For a big chunk of my life, I have lived vicariously through my tv screen. And it mostly never bothered me except for once in a while. Because every once in a while, after I would watch a character on a tv show travel around the world for miles and miles, I would realize that all along I hadn’t moved or travelled far at all... weeeellllll, except for that long exodus from my chair,to the kitchen- to get some food, and back to my chair, to prepare myself to risk it all through the life of someone else, while my real life remained without any real life dander.
But I’m exaggerating a little. I mean it’s not like watching tv is literally all I did in my life. In fact, I would say that, I’ve had pretty interesting life. A life with it’s fare share of risk and real adventure. What adventure you ask? Well let’s see... I’ve physically, not mentally, travelled around the world to places like Asia, South America, Africa, The West Indies, and Europe. I’ve climbed up mountains and waterfalls, jumped off cliffs and leaves. And whenever I went somewhere new I would always leave the set path, just like the people I would see on the tv screen do. All in hopes that suddenly...a dragon would swoop down from the sky, scoop me up, and tell me that I was a being from another planet sent here to save the world with my crazy awesome superpowers...
(Sigh deeply) But unfortunately, that is often never what would happen. What would happen is that I would get to witness this beautiful landscape before me, allowing me to escape the great glory that is this mundane and monotone and magic-less life. Cause as long as I can remember, something in this real world, never really seemed right. So I would write...rhymes...that is when I wasn’t spending my time trying to figure out if the feeling about life that I’ve had was honestly real, or if it really was all in my mind. And in the process of working through this mystery, I found tv, was a comfort that not many other things seemed be in the face of this inner calamity.
For I could be a bouncing off the walls type of calm when I was watching a sit-com; Boy Meets World to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was the very air that I breathed and laughed on. And it was so cool being running home to watch cartoons after-school; from Recess to Doug Funny, to Dragonballz, to Bug Bunny. And what was truly funny about all of that is the fact that all these shows and more would end up, at the end of the day, empowering me. Yup, I said it. Call me crazy, but TV empowered me.
It empowered me to believe that anything was possible.
That with enough heart, and imagination that I could be unstoppable, When it came to making the world in my head, a real world. And this source of inner salvation didn’t just stop there, but was carried everywhere I went. Through my sports (believe it or not I played basketball and tennis back in the day, but not much football. For some reason it just never really interested me), through my art (piano, poetry and rhyme writing), through my extracurriculars (church stuff, hanging with a bunch friends... hanging with a bunch girlfriends.Playa!lol. Nah I’m just joking, had a lot of friends who were girls growing up.The curse of being raised by 4 women I guess but anyway...) tv even followed me through my education.
Actually, I’d say especially my education. Man from elementary school all the way to college, I can’t remember when watching tv wasn’t essentially acknowledged. Their was even an intellectual expansion, in college, of my tv shows and thus life knowledge. For I always felt, that the expansion of the understanding of people, professions, and my own passion rose... whenever I watched a Charlie Rose...show. And I knew what subject I wanted to learn about more when I first watched the show called The Entrepreneur. And the way I judged the life music I loved, completely budged, when I watched Lauryn Hill on MTV: Unplugged. And when I watched the interview from the journal of the guy who wrote... what is the books name... oh yeah, 3 cups of tea/ I could feel limits I had set within me leave as my soul was set free which in fact, if I’m being exact, if you look into the originally intended point of a liberal arts university, you’ll see it goes all the way back to ancient Greece, where the original words for liberal arts were defined...as the art of liberating ones mind which- while I find higher education largely failing at this- tv seemed to accomplish this for me all the time.
But it did even more than that, for my education of self to. Cause when I went through a severe, suicide attempted depression, after I ended my year as a freshman, it came from multiple tv shows that telling someone and getting help was something that I needed to do
...So I did... and today I stand here finishing up my college career, no longer a kid...but a man. A man that, despite dealing with real pains, still managed to maintain my idealism, and still holds on to the imagination of my childhood which today remains, to be a fundamental facilitator of how I strive to pursue and do what makes me feel alive- sharing uplifting stories- where before me is a world where so many are pursuing and doing things that are killing them inside.
Yet ,despite these true story words, I have heard people say that it’s cause of tv that I am so ADD and spacey. That’s it’s cause I watch so much tv that I’m living in a fantasy. That it’s because I watched so much tv that I don’t deal with “the reality” of what society claims this world to be. They even call me watching all this tv a crutch, that keeps me lost and out of touch. Well... maybe that true... and maybe their right... But I have never scene a crutch move someone forward in life this much.
So much so...that out of almost all of my friends I seem to be known as the one who is ignorant enough, crazy enough, naive enough, self-deceived enough, to believe enough...(deep breath) in his dreams, to go after them, as if he has already known what is going to happen, and is giving a spoiler alert to the rest of the world, before the tv show is even publicly shown.
And I do know, cause I’ve watched it on tv already. Through tv God gave me a sneak preview as soon as it was said and done. So you may be waiting to see it on “reality tv”, but to me...realizing my dreams is nothing more... THEN WATCHING A RE-RUN.
The Movement Continues...
- Rhetorical Artz
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