House of House

Forget heroine.  Forget Ben & Jerry's Heath Bar Crunch.  Forget Stoli.  The New Binge is watching an entire season of something in a sitting.  To be really cool, it should be House of Cards.  I'm on 1/3 cool, so it's House.  Or House M.D.  I've gone so far as to get a portable DVD player when the one connected to my TV decided to start saying my disks were unreadable.  I spent the flu too weak to order that portable DVD and too freaked at what a lot of House would do to me in a fever, but as soon as I was well, I ordered one and bought the rest of the seasons and now I rush home or to my bed after I've done my day's stuff to crawl into this small world of the DVD player on my chest and a hyper dose of cynicism.  I can now nominate Hugh Laurie and John Malkovich as the best smirkers ever.

These last couple of weeks I've been really letting myself feel my anxiety.  I've been letting it be the suffocating soggy blanket that it wants to be -- while trying to get on with my obligations anyway.  It's been an experiment because I want to know its true extent as I try some things to work on it.  When I felt like I was in a corset at having to walk the jackal who pulled me down, I decided to fire the gig.  It took two weeks to make the decision, but I'm a slow decision-maker and slow to react except with self-pity to almost everything except my family (sorry, guys: you get the unedited id of me -- on the other hand, you actually get to see and talk to me ever, which nobody can say about me any more: love you).  Is dog anxiety worth it?  What will the anxiety of going to copy posters and hang them up and meet dog owners cost me versus the rickety feeling I have before and after walking the miserable bastard?  It takes me a while to register my fear and then reason it out.  The pain of breaking my face, and my self-pity over the money and the pain were automatic but the reasonable conduct took some time.

Today I woke in a sweat of anxiety.  It wasn't about going out of the house but it was partly about this blog.  For the first time in two weeks, I had time today.  There was my other life to attend to, which I felt resentful of, and there were two outside dog walks, but other than that there was time to do my laundry, pray, write, think -- and I was immobilized.  I've just been chastised for not cleaning the washer/dryer of dog hair (I try, really) and so I've let laundry mountain up.  It's hard enough to get my shit together to go down to the cellar and do it, but now I have to worry about cleaning well enough after.  If that was hard, what was I going to find in the rest of what I had ample time for?

So I walked Daisy and started reading a l-o-n-g New Yorker article about fusion physics.  House actually makes me anxious, too, because I know how the series ends, how bad it gets in the last two seasons and I've worked my way into those seasons.  I also know it continually surprises me and, sometimes, hits close to home.  So I get a little freaked out about the thing I'm supposed to be hiding in.  The best antidote to that is The New Yorker when I get an issue that's interesting but doesn't directly pertain to my life.

But even fusion can go on too long and the nap I craved didn't last that long and so I picked up my nifty little DVD player and watched the first disk of Season Whatever. 

I love the humor of House.  I used to love the medical mysteries but I've heard the same diseases -- taxo-this, lympho-that -- too much now, watched too many "Get a crash cart in here" moments to not be cynical about the medicine.  I stay with it because of House himself, because of Laurie's ability to portray loneliness, gruff unwilling humanity.

It's naked, this man's balled up and ignored need.  Mine is naked here and in my books and, occasionally, when I blow up in my family, but mostly I walk around pretending the need is met, clothed, all grown up and acting like...oh, I don't know.  Self-acceptance, I think.  Because what keeps someone from needing except the hideousness of need and the hideousness of a history of unmet need?

I philosophize.  I didn't mean to.  I meant to claim my place as being One Third Cool because I, too, have an unnecessary piece of electronics and a binge of seasons going on.  I guess I needed to betray myself after all...