I just don't know anymore...

Sorry for the lack of updates. My brother is being shipped out early tomorrow morning for the Air Force. I don't know what to feel. It feels like I just broke up with someone I loved, but it hurts more in the bones, deep down. I know I'll still be able to see him, like once every few months and he won't be going to Iraq or anything, but it isn't enough to stop this pain.

TV is such a comfort food. That has been all I could think about doing since he got called up. Watch TV. Shut away and ignore the pain. Without TV I have been finding myself not able to concentrate on anything, I just float through the day thinking how much I will miss him.

I guess this is what it means to be human. Feel pain without anything to make you forget it. To numb it. It is interesting.

I just don't know. I feel lost. Like I am loosing someone I have known my whole life. Like he will just disappear.

Another 3 or 4 days...

Funny. Now I don't even want to be on the internet as much as I used too. I think this is why I am having trouble updating this blog.

Today, besides telling you how hard its been the last 4 days or what television show accidentally crossed my vision while I was in a friends house, I will tell you what I have been doing instead of watching television.Then later today, when I feel more creative, I will post a discussion I had with a friend that relates to how television can brain-wash you into thinking its not even television telling you to do certain things!

I read, a lot.
I write, a lot.
I have caught up on my homework.
I workout.
I haven' yet, but I have had a real craving to start drawing again.
I have conversation with real people in front of real people, not in front of a TV.
I prepare a lot of raw foods.
I lay on the floor looking at the ceiling listening to amazing music.
I read Calvin and Hobbes.
I play with my cat more.
I have made decisions to do other things that now I have time for, but that haven't been done yet.
I think about writing a lot.
I try to figure out how I am going to move to Portland with as little amount of money as possible.

3 days late

It has been much longer than anticipated.

The first weekend of my anti-tv crusade. It was horrid. I found myself bored a lot of the time, bored enough not to want to read, or write. I would sit there, looking at the ceiling, my mouth open, drool coming out of my mouth. Scratch that. It wasn't that boring.

I have found that now I crave the company of others. I used to be such a loner, content in staying home everyday and only venturing out when I needed too. The movie actors and the video game text were my means of conversation. Now that those are gone, I crave people like a drug. Just listening to others, their words on their lips, is amazing. I don't think I ever listened to anyone. In usual situations, I would sit back and catch enough of the conversation to keep it going, but never paid attention to the inflection in the voice, mannerisms, hand movements, the language used. Conversation. I never realized the importance of words until I listened to someone with my full attention. Beside our clothes, our cars, our haircuts, conversation I believe is what society relies on most to judge another, and is the first step in learning about someone. Perhaps the only step.

I caught myself watching a music video on youtube yesterday. Once I realized, I clicked the X on my web browser. Harder than I thought. Still...

I had too...

I didn't have the motivation today for this blog. It's almost 11pm, the end of the day, and I am writing. Between school, this blog, and my own personal fictions, I feel I never stop writing.

Remember what I said yesterday? About how your mind works in such a way that it relates everything you do with what you have seen on the television, yet you are too unaware of this because you are still trapped in the cycle of digital landscapes and boredom? I have been off TV for 4 days now, and it's worse than ever. I notice more now that I have stopped watching. I write my stories, I think of movies. I talk to my friends, I think of sitcoms. I write my emails, and want to scream out memorized dialog from Fight Club. "You are not your jobs! you are not your watch! you are not how much money you have in the bank! you are not your khakis!"

I AM NOT TELEVISION. I am shocked I have been ingrained with information that is rather useless for living life. Do I know how to hunt if I ever have to? No. Do I know how to build a solid shelter in the forest if I ever need to escape or find myself lost? No. Do I know how to survive in this world without a tube feeding me information? No. Do I really know what foods to eat, what music to listen too, what cat food to buy? Or is it someone telling me these things. Telling me you must be comfortable in your life to survive. You must give up. Never question your primal survival skills, my light will shine in the darkness of your living room to guide you. I am your mother. I am your culture.

I AM NOT YOU!

I don't know how, but I WILL force you out of my life. Out of my head. Free in all the ways you are not. Free to choose and survive without the constant whisper of mother culture in my ear. (Ishmael reference, if anyone asks.)

