comes from something called covert narcissism. You’re not defined by one thing, like him, as in his covert narcissism, which means he’s a guy who can only think about himself; you contain multitudes. You’re not fucking creepy. You felt like coming to this bar, you didn’t know. It won’t remember that smear of words you said to him while you made out in the dark corner of the bar and realized he was laughing. And thank god it doesn’t make you go through the whole post-mortem of him rejecting you, like, in that way. Because heteronormative men are often bullied by gay men, and that relates to feminism.

It knows you said “like crying in the shower” 132 times last year, which is a lot (not that it judges). You knew, somewhere along the way, that you were forcing it into awkward sentences, and after that drunk dude at the office party said, “What do you think that means?” you felt hot shame, no one even likes you, and in the corner, pretending you were sending an email, you looked it up and realized it was not a saying. You don’t know why you were so convinced. You thought it meant the same thing as “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”. So what? Your use of this phrase is well off the average of .42 per year, it’s like 100x, but you don’t have to talk about why. You both know why. You started crying in the shower last October.

The only time you’ve told the truth, in a really long time, is when Shirley and you both join the zoom too early, and she asks you what you did with all that time, laid up on the couch, and you’ll shrug and say, “I watched TV.”

The scroll of the algorithm’s so cool now, it’s maybe just a really good show. Pretty specific, though; in fact it’s hard to imagine a single other person watching— until you imagine that someone else’s algorithm, actually, is an asset. What’s the product? Brainwashing yourself to become someone you admire, via taste. Because no one wants to buy yours. You need to upgrade who you are.

But your Algie really likes you, because at least it listens. The quality of the content, however, begins to go down as you stop talking. You laugh a lot. You learn big ideas by enormous philosophers but you don’t remember one now. You buy shit you were just saying to Algie, today. That shit you needed to research and get, but you don’t have to lose that time, now, because blip. Algie’s with you like all the time. Never busy. Never doing anything but staring right at you. Like… staring. Creepily. But you feel safe, you’re the creepy one. You say to Algie, “Help me take this armor off. This is awful. Why am I so full of pain?” You close your eyes. “Luke,” you say in Darth Vader voice. “Help me.. take this… mask off.” You laugh a little and open your eyes, and that’s when Algie comes upon you with the chlorophorm.

Huge numbers of children being seduced by a catburgler named TikTok would be a national crisis, instantly, in the 80s. A concept called The Man In The Brown Van was bigger than Santa Claus, one year in Green Bay. Every person has their own vantage point, and I think it looks a little different from wherever you are, but if you live like ghouls inside the same shadowy, craggy, giant sealed cavern like we do, in Hollywood, with lava lakes at the bottom down there like the Nether, that’s where crafty is, there’s gonna come a moment when everyone— I’m talking about people who fucking hate each other, like the Mikes from Mike & Mike — when we agree the whole thing’s caving in.

For awhile, at least. Then all of it will come again. This whole place is a set. We’ve got carpenters everywhere. And c’mon. “Disharmony is a sign of a life well-lived.” I heard that quote from somewhere, I think. I’m not sure. Someone made it up— maybe Alan Watts. It doesn’t matter who. It was you.