Tinkertown

Tinkertown is the late Ross Ward’s life work, called a “museum”, but more accurately a diverse, rambling, sometimes overwhelming collection of whimsical memorabilia, toys, tools, folk art, and down-home wisdom. It’s a gorgeous mountain of cultural flotsam, begging to be picked over.

Scattered amongst the antique wedding cake figurines, miniature Wild West towns, hay knives, circus clowns, and fortune-telling machines are quotes from all manner of cultures and sources exhorting the reader to be happy, to love, to play, to laugh. They’re all painted in cheerful colors and bold capitals, and the occasional misspelled word only adds to their charm.

There are also little posted reminders throughout the museum, painted on wood or paper, that I did all this while you were watching TV!

It’s actually a pretty profound and damning statement, when you consider the scope of the work at Tinkertown and the statistics on teevee consumption in America: according to one report, the average person is watching 35 hours of television every week this year. Thirty-five hours every week. That’s an astonishing amount of time to sit on your ass, allowing yourself to be groomed by marketeers and fearmongers. What else could be done with that time?

Our TV had been on its last legs for quite some time, and earlier this summer it finally succumbed to whatever malady had been plaguing it. I carted it off to the electronics recycling place and paid a paltry $5 to keep the heavy metals and other sundry oogies out of the landfill. I craigslisted the entertainment center, collected the dust bunnies buffalo that were roaming behind it, and set about feeling just a little smug about my TV-free home.

But.

But, oh the horror, I found myself going through teevee withdrawal.

Now, I didn’t grow up watching much TV, and I’ve never had anything like a 35-hour-a-week habit. But after the last move, when the incredulous cable guy (who just couldn’t believe we only wanted internet access and nothing else) took it upon himself to hook it up anyway, I have enjoyed the heck outta some Discovery Channel and HBO (here’s how out of touch I am–since when is HBO “basic cable” material?). I still can’t bear most (or any, really) of the ubiquitous “reality” programming, and I compulsively mute all commercials (I’ll youtube the Old Spice man when I want a giggle, thank you very much), but I had become, nevertheless, a regular watcher of ye old television.

Oh how good our wrinkly little cerebrums are at self-deception. I still thought of my crunchy granola credentials as intact, and my mind pure and unpolluted by the idiot box. Imagine then my surprise when my palms started itching for that remote control once the TV was no more.

I think I went through all five stages of grief, followed by an acute attack of ideological embarrassment.

And then I got over myself. It’s TV. It’s designed to be addictive, and I fell for it, just a little. For the first week post-TV, I missed it. It was so easy to come home from a bone-crushing 13-hour shift and just turn off my brain. I plugged in the TV, unplugged my intellect, and let myself be a passive entertainment receptacle. It was pleasing in the way that fast food is satisfying when you’re ravenously hungry and there are no other options for sustenance in sight: it always seems like a better idea going in than it does coming out. After I turned off the TV and made my way to bed, it always occurred to me that I’d completely wasted my entire evening. Instead of relaxing in a way that was healthy for me–meditating or swinging in the hammock or sipping a cup of tea–I’d packed my eyeballs and my brain with cotton candy–seemingly innocuous fluff that would eventually rot holes in my head.

Sound a bit over the top? I don’t think so.

A chief feature of our modern life is our blindness to the over- in overstimulated. We don’t really appreciate how powerfully we are affected by the crap we eat, the crap we watch, the crap we hear, and the crap we do. In much the way I didn’t really grasp how sick wheat was making me until I stopped eating it, and how aggro driving made me until I did far less of it, and how vapid and inflammatory most “news” was until I stopped watching it, I’ve only really appreciated how intrusive the TV was when I didn’t have one. I like the quiet in my house now, but, more importantly, I like the quiet in my head.

I’m not altogether demonizing the television. We’ll probably buy another one eventually, and my Netflix queue still gets a regular workout (381 flicks and counting!). But when that happens, I’ll be more aware of how easily even the smuggest of us can get pulled into the TV time suck. Right now, I’m enjoying having more time to write, to read, to plan my next sewing project, to hatch plots and cultivate dreams… to live my own life, not watch someone else’s idea of a life.

Welcome to my Tinkertown.