Errors...

I talked to my teacher today. He said it was a very odd request because my request has never been made before. We are trying to work something out. Right now it seems we are content with me studying in another room until the film is over. I will be reading and studying whatever we would be watching for that class period. So it shouldn't affect my grade.

Today, my mind played whole movie scenes.

Try to test yourself. Now that I have refused television, I have found that throughout the day I relate events happening in my life to movies, sitcoms, or video games. I never realized I did this until I stopped watching television. A conversation may happen and I am reminded of Seinfeld. Sometimes when trying to explain a story, I use scenes or dialogs from Dark City. Remembering parts of my past brings up the television shows I was watching at the time.

I feel like I am stuck in a past that never belonged to me.

Have we lost all sense of who we are? Have we let every pixel we have seen become a part of our consciousness?

Go to a coffee shop or a restaurant and listen to conversations. If you listen long enough, they will talk about a movie, a television show, what they saw on the news that night. Robots repeating everything they see and hear. Have we lost the intelligence to speak directly about how we feel, without bringing up mass televised media?

I was reading that in an average American person, from the time they are born to the time they die, watches approximately 15 years of television.

15 years! During that time, you can master almost anything! You can become a computer genius, a master artist, a decent writer, a great soccer player! Imagine what you have lost. ITS STEALING 15 YEARS OF YOUR LIFE AWAY. Thats 15 years you don't spend with your friends, your family, your pets, your studies. And in turn, 15 years of advertising, canned laughter, false news reports, fear, hate, and racism.

We no longer have parents who raise us. Their values and morals are outdated. We now have FOX, ABC, and NBC telling us the proper way to behave. Instead of our heroes being Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Brown, your brother or sister, your grandfather, your best friend; we now look up to characters in movies and the rich people in sitcoms.

Instead of accepting people for who they are and what they look like, we need bigger breasts and larger muscles. Perfect smiles. Bleached white teeth. Unblemished skin.

We never worried much about such things before. People were people. Now we are told they aren't unless they look like the current Hollywood flavor of the week.

Read this comic. It goes along perfectly with my blog. Jonathan Hickman has founds facts about our "truthful" news media that would shock you.

Second Day

Speaking the truth, I miss television. Its only the second day! On Monday I had school and homework to fill up time. Today I have nothing. No school, little homework. I finished working out and sat on my couch. I picked up a book, read a couple pages, placed it back down. I wandered around my small apartment bored. I turned music on, then I turned it down, then off. Back on again. I then decided to write what I am experiencing.

I feel I have ADD. My mind will not focus, for long or short periods of time. I just had a body numbing work out and all I want to do is rest. But usually resting after a work out means popping in a movie and zoning out.

I turn the music down, hoping it will help me focus. Its eight o clock. I have three long hours before bed time. Three hours of wishing I was watching a movie, playing video games. I jump from thought to thought, like my cat jumping at a red laser after I gave him catnip.

I turn the music back up, trying to drown away my thoughts of televised madness.Am I detoxing it out of my system? The cravings will go away, but not until they drive you to the ground screaming in frustration.

Maybe I will meditate. Quiet the mind. It works for Buddhists.

Read, read, read...

"A motion picture, or music, or television, they have to maintain a certain decorum in order to be broadcast to a vast audience. Other forms of mass media cost too much to produce to risk reaching only a limited audience. Only one person. But a book... A book is cheap to print and bind. A book is as private and consensual as sex. A book takes time and effort to consume---something that gives a reader every chance to walk away. Actually, so few people make the effort to read thats it's difficult to call books a "mass medium." No one really gives a damn about books. No one has bothered to ban a book in decades.

But with that disregard comes the freedom that only books have. And if a storyteller is going to write novels instead of screenplays, that's a freedom you need to exploit."

---Chuck Palahniuk

School

As I predicted, we watched a documentary about Robert Frost in my English class. I wasn't in the mood. I turned two computer screens towards my desk and read by the glow of a web page. The light bright enough to illuminate my pages as my mind was trying to block out garbled lines of poetry.

