Trying to think of suitable drivel to release upon the world is never an easy task; trying to do it while Bonkers the cat is squatting beside the grand exalted throne deep in the heart of drivel HQ going “Ehhh! Ehhh!” makes it even harder.
Bonkers doesn’t go “Meow” like other cats. Bonkers goes “Ehhh!” It’s an improvement. He used to bark like a dog. Well, not exactly like a dog, but so close that you had to wonder if he wasn’t raised by a German shepherd. But the “Ehhh!” can still be kind of unnerving, especially when he does it over and over. Sometimes it’s like he’s about to speak.
For many people drivel comes easy, so easy that they rake in stunning piles of money in exchange for their mental drool. I can’t understand it, but they’re all over television and radio every single day. How do they do it? If I could figure out the answer to that riddle, I’d have the tiger by the tail, the jinni in the lamp, a goose that laid the golden egg, and all my readers by the short hairs. But, as you see, I have no discretion when it comes to self-control. I know lots of metaphors and I’m not afraid to use them, even though I should be.
Still, it bugs me. After dinner, My Darling B and I were trying to remember the last good television show we saw and couldn’t come up with anything we thought was worth paying the four to six hundred dollars a year we’d fork over if we succumbed to the herd mentality and subscribed to cable television. I think the last program we all watched together was either Lost or Heroes, two shows that were mildly interesting when they started but lost me so fast I felt like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner.
And I don’t mean they lost me intellectually; I mean they started to suck. I stayed with Lost for two seasons because nearly every series has quite a few hiccups in the first two seasons while it tries to find its feet. There was plenty of time for Lost to live up to its promise, but it never did. It just kept sinking lower and lower. After the bug-eyed guy showed up I couldn’t even figure out what it was about any more, and walked away.
And Heroes, what a waste. I would’ve given it a chance by sticking with it through the second season if it didn’t make me feel like such an obvious schmuck for doing so. I haven’t watched any television series since.
B stuck with both Lost and Heroes to the bitter end, like a marathon runner obviously in great pain but determined to cross the finish line. And like those psychos she wept in pain and wondered why she was doing it, but she crossed the line, she got the t-shirt, she can say she did it. I still don’t know why, and to this day she’s not sure she can explain it, either. Poor thing.
I burp this up after succumbing to curiosity and searching out several episodes of the old Star Trek series. I’d turned up several blogs that celebrated the can-do spirit of the original show and, in a fit of nostalgia, caved in and let myself waste an hour or two with whatever was available on YouTube, and you know what? That show sucked. Like a victim of an emotionally traumatic experience, I had no clear memory of how bad it was: The hammy acting, the clunky dialog, the piss-poor production values. It was such a bad show in almost every way, and I spent just about every afternoon of my teenaged life watching every episode, most of them three or four times.
Drivel. It’s what’s for dinner.
This Is Drivel 