Life As Performance Art 45

Everybody on CBC Radio seems to have nothing more interesting to talk about than Game of Thrones. I have only seen little segments on YouTube, I am not interested in watching it further, and really, it completely escapes me that something so puerile would be so popular. (the acting is terrible, by the way) Oh, wait a minute. I just answered my own question. Of course it's going to be popular. It is puerile, and people love garbage. Perhaps because I don't have TV. This forces me to have a life, because I don't have other people's versions of reality to sink into my empty and vacuous little soul. This hasn't left me immune, on occasion, to binge watching Schitt's Creek or vintage sitcoms from the sixties and seventies+. But those have been like passing viruses, and I always recover well. I'm also repelled by the violence, sex and nudity in Game of Thrones, and this is likely because I am older, more squeamish with age, and no longer have time for watching things that could upset or disturb me. Not so much a problem with nudity, as I am fine with the human body, which really is a sublime work of art, but sex is something private and I just don't want to see or hear what goes on behind closed hotel room doors, and violence is just simply horrible and gross. What I also don't get is how many adults (or de facto adults) get hooked on those dumb TV shows and when they go to work, that is all they can talk about to each other. Could this be a very sad reflection on how empty and dismal and monotonous your average human Canadian life has become? Methinks, yes. When you consider how completely absorbed one becomes into education, career, home, family, child rearing, and simply staying alive through it all, no one is going to have a lot of time left over for having much of an interesting life. And folks are going to want to have something in common they can talk about in the staff room. So, bring on Game of Thrones, or whatever is on screen de jour. I am reminded here of the wife of a client whom I was helping her care for some twenty-five years ago or so. She was a proper British lady, upper middle-class, and her husband was a stroke survivor. I would come in on Fridays to help him with his bath and breakfast and hang out with him while his wife was busy with other things. Lovely people. We got on marvelously well. She mentioned to me one day that she was going to attend some frothy, sweet and light musical theatre production with her friend. She added that she really had no time for profound and depressing dramas, since life was already difficult enough. Even though I have a preference for profound and depressing dramas, considering her life situation, having to care for a disabled husband, I could not blame her one bit for wanting escape. I suppose this could be true for Game of Thrones fans, though I also wonder if there is such a deficit of drama, colour, and imagination in their lives that they have to get it on tap, thanks to HBO. As for myself, I already live surrounded by plenty of drama, here in my downtown neighbourhood. Just yesterday, we were being serenaded by a psychotic woman in the building next door, flying into prolonged fits of screaming and swearing. There is also the drama of chronic addiction and chronic homelessness and broken hearts outside our front door. When your life is already sheltered, cossetted, and just plane stupid ass dull, then you are going to want your TV dose of safe fantasy and drama with plenty of gratuitous violence, sex, and exposed girl and boy bits (especially girl), I'm not going to fault anyone for loving this toxic Kool Aid. Life, as most of us have been conditioned into perceiving it, simply has very little colour, so why not crack open a cold one, turn on the TV and get yourself all lost and titillated. Plus, you will never be at a loss for something to talk about the next day in the staff room.