Friday, October 31, 2014

LIVING FREE OF TELEVISION


photo by vada, 3

New weather hysteria. We have a forecast for possible snow, an inch or two, and panic is in the air. Oh no, snow! What if the roads are slippery? What if? Of course the roads will be slippery. And it will be cold. For a short time. The snow will be gone by next day. This county isn't even included in the forecast. I'd love to see a wet snow with colored leaves still on the trees. I've seen it once. The world is like candyland. Weather forecasting has become a bit over-frantic in attempts to make the mundane into something exciting for five minutes of tv space. Gotta keep it exciting like the news and commercials around it with jets shooting missiles into Middle-Eastern cities, death from the sky, somebody else killed by cops, another school shooting. The weather doesn't have a chance in the excitement department. Recent reportage predicted a few months ahead to another Polar Vortex, that span of really cold weather that swept over us last winter. Another report says there will be no Polar Vortex this winter and it will be a mild winter. I've heard several predictions that the winter will either be the worst ever or the best ever, nothing in between. Bipolar. Our news, itself, has become bipolar. They only run extremes. Good drama. I'm remembering the time in the hospital channel-surfing a tv with fifty channels. I'd hold each channel long enough to see what it was, two to five seconds, run through it once and turn it off. I am still stunned by how much gun violence I saw, repeatedly, pointing, threatening, shooting, shooting to kill. News was about killing. Entertainment shows were about killing. The evangelists today are even more obvious frauds than the ones in the time of Tammy Faye and Jerry Falwell. Pat Robertson goes on raking in free money tax-free pontificating ignorance. 

by vada

Television is the American dream. I look at it and see what everyone around me, the people of the world I live in, are dreaming, tv shows focused on killing and fraudulent religion. Pizza dripping strings of cheese up close. Fast food. One of my rules of thumb for a good life, like stay out of Walmart, is don't eat anything advertised on tv. On Sundays, watching the race with Justin and Melvin, and football, and basketball, and baseball, and golf, and hundreds of commercials, I'm in a foreign country. It is not my world. Everything is coercion, you must buy something. You must look a certain way. You must have fun a certain way. I could not live with that hysteria in my house telling me what to buy, teaching me money is the only value. The False News channel has recently won a federal court case allowing them to lie legally in their news. Surely, this is to protect them from lawsuits for false reporting. It's not like they were waiting for permission. I'm glad I early voted. The political ads as false as Ann Coulter I pay no attention to since voting. I don't even hear them. Kay Hagan the democrat I can't tell from a republican. And the republican parrot Virginia Foxx. When I see her possum face I want to say, Knock, knock, is anybody in there? Not my world. I had the displeasure in the late 1980s to sit at a dinner party next to the head of the NC democrat party. He asked me how many children I had. I wanted to say, How many books have you read? I discouraged him from trying to talk to me right off. I felt like I died and went to hell. I did not feel at home. My world does not include people who ask me how many children I have, pretending to be interested in what I have to say. I knew before he started he was not interested in anything I had to say, and I wasn't interested in how many children he had. 

by vada

It was an interesting peep-hole into a world completely separate from my own, a world I did not want for myself. Something like television in that way. Made me glad I was not born into wealth as I regretted in childhood. Throughout my life, I've wanted to know as many different kinds of people as I could, from poor to rich, ignorant to brilliant, crazy to sane, different cultures, different countries. My reading is from all over the world. Recently been through about ten years or more of reading about China, history, fiction and poetry, seeing films and art. I'd waited a very long time for China to open up and let the rest of the world see their contemporary writing and art. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sparked my interest. I looked for more and found quite a lot more. Raise the Red Lantern, The Hero, Shanghai Triad. One led to another, finding writers at amazon. In a short number of years I learned China's history, the whole story of Maoist China from the revolution to the post-Mao era. Perhaps the biggest surprise was the expanse of desert in China. I've seen parts of it in films, looked at it in the Atlas. It's serious desert like Australia, perhaps even more. Not even Aborigines could live there. Some of my favorite poetry is from Old China, Li Po, Po Chu Yi, Tu Fu, Han Shan, One of my favorite books in the house is Sunflower Splendor, a collection of Chinese poetry printed in the early 1970s. It's a desert island book. Interest in China expanded to interest in Mongolia. The great wall of China was built to keep the Mongols out. They were that much of a problem. Mongols raided northern China regularly. The Mongols could not be defeated, and one of the wonders of the world was constructed to wall them off. 

by vada

I've not done anything notable with my life, but I've had a rich life of the mind, which was the only thing I wanted all the way along. I knew from the start I wanted to live remotely and alone, to follow my own interests. So much I was curious about and one thing led to another. By now, I have a fair to moderate understanding of the history of the whole earth. Persia is a gap. I have little experience with Persian history and writing. Some of Persian history is in the Old Testament. Persia was a powerful force in the Old Testament part of the world, and had some interesting kings. Their religion, Zoroastrianism, is one of the world's great religions. They are called Parsis in India, I've checked out a netflix documentary about Persia that was interesting, a good starting place. There is one king, in particular, whose life I'd like to read about. If my imperfect memory is functioning, I think it was the first Darius, the Great. He sounded like a good ruler. One of the rare ones in human history. I sent off for a DNA analysis a couple days ago. I'll be curious to see all the parts of the world my DNA went through. I feel like I spent some time in Mongolia. I'm curious to see the African lineage. I've an idea Africa is where most of it will be. Cultures all over Africa are unique unto themselves. The music from different parts of Africa are unique to their culture. Thomas Mapfumo's music from Zimbabwe is very different from the music of Chaba Zahouania from Algeria. My curiosity encircled the globe down through time. I don't know a great deal about any one place, but have some familiarity with almost every place on the globe. I don't know much about Greenland, though recently met a woman who had lived there. She told me about the landscapes inland seen from a plane. This is how I entertain myself while the people around me watch television and buy new cars. My life is so much richer for bypassing television. I've not had time to watch television. Too much interests me to waste a lifetime on hyper-violent, mind-numbing eye candy. 

vada herself


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