We do everything to avoid television commercials.

We DVR and fast forward.

We stream and we back out of commercials.

We skip ads on YouTube after five seconds.

Commercials are hardly ever watched at all anymore.

Except during the Super Bowl. We love us some commercials during the Super Bowl–sometimes even better than the game.

This demonstrates the lure of live major sporting events.

Most of us of a certain age demographic recall how our sandwich-making skills were honed during the playing of television commercials.

It was an art to be able to make the sandwich and return to the easy chair in the living room before the show started again.

It also felt like hitting a jackpot of sorts when your rear end hit the seat just as the show resumed. Or at least it did for me.

Sometimes, however, we didn’t make the sandwich in time and we ended up missing some of the dialogue between the show’s characters.

That’s when re-runs came into importance; you could catch what you missed when the show reran.

On lazy summer days you could catch up on everything you might have missed the first time the show ran in the winter.

Now, there’s no challenge in watching TV anymore. We can blame it on our ability to pause our big screens whenever we like.

During pauses in our television viewing, we:

Prepare complete meals–taking as long as we need to do so.

Vacuum out our car’s interior.

Give the dogs a bath.

Give the kids a bath.

Take a bath ourselves.

Decide we need more chips in order to make it through the show we just paused and drive to the convenience store.

Debate the merits of convenience stores while we’re on the way to them to pick up more chips.

Decide to pause our phones by putting them in Airplane mode before driving to the convenience store.

Wonder why we feel something is missing when we watch TV.

Wonder why this empty feeling comes upon us as with endless TV choices and variety we should be in a perpetual state of bliss whenever it is we watch TV.

Everything in moderation

TV is not a medium of moderation.

It is one of gluttony.

We binge watch.

We watch until we need eye drops to soothe our eyes.

We are enthralled with some shows’ viewings and we are literally glazing over with giddiness when watching others.

Just before we are able to say enough, though, we are sick and tired of watching.

When we reach this point we understand we’ve gone too far.

Too far beyond moderation.

Way, way far beyond moderation.

…

It’s still winter and storms are upon us as we enter into TV’s most glutinous period.

We don’t acquire any skills like efficient sandwich making during this time.

I would suggest we actually become less intelligent by virtue of our engaging in continual spectatorship.

When you’re watching more than you’re actually doing, you’re in decline or are degenerating from within. You’re allowing dust to accumulate on you like the furnishings inside your living room.

You insist all will change with warmer weather and spring’s arrival.

And it likely will temporarily.

Until summer’s stifling heat dictates a return to interiors, air conditioning and binge watching.