Makes Slashing Motion Across Throat

It steals from us, yet we continue to give to it freely. It dulls and deadens our once sharp minds, making us living, breathing piles of unfocused mush. It offers sustenance in the form of useless knowledge that we mark down as fact and then, unwisely and disturbingly, apply to our lives. It distorts the true images of our surroundings with false pretenses and ideas of grandeur. It exalts people and things never meant to be exalted. It gives those people power, which they abuse. Power we unknowingly gave up but should have rightfully kept for ourselves. TV may not be the devil but it's damn close.

I can't help but think of Fahrenheit 451. Nations of men and women, huddling around their futuristic TV's to watch "The Family", a pathetic show about what their lives could have been if they weren't sitting in front of the TV all the time. A society willingly ruled, influenced and controlled by the ideas of a few unoriginal people. The passage of free thought and knowledge stymied by a simple form of mind-numbing entertainment. Has gen x and the subsequent raised on-the-tube generations fulfilled the prophesy of the book? If not already, we're heading that way. All you have to do is look around for a million examples.

I'm cutting myself off. I'm not going to watch TV anymore. I will abstain from the electric glow of the cathode ray tube for all but a select few programs. I'm simply wasting too much of my life, otherwise. There are so many things I want to accomplish in my set number of day in this world and TV doesn't help me get any of them done. Just because I don't know what all of them are doesn't make them any less important. Entertainment is a necessity, but I want find that entertainment in activities that challenge my mind and get me moving, thinking, reacting and being proactive as well as productive. I want to do things that reward and give back. I want to get something out of my time, not just give it up like a worthless piece of trash. My time is precious and I don't want to devalue it any longer.

I've found myself watching the O's every night, which in and of itself is depressing and completely useless. But it's not just baseball. It's movies on FX and HBO, sitcoms, maybe a dramatic series or two. It's like picking different needles out of a stack of needles. They may look different on the surface but there still all just needles. And, honestly, how many needles does one person need? All TV ever does is remind me that I should be doing something better with my time. The human body actually uses less energy while watching TV than sleeping. It's hard to get any less productive than that.

I want to accomplish something - many things - although I'm not sure what they are. I'm confident I'll figure it out if I quiet the other distractions in my life, including pressing the "on" button on the remote. Even if I figure out what to strive for, there's no guarantee that I'll reach my goal. But at least I would have tried. No one ever said they were proud that they watched ten hours of TV a day of their entire life. At least I hope not, because that's sad.

Lost stays and maybe an O's game here and there. And there's always those hangover recovery Sundays where you're unable to do anything else but slip in and out of consciousness laying on the couch watching TV. Everything else has got to go. I'm going to see what I can really do.