Day 8 - Uh oh

I don't know what happened, but under the pretense of allegedly needing to know how the Sweden-U.S. hockey game was going, I switched on the TV. Hockey has never meant much to me, so this was obviously a ruse on my part to sabotage me.

The commentators were commenting on first period highlights & ads kept running on and on. I got bored. Since I'd crossed into that neverland anyway, giving in to the impulse to flip channels was just a short slide. Or so I rationalized at the time. Within minutes I was engrossed in 'The Wire', some gritty streetwise HBO thing that I knew from the old days, back when I was still using. The characters talked real fast, slangy & smart and there were no commercial breaks. I ordered my logic to do some gymnastics and in no time I concluded that it was just like watching a DVD or video - which I've somehow deemed as okay under my mushy rules governing this experiment. As I explained to a friend last night, with DVD's & videotapes it's me & only me who's determining what and when I get entertained. He wasn't convinced and now I see his point.

The episode ended & I shut it off. An hour of my life, vaporized.

I suppose I do know what happened: I wanted to regress into some primordial womb-state where I was fed by osmosis, no thought was demanded of me, and the outside world was invisible for a finite chunk of time.

Hmmm. This defeat is hard to digest, I feel like taking a shower. First & foremost I ought to tighten up my regimen & get rid of this DVD/video exception. No doubt this paved the way for today's breech. And then of course HBO should suffer, they owe me an hour. Some low-level intern there is going to have to spend some time skimming over & deleting a venomous email for me. That's a couple minutes reclaimed right there, for starters.