Curiosity

When I was home visiting a week ago I stayed at a loved one's house, and watched them suffer. There was a lot of time to think: there were treatments, and rides to treatments, and a doctor and many nurses and meals to cook and then ignore. There were pies and cookies and I had a birthday right in the middle of it. So I ate, and I cooked and all that shit, but there was suffering and going to bed. It leaves gaps of time that are perfect for some choice self-recrimination. And boredom. I kept thinking about how I, too, was suffering and then berating myself for many tedious afternoons, tasking myself for being a selfish shit (and I know you can relate: you're human, and you've probably been around/not been around someone whom you love who's having a really hard time, and you've felt like a selfish little shit for thinking about what their suffering means for your general level of satisfaction with things. If you haven't been to that particular road yet, disregard everything I just wrote- no need to get there any sooner than you're called.) I realized that the worst thing that could happen to me through my loved one's suffering is to get so bored that I just slide sideways into the despondency that's outside the rooms with the screens.

Fortunatley, there's television. The walls in the rooms that adjoin the abyss are covered in screens, but as long as you can find something on them that will hold your interest in an amused, possibly even charmed way, you can just stay in the rooms forever. That is the hope. The quality of your distraction has to be just right: intense about the right things (The Practice of Law! The Meaning of Familial Loyalty! Profiting Mightily from Property Re-sales!) but not too intense (lovers can always find other beds, for example.) There are eighty quidrillion choices out there, eighty quidrillion shows; I've seen maybe ten of them. The show that has me moderately curious right now is The Good Wife.

I think you know it. There's a bunch of good actors in it and a handful of mediocre ones (unfortunately, the lead role is occupied by one of the mediocre ones; she does a small amount of emotions well, but other than that, she's kind of blank. The fact that the pivotal performer is just meh is interesting, almost very interesting, to me: how did the producers know that I, in my sniveling angst, needed an untalented lead to bring me back to it, eternally curious about how the good cast members would dance around the bland one, holding my BFA in acting & directing crumpled into a metaphorical ball in my lap and willing the lead to wake the fuck up already...how did they know??) It's like a glass of warm milk, that show. It's so gently comforting that I'll watch three of them in a row when I might be doing all kinds of other things like working on some play or story or even a blog post. I could be out walking. I could be  washing the walls before the wall inspector gets here or whatever it is that compels us to clean walls. Ditto mopping, or just taking care of myself and not getting up too many times to begin a task and then walk away from it for a moment, never to return. I could save myself some really sore hips (moving too much can put some extra funk in my Sacroiliac Joint Dysfunction.) But The Good Wife is my friend, and never judges. She does not act (at least, not well) and she does not judge. I can watch as many episodes as I want and I get to stay in a room next to the big pit of boredom-induced self-loathing. I'm not sure what's going to happen when I've watched every episode  available on our Netflix account- I suppose I'll have to find another slightly involving television show to watch. Nothing crazy- I wouldn't be able to take Breaking Bad right now, and I don't have tiny brushes to scrub my eyeballs with after the most violent chapters of that show- but something that arouses a manageable amount of curiosity.

Any suggestions? It could be about anything. I just need a fall-back, now. I just need some unspooling fiction, something with lots of back story, something with a good cast and maybe one or two bad actors, for contrast. I'm petrified that I'm going to have to think hard about what it means that there's a person that I love who's suffering.