Like most people living in Auckland my consumption of television has gone way up. I always have to have a snack too. There’s something profoundly lonely about watching television without a snack. It’s ritual now, after months and months of it (roughly four in total but who can remember). It’s almost like watching television without having a snack is equal to going to a party without cigarettes or a vape—obviously being a reformed smoker, my choice is vape; there’s a sense that in both circumstances, the party and the watching of television, without the consumable accoutrement as ballast you might not properly assimilate all the information coming towards you. Like if I’m not eating a bowl of noodles or protein and rice I won’t properly recognise all the dramaturgical sleights and ludicrous freights of whichever show or movie I’ve made some barely-informed decision to stream. Same at a party—without the ballast of cigarettes and/or vape, which isn’t to mention that universal lubricant of alcohol, there’s a feeling (speaking for my own) that you’ll either evaporate and lose the requisite substantiality for being a human being gathered with other human beings seeking nebulous communion, or that their missives will do something similar; that their words and gestures won’t catch or drift the way they’re supposed to. That standing there without the fetishised prop of a vape or cigarette, I will vanish in the noise of so many other human beings. That I need these props to properly perform being a human being, and that I need these props to match the successful performances around me.
Same with eating in front of the television. If I do not do this ritualised thing which every human being will recognise as indelibly human—the eating—then I am somehow less in the circumference of human experience which storytelling by way of streaming attempts to enclose me in. Like, I need to attune to the given animality of the human organism to properly assimilate the abstraction in front of me—The Sopranos, Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer—or risk missing the vestigial truth of that abstraction by failing to augment it’s intangibility with a levelling-tangible. It’s a simple math by which a whole system of consumerist relations, commodifying the visual as edible—by way of Cronenberg, sustenance for the New Flesh—has reconfigured how we see ourselves and each other, mediated not just through the descriptor of serials soaps and cinema, but as pilgrims in a terrain constantly shifting in hyperactive alignment with screens which proliferate like so much black mould. Every humid human endeavour has a correlation now in storying, in that nothing happens without a digital trace—enough of these traces metastasising into streamable subject matter, crystallised in a mirror ball of likes shares and re-posts/tweets.
If I wasn’t to eat something while watching something would I, facing my abject fear of not eating in front of the television, somehow escape the representative regime of streaming wokeness? Would I maybe, being one intangible meeting another intangible, drift somewhere outside the shared ground of identity (in the least critical sense of the word) and it’s vicious propagandas (I’m looking at you Netflix)? Should I perhaps experiment with watching a movie without the proverbial corn chips/ice-cream/fried-chicken/(insert junk preference here) and come back with notes from the other side?
Maybe not. I’m too phobic at present. I don’t want to give any oxygen to my covid-related paranoia (which pushing myself to this particular limit would inevitably do). A paranoia I might add which is currently occupying the very last of my mental and emotional capacity for the year (which as I write this is eight hours away from closing out; blessed be).
Irony aside I can’t help but suspect the energy it would take to extricate eating from binge-watching would be equal to, if not greater than, the veritable atom-bomb it took for me to swap cigarettes out for a vape. I know there’s new research extolling the evils of vaping—pale next to huffing paint-stripper through a paper cylinder stuffed with tobacco weed—but I can feel the difference in my body. Life sans smoking is glorious (and yes I am hating myself for being a reformed-smoker-vape-evangelist but my testimonial is legit). That said my relationship with smoking was so painfully molecular that it took a breakup to galvanise a second divorce, one which I’d been contemplating for as long but which, which which which, took more from me than any Anne Hathaway rom-com had prepared me for. That being on the other side of a separation is a grief in miniature is something I hadn’t picked up from the laughing melodramas which constitute the majority of popular accounts—so far as I’ve found anyway.
Why am I marrying quitting smoking with quitting a relationship? Do I have a retroactive bias about the relationship being bad for me, quote-unquote “toxic”? Because taking inventory that doesn’t come through with it’s usual rouge flags—gaslighting emotional/physical abuse intimacy blocks etcetera—for all intents and purposes, we were just two people whose humours, previously aligned, suddenly misaligned.
But then everything gets nominal value in hindsight. Impossible to archive something without evaluating it first, as any anthropologist or museum worker or internment-camp guard already knows. Even more spurious is to make sweeping value judgements about a relationship, like I have any objective notion about what a relationship is meant to do and be. I like to think that being ‘queer’ I’m somehow outside the normative protocols pressuring straights into certain behaviours and logics. But (that infuriatingly elusive commodity) hindsight is showing me otherwise—that I pang and aspire in the same deluded rubric, that culture really does operate via lines of squishy osmosis, and that consciously choosing not to assimilate a particle in the air, while I take great gulps of air, is as quixotic as it gets.
Perhaps this newfound horror of not eating while watching television is from having watched television for the last seven years with a partner. And now a junky delectation is a substitute, and will be for as long as watching television—frequently alone (and especially these last four months)—induces pangs of nostalgia normally reserved for widows retreading the footsteps of intrepid honeymoons, or perusing wedding polaroids as they box up their once shared lives to relocate to a singles unit. Summer is a particularly sore time. I knew it would be. If only because in New Zealand the end of the year is a monstrous conflagration of Christmas, summer-break, New Years, and general annual fatigues; exacerbated this year by the void-ish anxieties of a lingering pandemic (I say lingering like it’s out-stayed it’s welcome, like there was some expectation that the world organises itself to deal efficiently with something like this; has it?). So this summer being my first without a partner in seven years, is also the first summer in as long that I’ll be bearing the full brunt of this scheduled orgy of consumption as a single, as one person, as an un-scaffolded shock absorber. As one intangible attempting to channel an unending barrage of intangibles, and tangibles—needing something to bolster myself with so I can better order every incoming message. Which I remember never having trouble with before said partner. But that was back before I knew the difference in gravity between life with and without a partner. Which isn’t to say one is better than the other. Only that I feel less substantial now, living in the stark difference. Like I’m not really awake. Like this whole year with it’s fifty shades of fuckery has been my own invention, a necessarily extreme distraction buffering a loss as yet uncounted.
There’s a word for this kind of magical thinking; solipsism (symptoms include social-media addiction and/or being under the age of 21).
I am feeling this distinct pain about the loss of my partner (months and months after the fact), this person who I had chosen—or through certain events the sense of volition had been successfully simulated—and in that choosing allied myself to our own unique variant of an existing sequence of systems-overlap and protocol. In that protocol a certain sheltering from the wider stimuli of the world was formed, continues to be formed—such is the lure of relationships. The status they afford for individuals in the wider community, the symbolic values coupledom embodies, and the individual attainment of these values which couple status signals widely. And then there’s all the affordances of this status, like the assumption that functional levels of maturity have been attained when a ‘long term relationship’ is kept and tended, regardless of the cost. There is cultural cache in the relationship, giving it value even outside of the more intimate meaning which committed relationships are meant to generate. Or so you’d assume that this kernel of profounder meaning is the vestigial agenda of relationships. So thought I before having one of my own.
And certainly in the unpacking of hindsight there are so many features of personhood which prior to the endeavour were dormant in me, so many new gravities and textures which I’d have been blissfully unaware of were it not for this haphazard agreement—slouched into and fitfully sustained in varying degrees of earnest (weather permitting).
I will be eating in front of the television for the foreseeable future then.
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