“Television: A Memoir Of A Box”

Dear Diary,
The lights blare on in the asylum and here I am in the coldness of my room. I have been in here for days and it is like a box; the nurse introduces me to a fine dinner. A cold ham and cheese sandwich with cold lettuce and cold mayonnaise. Every day we go to watch tv after therapy specials. The ones where we write about our day and about our productivity during that day. However panic-stricken you must be, do not let it spoil your day though. I am enslaved in this asylum to this abysmal daily routine where so much as one toe out of line and you get the dark padded room that smells of something between lime-away and musty old bed sheets. This, was what watching television was like. Only it was away from society except your own peers. A way away from the world.

Dear Diary,
Down here in this old Russian asylum, I watch the news. But who would like to watch the news when there are so many deaths out there? The History Channel of Russia had things like Chernobyl blowing up and things about the cold war and how books were being burnt to keep warm from the cold. There was nothing more depressing than real tv than the tv shows that showed the bourgeoisie of Russia’s rich and famous. It was depressing because these shows showed content faces; happy faces like the ones that were painted on smiling porcelain dolls. Then, you had to watch the English queen give a speech. Well what the fuck did I know about the queen except that she was a content, poised and grand figure compared to this rubbish in an asylum smock watching tv while she was watching the cameras that enslaved her image to the tv and captured the view enslaving the trees and her mansion behind it?

Dear Diary,
Watching tv made me feel less and less alive. I was always jealous of the happy people in these black and white sitcoms that my thoughts would turn to violence, to anguish, and then to a matter of escape. But then as I composed my sanity, why hurt these people who did not know me? I was dead to them rest in peace; god save my soul. Good riddance they would tell me as happy faces entered the black and white screen that was mahogany on the outside with black knobs changing the channels at every small twist. What could I do but just sit there cross legged and watch as someone screeched down the hall? I envied those faces. Why? Why? Why? I ask myself why I could not have been happy like them? Amidst the screams I would watch reality sitcoms from overseas, and it was not until I began to wonder at the commodity of myself being in this asylum that they are happier and more better off than me. One is married and is a happy housewife named Lucille Ball with a wonderful husband named Ricky. He probably gets home to his wonderful wife Lucy in a grand Chevy. With how happy they are, I could just scream at them.

Dear Diary,
It has been more than five months since my last check-in. I still watch Lucille Ball with Ricky and their wonderful laughter. I wonder how can anyone instill into peoples’ minds that life is like that?! My brain begins to absorb Ricky and Lucy, Ricky and Lucy. Everything done in a day of sitcom watching and noticing that life is harder than what we perceive in television. I hated tv for this reason. None of it seemed real. No matter how hard I wanted it to be real, I could not adjust the knobs anymore because I was disgusted with how fake tv actually was. Was it to better the hopes of other people? In the asylum, I’ve learned that not all or everything was about Lucy’s day. Out of the asylum, it got harder compared to outside life in the real world. Try me, a thirty-five-year-old woman with a patch quilt dress and a shawl on my head to keep warm tied right above my neck with old leather shoes working at a factory. You know when you have hit rock bottom, and sometimes because of the tv, you get tired of life.

Dear Diary,
I have heard that the tv was a part of progress. If that was true, then tv had sucked from the beginning. The way Ricky carried his wife and the way Lucy smiled. My only progression was cleaning clothes and doing factory work for people who liked to wear clothes and keep warm. I am a Goddamned patchwork quilt woman. What makes me angry is that in order to sustain myself, women like me could not afford to be Lucille Ball and the men here; well, some could not afford to be the richest man with a wonderful wife and a beautiful house like Ricky and I was suddenly tearing up and in mental anguish because the tv was a lie. Some of the news was not even real. All of tv was actually a lie except for things that were depressing. The tv showed things that were unable to obtain and things that were impeccably ridiculed.

Dear Diary,
Today is my birthday. I would never wish for another tv set to break by my own hands again.