Twopence pensées

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My wife and I recently purchased a large LCD flat-screen, high-definition television. After setting the thing upon our new entertainment center console (think Pottery Barn-esque), connecting the high-definition cables and 800-watt surround-sound system, and tweaking the settings till everything was just so, I sat on my couch, suddenly confused. For the whole structure before me was eerily familiar -- and remarkably misplaced. I was not looking at a high-end bit of technology. I was sitting in front of an altar.

So I got up and went outside.

Weird.

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I am a fairly earnest professional football fan (for you Europeans, please emend), though I am really not a fanatic. And I am a New England Patriots enthusiast, though I am by no means well-informed about that fine team. All I can say is that I enjoy football in the regular season only to loathe the Super Bowl. I am loosely connected to the Patriots from September to December, and then I begin to fray after that.

This, I assure you, is not a good omen when there is an altar in my TV room devoted solely to such things.

*

Tomorrow will be a glorious day in the heavens; there will be tides and migrations and births and sunrises and sunsets and storms and even the end of storms, but I will hardly notice. I'll be too busy prepping for guests, for the big game.

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I feel a bit like a postmodern Ben Franklin: I've tethered my satellite kite in the meadow; it gets struck by digital lightning, a lightning that rips a course through my little string, all to ground me in digital vibrancy to a spot in my new sort of pew.

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Tomorrow I will again cringe at excess, my own mostly. I will see gratuitous consumption, grotesque displays of life lived too many steps beyond 'enough.' I will feel guilty about my relationship to myself -- feeling I've wasted mind and body and time. I will feel guilty about my relationship with others -- those poor who cannot watch the high-definition-privileged in their $10,000 Super Bowl seats, or the widow alone in her room -- or anyone else. I will feel guilty about my relationship with God, that I've rarely been as excited about the divine as I've been about nearly everything mundane. And then on Monday, well, I'll talk football in the confessional.

Perhaps I can hit the TIVO: I'll record the life I should live tomorrow -- the life I'll miss while watching the Super Bowl -- and then live it some other time.

Now, how great would that be?

A lifetime to back-up.

Peace.


©Bill Gnade 2008/Contratimes. All rights reserved.