December Diary Entries, 2022

Hours and hours of TV

Dec 21

More TV! I make popcorn. I’ll eat the whole bag myself. The room is dark except for the Christmas tree. I take off my watch and take my phone out of my pocket. I get my snacks, my drink, the TV remote, and I set up my things on a little blue foam block, a toy for the kids that at night gets used as an end table. I sit on the couch and lay out the blanket, turn on the TV. Soon the cat has jumped up and settles in. Ah.

Lately I’ve been watching the Netflix show The Last Kingdom, with which I’m so enamored I can hardly explain. I watch and imagine that I myself am the show’s hero Uhtred, that I was born in 9th century England before it was even England to Saxon parents in the north, at the great fortress of Bebbanburg, before the surrounding land was attacked by Danish invaders, before my father was killed, before I became a Danish slave. I am only twelve but one of the Danish leaders comes to like me, he admires my courage. Eventually I am adopted as his son and he raises me as his own. I have a warrior’s spirit, it turns out, and the Danes teach me to cultivate it.

I live like this until some years later all is lost again in blood feud. My adopted Danish father is killed by another warlord as revenge for having taken out that warlord’s eye, which was a punishment for his having attempted to rape my adopted Danish sister, who now has been kidnapped by the one-eyed offender, who returned after being banished for his crime, which he committed as a teenager — but now he’s older and he wants his revenge.

So I am left lordless again, and I flee with my friend and sometimes lover Brida, who like me was born a Saxon but was raised Dane. She feels she is really all Dane, and so when the world opens up and takes our family away from us, she goes to where she knows is home — with my other Danish sibling, my brother Young Ragnar, who will become a warlord himself.

I on the other hand am conflicted. There must be something masterless in my heart. Neither Saxon nor Dane, I am destined, I feel, to reclaim the fortress of Bebbanburg, which now through a series of complicated reversals I can no longer recall is occupied by my wicked uncle, who connived to steal it from me after my father died. Though I was the rightful heir to the fortress and its lands, I was a boy at the time, and could do nothing. How was it my uncle came to occupy the fortress? There have been too many battles since for me to remember. My life feels like one long saga of shield walls and foolhardy charges, last-minute plans and triumphant escapes.

I tried a few years ago to watch the PBS show Poldark, which is about a man come back to England after having fought and lost in the American Revolution. He endeavors to restore order to his family home, and there’s something about a woman he loved before he went off to the war that I can’t remember. They were engaged but now not anymore? She gets entangled with some new weasel suitor, but then Poldark comes back, and they have scenes together with little gasps and close-ups — sir — sir, you’ve returned…

Anyway I had to stop watching because the show made me dizzy. Poldark’s life was just endless up-and-down, but rapidly, rapidly, in the course of an hour. He’d start the episode poor and destitute, make a fortune by the thirty minute mark, and then by the end go bankrupt again in a new investment scheme gone wrong, having made new enemies in the process. Local earls or merchants or shareholders, men with wigs. It became a joke between me and my wife — I’m poor! I’m rich! Haha! I’m poor again!

The Last Kingdom is a story of endless reversals too, but it’s better than Poldark, I think. Maybe it’s because the stories are presented as memories, and so it doesn’t seem strange when we look up and everything has changed. The boy who had his eye taken out is suddenly a man. He has land now, and men who follow him. He thirsts for revenge. Depending on when he comes looking for me I might be about to wage a great battle on behalf of my lord, or instead be out of favor with the same lord and on the run. Maybe I’ve gone back to my wife and our lands, or maybe my wife has fled to a nunnery because she hates my pagan ways, which I won’t give up even after two baptisms. Or maybe I’ve just been baptized again and I have a son now, who is Christian because the aforementioned angry lord sent him away as a plan of revenge against me for the time I held a knife to his throat because he tried to trap me into staying loyal to him again, because I am always still lordless deep down in my heart and so have to be coaxed into these things. I’m just about to be the lord of a whole kingdom myself, which if you watch a few minutes more you’ll see me give up.

Life after hours and hours of this becomes one wide kingdom of reversals. In my memory and right now, constantly, I am in that state — the state of reversal. My life is in the hands of fate, which is the caprice of the gods.

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Dec 22

I’d like to give myself up to them, Odin and Thor, and the other ones. I please and displease them. I give myself up to them. I try, in my own way, to find some virtue, to pursue their favor.

What’s a man who doesn’t take care to attend to them? Nothing. He wanders the house with the phone stuck to his face — he can watch TV on it too, during the day. His kids are asleep, it’s nap time, and he feels on this average afternoon that he can’t summon any organizing virtue, that it must be that his fate has yielded at last to some crisis that’s happened up the street. There’s been a revolution, or a large purchase has been made. Revenge has been had or someone’s love has gone missing. This is all happening somewhere down the street, afar, but in its river-winding way it finds him on a winter afternoon not unlike the ones that came before. But now all is changed.

Suddenly he’s older. He’s worried about staying in shape. The cat is throwing up. He once was a “man to follow”, but now his mind is failing. He thinks: “If I keep watching this TV show I might catch it, the secret that will bring me back in their favor.” But he receives no sign.

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Dec 28

I want it never to end, even though I know it will. But I see now that I could just loop back around and start again at the first season. I hardly remember any of it anyway. TV could make a life like that: one wide agglomeration of episodic views. A new hair style every season. Love interests, subplots, parts played better or worse. Sometimes you do what you can with the part you’re given. Sometimes you play the same character so long you start introducing your own little touches into the formulaic scripts. Quick, before the next reversal, which we’ve seen before — a last minute escape after loyalties shifted, the script hangs over a cliff — quick — get a joke in! One you wrote yourself.

How long can I keep missing out on sleep, letting the show run on into the night? They must have constructed it just for me, the enclosed archons of this dimming time, this nightworld lit up in nice consecutive dreams, that I run to, made just for me, couch potato and safe. Safe from the surge of the batteries’ polar switching, love vehement into hate and back again. Worlds witnessed and worlds destroyed.