My classmate told me that documentaries are OK to watch. Even after I explained to hear I am trying to stay away from all TV, including the noun form. The eerie luminescent dull glow. She still told me that education gleaned from a televised documentary is a good thing. I refuse to accept this. As I was reading by computer light, my eyes would often wander to the television screen, catching brief flashes of a graying old man telling us he took the road less traveled by. During one of these very brief interruptions from my Palahniuk, I remembered an article I once read about the effects television has on our brain chemistry. How it releases a chemical that puts you into a state of dumb euphoria, flipping your brain switch to alpha mode, making your more receptive to hypnotic suggestions.

Do you really believe you want to eat that food your eating or watch that new movie coming out? They implant thoughts into our head while we are switched off. Suggestions are made. All television is a marketing drug, slipping you pills to keep you comatose and happy, waiting to be told what to do.

This link pretty much sums it up without a lot of big scientific words.

How TV Rots the Brain.

With this new information, you can see that it doesn't matter whether its television, a movie, or a video game, the effect of just having the TV is the same result.

Hypnotic trance.

NBC, CNN, ESPN, FOX, ABC, BBC. We have replaced the gold watch that swings back and forth in front of our eyes with thousands of brand named pixels printing their images onto our Occipital Lobe.

My goal at the end of the thirty days. A smashed TV, on video, so I can always remember.

Projects coming up in the next 29 days. Letters to the 5 biggest media conglomerates! Questioning people on the street? Maybe a staged protest at a local news channel?

The First Day

The last time I watched was yesterday.

I packed up my TV, VCR, and PS2 and placed in storage. I hid all my games and movies. I drove to my mother’s house for dinner. The television was on, but the sound was off. Have you ever realized that even when their is no sound, the television makes a whiny protest of noise, continiously dowloading bandwith into your home. The internal tuner forever trying to place an image on the screen creates a low frequency shriek. Sometimes, you can even hear the squeal when it is turned off. I kept trying to steal glances at the images of men in tight uniforms throwing a leather ball to other men. Programmed teamwork.

After dinner, my brother put on a movie. I decided this was to be my final movie before I started my 30 day resistance. I felt guilty at first, but the further along the movie played, the further I was enthralled, hypnotized, and trapped in the bizarre, subliminal impressions speaking to me.

It is morning. I wake with a sense of urgency. Today feels new. For the first time in a very long time, I am excited to get up, to see what happens. I ate breakfast and cleaned myself. Work is where I will encounter my first problem. My coworkers listen to the radio. They do not like local radio stations. They prefer the consumer driven behemoth of Simmons or ClearChannel. Blasted noise devices. My boss also has his TV on all day. The garble of news anchors and spin masters below audible understanding. Fox and Murdoch wanting to be heard. America’s marketing dreams offered us, one sound bite and commercial at a time. I have a gut feeling that if we didn’t watch TV or listen to the radio, we would have some semblance of control over our lives.

School is tonight. I am sure we will be watching a movie about some poet. Maybe Ill bring a book and try to read by what little light our classroom will have. My teacher may understand my predicament, I will ask.

The rules:

1. No television.
2. No video games.
3. No movies.
4. The television, as a solid object, will not be within sight when I am at home.
5. No finding movies or television shows on youtube.
6. No visiting internet sites where the prime source of information and news is about video games, movies, or television.

Goals: To reach an understanding with myself that the people who feed me movies, television, and video games are only trying to force upon me their world view. These forms of entertainment are so well packaged that they leave an imprint on our mind, brainwashing us with a programmed view the world. The rich, the well-to-do, the popular, corporations, government They all play a part. I am wanting to erase their images from my head so I can create my own images. I can write my own story without the whispering in my ear.

I haven't watched television for the past few months. When you give up programmed TV, you start using the television for other things. I became addicted to video games. I would watch movies all day. As the novelty of these began to fade, I played and watched less and less. But at least three or four times a week, I would find myself watching a full movie when I only meant to watch 20 minutes. Or putting in a video game for a relaxing session after work, only finding myself playing for hours after the sun went down.

This is addiction.

This is an addiction I am willing to break. Will break. With the culmination of a sledgehammer, a tv, and a video camera. Can I accomplish this? Can I honestly escape from everything that I am against. I doubt it, but I must try.