The saccharine nothings of nighttime television, like cavemen around a flickering fire we’re exploited via hardwire:

I made the pilgrimage last night over to Brad and Beth’s to watch the final episode of friends. When R and I first moved to St. Louis we were exhausted by the pace of life, I was spending several hours a day in my car moving from campus to campus on the adjunct tilt-a-whirl and we had one car between us, so I was chauffeur as well. We would come home from our workdays and collapse in front of back-to-back episodes of friends. We had few actual friends, and little energy and cash to do much anyway, so we acquiesced to this surrogate life. We both began to dream about the characters and took our unhealthy relationship dynamic one step further through our involvement with this fictional world. I haven’t watched a new episode of Friends in some time. I sort of broke up with the show when we broke up, so I had to get the plot fill in from Beth. I must say, after not having TV for six months, this episode did not give me the sense that I am missing anything. “They spent ten million plus on this? They certainly made that back through the endless commercial breaks.”

I read the Slate article that admits Friends is a popular show, but also notes that it’s best ratings wouldn’t have cracked the top twenty in 1995. Npr this morning compared the end of Friends to that of Frazier, which is a much better (i.e. more substantive) show, and posed questions about Mash and Cosby. It’s hard to find that mix of substance and humor. I’m not sure Friends ever had it, but I did enjoy it for a time, Chandler had great timing. I guess the characters were always materialistic, but that seemed to increase as the show wore on. The narrative engine seemed to shift from the struggle to find one’s self to the struggle with the selfishness that denies the cost of privilege – an ironic observation as I sit on this side of the digital divide and drink my morning coffee. The episode where Phoebe takes back her charitable donation so she can fund a huge wedding was my last straw. Beth tells me she gave it back and got married on the street in the snow, so perhaps other viewers had my reaction. Blah, shouldn’t our guilty pleasures give us more pleasure? Perhaps I need to start watching Alias, Jennifer Garner is certainly a cutie.


Insipid rhyming is a sign of mental collapse:

Ah Friday, bringer of the weekend. May your accomplishments be many and your obstacles few, if it can’t wait till Monday then push it quickly through. On Sunday you’ll be golfing, in Forest Park, that’s true. This evening you’ll be drinking; nothing new, nothing new. So say hi to friend Jen, she wants to be a Jew, and say hi to the others here (perhaps in “comments” they’ll say hi to you). This weekend still I’m working, my Mother’s far away, so Sunday in the afternoon the store is where I’ll stay. Next weekend it’s the Ozarks, so very far away, vacations sure are needed to escape the workday fray. Next Friday is the goal now and it’s just half a day. In a speedboat I’ll be bobbing, next Friday night for sure, and all my workday trials this happenstance obscures. So toast me now for drifting, in life and in that boat, for like the witch in Holy Grail if I’m a duck I’ll float.