Everything Is On

(5-minute read / listen)

It’s 9:17 on a particularly dark winter’s night. The couch is pre-warmed. Our daughter’s in bed and my wife and I haven’t hit the wall just yet. We’re restless but hopeful. We can still do it. And it can still be great. At least it should be. In theory. All we have to do is make the decision: What are we going to watch tonight?

Long before I knew or cared what sex or money were, staying up past 9 o’clock and watching TV was the point of being an adult. Still is.

Back when we were brand new adults we would get to this point on a Wednesday evening and ask, without even thinking, “What’s on?”

We don’t ask that question anymore. It can’t be answered. Because everything is on. All the time.

Right now, this very second, we could watch The Show About The Vampires Who Are Roommates. It’s a fantastically original, well acted show. We’ve watched five-and-a-half seasons. My wife and I send each other Vampires Who Are Roommates memes. Sometimes we do character voices. The series is wrapping up, though there are still two episodes we haven’t seen. But if we watch them now then we’ll be done and we won’t be able to look forward to watching them. This is our spirit show. It is legitimately great. But looking forward to it is better.

Sometimes I’ll watch old episodes of The Show About Nothing. Just one, when my wife is in the shower or a few when I’m in a hotel room by myself. My wife once saw Larry David acting like Larry David in a phlebotomist’s waiting room in Manhattan. Afterwards she hated The Show About Nothing even more than she did before. I used to watch it on Thursday nights in high school. On Friday mornings I’d make a bee line for my English teacher and we’d start talking about the episode like we were the only people in America who’d seen it.

I can’t have those conversations anymore because I don’t know what anyone else is watching.

I still hang out with my high school English teacher. He just retired. We’ll get beers and I ask, “What are you watching?”

“YouTube videos about changing electrical outlets,” he says. But he knows what I’m looking for and recommends The Miniseries About A Prison Escape in the Adirondacks.

“I’ll put that one on my list,” I say.

My List. Yes. My list. It’s 9:53. The night is middle-aged. But we can still do this. I check My List. It’s all there: Everything we’ve ever even kinda wanted to watch: The Show About the Undercover Cop in the Retirement Home, The Show About The Drug Dealers in Baltimore That Everyone But Us Has Seen, The Show Where People Put On Blindfolds And Date Each Other. Yes yes yes. But also: No no no. Not right now. Everything is good. Nothing is quite right for how we’re feeling tonight. I don’t really know how we’re feeling tonight, other than that it’s the same way we feel every night.

We could watch a movie. It’s been ages. But with all the time and attention that would require we might as well do our taxes.

You know what? We should watch The Show About The Vampires Who Are Roommates.

But now it’s 10:12. We used everything we had to watch something trying to decide what to watch and the invisible window closed. So we watch something that feels like nothing: An episode of The Show Where People Have Their Antiques Appraised and Try Not To Act Too Disappointed, or maybe The Show Where People Move Overseas And Criticize the Apartments There. And then we head upstairs, more tired but just as restless, to bed, to try again tomorrow night.

Lately I’ve started keeping a dream journal, because maybe there will be something good on there.