Reduction

Something in me is always aspiring for less and less. Or actually... for more nothingness. Since a few days, I have an Internet connection at home and 180 television channels, and all I can think of is: how to stay away from them.

There you have it: last Wednesday, the Cable Guy came by my house and hooked me up. Since then, in one corner of my former Private Convict, I’ve got a laptop computer, and, within clicking distance, a whole new Universe to explore... be it a virtual tour through the MoMa, or watching badger babies on a web cam, searching for fine new poets, or seeing Brazilian girls throw up all over each other... anything goes.

And then there’s the TV. No longer with the familiar ‘20 channels of shit to choose from’– four weather forecasts, three soaps, six steak knive infomercials, a show about disobedient dogs and a Mexican gentleman giving them correctional treatment, a cartoon for babies, and the rest of the channels is regular advertisement. No, now I have – just for a few months, after which they start charging for all the extra channels – everything imaginable, from Bollywood films, ESPN American football, Arabian news, to the latest HD film premières, classic cartoons, round the clock cooking television, Seinfeld reruns and porn. Four channels of porn, five if you include the gay porn channel. That’s a lot of porn.

It makes me feel like a Færøe Island farmer in New York City... Ned Flanders in Vegas... Muhammed in Gomorrah... Joey Ramone in Disneyland... Winnie the Pooh in Neverland... Eddy Merckx in the Indie 500. All I seek is peace and a reduction of my world till just the things that are fine & beautiful remain. I know it sounds like a chutzpah: with so many people in the third world devoid of access to high quality girl-on-girl porn, or a decent weather radar, and here I am looking for a book to read or cactus to attend to. I’m a freak... an ingrate! (Then again, guilt has always ruled my being, so there is nothing new about that.)

I switched it all off and went out for a walk through the city. Up up and away... into the real world! It was raining and rotting leaves blew through the streets... it was perfect. People outside looked fine... not a trace of depravity or menace, no hidden commercial agenda on their faces, no celeb quality, just good old honest country folk, jolly yokels and wannabees. It felt normal. It felt safe and good. Against my custom of buying everything second-hand and dead cheap, I bought three brand spanking new, very expensive poetry books of some of my favourite present-day poets. It was time I did that. Not all my money can go to wine, whale rescuers and gasoline: poets have to make a living too.