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I Can’t Stop Watching Live Television

The ancient art of watching whatever’s on gets me thinking about some real philosophical questions

In February of this year I was sidelined with a flu that laid me on my couch for days. I found myself lost in childhood feelings, hazy remembrances of sick days and cartoons, memories that for brief and occasional moments felt indistinguishable from reality. In this state I found myself wanting to re-create the experience of childhood sick days. I wanted to lay on the couch and watch talk shows, law office commercials, court shows, soap operas. I wanted to doze in and out of Tom & Jerry cartoons, the remote dropping out of my hand. So I did exactly that. I paid extra for the Hulu feature that allows you to watch Live TV, that is to say what remains of channels. Remember those? I flipped up and down. Nothing was on that I wanted to watch, which is exactly the feeling I wanted. I settled on cartoons which stayed on for hours. And then for days.

A few weeks later the lockdown came, and the hazy remembrances never quite left. In Ling Ma’s book Severence a pandemic comes from China and cripples American capitalism. You won’t believe me now, but I read Severance in early February right before I got sick. In the book, those affected with the virus become lost in memory. For the first few weeks of the pandemic I marveled at how Ma had come so close to predicting COVID but had gotten the memory part wrong. It would take me…