When you're tired, the direction of thoughts points downward. What seems brilliant now will be obvious tomorrow. When someone tells you that you need to adjust your chair or your back will feel like the Turkish Windmill knot Boy Scouts earn badges for tying, you react as though someone has said your mother had a thriving career in a Las Vegas suburb.
Tiredness is a daily reminder that what ravages the body ravages the mind. Descartes thought there was an impenetrable wall between mind and spirit, but mere living should have told him that wall is more like cloth than masonry. We tire, therefore we are. Our thoughts can drag on the ground just as surely as the backs of our hands.
I was flipping through channels the other day, and every program featured people running, gesturing, yelling, expressing rage, contempt, jealousy and every other variation of extreme interest. I saw hysteria fit for a Dostoyevsky novel and meaningless cruelty fit for a Scorsese film. That was just the sitcoms.
And I stared at the screen, incredulous. Here were all these superanimated actors, running on plutonium, whereas I, a member of the same species, lay on my couch unable to conjure enough pilot light to get up and refill my water glass or take my stomach pill.
I begin to entertain the thought that MTV's Jenny McCarthy has stolen Lucille Ball's career, that the feud between Dan Rather and Peter Jennings might stem from the fact that Rather has a more interesting accent, and Jennings can't stand for that. For a moment it occurs to me that the pattern of the parquet at Boston's Fleet Center, where the Celtics attempt to play, spells out "Buy More Bud." I opine, suddenly, that the Discovery Channel's bear footage is interchangeable with C-Span's coverage of the House of Representatives.
All these thoughts seem as plausible as the ceiling above and the scattered remains of last night's meal below. I actually believe there is material for dozens of future columns here. The Home Shopping Channel is a symptom of the ever-widening chasm between the classes, I think. They try to fool us that a pair of earrings worth $345 is ours for a mere $99. The rich people would pay $144 more, eh? That makes me want those butterfly shaped, diamelle-studded earrings that much more.
Frederic Jameson, the cultural critic, says we live in the "post-modern" era. He says our picture of the world has been hopelessly fragmented to the degree that we couldn't put the pieces back together if we tried. His prime example is the front page of a typical newspaper. The story about the lack of affordable housing is separated by column inches or by days or weeks from the story about the chicken plant hiring 125 new workers for $6 an hour. No attempt is made to relate the two. They are the shards of a shattered picture. It is up to us as readers or viewers to fit them together, to explain how one causes the other, or how one affects the other.
It is up to us to explain how the seeds of one story were thrown upon the winds blown by another and landed on another page, thriving into a jungle of text describing tooth-gnashing, grand-standing and, worst of all, court proceedings. Otherwise, each story is a single, self-contained fact. Isolated facts are useless.
All this, says Jameson, is because the corporate interests want it that way. The more we understand, the less desirable we are as employees or citizens or voters. If we can connect one story with another, we just might not allow what we allowed a week ago.
I think I have found another cause of postmodernism. Tiredness. You work your eight hours. You come home drained. KATV and KARK give you their Cliff's Notes of what happened today, careful to leave out the complicated. The news is in fragments. You think in fragments. In the end all you get is so much useless powder.
All this is true unless you work to be critical of all you see or hear in the media, whether it be in this newspaper, or on the radio or -- especially -- on television. And it is work. Don't take one account as definitive. Collect them all, and base your judgement on as much information as you can, even if you have put in your eight hours and you are so tired, and your thinking is so postmodern that Wheel of Fortune stumps you.