A Town Called Malaise
By complete coincidence, in the last couple of weeks I’ve been employing very similar tactics as Charlie Brooker:
Clearly some kind of self-defence is in order, which is why I’ve already started mentally withdrawing from the real world. It’s easy: all you have to do is imagine that the whole of life itself is just a low-budget daytime TV show, one you’re watching uninterestedly from the sofa with one eye while reading a magazine with the other. You know: Cash in the Attic, something like that. To help sustain the illusion, imagine a cheapo theme tune playing each morning when you wake up, and again each night before you go to bed. Before long, the day in between will feel like zero-consequence schedule-filling fluff, thereby lifting an almighty weight from your shoulders.
It’s surprisingly easy to do, ignoring the news, digging out the dusty old PlayStation, wallowing in a bean bag blinking dumbly at the telly. Finding yourself less informed on the issues of the day than just about anybody else around you comes as a slight shock to begin with but after a while you start to enjoy it in a fuzzy, stupid kind of way.
Ignorance isn’t just a state of mind. It’s a place you can visit. It’s very nice there and you don’t have to leave if you don’t want to.
Posted on May 26th, 2008 at 9:29am under Pooterism, The coming apocalypse
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A political blogger admitting ignorance? If this becomes a trend it will be the end of the interwebs!
To try and redress the balance and restore readers’ faith in the infallibility of that master-race of intellectual giants that is the political blogger, I know everything there possibly is to know about every single issue in every single European and Eurasian country. (Which is why my most recent post is on Eurovision, obviously.)
Nosemonkey’s latest blog post… Belated Eurovision liveblog
It’s great if you can afford to do it. Like when you’re living at home with your mum. You can watch all the mind numbing guff and then bugger off to the pub every afternoon. It’s great for a while, but then it becomes a bit repetitive. you start wanting more, wanting to do more, but then you find it’s no that easy to get out of the rut.
Best not to withdraw, better to change how you interact.
In the immortal words of Paul Simon (Only Living Boy in New York)
“I get all the news I need on the weather report” Found your link on Scary’s blog – just returning from a long absence from blogging
Blogs are getting much better
cheers
mog
Did much the same a few years ago: no thanks, that’s enough, turn the news off whenever it comes on. Or watch it with the sound off and subtitles on, which for some reason is a great deal easier to bear.
(Now of course I watch it almost every night – in order to practice my Spanish.)
ejh’s latest blog post… Aspirations