Great Horrendous Couch Potatoes

And a list of things I'd like to do before I die

Photo by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash

The Pluto TV Couch Potato advertisement was a huge hit during the SuperBowl. In the commercial a field full of humans in potato costumes sit on couches and describe how much they love the many channels that they can immerse themselves in while watching the Pluto TV streaming service. In case you haven’t seen it, here’s the link.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=couch+potatoe+commercial&t=newext&atb=v255-1&iax=videos&ia=videos&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D7BFk9L6jiRU

While it was apparently a triumph of marketing, it just made me sad. Sad for the future. And sad for the people who immerse themselves, day after day and year after year, in passive entertainment.

It isn’t that I don’t watch television. And goodness knows I wasted too much of my youth looking at TV screens. Although, in those days of rabbit ears and local stations, I was beyond thrilled to find a fuzzy channel showing Monty Python’s Flying Circus on a weekend night. The thought that the future would hold almost countless channels for our indulgence was beyond my ability to imagine.

Admittedly, sometimes I get it. When I come home from work after twelve hours in the ER, it can take all of my energy to eat and collapse on the couch. I have all too often fallen asleep only to wake and go to bed when the remote fell out of my hand onto the floor.

After busy days around the house and yard, after helping family and doing all of the ‘busy-ness’ of life, Jan and I lie often down and fall asleep to shows we’ve seen over and over. The familiar repetition of what we know is like a narcotic.

I can’t exactly throw stones in this great house made of screens in which we live our digital lives.

But I feel as if we’ve crossed into dangerous territory as a culture, as a civilization; maybe as a species. That is, between the Internet and streaming services, we have untold millions, even billions, of men, women and children who have just fallen in love with watching and listening rather than doing.

I believe that I have used my time pretty well. I’ll be 60 in July and I have loved and lived and learned so much that if a meteor hits me tomorrow on the way to work, well I won’t have done too badly. But that eventuality aside, I’m still not finished.

There are so many things I would love to see and do. So many things I want to learn! There are adventures I want to have with the wife and children I love.

Being a couch potato, lying motionless except for the click of the remote and the occasional trip to the restroom or fridge, well these are not consistent with what I desire.

But what do I desire? What things are far better than life as a couch-potato? A formless furniture starch?

I want to travel more. I would like to take my wife to see the Northern Lights in the true North, to see the waves crashing in Hawaii, to see ruins in Rome, to see the Southern Cross at sea. I want to walk Hadrian’s Wall and imagine legions departing for the barbarian lands.

I want to take my children and someday, hopefully, grandchildren to the seashore. I want to walk historic parks with them and play in creeks in Summer. I want to walk in the woods with them and look through rocks for arrowheads. I want to ski down mountains as long as my muscles and bones allow.

I want to rediscover what French I learned in college and add some more. I want to learn Biblical Greek and a little Anglo-Saxon for my ancestors.

I want to play the mandolin or maybe the piano.

I want to understand T. S. Eliot and Dante and so many of the great men and women who left us tiny windows into eternity in their books.

I want to learn to fence. Simply because as impractical as it may now be, the sword has always seemed elegant to me.

I want to write more poetry. And actually do it well.

I want to publish a novel that makes men stand taller and walk with confidence, and women weep great, salty tears that splash joy and sorrow onto their dresses as they finish it.

I want to catalog a year of seasons at our hilltop home and describe each one in all its glory so that future generations will know how beautiful it was without pictures.

I want to pray more and more, and read the Bible over and over until it infuses me so much that it rolls off of my tongue if I develop dementia. I want to be a little, confused bundle of blessings when I wander about in a fog.

I want to shoot my bow more, because it archery is a kind of wonderful, practical meditation handed down to us for millennia.

I want to dance so often with my wife that dancing becomes simply another way of walking around the house.

That’s only a small part of the list. How much will I realistically do? Probably not nearly as much as I’d like. But engagement in life, love of knowing, love of doing, these are life-lines that serve to keep me up and moving, rather than still and slowly, surely dying by becoming a couch potato, wrapped in poisonous ease like aluminum in the oven.

The thing is, I think a lot about how long we live. And I think about what happens when we die. And because I am a Christian, I think about living after I die. I have come to believe that maybe life only goes on, only can go on, for those who really are full of enough love and desire to keep living it.

One of my favorite poems is Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson. When I was in college and medical school I had a poster with part of the first stanza emblazoned on an orange and black background on which was the sea.

That portion goes like this:

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

If you’ve never read the full work, it’s worth your time. In fact it’s worth your time to cruise around the Poetry Foundation website. It’s one of my favorite places on the Internet. (I am aware of the irony that this requires screen time…I also advocate poetry books.)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45392/ulysses

I hope I can resist the modern temptation to death by couch, death by screen, death by recliner.

Because there is just so much this life holds that it would be a crime to waste the remainder in pointless pursuits.

Edwin

PS Share some things you would like to accomplish in the time you have left on earth!