Several posts on this publication have analyzed the normal everyday structure of life in the US.  The way we speak and think, the way we wait, the way we pursue goals and now the way we furnish our apartments.  Technically, and more specifically, the way I just re-arranged the furniture in my apartment.

The normal structure belies a wild, untamed, unexplainable and lonely and quiet unpredictable wilderness of bad grammar, aimless ambition, and unresolved hours.  The incredible weirdness of life – the utterly incomprehensible strangeness of the thing you are seeing or feeling or smelling right now is a controllable force.  It is a wild animal, but not a cool wild animal like a tiger; it is a normal, reasonable wild animal like a water buffalo, or a yak.  It is a boring, brutally strong, single-minded eating machine capable of clearing a field with its mindless chewing while restoring it with its profuse expulsion of shit.  But it’s too dumb to know its power.

It is a beast of burden and the thing that is probably your conscious or your soul and I don’t care if this is too big of an introduction about the interior decoration of my apartment.

The TV, the great tamer of the beast, is no longer the central focal point of my home.  It has been banished to the bedroom where it will be viewed only when demanded.  My living room is now the room within which I live.  Which does not include watching TV.  It includes other things, TBD.

This is not a post that celebrates the demise of TV in the era of Wikipedia.  I hate wikipedia and I love TV.  Especially bad primetime dramas about death and the resolution of crimes that prevent more death from happening.  These programs are the things that tamed the dumb wild animal inside me.

TV – the Empire of Television – drew the maps of my life.  It laid the highways in the wilderness that organized and neatly divided what was something that had no name or metaphor or reason. It gave a history to a place or to a thing or a to a person that didn’t need one, necessarily.  Is this too big a metaphor for interior decoration?  I don’t know – you tell me.

The boundaries that define normal have been drawn by television.  A living room has a couch and chairs that try to face each other (for, you know, conversation) as well as face the TV (in case, you know, no one’s talking).  A workday revolves around the prime time television schedule.  Even if no one is watching prime time TV the way they once did.  Dinner is eaten at or around the evening news.  Sleep occurs at or around the nightly news.   Go somewhere on this planet that has no specific concept of primetime TV and you will find yourself lost.  You will be looking for an axis point around which a day is organized.  Is today a workday or a weekend?  You will consult the TV and you will be confused.  This is the moment when you realize the strangeness underlying the thing you thought was normal.  It’s a thin line.

I crossed that thin line involuntarily.  I am trying to reorient my way around my home without this time-honored focal point.  I do not expect a meaningful transformation to occur.  I am not seeking a new level of productivity or awareness.  I simply cannot go back to unknowing the outside boundaries of TV’s map.  The outer area is bigger than the 3 hours of primetime.  It is wild, curvy, weird, boring, quiet and completely pointless.  Here’s my impression of a yak’s epiphany: “Oh Look!  More Grass!”