I have just added a new article: Me TV. It’s a memoir-ish account of the television shows I watched in my youth, and is really a testament to the great wasteland that is my mind. If I had spent half the time I spent watching TV just walking around, I might have never had a weight problem.
One little tidbit I left out is that during some of the family TV time, my father and I would watch The Rockford Files, which is an hour-long show. He’d stop at Uncle Bill’s on his way home (Uncle Bill’s was a bottom-feeding discount store, back before there were stores such as “Big Lots”) and pick up a half gallon of Whoppers, those delicious malted milk balls. We would plow through the entire carton during the show, after dinner. It seemed a little bit like dessert, but was not a great thing for me to do.
So I’ve had this weird relationship with food and television all of my life. I’ve loved both of them far too much, and for the wrong reasons, and without any conscious thought as to whether or not it helped me, made me stronger, smarter, or faster in any way. I just liked those things, enjoyed them, and squandered the better part of my life away because of it.
Granted, it wasn’t as bad as alcoholism, or drug addiction, or gambling away all my possessions. Instead it was a slow decline into obesity, and time wasted that I could have been learning something, building a business, or improving the world. I wonder if I can do any of those good things now, ever.
That seems to be behind me now. I just don’t have as much time to watch television anymore, in spite of how much I love it. About half the time that I do, I do so on a treadmill exercising as I go.
To be honest, though, I would like to just sit some time and plow through a carton of chocolate covered malt balls.