Moodswing - Avoiding all activity

I’m not proud that I know all the names of the final contestants on that mental enema of a TV show called “Making the Band,” but my excuse it that I’ve recently spawned and I’m adhering to a strict recovery regime that entails lying on the couch like a sack of medicated sausage for six weeks. So when “Making the Band” appeared on TV, I was drawn to it like a helpless bacterium toward a sucking sore. I could have changed the channel, but pressing the remote technically qualifies as physical activity and — unlike my 86-year-old neighbor, Miss Taylor, who lives across the street and works in her garden with a heavy pickax every day — my goal is to avoid all activity. The other morning I saw Miss Taylor walking barefoot in the rain. Kicking her feet up and everything. I was spying on her through my window blinds. Compared to her I am a plankton-eating ocean slug. But that’s my goal, what with my needing to heal and all.

Anyway, my husband has very strong convictions about bad TV. In fact, he only leaves the TV on when the house is empty so burglars will be psyched into thinking someone is home. If he ever discovered I watched “Making the Band,” he would have donated our TV to Goodwill the very next day, which would have prompted me to scream at him until his sinuses cracked.

Since I was trying to keep such exchanges at a minimum for the baby’s sake, my practice was to wait until Chris left for his late-night bartending shift before I clicked on the tube to see what Lou Pearlman — that creepy entertainment promoter with a body like a pail of paste who chooses who’s in the band and who gets tossed like a used tissue — has in store for the boys as he dicks with their brains week after week like a drunk kitten with a basket of yarn balls. One time he tricked the kids into being late for choreography practice or whatever, so by the time they finally showed up their instructor had left and their publicist just stared at them with a face like a puckered poohole.

As engineered, this reduced the boys to a bitchy pool of adolescent piranha, and they pecked each other to emotional shreds. So as you can see it was easy to convince myself I was auditing a behavioral study rather than face the truth, which is that my brain was being drained like a bag of melted bacon fat.

So during this moment of TV reprieve while waiting for Chris to leave, all of a sudden it occurred to me that maybe it’s not all that normal for an 86-year-old lady to be walking barefoot down the road in the pouring rain. Maybe I should have gone out there and asked Miss Taylor if she was all right. Maybe her family was looking for her or something, I don’t know. Jesus God, what kind of neighbor am I?

So I looked out the window to make sure she wasn’t at it again when I noticed that the curb was packed with parked cars, which is weird because parking isn’t allowed on our street. So I went outside to discover that a wake was being held in honor of my other neighbor, who had died the week before.

Needless to say I felt like a complete basket of crap. Just think, while I was sitting like a sea elephant in front of the TV my neighbor next door died and I knew nothing about it.

And what’s worse is I vaguely remembered hearing an ambulance’s siren blaring to a stop right near my house some nights earlier, but I was so busy being a TV turd it didn’t occur to me something might be wrong. You’d think I’d care enough to venture outside my cable-connected cocoon to check. There was an ambulance, for chrissakes.

I offered them my condolences and shuffled back home. Chris had left for work so the TV was bellowing. “Win Ben Stein’s Money” was in its final elimination round and Stein was about to defend his $5,000 by becoming a common contestant. “Stay tuned, you’ll learn plenty,” he beckoned from the box, but my regime of avoiding all activity was over, so I turned it off.