Timeless Farewells

It's snowy outside, and has been for a few days. That's unusual around here, where we usually get a little snow which thaws over the next day or two. Back East they've been having summer weather. Those who say the climate isn't changing haven't looked out the window lately... but I digress, as usual. On such days, where getting outside isn't an option if one prefers one's ankles unturned or tailbones unbruised, the in-head chatter can build up to critical mass. Thus, the need to vent a few idle thoughts once in a while lest I go even more insane. I'd say I'm clearing my head to enable me to do something useful with the evening, but I suspect you wouldn't fall for that one. I'd also say I'm sparing the regulars on message boards where I lurk and ramble, but they seem to read this anyway. So I'll just say that if you're bored or confused or in any way dismayed about anything I post, it's your own fault for reading what I clearly state at the outset to be a pointless blog, and stop offering excuses.

Shortly into the new year, we bought the complete DVD box set of Monty Python's Flying Circus on DVD for half price (at Half Price Books - go figure...) We've been watching roughly one DVD per evening since then, until at last, tonight, we watched the last DVD with the last episode ever aired of that venerable show. Now, granted, their last year was only half a season and had a certain off-kilter feel to it (which seems hard to credit to just the absense of John Cleese; I have to wonder if simple series burnout had set in, because their movies - those I've seen, at least - were right back on par with the best of the show), and granted the show went off the air a year before I was born, but still there was a certain indefinable sadness in watching the end. It's nothing on the scale of the physical, day-long depression that set in after I read the final book in the Hitchhiker's Guide series, or the tinge of loss when I hear a John Denver tune, or the lingering bittersweet tang of the last moments of the last Sledge Hammer! episode (which I saw when it aired, but still has that feel on DVD.) But it's real, and not altogether different from when a modern show/series ends or jumps the shark (not necessarily in that order, more's the pity.)

Logically, I know it's ridiculous, to mourn a fictional work on the same level as a human being. I know these things all really ended long, long before they entered my myopic field of vision. Even when today's shows or stories get the axe, I know it was all decided on some phone line or in somebody's office long before I, a member of the general uneducated public, get to see the results. I also know it's all, in its own way, a lie. Even so-called reality TV is a lie. You can't really know a person by their on-screen personality, any more than you can really know an author by the words they set down, or a singer by the songs they choose to record. You might know a part of them, the part they want the world to know, but nobody is just the part of them the world knows or history chooses to remember. Some of the world's most moving, hilarious, or beautiful works were enabled or created by people I would probably judge to be, had I met them, complete and utter jerks. But that's the trick of DVDs, or recorded media of any sort (VHS, print, cassettes, film, wax cylinders, 8-tracks.) They simultaneously suspend and distort time. They preserve whatever stories or people happen into them... or whatever pieces of themselves they presented. Cross that with a fannish ability to suspend disbelief to an almost insane degree, and those pieces cohese into something on par with a living thing, strong enough to raise the dead... or at least a version of the dead. Douglas Adams lives - he just told me a story. Graham Chapman isn't gone - I just saw him on my TV. Any show, any book, any movie, any song... exactly as it was, at that moment, at that time, that is all that remains. And it lives, in some way, whenever it is discovered anew.

The depression stems in part from this distortion. It seems, when you read a book or watch a TV show, as if, in some way, all of this was done inside your own home just for your pleasure. You choose to bring these people, these stories, these worlds and ideas into your life, and whenever you click on the player or open the covers, they obligingly perform as they have for countless others in countless corners of the world. Inside your own head these words or sounds or images string themselves together, coming to life again no matter how long it's been since they originally came to be set down on film or disc or paper. They make you laugh, or cry, or think, or not think. For a time, your reality slides away, and theirs takes over. And thus, when the story's over and they've nothing left to tell, and the blankness of the TV screen or speakers or back cover is all that remains, an awkward moment comes. They linger, fading, at the edge of your imagination, and you, their one-person audience, wonder how you offer your thanks to an inanimate device or intangible notion. You can't applaud a memory. You can't shake hands with a piece of plastic. You can't cheer a ghost. I suppose, at the very least, I ought to say goodbye, belated though it may be.

So goodbye, Monty Python, thirty-two years late. Until I reload the DVD player, at least...

[PS - For the curious, I did manage to get to my last job interview despite the snow and ice and generally scuzzy condition of local back roads... on worn-out snow tires with slow leaks. I thought it went okay, but then I thought my last interview went okay. So now I get to wait two to three (or more, to be realistic) weeks for the reply. Hence, my brain running in circles. Hence, these pointless posts about things that probably wouldn't seem half as interesting or important if I had some form of gainful employment. And hence, this long and rambling postscript after a long and rambling blog entry.]